A Framework for Analyzing the Roots of Endless War

This report identifies four factors that lie behind the mismatch between objectives and capabilities responsible for America’s endless counterterrorism warfare: (1) a lack of an existential terrorist threat; (2) the adoption of unlimited and transformative objectives that are difficult or impossible to achieve; (3) a failure to clearly define objectives in measurable terms; and (4) a failure to sufficiently plan for the termination of war. This section describes the theoretical basis for viewing these factors as the root of endlessness in America’s counterterrorism wars and provides a framework for assessing the existence of these factors that can be applied to current or potential future wars.

The first factor is the inability of America’s terrorist rivals to pose an existential threat to the United States.¹ The United States has not faced a major threat to its territorial integrity since World War II—even from other states, let alone non-state actors.² Were groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State capable of defeating the United States rather than simply achieving limited objectives, the war might end with an American defeat. However, it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which jihadist terrorists militarily triumph over the United States or European countries. Indeed, defeating the United States outside of the Greater Middle East may not even be an objective for many jihadist groups.³

If jihadist terrorists do begin to pose an existential threat, it will most likely be because the United States and its Western allies overreacted to attacks and become too willing to sacrifice their values. Some analysts and commentators view existential social disintegration or the loss of core values as a danger, particularly in Europe.⁴ Yet even in Europe, where jihadists have demonstrated a far greater capability to mount sustained campaigns of terror, they have largely failed to generate such a crisis.⁵ Moreover, this fear raises questions of whether military responses and the rhetoric of existential threat are helpful or merely the vectors by which such social disintegration could occur.

Beyond Existential Threat: Evaluating the Starkness of the Strategic Context

In the absence of a total American defeat as a likely possibility, the focus must turn to the question of American objectives. The strategic theorist Lawrence Freedman has correctly criticized the concept of a “war of choice” for lacking meaning, as in the end, all wars involve a choice to fight.⁶ While there may be no true wars of necessity, that does not mean that “the strategic context” within which the choices are made is constant.⁷ Freedman writes, “decisions facing previous generations were much starker than those facing our own, for the conflicts that mattered were between great powers. Now the choices are far more complicated, if perhaps less fateful, in a world of terrorists, failing states and delinquent regimes.”⁸

The strategic context of America’s counterterrorism wars is one where the United States faces a wealth of possible choices, and jihadists have far fewer. Jihadists’ inability to carry out a sustained campaign of major attacks inside United States while the United States easily projects military power globally means the United States’ choice of objectives plays the primary role in defining the war’s character. Unlike members of al-Qaeda, who found themselves targeted by missiles, hunted across the globe, and imprisoned and tortured in black sites, for the vast majority of Americans, jihadist terrorism had very little personal impact on their daily lives. Even in 2001, the risk of dying in a terrorist attack was less than such accepted risks as death in industrial accidents, and between 1970 and 2016, the annual risk of an American dying in a terrorist attack was less than the risk of drowning in a bathtub.⁹

Even the spike of fear surrounding ISIS’s surge to prominence in the Middle East did not translate into the presence of a clear and direct terrorist threat to the United States. As the United States initiated its counter-ISIS war, it reiterated that it had no evidence of specific, credible plots by ISIS to strike the U.S. homeland.¹⁰ Two independent reviews of U.S. terrorism cases found no examples of returnees from the Syrian conflict committing violence in the United States, and only one publicly known plot to do so by a returnee from Syria.¹¹ With the possible exception of the attack in Pensacola, Fla., no foreign terrorist organization has directed and carried out a deadly attack inside the United States in the post-9/11 era.¹² The attack in Pensacola on December 6, 2019 that killed three American sailors was at least enabled by AQAP, but it is not clear to what extent AQAP provided material assistance to the plot beyond effectively branding it by communicating with the attacker prior to the attack and providing evidence of the communication. Nor is it clear whether military action can prevent such attacks over the long term. For further discussion of the Pensacola attack, see Appendix One.

