Foreign Affairs newsletter reports:
In Iran, the Trump administration fell “prey to the short-war fallacy, focusing inordinately on the power of its means while losing sight of how to achieve its ends,” writes Lawrence Freedman in a new essay. Great powers tend to assume that “moving fast with tremendous force will incapacitate adversaries and achieve swift success on the battlefield,” but “wars do not often end so easily.” Today, the United States’ gambit in Iran “may not turn out to be a long war, but it has already failed as a short war.”
Pithy stuff.
The White House spin doctors will soon come up with a way around this by classifying the Iran war as a 'medium' war: not short enough to be short and not long enough to be long.
They will say short wars like Libya were a disaster as were long wars like Afghanistan so the medium war is clearly the way to go - we have learned our lessons!