[fallous]

Unfortunately we do hear the phrase "war on crime (usually meaning violence or drugs)," but policing is the enforcement of all laws and thus lacks the targeting required to be a "war" in a meaningful sense. The same with contracts and taxes, although both have suffered their own specific "war" monikers on particular behaviors in the past.

A war does indeed have a structure, but I'd disagree with your list a bit. Your point 1 is correct, but "groups" is a fungible category and we've certainly seen wars that included the attempted destruction of both groups of people and concepts (history, religion, ideology, etc). 2. Unfortunately history argues that peace is the exception rather than war. There are plenty of wars occurring right now in which we have no participation, nevermind those that we do. 3. Plenty of wars ended with no victory or defeat, and it's certainly arguable that in some cases neither was realistically possible.

I specifically left out the War on Cancer because a good portion of it was under the aegis of private parties, not that it much mattered when it came to the failure of results. They originators believed that Cancer was a single entity that one muster all efforts against... they were wrong.

That the wars waged were wrong-headed in both conception and means is pretty obvious, the means simply ensured that the consequences would be much closer to actual war.