Winning Wars: The Enduring Nature and Changing Character of Victory from Antiquity to the 21st Century

By Matthias Strohn

A collection of military history essays examining the philosophical side of war and the meaning of “victory.”

What does it mean to win a war? How does this differ from a simple military victory? How have different cultures and societies answered these questions through history, and how can we apply these lessons?

When considering how a war might be “won,” there are three big ideas that underpin how success can be measured: ownership, intervention for effect, and fighting for ideas. These three main themes also contain a series of sub-themes: internal and external, short-term and long-term, military success versus political success, and tactical outcomes versus campaign effects versus strategic success.

This book examines the constituent parts of what may comprise “victory” or “winning” in war and then travels, chronologically, through a wide variety of historical case studies, further exploring these philosophical components and weaving them into a factual discussion. The authors of each chapter will explore the three big ideas within the context of their individual case studies, offering pointers as to where, within that framework, their case study may sit.

The message of this book is not just an academic exploration for its own sake, but a vital aspect (both morally and practically) of the political and military business of the application of force. In short, know in advance how you wish to end before you start.

“Comprising sixteen excellent and thought-provoking essays by eighteen noted military historians and former warriors, the book comprehensively examines the realities of war and the wide-ranging concepts of victory. At the same time, it offers a very good general history of warfare.” —Baird Maritime

“[This book] can provide useful insights to anyone; students and subject matter experts alike can find something to gain from this book. Most importantly, its emphasis on contemporary warfare can provide consequential information for our current military and civilian leadership, if they are willing to hear it.” —Air & Space Power Journal

• Language: English
• Publisher: Casemate Publishers
• Release date: Dec 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781952715013

Book preview

Introduction

Sir Hew Strachan

‘Attempts to solve major security issues by military means alone seldom succeed in the long term, even if initially enjoying apparent success.’¹ Those are the words of the fifth and most recent edition of UK Defence Doctrine. Published in November 2014, it reflects the bitter experience of the post-9/11 wars. In the Falklands in 1982, in the Persian Gulf in 1991, in Kosovo in 1999 and in Sierra Leone in 2000, military action had delivered political results in short order. War did indeed seem to be the continuation of policy by other means. However, after 2002 Britain and its allies fought wars which promised easy and quick success, but which persist to this day. Each of the interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya was characterised by an apparently easy victory, loudly and triumphantly proclaimed at the political level, but which then gave way to protracted conflict with – at best – indeterminate results.

UK Defence Doctrine’s equivocation about the utility of military force presents a persistent conundrum in the making of strategy. The doctrine applicable to war’s next level down, UK Joint Operations Doctrine, was also published in a new edition in November 2014. At one level it reflected UK Defence Doctrine by eschewing words like ‘winning’ or ‘victory’, but in reality it deployed elements of both. It defined the ‘military strategic end-state’ as ‘the successful completion of the military contribution to the desired outcome, reached when all the allocated military strategic objectives have been achieved.’² The words ‘success’ or ‘successful’ are used 21 times in Joint Operations Doctrine, and their pursuit is clearly – and many might feel properly – a benchmark for the British armed forces. But this determination to win evaporates when we revert once more to the higher level. The nearest that UK Defence Doctrine comes to defining what ‘success’ might actually look like in strategic, as opposed to operational, terms is to say that ‘war is undertaken to maintain a position of advantage, establish a more advantageous situation, or influence the attitudes or behaviour of another party.’³

The note of qualification, the aspiration to relative rather than absolute success, contrasts with the expectation of a clear-cut and decisive victory derived from strategies of the past. In 1827 Carl von Clausewitz memorably defined wars as being of two types. He described one in geographical terms, as designed ‘merely to occupy some of [the enemy’s] frontier districts so that we can annex them or use them for bargaining at the peace negotiations.’ This too was relative rather than absolute, but the objective of his other sort of war was much less ambiguous: ‘To overthrow [the German is niederwerfen] the enemy, to annihilate [vernichten] him politically or render him defenceless [wehrlos], thus forcing him to sign whatever peace we please.’⁴ No trace of this sort of winning is to be found in either of the two UK doctrines of November 2014.

At the tactical level, any suggestion that fighting is not intended to destroy the enemy results in logical absurdity. Infantry drills for fire and movement are designed to concentrate killing power in order to achieve an immediate effect or to secure a particular objective. In practice, not all tactics have destruction as their aim; they might be designed for reconnaissance or protection, to reassure a population or deter – not kill – a possible enemy. But success at the tactical level remains more quantifiable than at the strategic, and in some instances can be measured in ground gained or in enemy killed and captured. These victories give combat purpose and rationalise what soldiers do. They also give them moral purpose: to demand that they put their own lives at risk without a recognisable and justifiable reason for doing so would be unconscionable (which does not mean it does not happen).

