This is a bit on the misleading side -- even by the standards of the blog the United States was involved in some form of military conflict at some point during 93% of years between 1776 and 2011, not 93% of the time. Also, many of the military conflicts on the list were characterized by low burning tensions that sometimes erupted in violent events rather than ongoing, large-scale battles.

But it's certainly fair to say that the United States has been quite liberal with the use of its military. This blog gives a list of (some) US military interventions since 1890, the year sometimes given for the end of the Indian Wars and "closing of the West" (although some violent conflicts continued after that year). As another commenter pointed out, there may be some semantic discussion to be had over whether all of these interventions qualify as wars per se, but it's a striking list nonetheless. And of course US military conflicts pre-1890 make a lengthy list also. The Indian Wars absorbed an enormous amount of the US government's attention and its federal budget prior to the Civil War, and the US continued to prosecute wars against native nations afterwards as well.

So the headline is a bit misleading and clickbaitey, and I wouldn't describe US military history in quite these terms to a class. But there is a substantial and enormously varied history of military conflict behind this as well.

Here's an apparent year-by-year breakdown of how they managed to get to 222 years of war

I think it's pretty obvious that whoever made it was as liberal as possible with what constitutes a "war" in order to end up with the highest conceivable number of years possible. For instance, a nebulous group of peaceful occupations and occasional military clashes rarely lasting more than a day or two across several different countries gets all lumped together into the "Banana Wars" for this tabulation and counts for the list at 35 years of uninterrupted warfare - regardless of whether there was fighting or not. The same is done with the Chickamaya Wars - which end up presented at 19 years of uninterrupted war. They stitch the Boro Rebellion into the years of the Philippine-American War to turn that 3 year long conflict into a 15 year long one. The same is done with the Cold War, which they break out as a legitimate war whenever they've got some years on the calendar that need plugging up - such as the end of Vietnam and the beginning of the Gulf War. It becomes increasingly clear that whoever made this list does not consider US military involvement to actually be a prerequisite of America being at war. For instance, the Ukrainian Civil War is absurdly counted as an American War - as is the 8 years of the Russo-Afghan War, the Yom Kippur War, and some nebulous conflict whose origin I am not even aware of which they just call the "Conflict in Iraq" which is a 5-year long American war in the middle of the 90's which I apparently missed. The Yellowstone Expedition somehow gets counted as a war (you might as well include "the Lewis & Clark War"), as does the Posey War, which was a weekend-long policing action by a group of local posses. The Lincoln County War counts as well even though it was a shootout between bandits and lawmen - including this is like including the North Hollywood Shootout. Same with the Jayuya Uprising - a police action lasting a single day. I'm particularly annoyed at the fact that the Cuban Missile Crisis, perhaps the greatest triumph of diplomacy in our country's history, is nonetheless shoved in there as an American war too. Honestly the whole list is just full of disingenuous things like this aimed at trying to make the United States seem as war-like as possible. And that's not even getting into how misleading it is when an entire year gets checked off regardless of the length of the actual conflict. The United States was at war 365 straight days in 1943, whereas the Posey War, the Lincoln County War, and the Jayuya Uprising together were less than a week - yet each of those count for a year all on their own.

For the Sabine and Yellowstone expeditions - were shots fired against a belligerent in either of these? Were there belligerents?

Can anyone here tell me how many years we were officially at war? As in, congress formally declaring it?

The list has problems, yes, but like with any argument that aims for a big picture perception question, the issue is more appropriately "is the impression it gives, counter to the self-image of Americans as reluctant warriors across history and of democracies as peaceable generally relative to other forms of government, a useful one". I think it's comparable (although with significantly less novelty at this point) to the way that Darius Rejali shed light on just how common and widespread specific forms of torture were in 20th century democracies, both in domestic and foreign operations. You could try for a letter of the law rebuttal, or you could consider what it means over the different stages of American authority and power over time, relative to other powers.

Someone above handwaved past the so-called Banana Wars as if this was a nonsense citation, simply because technically not every part of every year in that span was filled with active warmaking. Sure, the citation could be parsed out more cleanly. But it was a tremendously destabilizing, future-realigning period for the countries that were, occasionally, also "peacefully occupied" in addition to being a field test of American air power (as Nicaragua was per Schroeder's formulation), as if such a thing would not be counted as an act of war if it happened to the United States at the hands of another country. It is these wars along with the Spanish-American War and the subsequent occupations that carry the country to Vietnam and Iraq, not just the show-stoppers in WWI and WWII.

Simply because they were a rounding error in the American experience of their foreign policy does not make them any less consequential to having a realistic sense of the United States' place in the global stream of history. It's not just about how Americans feel about them, in the end. So I guess my response would be, of course a polemic reposted on Facebook is going to have holes in it. But there's a difference between holes that point to a broken thesis and holes that nevertheless leave a useful critical lens for American foreign policy under the assumption that it is consistently warlike versus a series of incredible coincidences surrounding reluctant leaders and wars that just pull them in.