When the Soviet Union lost the Cold War and the Berlin Wall came down, it was a momentous time. We expected peace in our time. Without two superpowers deterred by mutually assured destruction (MAD) the threat of a nuclear holocaust became distant.

The United States was the sole modern army and no army could dare challenge us, but we soon became aware that technological superiority begat a primitive counter offense that technology could not address. Instead of politics and power wars became about “blood and faith” to borrow from Ralph Peters’ book of that name. As Peters also noted, “suicide bombers trump microchips.” This we learned on 9/11.

Commitment without power will trump power without commitment. Americans are an impatient people and we want our wars quick and cheap; yet we fight an enemy committed to win without a timeline. We learned in Viet Nam that the one thing the North Vietnamese could control in spite of inferior firepower was the duration of the war. In order for a war not to last forever we must be committed as though it will. Our impatience is our Achilles heel; and our enemies know how to exploit it.

With on the ground technology our soldiers have become adept at minimizing civilian casualties. But the concept of a humane war seemed to increase the duration of the conflict. Wars used to be fought to exhaustion, and that included the civilian population. Now we take out the combatants with relatively minimal civilian collateral damage, but the wars never end. Hamas and Palestinian radicals rise up from the very population that was spared by their humane opponents. Wars may now be measured in centuries.

Broader media coverage may also increase the ferocity of battle. Facing media outcry, a warring force may need to sacrifice humanity for speed to avoid the backlash from the media. No military leader wants to see his victory on the battlefield undermined by a global media that values headlines more than understanding. Short term ferocity is also the more humane strategy.

There is a distinct difference between violence and brutality. To win a war the forces of good must become better at violence than the forces of evil, but that does not mean that they must adapt the brutality. We cannot afford to wish and pretend that wars can be won without the ferocity and violence to defeat a brutal enemy.

We now send troops to fight without a declaration of war because we now fight forces that exists outside the realm of a national entity. We now fight to preserve the sovereign integrity of a nation like Iraq or Afghanistan or Kuwait against the cancerous maggots of an Al Qaeda, though our own national interests still dominate our actions.

Our soldiers come from all aspects of our life, and for the most part they return to the jobs of teachers, welders, truck drivers, lawyers and shop keepers when they are done. The wars we fight now are different in many ways from the wars fought by our fathers, but the soldiers still fight with virtues that previous generations of soldiers would admire. They deserve the same respect on Memorial Day.

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