The Long Losing Streak

 

Let me tell you something about fear. Real fear. Not the Hollywood kind—not the jump-scare, got-you kind that makes teenagers spill their popcorn in the dark. I mean the deep, marrow-cold kind. The kind that wakes you at three in the morning and just sits there on the edge of your bed, breathing.

That’s the fear that haunted the men and women of the U.S. military when they first set foot on the Arabian Peninsula in 1991. Picture it: thousands of boots on burning sand, the sun punishing and indifferent overhead, the air tasting of oil and something older—something that had been smoldering in that part of the world since long before America was even a bad idea on a king’s drawing board. Keith L. Shimko, a political science professor up at Purdue University, wrote about it in his 2010 book The Iraq Wars and America’s Military Revolution: doubts and fears haunted those troops. But here’s the thing—and this is the part that keeps you up at night—they weren’t afraid of the enemy. Not really. No, what they were afraid of was themselves. What they were afraid of was the ghost that had been following Uncle Sam around for sixteen miserable years, the ghost with napalm still dripping from its fingers and the faces of sixty thousand dead boys burned into its eyes.

Vietnam.

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Even Hollywood—that great, glittering machine that chews up history and spits out legends—had tried to dress Vietnam up as something palatable. Rambo came along, muscles oiled, bandana tight, and America clapped and cheered because God, we needed that. We needed to believe. But underneath the box office receipts and the action figures, the U.S. military knew the truth the way you know a cancer diagnosis the doctor delivers in a quiet, carpeted office: we lost. And we lost because of our own stupidity.

They had walked into the jungles of Indochina carrying the playbook from World War II—the same dog-eared, bloodstained playbook that beat Nazi Germany—and expected it to work. It was like bringing a chainsaw to perform heart surgery. Impressive instrument. Wrong application. Catastrophically wrong.

The bombs fell. Lord, did the bombs fall. They rained down on North Vietnam the way a Biblical plague rains down—relentlessly, mercilessly, in numbers that should have turned the whole country to ash and silence. But bombs, you see, are obedient only to physics, and physics doesn’t care about your war aims. Gravity pulled them down. Wind pushed them sideways. And the majority of them—most of them, more than anyone in the Pentagon ever wanted to put in writing—landed off-target. They churned up empty jungle. They cratered rice paddies. They killed water buffaloes and old women and children who had never once thought about Communism or the Domino Theory or the credibility of American deterrence.

And the Viet Cong? They survived. They melted into the hills and the rainforest like smoke, those dark, determined fighters who knew every root and ridge and shadow of that terrain the way you know the layout of your own bedroom in the dark. The jungle was theirs. It had always been theirs. And when Uncle Sam came stumbling through it, fat and loud and absolutely certain of his own righteousness, they waited. They watched. And then they hit back.

When it was over, Shimko’s phrase is the right one, the honest one: Uncle Sam headed home with his head hung low.

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Two men came out of that catastrophe changed forever. Colin Powell. Norman Schwarzkopf. They had been young men in Vietnam—had breathed that humid, history-poisoned air, had watched boys they knew come home in boxes or not come home at all. Defeat has a way of either breaking a man completely or hardening him into something extraordinary. It hardened these two into something that the Pentagon hadn’t seen in a long time: generals who knew what losing felt like.

And knowing what losing feels like—really feels like, not just intellectually but in your chest, in your sleep, in the way you can’t quite look at a flag without remembering—changes everything about how you plan to fight.

So when Iraq swallowed Kuwait whole in the summer of 1990, and President George H. W. Bush decided America was going back to that ancient, fractious part of the world, Powell and Schwarzkopf made sure it wasn’t going to be Vietnam II. This wasn’t going to be a carpet-bombing campaign that turned a country to rubble while somehow leaving the enemy largely intact and permanently enraged. This time, the Americans brought new toys. Terrifying toys.

The F-117 Stealth Fighter. A plane so angular and black and wrong-looking it seemed designed by someone who’d been having nightmares about geometry. AWACS—those great lumbering radar planes that could watch an entire battlefield from the sky like a god peering down at a chess board. JSTARS, which could track enemy ground movement in real time with an intimacy that would have seemed like black magic to Patton. And then there were the precision-guided munitions—smart bombs, they called them, as if bombs could be smart, as if you could teach a weapon wisdom. But compared to what had fallen on Vietnam, these things were surgical. A scalpel where before there had only been a sledgehammer.

In under two months, the U.S. killed approximately 50,000 Iraqi troops. Destroyed more than 3,000 tanks. Put nineteen Iraqi warships on the bottom of the Persian Gulf. Knocked 110 military aircraft out of the sky or burned them on the ground.

In March of 1991, President Bush stood before Congress—pleased as a man can be, the way a man is pleased when something that was supposed to work actually works—and he declared that Iraqi aggression against Kuwait had been defeated. That the war was over. That the honor and courage of U.S. troops had carried the day.

