For what it’s worth, the US military is downright the most powerful fighting force in history. There is nothing even close to it.

The problem is you can’t just bomb an ideology out of existence. It takes a soft touch and a competent state department to actually build a cohesive government. And unfortunately we have not been particularly good at that. The military does its job by breaking a lot of things, and then the state department comes in and just breaks more things.

So it’s not so much that we can’t win the war, it’s that the conditions to “win” aren’t something you can even achieve through conflict. We can’t put the pieces back together once we break things.