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And before the Spam-Am War, the defining experience for the Army was the Indian Wars. Hell, we still refer to outposts in enemy territory as being in "Indian country."
The World War Two paradigm isn't just appealing to conventionally-minded soldiers for technological or organizational reasons. It is appealing for its moral clarity.
The most salient characteristic, to me, of the American way of war is that it is of paramount importance that we be the good guys. We are uncomfortable with "small wars" because they often require us to confront shades of gray and to make decisions in a world of moral ambiguity. It's far easier to fight to remove the butcher of Baghdad than to fight over who has the right to approve the font face of the typescript used for the new form of contract used to hire butchers for Baghdad butcher shops.
We stayed out of the carnage of World War One for almost three years because we viewed it as merely a war between imperialists over the spoils of their empires. When finally drawn in, we demanded that it be a Great War for Civilization and we bought into the anti-Hun clash of civilization propaganda hook, line and sinker, all the way to renaming sauerkraut "liberty cabbage". When the war ended, and the European victors decided to divide up the spoils and generally ignore Wilson's Fourteen Points vision of liberal nationalism, we abandoned their project and stayed out of the League of Nations.
I confess to only having skimmed the piece that started this thread. I am generally underwhelmed by Cato writings on defense matters. But I note that the author only mentions "good" in the sense of quality, never in the sense of morality, and never talks about the moral component of our war efforts except to say morale often goes down over time.
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