It is certainly true that terrorist groups have managed to inspire and, in a select few cases, advise attacks inside the United States via online communication. ISIS took this approach to an unprecedented level.¹³ However, it is not clear that these so-called enabled plots are deadlier or more likely to succeed than attacks that are merely inspired by foreign terrorist groups.¹⁴ For more discussion of this report’s differentiation between inspired, enabled, and directed plots, see Appendix Two. Even if one includes all attacks motivated by jihadism interpreted broadly regardless of the existence of actual organizational direction since 9/11, the death toll is similar to the death toll from far-right wing terrorist attacks, a problem the United States does not see as requiring war.¹⁵

Given this strategic context, American objectives and decisions deserve greater focus than other factors in analyzing what gives rise to these wars and their endless character.¹⁶ Terrorist violence in the United States post-9/11 is more similar to other crimes, for example mass shootings, than a direct military threat that presents a stark context in which to make choices about waging war.

The less-than-stark context of America’s decisions regarding its counterterrorism wars reflects the protection provided by the United States’ distance from the conflict zones and the separation provided by oceans. As Julian Corbett noted in 1911, much strategic theory assumes a context of continental war distinct from that facing maritime powers like the United States.¹⁷ Corbett’s discussion of a continental vs. maritime context illuminates a problem with claims that focusing on U.S. decision-making constitutes a form of “strategic narcissism.” ¹⁸ Such claims presume the adoption of objectives requiring continental warfare. The decision to adopt such objectives is a choice, and obscuring that choice—as a turn away from U.S. decision-making processes does—constitutes its own form of strategic narcissism because it assumes that one context for war is universal.¹⁹

The variety of choices available to the United States with regard to its response to terrorism also differentiates the endless wars the United States engages in from other cases that also might be considered endless. For example, in its confrontation with ISIS, the Iraqi government did not benefit from a strategic context in which it could view itself as being the primary determiner of the war’s character. ISIS demonstrated its ability to define the character of the war by seizing Iraq’s second largest city of Mosul and engaging in occasional further advances even after the U.S. intervened with airpower to support the Iraqi government.²⁰ In Afghanistan, where United Nations data on civilian casualties attributed almost half of all civilian casualties in 2019 to the Taliban and another 12 percent to ISIS, it likewise would be narcissistic to contend the Afghan government plays an inordinately primary role in defining the character of the war.²¹

Unlike the United States, the Iraqi and Afghan governments could not just decide to retreat across the ocean back to their homeland and expect the threat to be manageable and minimal.²² These examples, however, only serve to show the immense importance of the original choice to intervene in continental wars and thereby surrender the benefits that geopolitics have endowed the United States with in terms of strategic distance.

America’s expansive objectives, which tend towards the unachievable, have contributed to the endlessness of America’s counterterrorism wars. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush defined America’s objective in the war on terrorism in remarkably broad terms, stating, “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”²³ Since then, policymakers across the political spectrum have repeatedly presented the objective of America’s counterterrorism wars in more circumspect terms while still maintaining defeat as an objective, for example, seeking the defeat of al-Qaeda, ISIS, or other terrorist groups.²⁴ However, the United States has never fully abandoned the broad aim that Bush presented in the days following 9/11 as illustrated by Trump’s presentation during the 2020 campaign of his agenda were he to win, which included the statement that he would “Wipe Out Global Terrorists Who Threaten to Harm Americans,” a line that evokes the breadth of Bush’s early comments despite Trump’s stated commitment to ending endless war.²⁵

In order to evaluate the role of American objectives in generating endless war, it is useful to divide objectives by their type. This report defines three types of objectives: Unlimited, Limited (Transformative), and Limited (Disruptive). While objective type alone does not determine the difficulty of achieving a chosen objective, when it comes to counterterrorism warfare they are related as shown in Table 1.