The potential divergence between the tactics of fighting and the political context of war therefore creates a challenge which emerges most obviously at the operational level, not so much when it gives shape to tactics (its principal role in the 1980s, during the latter stages of the Cold War) as when it looks up to the political and strategic. This is where its gaze has been increasingly directed in the post-9/11 wars. It is here that the tactical imperative (and the military presumption that the aim is success, however defined) collides with the political objectives mediated at the strategic level.

In May 2006, Major General Richard Shirreff arrived in Iraq to conduct a reconnaissance before taking over in July as commander of the Multi-National Division in South-East Iraq (MND-(SE)). Since 2003 Basra, Iraq’s principal port and its major city in the south, had been a British responsibility but by 2006 the bulk of British forces had been withdrawn from its streets. The city was increasingly in the hands of Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM), Shia militias who were backed by Iran. British efforts were focused on checking the flow of weapons across the Iran–Iraq border but in Basra itself were restricted to supporting the Iraqi police, who had themselves been infiltrated by JAM. Shirreff was worried that ‘standing still amounted to defeat’ and that Britain’s objective had become ‘extraction rather than necessarily achieving mission success.’ He wanted to wrest back the initiative by focusing on Basra and the Shia militias, who were, he said, ‘ingenious, capable and determined to inflict a humiliating defeat on us.’ He wanted to hand back to the Iraqis a city which was in a governable state. If he did not, he feared the consequences not just for Iraq but also for the British army, whose credibility and reputation would be damaged both in its own eyes and in those of its American allies. Rather than an ‘exit strategy’, he wanted ‘a winning strategy’. The plan for putting this intention into effect was initially called Operation Salamanca and then, in its reworked form, Operation Sinbad.⁵

Ultimately Operation Sinbad failed, and it might always have done so, but in August 2006 the challenges it faced came not just from within Iraq and Iran but also from London. As Justin Maciejewski, who commanded 2nd Battalion, The Rifles, in Basra in 2006–7 and so confronted the tactical consequences for what followed, put it:

The British campaign in Iraq was designed to do just enough to underpin the credibility of the political and military relationship with the US, whilst minimising the domestic political consequences of financial and tactical over-exposure to events on the ground. From a British political viewpoint, the priorities for Operation Telic [the British commitment to the war in Iraq] after the invasion were damage limitation and economy of effort. It was this geostrategic equation that established the scale of military resources available in theatre, not the requirements of the campaign itself.⁶

At the UK’s Permanent Joint Headquarters in Northwood, the chief of joint operations, Lieutenant General Nick Houghton, reflected the government line when he warned Shirreff to resist any ‘rushes of testosterone’.⁷ Britain was already shifting its main effort from Iraq to Afghanistan and would not resource what those on the ground in Iraq saw as essential to achieve success. Shirreff’s plan to stabilise Basra after the military effort depended on the creation of a provincial reconstruction team, a model developed in Afghanistan, but the team which resulted had neither the money nor the personnel for the scale of the undertaking. The incoming chief of the general staff, General Sir Richard Dannatt, was worried by the strain on an army configured for only one war at a time, but now engaged in two, and counselled caution in Iraq while counting on Afghanistan to redeem Britain’s military reputation. What little wind was left in Britain’s war in Iraq was further reduced as rumours multiplied that Tony Blair, who had committed Britain to the invasion, was planning to stand down as prime minister in favour of Gordon Brown. In October Dannatt gave an interview to the Daily Mail in which he said that British troops needed to leave Iraq soon because they were worsening the security problem, not helping it. For him, the army’s reputation was to be saved in Helmand, not in Basra; Shirreff said Dannatt’s statement was a ‘crass own goal’. When Blair visited Iraq in December 2006, Shirreff complained about the lack of cooperation in Basra between the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for International Development. What was even more striking was the lack of British cooperation with the Americans, who were now surging forces into Iraq, while the British were – in Shirreff’s words to Blair – ‘just dribbling’.⁸

The faults in this story were not all on one side. Military training stresses the need for action, the importance of seizing the initiative and the psychological value of the offensive. Regiments commemorate their battle honours and the history of war constructs its narratives around the notion of ‘decisive victory’. These are the equivalents of the ‘military end state’ setting its own standards for declaring a win. They tell a story that is dominated by tactics and operations and only rarely shaped by politics and strategy. In practice battlefield success has frequently not translated into ‘decisive victory’, but instead proved transitory in its strategic and political outcomes. The Duke of Marlborough’s greatest tactical and operational victory came at Blenheim in 1704, but the War of the Spanish Succession did not end for another ten years and was settled on terms which did not reflect the scale of Marlborough’s success in this or subsequent battles. Frederick the Great ‘decisively’ defeated the French at Rossbach and the Austrians at Leuthen in successive months in 1757, one year after the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War, but the war carried on until 1763 and by then Prussia was economically exhausted.

