Your remark is right on.
There are other reasons, based on common sense, for using vastly superior mobility and overwhelming force to win before the enemy knows what is happening.
But the nit picking of military ignoramuses, fellow travelers, anti-Americans, crypto-Marxists, crypto-Islamicists, warped moralists, etc., thrives on a drawn out conflict, focusing on every real and imagined and faked bit of human suffering they can ferret out.
The leadership of the United States, both military and civilian, has reflected the basic ignorance of the elites about warfare since World War II.
The leadership of Israel, both military and civilian, seems to have followed in their footsteps now that they do not have an Ariel Sharon in a position to do the right thing despite various "torpedoes" such as superiors ordering him to do the wrong thing.
I am reminded of Major General Stanley, the leader of a late nineteenth century police action against the pirates of Penzance:
I am the very model of a modern Major-General,
I’ve information vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical;
I’m very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical,
I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical,
About binomial theorem I’m teeming with a lot o’ news –
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse.I’m very good at integral and differential calculus;
I know the scientific names of beings animalculous:
In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I am the very model of a modern Major-General.I know our mythic history, King Arthur’s and Sir Caradoc’s;
I answer hard acrostics, I’ve a pretty taste for paradox,
I quote in elegiacs all the crimes of Heliogabalus,
In conics I can floor peculiarities parabolous;
I can tell undoubted Raphaels from Gerard Dows and Zoffanies,
I know the croaking chorus from the Frogs of Aristophanes!
Then I can hum a fugue of which I’ve heard the music’s din afore,
And whistle all the airs from that infernal nonsense Pinafore.Then I can write a washing bill in Babylonic cuneiform,
And tell you every detail of Caractacus’s uniform:
In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I am the very model of a modern Major-General.In fact, when I know what is meant by "mamelon” and “ravelin”,
When I can tell at sight a Mauser rifle from a javelin,
When such affairs as sorties and surprises I’m more wary at,
And when I know precisely what is meant by “commissariat”,
When I have learnt what progress has been made in modern gunnery,
When I know more of tactics than a novice in a nunnery;
In short, when I’ve a smattering of elemental strategy,
You’ll say a better Major-General has never sat a gee.For my military knowledge, though I’m plucky and adventury,
Has only been brought down to the beginning of the [(19th)] century;
But still, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I am the very model of a modern Major-General.