War objectives are either unlimited or limited. As Donald Stoker, professor of strategy and policy at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., argues, the determination of whether a war is limited or unlimited is fundamentally a question of the limited or unlimited character of its objectives. For Stoker, channeling Julian Corbett, unlimited objectives are those that seek “to overthrow the enemy government” and anything that seeks “something less” constitutes a limited objective.²⁶

Stoker warns that definitions of limited war not based in this distinction blur means and ends in a way that deprives the term of analytical usefulness.²⁷ Indeed, many of the United States’ post-9/11 wars waged for unlimited objectives have been shaped by limitations on means and a light footprint model that backfired.²⁸ One prominent example is the American decision to adopt an unlimited objective of regime change in Libya along with transformative objectives regarding what would replace the Ghaddafi regime while refusing to commit significant troops, attention, or resources, helping fuel an internationalized civil war.²⁹

In the context of America’s counterterrorism wars, Bush’s promise that the war “will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated,” Obama’s statements that “we’ve sent a message from the Afghan border to the Arabian Peninsula to all parts of the globe: We will not relent, we will not waver, and we will defeat you” regarding al-Qaeda and regarding ISIS, that “our objective is clear: We will degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counterterrorism strategy” all constitute unlimited objectives.³⁰ Trump’s statement that “terrorists who oppress and murder innocent people should never sleep soundly, knowing that we will completely destroy them. These savage monsters will not escape their fate, and they will not escape the final judgment of God” puts forward an unlimited objective as did his administration’s more staid comment that “it is the policy of the United States that ISIS be defeated.”³¹ Joe Biden’s statement that we should “narrowly define our mission as defeating al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (or ISIS)” is also an unlimited objective even though he says the U.S. will pursue the aim narrowly.³²

Limited objectives can be further divided into two types. Some objectives are limited but transformative in that they seek a broader change in social and political conditions via the use of military force.³³ Unlike an unlimited objective, a transformative but limited objective would seek such transformation only in a particular area or with regard to a specific capability without defeating the enemy as a whole. Transformative objectives tend to be expressed with terms like “degrade.” Terms like “destroy” and “defeat” can also express transformative objectives when qualified by a particular object short of the enemy as a whole, as in “territorial defeat.” When CENTCOM releases a press release describing counterterrorism strikes in Yemen while saying the strikes were meant “to degrade these groups’ ability to hold territory and coordinate external attacks,” those are limited but transformative objectives.³⁴ The named aim does not mention the defeat of AQAP, but it does seek to reshape the conditions in Yemen to prevent AQAP from holding territory or organizing plots without mentioning a specific plot in need of disruption.

Transformative objectives can be contrasted with disruptive objectives that seek to merely interrupt or eliminate a rival’s capability to achieve a particular objective or outcome without reshaping the political and social conditions of an area.³⁵ Limited and disruptive objectives are defined in terms of particular threats, for example an aim of rescuing particular hostages, killing the individuals plotting a particular attack or set of attacks on the United States, or halting a terrorist army from advancing.³⁶ For example, the United States’ effort to track down and kill Anwar al-Awlaki constituted a disruptive objective. While the U.S. also pursued more transformative and even unlimited objectives in its counterterrorism war in Yemen, the killing of Awlaki was not viewed as a means of re-writing Yemeni governance. Instead it was justified mainly as a means of removing a figure thought to be particularly dangerous due to his role in specific plots that the U.S. believed would at least be interrupted or made less effective upon his death.³⁷ Similarly, the attempted raid to rescue Americans held hostage by ISIS in Raqqa on July 3, 2014 was not viewed within the U.S. government as part of a campaign to defeat or degrade ISIS but as a specific effort to rescue Americans held hostage, a limited and disruptive objective.³⁸

Assessing the Difficulty of Achieving Unlimited Objectives

An objective’s type does not inherently define the difficulty of achieving it. Some unlimited objectives may be easy to achieve. One examination of multiple databases of terrorist groups suggests that an average of 50 percent of terrorist groups across the databases do not survive past their first year.³⁹ This finding would seem to suggest that it is far from impossible to destroy or defeat a terrorist group. In contrast, some limited objectives may be impossible to achieve. For example, it is likely impossible that the United States can degrade an entrenched terrorist group intent on striking the U.S. homeland—like al-Qaeda—sufficiently to prevent it from successfully carrying out an attack in perpetuity.

