DEFINING AND ACHIEVING DECISIVE

VICTORY

Colin S. Gray

April 2002
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ISBN 1-58487-089-3

ii
FOREWORD

The United States was thrust so suddenly into the war

on terrorism that it was forced to deal with both immediate

operational issues and broad strategic questions

simultaneously. Even while the American military is

consolidating battlefield success in Afghanistan, strategic

thinkers and leaders are developing a long-term strategy. In

this process, nothing is more important than defining

victory.

In this monograph, Dr. Colin Gray, one of the world’s

leading strategic thinkers, explores the concept of victory in

the war in terrorism, but he does so by placing it within the

larger currents of change that are sweeping the global

security environment. He contends that the time-tested

idea of decisive victory is still an important one, but must be

designed very carefully in this dangerous new world. To do

so correctly can provide the foundation for an effective

strategy. To fail to do so could be the first step toward

strategic defeat.

The Strategic Studies Institute is pleased to publish this

study as a contribution to the defeat of global terrorism.

DOUGLAS C. LOVELACE, JR.

Director

Strategic Studies Institute

iii
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR

COLIN S. GRAY is Professor of International Politics and

Strategic Studies at the University of Reading, England. A

graduate of the Universities of Manchester and Oxford, Dr.

Gray worked at the International Institute for Strategic

Studies (London), and at Hudson Institute (Croton-onHudson, NY), before founding a defense-oriented

think-tank in the Washington area, the National Institute

for Public Policy. Dr Gray served for 5 years in the Reagan

administration on the President’s General Advisory

Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament. He has

served as an adviser both to the U.S. and the British

governments (he has dual citizenship). His government

work has included studies of nuclear strategy, arms control

policy, maritime strategy, space strategy, and the use of

special forces. Dr. Gray has written 17 books, most recently

Modern Strategy (1999). In 2002 he will publish Strategy for

Chaos: RMA Theory and the Evidence of History and Future

Warfare.

iv
SUMMARY

The idea of victory, let alone decisive victory, was very

much out of style during the Cold War. The theory and

practice of limited war in the nuclear age was more

concerned to minimize the risks of escalation to nuclear

holocaust than to win the conflict of the day. That changed

dramatically with the end of the Cold War; indeed so much

so that from 1991 to the present, with the painful exception

of Somalia, the United States has known nothing but

victory in its exercise of military power. The author

challenges the view that war lacks the power of decision,

arguing instead that war, even when not concluding with

clear success for one side, still has the power of decision.

This monograph discusses the idea of decisive victory with

reference to different levels of analysis—the operational,

strategic, and political. It is suggested that the concept of

decisive victory needs to be supplemented by two ancillary

concepts, strategic success and strategic advantage.

The author explores the means and methods most

conducive to achievement of decisive victory. He explains

that objectively “better” armies tend to win (war may be the

realm of chance, but the dice are loaded in favor of those who

are militarily competent); that there is no magic formula

which can guarantee victory (not even today’s

information-led revolution in military affairs [RMA], which

tends to equate precise firepower with war); that technology

is not a panacea, the answer to all military and strategy

difficulties; that the complexity of war and strategy allows

for innovative, even asymmetrical, exercises in substitution

as belligerents strive to emphasize strength and conceal

weakness; and that it is essential to know your enemies,

especially if you require them to cooperate in a deterrent or

coercive relationship.

The author concludes by arguing that the concept of

decisive victory is meaningful and important. Also it advises

v
that different enemies in different wars will require the

application of different military means and methods. One

size in military style will not fit all cases. Readers are

recommended not to think of decisive victory in terms of a

simple either/or. Strategic success or advantage may serve

the goals of policy quite well enough. Finally, the point is

made that, among Western states at least, the United

States today is surely unique in being interested in the idea

of and capability for decisive military victory. America’s

European allies currently do not discern any serious

military issues as clouds on their peaceful horizons.

vi
DEFINING AND ACHIEVING DECISIVE

VICTORY

The political object—the original motive for the war—will thus

determine both the military objective to be reached and the

amount of effort required.

Carl von Clausewitz, 1832

To study a war without taking into account the circumstances

in which it is fought and the peace to which it led is a kind of

historical pornography.

Sir Michael Howard, 1999

In war there can be no substitute for victory.

General Douglas MacArthur, 1951.

Introduction.

The justification for this monograph was explained

succinctly in a brilliant essay written a generation ago by

French scholar, Raymond Aron. “Strategic thought draws

its inspiration each century, or rather at each moment of

history, from the problems which events themselves pose.”1

Since September 11, 2001, it has been open season for

efforts to grapple with the deceptively simple concept of

victory. Journalists and other commentators have penned

analyses with such titles as “The elusive character of

victory,” and “What Victory Means.”2 If “victory” unadorned

is hard to corral intellectually, what sense can we make of

“decisive victory”? Is the concept a theoretical artifact from

a past age, or does it retain vitality, particularly for the

hegemonic United States of today? I will argue that decisive

victory, adjective and noun, is a meaningful and important

concept.

Before plunging into the muddy waters of definition, it

may be useful to recall a little history. Although since 1991

1
victory has come back into fashion as a proper outcome to be

expected of the use of American arms, for the duration of the

Cold War it was most emphatically one of yesterday’s ideas.

In very good part for reason of the sensible fear of escalation

to nuclear holocaust, the only kind of conflict that the

United States dared wage in the nuclear era was limited

war. Writing at the tail end of the golden decade of modern

American strategic thought (1955-66), Thomas C. Schelling

argued that

“victory” inadequately expresses what a nation wants from its

military forces. Mostly it wants, in these times, the influence

that resides in latent force. It wants the bargaining power that

comes from its capacity to hurt, not just the direct consequence

of successful military action. Even total victory over an enemy

provides at best an opportunity for unopposed violence against

the enemy populations. How to use that opportunity in the

national interest, or in some wider interest, can be just as

important as the achievement of victory itself; but traditional

military suicide does not tell us how to use that capacity for

inflicting pain.3

To strategic sophisticates in the 1950s and 1960s, victory

was an atavistic notion. American theorists found the

Clausewitz that they wanted to find in On War, which is to

say the post-1827 Clausewitz who revised some of his

manuscript in order to balance his discussion of “absolute

war” with consideration of “real war” for limited aims.4 But

on the first page of Book One, Chapter 1, Clausewitz insists

that “War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our

will.”5 He rams the point home by saying that “to impose our

will on the enemy is its object [the object of the act of force

that is war]. To secure that object we must render the enemy

powerless; and that, in theory, is the true aim of warfare.” Of

course, in the sentences quoted the great man is explaining

and exploring the nature of war, not offering advice on its

conduct. But Clausewitz’s admirably terse summary of the

nature and object of war did not find much intellectual favor

in Cold War America. After all, in a nuclear age would it not

be dangerous in the extreme, even perilously irresponsible,

2
to attempt “to compel our enemy to do our will”? Has not

Michael Quinlan written persuasively that “a nuclear state

is a state that no one can afford to make desperate.”6 To

extend Quinlan’s point, a nuclear state is a state against

which no one can afford to press for victory.

Readers can imagine the shock and horror that resulted

when in 1980 I published (with Keith B. Payne) an article on

nuclear strategy bearing the exciting title, “Victory Is

Possible.”7 A year earlier I had expounded at some length on

“Nuclear Strategy: The Case for a Theory of Victory,” but

the pages of International Security, or my dense prose,

probably were too forbidding to attract nonacademics.8

While I was trying to inject a little strategic reasoning into

debate over what passed for nuclear strategy, others made

like complaint about extra-nuclear matters also. For

example, in a characteristically robust essay of 1982 vintage

entitled “On the Meaning of Victory,” Edward N. Luttwak

recorded his view that:

The West has become comfortably habituated to defeat.

Victory is viewed with great suspicion, if not outright hostility.

After all, if the right-thinking are to achieve their great aim of

abolishing war they must first persuade us that victory is

futile or, better still, actually harmful.9

Through the middle years of the 1980s, and in good part

to help offset the belligerent facade of earlier talk of the

United States “prevailing” in a nuclear war,10 Secretary of

Defense Casper Weinberger repeated the sensible sounding

mantra that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never

be fought.”11 He had earlier aired the following thought,

which, despite its honesty and common-sense logic, had not

played too well politically: “You show me a Secretary of

Defense who’s planning not to prevail, and I’ll show you a

Secretary of Defense who ought to be impeached.”12

Luttwak’s 1982 judgment that “[v]ictory is viewed with

great suspicion, if not outright hostility,” was to be

vindicated on the grand scale a decade later, when most

Western scholars of the subject insisted that although the

3
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) lost the Cold

War, the United States had not won it.13 So far out of

strategic fashion had victory become, that the decade

1991-2001 should have caused some traumatic shock

among professional pessimists. With the exception of the

Somalia debacle of 1993-94, the United States enjoyed a

decade of all but unalloyed strategic success. From the Gulf

War in 1991, through Bosnia in 1995, to Kosovo in 1999,

concluding (after a fashion) with Afghanistan in 2001-02,

the United States achieved fair facsimiles of victory.14 Given

the absence of any such facsimile, fair or otherwise, from

1945 to 1991, this was a notable reversal of strategic

fortune. Had the U.S. military machine improved

dramatically, or had its political masters at last been able to

select cooperatively inept foes? Wherever the truth may lie,

and I suspect it reposes in a combination of military

professional excellence, technological superiority, and

enemy incompetence, victory became a habit, indeed was

the expectation, over the past decade—at least until now.

Hubris Invites Nemesis.

15 The decade that opened with

victory over the USSR, and with a campaign in the Gulf

memorialized immodestly and contentiously for the U.S.

