Sinking Speedboats with a Supercarrier

New America Senior Fellow Peter W. Singer examines the lopsided costs of Operation Southern Spear in Defense One:

And when leaders of the high-spending side begin to sense a ticking clock, they usually choose one of two options: evacuate or escalate. They may scramble to find a way to “declare victory and go home,” as the U.S. did in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Or they try to change the math, such as by using the costly assets in some other, usually dramatic, way. The pertinent example here is from 2003, when the perceived “force flow” commitment and then the unsustainable costs of keeping US forces massed on the borders of Iraq helped lead President George W. Bush to pull the trigger on its invasion.

Read the full article here.