Decisive Military Victory Research Articles

Making peace in the English civil wars

Abstract This article argues that peacemaking became a central strand of political debate and practice in England during the 1640s. The traumatic experiences of civil war and the failure of elite politicians to negotiate a swift settlement forced English people to think more than ever before about how peace could be achieved and preserved. Those outside the usual spheres of political decision-making now offered themselves up as mediators between king and parliament and publicized their own schemes for national reconciliation. At the same time, the article shows how those most committed to the Parliamentarian or Royalist cause sought to present themselves as peacemakers. It argues that a crucial issue in these public debates about peace was whether a lasting settlement was more likely to be achieved through negotiation or through a decisive military victory for one side.

Slow failure: Understanding America’s quagmire in Afghanistan

ABSTRACTThe United States government has no organised way of thinking about war termination other than seeking decisive military victory. This implicit assumption is inducing three major errors. First, the United States tends to select military-centric strategies that have low probabilities of success. Second, the United States is slow to modify losing or ineffective strategies due to cognitive obstacles, internal frictions, and patron-client challenges with the host nation government. Finally, as the U.S. government tires of the war and elects to withdraw, bargaining asymmetries prevent successful transitions (building the host nation to win on its own) or negotiations.

Two paradigms of justice: criminal vs survivor justice in Africa

ABSTRACTAfrican countries continue to experience civil wars and other low-level violent conflicts. An issue relating to the intractable nature of postcolonial violence and how it should be resolved, is what is the potential for advancing contemporary peace processes and negotiated agreements through the notion of survivor justice? Two paradigms of justice have emerged in Africa in response to mass violence: criminal justice based on the example of the Nuremberg trials; and survivor justice based on political reform and exemplified by the cases of South Africa and Sudan. These two paradigms of justice are compared, with the context undergirding the debate and assumptions of each explored, and how this related to the issues of building peace in Africa. The guiding question is whether civil wars can be ended in courts. I argue that where a decisive military victory is untenable, survivor justice, that is political reform combined with judicial reconciliation, is the best way to resolve Africa’s conflicts. The example of South Africa’s political settlement and the reconciliation process in Rwanda offer examples of solutions for conflict transition to peace. Criminal justice processes – absent a decisive military victory – can act to delay and prevent peace and resolution.

Debating on Success of the Kenya Counter Insurgency on the Shifta War: Between Double Success and Little Consolation

Military operations are undertaken to attain specific political and military objectives. However, what amounts to success in military operations remains unclear. Traditionally, operation success was narrowly defined in terms of objectives of the intervention. To ‘end human suffering’, ‘regime change,’ ‘capture a city,’ and ‘rescue captured troops.’ Modern definition of military success is human centric, based on tenets of just war principle of ‘do-more-good than harm.’ In this regards, operation success is achieved when and if in the intervention some people who would have died if no military assistance was granted, fail to die because the military intervened. Further, the restorative justice approach evaluates success of military operation in terms of state ability to repair harm committed by the military in the course of the war. The assumption is that military operations result in human rights violation. Using critical discourse analysis, this article interrogates the success of Kenya’s political and military objectives in the Shifta war against the four possible outcomes in war. First diplomatic and military success. Second, diplomatic and military failure. Third, diplomatic failure but military success and fourth, diplomatic success with military failure. The Shifta war having been resolved through a ceasefire, we conclude that decisive military victory was untenable for Kenya without diplomatic efforts. Kenya’s double victory and Somalia little consolation was majorly a result of Kenya’s successful diplomatic manourvoure over Somalia’s failed international charm. Keywords: Counter insurgency, diplomatic manouvoure, military operations, Shifta war. DOI : 10.7176/IAGS/71-04 Publication date : April 30 th 2019

Peacebuilding and statebuilding in post-2011 Côte d'Ivoire: A victor's peace?

In 2011, Cote d’Ivoire emerged from a protracted politico-military crisis not through peace negotiations, but thanks to the military defeat of former president Laurent Gbagbo and his associates. Relatively little has been written about the restoration of peace after a decisive military victory and about experiences of post-conflict reconstructions where the international community does not play a leading role. Quantitative scholarship has contended that victory makes restoring peace relatively uncomplicated. In contrast, strategic scholarship has insisted that winning the war does not automatically mean ‘winning the peace’. Victors, especially former insurgents, have to maintain cohesion within the winning coalition and to co-opt or repress residual resistance from the vanquished if they want to consolidate their rule. Moreover, former insurgents often struggle to implement their vision of post-conflict governance. In Cote d’Ivoire, the winning coalition showed risks of implosion after 2011, but has been up to now able to contain them. The Ouattara administration has been able to develop its own vision of post conflict reconstruction, drawing from Ivorian political tradition and the president’s distinctive personality. However, this political project faces future obstacles, particularly in view of Ouattara’s probable retirement from politics in 2020.

