# Forever Wars The name for a **condition, not a campaign**: American military operations that continue indefinitely because nothing in their legal, fiscal, or political design requires them to stop. The phrase usually points at the post-9/11 wars — [[Afghanistan War]], [[Iraq War]], the anti-ISIS campaigns in Iraq and Syria, and the drone and special-operations activity conducted across Yemen, Somalia, [[Libya]], the Sahel, and elsewhere. But the analytically useful version of the concept is not a list of theaters. It is the observation that the United States built a war-making apparatus with **no off switch**, and that the absence of the off switch was a design outcome rather than an oversight. ## Where the phrase came from Joe Haldeman's 1974 novel *The Forever War* — a Vietnam veteran's science-fiction allegory in which relativistic time dilation makes a soldier's war outlast his entire society — supplied the term. Journalist Dexter Filkins borrowed it for his 2008 book of the same name, reporting from Afghanistan and Iraq, and it stuck. The plural, *forever wars*, together with the more colloquial *endless wars*, hardened into standard political vocabulary around **2018–2019**. The politics of the phrase matter as much as the substance. "Ending the forever wars" is one of the very few formulations spoken with apparent sincerity by the progressive left, the libertarian right, the paleoconservative right, and the MAGA coalition simultaneously. That makes it a **coalition solvent** — and an unreliable signal. Two people using it may want opposite things. ## Four mechanisms that make a war permanent ### 1. Legal — an authorization with no expiration The [[AUMF]] of 2001 runs sixty words, contains no sunset clause, no geographic limit, and no definition of the enemy beyond those connected to September 11. The phrase **"associated forces"** — which appears nowhere in the statute — was supplied by executive interpretation, and extended the authorization to organizations that did not exist in 2001, including ISIS. [[Barbara Lee]] cast the only vote against it in either chamber. The 2002 Iraq authorization was repealed in **March 2024**, largely symbolically, since no administration was still relying on it. **The 2001 AUMF remains in force.** Congress's structural problem is that no member wants to vote against military authorization and be blamed for the next attack, and few want to vote *for* an authorization that ratifies operations already underway. Inaction is the path of least resistance, and inaction is what perpetuates it. ### 2. Fiscal — borrowed money makes no noise The post-9/11 wars are the **first major American wars financed entirely by borrowing while taxes were simultaneously cut**. Every previous large war — the Civil War, both world wars, Korea, even Vietnam in part — came with revenue measures that made the cost legible to the public in the same year the cost was incurred. Debt financing removes that annual reckoning: interest accrues quietly, and the bill arrives decades later attached to no particular decision. See [[Costs of War Project]]. ### 3. Personnel — a war nobody is asked to fight The [[All-Volunteer Force]] means roughly one percent of the population carries the entire burden and the remaining ninety-nine incur no obligation whatsoever. Conscription generated the domestic friction — draft notices, campus protest, arguments in ordinary households — that historically forced wars to a political conclusion. Without it, the political cost of continuing approaches zero. This is [[Andrew Bacevich]]'s argument in *[[Breach of Trust]]* (2013), and it is the mechanism he considers decisive. ### 4. Definitional — an enemy that cannot surrender A war against a state ends when the state signs something. A war against an ideology, a method, or a shifting roster of "associated forces" has no counterparty with the authority to conclude it. The [[War on Terror]] framing therefore builds permanence into the grammar of the thing: there is no condition under which anyone can announce that terrorism has been defeated, and so no condition under which the authorization becomes unnecessary. ## The ledger Figures from the [[Costs of War Project]] at Brown University's Watson Institute, the standard independent accounting: | Measure | Estimate | |---|---| | Total US budgetary cost | ~**$8 trillion** | | Direct war deaths (all sides, all categories) | at least **940,000** | | Total deaths including indirect | **4.5–4.7 million** | | People displaced | **38 million** | | Projected care for post-9/11 veterans through 2050 | **$2.2–2.5 