A U.S. Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt II ground attack aircraft. U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Jeffrey Allen

David Ignatius finds fault with “limited” war:

The problem is that military history, since the days of the Romans, tells us that limited war is rarely successful. Policymakers, when faced with a choice between going “all in” or doing nothing, usually choose a middle option of partial intervention. But that leads to stalemates and eventual retreats that drive our generals crazy. The warrior ethos says, “If you’re in it, win it.” The politician rounds the edges [bold mine-DL].

That may apply in other cases, but that isn’t really what has happened here. It wasn’t the “warrior ethos” that committed the U.S. to “destroying” ISIS. The president did that. The politician in this case could have “rounded the edges,” but chose to define the goal of the military mission in the most maximalist way possible. It is true that the politician then imposed a restriction on the means that would be available for achieving that goal, but to call this war a “limited” one is to focus solely on the means currently being used rather than on the extremely ambitious end that the president seeks. The Libyan war was similarly “limited” in that the U.S. sought regime change on the cheap, but the intervention resulted in the complete destruction of a foreign government. That is hardly a limited or modest outcome. If the U.S. didn’t set extremely ambitious goals for its interventions, the gap between means and ends would not be nearly so large. If the U.S. had more modest goals for what it was trying to do when it used force abroad, it would probably be more successful more often than it is when it sets far-fetched goals with insufficient resources. Ignatius admits as much as he reviews the record of U.S. foreign wars with mixed or bad results:

Only in 1991’s Operation Desert Storm did the United States win a decisive victory, but it had limited objectives [bold mine-DL] and faced a weak adversary.

The main reason why Desert Storm is remembered this way is that the campaign was of short duration, it achieved its limited goal of expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait, and then it ended. The U.S. habit of seeking ambitious and often unrealistic goals sets up its policies for failure, because success as defined by the government is often either impossible or would require such a massive, long-term commitment that it would be rejected by the public within a few years.

Limited war is “rarely successful” when the desired outcome is the total defeat of an enemy, but that should make us question why our government insists on making total victory the only acceptable definition of success. That is all the more important when the wars in question are wars that the U.S. doesn’t have to fight, but opts to wage for various reasons that normally have little or no connection to U.S. security. Fighting wars with insufficient means is a tacit admission that almost no one–not even the administration waging the war–genuinely believes that these wars are necessary for U.S. security, and that is why there is so little support for making the much larger and costlier commitment that is usually required.