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Seventy-five years after the Red Army won the war in Europe, this victory is marred by two controversies. The first asks: What was the contribution of the Soviets to victory in World War II? The se...

The United States government has no organised way of thinking about war termination other than seeking decisive military victory. This implicit assumption is inducing three major errors. First, the...

This article examines how scholars of the just war tradition think about the ethical dilemmas that arise in the endgame phase of modern warfare. In particular, it focuses upon their reticen...

A military cannot hope to improve in wartime if it cannot learn. Ideally, in wartime, formal learning ceases and the application of knowledge begins. But this is optimistic. In 1942, USAAF Eighth Air Force assumed it had the means necessary for victory. In reality, its technique and technology were only potentially – rather than actually – effective. What remained was to create the practice of daylight bombing – to learn. This article (1) recovers a wartime learning process that created new knowledge, (2) tests existing tacit hypotheses in military adaptation research, and (3) offers additional theoretical foundation to explain how knowledge is created in wartime

Nicholas Lambert argues that in 1912 Britain believed it had developed an economic warfare strategy that promised a quick and bloodless victory in the event of war against Germany. This article scrutinises this argument and demonstrates that its evidential and methodological flaws render it untenable.

This is a short commentary on Dmitry Adamsky’s recent article ‘The 1983 Nuclear Crisis – Lessons for Deterrence Theory and Practice’. First, it teases out nuances in the relationship between deterrence and strategy and considers deterrence to be both a strategy and an effect. Second, it explores the culminating point of deterrence in theory and considers it untenable, as it does not conform to the logic of, or to any logic analogous to, Clausewitz’s culminating point of victory. Deterrence logically cannot culminate. Moreover, any culminating point of deterrence would ignore why the potential deteree should perceive the actions of his deterrer in such a way as to render strengthened strategies of deterrence counterproductive. It is the deteree who is the only strategic actor to determine whether the deterrer is actually practising a successful strategy of deterrence or not.

This article challenges the widely held belief that that the United States ‘won the war but lost the peace’ following the war with Iraq in 1991. Fears of a resurgent Iraq grew throughout the decade, despite abundant evidence that Iraq was becoming desperately weak and was no longer a threat to regional security. In fact, the United States won the war as well as the peace by any meaningful definition of the term. The article also discusses the reasons why US policymakers and observers convinced themselves that they had lost. The final section considers implications for strategy and policy in wars of limited objectives.

For 74 days in mid-1999, India waged an intense war against intruding Pakistani forces on the Indian side of the Line of Control dividing Kashmir in the Himalayas. The Indian Air Force (IAF) was a key contributor to India's eventual victory in that war. Among other things, the IAF's combat performance showed how the skillful application of air-delivered firepower, especially if unmatched by the other side, can shorten and facilitate the outcome of an engagement that might otherwise have persisted indefinitely. It also showed that a favorable position in the conventional balance remains strategically useful even in conditions of mutual nuclear deterrence.

Following costly military defeats political elites usually attempt to persuade their publics that the battlefield outcome was not a shameful defeat but a ‘moral victory’. Yet, only sometimes their public accepts these claims. The paper tries to explain this variation in the domestic publics' perceptions in the cases of non-democratic entities. It is argued that the key variable that determines actors' success in claiming a moral victory is the existence of certain battlefield elements, or at least symbolic military acts/achievements of the defeated actor which can persuade his public that these battlefield elements existed. Propaganda efforts to misrepresent the battlefield facts can play only a secondary role and only under certain conditions.

J.C. Wylie presented his dichotomy of sequential and cumulative operational patterns in a context of effect through control, not victory or peace, as the objective of war. The author refines concepts of control presented by Rosinski, Eccles, Schelling and Corbett and presents its three facets (taking, denying, exercising) to develop a model of control as manipulation of the opponent's operational choices. This concept of control, when applied to sequential and cumulative strategy, reveals the effect each has operationally and, from there, strategically, in the primary arenas and forms of engagement (land, sea, air and cyberspace; conventional, guerrilla, terrorism, special operations).

Robert A. Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory: French Strategy and Operations in the Great War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Pp.592. $27.50, PB. ISBN 978-0-674-02726-8. Elizabeth Greenhalgh,...

This article examines the unspoken assumptions behind the ideal image of Blitzkrieg to be found in the literature on the Revolution in Military Affairs. This image has little in common with current historical research into the Wehrmacht's way of war. It is based on an isolated operational analysis of the German victory over France in 1940, a comparison of doctrine which ignores strategic and economic factors, and the removal of the Eastern Front from the picture of Nazi warfare. This image of Blitzkrieg in fact reflects post-Vietnam American warfighting ideals. Taken together with a widespread and uncritical admiration for the Wehrmacht, it raises the question of the extent to which defense intellectuals are disciplined by a methodology designed to weed out bad theory and self-serving assumptions.

Despite recent attention, the Korean War (1950–53) remains underappreciated and further explanation of its ‘forgottenness’ is needed. Korea originally faded to gray because there was no satisfying victory. National security planners had ample reason to try and rehabilitate the war in the mind of the public, but had little success. This was because a primary accomplishment of the second half of the war – forcing the enemy to accept so-called voluntary repatriation of POWs (prisoners of war) – was semi-secret and never declared as a major war aim. Since the nation was never united around securing voluntary repatriation, there was little raw material for creating a memory of success.

