As the coach said, "We gotta get back to the basics!"
There is nothing more basic than understanding the four ways by which military strategy has sought victory during the long and very bloody history of the human race. While most of the examples referenced are drawn from Western experience, trust ole Doc Geek, war and the four avenues to victory have existed everywhere wars have been waged.
The most basic avenue to victory is that of annihilation. The target of military operations is the enemy's forces in the field. The goal is the total destruction of these forces in one climatic battle, or as an alternative, a short series of battles.
Back when armies were small and combat was always face-to-face, the battle of annihilation was quite possible. The most often used examples of the battle of annihilation were those of Hannibal against the Romans during the Punic War. Not once but twice Hannibal encircled and obliterated the hapless Roman legions, thus establishing the paradigm of what has been the general's wet dream ever since.
The growth of mass armies and industrialized warfare seemed to spell the end of annihilation as a viable avenue to victory. But, when a massive asymmetry exists in firepower, mobility as well as the integrity and efficiency of command and control systems, the battle of annihilation can still be brought to pass. This was demonstrated dramatically during the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Now for the bad news. Annihilation does not bring victory in the sense of successful hostilities termination. What happened to Hannibal following his two splendid little victories? Yep, that's right, nothing. He and his small army wandered around Italy for awhile, went home, and eventually his successors were destroyed by a Rome which had never lost its political will even when its legions were gone.
You see the parallel with Iraq, right? No victory parade regardless of "Mission Accomplished" banners and presidential grins. The political will of those Iraqis who feared, loathed, or hated the US and other foreign interlopers made their position plain. Sectarian rivals (which really means political opponents) did the same. The result was no hostilities termination let alone conflict resolution. (That's right, the two terms are not identical with implications which will come later.)
Although the term got a bad rep during World War I and an even worse one in the course of the American War In Vietnam, attrition is a perfectly valid and often employed avenue to victory. Once again the target of military operations is the enemy's forces in the field. The goal is the progressive reduction of these forces over a relatively long time. This implies the winning side can kill its opponents faster than they can be replaced--and faster than the opponent can do the same to the eventual winner.
It is important to note that while the strategy of attrition is valid, it has never been responsible in and of itself for victory. Attrition has always looped into one of the next two avenues.
The third route to victory is erosion. Implementing the erosion strategy requires the target be the enemy's material capacity to wage war. This means destroying or disrupting the enemy's factories, agricultural base, transportation infrastructure, and other facilities critical to the continuation of the war. In the process, the enemy's forces in the field are attacked only in so far as doing such serves to overstretch and eventually break the lines of supply and the goodies fed into those lines.
The Anaconda Plan developed by Winfield Scott for defeating the Confederacy was primarily one of victory through erosion. The strategic bombing campaign of World War II, particularly in Europe, also sought victory by emphasizing erosion. The enormous resilience of industrial states with a large infrastructure and a population which can be mobilized effectively for the war effort can successfully resist erosion. This remains true even when it is multiplied in effect by attrition of the forces in the field.
What is remarkable about World War II in Europe is not that Germany was defeated. What is remarkable is the amount of time, effort, and blood the job required.
Parsed closely all three avenues outlined point to the supremacy of the final route to winning--enervation. Enervation, the progressive reduction of the enemy's political will to continue the war--is the most effective of the several alternative approaches. It is also the least well understood by military and governmental decision makers and planners. It is also the avenue least likely to be consciously chosen.
Even though the American War of Independence was won because the British elite lost the will to continue, Americans refused to accept the reality that it was not the Americans winning but the British losing which brought independence in its wake. Nonetheless, it was an American, William Sherman, who first implemented the strategy of enervation with deliberate premeditation.
Sherman, who had lived and worked in the south, understood the conflict of loyalties which could be created in the mind of Confederate troops if their homeland seemed wide open to Yankee threat. He conceived his March to the Sea as being the mechanism which would cause the collapse of morale in the Confederate forces as well as the will to continue the war in the minds of civilians generally.
