US President Donald Trump said Monday the US has squandered trillions of dollars on military operations in the Middle East over the past two decades without winning any of the wars.
“We never win, and we don’t fight to win,” he told the nation’s governors at a White House meeting. “We’ve either got to win, or don’t fight it at all.”
Trump said he wants to provide soldiers with the tools to deter war and, when called upon, “to start winning wars again.”
“When I was young, in high school and in college, everybody used to say we never lost a war. America never lost. Now, we never win a war,” Trump said.
He cited the example of the Middle East, where the US has waged wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan since 2001.
“Here we are, almost 17 years of fighting in the Middle East.“I saw a chart, as of a month ago, $6 trillion we’ve spent in the Middle East. That’s just unacceptable,” the President stressed.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer said that a large-scale military buildup will not lead to any arms race with other countries.
"When you look at the state of some of the infrastructure in our military, you recognize that we need to rebuild a lot of these things," Spicer noted.
