US military has terrible track record of losing wars

By just about any metric US military is by far the most powerful on the planet. The most powerful this planet has ever seen.

Yet, if you look at how it's been doing since WW2, it looks real bad.

I'm only including meaningful wars here, not just throwing a few bombs here and there.

Scorecard

I'll rate them on scale of: total failure, narrow failure, clear draw, narrow victory, total victory

Korean War - clear draw. After a lot of fighting everyone was pretty much where they all started.

Vietnam War - total failure. It doesn't get any clearer, nothing was left of what US spent so much time defending.

First Iraq War - narrow victory. Saddam was on verge of losing power, but US indecision let him crush the rebels and remain in power, remaining a problem for long time afterwards.

Afghanistan War - total failure, Taliban still controls most of Afghanistan, and Afghan government is basically negotiating terms of surrender.

Second Iraq War - narrow failure, Saddam was overthrown, but US got forced out by insurgents, and Iraq was 1/3 controlled by Islamic State, the rest by pro-Iranian puppet regime. After ISIS got defeated, pro-Iranian puppet regime controls Iraq.

So of big 5 wars, there's 2 total failures, 1 narrow failure, 1 clear draw, 1 narrow victory, and 0 total victories.

Is that what the world's biggest budget can buy?

It's not difficult to see the pattern. US military is terrible at counter-insurgency, and extremely unwilling to tolerate even modest casualties.

Many US cities are more dangerous than warzones US has been fighting, but even those modest losses are just too much.

So what is it good at?

So the question is - for all that money - what is it actually good at?

It's not actually clear it would be good at WW3 - most likely result is that everybody living in every major city anywhere dies from nuclear missiles.

At purely conventional version of WW3, general consensus is that Soviets would have conquered big parts of Western Europe before Americans would even show up. Not like Soviets had any intention of not using nukes. Every countries which couldn't retaliate was the target, including neutral countries.

It's really unclear that US would be able to win any of the likely regional conflicts with near-peer enemy.

It's not clear if US has any meaningful way to stop China from taking over Taiwan. China has effective ways to prevent any US ships from coming close.

Likewise if Russia wanted to conquer Ukraine or the Baltics, US wouldn't be able to do anything to prevent that.

This is mostly because geography favors its opponents in such cases.

US can win conventional fight against Third World countries, like Iraq in 1991 (on paper Saddam had one of 10 strongest armies in the world), but without willingness to accept costs of occupying those countries and ability to wage effective counter-insurgency this is of limited effectiveness.

US can bomb any Third World country it wants, but effects of that have been rather limited so far.

And US has no ability to defend its own borders - from illegal crossings - but that's intentional political failure.

It's by no means terrible, but relative to how much money is spent on it, it looks quite disappointing.