Winning battles, losing wars? Owen R. Cote, Jr. reviews victory in war: Foundations of Modern Military Policy.

In Victory In War: Foundations of Modern Military Policy, William Martel attempts to provide a theory (actually, a "pre-theory") of victory in war with the stated purpose of helping both political leaders and academics better understand how best to achieve it. Certainly, with the war in Iraq festering in the background without an end or a victory in sight, the case for a better understanding of what causes victory in war is strong. Martel's basic argument is that the concept of victory in war has never been defined specifically enough to provide a reliable set of criteria for decision makers to use when deciding to pursue it. Despite a valiant attempt, the book fails at this task because victory in one type of war will look very different from victory in another. A typology like the one Martel provides, designed to capture all of this variation, will inevitably lack parsimony and policy relevance. Better perhaps to start with a typology of different kinds of war and develop a theory of victory in those contexts.

Martel starts by reviewing what over 50 writers from Sun Tzu to Herman Kahn have said on the subject, showing the lack of a unified theory of victory in war. He then induces what he calls four organizing principles of victory: level of victory sought, degree of change in the status quo sought, amount of mobilization required in order to achieve victory, and post-conflict obligations acquired if victory is to be preserved. Each principle is treated as a continuum along which all victories vary. For example, the level of victory can range from the military level to the political-military level and finally to what Martel calls the grand-strategic level.

He then applies these principles to the United States' wars, first in a single chapter on eight wars from the War of Independence through to the Cold War (curiously omitting the Spanish-American War), then in six chapters each looking at a military engagement from the late 1980s to today's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (omitting Grenada and Somalia, including Libya, and treating Bosnia and Kosovo as one). By Martel's count, the US was 11-1 prior to 2001, not a bad record, but of course it is the prospect of victory lost (or never gained) in Afghanistan or Iraq that is of concern today.

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Martel does not draw any "parametric" links, as he refers to them, between his four organizing principles. He resists contemplating, for instance, that a war with grand strategic objectives can also imply significant changes in the status quo, high levels of mobilization and significant postwar obligations. In his concluding chapter, using a more deductive approach, he codes each of the United States' wars in the four categories but remains reluctant to deduce any formal links. One is left with the message that leaders contemplating a war should be clear beforehand where it will fall along the continuum of each of his four organizing principles.

Of what use would this message have been to decision makers in advance of the current war in Iraq? In making its case for the war, the Bush administration established the aim of replacing Saddam Hussein's regime with a more stable and democratic one, causing a fundamental reversal in which other autocratic and theocratic regimes in the Middle East would follow the path of the new Iraqi regime. Furthermore, it argued that these goals could be achieved by a rapid military campaign with a modest force, leaving the now-liberated Iraqis to rebuild themselves largely using their own oil revenue. In short, using Martel's principles, it sought a very ambitious grand-strategic victory and a major change to the status quo, but believed both goals could be achieved without a major mobilization of US resources or the acquisition of major post-war obligations.

If only it were so. The Bush Administration did not ignore Martel's four organizing principles; rather, it addressed them all specifically and came up with a theory of victory that may now look reckless and misguided, but which, alas, a majority of Americans supported at the time. It is exceedingly difficult to believe that there is no interrelationship, parametric or otherwise, between the ambition of a state's war aims and the degree of change in the status quo sought, and the degree of mobilization required to achieve those aims and the post conflict obligations likely to result.

One way to miss this is to compare apples and oranges; another is to simply code cases of defeat as victory. Martel correctly codes the Cold War as a grand-strategic victory that involved substantial changes in the status quo and high levels of mobilization, but did not result in significant post-conflict obligations. The Cold War was not actually a war, and the Warsaw Pact was never defeated in battle. How could one acquire postwar obligations like the US did after World War II as a result of a peacetime military competition that caused your opponent to simply implode rather than surrender?

Equally problematic is Martel's coding of both Iraq and Afghanistan as grand-strategic victories. He acknowledges that the outcomes remain uncertain, but this coding gives him two wars that undermine what otherwise appears to be a strong correlation between grand-strategic victories and the need for high degrees of mobilization.

Finally, in treating all cases of victory and defeat as equally interesting from an analytic viewpoint, Martel misses the chance to focus on cases of particular interest to the United States today in light of current events in Afghanistan and Iraq. As he notes, history provides many examples of wars in which one side wins many battles but fails to achieve its objectives, while its opponent eventually achieves its goals without victory on the battlefield. This outcome is most common in wars involving insurgencies, such as the US defeat in Vietnam, where it never lost a battle to the North Vietnamese Army or the Viet Cong but still failed to prevent the fall of South Vietnam. It is such an outcome that the Bush Administration is struggling today to avert in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Insurgencies are a theory of victory adopted by political movements that acknowledge they can not achieve victory through traditional battle. Insurgents provoke occupying armies to use conventional firepower in ways that alienate the local population, thereby creating a steady supply of new insurgents and presenting the occupier with a protracted conflict it may lack the will to complete. In principle, any war that results in the occupation of another country could potentially lead to an insurgency. But once one starts, conventional military superiority can not eliminate it, for the battle has shifted from a military contest to a contest of competing wills. Because of the asymmetry in relative stakes of the occupied and the occupier in the outcome, the balance of competing wills can often come down in favor of the insurgents.

Any decision for war that envisions the occupation of another country must be informed by this uncertainty, particularly one in which the conventional military balance greatly favors the potential occupier. In such cases, pre-war planning for conventional military victory will not prepare the victor for a postwar occupation with insurgency.

For example, the planning for the Iraq war focused overwhelmingly and successfully on defeating the Iraqi military, taking Baghdad, and deposing the regime. But this force was not optimized for achieving the war's much more ambitious political-military and grand-strategic objectives, such as the establishment of a new regime and its protection from potential internal challenges should an insurgency emerge.

Thus, ironically, it is the most powerful countries, most prone to fight wars of choice with ambitious grand-strategic objectives against much weaker opponents, that are most vulnerable to the trap of winning battles and losing wars. More than anything else, the United States needs a way of thinking about victory in war under such circumstances. It is a gamble to go to war when one's grand-strategic objectives are great but one's willingness to engage in significant mobilization and incur major postwar obligations is limited. This leaves much of the initiative in the hands of one's opponent. Will he accept military defeat or decide to transform the conflict into a contest of competing wills? Should one prepare for the worst and mobilize for war assuming the latter? Victory In War: Foundations of Modern Military Policy provides much of the history and analysis that would be needed to answer questions such as these but, in the end, does not address them. This is unfortunate because they badly need answering.

OWEN R. COTE, JR. is Associate Director of the MIT Security Studies Program. He is also a co-editor of the journal, International Security. Victory in War: Foundations of Modern Military Policy is by William Martel (Cambridge University Press, 2006).