I'm not sure what types of wars USA military is good at winning, because they haven't won a war in my parents' lifetimes, but these definitely don't include "impose unpopular policies on broadly dispersed heavily armed rural population".
Never winning wars is no obstacle to blazing through those trillions of dollars you reference, but I imagine that killing voters and their families might constitute such... they'd need to kill these "flyover" voters in some fashion that would appeal to coastal voters enough to inspire deeper political commitment to the continued prosperity of the military-industrial complex. Frankly the whole idea seems too risky for these chickenhawk cowards.
you can only win a winnable war, obviously. the USA could turn afghanistan into glass if they posed an existential threat, but we keep entering conflicts with no criteria for exit with stateless foes.
The frontier wars of empires are rarely about winning. Truman didn't really want to win Korea but he'd have been happy to let MacArthur win if Mac hadn't been such an arrogant son of a bitch. Johnson, McNamara, et al weren't willing to win Vietnam, as a statement of historical record. Grenada was forgettable because of its success. Clinton won Bosnia by accident via third-order effects of Richard Holbrooke's chase vehicle falling down the side of a mountain. We achieved our stated objectives in Afghanistan (take out Bin Laden) and Iraq (regime change) but successive administrations of both parties have found it advantageous to keep a presence in the region. It is worth noting that presence includes things like having Iran almost surrounded. Yes, surrounding our enemies on their own continent is the definition of the US frontier. We have agreements with many Asian countries(1) with the net effect of having pushed our "frontier" up the borders of Russia, China, and Iran.
If you think the small number of troops in some of these locations is trivial, keep in mind there were only a few thousand troops in Korea before the North crossed the 38th parallel and pummeled Seoul. The key was to have US engagement at the country level, and the death of a single US troop. That created the diplomatic opening to bring unlimited military power into South Korea.
This created a model, and this is important to Pax Americana, so pay attention: a model where any country allied with the US is relatively safe from its neighbors, as long as such neighbors are not allied with the US, and the US presents a credible ability to threaten the non-allied country. This is why Iran is not happy about US alignment with Afghanistan, and Iraq, and the Gulf states. Note the US even has deals with Turkmenistan.
And that is what makes the US non-response to drone strikes in Saudi Arabia a sensitive issue. The Iranians are trying to draw a picture where the US has lost its ability to present a credible threat. Which is bullshit, but the Iranian economy is in a bad way and getting worse and that makes for desperate politicians. (growth went from 13.4% in 2016 to a projected -4.5% this year). However, while the US has plenty of agreements with the House of Saud, no US servicemembers were harmed by overt aggression by Iranian combatants (as defined by the Geneva conventions, law of armed conflict, etc). So the US threshold for response has not been met. Not by a long way.
While I'm sure the price of gas in LA is up, it will be temporary. Those refineries were no doubt diverting processing to offline capacity even as the fires were burning.
tl;dr: arguing about whether the military is 'winning' misses the problem of empire entirely. Pax Americana is still here and you're enjoying it despite the shitshow at home.
(1) Backing out of TPP and electing Trump were terrible for our long-term strategic interests in Asia, particularly with respect to the Middle Kingdom and it's satellites. We pissed away a hell of a hand there. E.g. seeing a few Apple-related factory jobs show up in Austin will never compensate for the net weakening of our new ally in the modern version of Vietnam.
Wow that is an impressive... deposit of special pleading, post hoc Panglossian reverse logic, argument by novel definition, and misguided historical reinterpretation.
Nowhere in this whole page of text do we find consideration of any actual interest of USA citizens as such. No one down at the filling station cares about Turkmenistan. If asked to consider the "problem of empire", they'd answer, "Yep, it's a problem." Nor do we find here the actual reason that the war media are constantly inciting more wars in more unfortunate foreign locales: to feed more money into the maw of the military-industrial complex. Face it, USA military spends money and kills random people. They don't win wars. It's one of the more obvious facts of modern life. Only constant gaslighting from the war media has created the sort of psychological prisons from whence could issue the specious reasoning seen here.
(Thanks for moderating the earlier statement, Major.)
