America’s Failure to Win Wars—Inside the Trinity
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America’s Failure to Win Wars—Inside the Trinity
Wednesday, April 30, 2025 9 min read
What most often prevents wars from being won? The general tendency is to examine strategy, tactics, technology, weaponry, leadership, training, logistics, and whether the war was a just cause. Rarely is the quality of a country’s citizens and their relationship to their government considered as factors necessary for winning a war.
They should be. Clausewitz recognized these factors in his simplified social trinity of people, army, and government, and their relationship with one another. While each element of the trinity has deep social and structural roots, their relationship with one another is variable. Still, a balance is required. President Eisenhower in his farewell address also recognized the trinity and went a step further when he cautioned that, “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
Eisenhower was addressing the conditions inside each of the trinity’s three elements. Clausewitz warned that neglecting the balance among the three would undermine a nation’s ability to fight a sustained war and win. Since the end of World War II, the trinity has become unbalanced. But does the balance required by Clausewitz depend on healthy conditions inside each element? Unhealthy internal conditions may explain why the trinity has become dysfunctional and why the United States now fights but loses wars.
The purpose of each of the elements in Clausewitz’s social trinity is as follows: The government declares war and establishes its objectives; the army fights the war in pursuit of established objectives; and the people are the engines of war and the footbrake that leads to peace. Paradoxically, dysfunctional relationships among these elements give each more room for maneuver and arguably generate endless wars. What happens when disorder appears inside the elements? Checks on government overreach are minimized if Americans neglect their obligations as citizens. A professional army that no longer has a flow of citizen soldiers through its ranks becomes removed from the population it serves. The government, whose citizens are shielded from war can operate with less constraint. Most disturbingly, the army gets to fight wars as it sees fit without checks from the government and the people. An examination of the breakdown inside each element of the trinity follows.
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