“The latter United States battles against the Soviet Union?” one of the women at the back of the room said, not looking up from her sketch.

“Very good, Ensign,” the young man said. “And can you give me another example from the same time period?”

The young woman looked up in startlement at that and shook her head.

“The War on Terrorism?” one of the males asked.

“Yes,” the instructor replied. “At no point in either war did the U.S. directly attack those countries which were the most dangerous to them, politically and strategically, through the use of terrorism. Instead, it attacked the countries that aided and supported them in their cultural memes or directly assaulted those memes. By destroying the economy of the Soviet Union in the first case, and by destroying the cultural, not to mention financial, support of terrorism in the second, the U.S. in both cases destroyed an enemy that, arguably, was capable of winning the war. The Soviet Union by a direct nuclear strike, or a ground assault upon America’s allies, and the terrorist-sponsoring states through economic embargo or direct sponsorship of weapons of mass destruction terrorism. But in each case, by strategic ju-jitsu, the American nation attacked at the weakest point, winning vast wars with very small engagements.”

“Iraq was not the weakest state in the region,” the female ensign said. “They had more forces than the expeditionary force could field against them for logistic reasons.”

“Which EF used the indirect approach again,” the instructor pointed out. He wiped the preceding sketch from the board and started to draw another. “The enemy was in fixed, and very strong, positions, along the probable avenues of approach. Approaches that had been used, notably by the Briton allies of the Americans, in previous wars. By using movement through what the enemy thought was impassable ground, logistically, the Americans and their Briton allies forced the enemy into a battle of maneuver that it could not win against their air superiority. And then by placing forces in the region they drew off the majority of attacks against the civilians in the allied state of Israel as well as their home countries.