When America's All-Volunteer Force Loses a War - War on the Rocks - 0 views
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rguments will rage for a long time about whether the United States could have won the war in Afghanistan with another approach — or even won at all. But after the nation invested two decades, more than $2 trillion, and the lives of almost 2,500 military personnel, the outcome remains the same.
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The U.S. military now faces the challenge of processing this defeat on two different levels: as individuals, among those who deployed and fought, and as an institution, in which the military’s leaders should now help the all-volunteer force process this painful outcome while simultaneously ensuring that it remains strong and capable of winning the nation’s future wars.
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Institutionally, the U.S. military faces three critical tasks. First, it has both a moral and a practical obligation to dissect what went wrong during the 20 years of war and to demonstrate that it has processed and learned from those hard lessons.
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