Army by Major General Robert Scales in a book titled

Certain Victory, and by Norman Friedman for the U.S. Navy

in Desert Victory, closed with what appeared to be another

brilliant success, this time in Central Asia.16 For the fourth

time in 10 years, American airpower delivered military

success, most recently (2001-02) in a style of joint warfare

that was as novel as it was appealing to a country still

nervous of committing large forces on the ground in distant

climes. Both America’s friends and foes have noticed a

certain military triumphalism about U.S. policy. The

George W. Bush administration, in particular, is the

beneficiary and the victim of recent military success. It is

the beneficiary of a recently acquired (and well-merited)

reputation for military effectiveness, as befits the

contemporary hegemon. As with Rome in its early imperial

centuries, America today is unchallengeable in regular

4
warfare. Also as with Rome, however, a mixture of unusual

incompetence, bad luck, and a smart enemy can produce the

occasional imperial disaster (happily, Mogadishu was only a

minor embarrassment compared with Publius Quintilius

Varus’s loss of three legions in the Teutoberger Wald in 9

AD). Those whom the Gods would destroy, they first make

overweeningly proud. The so-miscalled “war against

terrorism”17 (apart from being a linguistic atrocity) has been

launched by an understandably vengeful American

hegemon that today is the victim both of its recent military

successes and of its own growing conviction that in practice

the age-old lore of strategy can be short-circuited by high

technology.

Osama bin Laden may or may not prove to be nemesis for

American strategic hubris, but he and the elements he

represents are likely to show up some contemporary leading

American attitudes for what they are, as examples of what

historians have called “victory disease.”18 Germany in

1940-41 and Japan in 1942 both fell victim to the illusion of

their own invincibility, an illusion fed by the misreading of

the causes of their early successes. A new American way of

war was demonstrated in Afghanistan, one which married

long-range airpower, space systems, special operations

forces (SOF), and local allies. But success in Afghanistan

may tell us more about the hapless Taleban and its

al-Qaeda co-belligerents, than it does about a plausible high

road to victory in future conflicts. If, as I beg leave to doubt,

the misnamed war against terrorism is World War III, as

Lawrence Freedman speculates,19 the decade of victory

from Kuwait City to Kabul is likely to come to a crashing

halt. It is perhaps ironic, if not actually unfair, that a

hegemonic United States, preeminent in the most advanced

ways of regular warfare, should twice be thwarted

strategically; first after 1945 by its own nuclear discovery,20

and now today by exceptionally asymmetrical enemies. The

long nuclear stand-off challenged traditional

understanding of victory, as goal and as descriptor. The new

stand-off between the asymmetrical strategic cultures of

5
hegemonic superpower and transnational terrorism

similarly throws into question both the meaning of victory

and the sense in its pursuit as high policy, grand strategy,

and operational art.

I have chosen not to trouble these opening paragraphs

with scholarly quibbles about the definition of terms. Such

casualness cannot be indulged any longer, however,

because we will be unable to proceed very far down the road

to decisive victory unless we are clear enough in our own

minds as to just what conditions are and are not, consistent

with that destination.

The Big Ideas.

In his book, The Age of Battles, Russell F. Weigley argues

the case against war as an instrument of decision. Quoting

Walter Millis, Weigley writes: “If ‘its power of decision’ was

the ‘one virtue’ that war had ever had, then war never had

any virtue.”21 Referring to the strategic history of 1631 to

1815, “the age of battles,” from Breitenfeld to Waterloo,

Weigley offers an uncompromising condemnation. “If wars

remained incapable of producing decisions at costs

proportionate to their objects even then, consequently the

whole history of war must be regarded as a history of almost

unbroken futility. So it has been.” 22 Or has it? I will argue

that Weigley is fundamentally wrong. There may well be

wars that the belligerents, perhaps all the belligerents,

wished they had never entered, but that is another matter

entirely. The issue at this juncture in our analysis pertains

strictly to the alleged futility of war.

Of course, if war is judged futile if it fails to produce some

ideal, enduring, and preferably intended, outcome, then the

skeptic has a point. Such an extreme and unrealistic test of

war’s merit, however, plainly cannot be a test with utility to

reasonable people. Historically well-educated persons,

certainly those raised in some variant of the “realist” school

of statecraft, know that we cannot wage war to end all war,

or to establish a permanent universal empire and

6
imperium.23 Even modest aspirations for a “Thousand-Year

Reich” fell 988 years short of the declared ambition. War is a

social institution, employed and misemployed by flawed

people for a host of reasons, praiseworthy and otherwise.

Any rapid foray into the morass of scholarship on the subject

of the origins or causes of war or wars impresses with the

near unmanageable richness of variety in the subject.24 War

is certainly the most extreme among Man’s behaviors, but

its history does not suggest that it is beyond the pale of

reason, or useful achievement, in high policy. We will argue

that Weigley, for all his high reputation as a military

historian, was monumentally in error—for then, for today,

and for the future—when he took issue with Clausewitz in

the following way:

War in the age of battles was not an effective extension of

policy by other means. With partial exceptions encompassing

those powers that like Great Britain could sometimes remain

on war’s periphery and even fight it by proxy, war was not the

extension of policy but the bankruptcy of policy.25

Famously, Clausewitz wrote that “war is simply a

continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of

other means.”26 Weigley is right in pointing to the frequency

with which the prosecution of war disappoints belligerents,

though that is scarcely a dazzling insight. Not infrequently,

battlefield achievement is squandered by incompetence in

peacemaking. That, however, cannot be a charge leveled at

war itself. The nonsense of Weigley’s argument is readily

demonstrated with reference to the strategic history of the

past 100 years. In support of my contention that war is a

powerful and effective instrument of decision, albeit not

always the decision that we prefer, consider this short list of

examples:

• World War I (the numeral was employed,

pessimistically, as early as 1920) decided that

Wilhelmine Germany would not secure European

hegemony. Germany did not go to war in pursuit of

such a dominant position, but that would have been

7
the consequence had the Central Powers been

victorious. The conflict also decided definitively the

fate of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman

empires.

• World War II decided that the Nazi adventure in

racial hegemony would come to an abrupt and

well-merited conclusion after only 12 years.

• The Korean War, 1950-53, decided that forcible

unification of the peninsula was not attainable at

bearable cost to either side. It would not be correct to

claim that 3 years of war—actually 1 year of quite

intensive combat followed by 2 years of ‘negotiating’

and fighting—simply confirmed the status quo ante.

Prior to June 1950, both North and South, and some

among their backers abroad, could aspire not

unreasonably to redraw the local geopolitical map

along more favored lines.

• The American war in Vietnam, 1965-73, decided that

South Vietnam would not sustain itself as an

independent polity. Although the military decision

eventually was lost by America’s dependent ally, the

protracted U.S. involvement had the effect of deciding

that communist victory would be delayed by 10 years.

That decision for delay, though ultimately unavailing

for South Vietnam, may well have played a vitally

positive role in the stability and development of South

East Asia more broadly. The history of that region

subsequent to 1975 suggests that, at least for once in

its experience, the United States may have lost the

war, but won the peace.

• The Cold War, the virtual World War III, decided that

the great communist experiment would self-destruct,

admittedly with no little assistance from American

statecraft. The outcome of this conflict also decided,

8
by geopolitical elimination, that the United States

would enjoy globally hegemonic status for a while.

• The war over Kosovo in 1999 decided whose writ

would run in that Yugoslavian province, and in its

consequences, it decided also that Slobodan Milosevic

and his appalling family would cease to reign and rule

in Belgrade.

• The war against the Taleban and al-Qaeda in

Afghanistan in 2001 decided that that country

(speaking loosely) would have a change in central

government and probably a return to traditional

warlordism, Afghan-style. More to the point, the

U.S.-led and enabled military effort decided that

Afghanistan is unlikely to provide a safe haven for

transnational terrorists for some time to come.

I submit that these seven examples of recent wars

demonstrating a significant power of decision are not

exceptions that prove a rule to the contrary, affirming war’s

alleged futility. Naturally, war is apt to be futile, or more

likely worse, for the losing side. But the thesis that war

either has lost its presumed erstwhile power of decision or,

following Weigley, never had such power, is thus easily

shown to be absurd. We would not sound the trumpet so

loudly on this point, were it not so central to the Big Ideas

that must organize this analysis. After all, it is my

contention: (a) that wars can be won or lost (admittedly on a

sliding scale of completeness, perhaps “decisiveness”); and

(b) that wars’ outcomes typically have a significant power of

decision, if not always the decisions intended, even by the

victor. As a corollary to those points, I must insist that war

remains not merely useful, but quite literally essential as a

tool of statecraft for which there are no close substitutes.

Furthermore, rejecting out of hand the proposition that war

is futile because it lacks the power of decision, I must insist

also that it matters greatly who wins and who loses; in other

words, which decisions will a particular war’s outcome

facilitate and which inhibit.

9
The time is perhaps long overdue for this monograph to

deal directly with the key concepts, or Big Ideas, misuse of

which fuels confusion and even friction in the policy

process.27 Our North Star is the composite idea(s) of decisive

victory. Thus far, we have chosen to treat this very Big Idea

in relatively low key, requiring of it only that it recognizes

both the likelihood of wars having winners and losers, and

the strong probability that the outcomes of wars will, in

strategic and political effect, achieve noteworthy decisions.

So much should not really be in contention among

reasonable people. However, there will always be a rump of

idealists who emotionally resist the idea that war is an

instrument of policy.

The Big Idea of decisive victory can be disaggregated as

above, where it is interpreted in a closely Clausewitzian

vein as referring to the ability of success and failure in war

to enable issues to be decided (e.g., who runs Kosovo,

Europe, or the world!). That approach to the concept should

not be unduly controversial. More challenging, perhaps, is a

strict focus on the adjectival modifier. What do we think we

know, not about the ability of victory to facilitate important

(say, geopolitical, or ideological) decisions, but rather about

the more or less decisive quality of victory? Braving the

risks of damage by some critic wielding Occam’s razor, we

can argue, following Clausewitz in his belated recognition of

real war, that at least three related concepts require explicit

recognition. These are not fine academic distinctions, but

rather real-world conditions apt to be encountered, indeed

enforced, by American superpower. The three concepts are

decisive victory, which is our organizing Big Idea, strategic

success, and strategic advantage. They comprise a simple

three-level view of relative military achievement. By way of

clarification, Scales could rightly puff the U.S. Army’s

achievement in Desert Storm with his tale of Certain

Victory, but few people 10 years on from that celebration of

American military prowess would be completely

comfortable with a claim for decisive victory. Unless, of

course, one is fairly relaxed about just what it was that was

10
decided. Undoubtedly, a decisive victory was secured in

1991 in terms of the explicit war aims of the Coalition.

