Front Burner - Why can’t the U.S. win its wars?

Episode Date: April 24, 2026

Nearly two months into the war on Iran one thing remains clear: Iran has secured strategic leverage that before this war began, seemed unlikely.And it's left many asking why the United States’ military - the most powerful in the history of the world — so often finds itself unable to win wars or satisfy its strategic objectives?All kinds of military analysts and historians believe the U.S. has lost or failed to meet its strategic objectives in virtually every war it has participated in since 1945. This includes the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Today, we’re joined by Seth Harp, journalist, and author of the bestselling book ‘The Fort Brag Cartel’. Seth served one tour in Iraq as a member of the U.S. military, and previously worked as the assistant Attorney General for the state of Texas. 

The Powering Politics Podcast is available six times a week, but you might not be. If you want to catch up on what happened this week in politics, join me, Laura Dangelow and some of Canada's most tuned-in political strategists to break down the week that was. Short on time, the weekly wrap has you covered with a new episode every Saturday. This is a CBC podcast. Hey, everyone. I'm Jamie Poisson. Just one month into his first term as president, Donald Trump told a group of U.S. governors. When I was young in high school and college, everybody used to say we never lost a war. Now we never win a war.

Trump's claim is shared by all kinds of military historians and analysts who believe that the U.S. has lost or failed to meet its strategic objectives in virtually every war it has fought since 1945. This includes the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Afghanistan, and Iraq. And while it's not over yet, Iran, or the government. government remains intact. The local population has not risen up. The country has a kind of contested ownership over the Strait of Hormuz, has marshaled attacks on U.S. military bases and energy hubs across the Gulf, and maintains its nuclear ambitions, be they civilian or military. So today we're asking, can the most powerful, well-resourced and battle-tested military in

the world win its wars? We're joined by Seth Harp, journalist and author of the best-selling book, the Fort Bragg Cartel. Seth served one tour in Iraq as a member of the U.S. military and previously worked as the Assistant Attorney General for the State of Texas. Seth, hi. Thanks so much for coming on to Front Burner. It's really a pleasure to have you. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be with y'all. We're a big fan of your work, so it is really great to have you. I want to begin with your reporting from last year's U.S. military parade in Washington,

a $30 million spectacle, the first procession of military forces past the White House since the end of the Gulf War, I believe. And something, you know, a lot of people might relate to places like North Korea or China. But you write about this contradiction at the heart of what you were seeing, on one hand, to show a power and dominance. And on the other, you were seeing a military under real strain. And just take me back to that day, what did you see, what struck you, and what do you feel like it all represented? The overwhelming impression that I had of the parade was one of disappointment, let down, being underwhelmed. It was frankly pathetic. People had in mind or were expecting beforehand,

like you said, the first procession of military forces through Washington, D.C. in many years. And people, I think, had in mind an expectation of some North Korean-style display or some display, like you would see, the Chinese Communist Party put on of masses of military troops that were highly drilled and, you know, wearing pristine uniforms and parading their equipment along. But it wasn't like that at all. It was quite a shambolic, disorganized affair. From Fort Bragg witness a powerful demonstration of strength, purpose, and the unmatched capability of today's army. And as I was watching the military, equipment go by, you know, I was thinking and reflecting on how how many years it has been

since the U.S. has updated its basic equipment. You know, the RVs armored land vehicles that it uses are all 40 plus years old. All of its aircraft is like 40 years old, if not older. Many failed attempts to update this system. And so that kind of spun out into a kind of a broader reflection on the state of the military industrial complex, quite apart from, you know, my views on American foreign policy and foreign wars. The parade was also an opportunity to kind of display servicemen and women, thousands of whom were flown from bases across the country into Washington. And you mentioned a number of these divisions and bases in your writing, but one that comes up more than any other, was also the subject of your best selling and very cool book. And that is

