"Everyone prepares to fight the last war".
At the beginning of World War 1, the world's militaries worried and planned to fight a war similar to the last one they fought - the Boer War, the Franco-Prussian war or the various Napoleonic wars, depending on the nation involved, with lines and columns of infantry parading about and clusters of cavalry dashing hither and yon - only for it to bog down into four years of stalemate in the trenches with progress mesaured in yards not miles.
So at the beginning of World War 2, the world's armies were ready for a bloody, poison-gas-sodden stalemate where machine guns and artillery made life above ground nearly impossible - only to be faced with a war where tanks closely supported by infantry, artillery, air support, and naval gunfire, and finally the atomic bomb, turned trenches and fortifications into liabilities.
So the United States went into Vietnam trained and equipped to fight a central European-style combined arms war - and ran into an enemy that slipped out of the jungle, or the population in the villages and cities, and melted back into both, inviting carnage among civilians freshly packaged for the Evening News.
It took 20 years for the US to face another foe, to dire warnings of "quagmire" in the deserts of Kuwait and Iraq - only to fight a World War 2-style battle with tools and techniques that must have seemed like science fiction to the Greatest Generation vets who were just past retirement age at the time, wrapping things up in four days of ground combat.
A decade later, another war in the same place started with hopes, and for a moment, the reality of another blazing-fast conventional mismatch - to fall into a two-decade-long quagmire of political indecision and proxy gamesmanship lasting a generation, and precipitated the term "forever war".
"Everyone prepares to fight the last war". It's neither entirely fair nor completely unfair (I say, watching the Russians trying to reprise Stalingrad on the steppes of Ukraine) to describe the world's militaries' approach to warfare.
But it is certainly fair for the anti-war, pacifist, and counter-cultures' approaches to the subject.
After five days, talk of "Forever War" has been going on for about four of them:
Ariel Basora is with About Face, Veterans Against the War.
"We are here to use our collective power and break the cycle of forever wars that have already claimed over 500 lives in Iran, including over 80 school children," Basora said.
Lena, from the Palestinian Youth Movement said, "We are here today because we oppose the illegitimate war on Iran, and we represent the majority of this country who do."
And a left-media culture that was chortling "Trump Always Chickens Out" two weeks ago is holding a stopwatch already:
U.S. and Israeli officials are privately casting doubt on projections from the Trump administration that the war with Iran could end within a matter of weeks — instead warning that a months-long campaign may be required to destroy the country’s ballistic missile capabilities and install a pliavernment, multiple sources told The Times.
Thextended combat creates political risks and uncertainties for President Trump, whose penchant for dramatic, short-term military operations has suddenly given way to a full-scale assault on the Islamic Republic, shocking a MAGA base that for years supported his calls to end forever wars in the Middle East.
One Israeli official told The Times — despite internal guidance among Israeli officials to adhere to the U.S. president’s stated time frame — that the war “definitely could be longer” than the four-week window that Trump repeatedly offered to reporters.
I can be convinced either way about the war, and especially about the eternal thrill ride that is Trump's messaging.
But I don't recall this kind of clock-watching over 47 years of Iran waging war on us.