The long pedigree of the ‘decisive’ battle extends back to the Greeks’ defeat of the Persians at Marathon in 490 BC. It was the earliest action described in Edward Creasy’s massively successful Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World (1851), which had gone through 38 printings by 1891, ⁹ and it was where Jean Colin began Les Grandes Batailles de l’Histoire, published over 60 years later in 1913. More recently it has been a departure point for Victor Davis Hanson’s arguments about hoplite warfare and the enduring success of what he calls the ‘western way of war’ in Why the West Has Won: Carnage and Culture from Salamis to Vietnam (2001) and of John Lynn’s riposte, Battle: A History of Combat and Culture from Ancient Greece to Modern America (2003). The Greeks checked the Persian invasion at Marathon, but the Persians came back again ten years later, defeating the Spartans at Thermopylae and occupying Athens. This time the Greeks destroyed the Persians at sea, destroying their fleet at Salamis, and so breaking the Persian line of supply, and forcing the Persians to retreat once more. However, the unity which the Greek city states had achieved against the Persians collapsed in 432 BC, with the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, during which the Persians became the power brokers within Greece and underpinned Sparta’s eventual victory over Athens in 404 BC. By the following century both city states were backwaters and the balance of power had swung north to Macedonia. Marathon had looked decisive in 490 and had regained its lustre after Salamis confirmed its verdict, but any political and strategic benefits it had brought had evaporated thereafter: the verdict of history is conditional, dependent on the point in time when the judgement is being made.

For more modern historians, including both Creasy and Colin, before the outbreak of World War I the battle of Waterloo stood at the apex of this veneration of what was in essence a Napoleonic model of warfare – a short campaign (100 days in Waterloo’s case) which reached its culmination in a single day’s fighting (and not even a full day at Waterloo because the sodden state of the ground on 18 June 1815 prevented combat from starting until nearly lunchtime), and which produced a peace in Europe which lasted almost a century. There is of course a problem here, as the epithet ‘Napoleonic’ reveals. Napoleon lost this, his last battle. He had won many ‘decisive battles’, from Marengo to Austerlitz, but he lost the war. When he fled the battlefield in the gathering dark of 18 June 1815, he pressed on to Paris in order to rally support for the raising of fresh armies, but France was prostrated, not by one battle only but by 23 years of nearly unbroken warfare, and could summon neither the political will nor the resources for more. The cumulative effect of all France’s battles and Napoleon’s victories, as well as his defeats, determined the outcome of the war.

Clausewitz served in the Waterloo campaign, although he was not present at the battle itself. He opened book IV of On War, which he devoted to fighting (Gefecht), with a chapter on the nature of the modern battle (Schlacht in German, so we might call it major battle). His tone is ironic, suggesting that its decisiveness lay in the eye of the beholder more than in strictly measurable outcomes. He describes what contemporary commentators would call ‘symmetrical warfare’, in which ‘contemporary armies have developed almost identically in military organisation and methods’. At the outset the two sides form up and a number of semi-independent fights develop. ‘The battle smoulders away, like damp gunpowder.’ When nobody can see any more, and ‘darkness brings it to a halt’, it is ‘time to reckon up how much in the way of serviceable troops is left on either side’ and to calculate the ground lost or gained. ‘The results, along with personal impressions of the bravery and cowardice, intelligence or stupidity that one thinks one has observed in one’s own troops and the enemy’s, are then combined in an overall impression on which a decision is based.’¹⁰

Clausewitz made the outcome – of this battle at least – a matter of subjective judgment rather than objective facts. Paradoxically, however, he also argued that battle was the central act in war, since ‘the concept of the engagement [Gefecht] lies at the root of all strategic action.’¹¹ Clausewitz regularly defined strategy as the use of the battle for the purpose of the war, but here he provided his successors with the arguments for inverting the sequence, for saying not that the battle served strategy but that strategy found its culmination in battle. By the end of the 19th century, most generals believed that their role, and the function of strategy, was to bring about battle on the most favourable terms, so as to deliver a decisive victory. Clausewitz, who had been on the receiving end of one of Napoleon’s most convincing triumphs, the smashing of the Prussian army in the twin battles of Jena and Auerstedt in 1806, became for many commentators (and for one critic in particular, Basil Liddell Hart) the proponent of battle as the central act in war and as the direct route to victory.¹²

