I think that title sums it up nicely. We aren't happy unless we can distill something to a snapshot (25 words or less). It doesn't have to be accurate...just short.

In all seriousness, I'm not really sure we have a coherent way of war...at least not one way. If we wanted to snippy, you could turn a movie line on its ear and use something like "If we come, we will build it." We build up our military to suit a particular situation, we build infrastructure to house that army in a standard we think it needs, and start reworking the local landscape (both physical and cultural) to suit the needs of the moment. There's also a certain haphazard quality about Americans making war. We've always had an uncertain relationship with a professional military, and our political system isn't designed to formulate long-term strategy.

So something like "Bullets before bodies, and if we come we will build it" might sum up the entire experience (assuming, of course, that it's a wise thing to simplify complex concepts into Twitter lines).