What's the advantage of using short wings rather than long wings?
Another reason to have shorter wings on high-speed or maneuverable aircraft deals with the aircraft's aspect ratio, which is the ratio between its length to is breadth/chord. Longer wings (high aspect) bend more under load, and may twist, which causes structural issues. Additionally, aircraft with shorter wings (low aspect) can roll much quicker. This means that a fighter jet with short wings may roll at rates up to 720 degrees/second while a large airliner or cargo plane may roll at 15-60 degrees per second.

A third reason is parasitic drag. From the linked wikipedia article above:


  While high aspect wings create less induced drag, they have greater parasitic drag, (drag due to shape, frontal area, and surface friction). This is because, for an equal wing area, the average chord (length in the direction of wind travel over the wing) is smaller. Due to the effects of Reynolds number, the value of the section drag coefficient is an inverse logarithmic function of the characteristic length of the surface, which means that, even if two wings of the same area are flying at equal speeds and equal angles of attack, the section drag coefficient is slightly higher on the wing with the smaller chord. However, this variation is very small when compared to the variation in induced drag with changing wingspan.
  For example, the section drag coefficient $c_d$; of a NACA 23012 airfoil (at typical lift coefficients) is inversely proportional to chord length to the power 0.129:
   $$ c_d \varpropto \frac{1}{(\text{chord})^{0.129}}.$$


Since parasite drag increases with airspeed, and high aspect wings have higher parasite drag, it makes sense for high-speed aircraft to have the wing that creates less drag at high speeds, and the slower aircraft to have the wing that creates less induced drag. You can see this in a simple graphic of the drag curves:



(Since the induced drag is lower at high speeds anyway, there is little point in minimizing that, rather minimize the type of drag that is a much larger factor at high speeds)