Why does the United States win battles, only to falter when shaping their endings?

Prepared and Analyzed by the Strategic Media Department – BETH
Supervised by Abdullah Al-Omairah

The United States possesses the world’s most powerful military machine, its largest intelligence network, and research and planning institutions that are difficult for any other country to match.

Yet its modern military history raises a perplexing question:

How can the United States overthrow regimes, destroy armies, and occupy capitals, only to withdraw at times before achieving the political outcome for which it entered the war?

This happened in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Iraq. The question is resurfacing today with Iran, as Washington appears capable of launching extensive strikes, yet advances and pauses, escalates and negotiates, and attacks the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps without decisively determining what it ultimately wants from it.

Is the United States acting without a strategy?

Or does its problem lie not in a lack of power or thought, but in the gap between winning the battle and shaping the outcome?

A Mind That Directs the Strike

It cannot be said that a country possessing such military and intelligence institutions operates entirely without a strategy.

But the existence of plans does not necessarily mean the existence of a single, coherent strategy.

In Washington, the president may have one vision, the Department of Defense another, and the Department of State a third, while intelligence agencies, Congress, and U.S. allies each pursue their own calculations.

The problem begins when these parties fail to agree on clear answers to four questions:

What is the ultimate objective?

How much force is required to achieve it?

When can the mission be declared successful?

And what happens the following day?

This is what can currently be seen in the war with Iran.

Some seek to prevent Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Others want to guarantee freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz. Some aim to destroy Iran’s missiles and drones, while others believe the objective is to compel Iran to sign an agreement.

These are not different means of achieving a single objective. They may amount to four wars within one war.

The American dilemma can therefore be summarized in a single sentence:

The United States has a mind that directs the strike, but not always one that directs the outcome.

Winning Militarily

It is essential to distinguish between military defeat and political failure.

In Iraq, U.S. forces overthrew Saddam Hussein’s regime with remarkable speed.

In Afghanistan, they removed the Taliban from power and dispersed al-Qaeda during the initial phase.

In Vietnam, U.S. forces won numerous battles and inflicted enormous military and human losses on their adversaries.

But overthrowing a regime is not the same as building a state. Destroying an army does not create peace. Killing an adversary’s leaders does not make the idea or movement to which they belong disappear.

The American problem, therefore, does not usually lie in penetrating defenses or occupying capitals. It lies in transforming those achievements into a stable and sustainable political reality after U.S. forces depart.

The United States knows how to dismantle an army, but it does not always know how to build the system that follows it.

When the Objective Expands

Some U.S. wars begin with a limited objective, only for the mission to expand gradually until its endpoint becomes difficult to define.

The intervention in Afghanistan began with pursuing al-Qaeda and removing the Taliban from power. It then evolved into an attempt to build a state, an army, institutions, an economy, and an entirely new political system.

After 20 years, the mission had grown beyond the ability to complete it, while the American presence itself had become essential to the survival of the state that was supposed to become capable of defending itself.

In Somalia, the mission began with securing the delivery of humanitarian assistance. It then shifted toward pursuing faction leaders and attempting to influence the country’s political and security structures.

In Iraq, the plan to overthrow the regime succeeded, but the post-regime phase revealed the absence of a comprehensive vision for administering the state, preserving its institutions, preventing a security vacuum, and building new political legitimacy.

The more the mission expands, the more ambiguous the meaning of victory becomes.

When a country cannot define what victory means, it cannot identify when it should stop or what conditions would allow it to leave.

America Fights Against the Clock

America’s adversaries fight on their own land and can wait for many years.

The U.S. president, however, wages war under pressure from elections, Congress, the media, public opinion, human losses, and economic costs.

The weaker adversary does not, therefore, need to defeat the U.S. military.

It merely needs to survive.

The United States needs to achieve a clear victory, while its adversary needs only to avoid final defeat.

As time passes, mere survival becomes a political victory, even if the adversary suffers far greater military losses.

This was understood by the leadership in Vietnam. It did not rely on defeating the United States in a conventional military confrontation, but on prolonging the war until American resolve weakened from within.

America’s adversaries learned that its vulnerability does not necessarily lie on the battlefield.

It lies in time.

A Weak State Is Not an Easy One

Some argue that the United States chooses vulnerable regions and weak countries in which to exercise its military superiority while avoiding direct confrontation with major powers.

This argument is partly correct.

The United States avoids direct war with nuclear powers such as Russia and China because the cost of confrontation could exceed the limits of control. It therefore relies on deterrence, sanctions, alliances, and indirect wars.

Weaker states, by contrast, appear to be targets that can be subdued quickly and at a limited initial cost.

The paradox, however, is that the same weakness that makes a state easy to overthrow also makes it far more difficult to govern after its collapse.

