Destrier

There’s a popular saying among GWOT veterans and it goes like this, “We were winning when I was there.” It’s true, we literally won every single year of the entire campaign. We are not the Vietnam generation that accepted loss just because some politicians retroactively decided that is what happened. The US never lost either the Afghanistan War or the Iraq War. We lost less than 2,500 service members and directly killed almost a million combatants (according to best estimates). That’s approximately 1 American death for every 400 combatants we killed. Truly astounding domination. Regrettably we also killed an estimated 3.5 million when the second and third order effects expanded to the civilian populations. We sure weren’t defeated. Even in Afghanistan, the Taliban had to wait for Biden’s sloppy withdrawal to claim that they won. After the withdrawal from Iraq, American forces went back in and smacked down the ISIS forces who expanded from the Syrian conflict. Syria was primarily a SOF fight and run with clear objectives. The original GWOT? The full-scale war? Al Qaeda was decimated, Saddam was overthrown (then executed), the Bath party was driven from power. Bin Laden found and killed. Militarily there was never a question. The US so overwhelmingly won that half of the troops in both countries quit carrying magazines in their weapons while on American installations because a negligent discharge was a greater threat to support personnel than a direct attack. Politicians repeatedly moved the goal posts. Not “what constitutes victory”, but rather to “what constitutes success in forcing 2 civilizations to entirely alter”. Congress and multiple White House administrations lacked what SOF refers to as Cultural Awareness. You cannot overwrite the cultural and religious values of a civilization by simply telling them they now have to do what you tell them. Politicians repeatedly attempted to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Unfortunately, politically this hasn’t improved, Congress is still, to this day, paying the Taliban monetary installments & refuses to remove them from funding bills.