Among the commentariat, America’s problem with “forever wars” is usually discussed as a failure of grand strategy. In this telling, presidents misjudge threats; generals overestimate what military power can accomplish; and policymakers confuse battlefield victories with political success. These explanations are all valid, but they miss something fundamental: the people making decisions about war face incentives that are often badly misaligned with the interests of the public.
The United States does not need to assume that its presidents are uniquely reckless, its generals uniquely ambitious, or its diplomats uniquely foolish. It needs to recognize that even intelligent, well-intentioned people can make systematically bad decisions when the institutional incentives surrounding them are wrong.
Consider the politician’s dilemma. No president wants to be remembered as the person who “lost” Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, or some future client state. Continuing a failing war therefore has an asymmetric political advantage. If the war eventually succeeds, the president can claim credit. If it fails, responsibility can be distributed among predecessors, allies, Congress, insufficient resources, or changing circumstances. Withdrawal is different. If the government collapses afterward, the president who ordered the withdrawal can be blamed personally.
The result is predictable: continuing a war can be politically safer than ending one, even when continuing it is strategically irrational.
The same incentive problem exists within the military. Imagine an administration asking for a new commander to turn around a failing war. The officer who says, “The mission is fundamentally impossible and we should leave,” is unlikely to be rewarded with the command. By contrast, the officer who says, “Give me the job. I have a new strategy, and the previous commander simply did not execute properly,” has a much better chance.
This produces what’s known as “endogenous optimism,” a state of mind where hope and expectation grow from within a closed system. In practice, what this means is that when a strategy fails, institutions naturally search for better implementation rather than question the underlying premise. In the case of forever wars, it means more troops, a new commander, a revised counterinsurgency doctrine, more training, more money—all of which are easier to propose than the politically devastating conclusion that the mission itself cannot succeed.
Afghanistan provides an excellent, recent example of these unfortunately familiar dynamics. Over two decades, Washington repeatedly changed commanders and strategies while rarely reconsidering the fundamental assumption that American military power could create a self-sustaining Afghan political order. When one strategy failed, policymakers tended to conclude that the strategy had been wrong, not that the larger objective might be beyond America’s ability to achieve.
This is a classic public-choice problem. The costs of intervention are broadly distributed among taxpayers, soldiers, military families, and civilians, while the benefits of continued intervention can be concentrated among institutions and individuals with direct stakes in its continuation. Nobody needs to conspire. Each actor can behave rationally according to his or her own incentives while the system produces an irrational collective result.
The answer is not to hope for wiser presidents. It is to change the incentives. What follows are a list of reforms that would make forever wars harder to start and easier to end, and which do not require wholesale changes to the existing structures of power. While making forever wars impossible would be preferable, the abolition of centralized political authority ideal, these small adjustments could vastly improve the economic and security situation of Americans while diminishing the suffering and harm of the beleaguered citizens of Washington’s targets abroad.
First, every authorization for military force should have a hard sunset.
Congress should never give the executive branch an effectively permanent authorization to wage war. Every authorization should expire after a defined period, perhaps two or three years, unless Congress affirmatively renews it.
This would reverse the current presumption. Instead of asking, “Why should we stop?” policymakers would have to answer, “Why should we continue?”
That distinction matters enormously. Continuing a war should require a fresh political justification rather than simply inheriting an old one.
Second, every intervention should have a clearly defined political objective and exit criterion.
Before committing substantial military force, the administration should be required to explain precisely what political outcome it expects military force to produce.
“Defeat terrorism” is not an adequate objective. Neither is “promote stability.” The government should identify what success looks like, how military force is expected to produce it, and under what circumstances American forces will leave.
This is fundamentally a Clausewitzian principle: military action is a means to a political end. If policymakers cannot explain the political end, they should not be trusted to determine the military means.
Most importantly, the exit criterion should not be endlessly expandable. “We will leave when the local government is strong enough” is not an exit strategy if American policymakers can always declare that the government is not yet strong enough.
Third, create an independent strategic red team whose job is to argue for withdrawal.
Before and during major interventions, an independent body should be empowered to make the strongest possible case that the war is strategically misguided.
Its members should have no institutional stake in the continuation of the mission. They should be required to examine sunk costs, unreliable allies, mission creep, bureaucratic incentives, and, most importantly, the possibility that military force simply cannot produce the desired political outcome.
The president needs someone whose professional responsibility is to say, “No. The premise is wrong.”
Fourth, change military promotion incentives.
American military culture should reward strategic candor, not merely confidence.
Officers who identify unrealistic objectives, challenge prevailing assumptions, acknowledge uncertainty, or recommend terminating an unsound mission should not be regarded as insufficiently aggressive. They should be recognized as demonstrating precisely the kind of strategic judgment that leaders need.
A general should not advance professionally because he promises that he alone can succeed where his predecessors failed. Sometimes the most valuable military advice is that the mission cannot be accomplished by military means.
Fifth, make the full cost of war politically visible.
Congress should be required to consider the genuine long-term cost of every intervention, including veterans’ care, equipment replacement, interest on borrowed money, and other deferred obligations.
The public should not be presented with the cost of the next appropriation while the enormous, accumulated cost of the intervention disappears into separate budgets.
If policymakers are going to vote to continue a war, they should have to confront what it has already cost and what another year is realistically expected to cost.
Finally, require an exit plan before entering a war.
Before American troops are deployed, the administration should have to explain the circumstances under which they will come home. The plan should be public except where genuine security concerns require classification.
This requirement would force policymakers to confront a question they too often postpone: If this intervention does not work, how do we get out?
That question should be asked before the first American soldier is deployed—not after twenty years of fighting.
Again, while none of these reforms make the fighting of wars impossible, their implementation would be hugely beneficial to keeping such wars as limited as possible.
This will continue to be important so long as Washington retains such preponderant military superiority. For America’s extraordinary military power makes this problem much more acute. The United States can destroy armies, topple governments, occupy countries, and sustain client regimes long after their political foundations have eroded.
What it cannot reliably do is manufacture legitimacy, nationalism, or political cohesion.
That is the lesson of Vietnam. It is the lesson of Iraq. It is the lesson of Afghanistan.
The answer, therefore, if abolishing Washington’s hold on power is not possible, is not simply better strategy but better institutional design.
At present, the American system makes wars relatively easy to begin and extraordinarily difficult to end. We should reverse that presumption.
Starting a war should require a compelling affirmative case—continuing one should require an affirmative demonstration that its political objective remains achievable.
That would not eliminate American interventionism. But it might finally make “forever war” the exception rather than the default.