Fort Bragg. A U.S. military base located in North Carolina, which you refer to as, quote, a kind of Bermuda triangle of unexplained or covered up crimes, accidents, murders, and sabotage. What does the story of Fort Bragg ultimately tell you about the U.S. military today? In Fort Bragg, I located kind of a symbolism for how really run down and demoralized the military was, at least at the moment in time that I chose to focus on in the book, which was right around the end of the war in Afghanistan, kind of like the very high levels of suicide and drug addiction are, I think the two main things I really focus on. Other things as well, violence against women, other forms of criminality are characteristic of life. for Bragg, but really it was the suicide and the drug overdose epidemics there that that I mainly focused on in the book and as a way of indirectly critiquing the foreign policy of the United States for the last 20 years and wasting these wars that have very little

to no popular support. You've written, quote, the United States has either failed to achieve its stated aims in or outright lost every major war it has waged since 1945 with the arguable exception of the Gulf War. And it only seems to be getting less effective as defense expenditures continue to rise. And I'd like to spend some time interrogating that central claim with you today that the U.S. has lost every war since 19. 1945, practically. This would include the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Why is it that the most powerful military force in the world can't win its wars? Well, that's a great question. You know, I say every major war because some, like Granada and Panama, have been in the nature of police actions that lasted only a few days in the war tactical successes. And I point that out, especially because we just saw. the raid that captured Nicholas Maduro in Venezuela. So it's not my claim that the military is so ineffective at fighting that it's unable

to carry out, you know, operations, small sale operations like that. However, I would argue that all of the major wars that you just listed were indeed losses, including the Korean War, including, obviously, Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam. I think those three are incontestable. And it's a matter of looking at the United States stated aims in advance of these, not the not the narratives that come to prevail during the war and after the war in which, you know, the story kind of changes to some degree. And now we're over now we're in Iraq because to establish democracy. That was actually our goal all along. No, actually, we said that we were going there to disarm the Saddam Hussein's regime of weapons of mass destruction, which didn't exist.

And so, you know, if you look at the stated aims of the United States in advance of each major military operation, you will find that they have never come to fruition. Yeah, I mean, just I just kind of want to interrogate more of why you think that is. I mean, just for me in reading about this, there seems to be a few different kind of popular explanations here. Some say the nature of war itself has changed that the U.S. is now largely fighting insurgencies, decentralized wars or civil wars where victory is harder to do. define where weaker actors can survive simply by enduring. Others argue it's a failure of strategy that American leaders have repeatedly failed to define achievable goals or to think seriously about what comes after initial military success. And then there's some of what you've written about, which is that something deeper has shifted, that the United States has built a way of waging war that is more covert and technologically

precise, but one that can go on indefinitely. and like just which one of these explanations feels closest to the truth to you? Like, how would you kind of talk about that? I think that all of those sort of rationales that you articulated very accurately on behalf of sort of the foreign policy elite debate in the United States and elsewhere in Europe and so forth. I think those are all copouts. And that in reality, it is very possible to win wars in the modern era. and you kind of need three things.

One is popular buy-in among your population, that they, you know, in general, people in your country support the war. Number two, you need a mass commitment of conventional troops. None of this fancy, like trying to win wars on the cheap with just airstrikes and special forces that absolutely does not work. And then third, you need a willingness to absorb mass casualties, which the United States also doesn't have. That's very much related to the first, the first factor about having popular support for the war.

And to see an example of what I'm talking about, you need to look no farther than Russia and Ukraine. And at the reality of the war, the material reality of the war, Russia has prevailed in Ukraine, at least to a limited extent. I mean, they have more territory than when they started with. Ukraine has less. therefore Russia is currently the winner and I don't think there's much doubt that they will remain in that position where they've taken basically all the territory that is important to them, the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine, the parts of Ukraine where the population is friendlier to Russia than they are towards the West. And Russia achieved that just in the ways that I'm talking

about. I mean, on both sides, the casualties have been absolutely massive. I mean, there's been so much attention to the wars in the Middle East over the last months, for obvious reasons, rightly so. But we, you know, the casualties in Ukraine and Russia are so much higher. You know, Donald Trump let out in one of his speeches recently that the casualties may be as high as more than a million on each side. He spoke about millions of casualties, using plural millions, suggesting that both Ukraine and Russia may have lost a million troops each. So there's a conventional war in which one side has come out ahead in modern times. And the United States doesn't do that. We don't wage wars of that type anymore for the most part because we don't have

immediate security threats of the kind that would necessitate a mass mobilization and deployment of troops in which there would be large popular support among the population. On big lives, we take a single cultural icon. People like Jane Fonda, George Michael, little Richard. And we pull apart the story behind the image. And we do this by digging through the BBC's vast archives. Discovering forgotten interviews that change exactly how we see these giants of our culture. We're here for the messy, the brilliant, the human version of our heroes.