trillion** | The gap between these numbers and official Pentagon figures — roughly $8 trillion versus roughly $2 trillion — is the accounting question at the center of the debate. Costs of War includes interest on the war borrowing, war-related State Department and Homeland Security spending, and the multi-decade veterans' obligation. The Pentagon counts appropriations for named operations. **Neither number is dishonest; they answer different questions**, and which one gets cited is usually a political choice. ## The wars end without ending The American withdrawal from Afghanistan concluded on **August 30, 2021** — the visible war, over. What did not end: the 2001 AUMF, the drone and targeted-killing architecture, the "over-the-horizon" strike posture, the detention apparatus at [[Guantanamo]], the domestic surveillance infrastructure built under war authority ([[USA PATRIOT Act]], the [[Surveillance State]]), or the budget baseline the wars established. This is the concept's sharpest point and the reason it belongs in this vault rather than in a foreign-policy reference: **the machinery outlives the war it was built for**. Bacevich's formulation in *[[Washington Rules]]* is that the withdrawal ended a deployment, not a doctrine — and a doctrine that survives its own most expensive failure is not going to be retired by the next one. ## Who says it, and what they mean | Speaker | What "end the forever wars" means to them | |---|---| | Progressive left | Redirect military spending to domestic needs; restore congressional war powers; humanitarian accounting of the costs | | Libertarian right ([[Rand Paul]]) | Constitutional objection — Congress abdicated a Article I power; also a spending objection | | Paleoconservative right ([[Pat Buchanan]], [[Paleoconservatism]]) | Other nations' quarrels are not America's; national particularity over universal mission | | [[MAGA]] / [[America First]] | Alliances and commitments as bad deals; withdrawal framed as leverage rather than as restraint | | Restraint scholars ([[Andrew Bacevich]], [[Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft]]) | Fewer commitments so the remaining ones are honored; diplomacy first; force subject to law | > [!warning] The vocabulary test > Shared phrasing conceals opposite premises. The restraint position proposes to **do less**; the transactional position proposes to **owe less**. When this vault encounters forever-war language, record which one is on offer — the noun does not tell you. ## KB significance **1. A bipartisan failure, not a partisan one.** Four presidents of both parties stretched the same sixty words. Congress declined to reclaim the authority under unified control by either party. The forever wars are the vault's cleanest case of a structural failure that does not map onto the usual factional analysis — which is precisely why they are useful for testing whether an account of American politics is describing mechanisms or just picking sides. **2. Emergency powers become permanent infrastructure.** The [[AUMF]] pattern — emergency authorization passed under fear, never revisited, reinterpreted outward — recurs across the vault in the [[USA PATRIOT Act]], in emergency economic powers, and in the [[Unitary Executive Theory]] literature. Compare the [[Gulf of Tonkin Incident]] resolution: passed on claims later discredited, used to escalate far beyond what was described to Congress. **3. The phrase is a solvent, not a position.** Because it is shared across otherwise hostile coalitions, "forever wars" is one of the most efficient places in American political language to watch a single formulation do incompatible work for different speakers. Track the usage, not the agreement. ## See Also - [[AUMF]] — the legal architecture; the sixty words - [[All-Volunteer Force]] — the personnel mechanism - [[Civil-Military Relations]] — who controls the instrument - [[Breach of Trust]] — Bacevich on the civic default - [[Washington Rules]] · [[America's War for the Greater Middle East]] — the doctrine and the military history - [[Costs of War Project]] — the ledger - [[War on Terror]] — the framing that makes conclusion impossible - [[War on Terror Timeline]] — the full chronology - [[Militarism]] · [[Military-Industrial Complex]] — the cultural and material layers - [[Guantanamo]] · [[Surveillance State]] · [[USA PATRIOT Act]] — the domestic apparatus built under war authority - [[War Powers Resolution]] — the statute the AUMFs circumvent - [[Barbara Lee]] — the lone dissenting vote - [[Andrew Bacevich]] — the critic the concept runs through [[Concepts Hub]]