While some American officials had used the phrase to predict a shorter conflict and a quick collapse of the Iraqi leadership, Vice President Dick Cheney was not among them.
Official numbers are difficult to find, said Deborah D. Avant, author of the 2005 book "The Market for Force: The Consequences of Privatizing Security," but an estimated 9,200 contractors deployed during the Gulf War, a far shorter conflict without reconstruction projects.
If, however, the United States and other western societies view our fellow citizens who happen to be Muslim as our strongest asset and partners in defeating the objectives of Isis, then this will be a shorter conflict with far fewer lives lost.
Instead, the Chinese military appears to have embarked on modernization programs that would allow it to fight and win short conflicts fought with new weapons along its periphery.
The massive trucks, known as MRAPs, came to symbolize the bloody evolution of wars that were meant to be short conflicts but turned into quagmires.
Hamas knows that [Israel's prime minister, Binyamin] Netanyahu was reluctant to be drawn into this conflict and it knows the history of Israeli wars – that it tends to prefer short conflicts.
In the transition regime (middle panel) the scenario of peaceful times interrupted by short conflicts is still observable, but periods of continuous conflict occasionally appear.
In early March, for example, General Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, serenely anticipated "a short, short conflict".
During the short conflict, Israel lost 119 soldiers and 43 civilians while between 250 and 500 Hizbullah fighters died.
Timothy O'Donnell, the managing director of Emerson, said demand for flags during the gulf war dropped as soon as that short conflict ended on Jan . 17 , 1991