I'm Immanuel Jochi and Kai Wright. And this is Big Lives. Listen to Big Lives, wherever you get your podcasts. You know, just coming back to the U.S., a military power that essentially stretches across the world. Any single war is just one of a number of competing security commitments around the world at any given time. But for an enemy, a conflict with the United States is an existential event, which occupies its entire attention, right? And as one writer put it, it's a limited war for Americans and total war for those fighting Americans. Is that an assessment that you'd be

compelled to agree with, or do you see it kind of differently? No, that sounds exactly right. For the Iranians, for example, it's an existential war that they're in right now with us. Whereas for us, it's nothing. It's like a game show almost. There is no, I mean, there are now some real world consequences with the closure of the Strait of Hermuz, certainly their second order things. But even those will be blunted with their impact on North Americans. So absolutely, like the countries that fight us are.

And I mean, maybe you're suggesting that that's part of why the United States, loses wars. Yeah, I am, yeah. I completely agree with that. That's absolutely right. Another kind of key theme here is the U.S. military's inability to win what are referred to as asymmetrical wars, essentially a conflict between parties in which there is a wide gulf in resources power, the kind of war which pits a conventional military against insurgents or guerrilla forces,

the Taliban or the National Liberation Front in Vietnam or the Houthis in Yemen. And just like, why do you think the U.S. struggles in asymmetrical wars where there exists such broad power differentials? I mean, in addition to all the factors that we've just covered, there's also a home court advantage in warfare is well known since antiquity. The army that's fighting on its own territory has an advantage inherently because they know it and because they have the support of the population there or they can rely on the population. the United States in all of its wars is a foreign aggressor and invader. And I think that's an important, I mean, what does that tell you? It shows that, you know, basically none of the wars, although they're almost always couched as defensive, even Vietnam was couched in defensive terms. In reality, there are projection of troops around the world thousands of miles to pursue abstract foreign policy goals that mostly matter to the elite in Washington, D.C., which has to be have to be justified by.

by often highly tenuous and intellectual paradigms. We have to be fighting in Korea for this reason and Vietnam for that reason in Iraq and Afghanistan for all of these different reasons. But having to project force around the world thousands of miles and keep it up and maintain it and fight foreign adversaries where they live, often tangling not only with the conventional militaries but with insurgencies that develop in these places, self-defense militias, various types of nationalistic insurgencies and guerrilla movements that arise in opposition to foreign invasion. So that's yet another reason why the U.S. has been at a disadvantage and has a track record of failure since 1945. I guess another point of clarity is what is even meant by victory in the context of war anymore.

many will probably remember George Bush's mission accomplished address and banner aboard an aircraft carrier in 2003 declaring this premature victory in Iraq. In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And Iraq is free. Trump declared victory last year following a month long war with the Houthis. He's declared victory in Iran multiple times. And we've won. You know, you never like to say too early you won, we won. In earlier wars, victory signaled things like expanded territory or surrender, right?

But in modern context, these goals feel harder to pin down, especially with America's wars. So I wonder, this concept of victory, what does it even mean today for America? They're harder to pin down because the rationale is given our lies for the most part. And when there are wars in which victory is possible, that's not necessary because people are confronted with the reality of needing to defend themselves. Americans are basically never put in the situation, Canadians do, except I think in a very limited circumstances more than 100 years ago when our country's had some border conflicts. but we almost never have had the experience of have a foreign invasion on our soil or any kind of necessity of actually defending the United States. Like the United States has not had to actually depend itself. Even in World War II, it really didn't have to defend itself because we have an entire continent to ourselves over here.

It's protected by two mighty oceans on both sides of the United States is geographically impregnable. Even the attack on Pearl Harbor, what was Pearl Harbor? what was Pearl Harbor? What was Hawaii? I mean, that was just a territorial acquisition done halfway across the Pacific in order to create a military base and project power towards Japan. I mean, that's why the Japanese attacked it. There was 9-11, but, you know, Al-Qaeda doesn't exist without the CIA and U.S. intervention in Afghanistan. Covert War there.

