alt Hacker News>The US did not 'lose' the majority of the wars it started - it won most of them, and arguably failed to achieve strategic objectives in some.
I mean if we look at all recent wars, Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam and now Iran we completely failed in our objectives. We spend billions, kill a lot of people and get a lot of our own people killed and didn't manage to instill democracy anywhere. How is that not losing the wars? It's complete failure to do what we set out to do 3 times now in recent history.
Hi, the guy with the original claims here: You can really argue this one either way - If you look at Wikipedia, the field seems fairly even, but when you start looking into the details, things don't look quite as rosy: There's a few "wins" that are literally just a plane getting shot down or similar, there's a lot of revolutions they were involved in (some turning out good, some bad) But as you've observed: the big, memorable ones they lost. even the ones Wikipedia claims as wins/mixed bags are sometimes consequences of an earlier battle that they lost. For example, Korea: the division counts as a 'win', because it happened during WW2 and the US were part of the victors of WW2. Defending the south in the Korean war counts as 'mixed' and gets thrown in with the lost counteroffensive of taking the north. You can play the numbers however you like here, it feels like.