The U.S. Should Get Over Its Short War Obsession
Americans have long been fixated on the idea of the short, decisive war. At the start of the American Civil War, Washington gentry traveled to watch the First Battle of Bull Run—to partake of a spectacle they presumed would soon end. In 1898, U.S. Secretary of State John Hay expected the Spanish-American War to be a “splendid little war,” culminating in a quick victory for the newly emerging global power. As U.S. troops neared the Yalu River in November 1950 during the Korean War, Gen. Douglas MacArthur promised that his soldiers would “eat Christmas dinner at home.” In 2003, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld predicted that the Iraq war “certainly isn’t going to last any longer than [five months].” Multiple administrations underestimated the timeline of the war in Afghanistan.
A similar obsession with short wars colors the coverage of the Ukraine war today. In 2022, as it became clear Russia was about to invade Ukraine, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, the U.S. intelligence community, and most outside experts predicted a Russian victory in a matter of days. As the Russian advance sagged, a handful of commentators then predicted a speedy Ukrainian victory. Many more have judged the war unwinnable and called for a quick end through negotiations. The media, for its part, has labeled the war a stalemate during just about every lull in fighting.
History has not been kind to any of these predictions. The Civil War lasted four years and remains one of the bloodiest conflicts in U.S. history. The Spanish-American War devolved into a yearslong insurgency in the Philippines. MacArthur’s push towards the Yalu triggered Chinese intervention, which prolonged the conflict by years, not months. The Iraq War lasted an order of magnitude longer than Rumsfeld predicted, and Afghanistan turned into Washington’s longest war. Today, the war in Ukraine has not resulted in a quick win for either side—but it is not a stalemate, either, as the battlefield continues to evolve.
This also happened with Austria and its allies hoping to scoop up in-revolution France and probably countless others.