It was supposed to be a ‘special military operation’ by the Russian Armed Forces in Ukraine that should have achieved what it set out to do, i.e. regime change in Kyiv, in a week or so at most. And yet, here we are beyond 150 days (at the time of writing) of a brutal war in Eastern Europe that shows no signs of letting up and even fewer of a decisive victory by one side or the other. Is this the new face of conflict in the 21st Century, where there may be no obvious victors or vanquished? Or was it just a combination of ill-considered assumptions, ill-planning and poor leadership cocooned from frank and contrary advice compounded by poor execution? Were/are Russian armed forces poorly informed and led? The answers are not straightforward or easy to reach. It is very much possible that Russia will still grind out a victory well short of the original aims. On the other hand, Kyiv’s leaders could also proclaim Russia’s inability to achieve most, if not all, of the stated objectives in a short time frame as a Ukrainian victory in itself. War, as the saying goes, has a grammar and vocabulary of its own and very few, if any, have the genius to master its complexity and achieve victory as originally intended.

Defining Victory

Even a seemingly straightforward term such as victory is prone to varied interpretation, especially when it comes to deciding the outcome of military operations in the 21st Century. Defining victory, which is sought to be achieved through the waging of war should, on the face of it, be a relatively easy proposition. Yet, there are multiple versions of what constitutes victory, the scale ranging from an outright defeat to massive victory, with many points along the scale that delineate degrees of success.1 War being a continuation of politics by other means, victory in war is also subject to political interpretation and subjectivity, thus making it difficult to assess genuine success in conflict in most cases. What counts in the end is the strategic outcome. The story of a conversation between Colonel Harry Summers and a North Vietnamese officer after the Vietnam War is worth mentioning in this context. Summers commented that the United States had won all the battles, and the North Vietnamese replied, “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”2 From the level of victory, be it tactical, or politico-military strategical, to the achievement of a desired change in the status quo, and the level of effort exerted by a state, each factor impinges on the nature of victory achieved.3 Nations that declared military victory when major combat ended, have over time found themselves on the losing side strategically. The 21st Century is replete with such examples as wars in Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan have shown. Robert Mandel, an American professor of international affairs, writes in his 2007 book The Meaning of Military Victory that while the term victory suggests an endpoint, in some of the contemporary wars, organised military forces may be just a one-armed faction in a prolonged power struggle – and success may only be appreciated with hindsight. The Taliban’s stunning strategic victory in July 2021 in Afghanistan is a case in point, when all metrics in the military equation seemed to suggest that the Afghan National Army, backed by US and NATO advisors and airpower, could hold key areas. Mandel therefore, correctly insists that victory has to be judged by political rather than purely military criteria.

Decisive Battle to Decisive Victory

One has to only look back a few centuries, to a time when the power of the sovereign and the military commander resided mostly within the same individual, with means of waging war on land limited to line infantry, horse drawn artillery and cavalry. This is when the allure of decisive battle, which delivered spectacular national victory over another state emerged. Here the nature of strategic decision making, and outcome of battles was such that a key engagement over a period of a few hours, or a day, could lead to decisive victory by a kingdom or state over another. At times a series of such engagements in a short military campaign would result in the desired victory. An oft quoted example to explain this is the Battle of Leuthen, fought on 5th December 1757 between the Prussians, led by Frederick the Great, against a much larger Austrian force. The battle was Frederick's greatest victory, perhaps the greatest use of tactics in his career. In one day, Frederick had regained every advantage the Austrians had won earlier that year at Breslau and Schweidnitz and ended the Austrian attempt to reclaim Silesia.4 Thus, the concept of a decisive military victory in battle was more or less synonymous with decisive victory at the politico-military and strategic levels as well. This uncertain connect has however continued to influence the minds of political leaders and military planners well into the 20th Century, even as the complexity of waging war at the close of the 19th Century clearly pointed to the inability of a single individual to influence the course of events, or a single decisive battle being capable of bringing a recalcitrant foe to heel. Prussian victories over the Austrians and French in the campaigns of 1866 and 1870 respectively are even today remembered more for the victories at Königgrätz and Sedan, than for the bloody, grinding campaigns that led to such battles.