This article exposes some of the problems of ‘classical’ British ‘hearts and minds’ counter-insurgency theory of the sixties by applying it to the Northern Ireland conflict. The four requirements of counter-insurgency theory were: demonstrating ‘political will’ to defeat the insurgents as the key to victory; the importance of ‘the battle for hearts and minds’ of the affected population; ‘police primacy’ over the army in defeating insurgents; and the importance of civil-military coordination to bring together all the elements of a successful counter-insurgency campaign. Five problems are identified with ‘classical’ counter-insurgency theory. First, counter-insurgency theory emphasises the role of the government in defeating insurgency but does not draw attention to the tensions this can create between the political and military elites and the possible consequences for democracy. Second, the theory is found to be ambiguous and open to highly divergent interpretations, in particular on the use of fo...

This article examines the notion of so-called decisive victory, and the apparent relationship between battlefield victory and strategic success. It argues that there is no necessary causal relationship between what happens on the battlefield and the eventual outcomes of wars. It further argues that the Revolution in Military Affairs, because it appears to render battlefield success so much more attainable, further complicates muddled strategic thinking on these issues, and may actually be counter-productive to strategic success.

The pattern of civil–military interaction in India is informed by the notion that civilians should refrain from involvement in operational matters. The emergence of this trend can be traced back to the defeat against China in 1962. In its aftermath, the belief that the debacle occurred because of civilian interference took hold. Thereafter, politicians restricted themselves to giving overall directives, leaving operational matters to the military. The Indian ‘victory’ in the subsequent war with Pakistan was seen as vindicating this arrangement. This essay argues that the conventional reading of the China crisis is at best misleading and at worst erroneous. Further, it contends that the subsequent war with Pakistan actually underscores the problems of civilian non-involvement in operational issues. The historical narrative underpinning the norm of civilian abstention is at the very least dubious.

In the aftermath of Israel's stunning victory over Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian forces during the 1967 Six-Day War, accolades for the victory were often showered upon the Israeli Air Force (IAF). Indeed, many believed that it had been Israeli air power that had been the decisive element in the war by first eliminating the Arab air forces and then obliterating the Arab armies in turn. While the IAF did play an extremely important role in the fighting, it was not the decisive element of Israeli victory, and its impact was felt in very different ways from the common perception. Indeed, an appreciation of the true role of Israeli air power in the war reinforces both the importance of psychological factors in combat, and the ability of air forces to have a psychological impact disproportionate to their physical impact.

Military Power's argument is straightforward enough: victory and defeat in warfare have, since 1900, resulted from mastery of what the author calls ‘the modern system’ of tactics, the essence of wh...

Over the past 15 years Israel has been involved in a bitter counter-insurgency campaign against the Palestinians. Palestinian insurgency, particularly during the current Al-Aqsa Intifada, has posed serious challenges to the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). Whilst being able to adapt successfully its tactics to Palestinian terror and urban guerrilla warfare in order to reduce the level of Palestinian violence, the IDF has not been able to achieve a battlefield decision or victory. This has been due to the nature of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, which ultimately necessitates the provision of a political solution by the Israeli political leadership, which has relied too often on the IDF as a panacea for its own strategic and political indecisiveness vis-a-vis the Palestinian national question.

It is common to attribute the operational difficulties faced by post-Napoleonic armies to an increase in defensive firepower. In fact, the immense ‘mass armies’ of the day also suffered from problems of command, control and information that ultimately worked to their undoing. The German achievement in the interwar period went beyond tanks and aircraft. It also involved harnessing the radio to the service of the field army. Radio made it possible to coordinate mobile masses of men and equipment and to process the huge amounts of information they generated. The smooth flow of information was key to the Wehrmacht's revival of decisive battlefield victory in 1939–40.

In 1941, the British instituted a comprehensive system of convoys in the Atlantic. One of the first convoys, OG 71, while sailing between Britain and Gibraltar, was shadowed by German aircraft and attacked by U‐boats. In the ensuing August battle, while no U‐boats were sunk, the British lost, out of a convoy consisting of 22 vessels, two escorts and eight merchant ships. The German victory was not complete owing to the inability of the German aircraft and U‐boats to cooperate successfully as well as the failure of the U‐boats to fight the battle effectively and aggressively. The British also made many mistakes during the defence of Convoy OG 71. The surface escorts made many errors of tactics; as for the British aircraft, owing to an inability to cooperate with the surface forces, they became almost totally ineffective. One bright spot for the British during the battle, however, was communications intelligence. The battle saw the first use of high frequency direction finders and on several occasions skill...

One of the most commonly expressed opinions about victory in the Second World War is that the Soviet Union was mostly responsible for beating Nazi Germany. Supposedly the great land war fought between these two powers in the East was the decisive front in Europe. The West's contribution to German defeat, on the other hand, is often seen as somewhat marginal. The Anglo‐American strategic bombing campaign in 1943 paid few dividends and it was not until after the Normandy landings in June 1944 that the West really began to divert a large amount of German resources. The purpose of this article is to challenge some of these basic notions. Through analysing what Germany produced, where it was sent and how it was destroyed, the West's contribution to defeating Germany moves from an ancillary position to a dominant one. Taking German war production as a whole, from 1943 onwards the West was responsible for tying down and destroying a significantly larger share than the Soviet Union.

With the outbreak of war in September 1939, Italy's presence in Abyssinia (Ethiopia) was a serious concern for Britain. Yet not until Italy declared war in June 1940 did London accept the recommendation of military planners to defeat Italy by aiding the Abyssinian Patriots whom the Italians were unable to quell. The subsequent campaign, christened ‘raising the tribes’ made an important contribution to victory in Italian East Africa at very small cost to Britain. This article explores the changing assessments of the value of ‘raising the tribes’, the planning for the campaign, its results and its value to Britain's war effort.