This may ramble a bit, but Peter Feaver’s well-timed warning against diverting our national attention away from Iraq makes me wonder if it’s not time to just concede, as a nation, that we’re just not capable of fighting two wars at once without half-assing at least one of them.

Over the last several years, there’s been a lot of head-nodding in foreign policy circles that we have to put our shoulders to the grindstone and take Seriously the fact that we’re waging two prolonged wars. Now, as a statement of fact, if you find yourself in two wars, ignoring at least one of them is obviously undesirable. Alternatively, ending at least one of them — particularly if one of them isn’t in the national interest — is a good idea. But when people started saying that Iraq distracted from Afghanistan, I’m not sure if the full implication was really absorbed. I remember the Bush administration, implausibly, pushing against it, saying this-or-that combat brigade or intelligence asset might be in Iraq but that didn’t mean Afghanistan was shortchanged.

But perhaps the right lesson is to replay that war is too complex and demanding to have to compete with a whole other war simultaneously, for any sustained period. It’s not just a question of launching discrete military strikes — your occasional Hellfire missile — or having X-number of troops or X-amount of money. It’s that you only have so many exceptional officers. You only have so much time in the day. You only have so many creative intelligence analysts. You only have so much mental ability to process complex and ever-changing amounts of data that mean the difference between life and death and the protection of national interests. There’s only so much human beings, organized into groups for the purposes of accomplishing a task, can do. War is hard.

I liked that the Quadrennial Defense Review moved the U.S. away from an outdated and unrealistic pledge to prepare for fighting two major wars simultaneously. And there’s prudent risk management in being prepared to surge capabilities in the event that the U.S. will be attacked roughly simultaneously by two different actors or the more-realistic case where the U.S. is compelled to fight against two different adversaries through a variety of global commitments. But this goes beyond that. It’s healthier for a nation not to write checks it can’t cash, and if it has to overdraw its account, to only do so in cases of real emergency. There’s wisdom in formulating doctrine around the idea that the U.S. should fight as few wars as it absolutely must, since we’ve just seen the wages of fighting elective ones alongside necessary ones. I’ll stop here and reserve the right to revise and extend.