And the crowds cheered. And the yellow ribbons went up on the trees. And for a moment—a brief, golden, deceptive moment—it seemed like America had finally shaken that ghost.

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But here’s where it gets dark. Here’s where the story stops being a war movie and starts being something else. Something Stephen King might write. Something that happens after the credits roll.

They didn’t win. Not really.

The writer Eduardo Galeano—a man who had watched his own continent get “saved” by America more times than he could count—put it plainly: every time the United States tries to save a country, they turn it into a madhouse or a graveyard. Sometimes both. Sometimes a madhouse that eventually becomes a graveyard.

Sean McFate knows this better than most. He was a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne—one of those guys who jumps out of perfectly good airplanes in the dark, which already tells you something about his relationship with conventional wisdom. Then he became a private military contractor (very American, as McFate himself will tell you, that particular career pivot), and now he’s a professor of international relations at Georgetown, which is where men go when they’ve seen enough of the actual world and need to explain it to people who haven’t. In his 2019 book The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder, McFate lays out a truth that the Pentagon has been walking around like a crack in the sidewalk, pretending not to see:

Victory in war isn’t measured by body count. It’s measured by where a country stands after the fighting ends.

And where did Iraq stand? The Americans killed their enemies by the tens of thousands, yes. They burned through hardware and ordnance and treasure. They drove Saddam’s army back across the desert like dogs. And then they went home and left behind a country that had been destabilized like a building with all the load-bearing walls kicked out—still standing, barely, swaying in the wind, waiting to fall. Saddam Hussein remained in power, still there in his palace in the “Land of 1001 Nights,” still gassing Kurds, still ruling through terror, still a monster—just a contained monster. Like something in a cage that isn’t quite strong enough.

The cage broke in 2003. You know what came out.

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By McFate’s accounting—and it is a grim accounting, the kind of ledger that keeps actuaries awake—the United States has not won a war since 1945. Korea. Vietnam. The Gulf War. Iraq. Afghanistan. The grinding campaign against ISIS. Every single one. Losses, or at best expensive, bloody draws that solved nothing and broke everything.

Every conflict, McFate writes, the U.S. has always come home with its head hung low.

Sixteen losses. Sixteen. That is not a slump. That is not bad luck. That is a pattern, and patterns have causes, and causes—if you’re brave enough to look at them clearly—have solutions. Or at least they have lessons. Though America, as we shall see, has never been particularly good at learning lessons. We prefer the comfortable lie. We prefer the statue and the parade.

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Think about June 5th, 1944. The night before D-Day, when the whole terrible machine of the Allied invasion was coiled and waiting. General George S. Patton—Old Blood and Guts himself, a man who believed so ferociously in violence as a solution that he practically vibrated with it—stood before his troops and told them that America had never lost a battle. In its entire history. Never lost.

It was a glorious lie, and they needed it. Those boys needed it the way you need a flashlight when the power goes out and the house is making noises and you’re not entirely sure what’s in the dark. Patton gave them that light. And to their eternal credit, they carried it across the beaches of Normandy and kept carrying it all the way to Berlin.

A year later, it was over. The Nazis were defeated. The light had held.

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And then America, intoxicated with victory, made the most dangerous mistake a nation can make: it fell in love with a single moment in time and decided that moment was eternal truth. That the way you beat the Nazis was the way you beat everyone. That war was a problem of hardware and willpower and firepower and industrial capacity, and if you had enough of all of those things, you could win. Always. Forever.

The budgets swelled. After World War II, the United States was spending $500.6 billion a year on its military. Five hundred billion dollars. More than any nation on Earth had ever spent on the organized application of violence. During the Cold War’s long, anxious ideological standoff with the Soviet Union, it averaged $298.5 billion annually—and after the Cold War ended, after the other superpower simply dissolved like a sugar cube in hot water, the spending never dipped below $500 billion.

What did all that money buy? Spectacular things. Nuclear weapons that could end civilization seventeen times over. GPS—which also, quietly and without fanfare, changed how every human being on Earth navigates, which is a nice side effect of the apocalypse business. The internet. The F-22 Raptor, which is as close to a flying dragon as aeronautical engineering has managed to produce. Aircraft carriers so enormous that small cities have more modest populations. Drones that could kill a man in a cave in Pakistan while the operator sat in a temperature-controlled room in Nevada, eating a sandwich.

All of it real. All of it extraordinary. All of it pointing at the wrong enemy in the wrong war for the wrong reasons.

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Because here’s what America failed to understand—or perhaps more accurately, refused to understand, the way a man with a bad diagnosis refuses to go back to the doctor for the follow-up: after 1945, the nature of war changed. Not just the weapons. Not just the tactics. The soul of it changed.

World War II was about nations and territory and industrial capacity. It was a war of things. Factories and tanks and tonnage of steel. Whoever could make more things and blow up more of the other side’s things would win. America was extraordinary at making things. It was the most productive, most inventive, most ferociously industrial nation on Earth, and it brought all of that to bear, and it worked.