The whole point here is to highlight that the human mind tends to seize a simple construct: that of large battles leading to annihilation of a foe in a short period of time. The infamous Schlieffen Plan and the Pearl Harbour Plan are just two such examples, while pushing to the back of the mind the inconvenient fact that the tools for the conduct of war have become so lethal and extensive, with overlapping multiple domains. It is now seemingly no longer within the grasp of a few individuals, supported by a general staff, to pull off the kind of decisive victories that result in total capitulation of an enemy. With the introduction of the aircraft in World War 1 and expansion of the land and maritime domains, followed by the utter devastation rained down on Axis nations involved in WW II, total destruction became a means to achieve decisive victory. To all this, with the addition of nuclear weapons, the problem of waging war that is quick and decisive has increased enormously. Today, space, cyber and the exploitation of new technologies such as drones, AI enabled autonomous weapons, information warfare and hypersonic platforms are touted as game changers for traditional means of waging war. Even relatively weaker nations and non-state actors can acquire such capabilities and stymie larger players. We have seen this play out in Syria, in Yemen and are seeing it in Ukraine as well.

War as a Wicked Problem

War is a ‘wicked’ problem. These are problems that are difficult to define, have no set solutions, perhaps even no solutions, and they could be symptoms of an underlying deeper problem, to name but a few of their characteristics. The adjective ‘wicked’ was initially supposed to describe ‘the mischievous and even evil quality of these problems, where proposed solutions often turn out to be worse than the symptom.’5 No endeavour demands so much of human capital along with a nation’s physical, economic and moral resources as does the planning and conduct of war. It is, in the final analysis, a social phenomenon in which one side attempts to impose its will over the other by sheer physical force and pain of death. As Clausewitz stated in his very definition of war, it is “an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.”6 Coupled with the fact that nation states and their militaries - even powerful ones - do not go to war very often, the attainment of predictable outcomes through the employment of the military as an instrument of decision in major disputes, is never really in the hands of one side or the other. Two senior Israeli military officers in an essay last year on the Israeli Defence Forces’ victory doctrine have this to say; “An operational military doctrine does not function in a void. It is required to serve the ideas and goals of a broader concept - a national security strategy. This strategy is required to answer fundamental questions, such as what are the country’s national security objectives; what warfare goals the military must attain when an armed conflict starts; and in what way it is required to act for such purpose.”7 Quite often a divergence or disconnect between a state’s national security objectives and its military’s operational doctrine for victory leads to confusion and unwanted outcomes.

Military Balance

A quick glance at the military balance of power of key nations would reveal that while force equations in terms of numbers and types of aircraft, missiles, ships and ground troops, (as also nuclear warheads of a select few) are easy to list and compare, factors that are never easily identifiable or evident are vital. These are related to training, quality of leadership at the strategic and operational levels, critical high-tech manufacturing capabilities, civil-military interface in a crisis, and a host of inter-related national capacities from critical infra to the human, natural, industrial and agricultural base, to name just a few. When a nation sets out on a course for war, how quickly, efficiently and extensively can it tap into all of these is a major determining factor in whether given war aims are likely to be attained. It was the genuine fear of such resources being the ultimate arbiters of strategic victory or defeat in WW2 that gave rise to the apocryphal story of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, of the Imperial Japanese Navy, when asked his opinion about the outcome of war, pessimistically stating that the only way for Japan to win the war was to dictate terms in the White House. National will and the determination to resist are also an intangible yet vital ingredient in the mix when countries fight. If it is not factored in by all protagonists, the strategic outcome of war may surprise leaders who took the risk to initiate a conflict.

Achieving Victory

All of which brings us back to the question, “is decisive victory achievable anymore?” To qualify, when powerful states decide to wage war against a perceived weaker country - albeit not a push over - have they ensured the correct identification of a desired strategic end-state? Is it achievable through the planned application of all strategic and military resources? What are the external manoeuvres through various other instruments of national power that are needed for shaping the external environment? Have major strategic risks of such an act been identified and a mitigation strategy or strategies to address these drawn up? Is the general population aware and involved in the overall scheme of things? Are measures to guard the citizens from subversion, disinformation and propaganda in place and active across all domains of information? The list of questions and activities is endless and ever increasing. The domains to be addressed have expanded well beyond the traditional three to outer space and cyber. The whole point being that an act of waging war in the 21st Century is a complex and uncertain process, which is no longer in the control of any one set of leaders or individuals.