This understanding of battle was discredited by World War I. There were ‘decisive’ battles in its opening weeks, particularly at Tannenberg and on the Marne, but their strategic effects were defensive and negative. They protected France from the German invasion and East Prussia from the Russians, and they therefore prevented rather than enabled a quick victory. Moreover, they were not repeated. By 1916 what were called ‘battles’ on the Western Front, Verdun and the Somme, were in reality more akin to campaigns in both scale and length: the first lasted ten months and the second five. By their end the losses on both sides were comparable, the position of each had barely changed, and the same ground would be fought over again in subsequent years. At sea, the battle of Jutland (or Skagerrak for the Germans), fought on 31 May 1916, lasted a single day, but that was the only aspect in which it corresponded with Trafalgar, the model of decisive maritime victory so venerated by the Royal Navy. The two fleets were twice in contact for periods of about 20 minutes, and the strategic situation remained unchanged as a result. In 1918, the war ended, at least on the Western Front, without a climactic equivalent to Waterloo, and with the German army still intact and in enemy territory. Although there were major allied victories on other fronts – in Macedonia, at Megiddo in Palestine and at Vittorio Veneto in Italy – few historians linked them to the war’s final outcome.¹³

Not dissimilar points can be made about World War II. The Germans won a sequence of dazzling victories between 1939 and 1941, overrunning much of Europe, but they still lost the war. The same point could be made about Japan. What were called ‘battles’ were not battles in the traditional sense: the battles of Britain and the Atlantic were campaigns, lasting months in the first case and years in the second, and so in many respects was Stalingrad, for many the ‘turning point’ in the land war. It has been argued that in the 18th century, soldier-kings accepted the verdict of the battlefield as conferring some sort of legal force on the resolution of disputes between states.¹⁴ The picture is overdrawn: states did not necessarily seek terms after suffering a single defeat, but the victors did on the whole recognise the limits of what war could deliver and so proved readier to negotiate. That was not the case in the two world wars, whose scale – in terms of alliances, geographical reach, and levels of economic and social mobilisation – became incommensurate with what war might deliver unless they became wars of exhaustion. Air and sea power, the principal weapons of economic war, proved more important to the outcome of World War II than fighting on land. The differences in the output of equipment and munitions between the two sides proved decisive and the margin widened as much – if not more – through losses away from combat as in it, as the war’s geographical scale wore out aeroplanes, ships and engines because of the distances they had to travel. Phillips O’Brien, who has argued in these terms, began his book on the subject by stating that, ‘There were no decisive battles in World War II.’¹⁵

Since 1945 there have been short wars with decisive outcomes: the Arab–Israeli wars of 1966 and 1973 are cases in point, even if there has yet to be a lasting peace settlement in the Middle East. But most inter-state wars have been limited, and the most frequent forms of war have been irregular and insurgent. Their verdicts have come not on the battlefield, but over time and through eventual negotiation. Moreover, since the end of World War II, three major influences have served to undermine yet further the expectation of decisive victory in war.

The first of these was and is legal. In 1928 the Kellogg–Briand pact prohibited the use of war as an instrument of national policy except in cases of national self-defence. The pact failed to prevent war almost from the moment of its signature, but it still formed the foundation for the charge of waging aggressive war brought against Germans accused at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Moreover, in 1945 Article 51 of the charter of the United Nations incorporated the ideas of the Kellogg–Briand pact, appropriating to the Security Council the right to use force to maintain peace and security, and leaving only the right to self-defence to the individual state. In terms of international law, war lost its place as the final arbiter in inter-state relations. States are formally precluded from declaring war in most circumstances, and as a result normally don’t do so. Obviously, de facto wars occur nonetheless, but one result has been a less clear demarcation between war and peace, with results that make it less certain when war can be deemed to have been won or lost. The 2014 UK Defence Doctrine reflected this ambiguity. ‘Relationships between states, between groups and factions within a state, and between state and non-state actors are always competitive’, it stated, ‘and may be classified as those of cooperation, confrontation and conflict.’ Note the refusal in this statement to use the word ‘war’; note also the consequence that followed – ‘Defence must be capable of operating across this spectrum’ from cooperation through confrontation to conflict, or from peace to war.¹⁶ If war and peace are on the same spectrum, and if cooperation, confrontation and conflict exist on a continuum, what is the legal difference between a state of peace and a state of de facto war?

