Not well fought? Pardon me in my myopia, but where it concerned South Vietnam Tic-tac-toe probably would have been the better choice, because we sacrificed 58,286 pawns in a gambit to keep the place from going communist. If the locus of our resistance to communist expansion is measured in body count then our brilliant leadership inside the Beltway failed miserably. And it was "communist," not just "Soviet" expansion we were presumably resisting, so we shouldn't exclude the PRC. It hasn't collapsed yet either, even though it, like the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, has had somewhat of a change of heart where it concerns capitalism. (Recall that in respect to Vietnam, China, not the Soviet Union, was our main concern regarding any possible invasion of North Vietnam, lest we repeat our quagmire in Korea when we crossed the 38th Parallel and China entered the war. The Brain Trust didn't figure out North Vietnam and China were not on the best of terms until well after we threw in the towel.)
How can I miss it? Or Cambodia? Or Bosnia? Or Kosovo? Or Kurdistan? Or DR Congo? Or Sudan? Or Somalia? Or Rwanda? Or any of the several score genocides or humanitarian crises that have occurred around the globe over the past few decades? Where it concerns warfare as an extension of foreign policy, I take the Eisenhower/Ron Paul approach: choose your fights carefully, making sure that vital U.S. interests are at stake, but if you do decide to wield a stick make sure it's the biggest mother****er on the block and don't be afraid to crack heads. You see, the problem with so many of our so-called leaders is they've never been to war, but they think the Army is the solution to everything, at least until they miscalculate and then cut their losses as Johnson/Nixon did in Vietnam, Reagan did in Lebanon, Clinton did in Somalia, and Bush/Obama did in Iraq. (Johnson and Bush did the miscalculation in Vietnam and Iraq, respectively, while Nixon and Obama cut the losses.)
So my concern is that the Nuclear Warheads sitting in the beltway plotting strategy have already concluded that the only way to defeat ISIS will be to put Western (i.e., mostly American) boots on the ground and that they will, once again, forget to enter some critical thing into their models, at which point we'll find ourselves in another cluster****, with mothers and wives weeping over lost sons and husbands well past the day the policy wonks have moved on to the next crisis in some other unstable part of the world. Only in retrospect do the people left holding the bag realize that a little myopia on the part of their leaders might have been a useful thing.