Victory in War: Foundations of Modern Military Policy (review)

Arguing that the absence of a modern theory of victory makes it difficult to assess success in war, Martel's book is explicitly designed as an aid to current American policy. That is part of the problem with this book because it devotes far too little attention to non-American war-making and concepts of victory. The historical approach is very much Western, and both China and India are totally omitted. This is not simply a case of questionable emphasis, which is a problem with all our work, but rather one of wholesale omission. That is scarcely an encouraging start to a review, but I could be more positive if the title was restricted to the U.S.A. From that perspective, Martel, Associate Professor of International Security Studies at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, has identified a key problem and thus picked a good topic. There is indeed, as he argues, a lack of clarity about victory, although, looked at differently, that reflects the very broad range of tasking necessarily involved in conflict and one that it is too easy to underrate. Tasking indeed is a central concept, as I tried to argue in my Rethinking Military History (New York: Routledge, 2004), not least because it encompasses civil control (a topic Martel underplays) alongside foreign war and also clarifies the varied meanings of the definition of victory in terms of persuading an opponent that he has lost. Thus, tasking is in a dynamic relationship with ideologically and culturally defined perceptions of victory and defeat. These vary in time and place, and it is very difficult to influence the perceptions of others. If this presents one way to argue that war is an aspect of the cultural project of conflict, that underlines the military and political difficulties of winning.

Most of Martel's book is devoted to case studies of American military interventions from 1986 to 2003: in Libya, Panama, the Persian Gulf, Bosnia and Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. These are followed by a chapter on military power and victory which notes, for example, the use and also disadvantages of air power, and discusses the ways in which the U.S. military is modernising itself technologically to be more relevant to the kinds of war that the U.S. may confront. An interesting book, but there is room for a study of other contemporary concepts of victory, for example those of terrorists which Martel only briefly addresses, and the light they throw on American policy. None of those cited on the back cover, a list that includes John Kerry and Fred Kagan, trouble to note the omission of much of the world. No wonder Western policy is in such a mess, which is distinctly worrying for those of us who are rightly troubled by the goals and methods of many non-Western states.