The second influence was the impact of nuclear weapons. In 1946, Bernard Brodie asked in The Absolute Weapon, his edited volume written in response to the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Japan: ‘If our cities can be wiped out in a day, if there is no good reason to expect the development of specific defenses against the bomb, if all the great powers are already within striking range of each other, if even substantial superiority in numbers of aircraft and bombs offers no real security, what possible avail can large armies and navies be?’ Not all those conditions were already fulfilled by 1946 but by the 1950s they increasingly were, and by then too most opinion was persuaded of the conclusion which Brodie reached in 1946. ‘Thus far the purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose.’¹⁷ Since the end of the Cold War, the salience of nuclear deterrence has diminished, but the notion that ‘the purpose of our military establishment [is] to win wars’ has not been revived.

That is in part the consequence of the third development, the growth of the idea of security, human, national and collective, as the overarching framework within which defence is nestled and where the spectrum from peace to war resides. Western democracies face threats to their security, from natural causes like pandemics and floods, as well as from human agency through cyberattacks and terrorism. In 2014, UK Defence Doctrine began its chapter on strategy with a statement on national security and with a list of the external and internal threats which the nation confronted. It included disease and climatic events, whose impact policy might mitigate but whose onset it might struggle to avoid, alongside ‘invasion, attack or blockade’, whose prevention can be regarded as a primary function for defence traditionally understood. In general, most western democracies, especially within Europe, have come to discount the specific danger of war, not because its impact might not be as serious as a pandemic but because its probability is currently lower. This is war’s standing with the UK’s national security risk register. Moreover, if and when states go to war, as the United Kingdom has done three times since 9/11 (even if it has not declared it), they do so in pursuit not of winning, but of greater security. So states, despite living in much greater security than was the case for most of the 20th century, stress their insecurity by harping on about problems such as terrorism or Islamic radicalism. The latter present threats, but not major ones in terms of loss of life, and they are concepts, ‘-isms’, not specific enemies except in a metaphorical or rhetorical sense, and not in a formally declared war. By making national security so all-encompassing and absolute, we heighten the awareness of insecurity, and by equating national security with strategy we are encouraged to apply strategy’s concepts to the minimisation of the threats to security. However, this is the opposite of the approach required by war, which demands that the threat be confronted and overcome. Strategy in this context embraces risk as an opportunity for exploitation, not as a threat to be avoided. Almost by definition UK Defence Doctrine, in being so determined to avoid losing, eliminates the idea of winning.¹⁸

These three elements – the place of international law in conditioning the use of force; the presumption, however residual after the post-9/11 wars, that the purpose of that defence is to deter, not fight; and the open-endedness of security which fuses individual needs and rights with those of the state as a whole – have combined to foster a political and societal disengagement from the idea of victory. In the current catchphrase, soldiers have in the public’s eyes become ‘victims’, not ‘victors’, misused by the state in wars of ‘choice’, not of necessity. In other words, they are killed or wounded in wars which do not have to be fought for existential reasons, and so do not have to be won.

For Clausewitz, living in the era of the French revolution and its veneration of the citizen soldier, an effective army which was politically aware because it was fighting for values to which the nation as a whole subscribed would also be an effective army – a nation in arms. In Iraq Richard Shirreff planned Operation Sinbad not as a citizen soldier but as an officer in a professional army concerned for the self-respect of the service to which he had dedicated his career and for its credibility within the army (also professional) of its principal ally. The war into which his plan fitted in 2006 was one to which the United States was still committed, and which its president, George W. Bush, believed could still be won, but that was no longer the view in the United Kingdom. The British people, having rallied round the flag when British troops were initially committed to the invasion of Iraq at the end of March 2003, had turned against the war by 2006, no longer believing it to be winnable and distrustful of its conduct by the United States. The military values which Shirreff embodied, although still widely respected within British society, no longer seemed apt for the war to which he wanted to apply them. British politicians, beginning with the prime minister, drifted because they could not see a way out of a situation for which they had to take a large measure of responsibility but which they did not have the ability to control or the determination to master.

At one level the societal response was more realistic than the military, and not just because it better reflected the actual resources that the British government was ready to put into the campaign. The more fundamental problem was that the post-9/11 wars were never winnable in the terms set by British (or even American) tactical and operational methods, however much they were bent into fresh shape in order to deal with the actual circumstances that confronted them. The vocabulary used at the political level to conceptualise the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, ‘the global war on terror’ and later ‘the long war’, lacked utility for the purpose of framing strategy. Coherent strategy requires the prioritisation of objectives and the matching of means to ends: ‘the global war on terror’, with its limitless objectives and its under-resourced implementation, did neither. It misunderstood its enemies and it was not based on the sort of war its armed forces actually had to fight. But as a phrase it still said something important about what had happened to war after the end of the Cold War. The bounds of war had escaped the categorisation of armed conflicts inherited from the overarching threat of international war, the notional demarcation between ‘major’ and ‘small’ wars, between conventional and unconventional, regular and irregular, state and non-state, ‘old’ and ‘new’. Instead war had become all these things in one, chaotic, protean and dynamic, constantly evolving as it eluded the clutches of states anxious to give it utility and to contain it by allocating it conceptual pigeon-holes. In the field, counterinsurgency provided an operational framework for military action, but was stripped of a strategic context or the political will to shape it for policy ends. Victory was hardly possible when there was so little idea of what winning would look like.

