Analysis: Cheap Wars, Expensive Men | MEMRI

By: Amb. Alberto M. Fernandez | MEMRI.org | July 31, 2026

It was a great and subtle statesman almost a century and a half ago that remarked that the Balkans in Europe were “not worth the healthy bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.”[1] Otto von Bismarck’s famous dictum was something a clever man would say, was true in a way, and yet less than thirty years later millions would die in Europe during the Great War because of the Balkans.

The 2026 War in Iran is serious business, waged against a vicious, murderous Iranian regime, but it is also, in some ways, farcical. The United States and Israel bombed Iran for 39 days from late February to early April 2026 and yet Iran’s key lifeline, its oil exports, were untouched for that entire period. The U.S. naval blockade came later, when ceasefire talks broke down. They were then lifted when that Memorandum of Understanding broke down and reimposed more recently when Iran began firing at ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz during a ceasefire.

Nobody knows how this war will end, but the on again, off again, selective tempo of the conflict does not bode well. It does underscore a larger point about modern wars – not just the one in Iran – that, for the West at least, wars are changing and perhaps have changed irrevocably. We seemingly are not able to sacrifice or do what is needed to win but we cannot seem to avoid being dragged into these conflicts anyway. A war important enough to be involved in but not important enough to do everything to win is a perilous scenario. 

Korea ended as a stalemate and Vietnam ended as a defeat because the United States was willing to expend vast amounts of blood and treasure but, because of Cold War considerations, was not able to destroy the enemy. North Korea and North Vietnam were, or became, off limits. They could be bombed from the air with impunity but could not be taken or overthrown from the ground. Afghanistan and Iraq – two initial victories – morphed into a long, slow grinding defeat as the metrics of success shifted. In Afghanistan, the Taliban, the loser of 2001, became the winner of 2021. In Iraq, the bloody dictatorship of Saddam Hussein was replaced by a (mostly) pro-Iranian, corrupt pseudo-democracy.

All these wars featured great American heroism and the ultimate sacrifice with, at best, unsatisfactory political and military results. The great scholar Dr. Edward Luttwak has suggested that we now live – at least in much of the West – in a “post-heroic age where societies no longer accept combat casualties for any reason – not even to resist aggression.”[2]

Dr. Luttwak sees this tied more to demographic changes rather than the withering of martial virtues. Smaller families, less children equals fewer military age males.[3] There is something to this. There is nothing the United States could not do to Iran if it had the will to do so but American society – especially after the debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq – is understandably skeptical.[4] There is little love for the Iranian regime but great skepticism of our own government and our own policies and objectives. Losing 18 American dead in Operation Epic Fury is tragic but comparatively tiny in contrast to other American wars.[5] But like Bismarck’s Balkans, the cost seems too high for many.

This calculation is not limited to America’s latest war. The brutal Russia-Ukraine War may have claimed at least a horrific half a million dead so far but neither Russia nor Ukraine was willing to go to full mobilization of their populations.[6] Both seemed to have felt that their societies would not accept this.[7]

Other recent battles have been almost as bad. As brutal as the war in Ukraine has been, the death toll in two recent African wars is proportionally almost as high. The Tigray War of 2020-2022 in Ethiopia cost at least 100,000 battlefield deaths. Probably the same number is true in the ongoing (April 2023 to now) Sudanese Civil War. In both Sudan and Ethiopia hundreds of thousands more (civilians rather than soldiers) died as a result of massacre, famine or disease.[8] This is a number much larger than the number of civilians killed in Ukraine or Russia. Tigray and Sudan are both civil wars and, in a sense, so is the Russia-Ukraine War.

The harsh lesson here is not that war is going away any time soon. But that extended wars fought with humans are going to be very difficult to sustain, not just logistically, but because of a lack of will among both America’s and Europe’s Left and Right.[9] Americans still love military victory but are dubious about conflicts that promise much and deliver little. Supposedly our future conflicts may be “wars without soldiers.”[10]

A civil war may be different. It is intimate and immediate, involving your family on your territory. I would classify Israel’s existential fight against various states and players seeking to destroy it as also being like a kind of civil war – local, imposed, territorial, up close and personal. The IDF has high morale not only because it is a professional force but because it is extremely motivated.[11] Israel sees its very survival at risk in ways that the United States has not really seemed to face since the Second World War. The stakes were high during the Cold War but it was mostly fought politically or in distant brush wars that seemed really important at the time but which have faded into history.

Americans are still willing to fight but it is politically sustainable only if is played to win, over quickly and cleanly, does not cost too much and is easily understood. This is a grim reality policymakers ignore at their peril.

*Alberto M. Fernandez is Vice President of MEMRI.