What is victory in war?

Did it ever occur to you that the US military doesn't now what victory is? I'm not sure how else we can read this:

The security profession needs a basic theoretical construct within which to think about winning wars. Gallons of ink have been expended over the centuries on how to win wars, but that effort has largely been uninformed by even a rudimentary theory of victory. Many existing theories pay little attention to what victory is and why one wins, going instead to the more difficult issue of how one wins. When theorists do address winning, it is usually in passing, as an assumption, or as an excursion from their primary topic. Clausewitz is an exception to this assertion, but his musings on winning are scattered and incomplete. There is a school of thought that claims theory is not necessary for competent performance. While that might explain how mankind has gone without a theory of victory for so long, it does not negate the utility of theory. Existing theories of war are not necessarily wrong; they simply might benefit from some supplemental thought specifically devoted to victory. Fortunately, the extant theoretical literature contains enough material to begin constructing a theory of victory.

That's from another article in the Summer 2008 Parameters, Theory of Victory by J. Boone Bartholomees.

Bartholomees makes some important points in the first part of his article by discussing how victory and defeat, the scale of decisiveness in the results of the war, and the level of achievement all have to be understood as continuums. And he makes the important distinction between tactical success, operational success, and strategic success. Strategic success has to do with the political goals of the war, both in conventional warfare and in counterinsurgency (COIN):

If war is a political act, victory at the highest levels is correspondingly defined in political terms. The implication is that tactical or operational victory without favorable political outcomes is sterile, and by any reasonable assessment that is true.

He describes how success and defeat can be understood differently by opposing sides. In the Israel-Egypt war of 1973, both Israel and Egypt were able to claim victory from their different viewpoints. Even in the Gulf War of 1991, the coalition headed by the US could claim victory because Iraq was pushed out of Kuwait, the maximum goal of the war from the coalition's perspective. But Saddam could also claim victory because he remained in power after the war, which was his key political goal.

But as he goes into an analysis of how "victory is heavily dependent on perspective", the discussion starts to go so far into abstractions that we're up in the clouds. He argues for instance, that since the public is one of the major judges of victory: "As a result, at the strategic level victory and defeat can be as much issues of public perception and even partisan politics as they are of battlefield achievement or diplomatic negotiations."

That sounds a bit too New Agey for me: "victory" is what we think it is; with the right thoughts, we create our own victory.

Because it's one thing to say that the majority of the public in a country make a political judgment about whether "victory" has been achieved and that their opinion will have an effect on policymakers. It's another to say, in effect, that whatever the public decides is "victory" really is. Particularly when he's supposedly trying to define what "victory" is in some objective way.

As his explanation continues, it begins to sound increasingly like he's saying that there really is no objective measure for victory in the so-called "war on terrorism". Or, rather, that there is no objective measure for strategic (political) victory. However, he writes, "At the tactical and in most cases the operational level winning is a military condition, and the assessment rests on reasonably well-understood military criteria."

This sounds an awful lot like the outlines of the stab-in-the-back excuse: the military "won" on their part of the fight (tactical and operational) but the politicians failed on their part (strategic). And my suspicions increase when I read things like this, in a discussion about how the Will of the enemy public is a critical factor in war:

The only method currently available to directly attack will is information operations; all other options attack indirectly through some other aspect presumed to influence will. Information operations, however, are very blunt instruments whose impact is difficult to predict or target. Conversely, if victory is an assessment, information operations are strategically critical in deciding the winner. America'’s inability to come to grips intellectually, physically, or psychologically with this aspect of war in an age where control of information is impossible is a huge part of our current perceived inability to achieve positive strategic results in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bartholomees is not making a stab-in-the-back argument about the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War or the "war on terrorism".

But there is a large body of argument growing out of the stab-in-the-back theory of the outcome of the Vietnam War, a theory widely popular among the officer corps and political conservatives, that emphasizes the central role of American public opinion in counterinsurgency wars. Although Bartholomees doesn't use the phrase in this article, that view of these types of wars typically holds that the US military cannot be defeated in their part of the fight. So therefore the "center of gravity" in such a war is American public opinion, which must be persuaded to support the war.

Not only is the notion highly questionable as a theory of war. But defining American public opinion as the central focus in winning a war also leads to directing those "information operations" (i.e., propaganda) at the American public. And the Pentagon has given in to that temptation in a big way with the Iraq War. (See Pentagon’s Pundits: A Look at the Defense Department's Propaganda Program Democracy Now! 04/22/08.) Despite federal laws against the government conducting propaganda operations aimed at the American public.

Bartholomees' analysis is certainly open to being read as validating that line of thinking.

Tags: j boone bartholomees, stab-in-the-back