However, there are general trends regarding the achievability of particular objective types that require examination. A failure to account for the type of objective being sought and its relationship to achievability contributes to the endless character of America’s wars.

Unlimited objectives in counterterrorism warfare tend to be unachievable. It is arguably not even possible to formulate an achievable unlimited objective in the context of counterterrorism, as terrorist organizations generally do not have governments that can be destroyed. A useful warning about expanding the definition of unlimited objectives to include the total extirpation of a movement can be extrapolated from Corbett’s discussion of naval strategy where he states, “No degree of naval superiority can ensure our communications against sporadic attack from detached cruisers, or even raiding squadrons if they be boldly led and are prepared to risk destruction … By general and permanent control we do not mean that the enemy can do nothing, but that he cannot interfere with our maritime trade and oversea operations so seriously as to affect the issue of the war, and that he cannot carry on his own trade and operations except at such risk and hazard as to remove them from the field of practical strategy.”⁴⁰

Even if destroying a terrorist group as a whole is understood to be a coherent unlimited objective, data on terrorist group longevity suggests that achieving unlimited objectives is difficult. Thus, making an unlimited aim the objective of a counterterrorism war is usually a recipe for endless war.

A 2008 RAND study of post-1968 terrorist group fates by Seth Jones and Martin Libicki found that “military force has rarely been the primary reason for the end of terrorist groups.”⁴¹ Studies like that by Jones and Libicki may still overestimate the potential for military defeat of terrorist groups. As Jonathan Powell, British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s former chief of staff and chief negotiator in the Northern Ireland peace process, has argued even these studies and ones like them tend to produce an inflated sense of the potential for victory by including small groups alongside more entrenched, larger terrorist groups when few if any entrenched, larger groups have been defeated or come to an end except via negotiations.⁴²

A look at the terrorist groups the United States has fought its counterterrorism wars against suggests they tend to fall into the category of larger, more entrenched groups resilient to military defeat.⁴³ The United States has been fighting various incarnations of ISIS for more than 17 years, and failed to defeat the group despite having 150,000 troops in Iraq, a cost Americans were unwilling to accept.⁴⁴ Despite almost 20 years of war in Afghanistan, and more than a decade of drone strikes in Pakistan, al-Qaeda continues to exist in South Asia though in a substantially degraded form.⁴⁵ In addition, al-Qaeda continues to operate across the Greater Middle East, is now at least 32 years old, and is more than 24 years into its declared war on the United States.⁴⁶

Former government officials who have worked on counterterrorism policy are cognizant of the difficulty of achieving unlimited objectives like the defeat of al-Qaeda or ISIS. For example, former National Counterterrorism Center Director Nicholas Rasmussen has warned that words like “defeat, destroy, or deny” constitute “very ambitious objectives that, even if we were maximally resourced, even if everything broke our way in the international environment, even if every positive projection of the international environment you could develop came true, we still would have struggled to meet those objectives on the kind of timeline we were setting for ourselves.”⁴⁷ Similarly, Rosa Brooks, a former counselor to Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy, wrote regarding terrorism, “we need to … recognize it as an ongoing problem to be managed, rather than ‘defeated.’”⁴⁸

Two limits on the ability of the United States to defeat terrorist groups are worth exploring in particular. First, America’s jihadist enemies’ resilience is rooted in the fact that they draw upon and give voice to real grievances and socio-economic problems in the Greater Middle East.⁴⁹ Second, jihadist groups have decentralized, giving rise to affiliates and front groups while also playing up their identity as brands so any individual can claim to act in their name.⁵⁰ As a result, even in the rare cases where a jihadist terrorist organization might be defeated, it can reconstitute itself or serve as an inspiration for a new organization, and where groups are not eliminated, the networked nature of the jihadist movement can help sustain groups that are struggling due to counterterrorism pressure.