To put this point in the terminology of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), ‘warre’, that perpetual conflict which Hobbes imagined as existing before the state secured the monopoly of force, had become joined with ‘war’, the use of armed conflict in the pursuit of the state’s interests.¹⁹ Hobbes’ understanding of ‘war’ was that it was bounded, both by legal norms within war’s own conduct and by the idea that its purpose ultimately was to resolve disputes between nations and so create peace. Those who wage war through insurgencies, civil wars and so-called ‘new wars’ with a view to winning are engaged in ‘warre’, and for them its persistence is itself a form of victory. Western democratic states, which responded with the tools of ‘war’, were handicapped because war had more forms than those for which they were prepared, either intellectually or in terms of equipment, even if they moved on from ‘war’ to ‘warre’. Concepts like counterinsurgency and the ‘comprehensive approach’ were a form of catch-up, but still not the fundamental shift that was required to get ahead of the enemy. To do that would require western democracies to bend not just their armed forces out of shape, but also their states and their parent societies. This they lacked the will to do – the will to win.

Moreover, in adapting the concepts which they applied to ‘war’ to meet the problems posed by ‘warre’, they undermined the authority and inner certainty with which they had imbued those concepts in the first place. In 1977, the additional protocols to the Geneva conventions responded to the post-1945 colonial struggles for national liberation by retrospectively recognising their legitimacy and granting belligerent rights to ‘freedom-fighters’. In doing so, they sundered the legal and ethical distinction between the authority to go to war, vested in the state, and the rights of those engaged in war, effectively legitimising revolution by giving belligerent status to those who fought as insurgents. The 1977 additional protocols were recognised as a sufficient threat to the state-dominated structure of the laws of war for the president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, to say that they did not apply to terrorists, precisely because they might.²⁰ Then, the adoption in 2005 by the United Nations of the ‘responsibility to protect’ peoples from the savagery and even genocidal tendencies of their own governments authorised outside interventions in civil wars and intra-state conflict, provided they had a Security Council mandate. The principle of state equality on which the United Nations rested was replaced by the categorisation of some countries as ‘rogue’ or ‘failed’ states, especially in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The association of both law and war with the authority of the state was thereby eroded, with repercussions for both. Since 9/11 the legal regimes governing war have been in disarray, with the United States openly challenging them through processes like rendition and indefinite detention without trial, and the United Kingdom calling for a statute of limitation on accusations of war crimes against its own personnel and stripping British terrorists of their citizenship rather than bringing them to court.

‘Democratic peace’ theory, with its implication that because democracies do not normally fight each other they are inherently disposed to peace, muddies the waters yet further. The historical record since 1789 does not argue that democracies are incapable of fighting and winning wars. If anything, the reverse has been true. From the French revolution onwards, democracy has been a powerful agent for national mobilisation in time of war. In both world wars, democracies were ultimately able to prevail over more autocratic and totalitarian regimes. They may be reluctant to fight, but they are not pacifist. However, their armed forces cannot be expected to win when their very professionalism is interpreted as separating them from the society on whose behalf they fight and as denying them a civic voice in the framing of the policy objectives which they are expected to serve. As professionals, their operational concepts have consequences and sustained assumptions – like those of success and even of victory – which are not reflected in the national security strategies which govern their employment.

Going to war requires of those who do it a commitment to win – and a sense of what victory would look like. Without that, war lacks purpose and the strategy to shape it is robbed of coherence. Moreover, without either there is no obvious route to peace. During the course of the 20th century the path from peace to war proved to be a much easier and shorter one than the path from war to peace. World War I did not end with the armistices of 1918 but continued until the peace settlements were signed, the last of them – with the newly independent Turkish republic – in Lausanne in 1923. In the interim possibly four million people were killed in violent conflict across Europe and the Middle East, from Ireland to India and from Baltic to the Balkans, in addition to those killed in what we conventionally define as World War I.²¹ In 1919 the statesmen in Paris did not appreciate both that the war was still ongoing and that the completion of the peace settlements therefore required the continued use of the military instrument and the application of the principles of strategy as much as of diplomacy. In the end the peace settlements did not deliver on the victories which the war had secured. Although there was a better understanding of these issues after World War II, it too did not end neatly in 1945: there were civil wars in Italy, Greece and China, and post-war struggles for national independence in South-East Asia and Africa. The colonial powers had forfeited their right to rule not least through their defeats at the hands of Germany and Japan. War and peace may exist on a continuum, but if there is no idea of their difference, war cannot deliver victory and success cannot be translated into peace.