Victory decided that Kuwaiti oil, let alone Saudi oil, would

not enrich Iraq. Also, the war and its consequences decided

that the Iraqi path to achievement of deliverable weapons of

mass destruction would be extraordinarily long, costly, and

painful. Contrary to U.S. hopes and expectations, though,

what the war did not decide was a political future for Iraq

innocent of Saddam Hussein and led by people committed to

a view of regional order that would be judged constructive in

Washington.

We can identify several possible meanings to the concept

of decisive victory. It might be employed with operational,

strategic, or political meaning.

At the operational level, decisive victory should refer to a

victory which decides the outcome to a campaign, though

not necessarily to the war as a whole. A decisive victory in

one theater might be offset by a decisive defeat in another.

In contrast, a strategically decisive victory should be one

that decides who wins the war militarily. Such a victory or

defeat need not be effected by a single climactic clash of

arms, but may rather be the outcome of an attritional

struggle. Some historians have commented that there were

no decisive battles in the two world wars, of necessity both

were conducted as long wearing-out processes.28 That view

probably is an exaggeration, though it does point correctly

to the great resilience and depth of mobilizable assets of

modern societies. It is tempting to identify the German

defeats on the Marne in 1914, in the Battle of Britain in

1940, in front of Moscow in 1941, and at Stalingrad in 1942,

at least as candidates for “decisive” status. Each of the

defeats just cited arguably had some far reaching power of

decision over the subsequent course of military events.

Politically understood, a decisive victory should be one that

enables achievement of a favorable postwar settlement. The

quotation from Clausewitz that heads this monograph

makes the point exactly. “The political object” should

“determine both the military objective to be reached and the

11
amount of effort required.” Since soldiers do not make

policy, whether or not a military victory is decisive in this

political sense is above their pay grade. However, it is the

responsibility of the soldier to advise policymakers as to

what military power can and cannot accomplish. Also, it is

important that war should not be conducted in such a

manner as to subvert the prospects for lasting peace.29

Victory and defeat register on a sliding scale of

possibilities. But a simple axis would miss much of the

relevant action. Note Michael Howard’s plausible opinion

that “a war, fought for whatever reason, that does not aim at

a solution which takes into account the fears, the interests

and, not least, the honour of the defeated peoples is unlikely

to decide anything for very long.”30 Decisive victory

probably is sought because we intend to shape the postwar

environment for a tolerably good fit with our idea of an

international order that provides a lasting condition of

peace with security. Though, we must admit, decisive

victory also may be sought for the dominant, though not

sole, reason of national honor, as in the U.S. case after

September 11, 2001.

Although the concept of decisive victory in principle is

distinguishable from strategic success or strategic

advantage, in practice either of the two more modest

achievements can be positively decisive. We may not, indeed

generally will not, need to “render the enemy powerless,” in

order “to impose our will on the enemy.”31 After all, and

notwithstanding its declamatory appeal, a decisive victory

strictly refers to favorable military achievement which

forwards achievement of the war’s “political object.”

Strategic success or strategic advantage, accomplishments

that fall notably short of the forcible disarmament of the

enemy, may well qualify for the label of decisive victory.

Most belligerents seek an end to hostilities well before the

point where their power to resist is totally dismantled.32 The

idea of decisive victory, therefore, should not be equated

necessarily with the military obliteration of the enemy. All

that it requires is a sufficiency of military success to enable

12
achievement of whatever it is that policy identifies as the

war’s political object.

Military Decision for Political Decision.

Given that most wars are not waged for unlimited goals,

whether or not military victory proves politically decisive

will be an issue for the (somewhat) defeated party to resolve.

North Vietnam and its southern proxies were defeated

militarily in 1968 and again in 1972, but in neither case did

Hanoi choose to regard the defeat as decisive.33 In 1940-41,

Germany won a succession of military victories that

appeared to many people at the time, and not least to the

Germans themselves, to be strategically, rather than

merely operationally, decisive. North Vietnam in 1968 and

1972, Britain in 1940 (in continental warfare), and the

USSR in 1941, all declined to define military failure as

political defeat. British and Soviet geography, and U.S.

policy guidance for rules of engagement, allowed the losing

side to rally, recover, and return to fight again. These

historical examples illustrate a structural problem for the

strategist.

Strategy is, or should be, a purpose-built bridge linking

military power to political goals.34 If the political aim in war

is a total one—the enemy’s overthrow—then it has to be

matched with a military effort intended to achieve the

complete defeat of the foe. We may argue about the

respective merits of some apparently contrasting styles in

warfare, alternative modes designed to succeed by

maneuver, by attrition, or by paralysis. But, we will be in

the relatively straightforward realm of military science. We

will not be attempting to coerce a reluctant and culturally

alien enemy, rather we will be applying such military

means as should prove necessary to remove his power of

resistance. As I have argued elsewhere, an important

reason why strategy is difficult to do well is its very nature

as a bridge between military power and policy.35

13
Defense officials have to pretend that they know “how

much is enough,” so that they can justify the precise

numbers proposed in budget requests. Except for the

leading luminaries of the McNamara years in the Pentagon,

however, American strategic thinkers have rarely been

confused over the fact that estimates of “sufficiency” owe

more to art than they do to science.36 Even the carefully

calculated drawdown curves of the endless vulnerability

analyses that accompanied the competition in strategic

arms were exercises in a spurious precision. Those U.S. Cold

War strategic calculations were as fundamentally flawed as

was Graf von Schlieffen’s great final memorandum of

December 1905, which neglected logistics, numbers, the

French railroads, and Russian recovery from its

contemporary low ebb. Modern scholarship has revealed

that the so-called “Schlieffen Plan” was in fact nothing more

than a speculative think piece, a Denkschrift.

37

It is a most inconvenient fact that “[W]ar is nothing but a

duel on a larger scale.” Clausewitz explains that:

If you want to overcome your enemy you must match your effort

against his power of resistance, which can be expressed as the

product of two inseparable factors, viz. The total means at his

disposal and the strength of his will. The extent of the means at

his disposal is a matter—though not exclusively—of figures,

and should be measurable. But the strength of his will is much

less easy to determine and can only be gauged approximately by

the strength of the motive animating it.38

The meaning, perhaps meanings, ascribed to decisive

victory assume huge significance in the light of Clausewitz’s

words. By way of an elementary two dimensional cut at the

issue: the quest for decisive victory may focus either on the

apparent completeness of the military success—meaning

that a victory is militarily decisive—or on the quality and

quantity of political decision that that military victory

enables. Although the former must underpin the latter, a

focus on victory as contrasted with the political fruits of

victory desired by policy translates all too readily into the

14
situation where war obeys the dictates of its own nature.

“That while the purpose of war is to serve a political end, the

nature of war is to serve itself.”39 Military victory becomes

an end in itself, and policy is shaped to assist the war effort,

rather than vice versa.

Because strategy is a highly imprecise art, albeit one

subject to some material discipline (e.g., with reference to

logistics), calculation of what is required to deliver victory is

never going to be better than guesswork. In principle, at

least, a proximate goal of military overthrow does usefully

simplify matters, in that the overriding problems should be

fairly strictly military in character. If, however, policy

specifies restricted political goals, which logically should

require the application only of limited military power, the

full challenge to strategy is easily comprehended. Defined

as the use that is made of force and the threat of force for the

ends of policy, strategy is not always a bridge in good repair.

Strategy is neither the use of force nor the ends of policy, but

somehow, mysteriously, it is the employment of the former

to satisfy the latter. The more modest the policy goals, and

hence the more measured the military action, presumably

the greater the policy discretion an enemy enjoys.

For a contrary, counterfactual example, in 1964-65 the

United States might have decided that its modest objective,

to preserve a noncommunist South Vietnam, could be

secured only if North Vietnam was rendered physically

incapable of waging, or supporting, war in the South.

Rather than engage in a battle of wills, the United States

would have sought to deny Hanoi the ability to fight in the

South, regardless of the strength of its political will.

Contemporary American limited war theory, drafted by

civilian theorists and not by soldiers, was not friendly to the

proposition that sledge hammers made good nut crackers.40

The consequence was a 10-year conflict wherein the United

States indulged in what Thomas C. Schelling called at the

time “the diplomacy of violence.”41 The war could be lost, but

not won, in South Vietnam alone. For a range of reasons,

persuasive and otherwise, the United States elected to fight

15
a limited war in a distinctly limited way.42 The Gods of War

are not thus to be mocked. The outcome was determined by

the test of political wills that the United States had

promoted to pole position by its determination to wage only

a limited war in the South and over the North.

To achieve a decisive military victory that would have

taken North Vietnam out of the war (for a long while to

come, at least), could only have been a most challenging and

perilous, though feasible, undertaking. But the quest for

decisive victory along the strategic road actually taken

stood very little chance of succeeding. The reason, of course,

was that too much policy discretion was allowed to an

enemy whose political motivation was of the highest order,

and whose resources for war were not sufficiently damaged.

The American theory and practice of limited conventional

war proved unduly eloquent in appreciation of the merit in

limitations on the use of force, and inadequately

appreciative of what Clausewitz termed the “grammar” of

war.43 Rephrased, there are times when the prudent path to

relatively modest policy goals should be taken by what

appear to be disproportionately muscular military efforts. A

defense community whose best and brightest theorists were

civilian academics was understandably slow in grasping

that point. The “principles of war,” though much maligned

by defense intellectuals in the 1950s and 1960s,44 were

neglected in the U.S. conduct of war in Vietnam, with most

unhappy consequences.

There is not much about war that is literally, as opposed

to merely rhetorically, calculable. Logistical problems are,

indeed have to be, calculable, though there was a

Napoleonic and later German approach to the challenge of

supply and movement which transcended boldness and

ventured far into irresponsibility.45 Even the sums of the

logisticians, however, are subject to practical refutation by

the action of “friction” of many kinds—for example, bad

weather, mechanical breakdown, unexpectedly unfriendly

terrain, including insect life and disease 4 6—and

particularly to harassing efforts by the enemy. It is

16
surprising how many otherwise impressive examples of

military planning betray a pervasive failure to recognize

that war is, alas, a duel.

