Glaring strategic errors

Simple math problem for neoconservatives
If there are 100 terrorists in an area and we kill 99 of them, how many terrorists are there still alive? (As a hint: the answer is not 1).

If our essential strategy is "yours", that we should go out and fight and kill these hostile peoples in their homes and villages and on the hills and valleys of far flung and otherwise meaningless nation-states with minimal or dubious strategic and security value, then you still need to obey some basic tenets of military strategy in order to communicate that this "tough" approach will deliver military victories rather than indefinite occupations and casualty lists.

The first rule is to have a plan to destroy the enemy. Under a nominal conflict with a nation state a battle that kills, captures, or routs almost all of the enemy's troops committed to the fight is a pretty damned good outcome. This is because a nation-state's ability to conduct wars depends on its ability to equip troops with an expectation that they will prevail in battles and thus be given a pretty good idea that they might survive. But we're not fighting nation-states. We, publicly, have long been given this impression by calling things "the Iraq War" or the "Afghanistan War". Even changing the grammar slightly with "the war in Afghanistan" doesn't really give us a fundamental idea of the opponent and how we might be using military tactics to neutralize their fighting abilities and forces because it doesn't identify who we are fighting. Worse, this nebulous approach then gives ample room to declare virtually anyone who opposes our forces as "agents of terrorism" or the "Taliban" and so on. The over-simplification that so broadly encapsulates our foe is probably as maddening to commanders in the field as it was for the troops sent off to conquer the Old West from the "savage red man". I suppose it's too hard to explain to American citizens the dozens of tribal relationships and sources of internal division or corruption within a complex country like Afghanistan. That's fine. But we could start by more clearly defining publicly who we actually want to be at war with within Afghanistan. It's not "the Taliban", because that's a really broad cross section of the political and tribal forces involved some of which is actively hostile to international terrorist aims. It's not "drug-runners" or "narco-terrorism", because some of that is the people we back and support in their government. And so on.

I had originally used the problem as a lack of focus on the third strategic aim of a war: to suppress the enemy's will to make war and resist whatever aims the war was putatively concerning itself with. While that still exists as a questionable front in our strategic planning (at least so long as we insist on installing or propping up peculiarly unhelpful regimes), it's not clear that we had ever established a military capacity to fulfill the first element of strategic success in military conflicts. That is: to defeat the enemy in the field of battle. It sounds like we've learned and gotten a lot better at it. Because that notion of killing them all and that somehow being defined as a conflict victory has started to go away. That works when you are fighting an enemy equipped with planes and tanks and heavy weapons organised into set pieces and trained at great expense. It does not work at all when you are fighting an enemy lightly equipped, possibly armed only with improved explosives or rifles, and sent out under a plethora of reasons to fight, even to resist, a hostile army. There might be some strategic advantages left to wring out of Afghanistan that we did not have in a place like Vietnam or even Somalia. But I'm highly skeptical that these advantages remain in good standing, and moreover, they are likely countered by any institutional support for a government which is perceived, at turns, as corrupt, inept, or illegitimate.