Half-assed committment to big tasks is what causes this. Generals make it clear what level of commitment is required to achieve a strategic aim. Political leadership commits a fraction of that; then they’ve got aims that don’t match resources, they change their aims, they make up strategy as they go along. This isn’t because political leaders are mendacious or stupid: there can be perfectly acceptable reasons to under-commit. Not wanting to blow up the world, that’s one. So is realising that you’re fighting over something that isn’t a vital national interest … ore realising belatedly that you suddenly are!

You don’t have permission to talk about wars as quagmires until you’ve read Daniel Ellsberg’s essay, The Quagmire Myth and the Stalemate Machine. Ellsberg debunks Arthur Schlesinger’s idea that Vietnam was a sort of slippery slope that was going to swallow America up no matter what (and therefore the Kennedy and Johnson White Houses were blameless). https://archive.org/details/TheQuagmireMythAndTheStalemateMachine/

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