Endless War: A Term with a History and a Definition

Endless war. It’s a term that, along with that of similar phrases like “permanent war” and “forever war,” has grown in usage in the post-9/11 era.¹ In recent years, both Democratic and Republican politicians have promised to bring an end to endless war.² Some analysts assert that calls to end endless war constitute a “vacuous” narrative used by politicians to avoid strategic thinking or are a mere political trope that avoids debate over strategy.³ This is wrong. Endless war is not only definable, but proper strategic analysis of America’s counterterrorism wars requires analysis of their endless character.⁴

Contrary to claims that endless war is a mere slogan with no content, recently adopted as a pejorative in disputes over today’s wars, the term—or approximations of it—has long been used to describe wars that share a particular character of seeming permanence. This section presents a definition of endless war and responds to common criticisms of the concept.

What is an endless war and how has the United States gotten into so many of them? The first step to understanding how the United States has found itself mired in endless war, and thus how it might escape them, is to define what endless war is.

Wars take on an endless character when two conditions are met: First, when a belligerent adopts objectives while lacking the capability to achieve said objectives. Second, when, despite the inability to achieve its objectives, the belligerent is also not at risk of being defeated itself. Where these two conditions hold over a prolonged period of time with no clear possibility of change in sight, endless war emerges.

This definition is not pulled out of thin air. The conditions in which a war takes on an endless character can be usefully compared to the second stage of the Chinese-Japanese War as described by Mao Zedong in On Protracted War in which the Japanese advance stalled but the Chinese forces continued to prepare rather than advance against Japanese forces.⁵ Mao foresaw a protracted period within that stage rather than a quick victory for either side. However, Mao tended to view the second stage as unstable, eventually resulting in a rebalancing of power in China’s favor based on existing trends in material conditions rather than as a potentially stable condition absent an exogenous shock.⁶ To the extent that such a rebalancing was not in the cards without an exogenous shock, the second stage would fit the definition of endlessness presented here.⁷

We can find a fictional representation of the concept of endless war as a stable condition in George Orwell’s 1984. Orwell imagines a scenario of permanent war that he describes as “continuous.” Orwell wrote “in past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat,” but in Orwell’s fictional endless war, the superstates “cannot conquer one another,” leading him to draw a comparison to “the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another.”⁸ The purpose of pointing to 1984 is not to suggest that Orwell’s larger theory of what a continuous or permanent war might mean for society is necessarily correct—though it certainly has uncomfortable resonances with parts of today’s politics—but to reveal how concepts of what defines an endless war are not new.⁹

The concept of endless war is not merely a fictional device. Strategists and commentators have used the specific term “endless war” in discussions of the strategies and character of prior wars—most notably the Vietnam War.¹⁰ In addition, there is a long tradition in American foreign policy circles of using terms that suggest similar concepts such as quagmire, again dating largely to the Vietnam War, and recent scholarly work in the field of civil war research by Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl, assistant professor of political science at Leiden University, has given the term definition that allows comparison across multiple cases of civil war.¹¹

America’s enemies in the war on terror appear to understand the concept and apply it in their strategic theories. Osama Bin Laden, for example, wrote in a letter to the United States: “You are wading into a war with no end in sight on the horizon,” adding, “Continue the war if you will. … The path to security is for you to lift your oppression from us.”¹² Notably, Bin Laden’s interpretation in this letter of his war with the United States as endless places the final decision as to whether the war will end in the hands of American decision makers while suggesting that al-Qaeda is not capable of forcing an end to the war except by coercing changes in American opinion.

In addition, the phrase “endless war” has been used to describe conflicts that do not involve the United States as a primary belligerent in the same way that the war on terror does. For example, Colombia’s civil conflict has been described as an endless war.¹³ The New York Times also used the phrase to describe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict prior to the 9/11 attacks.¹⁴

Some analysts may assert that the concept of endless war is a novel pejorative designed merely to win rhetorical points during political campaign season. However, to adopt such a view is to willfully ignore how the concept has long held meaning for those waging and writing about war and its effect on society.

Endlessness is not clear-cut. Efforts to define endless war face three main challenges. First, a declaration of a war’s endless character projects an assessment of future events. Second, defining some wars as endless tends to suggest other wars have clear ends, a binary that does not necessarily hold true historically. Third, maintaining endless war as a meaningful concept requires efforts to resist attempts by politicians and others to broaden the term and turn it into a mere talking point to portray steps short of actually ending endless war as more meaningful than they are.

First, we cannot predict the future. A declaration of endlessness is a claim about future events that are inherently unpredictable. The Cold War seemed endless into the late 1980s—only to have it suddenly come to an end with the collapse of the Soviet Union.¹⁵ However, just because a conflict might end due to unexpected shifts in systemic conditions does not erase the strategic incoherence of waging war without an achievable objective.