Notes

1Ministry of Defence, Joint Doctrine Publication 0-01: UK Defence Doctrine , 5th edition (November 2014), 7, para 1.17. What follows is more a statement of opinion than a systematic discussion. For that some important departure points are: Gabriella Blum, ‘The fog of victory’, European Journal of International Law , Vol. 24, No. 1 (2013): 391–421; E. A. de Landmeier, ‘What constitutes victory in modern war?’, Militaire Spectator (20 March 2018); Robert Mandel, The Meaning of Military Victory (Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2006); William C. Martel, Victory in War: Foundations of Modern Military Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007; revised edn, 2011).

2Ministry of Defence, Joint Doctrine Publication 0.1: UK Joint Operations , annex 1A, CDS planning directive, (November 2014), 25.

3Ministry of Defence, Joint Doctrine Publication 0-01: UK Defence Doctrine , 18, para 1.54.

4Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege , Werner Hahlweg (ed) (Bonn: Duemmler, 1952), 77; this is my translation of the German; the English used in On War , translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 69, is more moderate than Clausewitz’s German.

5Justin Maciejewski, ‘Best effort: Operation Sinbad and the Iraq campaign’, in Jonathan Bailey, Richard Iron and Hew Strachan (eds), British Generals in Blair’s Wars (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2013), 161; Jack Fairweather, A War of Choice: the British in Iraq 2003–9 (London: Penguin Random House, 2013), 262

6Maciejewski, ‘Best effort’, 157–8.

7Fairweather, War of Choice , 261.

8Tom Bower, Broken Vows: Tony Blair: the Tragedy of Power (London: Faber and Faber, 2016), 528, 531.

9John Keegan, The Face of Battle (London: Penguin Random House, 1976), 57.

10 Clausewitz, On War , book IV, ch. 2, ‘The nature of battle today’, 226.

11 Ibid., 227.

12 Basil Liddell Hart, The Ghost of Napoleon (London: Faber and Faber, 1933).

13 I have developed these points more fully in Hew Strachan, ‘La redéfinition de la bataille: Verdun et la Somme’, in Alexandre Lafon (ed), Les batailles de 1916 (Paris: Sorbonne Université Press, 2018), 15–41; Hew Strachan, ‘La fin des batailles: stratèges et stratégies’, in Bruno Cabannes (ed), Une histoire de la guerre du XIXe siècle à nos jours (Paris: SEUIL, 2018), 49–64.

14 James Q. Whitman, The Verdict of Battle: The Law of Victory and Modern War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

15 Phillips Payson O’Brien, How the War Was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1.

16 Ministry of Defence, Joint Doctrine Publication 0-01: UK Defence Doctrine , 17, para 1.48.

17 Bernard Brodie, ‘War in the atomic age’, in Bernard Brodie (ed), The Absolute Weapon (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946); here quoted from Thomas G. Mahnken and Joseph A. Maiolo (eds), Strategic Studies: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2008), 203, 205.

18 Ministry of Defence, Joint Doctrine Publication 0-01: UK Defence Doctrine , 3–4, paras 1.1–1.4.

19 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), part 1, ch. 13.

20 Paul Kennedy and George J. Andreopoulos, ‘The laws of war: some concluding reflections’, in Michael Howard, George J. Andreopoulos and Mark R. Shulman (eds), The Laws of War: Constraints on Warfare in the Western World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 219; see also G. I. A. D. Draper, ‘Wars of national liberation and war criminality’, in Michael Howard, Restraints on War: Studies in the Limitation of Armed Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 147–8, 160.

21 Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End 1917–1923 (London: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).

CHAPTER 1

‘Winning’ in Classical Antiquity and the Roman Conception of Victory

Ali Parchami

The notion of ‘winning’ in classical antiquity invokes, for a western audience, images of Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar. They may also be familiar with famous deeds from the period which, despite ending in defeat, still resonate of audacity and heroism: the last stand of King Leonidas of Sparta at Thermopylae; Hannibal’s army crossing the Alps; the slave revolt led by Spartacus; or the military feats of the adventurer king, Pyrrhus of Epirus, who has bequeathed the term ‘Pyrrhic Victory’. These examples remind us that the concept of victory can be fluid, subjective and sometimes understood and gauged only with the benefit of hindsight. They also serve as cautionary tales: what may ostensibly be a significant tactical or operational triumph could still end in strategic defeat. Pyrrhus, Hannibal and Spartacus were all visionary commanders who showed considerable ingenuity in the field of battle and yet all three were eventually overcome. Alexander’s ‘world conquest’ proved transient and, as he lay dying, his empire was already being carved up by the Diadochi – his successor generals. Caesar’s victorious military campaigns could neither safeguard his political career nor shield him from the daggers of assassins. Yet operational defeat can occasionally translate into victory: the small force of Greek allies led by Leonidas was resoundingly defeated by the Persian invaders but their demise has become part of a lore that is celebrated by posterity as a ‘triumph in defeat’. The reception of defeat can, therefore, be an indicator of how different cultures view ‘winning’.