The strategist must cope with an uncertain exchange

rate between military effort and political effect. If the

overthrow of the enemy is not the policy goal, the strength

and durability under pressure of his political will must be a

crucial determinant of whether or not a decisive victory is

achievable at tolerable cost. We may be denied practicable

attainment of decisive victory if the enemy chooses not to be

coerced into acquiescence by the amount and kinds of

military pressure that we allow ourselves to apply.47 This

was the U.S. problem in Vietnam. The logic of decisive

victory in limited war is generically identical to the logic of

success in deterrence. In both cases, the enemy has to

choose to cooperate, albeit under duress, if we are to claim

some variant of decisive success. He can choose to fight on,

calculating that the political decision we seek will be judged

by us not to be worth the human, economic, and political

costs of protracted, and possibly more intense, combat.

By way of a rather extreme historical illustration of the

argument, in 1941 Imperial Japan chose to wage a

necessarily limited war against the United States. The

Japanese adventure rested on the calculation, hopeful

guess perhaps, that its immediate military victories would

translate into a political decision by a Washington focused

on Germany in Europe to acquiesce in Japan’s conquests.

This hideous miscalculation had its roots in a misreading of

American culture, and an underestimation of American

mobilization potential. To compound their sins against the

lore of strategy, the Japanese succumbed prematurely to a

bad case of “victory fever.”48 The lore of strategy includes

injunctions about relating means to ends and the necessity

to exercise choice in resource allocation between competing

operational possibilities. Imperial Japan was not

fundamentally misinformed about U.S. military potential,

though the scale and rate of realization of that potential

were a surprise to the whole world. Rather, its cardinal

17
error was cultural and political. Tokyo failed to appreciate

that the attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor

would be a full frontal assault upon American honor. That

was the kind of action that could not readily be tidied up

politically by means of some compromise agreement, let

alone by an injured America acquiescing in Japanese

aggression. This admittedly extreme example nonetheless

demonstrates with great clarity how difficult it can be to

cash tactical and operational military success in the coin of

lasting political advantage. Al-Qaeda and its friends and

allies inadvertently may have made the same

miscalculation in 2001 as did Japan in 1941. In both cases,

the political consequences of military action probably were

not those anticipated by the aggressor.

Before we turn to consider how decisive victory is more,

and less, likely to be achieved, three broad propositions need

stating.

First, decisive victory, and indecisive victory even more

so, is hard to translate into desired political effect.

Clausewitz rightly insists that “at the highest level the art

of war turns into policy—but a policy conducted by fighting

battles rather than by sending diplomatic notes.”49 He does

not dwell, however, on the difficulties that beset the

strategist on the bridge between military power and policy.

The concept of strategic effect usefully conflates the

consequences of the threat and use of force of all kinds, so

that we have a common currency for the value of all forms of

military power.50 What we do not have, to repeat the point,

is an agreed exchange rate between apparent military

success and political reward. “War” comes in many shapes

and forms, has many different contexts, and is subject to

diverse cultural influences. As the writings of Victor Davis

Hanson explain, culturally asymmetrical belligerents are

apt to disagree on the definition, feasibility, and

consequences of so-called decisive victory.51 British

historian Jeremy Black registers the same argument when

he claims that “war and success in war are cultural

constructs.”52

18
Second, decisive victory is probably best viewed as a

range of possibilities, rather than as a stark alternative to

the failure to achieve such a success. The enemy can be

understood to have continuing powers of resistance on a

sliding scale. Decisive victories come in many guises and

sometimes mislead the winner. Cannae was the tactically

decisive victory straight from the textbook, but its

operational, strategic, and political consequences were

trivial.53 Roman civic militarism produced fresh legions.

Hannibal could win battles; indeed, for a long period, he and

his veteran mercenaries and his barbarian allies tactically

were invincible, but he lacked a convincing theory of victory

in war as a whole. Moving very fast forward, Jutland in May

1916 was a material, though not tactical or operational,

victory for Germany’s High Seas Fleet. It was a strategically

decisive victory for the Royal Navy, however, because its

very occurrence and its course demonstrated to the German

Government that its fleet could not challenge Britain in the

North Sea for the right to use the seas. Jutland was widely

interpreted in Britain at the time as a significant defeat. In

May-June 1940, the Wehrmacht won what many

contemporary commentators regarded as a decisive victory

over France and Britain. The victory decided that France, if

not all of its empire, was definitively hors de combat. The

most important decisive effect of the victory, however, was

its influence on German self-evaluation in general, and the

Fuhrer’s self-confidence as warlord in particular. What the

victory decided was that Germany would judge itself

militarily unbeatable in continental warfare. The planning

for Operation BARBAROSSA, and then the (mis)conduct of

that campaign from June to December 1941, showed the

effect of the “decisive” victory of May-June 1940.54

Third, even if we affirm that decisive victory is our

doctrine and military intention, in practice, a number of

degrees of decisiveness are likely to prove acceptable. That

may not be the case if we are waging a total war keyed to the

goal of enforced régime change, though even then a change

in regime leadership effected by internal convulsion might

19
tempt us to moderate our strategic goals. American analysts

and officials must recognize that one size does not fit all

when it comes to conceptualizing about “war,” or to

estimating the likely military effectiveness of particular

capabilities. Again to quote Jeremy Black, war has

“multiple contexts.”55 A simple style in warfare which

worked well against the Taleban, though less well against

al-Qaeda in the context of Afghan politics, is not necessarily

reliably applicable in other contexts. War against Saddam

Hussein’s Iraq, against the Taleban in Afghanistan, and

now against terrorism, world-wide, are all notably

distinctive enterprises. If regime change in Baghdad and

Kabul counts as decisive victory—to ignore the more

troubling political difficulties that must follow such

successes—what would constitute decisive victory over, say,

al-Qaeda, let alone “terrorism” in general? Decisive victory

is possible against terrorists, but it is not the kind of victory

that can be practiced in the California desert. Doctrine and

metrics of success have to be tailored to the character of

warfare at issue.

Achieving Decisive Victory.

We reject as arrant nonsense the view expressed by the

British socialist and pacifist, George Lansbury, when on

September 3, 1939, he claimed that “in the end force has not

settled, and cannot and will not settle anything.”56 It is not

entirely true to argue, for example, that a bad idea can only

be defeated by a better idea. There are times, as from 1939 to

1945, when a particularly bad idea—Hitler’s vision of a

racially pure Thousand Year Reich—needs to be shot. Nazi

ideology could not be tamed by any peaceful process of

political or cultural engagement.57 If occasionally force

must be used, it is important to win and, to go back a step, it

is necessary to know how to win. War may be the realm of

chance, as Clausewitz advises,58 but victory or defeat are

not recorded as random outcomes. There is an approach to

war that maximizes the prospect of the achievement of

decisive victory (whatever outcome one decides is

20
sufficiently decisive and adequately victorious). That

approach is best expressed in just five propositions, which

can be phrased both negatively as caveats, or positively as

advice for action.

1. Better armies tend to win. Contrary to Clausewitz’s

metaphor, war is not like a game of cards.59 One’s military

“hand” is not dealt at random. Friction and surprise by

enemy moves certainly can render campaign plans obsolete

before the computer’s printer has cooled, but armies who

understand the nature of war expect to have to adapt in

realtime to circumstances that could not have been forecast

with precision long in advance. There are objectively

superior and inferior armies. Armies that recruit with high

standards, train hard and realistically, keep tight

discipline, equip intelligently, enjoy some measure of luck,

and study their variety of opponents each on its own terms,

will tend to win. Because surprise is always possible, even

probable, an important quality in a better army is its ability

to find a way to win, its capability to adjust to unexpected

events when plans are rendered obsolete by the

independent will of the foe. As General Dwight D.

Eisenhower once observed, the principal value of military

planning is not to produce ahead of time the perfect plan,

but rather to train planners who can adjust and adapt to

changing circumstances as they emerge.

The achievement of decisive victory at bearable cost can

rarely be guaranteed, but we can raise and maintain an

army that is objectively superior in relevant quality and

quantity. A good army is not one developed for its

specialized excellence in a particular scenario, unless, that

is, a country’s defense planners are sufficiently fortunate as

to have a truly dominant threat in their present and

confidently anticipated future. Because war is not solitaire,

even an excellent army may fail to deliver victory. Policy

simply may ask too much of its military instrument, or it

may hamstring military operations with damaging political

constraints. The German Army in both world wars set the

contemporary standard for tactical and operational

21
excellence. But in war after war, German policy asked its

soldiers to accomplish the impossible. To try to win against

a coalition greatly superior in resources, in circumstances

where dazzling operational maneuver is infeasible, means

condemnation to a lengthy struggle. When war is

protracted, military skills tend to equalize among

belligerents, and brute numbers count for more and more as

the smaller side is less and less able to absorb a high rate of

casualties. In both world wars, the Germans trained their

enemies. By the Summer and Fall of 1918, the British Army

was tactically at least as competent as the by then much

weakened Germans, especially with respect to the scientific

use of artillery;60 while by 1944-45 the Soviet Army had

taken operational art to a level not attained even by the

Wehrmacht at its peak.61

To summarize this discussion, we are likely to achieve

decisive victories if our army meets universally valid

standards of military excellence (e.g., if discipline is tight,

training is tough, morale is high, equipment is reliable and

modern, logistics are well-prepared, and so forth). However,

decisive victory may well elude us, notwithstanding our

apparent military excellence, if the army is too small, if it is

assigned missions for which it is ill-fitted, or if politicians

insist upon shaping military operations according to

extra-military criteria (e.g., do not provoke Chinese

intervention in Vietnam) in defiance of the “grammar” of

war. It might be needless to add that even a first-rate

military instrument will fail to bring home the bacon if it is

mishandled by poor generalship, either at the level of

operations or tactically in battle. The French army at

Ligny–Quatre Bras–Waterloo in June 1815 was by no

means Napoleon’s finest. It was, however, by quite a margin

the best army then in the field—superior to Blucher’s

Prussians and to Wellington’s mixed cohorts of British,

Dutch, Belgian, and German soldiers. Deficiencies in the

French performance of command, operationally and

tactically, delivered Wellington and Blucher a genuinely

decisive military victory.62 To bring the story more

22
up-to-date, it could be argued that poor Anglo-American

generalship in the Summer of 1944 allowed too much of the

beaten German Army to escape both from Normandy and

then from France, to rally for the defense of the Reich.

