: I agree regarding the War on Terror. Using a military force to fight a "war" against an abstract, non-human enemy (e.g., terror) has backfired extraordinarily. This is what the US military (and others, but the US is leading) is engaged in right now. Call that a political decision, but America's top military commanders are politicians (the "deciders"), and in fact the Commander in Chief ordered this debacle in his capacity as commander of the US military. This is a military operation, top to bottom, with the mission to end terrorism. The issue is political and criminal, and political and criminal strategies might have been more effective, but instead the US military was dispatched to address the issue. Thousands of soldiers are dead, but terrorist actions have only increased, and membership in terrorist organizations has swelled. 

 : The blunder is that the US military tried to accomplish a mission that could not be accomplished by a military (ending a behavior by individuals who hate them), and the disaster is that many thousands have died as a result and Iraq and Afghanistan have been completely destabilized in the process. The important facts are easily sourced (e.g., time spent at war, number of soldiers killed, rate of acts of terrorism before and after the beginning of the war, and number of soldiers killed compared to the number of people killed by terrorism since the war began). Yes, this is an emotional issue, and people will get hot-headed with their objections, but I perceive an unnecessary bias and inconsistent reasoning on this page. If the war is still ongoing, we do not yet know the outcome. I say 1) we do not need to know the overall outcome of the war to say this is a disaster by any objective measure now, and 2) the outcome of any war has already been refuted on this page as being relevant to whether a military disaster has occurred.