>We aren't losing in Iran because of military incompetence, but policy incompetence.

My point is these two things are inseparable, and to conflate them is simply Call of Duty-esque military fantasy. It's a feel good war story that doesn't actually reflect the reality of actually winning a war.

If the US military does not have the ability to hold, occupy, and install allied regime change, then the US military cannot win a war with Iran. You cannot separate the short term wins from the long term objectives. No one looks at Imperial Japan and says "they easily bombed pearl harbor, but due to policy failures they couldn't keep control of the South West Pacific theatre.

The US winning WW2 wasn't just dropping the nukes and high fives. There was rebuilding the Japanese nation, aligned to the US, becoming a long term ally.

This is no different than Afghanistan. Future humans aren't going to look back and say "the US easily controlled Afghanistan for 12 years, and then just returned to the Taliban". The lessons learned will be the US failed to hold Afghanistan and the Taliban returned to power and it was a military failure.

No matter how you dress it up, I can't afford the ferrari.