This distinction between endlessness as a permanent condition and endlessness as a characteristic of a war at a particular time can be clarified by examining Mao’s concept of protracted war. Mao presents a specific, materially based theory about how the Chinese-Japanese war would end. He thus advances a claim that the war was protracted but not necessarily endless.¹⁶ However, this material statement provides the basis for critiques of Mao’s interpretation of the Chinese-Japanese war and his strategic advice.¹⁷ If one judges that Mao was wrong about the processes that led to the end of the war, and that the war ended because of an exogenous shock—for example the United States entering the war against Japan—then the war would have held an endless character prior to the shift in systemic conditions.¹⁸

It is thus helpful to understand a claim of endless war as granting a dual meaning to the term “end.” It is not simply a claim about a war’s duration—though that is often part of it—but a claim about the lack of ends in the sense of aims on the part of the belligerents (whether the achievement of victory or an acceptance of new ends short of it) that could bring the temporal end into being.¹⁹ While a feeling of temporal permanence is an aspect of what defines endless war, it is not a meaningful challenge to the concept to assert all wars eventually end or to point to the end of a war that has been termed endless. Short wars can take on a feeling of endlessness that is quickly interrupted by unexpected changes in systemic conditions. Indeed, one of the purposes of calling a war endless is to open the space for discussion of how the war might be brought to an end and to identify the strategic failures that lead to a continuing lack of decision.²⁰

Similarly, a long protracted war where material trends within the conflict end up culminating in an end to the war can still take on an endless character for periods of the war. This can occur if the conflict settles into a stalemate, where the strategy of the power waging protracted war lacks a vision of a specific route to victory but instead relies upon the development of resilience until unspecified (or inaccurately specified) systemic conditions change.²¹ Such a strategy may prove successful but in the absence of a theory of how the war will move from the second to the third stage, it is an embrace of endlessness. That embrace brings with it the societal challenges of waging war without an end in sight. Critically, given the contingency of historical events, it is problematic to read history backwards in such a case by viewing victory as inevitable.

Second, calling some wars endless suggests that other wars have clear starting and ending points. But that is not necessarily true. The Prussian military theorist Carl Von Clausewitz describes wars as the “continuation of politics by other means,” which raises questions about whether we can separate war from other activities, for example policing, sanctions, or preparatory activities that may convey military benefit in the event of war.²² Wars may not be bound in time, according to the legal theorist and historian Mary Dudziak, but an “enduring condition” throughout American history: “when we look at the full time line of American military conflicts, however, including the ‘small wars’ and the so-called forgotten wars, there are not many years of peacetime.”²³ Dudziak warns of how declarations of ends to specific wars can occur without ending broader social patterns of war making turns such declarations into little more than illusions.²⁴ Rosa Brooks, a fellow with New America and former counselor to Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy, has similarly argued that a core factor in the growing sense of endlessness of today’s wars is an increased blurring between war and other activities.²⁵

A particularly thorny aspect of this problem is the question of whether a country remains at war if it seeks to influence a conflict without directly intervening with its armed forces—in other words, by proxy.²⁶ This report takes as its focus the direct involvement of Americans in carrying out or directing the use of force. This means that merely training another country’s security forces does not mean the United States is waging a counterterrorism war in a country.

On the other hand, conducting special forces raids, accompanying a partner’s forces into battle, or giving orders to a partner’s forces to engage in military action does constitute war. Thus, when Trump considered outsourcing the war in Afghanistan to private military contractors as a way to fulfill his promise to end endless war, or when during the campaign then-candidate, now President Joe Biden promised to “end the forever wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East” but in the next sentence said “we should bring the vast majority of our troops home from the wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East and narrowly define our mission as defeating al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (or ISIS),” that is not ending war.²⁷ Similarly, if U.S. forces tasked with training are being put on the frontline, leading to casualties and the use of American force supposedly in self-defense but actually as part of pursuing American objectives, as has been the case, for example, in Somalia, the simple fact that those efforts are being called training does not mean war has ended.²⁸

Third, efforts to define a concept of endless war have to continually contend with attempts by politicians and commentators to use the term to describe steps short of actually ending war. Much of the pushback to the concept of endless war as meaningful has derived from such improper uses of the phrase. One example of this dynamic is when major political figures portray strategies that continue to use military force in the form of special operations raids as an end to endless war.²⁹