9-11 is a form of blowback from America's covert war in Afghanistan. in. So that too is complicated. The reality that Americans don't want to confront because they want to see themselves as a warlike people is that we're perfectly safe over here and we don't have any need to be going around the world in search of monsters to destroy. But that's exactly what we've done since the conclusion of World War II is go around the world in search of monsters to slay. I'm paraphrasing an early president who warned against the dangers of war. of exactly that. And the reason why it seems like victory is illusory or, you know, intangible in these cases or out of grasp, or it's almost impossible even to define is because each of these

expeditionary wars has to be premised upon attenuated rationales that just don't hold up over time. I mean, the one that you just mentioned about Yemen, I can't even remember what they said, excuse for that was. I mean, the reality of it was defending Israel and punishing them for for throwing in militarily with the Palestinians. You know, another major issue associated with war in America has been the difficulty of leaving a conflict once it becomes a quagmire, right? One military writer wrote the following, quote, for 200 years, no American president has managed to and his own major war, once it's taken a turn for the worst. Truman and Korea, Johnson, and Vietnam, and Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq all handed the problem to the next guy.

On this point in 2014, Barack Obama said, I think Americans have learned that it's harder to end wars than it is to begin them. And do you think this trend is part of the issue here as well? Yes. Yes, it definitely is. I think one issue that we have not touched upon is how profitable these wars are for political insiders and politically powerful entities and groups in the United States. And that has a lot to do with why wars don't end, not just the quagmires that they get drawn into, but also the enormous fortunes that are being made off of these wars. And that's why in a time of declining rates of return,

and on capital and declining returns on investment and a lot of investment cash seeking returns, especially like in Silicon Valley, more and more they're going to directly to government contracts and trying to work for, you know, you see these unsuccessful AI companies and these other unsuccessful tech companies whose, you know, grandiose visions of technological development have not come to fruition. They will sort of, the next move will always be to try to reinvent themselves as defense contractors. So that way they get plugged directly into the the cost plus contracts, the no big contracts, all of the politically favorable contracts that get issued in the in the course of wars often with the justification of the need for national defense, justifying all kinds

of exceptional protections around them. It's very hard to figure out where the money is going, because it's also secretive. You know, formations like the ones that I write about organizations like Jay Sock or the American Army's special forces, you're never going to find out where those contracts are going. That's all secret. And so there is a powerful, powerful incentive to keep wars going once they have started because people are making generational fortunes where they're going to be rich, their great grandchildren are going to be rich. And that's the real game that's going on behind the scenes while the press is having these kind of debates really about like well, should we or shouldn't we, or are we winning or are we not?

There are people who really have the power, they're winning. And they don't care how many people that they kill. And they don't care what happens to the United States as a political entity after, you know, they've made their generational fortune. And that's a cynical view of things. It's very much borne out by the reality for a long time now. We've seen war change most meaningfully, maybe in the last couple of generations. drones and special forces are now the primary ways in which the U.S. military wages war. After 9-11, the CIA went kind of from a surveillance apparatus to more of like a paramilitary operation focused on targeted killings and assassinations and clandestine violence.

And I know that your work has really brought us inside this world via units of the military like Delta Force. But how did this strategy kind of become one of the dominant ways the U.S. fights its war? wars today and what are the kind of limitations of it? Yeah. So one of the only real checks, one of the only real Democratic checks on the profit-making bonanza entailed in wars is the American public's intolerance for casualties. You can bomb Yemen, bomb Iran, all of these actions that are unconstitutional and reckless. and violent, they kill large numbers of foreigners. Really, sadly, that doesn't get through to the American people because most people were just

kind of checked out. They don't watch the news. But the big exception to it, and they especially don't care about foreign policy, there's only a small portion of the population is even attuned to what's going on in the foreign policy realm. And the big exception to this is when people, when American soldiers start coming home and body bags. That changes the calculus, absolutely. That is when you start to get a mass social rejection of Washington's war policies. And the last time we really saw that was in Iraq, because a number of casualties that the United States sustained there was not that high in 5,000

