Generation war.

• Author: Pillar, Paul R.

Since World War II--the largest military effort ever by the United States, and one ending with clear victory--the use of U.S. military force overseas has exhibited two patterns. One is the increasing frequency and duration of the application of force. This trend has become especially noticeable since the turn of the twenty-first century, with the United States fighting its two longest major military campaigns, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Simultaneously, Washington has conducted combat operations in Libya, Syria and elsewhere, all under the indeterminate rubric of "war on terror." An entire generation of Americans has come of age with its country perpetually at war.

This state of permanent warfare is hard to explain in terms of national self-image. Americans have traditionally seen themselves as peace-loving folks who strike back only when someone else picks a fight. In the words of John Quincy Adams, they tend not to seek out "monsters to destroy." The United States has not been a latter-day Sparta, defining its virtue in terms of martial spirit.

The second pattern makes the first even more difficult to comprehend: the overall results of all this fighting overseas have been poor. Uncle Sam has regularly cried "uncle." The Korean War ended in a draw. The only major U.S. war since then to register a win was Operation Desert Storm, the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991. The other large U.S. military campaigns of the last sixty years fall on the opposite side of the ledger. They include the Vietnam and Iraq fiascos, as well as a war in Afghanistan that has gone on for fourteen years and shows no sign of ending. More modestly sized uses of air power have brought only mixed results: some success in the Balkans in the 1990s, but extremist-infested chaos in Libya after the intervention in 2011. Smaller U.S. operations on the ground also have had mixed outcomes, ranging from achievement of some modest objectives in the Caribbean to significant U.S. casualties in, and an embarrassing withdrawal from, Lebanon in the early 1980s.

The United States has been employing military force overseas more than what prudent pursuit of its interests would call for. Yet it keeps coming back for more. An impulse for more foreign military expeditions, despite its poor record, is reflected not only in the two-decade trend toward permanent warfare but also in current pressure in American public debate to do still more militarily in the Middle East. This impulse is not just a matter of policymakers misunderstanding foreign conflicts. More fundamental elements of American thinking are at work and are affecting today's debates about military force in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

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One possible way to explain the trend toward permanent U.S. engagement in warfare concerns long-term changes in the international system and the position of the United States in it. There is some validity to this approach. The United States evolved into a superpower with the increased opportunities and responsibilities that come with it. But the ability to project military power across the globe does not imply that it is prudent to do so, particularly given the United States' string of poor results. Political scientist Barry Posen explains that although the unmatched ability to project military power gives the United States command of the global commons (e.g., sea lanes and international air space), it does not give Washington the ability to control events wherever it wants. The expansion of U.S. military capabilities has prompted excessive applications of force, much as a person who owns a nifty hammer tends to perceive nails everywhere.

Theories elevating terrorism to a new and systemic threat wield little explanatory power. Granted, the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks did trigger an abrupt change in the American public mood. But international terrorism has been around for centuries and has been shaping U.S. interests for many decades. America's recent military misadventures cannot be sufficiently explained by the rise of terrorism. The costly expedition into Iraq had nothing to do with terrorism, notwithstanding contorted efforts by the promoters of that war to capitalize on the martial post-9/11 public mood.

A traditional explanation for resorting to arms focuses on the vested interests of particular stakeholders. In the United States, this thesis has been most popular on the left, but has had a wider cachet ever since Dwight Eisenhower spoke about a military-industrial complex. Of course institutional biases exist, but the attitudes expressed by the U.S. institution most involved in the use of force--the military--do not support the thesis. The military tends to favor full application of resources to assigned missions, not the undertaking of new missions. It was a civilian policymaker, Madeleine Albright, who asked the nation's top military officer, Colin Powell, "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?" Today's senior military officers are exhibiting some of the same caution that Powell did. In a recent hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee that addressed the possibility of establishing a no-fly zone in Syria, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Paul Selva, remarked that "we have the military capacity to impose a no-fly zone," but "the potential for miscalculation and loss of American life in the air" render the idea unwise. The hawkish and disappointed committee chairman, John McCain, referred to this testimony as "one of the more embarrassing statements I have ever heard from a uniformed military officer."

The infrequent use of military force in America's earlier history informs today's frequent use. Blessed with physical separation from foreign threats, Americans adopted the non-Clausewitzian habit of thinking about military means and political ends as two separate realms. They thought about war as the last resort, sallying forth abroad to eliminate whatever threat was sufficiently serious to justify such an expedition. Unlike the Europeans living with continuous threats at close quarters, Americans did not have to develop ways of thinking about security and military force that were more balanced and sustainable over the long term even with more permanent and...