But the wars that followed—Korea, Vietnam, the Middle East, Afghanistan—were not about things. They were about belief. About God and tribe and identity and the deep, howling human need to belong to something larger than yourself. About who your ancestors were and who your enemies had always been and what the divine will required of you.

You cannot bomb a belief. You cannot strangle an idea with a blockade. You cannot send a drone to kill a religion.

The Taliban didn’t control Afghanistan because they had superior armor or better logistics. They controlled it—and eventually, inevitably, retook it—because they believed with every atom of their being that they were doing God’s work. When the Americans disrupted that, when they kicked open the door and came in with their Raptors and their GPS-guided munitions, they didn’t destroy the Taliban’s will. They focused it. They gave the jihadists something to fight against, which is the one thing an ideology needs to thrive. You give a true believer an enemy, you give him purpose. You give him a devil, and suddenly he’s not tired anymore. Suddenly the hit-and-run raids in the mountains make sense. Suddenly the boys in Pakistan with their weapons and their safe houses are calling themselves brothers.

David Kilcullen—whose 2020 book The Dragon and the Snake: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West is one of the few genuinely honest postmortems on what the West has been doing wrong—explains that modern warfare isn’t the set-piece battle of Patton’s imagination anymore. It’s micro-warfare. Guerrilla tactics. Hit and run. Melt into the population. Come back at night. You don’t need an F-22 Raptor for this. You need patience, and shared blood, and an enemy dumb enough to stay on the roads where the IEDs are.

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And then there is the strangest, most peculiarly American failure of all: the outsourcing of the future.

When America wanted to know what was coming—what wars might be fought, what enemies might rise, what the battlefield of tomorrow would look like—it didn’t ask its generals. Not really. It didn’t convene panels of historians and anthropologists and people who had actually spent time in the places that would one day become war zones. No, it turned to Hollywood. To those dream factories out in the California sun, staffed by people whose experience of violence was entirely cinematic, whose understanding of the world was filtered through the beautiful and seductive lie of narrative.

Hollywood gave America three visions of the future, and America—to its enormous cost—believed all three.

The nihilists showed a broken world. Bio-plagues and zombie hordes and cities in ruins. So America spent massively on anthrax vaccines, terrified of biological attack. As Chris Hamby reported in The New York Times, the money flowed and flowed into that particular nightmare. And to this day, not a single American enemy has deployed biological weapons. The nightmare never came. The monsters were different ones.

The patriots showed a future that was simply the past—World War II, rerun in desert camouflage. The same grand battles, the same clear enemies, the same satisfying finality. Defeat the enemy, come home heroes. America loved this vision. It kept remaking it, kept believing it, kept sending in the tanks.

And the technophiles showed a battlefield of robots and powered armor and perfect, clinical precision—warfare as a video game played by gods. So America spent $80 million developing the Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit. TALOS. Essentially an Iron Man suit. Eighty million dollars on a suit of armor that would make a soldier nearly invincible.

And with AK-47s—weapons that cost less than a used television—ISIS fighters and Taliban guerrillas outmaneuvered F-22 Raptors. Turned them into expensive irrelevancies. Because you cannot send a fighter jet after a man who just disappears into a crowd.

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There is one more thing. Perhaps the most honest and uncomfortable thing. The thing Americans most don’t want to hear.

Everyone hates America. Except Americans.

I don’t mean this in a small way, the way a man might mean that his neighbors don’t care for him. I mean it in a vast, structural way—the way a thing can be true across cultures and continents and centuries of accumulated grievance. The interventions. The coups. The “saved” countries turned to madhouses. The oil. The bases. The relentless, sometimes well-intentioned, often catastrophic certainty that America knows best.

That hatred is not just an emotion. It is a logistics system. It means that when the Taliban needs ammunition, there is someone nearby who will provide it, quietly, no questions asked, because they hate the Americans more than they care about whatever the Taliban actually stands for. It means that there are always more fighters. Always more recruits. Always more young men for whom dying in resistance to America is a meaningful death—the meaningful death.

And so the long losing streak continues. Not because America lacks courage. Not because it lacks resources or technology or the will to fight. It continues because America is still fighting the last war. Still fighting the war it won. Still carrying Patton’s flashlight into a darkness that it never actually illuminates, wondering why it can’t see.

The ghost of Vietnam is still out there, still following. It has been joined, now, by other ghosts. Baghdad. Kabul. The green valleys where boys who believed in something died fighting boys who believed in something else, and nobody came home having learned much of anything useful.

The sand in the Arabian Peninsula is still burning. And somewhere in the distance, there’s always another war being planned.

As there always is. As there always has been. As there always will be.

That’s the most frightening thing of all, isn’t it? Not the wars we lose. But the fact that we keep starting them, over and over, convinced that this time—this time— it will be different.

It won’t be different.

It never is.

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