Conclusion

On September 14, 2001, three days after terrorists trained in and directed from al-Qaeda’s camps in Afghanistan killed almost 3,000 people inside the United States, Representative Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) rose to defend casting the lone vote against the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force. At that time, the choice facing the American public appeared stark. As Lee, put it, “Only the most foolish and the most callous would not understand the grief that has really gripped our people and millions across the world. This unspeakable act on the United States has really—really forced me, however, to rely on my moral compass, my conscience, and my God for direction.”¹ Yet even in that moment, Lee identified the dangers of the choice for war that the Bush administration was asking Americans to make, warning, “we must be careful not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target.”²

Almost two decades later, the wisdom of Lee’s warning is now clear. Endless war is no longer a warning of what the war on terror might become, but widely recognized as the existing character of today’s wars. Yet administrations of both parties have continued to wage counterterrorism wars without either clarifying the objective sought or defining what an achievable end-state might be.

As he left office, President Obama warned, “Democracies should not operate in a state of permanently authorized war. That’s not good for our military, it’s not good for our democracy.”³ He even criticized the dangers of stretching the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, yet Obama did not end the war in Yemen and returned the United States to war in Iraq while extending the war into a new country, Syria.⁴ President Trump claimed to be ending endless war while continuing the war in Syria—only with even less clarity regarding American objectives.⁵ It is clear that the use of the phrase “ending endless war” or variations of it is not sufficient to actually end endless war.

It is valuable that presidents increasingly think about and talk in a language of restraint opposed to endless war, but it is not enough, and if ending endless war is reduced to mere political rhetoric, it will be catastrophic for efforts to actually end the wars.

In order to move beyond such political talking points, advocates of ending endless war must put forward a usable concept of endlessness. In doing so, they must reject the trap of imagining troop reductions or declines in strikes as evidence of a commitment to ending endless war in the absence of discussion and revision of objectives. Endlessness is, at its core, about objectives, and it emerges when military force is approved for objectives that are not achievable by a belligerent that cannot be defeated. Some critics contend that endless war is purely political rhetoric. What this misses is that the term not only can be defined but has been used in the past to describe and assess the character of other wars. That such claims are themselves political rhetoric is revealed by their ahistorical nature.

Clear objectives and public authorizations are essential to ending endless war. Even where strikes and troop numbers are reduced to zero, in their absence, it is not possible to determine whether a lack of direct military action is really an end to the war or merely a temporary halt. The drone war in Pakistan, which has now passed two years without a public report of a U.S. drone strike, illustrates this uncertainty and how it preserves the war’s endless character.⁶ The U.S. drone war in Yemen may soon reach a similar situation. As of September 2020, the United States had only conducted four strikes in Yemen, according to New America’s tracking.⁷ Yet given the long pause between the first strike in Yemen in 2002 and the return of strikes in late 2009, and later shorter pauses to address Yemeni domestic concerns over part of 2010, viewing a reduction or end in strikes as an end to the war is inaccurate.

Some critics ask why ending endless war matters. They point to the low fatality rate of America’s counterterrorism wars following the troop drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan and warn of the risks abandoning the war.⁸ They call for militarized management, accepting the framework of “mowing the grass.”⁹

Such a stance requires a response, because while an embrace of endless war should perhaps evoke moral disgust, waging war without an imaginable end is not necessarily irrational for certain decision makers.¹⁰ Aside from the possibility of immoral but rational thought processes and issues of miscalculation, the assertion that endless war is necessarily immoral or irrational is often made by those who live where the strategic context for decision making is less than stark. Where the choice being made is between fighting without an end in sight and submitting to extermination, sustained oppression, or the destruction of one’s polity, the moral objection becomes less clear.¹¹ This is not to suggest the United States can reasonably lay claim to such a position with regard to its counterterrorism wars. However, such examples emphasize the need to make the case for why embracing endlessness while waiting for unpredictable systemic change is not a proper choice and not simply presume that embracing endlessness is necessarily irrational or immoral.

It is true that so far, America’s counterterrorism wars have had limited direct costs for Americans in terms of service member deaths—that is if you start counting after the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan troop deployments. Yet, to accept endless war on this basis is to make a profound temporal error of analysis—calculating the costs before the war is over. Mowing the grass is less a strategy as it is an embrace of strategic incoherence, and it leaves the United States vulnerable to sudden increases in cost when conditions change.¹² Endless or protracted warfare tends to erode protections for civilians and restraints over time, an issue visible in the way endlessness warps detention policies and the treatment of detainees.¹³

Already, America’s endless wars are showing signs that they could escalate and expand rapidly in such a way that would radically increase the costs of the war. In Yemen, where the endless counterterrorism war continues, the United States conducted an airstrike targeting an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps figure in retaliation for the killing of an American by an Iran-backed militia in Iraq.¹⁴ In Iraq and Syria, U.S. forces have clashed with a range of forces well beyond ISIS. This includes direct clashes with Iranian forces and Iranian-backed militias.¹⁵ U.S. forces have also exchanged fire with Russian semi-state mercenary forces tied to international far-right extremist mobilizations.¹⁶ The United States even deployed more forces to Syria to counter Russia, despite Trump’s claims to be ending endless war.¹⁷ The United States has also exchanged fire in Syria with pro-Syrian regime forces and Turkish-backed rebels.¹⁸

Even if the wars don’t escalate or increase in cost and the United States is sufficiently powerful to persist in its strategic incoherence, the acceptance of endless war warps American domestic politics, encouraging the militarization of American policing and society.¹⁹ Moreover, the impact of a constant American military presence in shaping Middle Eastern politics and the casualties attributable to American war must also be examined, even if the cost to Americans remains low.

For those committed to ending America’s endless wars, it is essential to reject the continuation of endless war as militarized management, whether rhetorically framed as an acceptance of ongoing war or by the perversion of the rhetoric of ending endless war into cover for special forces raids and drone strikes. That task will require establishing endless war as an analytic category and always challenging those who say their objective is the defeat of a particular terrorist group to spell out exactly what they mean in measurable terms.