You can always end military deaths overseas by withdrawing and surrendering...but that is not success.
The military is willing to fight. The number of deaths can become irrelevant if the cause is sufficiently noble and just. Policy doesn't become bad when soldiers die; our soldiers just ask that our leaders not to waste their efforts by fighting for bad policy...cost is a factor, but not the determiner of a bad or good policy.
It rings hollow when liberals claim to want to save the lives of soldiers by not letting them do their job (while using the military at home as a test tube for domestic social experiments). If fewer soldiers die on foreign soil because of a policy that encourages evil and the deaths of civilians both abroad and at home, the policy may be a failure even with fewer "Americans dying on foreign soil."
I'm not making a specific comment about specific policies. We can have a reasonable debate about specific policies. I'm commenting generally about how we measure policy successes.
The video: I just watched this the other night. I often think that people just don't understand the military mind. The bottom line is that our soldiers are not sheep, and they are not wolves. They are the sheep dogs, and they hate to be told to stand down while sheep are being killed by wolves, even if it means they must risk themselves to save the sheep. I'm not arguing that we must use the military to correct every injustice; I am arguing that it is offensive to the military mind when politicians who don't have the will to fight evil pretend they are avoiding the fight to save military lives. Find another reason not to fight the good fight, and we can talk about it. There can be legitimate reasons not to fight, but don't use the soldiers as the excuse not to fight.