Why America Stopped Winning Wars

Dan Zamansky

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To find a way out of its current security crisis, the United States must recognize some hard truths. Most important among these is understanding why America stopped winning wars. The last American war to date ended, in substance, a decade ago, when the U.S. formally concluded its combat operations in Afghanistan. Since then, a country forged in war, and sustained to a large degree by victories in numerous highly consequential wars which followed, has lost sight of the fundamental fact that there is often no alternative to war, and no alternative to victory.

For the United States to emerge as a country in the first place, of course, it needed to gain its independence from the British Empire, which was not inclined to let the Colonies go. On April 19, 1775, the colonists took to their muskets at Lexington and Concord, and began the multiyear Revolutionary War. It was in this war that America’s Declaration of Independence was born, and its excoriation of the king includes the charge that he “has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.”

Within less than two months of the declaration’s signing, British regulars nearly destroyed George Washington’s Continental Army on Brooklyn Heights, and forced him to retreat hastily in the dead of night. The war only ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1783. If the colonists had not persevered, for years, against what was then the world’s richest empire, there would have been no United States of America.