The Ending of Wars and the Ending of Eras

When wars come to an end, even a decisive military victory does not necessarily translate into a decisive political outcome. Michael Clarke reflects on the nature of international warfare, systemic change, and the difficulties of defining with any clarity the outlines of ‘victory’ and ‘defeat’, especially in political terms.

The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire by Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy (review)

Reviewed by: The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire by Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy Albert H. Tillson Jr. (bio) Keywords American Revolution, King George III, Lord George Germain, British diplomacy The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. By Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. Pp. 480. Cloth, $37.50.) In this work Andrew O’Shaughnessy attempts to answer an old question—why Great Britain lost the American Revolutionary War—by separate examinations of ten British political, military, and naval leaders who oversaw the conduct of the conflict. Because these men were subjected to satire and ridicule on both sides of the Atlantic, scholars as well [End Page 666] as popular culture have unjustly come to see them as incompetent and hidebound. To understand the roots of Britain’s defeat, O’Shaughnessy argues, requires a more nuanced and complex understanding of these men and the political and material constraints within which they operated. As a group, they were far from ignorant: Most were well educated and conversant with the British Enlightenment; a number were actively involved in literary and cultural life. Although part of an oligarchy, they and other British leaders competed for positions of power and prominence through merit and hard work. Essentially, they were confronted by a war that became for many reasons unwinnable. Yet its futility was not always clear as the war progressed; the British were in fact close to victory at several points and seemed to be so at others. Beyond simply providing a more three-dimensional portrayal of these complicated men, this book’s greatest virtue is its illumination of the strong elements of division and ambivalence regarding the war, not only within the British public but also among those who led the military effort. Perhaps inevitably, O’Shaughnessy begins with George III. Although far from a tyrant and relatively uninvolved in the early stages of the imperial crisis, the king was an energetic, informed, and articulate architect of policy from the time of the Boston Tea Party through the war years. More than other leaders, he recognized that American resistance and revolt threatened both the foundations of government within Britain and the survival of British international power. He actively pressed his prime minister, Lord North, toward a more uncompromising and aggressive pursuit of victory. Opponents of the war recognized his leading role and pursued measures in Parliament and in public discourse to reduce the king’s influence upon his ministers and government policy. Lord George Germain, the secretary of state for America, shared the king’s viewpoint. He pushed for a decisive military victory, in part to forestall French entry into the war; recognized that secure control of substantial American territory was essential; and urged close coordination between the army and navy. His ability to influence policy, however, was severely limited by an earlier court martial’s condemnation of his battlefield conduct and by his widespread reputation for homosexuality. The first Lord of the Admiralty, the Earl of Sandwich, espoused similar strategic views. Ironically, in the later years of his reign, George III came to be seen as a national icon: informal and personable, wisely resisting change in a revolutionary era, and living simply and virtuously in a [End Page 667] period of aristocratic decadence. Neither Germain nor Sandwich would experience a similar reassessment. Other political and military leaders diverged from this perspective. Lord North came to doubt the prospects for success through coercion and military force even before the outbreak of hostilities. These doubts, along with a personal aversion to confrontation and decisive action, led him to repeated efforts at peace through compromise with his American adversaries—sometimes in opposition to the wishes of the king and others—and this contributed to the persistence of disunity, indecision, and lack of clear military and diplomatic policy within his administration. On the other hand, without Lord North’s charm, intellect, and gift for compromise and persuasion, Parliamentary support for the war effort would have disappeared far more quickly. Similar assessments of the limited prospects for success through exclusively military means led the...

1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh, by Srinath Raghavan

1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh, by Srinath Raghavan. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2013. 358 pp. $29.95 US (cloth). This book is about the humanitarian crisis in South Asia in 1971, at the end of which General Yahya Khan's defeated military regime gave way to the presidency of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was released from captivity to assume the leadership of the new state of Bangladesh, and India won a decisive military victory. India had refrained from early military intervention in support of the struggles of East Pakistan. But Pakistan, insisting on the right of a sovereign state to suppress secession, proceeded with a brutal military campaign in its east that caused for a massive exodus of refugees in India's direction. The internal problem of Pakistan now became an internal problem for India. As the refugee crisis worsened, India increased its military pressure on Pakistani forces in the east. When Pakistan attacked India in the west, the war ended thirteen days later, with Pakistan's surrender. This outstanding book is the first serious attempt to analyze the political breakdown and geographic breakup of Pakistan in the global context of the Cold War, decolonization, and globalization of conscience. Srinath Raghavan does not aim to study or downplay the experiences of the victims, or elaborate on the relations between East and West Pakistanis, or between non-Bengalis and Bengalis. Rather, using archival and other information available in several countries across different continents, the author investigates in ten superbly sequenced chapters the interaction and impact of the wider historical forces on this crisis and rightly concludes that the creation of Bangladesh was anything but inevitable. A major contribution of 1971 is the explanation of international and regional responses and how the pressure of public opinion, inspired by various facets of emerging globalization, such as new forms of communication, transnational humanitarianism, diffusion of the Sixties' counterculture, and diasporic activism, shaped the crisis. For example, with the global student protests of 1968, the Student Action Committee in East Pakistan demanded full autonomy for East Pakistan. Pakistani journalist Anthony Mascarenhas's report on the brutal military actions was published by the Sunday Times with the headline Genocide that reached a wider audience with the globalization of conscience. The Bengali diaspora, humanitarian organizations such as Oxfam, and the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs publicized the cause of Bangladesh. The Swinging Sixties came alive with the Concert for Bangladesh in New York. 1971 is particularly engrossing and suspenseful when explaining how the expected Cold War line-up of nations did not enter into formation during this crisis. China, devastated by the Cultural Revolution and the purges in the PLA, and to the chagrin of the United States, refrained from intervening directly in the conflict. …

