The American Way of War in 25 Words or Less

[BayonetBrant]

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.

so we're the chameleons of war!

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.

Actually, Perrin makes a rather compelling case that the US operational art, and theater-level strategy, is built around a 'converging columns' model of warfare, but that relies on identifying come conquerable centers of gravity for the enemy that can be controlled by said columns.
Not all that applicable to a counterinsurgency, tho.
It's also amusing to hear the American military talk about how we "don't do counterinsurgency" when we spend 175 years doing exactly that from 1760 to 1935 or so, with a few brief 'conventional' interruptions