Victory in War: Foundations of Modern Military Policy

Extract

Victory in War: Foundations of Modern Military Policy. By William C. Martel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 436p. $35.00.

With the United States currently fighting protracted wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the question of what it means to achieve victory in war has never been more important for U.S. foreign policy. While policymakers, scholars, and military strategists have studied for millennia how to achieve victory in armed conflict, Victory in War seeks to provide an answer to a more fundamental question: What precisely is the meaning of victory in war and how do we know when victory is achieved? William C. Martel begins this book with the basic premise that there is currently no theory, framework, or set of organizing principles for understanding victory, yet paradoxically, “the implicit assumption [is] that the unalloyed purpose of [war] strategy is to achieve it” (p. 3). To address this glaring omission, the author sets out to develop a “pretheory” of victory, which entails the organization of principles about victory that can provide an analytic foundation for examining the concept of victory more systematically.