Why the United States Is Losing—And Russia and Iran Are Winning.

Second, US military culture prioritizes conventional interstate war over intervention in foreign internal conflicts, whereas Russia and Iran have a broader view of the military's mission. At a press conference in 2015, Barack Obama predicted that Russian intervention in Syria would end in ignominy and Moscow would be "stuck in a quagmire."[1] Rather than repeat America's own tough experience in recent Middle Eastern wars, however, the Russian operation helped Syrian president Bashar al-Assad seize the initiative and recapture Aleppo. Why the United States Is Losing - And Russia and Iran Are Winning [44] The experience of sustained counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan spurred greater attention to irregular war and led to the rise of counter-insurgency experts, or "COINdinistas", like David Petraeus.[45] During the last decade, however, the US military has pivoted back to its comfort zone of preparing for interstate war. [Extracted from the article]