Moving on 6 years, General MacArthur’s conduct of the

invasion of North Korea affronted most of the principles of

war, with dire consequences for troops of the United Nations

(U.N.) Command. With reference to the mid- and late 1960s,

although scapegoats abounded for the disappointing course

of the war in Vietnam, it is difficult to resist the judgment

that a fine American army was poorly directed in the field.

2. No magic formula for victory. War is so serious,

complex, and uncertain an undertaking that its

practitioners and interpreters are always on the alert for

some “key” to victory, some philosopher’s stone for military

art. Henri Jomini’s popularity with 19th-century soldiers is

entirely understandable. Instead of the somewhat opaque

Clausewitzian strictures about friction and chance, Jomini

offered a delightful certainty. “Correct theories, founded

upon right principles, sustained by actual events of wars,

and added to accurate military history, will form a true

school of instruction for generals.”63 At the heart of Jomini’s

system, at least of his reading of Napoleonic practice, was

what he called the “one great principle underlying all the

operations of war—a principle which must be followed in all

good combinations.”64 The principle was the injunction,

inter alia, to throw superior force at inferior force (at the

“decisive point” and at the decisive time), so that the enemy,

even if numerically superior overall, can be defeated in

detail, and to threaten his lines of communication. A

problem was that Napoleon Bonaparte, on a good day at

least, could be inventive. Sometimes he would attempt his

signature manoeuvre sur les derrières, and sometimes he

would not. The truth is that Napoleon did not have a

doctrine, a formula, for victory.

The quest for the key to certain victory can lead

strategists astray. Alfred von Schlieffen’s approach was

founded upon meticulous timetabling and confident

23
projections even of the operational end-game.65 That

particular German school of General Staff thinking was not

interested in political context, logistical problems, or the

need to improvise and adapt should the enemy not behave

as expected. In his brilliant essay on Jomini, John Shy noted

that modern American strategic analysis had located the

certainty it craved.66 In the spirit of Jomini’s “one great

principle,” American arms controllers, for example, had

found universal strategic truth in a formula for stability.

Every strategic weapon system could be analyzed according

to whether or not it contributed to, or detracted from,

stability. Though bereft of political, or indeed common,

sense, this stability theory was revealed truth to many in

the 1970s and 1980s.

Today, much of the enthusiasm for the information-led

revolution in military affairs (RMA), or military

transformation (as the newly preferred term of art), stems

from that same yearning for military certainty. The Gulf

War model of decisive action appeared to demonstrate how

total victory could be achieved reliably in the future. Events

in the succeeding decade have done little to shake faith in

the ideology of victory through technology. Somalia in

1993-94 might have prompted more soul searching than

seems to have occurred, but Bosnia in 1995, Kosovo in 1999,

and Afghanistan in 2001-02, have all been interpreted as

evidence confirming the soundness of the new American

RMA’d way of war. Strategic history tries to tell us that wars

come in a wide variety of forms and are waged in all manner

of terrain. Because, to repeat, all wars are duels, eventually

technological formulae (indeed, any formula) for decisive

victory will fail. The failure will be the result of tactical

ineffectiveness in specific circumstances (e.g., in an urban

setting), or operational and strategic negation by an enemy

who behaves as Edward Luttwak predicts in his

masterwork on strategy.67 The paradoxical logic of conflict

states that what works today will not work tomorrow,

because it worked today. In short, formulaic military

24
behavior can be deadly when the foe is intelligent and even

just moderately capable.

3. Technology is not a panacea. The attractive

proposition that the United States currently enjoys an

unassailable military technological lead which has sharply

reduced the value of allies, and which can deliver decisive

victory more or less to order, is fragile or wrong on all

counts.68 Technology is only one of strategy’s dimensions,

and it is by no means the most important. The Fulleresque

belief that relative technological prowess is the prime

determinant of strategic success has a substantial problem

with the historical record in all periods.69 It is difficult to

find clear examples of decisive victories in war achieved

because of a superiority in weaponry. We must hasten to

add the caveats that always are provided: either the

belligerents were technologically in touch with each other

(i.e., not assegais against maxim guns); or, even if they were

truly far apart in mastery of war’s machines, the materially

challenged party sought and found effective asymmetrical

offsets.

When a capability appears almost too good to be true,

especially when it pertains to an activity as complex,

uncertain, and risky as war, the odds are that, indeed, it is

too good to be true. If technology gives us an edge, then by all

means let us welcome and exploit it. But the American

military record from 1991 to the present should not be

misread as convincing evidence of the emergence of a new

way to the reliable achievement of decisive victory.

Bombardment, no matter how precise, is not synonymous

with war as a whole. The notion that the United States has

stumbled upon a technological formula for decisive victory

with its still largely unreconstructed military

establishment, should be met with a healthy skepticism.

The “Afghan model,” wherein special operations forces team

with (generally) long-range airpower and unmanned aerial

vehicles (UAVs) for the precise delivery of JDAMS, all in aid

of the taking of territory by local allies, may be hard to

replay elsewhere.

25
History provides by far the largest strike against the

belief that a transformed U.S. military, one that is the

global leader by a country mile in providing information-led

and well-networked RMA’d forces, has unlocked the secret

of decisive victory. Technology is only one among the many

dimensions of strategy and war. American optimists should

be sobered by the datum that weapons do not win wars, not

excluding superior weapons. Furthermore, even when new

technology is weaponized in appropriate quantity,

employed by intelligently tailored organizations, and is

directed by suitable doctrine, it is still no guarantor of

decisive victory. The reasons lie in the complexity of war, the

options probably open to the enemy, and that hardy

perennial, friction. There can always be a first time for an

important development, but it is difficult to identify a war,

let alone a succession of wars, in modern history wherein

exploitation of a technological lead plainly was chiefly

responsible for victory. Norman Schwarzkopf was

characteristically emphatic in his claim that the coalition

would have won the Gulf War even had the two sides

swapped equipment. Germany did not lose two world wars

because of technological lags. There is a sense in which the

USSR lost the Cold War because of its inability to compete

technologically,70 but the critical Soviet competitive

disadvantages lay in the realms of tired ideology and unduly

comfortable party-industrial bureaucrats.

What matters most is how weapons are used, and by

whom. The United States is riding for a most painful fall if it

proceeds into this new century confident that its military

hegemony is secured for decades to come by its current

military technological lead. The U.S. Army should recall the

limited, albeit still real, utility of its bright and shiny new

air mobility concept in Vietnam in the 1960s,71 while the

Soviet Army scarcely fared much better in Afghanistan in

the 1980s.72 The tools of war are important, but typically

they are not the drivers to victory. Alfred Thayer Mahan

provided a wise comment for the ages when he wrote:

26
Historically, good men with poor ships are better than poor

men with good ships; over and over again the French

Revolution taught this lesson, which our own age, with its rage

for the last new thing in material improvement, has largely

dropped out of memory.73

Technophiles should ponder also the culturalist thesis

advanced by Victor Davis Hanson, though they can take

some comfort from his argument.

It is one argument of this book that the Western way of war is

grounded not merely in technological supremacy but in an

entire array of political, social and cultural institutions that

are responsible for military advantages well beyond the

possession of sophisticated weapons.74

A defense community that rests its faith for future

success in a lasting technological lead will be apt to be

vulnerable on several counts. Specifically, technological

prowess will tend to equalize among polities over time,

especially when, as today, much of the frontier technology is

civilian in origin and can be acquired off the shelf;75

asymmetrical doctrines and practices of war may reduce the

value of high technology weaponry quite sharply; the

political and geographical contexts of conflicts may demand

manpower intensive operations rather than precise

firepower; a technological hubris could encourage an army

to lose its adaptability to different conditions; and, as

unsurprisingly has happened in Afghanistan,

bombardment can become an end in itself with the conduct

of war reduced to the application of firepower.

4. The complexity of strategy and war is the mother

of invention. Strategy and war have to be approached

holistically, all of their dimensions, or elements, are always

in play, though not always of equal importance. Nominally,

indeed plainly measurably, weaker armies than the

American can search for areas of strength to offset their

near certain deficiencies in technology.76 Americans should

be well-schooled by their own national history to be alert to

the power of smart substitution among war’s elements. How

27
and why did the colonists defeat the might of the British

Empire? Why did Confederate resistance last as long as it

did and come close to validating by battle the assertions of

seccession and independence?

There are problems with the concept of asymmetry in

strategic affairs; essentially it is “an empty box” bereft of

identifiable meaning.77 But the concept, for all its opacity

and even triviality, does usefully alert people to the

potential strategic rewards that can accrue to those who

dare to be different. For the time being, the armed forces of

the United States, rather like the Roman legions in their

heyday, have taken regular symmetrical ways in war out of

the active plans of potential enemies. Only seriously

psychologically disturbed, martyr-bound leaders are going

to tempt American military power with the inviting

prospect of “certain victory.” Because strategic effectiveness

is the product of behavior across all of strategy’s

dimensions, America’s enemies will strive to find and

exploit areas of relative strength for the levelling, or better,

of the playing field. In Southeast Asia, for example, consider

the appalling handicap under which MACV labored, given

the sanctuary status of North Vietnam itself, of Laos, and of

Cambodia. In the current war against terrorism, if that is

what it is, much of America’s striking power is going to be

hobbled and nobbled by strategy’s political dimension.

Many states that are not at all friendly to terrorists,

especially those who aim at them, are even less friendly to

the American practice of hegemonic guardianship of

international order.78

In their pursuit of decisive victory, the U.S. armed forces

should expect to be opposed not only by inept bad guys

picked by central casting to play the role of hapless victims

of American military excellence. In addition to the rag, tag,

and bobtail of fairly regular, and some irregular, forces who

presented themselves for defeat and who played a vitally

cooperative role in what now is known as “the Afghan

model” of future warfare, the United States is likely to have

28
to confront a genuinely smart enemy who understands the

full range of grand strategy.79

The complexity of strategy, the fact that strategic

effectiveness is the conflated consequence of behavior and

attributes on many dimensions, can work to America’s

advantage as well as disadvantage. Asymmetrical conflict is

a game that two can play.

