It is associated with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's focus on statistics: military expenditures vs. enemy deaths.

In fact, the phrase came from Eisenhower's Secretary of Defense, Charles Wilson. He used it in 1954 to justify the Defense Department's reliance on nuclear weapons rather than conventional armies. McNamara's focus on armies was a reversal of Wilson's context.

In 1953, Eisenhower gained a stalemate in Korea: a ceasefire. There has never been a treaty ending that war. In the decade of 1965-1975, in a much longer war, the United States lost. Today, the United States has lost the war in Iraq — where we are still bombing ISIS troops — and is losing the war in Afghanistan. Each of these wars have been longer than the Vietnam war, which legally began with Congress' Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on August 10, 1964.