While antiquity provides us with a richly varied range of successes in the face of adversity, it is Rome that western audiences will most likely associate with the idea of victory. Its enduring legacy notwithstanding, Rome ruled the Mediterranean basin for nearly a millennium: its formidable legions – with their unparalleled training, discipline and organisation – were to become a template for all professional military forces that have followed. In popular culture, Rome is often portrayed as a juggernaut which mercilessly crushed all opposition before it. This characterisation is not inaccurate, but we must remember that Rome’s beginnings were that of a humble city-state – one of many such polities in the Italian peninsula. The rise of Rome was both incremental and fraught with numerous setbacks and defeats. So, what made the Romans one of the most fearsome powers in history? To attribute Rome’s ascendency to the strength of its legions alone would be too simplistic and overlook what Virgil – the national poet – identified in the Aeneid as Rome’s greatest strength: the character of its people supposedly moulded by the gods. Rome’s complex social and political structures, and its cultural mores and religion, produced what could only be characterised as an irrepressible national will to dominate.

From the mid-Republic to the early decades of Empire, Rome was an expansionist state constantly at war. Though on occasions it was beaten by its enemies, it never acknowledged – much less could bring itself to accept – defeat. If a field army ever surrendered, the Senate could be expected to denounce the general, reject any agreed terms and declare for the continuation of the war. Even when they suffered military catastrophes, the Romans viewed these monumental defeats as a mere ‘setback’ on the path to victory. During the dark days of the Second Punic War, when Rome was engaged in a protracted and existential conflict with Carthage, it was not its legions that saved the city from the Hannibalic invasion but its remarkable resilience and determination to overcome and prevail. Nor was Rome ever willing to acquiesce to peace terms unless it involved the full and complete subjugation of the enemy. Tellingly, the Roman conception of peace – pax – is more akin to the English word ‘pacification’ than what is otherwise understood by our modern sensibilities. Rome could never make peace with a nemesis on equal terms because it viewed itself as an instrument of the gods. Its cultural rites entrenched a deep-seated patriotism that invited reverence for the state as the embodiment of public religion. Imbued with the idea that Rome was eternal and unstoppable, its citizen body was inculcated with the belief that, even if individual Romans could be conquered and Roman armies overwhelmed, the Roman people could never be defeated: for they were the personification of invictus.

To appreciate how ‘winning’ was understood in classical antiquity, we will first consider it in the broader context of ancient civilisations, particularly the Greek and the Hellenistic conceptions of victory, before turning our attention to Rome’s unique interpretation.

Winning in classical antiquity

Across the ancient world, the notion of victory was predicated on each civilisation’s social-political traditions and was informed by their cultural outlook.¹ There were, nonetheless, commonalities: whether it was the Mesopotamian empires, the Old or New Kingdoms of Pharaonic Egypt, or the Carthaginians and the Greeks, religion played a significant role in how victory was viewed and received. Widely considered as a gift bestowed by the gods, each civilisation performed a set of religious rites to please their deities in the hope of securing victory in conflict or in a crisis. Just as important was the extent to which success in war determined the power and authority of rulers. Victory brought with it not only prestige but also legitimacy by signifying that rulers were favoured by the gods. This, in turn, underlined their role as the protectors of their subjects and helped project the image of effective leadership. Another by-product of a successful military campaign was riches in the form of booty, slaves and territories.² So victory came to be primarily associated with the favour of the gods, political power, military success and material gain.

To this mix we can add communal security, collective identity and individual ambitions. In an age when no international law existed to regulate the use of force, every polity had to undertake measures to defend itself against external attack. Defeat could be costly and entail heavy financial burdens or, worse, the massacre or the enslavement of an entire population. The cuneiform inscriptions of the Assyrian kings boastfully relate how they terrorised neighbouring peoples and, in some instances, altogether extinguished them. Similarly, the enslavement of the Israelites and their Babylonian captivity is a familiar tale from the Old Testament. Warding off adversaries and the ability to project power beyond one’s realm was, therefore, a key measure of success. However, security is a relative term, and, for ancient communities, it was ephemeral and subject to inevitable challenge. For