The immense success of General Sherman's concept can be seen in several ways. One of the easiest is to look at one surrender. No, not the famous one of Lee to Grant. Rather the surrender to Sherman of Johnston's army, which at the time it surrendered was intact, under arms, well ordered, and securely ensconced in the mountains of North Carolina from which it could have waged guerrilla war for years. But, all hands saw no point in the exercise after the great sweeps of the March to the Sea and its successor, the March Upcountry.
Centralized, authoritarian regimes are both more and less able to resist enervation than democratic, decentralized ones. This can be seen in World War II.
The Germans never lost political will. Not until the Russian tanks and Mongolian infantry were in Berlin and the Anglo-American forces in Western and Southern Germany did the Nazi remnants toss in the sponge. Mass surrenders by German troops did not occur until the last few weeks of the war when the prospect of being taken captive by the Russians served as the stimulus to call out "Kamerad" as the Yanks or Brits drew near.
The Soviet central regime showed the same characteristic as their Nazi opponents. Once Stalin recovered his nerve a few days into the invasion, the Soviets never lost their will to resist and re-conquer. (Even if the Americans always feared the separate peace and based too much policy on this self-generated delusion.)
The story in Imperial Japan was quite different. Here the High Command, both civilian and military, was, in the main, in favor of fighting on even in the face of probable defeat. The bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima did not alter the views of these men. The mushrooms over Japan did change the mind of one man--the emperor. Hirohito made the call, "we must bear the unbearable, endure the unendurable."
On occasion enervation may occur without intent. This is what happened in August 1918 at the battle of Amiens. The British breakthrough so unnerved the war lords, Hindenburg and Ludendorf, that they advised the Kaiser the war must be ended as they could no longer guarantee the capacity of the Army to continue.
The German army had a lot of fight left in it as was shown in the aftermath of Amiens. The German population was suffering under the twin scourges of the "famine blockade" and the coming of the great flu pandemic, but the army could have kept on keeping on just as the Americans and the Allies expected. But, nerve once lost, political will once abandoned, cannot be regained. The road to Allied victory was paved by the weak knees of the German High Command.
The US lost its war in Vietnam through a case of self-inflicted enervation. This does not excuse nor ignore the raw fact that the US military fought the war in the wrong way so as to hand the political will advantage to the North Vietnamese. Nor were the antiwar protesters in and of themselves particularly responsible for the loss of political will stateside.
The sapping of American political will came from a complex of reasons poorly understood at the time and not deeply investigated by historians through the present. Basically, the combination of the draft, high American body counts, and the absence of any particular likelihood of anything approximating success were responsible for the steady loss of political will. Americans were used to "crusades" against an identifiable "evil" enemy against which we would muster all our strength and see "good" prevail in short order. We were not particularly enthused with limited wars in support of policy as the Korean War had shown a few years earlier.
Political will is a tough critter to target. This is particularly true when the enemy is a set of self-organizing groups bound together by nothing more tangible than a series of religiously rooted beliefs. In comparison to the motley and ever changing assemblage of Islamist jihadist groups and their individual members, the US is a soft target for enervation.
Absent the spur of an attack upon us or strong, decisive leadership capable of articulating a compelling reason for continuing a seemingly endless war with no prospect of anything approaching a "victory," American political will is fragile, easily enervated.
It is not surprising that support for the war in Afghanistan is slowly dropping. The surprise is that it lasted this long.
The US will not win against the Islamist jihadists whether in Afghanistan or elsewhere by enervating their political will--at least not in the foreseeable future. We can, however, defeat ourselves by losing our political will.
The real foreign policy challenge for President Obama and the others in his administration is not the specifics of a strategy for Afghanistan where success will remain quite elusive if one wants success to be defined by a Taliban surrender or the creation of a fully functioning state governed from Kabul. The real challenge is maintaining the political will of We the People lest we travel the avenue to victory called "enervation"--a victory for the jihadists.
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