A weak army may be defeated within weeks, but the collapse of state institutions creates a political and security vacuum in which armed groups, interest networks, and tribal and sectarian divisions emerge. These forces are difficult to subdue or negotiate with.

A state may be militarily weak without being politically or socially pliable.

When central authority collapses, the country does not necessarily become easier to govern. Instead, it may fragment into dozens of smaller forces, each requiring a different battle, agreement, and settlement.

The United States may therefore select an adversary that is easy to defeat militarily, only to discover that it has entered a society that is difficult to manage politically.

When Does America Succeed?

It would be inaccurate to claim that the United States always fails.

During the 1991 war to liberate Kuwait, the objective was clearly defined: expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait and restore its legitimate government.

Washington assembled a broad international coalition, defined the mission, connected military operations to an achievable political objective, and ended the war once that objective had been accomplished.

It did not proceed to occupy Iraq or overthrow its regime because neither objective formed part of the mandate on which the coalition had been established.

The liberation of Kuwait therefore presents a different model: the ending was known before the operation began.

The comparison reveals a fundamental principle:

The more limited and clearly defined the objective, the greater the likelihood of American success. The more the objective shifts from defeating a military force to reshaping a state and society, the more U.S. power begins to lose its advantage.

Iran Is Not a Mouse

Iran is not a conventional military peer of the United States, nor can it defeat it in an open confrontation.

But it is not a country without instruments of power.

Tehran built its capabilities specifically to confront an adversary that surpasses it in airpower, naval power, and technology. It therefore did not attempt to create a smaller version of the U.S. military. Instead, it developed tools designed to make the use of force against it costly and complicated.

Iran possesses missiles, drones, wide geographical reach, armed networks beyond its borders, and the ability to threaten military bases, ports, energy tankers, and maritime corridors.

It can also transfer the effects of war beyond its territory and turn any extensive attack into a security and economic disruption extending far beyond Iran’s borders.

Iran does not seek to defeat the United States militarily. It seeks to convince Washington that victory over it would be neither swift, clean, nor inexpensive.

It thus compensates for its conventional weakness through its ability to widen the battlefield, disperse its adversary’s attention, and raise the cost of decisive action.

Why Does the IRGC Appear So Formidable?

The United States does not fear the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a force capable of defeating it in a conventional battle.

It fears what might happen after an attempt to destroy the IRGC’s capabilities entirely.

The American question is not:

Can we strike the Revolutionary Guard?

The military answer is clear.

The more difficult questions are:

Would the strikes force it to surrender?

Would the missiles and drones stop?

Would the Strait of Hormuz remain open?

Would the armed groups linked to Iran cease their operations?

Would the war spread to other countries?

What would happen if the Iranian state weakened or its institutions collapsed?

And who would govern Iran the following day?

This is why U.S. conduct sometimes resembles a cycle of advance and retreat: a strike followed by a pause, escalation accompanied by negotiations, and a sweeping threat that ends in a limited operation.

This behavior may represent an attempt to use enough force to pressure Tehran without reaching a level that ignites a comprehensive war Washington does not know how to end.

The paradox is that this hesitation gives Iran an opportunity to appear more powerful than it truly is. Tehran presents every instance in which the United States avoids decisive action as proof of its own deterrent power and resilience.

More Than One Strategy

The problem, therefore, is not that the United States is a power without a mind.

It is a power with many minds that do not always agree on the ultimate objective.

It excels at reaching the target, destroying its military capabilities, and winning the opening battle.

But it falters when moving from the military question:

How do we defeat the adversary?

To the political question:

What do we want to put in its place?

Military power can open the way for politics, but it cannot replace it.

Whenever the political ending is absent, strikes become a means of postponing the problem rather than solving it. Military superiority then ceases to be a path toward victory and becomes an immense capacity to repeat the war.

Who Defeats America?

The real question may not be:

Why is the United States unable to defeat its adversaries?

It may instead be:

How have its adversaries learned to confront it?

They have realized that they do not need to shoot down American aircraft, occupy U.S. territory, or defeat its armies in a major battle.

They need only disperse their forces, conceal their capabilities, widen the battlefields, increase the cost, and wait for a change in the president, Congress, or public opinion.

The adversary does not defeat the United States with greater power. It pushes America into confronting its own internal contradictions.

The United States enters war with superiority in weapons, economics, and technology.

Its adversary enters with something else:

The ability to wait.

Conclusion

The United States does not begin its wars without plans, but it begins some of them before knowing what the ending should look like.

It knows how to strike, overthrow regimes, and destroy military capabilities, but it does not always know what to do afterward.

It therefore wins the battle, only to falter in politics.

It reaches the capital, but not the outcome.

It brings down the regime, then discovers that overthrowing it was the easiest part.

The problem is not that the United States does not know how to begin a war. It is that it sometimes begins one before answering the question that should have preceded the first shot:

How do we want this war to end?