All episodes of conflict are struggles between

belligerents who seek to substitute strength for weakness in

those dimensions where they are at a disadvantage. The

limited war literature of the 1950s and 1960s should have

been more eloquent than it generally was on the subject of

the competitive setting of the limits to military action. How

a war is fought, where it is allowed to be fought, with what

weapons, and so forth must go a long way to determine the

prospects for decisive victory. Some fraction of the combat

may be intended to test the emerging limits upon action in

quest of more favorable terms of engagement. The U.S.

Army needs to be alert to the threat to the prospect of victory

that lurks in the potential ability of an enemy to exploit

relative strengths on some of strategy’s dimensions in order

to offset its areas of technological weakness.80

5. Know your enemies. Respect for the enemy and his

way in warfare has not been strongly characteristic of the

American military experience. For example, Robert M.

Utley’s studies of the U.S. Army in the Indian Wars show a

military establishment that made few concessions to the

practical needs of the conduct of war against irregular

foes.81 In the 20th century, the U.S. Army entered both

world wars overconfident in its ability to teach Germans

and Japanese the errors of their ways. More recently,

initially at least, the enemy in Korea was not highly rated,

while in Vietnam the possibility that the North Vietnamese

Army and its southern proxies might prove a worthy foe was

not taken as seriously as it should have been.82 Somalia in

1993-94 is almost too obvious and painful an example to cite.

Probably the only historical example of the U.S. Army

29
showing an undue measure of respect for its enemy was in

the Eastern theater during the Civil War.

Really good armies are flexible and adaptable to a wide

variety of combat conditions. The British Army before

World War I was notably short on general doctrine beyond

that which could be gleaned from the Field Service

Regulations because, as a force with literally global duties,

it had to be able to move and fight in all kinds of terrain

against vastly different, generally irregular, enemies.83 The

Romans and the Byzantines faced the same problem.84 The

British Army had to be competitive in mountain warfare

with tribesmen on India’s North-West frontier, while also

capable of waging a mobile campaign (largely as mounted

infantry) against Boer commandos on the high veldt of

Southern Africa.85 For their part, the Roman legions of the

first and second centuries AD proved adept at waging

guerrilla warfare, a form of combat socially, logistically, and

culturally impracticable for their German enemies.86

Sun-tzu advises as follows:

Thus it is said that one who knows the enemy and knows himself

will not be endangered in a hundred engagements. One who

does not know the enemy but knows himself will sometimes be

victorious, sometimes meet with defeat. One who knows neither

the enemy nor himself will invariably be defeated in every

engagement.87

Just as tactics are easier to perform satisfactorily than is

strategy, so the material instruments of war—though, of

course, essential—have a way of deflecting attention from

the vital human element.88 Consider the challenge to a

policy of deterrence, for a leading example. Frequent

reference may be found in official, popular, and even

scholarly literature to “the deterrent.” Deterrence, which by

definition is a relational variable, is equated with the

military machines procured for its intended enforcement.

But it so happens that decisive victory for deterrence can be

achieved only with the admittedly coerced cooperation of

the targeted deterree. The path to decisive victory through

30
successful deterrence is likely to lead less through

bulking-up our arsenal and rather more through detailed

understanding of the intended deterree so that menaces are

precisely targeted at values vital to the enemy.

Deterrence will always be an uncertain and unreliable

behavior, which can fail for reasons quite beyond the control

of rational defense planners.89 Nonetheless, taking the

enemy seriously as a unique political and strategic cultural

entity must enhance the prospects of our achieving decisive

success. There is no small danger that a succession of easy

victories, such as the United States has achieved over the

past decade—with the exception of Somalia—will

encourage a misleading “technological triumphalism.”

Military establishments, being sensibly conservative and

prudent when offered novelty (“transformation” and the

like), can hardly help but seek and apply the lessons learned

in recent conflicts. The somewhat autistic tendency

understandable in the defense thinking of a superpower is

pregnant with peril for the future. The issue can be

simplified as the complex question, “did Iraq/Serbia/the

Taleban lose the war, or did we win it with our new model of

warfare?” It is, I believe, a fact that the United States could

not have lost the Gulf War, the war over Kosovo, or the war

in Afghanistan. The winning was not always elegant, and

the consequences of decisive success often left much to be

desired politically, but the prospects for victory were indeed

as certain as they could be for this realm of chance.

Any formula for military success invites potential

enemies to emulate, to evade, and to offset. Future foes more

competent than those encountered of recent years may not

perform the role of largely passive victims for the American

way in war on the “Afghan model.” Also, churlish though it

can seem to mention it, the victories recorded since 1991

were achieved despite serious errors of omission and

commission which might have proved costly against more

worthy opposition. The Gulf War was poorly conducted

operationally, with far too much of the regime’s Republican

Guard being permitted to escape. The air campaign against

31
Serbia in 1999 over Kosovo was a mixture of strategic

irrelevance and tactical failure. The success in Afghanistan

in 2001-02 should not be allowed to obscure the fact that the

joint and combined military operations have fallen woefully

short of reasonable expectations.90 Aside from the

elusiveness of Osama bin Laden, U.S. and allied forces

permitted far too many al-Qaeda fighters with heavy

equipment to escape from Kandahar. More damning still,

the protracted investment and assault upon the Tora Bora

and Shah-i-Kot cave complexes appears to have been

conducted with little regard to blocking escape routes over

the Pakistani frontier. Indeed, the Tora Bora case revealed

so great a tactical, perhaps operational, incompetence as to

raise the suspicion that the world of high policy did not want

a high body-count, dead or as prisoners of war.

My point is not the trivial and rather ungenerous one

that mistakes are made in war. Rather, the purpose of the

discussion is to remind Americans that for a decade they

have been flexing military muscles in exceptionally

permissive strategic contexts. Because outcomes

reasonably describable as decisively successful were

achieved in 1991, 1995, 1999, and 2001-02, courtesy of an

airpower-led “transforming” U.S. military, it does not follow

that future conflicts must follow the same pattern.

Conclusions.

As a military objective, decisive victory is not

controversial. Whether or not the decision sought needs to

be conclusive, if not necessarily quite of a Carthaginian

character (Carthago delenda est), is a matter initially for

policy to decide and then for political-military dialogue as

events unfold. The quest for decisive success in the 21st

century will more and more carry the risk of yielding only a

painful Pyrrhic victory, as some of America’s enemies

prudently equip themselves with weapons of mass

destruction. Desperate dictators, recognizing that they

stand helplessly on the brink of personal and régime

32
oblivion, may prove to be beyond deterrence or compellence,

should the United States give them the choice. The common

sense strategic logic of the U.S. commitment to homeland

missile defense, as well as to mobile theater missile defense,

is too self-evident to require further comment here.

This lengthy exploration of the meaning and

achievement of decisive victory yields four claims that merit

elevation as concluding thoughts. First, decisive victory is

both possible and important, though it is never guaranteed,

not even by military-technological excellence. The assertion

that war never solves anything, that it is inherently

indecisive, is simply wrong. All of history reveals the

decision power of the threat or use of force. In a moral sense

it may be preferable to talk rather than fight, but the West is

unduly inclined to talk when it should be fighting. Bosnia,

Kosovo, and al-Qaeda were all instances of enemies who

should have been addressed militarily long before they

actually were. America’s European allies are increasingly

nervous of what they discern as an assertive, unilateralist,

military triumphalist United States, disinclined either to

pursue serious dialogue with potential “rogues” or to live

with strategic irritants. Always provided the United States

does not truly succumb to its own high-tech variant of that

historically familiar malady, “victory disease,” it is to be

hoped that the anxieties of debellicized allies will not

disarm the superpower guardian of the international order.

Second, one size cannot fit all in the deterrence or

conduct of war. If the United States were to find in the

decades ahead that once again it faced a clearly dominant

threat from a great power,91 probably China or, less

plausibly, China and Russia, it might well find itself

needing to improvise in real-time. From the Gulf to

Afghanistan, via the Balkans, U.S. military power was

granted the initiative and generally time to correct for early

errors. Most styles in war lack universal applicability.

Blitzkrieg worked well enough in restricted terrain against

poor French and British armies that compounded their

problems in quantity with the commission of disastrous

33
operational moves.92 It worked much less well in Russian

terrain against an enemy who declined to acknowledge

decisive defeat.93 If the American way of war becomes

formulaic, albeit technologically impressive, it invites

smart enemies to attempt to wage the kind of conflict

wherein U.S. strengths would be at a heavy discount. Any

belief that U.S. military power, somewhat transformed by

the exploitation of information systems of all kinds, can

plan to fight almost without regard to enemy preferences

and abilities, should be hastily buried. Following the

Japanese experience (the 1904 and 1941 “model”), for

example, it is not likely that China would prove to be a

passive foe, content or obliged to fight only on American

terms.94

Third, decisive victory, though a meaningful concept, is

not a clear-cut alternative to defeat, or even to indecisive

victory. Both decision and victory register on scales that

allow for more and for less. If the ideal type of military

encounter which should yield a decisive outcome was the

brief but bloody clash of arms between the citizen hoplites of

the Greek city states,95 then the war upon which the United

States today says it is embarked is at the opposite end of the

spectrum of potential for decision. In words attributed to

Mao Tse-tung: “There is in guerrilla warfare no such thing

as a decisive battle.”96 Decisive victory needs to be

supplemented in American public discourse with the less

imperial notions of strategic advantage and strategic

success. It is distinctly American to believe that wars should

be unmistakably militarily winnable and to be intolerant of

apparently indecisive operations.97 Much as the U.S.

defense community had to come to terms with the unique

constraints imposed by the emergence in the 1950s of a

strategic context of mutual nuclear deterrence, so today it

needs to adjust to the frustrating realities of war against

transnational terrorist organizations. America’s NATO

allies, as well as Russia, China, and a host of other polities,

have more or less extensive experience of war against, and

living with, terrorists. For the United States, notwith34
standing the occasional outrage committed by the manic

Left and Right—or 30-odd years ago by African-American

extremists—the idea of living permanently, if uneasily,

with the insecurity of terrorist menace is novel. America’s

information-led RMA certainly has some utility in the war

on terror, particularly for distant surveillance and

targeting, but it is not going to deliver anything grander

than some strategic success.