The selection of unlimited objectives can also militate against the pursuit of negotiations, which are critical to resolving conflicts. As noted above, entanglements with entrenched terrorist groups, like those the U.S. is currently fighting, tend to end only via negotiations that integrate them into political arrangements and resolve their grievances to some extent.⁵¹ Yet, the rhetoric that is used to emphasize the need to defeat or destroy terrorist groups tends to label the groups and those who join them as inherently evil – hence the need for destruction and not simply limited aims to protect specific interests.

President George W. Bush summed up his administration’s views regarding the United States’ negotiations with the Taliban after 9/11, saying, “These demands are not open to negotiation or discussion. The Taliban must act, and act immediately. They will hand over the terrorists, or they will share in their fate,” continuing to assert, “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”⁵² The tendency to dismiss negotiation and promote Manicheanism even when it came to states regarding their level of enthusiasm for the war on terror hardly left room to consider negotiation with the terrorists themselves. Of course, all governments deny they will negotiate with terrorists, but it is also worth noting how Bush administration figures like Vice President Dick Cheney sought to torpedo negotiations with the Taliban even over such matters as prisoners.⁵³

The power of unlimited objectives to militate against negotiations has not disappeared even as the United States has pursued negotiations with the Taliban. Former Trump National Security Adviser Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster compared negotiations with the Taliban to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of the Nazis. Notably, the reason McMaster gives for this absurd analogy is that the process “renders the war unjust, because we no longer have defined a just end,” presumably because he describes the enemy as “some of the most horrible people on earth. These are the enemies of all civilized people” who require defeat and destruction.⁵⁴

The point about negotiations is not simply a matter of restating the difficulty of achieving unlimited objectives. Even where the United States is in the position to deal a terrorist group a substantial military defeat, the only true way to ensure that the tactical victories can be translated and consolidated into strategic victory is via negotiation and the other party’s acceptance of a new political arrangement. As Clausewitz warned, even where an enemy’s forces are entirely destroyed and their country occupied, “both these things may be done and the war, that is the animosity and the reciprocal effects of the hostile elements cannot be considered to have ended so long as the enemy’s will has not been broke: in other words, so long as the enemy government and its allies have not been driven to ask for peace, or the population made to submit.”⁵⁵ This is why Clausewitz emphasizes the concept of the “peace treaty,” writing that “even if hostilities should occur again, a peace treaty will always extinguish a mass of sparks that might have gone on quietly smoldering.”⁵⁶

The unlimited objectives at work in counterterrorism warfare rarely countenance the possibility of a peace treaty even in victory with unconditional or highly favorable terms. As George W. Bush put it in 2005, “In World War II, victory came when the empire of Japan surrendered on the deck of the USS Missouri. In Iraq, there will not be a signing ceremony on the deck of a battleship. Victory will come when the terrorists and Saddamists can no longer threaten Iraq's democracy, when the Iraqi security forces can provide for the safety of their own citizens, and when Iraq is not a safe haven for terrorists to plot new attacks on our nation.”⁵⁷ Ivo Daalder and James M. Lindsay similarly noted in December 2001 that “the United States campaign against terrorism will not be like America’s effort to force Japan’s unconditional surrender.”⁵⁸ They added:

The campaign against terrorism is instead much more like the cold war of the past century. Like the fight against Soviet communism, today’s campaign against terrorism is likely to be nasty, brutish, and long. Because of the diverse nature of the threat, the United States has no clear vision of when or how the war will end. Complete success in the military operations in Afghanistan will not necessarily mean victory. Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network of terrorists extends well beyond Afghanistan. It could easily reconstitute itself even if the United States captures or kills bin Laden and his lieutenants.⁵⁹

