As long as the American public is relatively unaware of the cost of the campaign.

We don't like forever wars, we don't like having troop deployments, but we also really don't like the bad guys winning.

We don't like it when ISIS rise up.

We don't like the Taliban taking over.

This has created this sort of odd set of incentives where American presidents never wanna say that we're at war, but they always wanna say that we're killing the bad guys.

There's like a fixture of stories in magazines and late night news reports that followed Navy SEALs as they conducted a raid.

The kind of quintessential element of the special operations community is the raid, right? There's a bad guy somewhere, and usually they are a really bad guy, you know? Most of the special operations guys can tell you about the torture house in the basement.

And a bunch of tough American warriors gear up, they go get the guy, and they go home.

Perhaps Washington and Jefferson thought our citizens, white male ones of course, will voluntarily take up arms for the cause of democracy.

The Founding Fathers somewhat fetishized the idea of the citizen soldier as being someone who's going to be superior to a career soldier who fights for money because they're fighting out of patriotism.

So, among the Rough Riders, there were lower-class men, middle-class men, upper-class men, and men of a number of different races.

So they'd have the right number of Anglo-Saxons, the right number of American Indians, the right number of Irishmen, and then they'd all go and be fused into one kind of new American race in the cauldron where the heat is provided by war.

Perhaps, Washington and Jefferson thought, our citizens, white male ones, of course, will voluntarily take up arms for the cause of democracy.

The Founding Fathers somewhat fetishized the idea of the citizen soldier as being someone who's going to be superior to a career soldier who fights for money, because they're fighting out of patriotism.

So among the Rough Riders, there were lower class men, middle class men, upper class men, and men of a number of different races.

So they'd have the right number of Anglo-Saxons, the right number of American Indians, the right number of Irishmen, and then they'd all go and be fused into one kind of new American race in the cauldron where the heat is provided by war.