I have a great deal more sympathy for this argument than for those upthread. This man [0] certainly wanted to go home. If we're moving the goalpost to this location, however, the debate is over. If "going home" is the aim, why not stay home in the first place? Nothing that USA military has done in the Middle East in my parents' lifetimes has made life better or safer for Americans or for humans in general. The only reason "the enemy" has "a vote" is that we're in their countries destroying their governments and killing their families. When we leave their countries, they'll lose any ability to affect us in any way. We should do that.
Many proud people have publicly claimed otherwise, so they'll be disappointed that we've finally rejected their bullshit. Still, the lives, health, and fortunes of Americans and other human beings is more important than the feelings of politicians and newsreaders.
> When we leave their countries, they'll lose any ability to affect us in any way
That's not consistent with Sharia law, 9/11, and fairly specific directives in the Quran.(1)
That's not consistent with the core principle of a proletariat uprising under Communism.
That's not consistent with observed Chinese espionage.
That's not consistent with Russian interference in elections.
That's inconsistent with the entire human history of empires. Someone ends up at the top of a particular heap. They end up with the unenviable task of finding some way of maintaining a Pax, which inevitably leads to managing a contested frontier. (Pax Romana, Pax Sinica, Pax Britannica, Pax Americana)
Other segments of history can be interpreted as transitions from one world order to the next, and usually involve quite a bit more bloodshed than occurred before or after the Pax. Thus the term is Pax and not Bellum.
(1) I'll grant you the origin story of the modern Israel is not a moral high point of Western civilization, but neither is the conquest of old Israel a moral high point of Arab civilization.
My Muslim friends, coworkers, and drinking buddies don't recognize this facile caricature of Islam and the Koran. Bush the Lesser, Obama, and Trump have all repeatedly rejected this specific description and claimed that we're not at war with Islam; why do you disagree? The Middle East isn't the only place we find Muslims anyway; why aren't we invading Indonesia? Saddam didn't cause 9/11. Taliban didn't cause 9/11. Daesh didn't cause 9/11. The war in Afghanistan will soon be old enough that it could be sent to fight a war. We've commemorated 9/11 for long enough, with enough blood and destruction.
What Middle Eastern "proletariat" is "uprising"? They occasionally elect someone who has some socialist sympathies, only for that leader to be deposed like we did in Iran, Afghanistan, Egypt, and basically every nation in Central America. (Just think how much money the military-industrial complex has stolen from the taxpayer over how many decades, made possible by destroying the liberal modernizing government that Iran had in the 1950s. Ike and the Dulles brothers didn't get paid near enough for that...) Who are we to complain about political changes in other nations, anyway? Our nation was born in revolution. Our own current election cycle seems likely to introduce some socialist reforms. (Please don't suggest that we invade Vermont.)
What does Russian or Chinese espionage or "interference" have to do with anything we've done in the Middle East? Do we have no spies? Did we not get Yeltsin elected? Are we not underwriting the protests in Hong Kong right now? Wes Clark told us about the 7 Muslim nations on the "to invade" list; when are the invasions scheduled for Russia and China? Are we likely to win those wars? It's as if every single natural action of a modern nation can be mutilated into a pretext for more disastrous war. 1A actually protects every single action of which Russia has been accused (without evidence) of taking with respect to the 2016 elections.
As for this "pax" mythos, I don't know just what to say. I try not to disparage anyone's religious belief. Let's just say that even for the tiny portion of the vast sweep of human history that might fruitfully be understood through a lens of "empire and pax", most humans living at the time hadn't heard of the relevant empire much less had paid it fealty. Even if we restrict our attention to such periods of empire, it's not easy to shoehorn USA's actions in modern times into that analytical framework.
Wars without states are small. Wars among normal states end, eventually. Wars that USA fights are permanent plagues upon humanity, with no purpose other than to enrich armaments manufacturers. (Yeah, I know, we've withdrawn from Libya, so it's no longer contributing to the bottom line. Still, with the slave markets etc. I think it can still be considered a plague upon humanity. It's hard to be sure; reporters don't dare go to Libya and keep track of the carnage by counting the bodies washing ashore in southern Europe.)
Never winning wars is no obstacle to blazing through those trillions of dollars you reference, but I imagine that killing voters and their families might constitute such... they'd need to kill these "flyover" voters in some fashion that would appeal to coastal voters enough to inspire deeper political commitment to the continued prosperity of the military-industrial complex. Frankly the whole idea seems too risky for these chickenhawk cowards.