That the United States and its allies failed to engage the Taliban in negotiations during and around the Bonn talks in 2001 and 2002 over the future of the Afghan government when the United States was at the peak of its relative power in Afghanistan, having destroyed the Taliban state illustrates the catastrophic consequences of rejecting negotiation to pursue unlimited aims of total destruction.⁶⁰ Instead the United States left negotiations with the Taliban until much later. As General Nick Carter, the deputy commander of Western forces in Afghanistan put it in June 2013, “Back in 2002, the Taliban were on the run. I think that at that stage, if we had been very prescient, we might have spotted that a final political solution to what started in 2001, from our perspective would have involved getting all Afghans to sit at the table and talk about their future …. The problems that we have been encountering over the period since then are essentially all political problems, and political problems can only ever be solved by people talking to each other.”⁶¹

Even in the oft-cited unconditional surrender of Imperial Japan to the United States in World War II, there was still negotiation over the surrender terms (with the final acceptance of unconditional surrender) and not simply the elimination of everyone involved in the prior regime. Indeed, the United States deliberately chose to maintain the Emperor as a figure and integrate him into the new system because they feared not doing so would preclude the ability to consolidate the victory.⁶²

A comparison of the Japanese case to today’s counterterrorism wars also helps reveal the definitional problem that haunts theories of unlimited objectives with regard to terrorists. In the Japanese case, the U.S. could claim the achievement of its unlimited objective because the referent point was the Japanese state, not every Japanese imperial figure as an individual. However, terrorists generally do not have the same kind of established state-like structures, meaning that unlimited objectives like “lasting defeat” or “destroy” bleed into broader and more difficult-to-achieve aims, like making every terrorist or adherent of the movement disengage.⁶³ The current politicized debate around Western ISIS detainees reveals the humanitarian dangers and counterproductive impact on security interests of tying these challenges too closely to military objectives, presumed guilt in atrocities, and preventive security fears.⁶⁴ Many citizens of western countries including women and children have been left in poor conditions in Syria or even stripped of citizenship as their status is interpreted through the risks they may pose in a continuing conflict rather than as an issue of human rights and demobilization and disengagement of armed actors.

That terrorist groups are closer to a movement than to a state makes it essential to clearly specify the limited objectives being sought—even if they are quite transformative or involve the destruction of specific organizational structures—rather than fueling a floating image of total defeat. The claim that destroying a particular terrorist structure is the same as destroying the terrorist group just does not ring true to people, nor should it, given how terrorist groups often strategically shift structure while maintaining continuity in a way states are rarely capable of.

At the same time, the moral power mobilized by and through the language of unlimited objectives imposes political constraints on admitting that the aim was always just a limited objective, such as denying territory to ISIS or degrading its ability to project power. One’s political rivals can launch accusations of failing to destroy the remaining adherents. If one has proclaimed defeat as the necessary aim, it then becomes difficult to credibly claim defeat really meant something more limited. This point is illustrated by the wave of public criticism of Trump for asserting that ISIS was 100 percent defeated. The claim became an oft-fact checked issue because Trump’s own rhetoric about destroying ISIS signaled broader aims, even when he seemed to suggest that he might only mean territorial destruction.⁶⁵

Meanwhile, the use of the language of unlimited objectives rather than the explicit definition and statement of limited objectives in measurable terms—whether it is ISIS’s territorial destruction or something else—opens the door for bureaucratic manipulation and invention of new objectives to maintain the presence. James Jeffrey, the former special representative for Syria Engagement and special envoy to the Global Coalition to Defeat Islamic State under Trump, appears to have admitted he took precisely this approach, saying: “When the situation in northeast Syria had been fairly stable after we defeated ISIS, [Trump] was inclined to pull out. In each case, we then decided to come up with five better arguments for why we needed to stay. And we succeeded both times. That’s the story,” while going so far as to conceal the number of troops in Syria from Trump.⁶⁶

Trump would have been better placed to mobilize support for a withdrawal if he had simply made the case that the specific, limited objectives that implicated U.S. interests had been achieved rather than invoking the moral mantle of destroying the enemy entirely, something he clearly had not done. While these examples are partially the result of Trump’s particular style of decision-making and failure to lead, it also reveals how the proclamation of unlimited objectives is ripe for confusion and abuse in ways that promote endlessness.

