The key word here is "easily" lets examine your examples: - Miloshevich thought that by controlling the Yugoslav army he could easily beat the seceding states.

The key word here is "easily" lets examine your examples: - Miloshevich thought that by controlling the Yugoslav army he could easily beat the seceding states. Wrong, but at the beginning it certainly looked that way. - NATO intervention in Yugoslavia. A collapsing state that was doing genocide. Drop a few bombs to destroy their will to fight in Kosovo and let the Kosovars take over and do the heavy fighting. It was an easy war from the NATO POV! Is NATO reacting the same way when Russia does the same as Serbia? - US Iraq wars - isolated country that had outdated weaponry. The US did win them easily. At least the conventional part, but they underestimated the amount of nation-building that is needed. - Hitler was used to appeasement, had a deal with Stalin (Molotov-Ribentrop) and knew that France and Britain didn't really want to fight. He was right about that all through the early months of the war. If France, the UK and USSR made clear that any shenanigans would result in a two or more front war, WWII would have been avoided. Hitler also thought that the USSR would collapse before winter 1941.. - WWI is the best example of all. No one thought that the war would last more than a few months, so it was a race to mobilise the quickly and attack your enemies. The Germans in particular thought they will quickly overrun France if they only went through neutral Belgium and Luxemburg.. This is why nuclear weapons are the best deterrent - even if you think you can win a nuclear war, the victory will not be sweet or easy.