Tactical wins breed strategic overconfidence

Small, successful uses of force (drone strikes, limited strikes) systematically encourage political leaders to upscale interventions without planning for occupation, governance, or long-term costs. That mislearning—treating tactically effective violence as proof of a sound grand strategy—produces unplanned quagmires when local politics and contingencies intervene. — If true, democracies need better institutional checks and public debate to prevent episodic tactical success from becoming open-ended war.