Since 2010, Unwinnable has been a showcase for offbeat, experimental, poignant and funny stories about games, books, movies and even weird stuff, like an advice column from a space marine 38,000 years in the future. We're devoted to examining the intersection of the culture we love and the lives we lead, bringing you the best in pop-cultural criticism, creative non-fiction and the occasional serialized short once a week in a beautiful digital magazine. Unwinnable is life with culture. In this issue, Matt Marrone reports from the 2014 Newport Folk Festival and Gus Mastrapa delivers the latest installment of Dungeon Crawler. Meanwhile, Owen R. Smith gets angry at the unjust world we live in and Stu Horvath muses on his life of gaming. No matter what your taste, Unwinnable Weekly has you covered, so make sure to check out our selection of back issues today!

Since 2010, Unwinnable has been a showcase for offbeat, experimental, poignant and funny stories about games, books, movies and even weird stuff, like an advice column from a space marine 38,000 years in the future. We're devoted to examining the intersection of the culture we love and the lives we lead, bringing you the best in pop-cultural criticism, creative non-fiction and the occasional serialized short once a week in a beautiful digital magazine. Unwinnable is life with culture. In this issue, Ian Gonzales talks to Jörg Tittel, writer of the forthcoming graphic novel Ricky Rouse has a Gun about satire and cheap knock-offs. Juan Valdelomar responds to Matt Duhamel’s “An Artist’s Statement” (from way back in Issue Eight) with a statement of his own. Cassidee Moser has a personal revelation thanks to the Nintendo 3DS Street Pass. Finally, Ansh Patel ruminates on how death is not the end in Crusader Kings II. No matter what your taste, Unwinnable Weekly has you covered, so make sure to check out our selection of back issues today!

Eight years after 9/11 and in the shadow of two protracted U.S. military campaigns in the Middle East, the enemy is not only undefeated but emboldened and resurgent. What went wrong_and what should we do going forward? Winning the Unwinnable War shows how our own policy ideas led to 9/11 and then crippled our response in the Middle East, and it makes the case for an unsettling conclusion: By subordinating military victory to perverse, allegedly moral constraints, Washington's policy has undermined our national security. Owing to the significant influence of Just War Theory and neoconservatism, the Bush administration consciously put the imperative of shielding civilians and bringing them elections above the goal of eliminating real threats to our security. Consequently, this policy left our enemies stronger, and America weaker, than before. The dominant alternative to Bush-esque idealism in foreign policy_so-called realism_has made a strong comeback under the tenure of Barack Obama. But this nonjudgmental, supposedly practical approach is precisely what helped unleash the enemy prior to 9/11. The message of the essays in this thematic collection is that only by radically re-thinking our foreign policy in the Middle East can we achieve victory over the enemy that attacked us on 9/11. We need a new moral foundation for our Mideast policy. That new starting point for U.S. policy is the moral ideal championed by the philosopher Ayn Rand: rational self-interest. Implementing this approach entails objectively defining our national interest as protecting the lives and freedoms of Americans_and then taking principled action to safeguard them. The book lays out the necessary steps for achieving victory and for securing America's long-range interests in the volatile Middle East.

In nine short days, Taliban forces destroyed two decades of American armed statebuilding in Afghanistan. This was no isolated failure. Over the last century, almost every attempt to intervene militarily to prop up or reconstruct an allied state has seen similar dismal outcomes. Why? This book answers that fundamental question. By exploring the factors that hindered success in Afghanistan, Adam Wunische identifies forces common to other unsuccessful U.S. armed statebuilding missions, from Vietnam to Syria, Haiti to Iraq. These forces, he argues, inherently favor insurgencies, forfeit sustainability for quick results, and create dependencies and corruption – all of which undermine the goal of building a state that can stand on its own. Not only that, but most of these forces are inescapable and uncontrollable. This means any future attempts at armed statebuilding will likely also be unwinnable, with costs and consequences far outpacing America’s interests and benefits. Faced with a future likely dominated by proxy wars, Wunische offers a novel way forward to prevent the U.S. from chasing new wars that it is destined to lose.

What does it mean to win a moral victory? Ideals of just and decisive triumphs often colour the call to war, yet victory is an increasingly dubious proposition in modern conflict, where negotiated settlements and festering violence have replaced formal surrenders. In the Just War and strategic studies traditions, assumptions about victory also underpin decisions to go to war but become more problematic in discussions about its conduct and conclusion. So although winning is typically considered the very object of war, we lack a clear understanding of victory itself. Likewise, we lack reliable resources for discerning a just from an unjust victory, for balancing the duty to fight ethically with the obligation to win, and for assessing the significance of changing ways of war for moral judgment. Though not amenable to easy answers, these important questions are both perennial and especially urgent. This book brings together a group of leading scholars from various disciplines to tackle them. It covers both traditions of victory - charting the historically variable notion of victory and the dialogues and fissures this opens in the just war and strategic canons - along with contemporary challenges of victory- analysing how new security contexts put pressure on these fissures and working toward clearer ideas about victory today. The result is a wide-ranging and timely collection of essays that bridges the gap between ethical, strategic, and historical approaches to war and develops new ways of thinking about it as a practical and moral proposition.