Fourth, and finally, the fact of U.S. interest in the

concept of decisive victory is in itself politically and

culturally revealing. It is difficult to imagine this topic

arousing any interest whatsoever in any NATO member

other than the United States. The general irrelevance of

military power in NATO-European and EU policy

calculation, and the comfortable assumption of a coalition

context for all military issues, renders the concept of

decisive victory a throwback to less happy times for

Europeans. It is no exaggeration to say that despite the

character of NATO, which is still, just about, a collective

defense organization, America’s European friends and

allies inhabit a universe that poses no serious military

questions. It is true that Kosovo in 1999 was a NATO

undertaking, but that episode, and indeed the whole sorry

ex-Yugoslavian story of the 1990s, showed how far

NATO-Europe has travelled down the road leading to

military impotence.

There is a time and sometimes a place for insistence

upon decisive victory. Europeans, snakebitten by two world

wars “at home,” are less than intrigued by means and

methods to achieve such military success. When Americans

encounter honest but culturally alien European disinterest

in the capability to achieve decisive victory, they are

naturally inclined to suspect allied motives, while breathing

a sigh of relief that their preferred way in war really does not

require the complication of non-American assistance (local

allies are another matter). A problem for the quality of U.S.

policy and strategy is that as NATO allies merit less and

less military respect in Washington, so their views on global

35
security more and more are discounted. The United States

increasingly finds itself strictly in a league of its own,

wherein it listens to little but the echo of its own domestic

debate about the use of force. Dialogue among unequals is

always difficult, but in this case it is urgently needed as the

United States embarks upon the first war of the 21st

century, if not World War III.

ENDNOTES

1. Raymond Aron, “The Evolution of Modern Strategic Thought,” in

Alastair Buchan, ed., Problems of Modern Strategy, London: ISS, 1970,

p. 25.

2. “The Elusive Character of Victory,” The Economist, November 24,

2001, pp. 11-12; Conrad Black, “What Victory Means,” The National

Interest, No. 66, Winter 2001/02, pp. 155-64.

3. Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence, New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press, 1966, p. 31.

4. See Azar Gat, The Origins of Military Thought: From the

Enlightenment to Clausewitz, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, ch. 7, esp.

p. 199.

5. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Michael Howard and Peter Paret,

eds. and trans., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976, p. 75,

emphasis original.

6. Michael Quinlan, Thinking about Nuclear Weapons, London:

Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies, 1997, p. 19.

7. Colin S. Gray and Keith B. Payne, “Victory Is Possible,” Foreign

Policy, No. 39, Summer 1980, pp. 14-27. The title, picked by the editor of

the journal, would have been improved had the words “but improbable,”

been added.

8. Colin S. Gray, “Nuclear Strategy: The Case for a Theory of

Victory,” International Security, Vol. 4, No. 9., Summer 1979, pp. 54-87.

9. Edward N. Luttwak, On the Meaning of Victory: Essays on

Strategy, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986, p. 289.

10. The commitment to “prevail” in a nuclear war was written in the

new Defense Guidance, 1984-1988, document which was inevitably

36
leaked to The Washington Post. For a relevant quotation, see Lawrence

Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 2nd ed., New York: St.

Martin’s Press, 1989, p. 406.

11. Casper W. Weinberger, Annual Report to the Congress, Fiscal

Year 1986, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office,

February 4, 1985, p. 45.

12. Casper W. Weinberger inThe New York Times, August 9, 1982.

13. For example, Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet

Collapse, 1970-2000, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. A different

opinion animates Peter Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan

Administration’s Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the

Soviet Union, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994; and William E.

Odom, The Collapse of the Soviet Military, New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press, 1998. Odom notes that “a program of U.S. military

modernization based on new technologies confronted the Soviet military

with another challenge it could not hope to meet.” P. 87.

14. See Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down, London: Bantam Press,

1999, on Somalia; Robert C. Owen, ed., Deliberate Force: A Case Study in

Effective Air Campaigning, Maxwell AFB, AL: Air University Press,

January 2000, on Bosnia 1995; and Benjamin S. Lambeth, NATO’s Air

War for Kosovo: A Strategic and Operational Assessment, Santa Monica,

CA: RAND, 2001.

15. With thanks for the inspiration provided by Ian Kershaw: Hitler,

1889-1936: Hubris, London: Allen Lane, 1998; Hitler, 1936-1943:

Nemesis, London: Allen Lane, 2000.

16. Robert H. Scales, Jr., Certain Victory: The U.S. Army in the Gulf

War, Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Staff, 1993; Norman

Friedman, Desert Victory: The War for Kuwait, Annapolis, MD: Naval

Institute Press, 1991. The Air Force story was told in Richard P. Hallion,

Storm over Iraq: Air Power and the Gulf War, Washington, DC:

Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992; and, in ways not wholly beloved by

the USAF hierarchy, in its commissioned Gulf War Air Power Survey

(GWAPS) (5 vols). See Thomas A. Keaney and Eliot A. Cohen, Gulf War

Air Power Survey, Summary Report, Washington, DC: U.S. Government

Printing Office, 1993. The official Air Force reaction to the GWAPS

volumes was not notably dissimilar from the Royal Navy’s distancing

response to the volumes of the official history of Naval Operations in the

Great War written by Julian S. Corbett.

37
17. For an influential British dissenting voice, see Michael Howard,

“Mistake to Declare this is a ‘War,’” RUSI Journal, Vol. 146, No. 6,

December 2001, pp. 1-4.

18. Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett, writing about 1940,

have commented that “For the Germans, the victory over France

suggested that everything was possible for the Third Reich.” A War to be

Won: Fighting the Second World War, Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 2000, p. 89.

19. Lawrence Freedman, “The Third World War?” Survival, Vol. 43,

No. 4, Winter 2001, pp. 61-88.

20. Save with reference to politically meaningless and morally

abominable destructive potential, nuclear armaments almost certainly

rendered the two superpowers less powerful than they would have been

without the nuclear discovery. Today, nuclear arms are the weapons of

the weak, not the strong. The U.S. Government in 2002 is thoroughly

disinterested in its nuclear arsenal, save only for its uncertain residual

value to help deter the threat or use of weapons of mass destruction

against U.S. interests. Usable American military power is thoroughly

conventional. The nuclear emphasis in recent Russian military doctrine

attests to Moscow’s appreciation of the weakness of its conventional

forces.

21. Russell F. Weigley, The Age of Battles: The Quest for Decisive

Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo, Bloomington, IN: Indiana

University Press, 1991, p. xiii.

22. Ibid.

23. For recent presentations of the realist paradigm, see Colin S.

Gray, “Clausewitz Rules, OK? The Future is the Past—with GPS,” in

Michael Cox, Ken Booth, and Tim Dunne, eds., The Interregnum:

Controversies in World Politics, 1989-1999, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1999, pp. 161-182; and John J. Measheimer, The

Tragedy of Great Power Politics, New York: W.W. Norton, 2001.

24. By far the most intelligent discussion of “the origins of great

wars” is T. C. W. Blanning, The Origins of the French Revolutionary

Wars, London: Longman, 1986, ch. 1. Recent studies include Stephen

Van Evera, Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict, Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press, 1999; and Dale C. Copeland, The Origins of

Major War, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. It is surprising

how many scholars fail to grasp both the vital distinction between the

38
causes of war and the causes of wars, and the need for theory to explain

periods of peace as well as outbreaks of war.

25. Weigley, Age of Battles, p. 543.

26. Clausewitz, On War, p. 605.

27. See the innovative analysis in Stephen J. Cimbala, Clausewitz

and Chaos: Friction in War and Military Policy, Westport, CT: Praeger

Publishers, 2001.

28. See Michael Howard, “When are Wars Decisive?” Survival, Vol.

41, No. 1, Spring 1999, p. 129.

29. For a most insightful discussion of the relationship between the

conduct of war and the securing of a tolerable peace, see Brian Bond,The

Pursuit of Victory: From Napoleon to Saddam Hussein, Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1996.

30. Howard, “When are Wars Decisive?” p. 135.

31. Clausewitz, On War, p. 75.

32. “Few wars, in fact, are any longer decided on the battlefield, if

indeed they ever were. They are decided at the peace table. Military

victories do not themselves determine the outcome of wars; they only

provide political opportunities for the victors—and even those

opportunities are likely to be limited by circumstances beyond their

control.” Howard, “When are Wars Decisive?” p. 130. Howard comes

close to overstating a persuasive point.

33. Readers tired of the literature that is largely dismissive of U.S.

and ARVN military efforts could do worse than examine the evidence

and arguments in Mark W. Woodruff, Unheralded Victory: Who Won the

Vietnam War?, New York: Harper Collins, 1999; and C. Dale Walton,

The Myth of Inevitable U.S. Defeat in Vietnam, London: Frank Cass,

2002. On the events of 1972, see Dale Andrade, Trial by Fire: The 1972

Easter Offensive, America’s Last Vietnam Battle, New York: Hippocrene

Books, 1995.

34. See Colin S. Gray, Modern Strategy, Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1999, ch. 1; and Richard K. Betts, “Is Strategy an Illusion?”

International Security, Vol. 25, No. 2, Fall 2000, pp. 5-50.

35. Colin S. Gray, “Why Strategy Is Difficult,” Joint Force Quarterly,

No. 22, Summer 1999, pp. 6-12.

39
36. On the McNamara years, see Alain Enthoven and K. Wayne

Smith, How Much Is Enough? Shaping the Defense Program,

1961-1969, New York: Harper and Row, 1971.

37. See Terence Zuber, “The Schlieffen Plan Reconsidered,” War in

History, Vol. 6, No. 3, July 1999, pp. 262-305; and Antulio J. Echevarria,

II, After Clausewitz: German Military Thinkers Before the Great War,

Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2000, pp. 193-94.

38. Clausewitz, On War, pp. 75, 77.

39. Richard P. Henrick, Crimson Tide, New York: Avon Books, 1995,

p. 75. I am grateful to Richard Betts for bringing this brilliant

interpretation of Clausewitz to my notice.

40. Robert Endicott Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to

American Strategy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957, was

probably the finest product of the civilian exploration of limited war.

41. Schelling, Arms and Influence, ch. 1.

42. See Stephen Peter Rosen, “Vietnam and the American Theory of

Limited War,” International Security, Vol. 7, No. 2, Fall 1982, pp.

83-113, for a hard hitting critique.