Decision to Wage War

Therefore, any decision to go to war today ought to be counterbalanced by the utter complexity of the nature and process of waging war itself. Rational leaders ought to think twice before taking such a step because of the uncertainty of outcomes and the horrendous costs of war. Seeking decisive victory of the kind witnessed at the end of the Second World War, or even Gulf War I, is probably no longer an achievable aim. This would be a rational conclusion through the conduct of simulations and war games. There have been exceptions to this. The Taliban in Afghanistan most recently and the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict in Nagorno Karabakh in 2020 have proven to be outliers in the strategic victory sweep-stakes. In an interconnected and interdependent world, the repercussions of trying to seek all-out victory in war over another state are far too many, and the risks immense for humanity as a whole. Even so, the ongoing war in Ukraine has established that despite all the challenges and complexities of using the military as the preferred instrument of coercion, countries with revisionist tendencies will still use it to try and attain political goals. The Chinese obsession about Taiwan is one such case in point.

Lessons

The ongoing Ukraine crisis has a lesson or two for us all. It teaches us the importance of having a capable and strong military that is self-reliant for its strategic needs. Russia, a nation known for its military research and technological prowess, is now facing shortages of key electronic components for its weapons such as cruise missiles and tactical communication systems, which it opted to source from outside in the past decade or more.8 Now, economic and trade sanctions may be impacting it considerably. The war also highlights the need for not underestimating an opponent, however weak and infirm they may seem from the outside. Imbibing incorrect lessons from past experiences and templating these on a larger scale is fraught with unintended second and third order effects. Vladimir Putin and his top military commanders seem to have based their Ukrainian invasion of 2022 on the experiences of annexing Crimea and forcing Ukraine to accept the new reality in Donbas ever since 2014, little realising that the era of setting out ambitious geo-strategic and political aims that challenge the existing international order, tenuous and flawed as it may be, may be over. We do need to mull over the reality that the military will remain a key instrument of statecraft for exerting national will, but one that needs to be much more of a deterrent and punitive force than for blunt use with an open-ended mandate for application. Setbacks and unexpected occurrences are in the very nature of waging conventional war. An ability to foresee these, to the extent possible, and maintain an overall direction and tempo through adversity should be the major focus of strategic and operational leadership development and key national resource and force integration exercises. Finally, nations and militaries need to be circumspectof their own prowess, yet capable and determined enough to protect national interests and achieve limited objectives at the strategic level. In the end, it needs no reiteration that military victory, as was perceived in the 19th and 20th Centuries, has to be redefined for the present times. Lessons from wars fought since 2001 have made it abundantly clear that the definition of strategic victory sought by any nation using the military and other instruments of national power needs to be re-stated in terms that allow it to remain within a nation’s grasp, as dictated by the realities of present times and not become a chimera.

Endnotes

  1. JB Bartholomees, “Theory of Victory,” Parameters vol. 38, no. 2 (2008). http://doi:10.55540/0031-1723.2419, accessed 27 April 2022.

  2. Harry G. Summers Jr., On Strategy: The Vietnam War in Context (Carlisle: Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, 1981), 1.

  3. Bartholomees, Op Cit., n.1.

  4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Leuthen, accessed 27 May 2022.

  5. CW Churchman, “Wicked Problems,” Management Science vol. 13, no. 4, (1967), 141-142.

  6. Carl Von Clausewitz, On War, eds. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1976), 75.

  7. Gabi Siboni and Yuval Bazak. “The IDF Victory Doctrine: The Need for an Updated Doctrine,” The Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies. https://jiss.org.il/en/siboni-idf-victory-doctrine-the-need-for-an-updated-doctrine/, accessed 28 April 2022.

  8. Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds, “Operation Z: The Death Throes of an Imperial Delusion,” RUSI Special Report, 22 April 2022.