Problem with Afghanistan/Iraq is that the US lost the knowledge on how to conduct a war since WW2. There was no plan on how to fix/rebuild the country after the threat (Taliban/Saddam) was eliminated - which led to the Taliban rising again with public support and the Iraqi political landscape essentially fractured.

With Germany, in contrast, the priority was to get us up and running as a democratic society. Mostly this was a side effect of needing a stronghold against Communist-Russia dominated GDR, but still - had the US gone through with de-industrialization of Germany as some plans wanted to, Germany would have been in chaos again.

> Problem with Afghanistan/Iraq is that the US lost the knowledge on how to conduct a war since WW2.

Did Vietnam and Korea not happen? Plenty of nation building going on there. Vietnam failed because peacekeeping isn't the same as peacemaking. The Nazi fought to the last man (or close to it) and were beaten down completely; the Japanese were nuked into submission. Both of those are not or were not options in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, where there was/is still strong opposition backed by foreign powers.

> There was no plan on how to fix/rebuild the country after the threat (Taliban/Saddam)

Afghanistan wasn't intended to be a long term fix, just chase out the Taliban, kill Osama, and let the Northern Alliance take over. That didn't work out so well. Nation building is also a lot easier when the nations were already global empires; Afghanistan is still having a hard time catching up to the 20th century.

Iraq was a deliberate failure in this regard, and troop numbers were kept deliberately low to more easily sell the operation to the public.

I think an important part of the story with Germany is that Hitler's rise was substantially aided by the Germany's treatment after WW1. Everybody was aware of the importance of doing a better job this time.

And everybody should have learned from history in Afghanistan/Iraq/Libya, but no one did apparently :(

Sure they did, they just didn't care.

$100 billion a year isn’t even close to the biggest misapplication of resources in the US economy.

No, but I'd still take a three-fold increase in NIH funding, or a 14x increase in the NSF budget.

drop in the bucket by comparison