DECISIVE VICTORY
1. Armed Forces have always sought “Swift Decisive Victory”. All plans /strategies or force application matrices are aimed at achieving a decisive victory, but in a modern hybrid Grey Zone escalatory continuum “Victory” may not be any more decisive but perceptional. I am sure when Putin launched special military operations one year back; he would not have catered for the long haul. Deep Battle had succeeded in World War II, Georgia and Crimea, it was supposed to follow the same script but then the adversary also has a card to play. Rupert Smith in his book “Utility of Force” draw an analogy of fighting a war with an opera and success of the opera was not on how the director or the actors of the opera perceived but what the audience felt after seeing / hearing the opera. In an industrial age society, metrics of victory could have been in terms of destruction of war waging potential and forces. The society today is “informationized” and metrics of success are perceptional.
2. Nature of war has remained unchanged while the character of war has evolved with tech infusion and RMA. War therefore is a strategic concept while warfare is a tac concept. The conduct of warfare must be aligned to the purpose of war i.e, the end state one aims to achieve. Clausewitz had in his seminal work “On War” stated “no one ought to go to war without being clear in his mind what he intend to achieve by the war and how he intends to conduct it.” The end of war is to engender lasting peace. Declaration of “Mission Accomplished” by President Bush on board USS Kitty Hawk was supposedly the end of Op IRAQI FREEDOM and his conception of Victory but we all know what ensued was a violent insurgency and the end of war at geo-strategic level never happened.
3. The Westphalian construct of interstate war has been questioned by the non-state actors and conglomerates who have the ability as well as the propensity to use violence to achieve their victory. Battle space today has expanded with vectors of warfare and prosecutors of the same not confined to the battle field but transcending all layers of society. Nations go to war, not armies. While Indian Armed Forces may have adopted the concept of multi domain ops, the focus remains on the kinetic conventional contact warfare which is a miniscule part of the national effort. The same can be explained by a diagram below: -
4. Planning in armed forces today is to solve complicated problems which can be solved by an algorithm but the challenges today are complex which need more abstraction and the need to look beyond established processes. Simon Senek in his book “Infinite Games” talks of the Viet Cong fighting not to win but to endure and survive. In today’s hybrid W, a country like Pakistan will not aspire to win but to endure and the analogy of US and Vietcong at some level is true for India and Pakistan. India wants to win while Pakistan wants to deny India its metrics of victory. To play a finite game one needs training but to be in an infinite game we need education. Indian Armed forces also must look at metrics of victory not from a finite game but play an infinite game. Finite game demands power while infinite games demand endurance which is contrarian to our concept of ‘Swift Decisive” victory.
5. Metrics of victory in a humanized society are also related to force preservation. Postmodernism has led to more accountability and stringent use of force. Utility of Force could now be termed as “Futility of Force”. Casualties both military and civil are despised and are contradictory to metrics of victory. There is no space for “Bloody boots on ground” but in the same vein you can’t cyber across a water obstacle. In order to achieve the correct balance, its may be necessary to infuse technology to alter TTPs to ensure “Economy of Force”. Historically Pakistan has always enjoyed the ambiguity and chaos of 4GW/Grey Z/Hybrid W is while Indian Armed Forces has always sought to relive its “Dhaka Syndrome”[1]. For victory to be ‘decisive’ there are two basic parameters one the vanquished must accept that they have be vanquished and this is the cognitive domain capitulation and two, there is no way to reverse the final verdict. In case of Pakistan both the metrics will never be met.
6. Success at tactical and operational level must not be confused with victory at national level. One may win all the battles and yet lose the war or vice versa. Finland fought two significant wars with the USSR; Russo-Finnish War or the Winter War from 1939 to 1940 and the Continuation War or the Second Soviet-Finnish War from 1941 to 1944. USSR was expected to win with consummate ease; however what transpired was cataclysmic losses in the battle field for the Soviet Army but if viewed from the Clauswitzian prism, Finlandization[2] was a strategic victory for Soviet Union. Victory like it has been said before is an assessment and not a fact, the assessment has to be made by a multitude of players, domestic audience, international fora, the mil establishment and now days most importantly in the virtual world of social media. Clausewitz had also laid out three markers of victory: -
(a) Loss of military capability.
(b) Loss of will to fight.
© Loss of adversary’s aims / aspiration.
7. Victory is no more binary but more of an escalatory continuum where as much one wins that much the adversary loses. What construes as decisive victory would also evolve with time and resources, or put in an operational art perspective; if ways and means change the ends would automatically metamorphose. Ukraine must have started this war with survival as a marker of victory but today buoyed by the resilience of its citizenry scaffolded by continued NATO and EU support which are the means at his disposal, Zelensky may be recalibrating the ways he wants to fight by inviting western defense industry to use the battle field as a test lab. The change in means and ways would be effecting the markers of victory for him and Ukraine as a nation state. Victory can also be at levels of warfare, tactical, operational or strategic. However the end game is of translating military victory into political outcomes wherein lies the entwined politico-military objective of going to war. Predicating victory markers for India in the present geo-strategic environment on above made arguments is: -
(a) Tactical and operational success in battle is must to set the stage for perceptions of military victory.
(b) Management of perceptions to generate the idea of victory and sustain it.
© Force preservation and ensuring jus-in-bello as well as jus-post-bellum to achieve moral victory.
(d) Hope for a stable and harmonious future for both the victor and vanquished is necessary to reinforce the idea of victory.
(e) Victory must translate to better peace than it was before the war.
[1] Indian Armed Forces believe that the 1971 victory was a ‘Decisive Victory” which needs to be replicated every time we are to go to war.
[2] Finlandization refers to the policy of strict neutrality between Moscow (Russia) and the West that Finland followed during the decades of the Cold War. The principle of neutrality was rooted in the Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance (or YYA Treaty) that Finland signed with the USSR in April 1948.
