"GLOBAL ISSUES, LEADERSHIP CHOICES":

After more than 18 years, the U.S. signed a deal with Afghanistan's Taliban last week that is supposed to be the framework for a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. This article by a military historian argues that the preponderance of wars are not won and lost on the battlefield but through attrition:

"War is the most complex, physically and morally demanding enterprise we undertake. No great art or music, no cathedral or temple or mosque, no intercontinental transport net or particle collider or space programme, no research for a cure for a mass-killing disease receives a fraction of the resources and effort we devote to making war. ... Yet, traditional military history presented battles as fulcrum moments where empires rose or fell in a day, and most people still think that wars are won that way, in an hour or an afternoon of blood and bone. Or perhaps two or three. ... Modern wars are won by grinding, not by genius. ... Losers of most major wars in modern history lost because they overestimated operational dexterity and failed to overcome the enemy’s strategic depth and capacity for endurance. Winners absorbed defeat after defeat yet kept fighting, overcoming initial surprise, terrible setbacks and the dash and daring of command ‘genius’. Celebration of genius generals encourages the delusion that modern wars will be short and won quickly, when they are most often long wars of attrition. Most people believe attrition is immoral. Yet it’s how most major wars are won, aggressors defeated, the world remade time and again. We might better accept attrition at the start, explain that to those we send to fight, and only choose to fight the wars worth that awful price."
aeon.co/ideas/wars-are-not-won-by-military-genius-or-decisive-battles