Institutions, Organizational Culture, and Counterinsurgency Operations: Why Do States Fight Similar Insurgencies Differently?

This article expands our understanding of how states respond militarily to threats and challenges by examining how organizational culture and institutional policymaking structures shape states’ use of force. To evaluate the explanatory power of culture and institutions, I analyze the effect of each variable on how the United Kingdom and France conduct counterinsurgency operations. To preview the conclusions, although both organizational culture and institutional structures provide insights into how states fight insurgencies, institutional structures are much more decisive in shaping outcomes. In states where policymaking institutions promote maximal political control of the armed forces, the result will be strategic satisficing, whereby restricted force is surgically employed, along with diplomacy, to achieve the state's limited goals while minimizing the risks of casualties and/or escalation. Contrarily, in states where institutions accord operational autonomy to the armed forces, commanders will pursue their preference for decisive military victory by applying overwhelming force and conducting operations that risk escalating conflicts. In contrast to institutions, organizational culture plays a more modest role, limited to shaping how military leaders initially conceptualize the challenges they face and the techniques they employ at the tactical level. Thus, institutional structures, rather than organizational culture, offer a more convincing argument for why similar states, facing comparable challenges, use force in systematically different ways.

Understanding the lethargy of Sudan's periphery-originated insurgencies

The assumption that an insurgency effort must culminate in the seizure of state power became the go-to cliché of the twentieth-century understandings of the Civil War. However, historical counterfactuals about Sudan's civil wars have cavilled at the accuracy of this postulate. This article argues that Sudan constitutes an outlier which does not perfectly fit this established convention. In essence, many factors have combined to be the sources of Sudan's intractable, periphery-originated civil wars. Since the Torit Mutiny in August 1955, virtually all these uprisings have exhibited deep failings in inducing a complete change in the centre; or separating any part of the country through military means. Succinctly put, they have, with no exception, ended in a negotiated settlement rather than through a decisive military victory by the rebels. Based on the findings of this study, state violence, ethnic politics, and power struggle among the rebels, as well as geography, geopolitics, and the permeability of the borders have emerged as key explanatory variables to this alternative hypothesis.

Why Political Power-Sharing Agreements Lead to Enduring Peaceful Resolution of Some Civil Wars, But Not Others?

This paper develops a bargaining model that explains why political power-sharing agreements lead to peaceful resolution of civil wars between governments and insurgents in some cases, but not others. The model predicts that if the civil war ends in a military stalemate, the government uses its offer of a political power-sharing agreement to the insurgents as a tool to misrepresent private information about its military capacity and defeat the insurgency. This exacerbates commitment problems, increases the degree of support that insurgent leaders receive from their civilian supporters and consequently increases the likelihood of recurrence of civil war. Conversely, the model shows that when the war ends in a decisive military victory for the government or the insurgents, the offer of a political power-sharing agreement reduces the degree of support that insurgent leaders get from their civilian supporters and increases the costs of fighting for the insurgents. Hence, after a decisive military victory insurgents have incentives to accept the political power-sharing agreement and not revert to fighting. Results from Cox Proportional Hazard models estimated on a data set of 111 civil wars (1944–1999) provide robust statistical support for the model's predictions.

Desert Storm and the Lessons of Learning

Abstract : Desert Storm promises to rank with 1914, Munich, and Vietnam as a powerful source of lessons for policymakers. Our involvement began with a clear-cut case of Iraqi aggression, followed by a million-soldier conflict. It ended in a decisive military victory for the US-led Coalition. The war was media-intensive, and, along with the events that followed, it had wide-ranging political consequences, some of which are still taking shape. Burned into our collective consciousness, Desert Storm will, for better or worse, be a benchmark for future US defense policy and military art. It is axiomatic that those who fail to heed the lessons of history are doomed to repeat its follies. However, the sages rarely remind us how difficult this learning process is. A full disclosure would show that decisionmakers, uniformed and civilian, often fail to learn effectively from experience. Their mistakes range from costly to catastrophic. Complex operations like Desert Shield and Desert Storm will require careful evaluation, not only in light of what happened there, but also in light of what we know about learning from war. Five observations, informed by interpretive history and the emerging literature about Desert Storm, will move us toward that end.