The Meaning of “Endless War”

What does it mean to be involved in an endless, invisible conflict? What does it say about us as Americans?

Phil Klay’s new book Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War makes an important contribution to contemporary debates over America’s seemingly endless war on terror. Klay accomplishes many things in the book including providing detailed, moving glimpses into military life and extended ruminations on how veterans and citizens generally are wrestling with their varied experiences of the wars.

Through a set of essays written over a decade, the book also sheds light on the meaning of the term “endless war” and shows that it is much more than a politicized talking point. Klay challenges widespread and incorrect beliefs about what constitutes “war” and what makes it “endless.” In his introduction, he contends that whether the United States is at war is determined not by whether Americans are dying but by whether Americans are killing.

Klay writes, “Wherever we’re regularly killing, we’re at war,” adding that this point “leads to the increasingly complex question of where we’re killing people.” He concludes that in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and Libya, “the answer is certainly ‘yes.’”

This point is a necessary intervention against a range of commentary that has equated the relative lack of U.S. casualties with an absence of war. However, Klay’s argument raises questions that are more complex than just the matter of identifying where the U.S. is killing people. For example, as Samuel Moyn asks in his book Humane, “What if the elemental aim of endless war is not the death of enemy soldiers but rather the potentially nonviolent control of other peoples? Would that be tolerable?” Some have challenged analytical frameworks that focus closely on the act of killing — in the form of specific drone strikes — to emphasize the larger systems that make such actions possible. Others have noted the way that increasing reliance on proxy or partner forces by various powers has deliberately obscured and complicated efforts to assign responsibility for particular acts and wars.

Klay’s collection might have benefitted from giving greater attention to these issues. After all, the United States says it has not used force in Afghanistan since the August 2021 withdrawal and does not appear to have conducted a drone strike in Pakistan since mid-2018. In Yemen, U.S. airstrikes have also declined and even potentially paused, increasing the importance of questions about how one determines responsibility, what constitutes “regularity,” and whether the true marker of war is not that the U.S. is engaged in regularly killing but that it claims the authority to kill.

Klay’s essays do not directly take on these questions and their implications for identifying where war is being waged, but they still shed light on them. And in a recent New York Times piece following the book’s publication, Klay examines the issue of secrecy and obscured responsibility with greater specificity. Even so, the questions haunt some of the book’s arguments.

And what do we really mean by “endless war”? This question is at the core of Klay’s collection.

As I have argued, “endless war” as a concept has long been connected to the meaning of “end” as in achieving a set purpose or objective. This concept distinguishes it from the phrase “forever war,” which emphasizes duration over purpose. Assessing the objectives of war and their achievability is important for understanding whether a war is endless.

Questions of purpose appear to inform Klay’s understanding of what constitutes endlessness. In the essay “Left Behind,” Klay writes, “The fraternal bonds of combat have always been invoked to political ends. But as we stand on the edge of seventeen years of war, these ends have become smaller, indeed almost pathetic.” Here he connects Donald Trump’s failure to “articulate a vision of American ideals, our outline, our broader moral purpose in the world” when defending the disastrous raid in Yakla, Yemen, which killed numerous civilians, including young children, and a Navy SEAL on the basis that, as Klay puts it, the raid produced “intelligence that would lead to more targets in the never-ending War on Terror.”

In another essay, Klay notes that American culture shows a similar “increasing obsession with Special Forces conducting commando-style raids” as exemplified by a range of movies like Zero Dark Thirty, 13 Hours, and American Sniper that celebrate the completion of tactical aims or the bonds of the unit, “without forcing too much consideration about the overall outcome.”

As if to drive home the point about the “end” in “endless” being at least partially about purpose, and not just duration, Klay’s essays are littered with references to “political ends,” “ends” that shifted, the “ends” that soldiers “furnish for themselves” to make sense of their experiences, and the idea of an “end-state.”

Klay’s repetition on this theme is a strength. A question often overhangs collected volumes of previously published work: Does the volume add value over reading the work in its original form? The answer for Uncertain Ground is yes. Seeing the same themes, and at times the same examples, reappear over a decade of writing illustrates the meaning behind the term “endless war” — making it difficult to assert that references to “endless war” are merely political sloganeering or exasperation at a war’s duration.

After centering the sense of purpose in the meaning of “end” in “endless war,” Klay raises thorny questions that anyone who speaks of “endless war” ought to wrestle with. Among these: How does a war’s purpose look from different perspectives? Regarding Trump’s 2019 partial withdrawal from Syria, Klay writes, “The most passionate argument I heard for continued U.S. presence overseas that year came not from an American, but from a Syrian refugee living in a camp with his pregnant wife and two children.” The man and his family feared the rise of Turkish-backed militias, and its impact upon them, as the result of the U.S. pullback.

Such an anecdote is not meant to mobilize people in support of endless military action. Instead Klay uses it to invoke a caution about how the extreme disparity between the United States’ security and those of others — and the lack of a clear purpose to war — imposes limits and warps debates over policy. As Klay puts it, “Such appeals for and against war are only of existential importance to combatants and to civilians.” In another essay in a different context, Klay writes, “When a threat is existential, the qualities you value in an individual shift.” As Americans enter their third decade of seemingly endless war, understanding that the “ends” being considered do not have equal weight for everyone, and how one’s positionality shapes one’s perspective will grow in importance.

Another valuable insight that Klay returns to often, drawing upon the work of Elizabeth Samet and others, is how the seeming lack of clear purpose in America’s current wars has led veterans to develop their own personal meanings for their service. Klay sympathetically examines the deep value but also the limits of such individualized meaning. He explores the potentially dangerous routes this might take, drawing connections to the rise of Q-Anon and other far-right politics among veterans and citizens more broadly. He warns ominously, “If you think the mission your country keeps sending you on is pointless or impossible and that you’re only deploying to protect your brothers and sisters in arms, then it’s not the Taliban or al-Qaeda or ISIS that’s trying to kill you, it’s America.”

One of the strongest essays in the book is “The Good War.” Through an artful set of references to scholarship, culture, and a World War II veteran’s story, Klay pits the questions of individual and national purpose and behavior against each other, helping to unsettle easy and hubristic assumptions about what gives war purpose and which wars are celebrated while refusing readers a pat and all-encompassing “war is hell” stance.

Uncertain Ground pushes forward the discussion of what “endless war” is. As both a retrospective and a warning, it highlights how waging endless war impacts Americans, the nation, and those killed in their name.

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