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Andrew Payne, Planning to fail: the US wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan; Why America loses wars: limited war and US strategy from the Korean War to the present, International Affairs, Volume 96, Issue 2, March 2020, Pages 560–562, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiaa034
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‘We never win. And we don't fight to win.’ There may be more than a kernel of truth to President Donald Trump's recent assessment of America's war record. With few exceptions, the American experience in major conflicts since 1945 has been characterized by stalemate, quagmire and the illusion of victory. In seeking to understand why the United States has repeatedly failed to win its wars, these two books share a common purpose. At a broad level, their respective diagnoses also share a number of common themes. Decision-makers have all too often pursued short-sighted policies, allowed consideration of means to define political ends and failed to think through logically the consequences of their actions. From here, the two accounts begin to diverge.
According to Donald Stoker, the root problem is one of strategic illiteracy. Political and military leaders ‘do not understand how to think about waging wars, and thus don't wage them effectively’ (p. 18). Based on a close reading of Clausewitz, the author insists that all wars should be defined by the political objectives being sought, since everything else, from strategy to tactics, flows from this first principle. The failure to understand this fundamental point has left leaders incapable of identifying or articulating coherent political goals, worryingly uninterested in the very concept of ‘victory’, and therefore prone to pursue wars without end. Policy-makers have apparently not been helped by a generation of limited war theorists, moreover, most of whom are guilty of defining war by the means used to fight it, rather than the all-important political purpose. In Stoker's view, limited war, at least as defined by many scholars of the twentieth century, is an analytically bankrupt concept, just as he considers more recent terms such as hybrid warfare, low-intensity conflict and grey zone war essentially meaningless. In making this case, the author seeks to slay a number of intellectual giants, including Thomas Schelling, Bernard Brodie and Robert Osgood. Mincing no words, Stoker admonishes these leading theorists for their production of dangerously flawed frameworks which make up ‘the shaky edifice that is the current approach to defining wars’ (p. 24).
