Mr. Jones and Ken:

At the risk of you guys hunting me down and killing me while I sleep, for you to reject the 3 examples I gave is sophistry. In the cases of the Philippines and the USSR, you impose a definition of victory that is impossible to achieve and in the case of Malaya, you are quibbling about precise definitions.

In the Philippines, we took over from the Spanish, quashed a rebellion, established authority in all the islands and maintained it until we gave it up as we, eventually, planned. We were not driven out. In fact during the war, the Filipinos fought, pretty hard, on our side. That is a clear and decisive victory...unless you decide that only transformation of the Philippines into Switzerland in the Pacific constitutes victory.

As far as the various components of the USSR go, they were all firmly part of that empire until that empire collapsed from within. They didn't cause that empire to collapse, only took advantage of a dissolution that was caused by other factors. To say "describe today's USSR" is like saying (exaggeration for effect alert!) Rome didn't do so hot because France isn't part of Italy now.

In Malaya, a large army of British people defeated an insurgency by some Malayans. It doesn't matter on whose letterhead the orders were written. The fact that the British had complete control is also irrelevant when judging if their efforts can be judged a success. If anything it is a lesson to be learned.

All 3 fit, wealthy, large forces, bureaucratic.

What concerns me though is to dogmatically state that it can't be done might be used as an excuse to forget about something that is hard to do and hard to think about, like we did after Vietnam. It didn't work out so well for us so we just refused to think about it, actively forgot what we learned and told ourselves that was ok because it would never happen again. It did happen again. "It" will always happen again and we have to keep what we learned from being forgotten.