Decisive victory The term decisive victory refers to a military victory in battle that definitively resolves the objective being fought over , ending one stage of the conflict and beginning another stage . Until a decisive victory is achieved , conflict over the competing objectives will continue . Like all concepts of warfare , decisive battles can take place anywhere from the tactical / unit level ( Pavlov ' s House during the Battle of Stalingrad ) , to the operational level , all the way up to the theatre or strategic level , including a decisive victory that ends a war ( which has happened numerous times throughout history ) for example the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 . In " Defining and Achieving Decisive Victory " , Colin Gray defined an " operational " decisive victory as " a victory which decides the outcome to a campaign , though not necessarily to the war as a whole " . For example , the Battle of Midway is often cited as a decisive operational victory for the US despite the fact that the Pacific War ended more than three years later with the decisive " strategic " victory of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki , which directly led to the Japanese surrender ; this is because the Midway operation represented the destruction of the majority of the IJN ' s offensive carrier forces , which decisively stopped both the IJN ' s string of unbroken victories in combat and their plans to expand eastward into Midway Island , Hawaii , the Aleutian Islands and potentially the US mainland . During this period the US Navy expanded greatly and the IJN was never able to regain their former strength , making the victory decisive in terms of determining the future operational shape of the battles for the Pacific . On the tactical scale , the Attack on Pearl Harbor is cited as a decisive victory , as it destroyed the entirety of the US Pacific battleship fleet and neutralized Pearl Harbor ' s ability to retaliate in one fell swoop , thus resolving the issue of whether the battleships ( which the Japanese inaccurately saw as the greatest threat ) would present a threat to Japanese expansion in the west . Of course , this proves that a tactically decisive victory is no substitute for a decisive victory on a larger scale , since the strategic issue of control of the Pacific remained very much in question , and was later resolved decisively in the US ' s favor ( see above ) via aircraft carriers and bombers instead of battleships . Writing in " Military Review " , Thomas Goss attributes the popularity of the closely related term " decisive battle " to Sir Edward Creasy and his 1851 book , " The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World " . Goss recounts a variety of different definitions for the term used by historians and military leaders ( neither of which typically define the term before using it ) : a battle that ( 1 ) achieves its operational objectives ; ( 2 ) ends the conflict because one side has achieved its strategic objectives , or ; ( 3 ) directly ends the conflict and results in a lasting peace between the belligerents . He concludes that " A decisive battle must directly lead to a rapid resolution of the contested political issues because the results on the battlefield caused both sides to agree that a decision had been reached . "