Victory in scholarship on strategy and war

Abstract

When policy-makers use force to achieve political ends, they use the word ‘victory’, yet its meaning is frequently left unclear. Policy-makers are using force for new purposes (peace operations, preemption, state-building, democracy promotion, counterinsurgencies and counterterrorism), but the language and thinking on victory in these new situations has not kept pace with the times. The essential problem is that the term ‘victory’ is an imprecisely defined concept for guiding decisions about military intervention. Everyone, from scholars to policy-makers, should understand that the failure historically to develop a precise concept of victory weakens the ability of policy-makers to use force effectively and contributes to confusion when societies debate whether to use force. This article seeks to make three fundamental contributions towards reducing the ambiguity that surrounds the term ‘victory’ in the strategic studies literature. First, it establishes the renewed importance of the question: ‘what is precisely the meaning of “victory?”’ Second, it presents a typology for understanding the nature of victory. Third, it uses this typology to reevaluate the contributions of prominent and lesser-known thinkers in strategic studies whose ideas have contributed to the scholarship on what it means to achieve victory in war.

Notes

I am indebted to several anonymous reviewers for their wise counsel and advice.

¹ The position that the advent of nuclear weapons changed everything is arguable. Since nuclear weapons no longer dictate policy, have not stopped wars, or have not been used in anger since 1945, one can argue whether nuclear weapons have changed the concept of victory.

² Herman Kahn advanced an opposing argument. As he claimed in 1960, a nuclear exchange between the superpowers could be survivable. Also, Kahn argued that escalation could be graduated and controllable, and contestable (1965).

³ This relates to Russell F Weigley's (1973) classic formulation of the ‘overwhelming might’ doctrine as the ‘American Way in War’.

⁴ Ikle, (1971, 107), also described the ‘task of estimating the results of warfare’ as another expression for victory.

⁵ This is more contestable and complex, however, as some modern historians argue that the problem with the Treaty of Versailles was that it was not harsh enough, and left a defeated Germany with the latent military-industrial capacities and the territorial integrity to rise again and exact revenge on the ‘victors’ of 1918–1919. Compare Boemeke et al (1998).

⁶ Clausewitz (1832), chapters 25 and 26; several translations are listed in the References.

⁷ Martin S Alexander and John FV Keiger (2006) outline several ‘key questions’ about victory: ‘do the victors know what they want? Do they know how to get what they want? Can they align domestic and world public opinions to make the objectives sufficiently acceptable? Can they align military and political objectives among their own elite advisers and key officials? Can unity of purpose be maintained amongst allies? What are the juridical implications that may constrain the desired terms of victory? What plans are in place if victory comes sooner than expected?’ (182)

⁸ For cultural influences on strategy and victory, see Alastair Iain Johnston (1995a; 1995b); Jeffrey W Legro (1996); Michael Desch (1998); Iver B Neumann (2005); Colin Dueck (2006); Robert Mandel (2006); David McCraw (2011).

⁹ Robert S McNamara (1995, 252–53): ‘[h]awks charged that we were forcing our military to fight with one hand tied behind its back and demanded that we unleash the full weight of America's military might’.

¹⁰ McNamara (1995, 86): ‘[o]ur object [was to] permit the South Vietnamese to maintain themselves as a free and independent country’. Compare ‘[a]mong the conditions required to win such a war is a strong, stable, and effective government which has the full loyalty and support of the people’ (110). McNamara et al (1999): the principal goal of American policy was ‘the establishment of a stable, independent noncommunist South Vietnam’ (328).

¹¹ This problem with the scholarship on victory is similar to David Baldwin's observation about the meaning of ‘security’ in security studies (1997): a core term that governs the understanding of the scholarship is ambiguous. Victory, like security, it is a term so widely used that few take the time to define it precisely.

¹² Harry G Summers (1984, 21).

¹³ See Francis Fukuyama (2006 [1992]); Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein (1994).

¹⁴ While the American Civil War from outward appearances looks to be a grand strategic victory, it did not at the time transform international politics (Martel 2007, 110–12). A more precise categorization is as an existential strategic victory (Martel 2011, 145–148), since it contributed to the development of American power in the twentieth century but not to a fundamental realignment of international politics.

¹⁵ Felix Gilbert (1973 [1943], 24), makes the argument that Machiavelli established the beginning of strategic thinking about war and by extension victory.

¹⁶ The best studies on Montecuccoli from which this study draws are Thomas M Barker (1975); Gat (1991, 13–24); Günther Rothenberg (1986, 55–63).

¹⁷ Gat also observed: ‘[t]he military thinkers of the Enlightenment maintained that the art of war was also susceptible to systematic formulation, based on the rules and principles of universal validity which had been revealed in the campaigns of the great military leaders of history’ (1991, 29).

¹⁸ Note the fourth and final adjunction in Winston Churchill's (1977) four-part epigram in the beginning of each volume of his 1939–1945 memoirs, ‘In Victory: Magnanimity’.

¹⁹ For Clausewitz's analysis of the concept of ‘major victory’, see On War (1976 [1832], 253–270).

²⁰ ‘Once the expenditure of efforts exceeds the value of the political object, the object must be renounced and peace must follow’ (Rothfels 1973 [1943], 107).

²¹ For excellent analyses of Lyautey, see Douglas Porch (1986); Jean Gottmann (1973 [1943]).

²² It is usually the government who is the counterinsurgent, though insurgents, for example Mao in northern China during the Chinese civil war, 1932–1949, or the Algerian Nationalist GPRA, 1958–1962, sometimes constitute themselves as governments-in-exile, governments-in-hiding or governments-in-waiting—deliberately setting themselves up as alternative and competing loci of politico-ideological loyalty for the population who are the true ‘centre of gravity’ of the struggle.

²³ See, for example, Army/Marine Corps counterinsurgency field manual 3–24 (2006).

²⁴ Compare Peter Paret (1964); Roger Trinquier (1964 [1961]).

²⁵ Compare BH Liddell Hart (1954, 370): ‘[v]ictory in the true sense implies that the state of peace, and of one's own people, is better after the war than before…Victory in this sense is only possible if a quick result can be gained or if a long effort can be economically proportioned to the national resources. The end must be adjusted to the means.’ The lineage of this idea traces to Sun Tzu.

²⁶ For a trenchant analysis of the influence of Soviet thinkers on war, see Edward Mead Earle (1973).

²⁷ Compare Francis Fukuyama (2006 [1992]) for a cogent summary of Georg Wilhelm Hegel's (1969) dialectical theory of Universal History.

²⁸ For an analysis of the failure of Marxism, see Joshua Muravchik (2002).

²⁹ For Mao's writings and pronouncements, see Mao Tse-tung (1966); Stuart R Schram (1966); Mao (1986).

³⁰ See David Galula (1964); John A Nagl (2005 [2002]); David A Kilcullen (2006); Rupert Smith (2007).

³¹ Compare ‘Obama review’.

³² Remarks by the President on the Way Forward in Afghanistan, 22 June 2011, < www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/06/22/remarks-president-way-forward-afghanistan>.

³³ See Walter Issacson (2005, 313); compare Henry Kissinger (1979, 272), on meeting the US withdrawal strategy from Vietnam: ‘would make victory impossible and even an honorable outcome problematical. The process of withdrawal was likely to become irreversible. Henceforth, we would be in a race between the decline in our combat capabilities and the improvement of South Vietnamese forces—a race whose outcome was at best uncertain.’ Also, Jeffrey Record (1998; 2010). Also, Larry Berman (2001); Jeffrey Kimball (1998, 370).

³⁴ In terms of ‘peace with honor’, see Richard Nixon (1978, 349).