Hi Roy, first of all thank you for reading, replying, and most importantly, for serving. I appreciate your thoughts and comments, and I’ll try to reply one point at a time. Apologies for the brief delay in responding as things have been busy, but feel free to keep replying, and I’ll do the same as I have time.

To your points!

1. WWII, the Civil War, and others are certainly ideological fights, and force did win those wars, but I would argue that force did not destroy the ideologies at play. America is still grappling with the consequences of systemic racism that — following the end of slavery and the Civil War — slowly became codified and accepted and is now resurfacing today. So the Civil War did end slavery, but not racism and its pernicious effects. Perhaps this would be different if Reconstruction had been more effective, or if Lincoln had not been assassinated, but as things turned out, I don’t think the Civil War is a great example of force destroying ideology.

I do think WWII is a bit different, but WWII was also total war in a way previously unseen, and both Germany and Japan were left totally decimated, militarily, economically, and ideologically. However, I do think that the victorious powers learned an important lesson from the aftermath of WWI, applied after WWII. Rather than Versailles, we got the Marshall Plan, investing Europe in our ideology (literally and figuratively) as opposed to punishment.

2. I think you are reiterating my point here. I agree that the threat of force (and sometimes force itself) is a key component of what is needed for victory, but it is only one tool in our toolkit. All the weapons you named proved that we were ready to fight if need be, but thank goodness that didn’t happen; we might not be having this conversation right now!

3. I — obviously — can’t speak to our military capacity at the time, but I take your word for it (and it’s very easy for me to believe) that we could have been successful if we had invaded North Vietnam, but that opens up a whole different can of worms, although I don’t think it necessarily detracts from the conversation. For example, given our failure to foster good governance in South Vietnam — our ally — would we have been successful in doing such in North Vietnam? Given our failure to nation build in Iraq, would we have been able to do so in Vietnam? I don’t know the answers for sure, but both the strategy and the implementation would merit serious debate and require serious oversight and resources.

4. I certainly think we should be doing more to fight ISIS, and yes, there is a moral justification for doing so! The US and the West cannot ALWAYS be the world’s police, but we do have an obligation to stop atrocities. I’ll admit that I don’t know EXACTLY what action steps to take, but please see the links below for some writing I did both pre-ISIS and pre-chemical weapons on the need to intervene Syria (from my defunct political blog) as well as a piece I wrote in February of this year calling for the creation of Kurdistan (from Medium). I firmly believe that the cornerstone of our foreign policy should be that we always do what is morally right (as distinct from what is in our best interest, although historically there has certainly been overlap, and I believe moving forward, there will be even more alignment). This doesn’t mean we can or should always use force. Though I didn’t go into specifics in this piece, we have a robust diplomatic and economic set of tools that we should continue to use and strengthen.

5. Finally, you say that war hasn’t changed, and in many ways you are correct. Many of the basic premises have stayed the same, but many things have also changed. Coincidentally, I’m currently reading a book “On Violence” by the political philosopher Hannah Arendt (she’s brilliant, and her books are well worth checking out if you’ve never read her work). Writing in 1969–70, she says: “The amount of violence at the disposal of any given country may soon not be a reliable indication of the country’s strength or a reliable guarantee against destruction by a substantially smaller and weaker power.”

Arendt is writing in the context of nuclear weaponry and deterrence, which in a way brings us back to your second point about nuclear — or other forms of — deterrence. As I said in the article, MAD may have given Khrushchev pause, but a suitcase sized mini-nuke in the hands of a jihadi is a different story. In that way, because of nature of weaponry, and the nature of the current ideological enemy, I would argue that warfare has changed. Whether she meant to or not, Arendt in some way prophesied the enemy in the War on Terror. And while suicide attacks and martyrdom are not new ideas, their indiscriminate use, the power of the explosives (and god forbid the potential power of future explosives), their offensive, rather than defensive or political, nature, and finally their psychological efficacy due to communications technology all point to the fact that warfare has changed significantly.

And none of that considers cyberwarfare, which is also its own topic, but below is a piece I wrote not too long ago that the Strategy Bridge was also nice enough to publish.

Like I said at the beginning, thanks for reading, responding, and your service. Feel free to keep the conversation going if you’d like, and I’ll respond when I have time!