Assessing the Difficulty of Achieving Limited Objectives

Limited objectives tend to be more achievable than unlimited objectives as they do not require the complete destruction of an enemy. But they also vary in the extent to which they are achievable.

Transformative objectives, despite being limited, still require a sufficient application of coercive power to eliminate effective challenges to the desired new order. While American history provides examples of the successful completion of transformative objectives, it is important to keep in mind that many of these successes were achieved through the use of significant violence and acceptance of illiberal means.⁶⁷ The history of failure of U.S. regime change cautions against transformative aims, as do the substantial differences between today’s Middle Eastern context and the context of the oft-cited transformative efforts in the wake of World War II.⁶⁸ In addition, the process of ordering another society tends to produce resistance from those who do not like the new order, even if they were not the original target of force. Too often, the United States has missed how its own interventions generate resistance.⁶⁹ Where transformative objectives are set without a commitment to the expenditure of sufficient resources and use of sufficient force to effectively reorder society, war will become endless in the form of constantly fighting against the latest opponents of the new order.⁷⁰ It is not even clear whether greater commitment could resolve the issue. Research on civil wars suggests that external intervention can prolong conflict by reshaping both domestic and international incentives regarding the conflict.⁷¹ Moreover, the inevitable civilian casualties that will come with a U.S. intervention of the sort capable of transforming Middle Eastern politics via military force will likely serve to fuel radicalization across the region, as occurred in Iraq.

In contrast to transformative objectives, disruptive objectives tend to be achievable for the United States. For example, the United States proved more than capable of demolishing Saddam Hussein’s regime. This is not to say that disruptive objectives are always achievable. For example, an operation to rescue hostages is a complex operation that can fail for many reasons, and it took almost a decade for the United States to track down and kill Bin Laden.⁷² The specifics matter, but disruption of specific threats tends to be more achievable than transformation.

The danger with embracing disruptive objectives is less that the specific objective will turn out to be unachievable, but more that mere disruption will prove unsatisfying. Wars initiated with limited and disruptive objectives can generate endless war in the form of continuous raiding when the capability to be disrupted arises from political and societal conditions that will continue even once the objective of disruption is achieved.⁷³ In such a case, the unstated aim was not disruptive but transformative, seeking to change societal conditions so the threat would not arise again.

This danger is particularly likely to arise when disruptive objectives are not framed in terms of specific, imminent threats but as a means of preventing a rival actor from gaining a future capability. Preventive war logic is, at its root, the expression of a transformative objective—create societal conditions that prevent the growth of a threat—masquerading as a disruptive objective of destroying a specific capability. Because the capability does not exist yet in a manner that poses an imminent threat, portraying the aim as disruptive is inaccurate, and produces a focus on capabilities that tends to miss how preventive war signals aggression, often making threats worse—what West Point’s Scott Silverstone terms the “preventive war paradox.”⁷⁴ Moreover, once a state accepts prevention of future threats as a legitimate justification for war, the realm of imaginable scenarios that might justify military action in the future expands with few limits, either geographically or temporally.⁷⁵

Unclear objectives have also contributed to the endlessness of American counterterrorism wars.⁷⁶ The war in Afghanistan provides one example. As the Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock put it in his report on the so-called Afghanistan Papers:

In the beginning, the rationale for invading Afghanistan was clear: to destroy al-Qaeda, topple the Taliban and prevent a repeat of the 9/11 terrorist attacks … In hundreds of confidential interviews that constitute a secret history of the war, U.S. and allied officials admitted they veered off in directions that had little to do with al-Qaeda or 9/11. By expanding the original mission, they said they adopted fatally flawed warfighting strategies based on misguided assumptions about a country they did not understand. The result: an unwinnable conflict with no easy way out.⁷⁷