Another example is the tendency to describe troop drawdowns as a step towards ending endless war. For example, the Heritage Foundation’s James Jay Carafano asserts that “President Trump has promised to end America’s ‘endless wars,’” and contends that Trump “is fulfilling that promise by withdrawing troops from Iraq and Afghanistan responsibly.”³⁰ The number of troops to be withdrawn per the announcement Carafano was discussing is about 2,200 in Iraq and 4,100 in Afghanistan. Such troop declines can hardly be seen as fulfilling the promise to end the war in the absence of actual change in U.S. objectives. Indeed, Carafano gives the game away when he notes: “Sometimes the smart answer is more troops, not less. In the end, the right number is the right number.”³¹ Carafano is not incorrect to disconnect troop numbers from the effort to end endless wars—at least in general terms—but such a point pushes against the view that troop reductions can be read as progress towards fulfilling a promise to end endless war in the absence of a revision of objectives. Tellingly, in other writing, Carafano has denied that the term “endless war” has meaning, calling it a “bumper-stick excuse for a serious foreign policy.”³² Yet he is willing to use the term when politically helpful. Such views have a broader danger than efforts to justify Trump’s policies. In an article denying that endless war is a meaningful concept, for example, Carafano asserts, “President Barack Obama’s withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq marked the end of that war.”³³

In another example, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo appears to have attempted to follow a similar line, trying to square the assassination of Qasem Soleimani with an effort to end endless war by asserting: “Endless wars are the direct result of weakness.”³⁴ Pompeo’s method for squaring the circle is to equate ending endless war with reducing troop numbers and then claim that even small reductions constitute linear progress towards the goal: “We’re going to get the force posture right. We’re going to get our facilities as hardened as we can possibly get them, to defend against what Iran may potentially do. But make no mistake: America’s mission is to have our footprint in the Middle East reduced while still keeping America safe from rogue regimes like the Islamic Republic of Iran, and from terrorist activity, broadly, throughout the region.”³⁵ What is missing in this statement is any change to the objectives of America’s counterterrorism wars—objectives that Pompeo read broadly enough to allow for direct action against an Iranian general. On the other hand, what is present is an admission of a willingness to stop short of zero troops or even increase troop numbers in response to crises.

It is essential to reject efforts to equate variations and reductions in troop numbers with ending endless war. Once the United States uses direct force, any reduction or end to the use of such force only constitutes an end to war when it is combined with a statement that U.S. objectives have been achieved or a statement that changes U.S. objectives so they have been achieved. A war does not end merely because troops are removed from a particular geographic area or because air strikes halt. An understanding of war defined solely by the presence of troops would struggle to differentiate tactical withdrawals from war termination. As one Department of Defense manual of the law of war notes, “As a legal concept, war has usually been described as a condition or state that applies more broadly than only the mere employment of force or the mere commission of acts of violence.”³⁶

The United States halted air strikes only to restart them in Yemen and Pakistan and removed troops from Iraq in 2011 only to return them to fight there again in 2014. Such withdrawals are merely tactical decisions about the level and timing of force that is necessary unless the return of force requires and is recognized as a decision to wage a new war. One of the roots of endlessness in American counterterrorism is that the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force remains on the books, and administrations continue to cite it as authorizing war—often in wars that they claim to have withdrawn from—without public and congressional debate over the reintroduction of military force.³⁷

While it is critical to note the effort to turn endless war into a meaningless slogan or simply equate it with troop drawdowns, this effort cannot be understood to fully define the use of the term. A wide range of commentators from across the political spectrum have criticized Trump’s efforts to portray limited drawdowns as a meaningful form of ending endless war without concluding the term has no meaning.³⁸ The analysis of those who look at the sloganeering and conclude endless war has no meaning does the work of the sloganeers for them by obscuring their critics and presenting the debate as between those who see no issue with the wars’ endlessness and the sloganeers.

For all the definitional challenges, there appears to be a shift in the extent to which specific American wars are understood by Americans to be endless, beginning with the Cold War and continuing in the War on Terror that is worthy of note.³⁹ One sign of this is that during the 2020 presidential campaign, both major party candidates used the language of ending endless war or ending the forever wars as did multiple candidates during the Democratic primary. Meanwhile, James Jeffrey, the former special representative for Syria Engagement and special envoy to the Global Coalition to Defeat Islamic State under Trump, calls the outcome achieved in Syria under the Trump administration a “stalemate,” proceeding to make an affirmative case for achieving a stalemate as desirable policy, saying, “Stalemate and blocking advances and containing is not a bad thing,” adding, “I think the stalemate we’ve put together is a step forward and I would advocate it.”⁴⁰

Another sign of a growing sense of endlessness can be found in the long duration of today’s wars and the expression of weariness regarding them. The Wall Street Journal, for example notes, that the war in Afghanistan has been waged for “longer than World War I, World War II and the Korean War combined.”⁴¹ Not only do the specific wars today seem to last longer (if they do end) and have more of an endless character than wars of the past, but in the post-Cold War era, the United States has carried out more military interventions, suggesting a greater endlessness even in the sense of endlessness as represented by the waging of repeated raids.⁴²

Given the growing public concern over endless war and its seeming rootedness in actual changes in the character of wars, it is important to find a usable definition that can ground analyses of how the United States might prevent the wars it wages from taking on an endless character. In the absence of such a definition, analysts, policymakers, and the public are likely to continue to speak past each other on the issue, creating room for those who condone today’s endless wars to deny that they exist, thus furthering the strategic incoherence of existing American policy.