43. Clausewitz, On War, p. 605.

44. See Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age, Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 1959, pp. 21-27. The “principles” receive

fair scholarly treatment in John I. Alger, The Quest for Victory: The

History of the Principles of War, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982.

45. For the best of modern scholarship, see the different views in

Martin van Creveld, Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to

Patton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977; John A. Lynn,

ed., Feeding Mars: Logistics in Western Warfare from the Middle Ages to

the Present, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993; and Thomas M. Kane,

Military Logistics and Strategic Performance, London: Frank Cass,

2001.

46. Hew Strachan observes of the war in German East Africa, that

“Both the climate . . . and the insect life. . . were strategically decisive.”

The First World War: Vol. 1, To Arms, Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2001, p. 504.

47. Recent examinations include Lawrence Freedman, ed.,

Strategic Coercion: Concepts and Cases, Oxford: Oxford University

40
Press, 1998; and Stephen J. Cimbala, Coercive Military Strategy,

College Station, TX: TexasA&M University Press, 1998.

48. The strategic malady of “victory fever” is recognized

appropriately in Paul S. Dull, A Battle History of the Imperial Japanese

Navy, 1941-1945, Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1978.

49. Clausewitz, On War, p. 607.

50. See Gray: Modern Strategy, pp. 19-23; and Weapons for Strategic

Effect: How Important is Technology? Occasional Paper No. 21, Maxwell

AFB, AL: Center for Strategy and Technology, Air War College, January

2001.

51. Victor Davis Hanson, Why the West Has Won: Carnage and

Culture from Solamis to Vietnam, London: Faber and Faber, 2001, risks

taking a powerful culturalist argument a step too far.

52. Jeremy Black, War in the New Century, London: Continuum,

2001, p. vii.

53. Hanson, Why the West Has Won, ch. 4.

54. The most comprehensive treatment to date is Horst Boog and

others, Germany and the Second World War: Vol. IV, The Attack on the

Soviet Union, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.

55. Black, War in the New Century, p. vii. He argues that war’s

multiple contexts is fatal for the RMA thesis.

56. Quoted ibid., p. 2.

57. For reasons none too hard to glean from Michael Burleigh, The

Third Reich: A New History, London: Macmillan, 2000.

58. Clausewitz, On War, p. 85.

59. Ibid., p. 86.

60. See J. P. Harris, Amiéns to the Armistice: The BEF in the

Hundred Days’ Campaign, 8 August—11 November 1918, London:

Brassey’s, 1998.

61. A proposition argued persuasively in Murray and Millett, War to

be Won, p. 483.

41
62. See David G. Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon, London:

Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967, Part 17. Napoleon’s forte was the

operational level of war. As an artilleryman granted command of the

army of Italy in 1796, Napoleon—unlike Wellington—had no experience

of leading infantry in battle. Napoleon’s military genius was not

tactical.

63. Antoine Henri de Jomini, The Art of War, 1838, Novato, CA:

Presidio Press, 1992, p. 325.

64. Ibid., p. 70

65. See Strachan, First World War, p. 724.

66. John Shy, “Jomini,” in Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern

Strategy: from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 1986, pp. 183-184.

67. Edward N. Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, 2nd

ed., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

68. Daniel Goure gushes as follows: “RMA advocates need fear no

longer [that others might exploit the RMA first]. The RMA they

predicted is here and the USA holds an unquestionable, perhaps even

unchallengeable lead. The war in Afghanistan demonstrates the reality

of the RMA and shows first how far the USA has come in owning and

exploiting it.” “Location, Location, Location,” Jane’s Defence Weekly,

February 27, 2002.

69. J. F. C. Fuller, Armament and History, London: Eyre and

Spottiswoode, 1946. For an outstanding recent discussion, see Eliot

Cohen, “Technology and Warfare,” in John Baylis and others, eds.,

Strategy in the Contemporary World: An Introduction to Strategic

Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 235-253.

70. Norman Friedman, The Fifty-Year War: Conflict and Strategy in

the Cold War, Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2000, Part 6, tells a

plausible tale, keyed to Soviet unreadiness to meet the computer age.

71. See Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., The Army and Vietnam,

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986, esp. pp. 112-127,

168-172; and Shelby Stanton, The 1st Cav in Vietnam: Anatomy of a

Division, Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1999.

72. For Russian perspectives on their Afghan experience, see Lester

W. Grau, ed., The Bear Went over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics

in Afghanistan, London: Frank Cass, 1998. For Afghan perspectives it

42
would be difficult to better Mohammad Yousaf and Mark Adkin,

Afghanistan—The Bear Trap: The Defeat of a Superpower, Barnsley,

UK: Leo Cooper, 2001, esp. ch. 11, “Wonder Weapons—Gunships versus

Stingers.”

73. Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon the

French Revolution and Empire, 1793-1812, Vol. 1, Boston: Little Brown,

1898, p. 102. I thank Jon Sumida for bringing this Mahanian dictum to

my attention.

74. Hanson, Why the West Has Won, p. 360.

75. Cohen, “Technology and Warfare,” pp. 247-248.

76. The question of substitution of strength for weakness among

strategy’s dimensions is central to the argument in Colin S. Gray,

Strategy for Chaos: RMA Theory and the Evidence of History, London:

Frank Cass, 2002.

77. Colin S. Gray, “Thinking Asymmetrically in Times of Terror,”

Parameters, Vol. 32, No. 1, Spring 2002, pp. 5-14.

78. For a terse persuasive statement of America’s contemporary

role, see Donald Kagan, On the Origins of War and the Preservation of

Peace, New York: Doubleday, 1995, pp. 566-573.

79. As Eliot Cohen has noted, the military and strategic

effectiveness of America’s information-led RMA cannot be assessed

properly until it is tested in combat against much more worthy foes than

have been trounced thus far. “Technology and Warfare,” p. 243.

80. Many countries, though militarily grossly inferior to the United

States, still could pose dangerous challenges through investment in

“niche” capabilities which could stress U.S. defenses and values.

Expertise relevant to information warfare is globally distributed, and

the entry price is financially modest. A large balanced blue-water fleet is

nice to have, but a handful of super-quiet diesel submarines and a large

and well-dispersed inventory of ballistic and cruise missiles,

particularly if assisted by some aerial or space based targeting aids,

which admittedly would be very difficult to employ, could cause

Americans acute anxieties. Should some missiles be loaded with WMD,

in part to compensate for targeting uncertainties, the U.S. military

could find itself committed to a whole new world of pain. There is much

merit in Robert H. Scales, Jr., “Adaptive Enemies: Dealing with the

Strategic Threat After 2010,” Strategic Review, Vol. 27, No. 1, Winter

1999, pp. 5-14.

43
81. Robert M. Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin: George Armstrong Custer

and the Western Military Frontier, Norman, OK: University of

Oklahoma Press, 1988, p. 206.

Custer never thought like an Indian. With most of his peers, therefore, he was

doomed to fight Indians with the techniques of conventional warfare. For a

century the army fought Indians as if they were British or Mexicans or

Confederates. Each Indian war was expected to be the last, and so the generals

never developed a doctrine or organization adapted to the special problems

posed by the Indian style of fighting.

Also see Sam C. Sarkesian, America’s Forgotten Wars: The

Counterrevolutionary Past and Lessons for the Future, Westport, CT:

Greenwood Press, 1984, which is a neglected minor classic.

82. Charles E. Heller and William A. Stofft, eds., America’s First

Battles, 1776-1965, Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1986, is

valuable.

83. The classic text is Charles A. Callwell, Small Wars: A Tactical

Textbook for Imperial Soldiers, 1906 ed.; Novato, CA: Presidio Press,

1990.

84. See John Haldon, Warfare, State and Society in the Byzantine

World, 565-1204, London: UCL Press, 1999, ch. 2.

8

5. See Edward Spiers, “The Late Victorian Army, 1868-1914," in

David Chandler and Ian Beckett, eds., The Oxford Illustrated History of

the British Army, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 189-214; T.

R. Moreman, The Army in India and the Development of Frontier

Warfare, 1889-1947, London: Macmillan, 1998; and John Gooch, ed.,

The Boer War: Direction, Experience and Image, London: Frank Cass,

2000.

86. At least if modern scholars are to be believed. See Adrian Keith

Goldsworthy, The Roman Army at War, 100 BC—AD 200, Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1996, ch. 3.

87. Sun-tzu, The Art of War, Ralph D. Sawyer, trans., Boulder, CO:

Westview Press, 1994, p. 179.

88. There is much to recommend this thought of Ralph Peters: “In

this age of technological miracles, our military needs to study mankind.”

Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph? Mechanicsburg, PA:

Stackpole Books, 1999, p. 172.

44
89. See Keith B. Payne, The Fallacies of Cold War Deterrence and a

New Direction, Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2001.

90. See, for example, Philip Smucker, “Blunders that let bin Laden

slip away,” The Daily Telegraph, London, February 23, 2002, p. 20.

91. On the logic of international competition, see John J.

Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, New York: W. W.

Norton, 2001.

92. Robert Allan Doughty, The Breaking Point: Sedan and the Fall

of France, 1940, Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1990, tells the story of

tactical and operational disaster well.

93. See David M. Glantz and Jonathan House, When Titans

Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler, Lawrence, KS: University

Press of Kansas, 1995.

94. The main title tells all in Qiao Liang and Wan Xiangsui,

Unrestricted Warfare: Assumptions on War and Tactics in the Age of

Globalization, Beijing: PLA Literature Arts Publishing House,

February 1999. China could well prove to be a dangerous, asymmetrical

opponent, one compelled to think imaginatively by America’s regular

military strengths.

95. See Victor Davis Hanson, The Western Way of War: Infantry

Battle in Classical Greece, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989; and

Stephen Mitchell, “Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece,” in Alan B.

Lloyd, ed., Battle in Antiquity, London: Gerald Duckworth, 1996,

pp. 87-105.

96. Mao Tse-tung, attrib., On Guerrilla Warfare, Samuel B. Griffith,

trans., New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1961, p. 52.

97. See Michael I. Handel, Masters of War: Classical Strategic

Thought, 3rd ed., London: Frank Cass, 2001, Appendix B: “The

Weinberger Doctrine.”

45
U.S. ARMY WAR COLLEGE

Major General Robert R. Ivany

Commandant

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