or so. But it was enough that there were people that were killed and they had their face burned off or that had their legs blown off in basically every community in America that we didn't have to look far to find someone who had been directly affected by the Iraq War. And so people very quickly turned against that. And it became, you know, an albatross around George W. Bush's neck and sunk his presidency. And so ever since then, American presidents have tried to sustain the permanent war paradigm. to where that they're starting a new war every two years for fun and profit, but without incurring American casualties. And the way that they've tried to square this circle is by doing it all through

air strikes and through special operations raids and proxy forces. Obama, I think President Obama was kind of the progenitor of this paradigm of American warmaking in Syria, a war that was waged in almost total secrecy without any kind of declaration of war, of course, with black operations troops who were there, not under any color of law, just deployed there in secret. Eventually, I mean, it took a very, very long time and only, as only recently come to its full fruition where we have a radical Sunni extremist, al-Qaeda, you know, in charge in Syria as the actual government of Syria.

And all of that was brought about without, I don't know how many American casualties total we incurred in Syria, but it's definitely fewer than 100. I mean, I would guess off the top of my head that it was like 50 guys. And women, too, American personnel that were killed there. And that same pattern has been applied in Libya and other conflict zones. And they're currently trying to do it in Iraq. although I will say that Trump has held back the American Special Forces aspect of it and is trying to do the entire thing through air strikes.

And as I was kind of trying to develop in the example of Syria, this is never successful. This never brings about a positive political outcome. I'd like to end here. There is now a lot of attention paid to the way that Donald Trump has decided to use the U.S. military as a weapon against Americans at home, deploying soldiers. into major American cities, for example. For a long time as well, people have noted the militarization of the police, the fact that some police departments in America have larger annual budgets than the militaries of some sovereign nations.

Also, your reporting focuses a lot on the degree to which soldiers come back home. And as we've talked about, break the law, inflicts extraordinary violence on people and the fact that the system, as it currently exists, has not been able to hold them to account or to help them. There's a phenomenon called the boomerang theory, essentially that the violence and surveillance the country set out in the world eventually comes back home to be used on their own citizens. And I wonder what you make of that theory and whether you see any evidence of it in the U.S. today. I mean, you couldn't be more clear that that's exactly what's happening in the United States. I don't want to exaggerate because over the past 25 years, the U.S. has killed millions of people in foreign countries. just by bombing, you know, apartment buildings and hospitals and schools and all kinds of civilian

infrastructure, totally crushing and destroying countries to where they never returned to where they were before, like Libya or Iraq. So I don't want to suggest that, you know, like American protesters are subject to the same extreme violence and oppression that the victims of American imperialism have been. But certainly in the case of, you know, the police militarizing and police surveillance, all the tools that were developed abroad are getting used on Americans, on American citizens in order to not only in the moment control, you know, what people are doing or monitor what people are doing, but I think also to conceivably prepare for a future in which the government has even less legitimacy. I mean, Donald Trump's administration is incredibly

unpopular. Before him, Joe Biden was almost as unpopular. Whoever is president next is very unlikely to be someone with mass political support because our democracy is such a shell of what it once was and all of the means of exercising a democratic input on the government are so debilitated and limited, we're really only able to push this button or that button for a one or another number of basically the same ruling class clique, who all for the most part share the same beliefs, particularly about foreign policy that are not shared by Americans in general, in which Democrats and Republicans enact highly unpopular policies across the board. They don't do any of the things, any of the popular policies that they run on once they get in office.

And so, you know, the strengthening of the national security state is ominous in this regard because you're conceivably looking towards the future in which, you know, people are so dissatisfied with the degradation of material conditions and the corruption, the just out and out corruption that we see in the administrations and in our Congress, that they try to actually do something about it. And in that case, that's when you really might see, you know, the war. The war is coming home. That feels like a good place for us to end.

Seth, thank you so much for this. This was great. Really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. All right, that is all for it today. Front burner was produced this week by Matthew Amha, Joytha Shen Gupta, Kevin Sexton, McKenzie Cameron, and Juliana Romantic. Our YouTube producer is John Lee.

Our music is by Joseph Shabbison. Our senior producers are Imogen Burchard and Elaine Chow. Our executive producer is Nick McCabe, Locoast, and I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next week. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.