When the United States fails to publicly lay out what it seeks to achieve, it can produce endless war by resulting in constantly shifting objectives in reaction to the conflict, denying the clear ability to determine when the objectives have been achieved.⁷⁸ Shifting or unclear objectives can also enable politicians to purposefully manipulate opinion to generate support for war.⁷⁹

Further, without a clear statement of American objectives, a reduction or pause in the use of military force that signifies the end of a war cannot be meaningfully distinguished from a pause that merely denotes a tactical adjustment. For example, there has not been a drone strike in Pakistan in more than two years, yet it is difficult to assess whether the war has ended because it is not clear whether the United States views its objectives as having been achieved, has stopped pursuing its objectives, or just views a temporary pause as tactically beneficial.⁸⁰ As this example demonstrates, even wars that are not being actively fought can take on an endless character when objectives lack clarity.

This report assesses the level of clarity on a scale of Very Clear, Clear, Unclear, or Very Unclear as defined in Table 2. These judgments are made based on the extent to which public statements lay out specific objectives and do not shift without public explanation and description of new objectives.

The pursuit of objectives without planning for an off-ramp or war termination has also contributed to the endless character of America’s wars.⁸¹ An objective may seem to have been accomplished, but only insofar as force continues to be applied, effectively accepting a state of permanent war.

Confronted with an apparent success combined with a failure to actually achieve the objective in a way that allows war termination, decision-makers will tend to expand the objective to transformative or unlimited ends to resolve the conundrum and achieve a lasting defeat. However, such an expansion will often—at least in the context of counterterrorism war—not bring the United States closer to having achievable objectives and a meaningful plan for war termination.

Alternatively, policymakers sometimes respond to such a situation by developing a strategy of repeated raiding as a form of militarized management. Victory is declared only to see such victory turn to dust in a few years.⁸² Such a strategy may acknowledge that it is unable to sustainably terminate the war beyond the short-term, but view permanent low-level war as an acceptable approach. An example of this strategy is the “mowing the grass” theory prominent in Israeli strategic circles.⁸³ The discourse of mowing the grass has already emerged among top U.S. policymakers, as illustrated by Secretary of Defense Mark Esper’s use of the phrase regarding counterterrorism strikes in Libya.⁸⁴

The importance of planning for war termination should not be understood as requiring a mechanistic and fully mapped out plan for how to withdraw troops upon initiation of the war. Calls for the importance of having an exit strategy have long received criticism for their ability to distract from the political objectives being sought, over-rationalizing the complex interactions that occur once a war starts, promoting overconfidence in one’s intelligence regarding the war’s character, and establishing weak plans that fall apart upon contact with the enemy.⁸⁵ However, simply dismissing the importance of considering exit strategies and developing war termination options at all stages of a war misunderstands how such efforts can clarify political objectives and has a tendency to explicitly legitimize endless war by accepting an unresolved stalemate as the successful completion of an objective, which in the final analysis it is not.⁸⁶

War termination is particularly difficult when it comes to wars against jihadist terrorists. The gold standard for war termination is the holding of negotiations with the opposing party that produce an agreement to halt the war.⁸⁷ Across history, states have been reticent to engage in negotiations with terrorists.⁸⁸ States tend to fear granting legitimacy to non-state groups, and also tend to view terrorism—specifically targeting civilians—as a sign that a group has maximal ends and will not negotiate.⁸⁹ In addition, some of the jihadist groups the United States is at war with do actually have unlimited or at least transformative objectives of their own that makes negotiation to terminate a war difficult.

As a result, states waging counterterrorism wars—and particularly states like the United States that are fighting primarily outside of their own territory where the enemy lacks the capability to threaten the power’s homeland in a major way—often find themselves relying on a different form of off-ramp for war termination.⁹⁰ That off-ramp is shifting the waging of the war to a partner or other entity that can take over security provision. For many counterinsurgency theorists, this is the very definition of victory.⁹¹

In order to allow for comparison of the extent of war termination planning and capabilities across and within cases, this report rates the level of planning and capability as High, Medium, or Low (See Table 3).