This analysis is only partially correct, but it echoes what is the (mostly) prevailing wisdom of the last couple years about "what went wrong". To start, we ac

This analysis is only partially correct, but it echoes what is the (mostly) prevailing wisdom of the last couple years about "what went wrong". To start, we actually did have a success: Gulf War I. It was an overwhelming victory, with extensive enemy casualties and minimal allied losses. It's strategic significance was not what it did to the US position in the Middle East however, but rather what it did to the General Officer Corps after the fact. All of the Cold War battle drills had worked exactly as planned (giant tank battles in open terrain, with CAS on station to mop up any stragglers). If you think for a moment about the kind of conformation bias that proliferated after that, then not having much of a post-game in the following wars makes a little more sense. Also, we didn't really impose "our" system of government on Germany and Japan, but rather grafted aspects of it onto their existing infrastructure, occupied them for a long time to ensure that those aspects were set in stone over a generation, and then essentially kicked them out of the nest when they were ready to fly in orbit around a US-led Bipolar world. Thus, the difference with Iraq II and Afghanistan after the invasions is not that we "botched" it, but more so that the coordination mechanisms in place in societies like 1940s Germany and Japan didn't exist in Iraq and Afghanistan (I'll caveat this by saying this is much more true for Afghanistan than it is for Iraq. Iraq had a mostly modern economy, with functional hierarchies of government and civil service, but was very cultrually distant from the US in ways that set it apart from Germany and Japan). Meaning, it was just straight up easier to do these kinds of things in Germany and Japan, overwhelming victory aside. I don't think I need to go into a detailed history of Afghanistan to illustrate why. The real "problem" is that we don't have a clear understanding of what the hell we should be using this military for anymore, after the Cold War ended.