Foreign Affairs
Quick conclusions are the exception, not the rule.
“Battles,” Carl Von Clausewitz said, “decide everything.” Yet the famed Prussian military theorist is wrong. Great battles and brilliant leaders can shape the course of events. But often it is attrition that is decisive in modern warfare. As Stalin observed in the wake of the Second World War, “Hitler’s generals, raised on the dogma of Clausewitz and Moltke,” lost because they “could not understand that wars are won in the factories.”
Too often the history of warfare is reduced to names and dates. Popular thought emphasizes military engagements, from Waterloo to Verdun and beyond, and it often underscores famous generals and admirals, from Napoleon to Robert E. Lee. Battles can be turning points, and leadership does matter. But as the historian Cathal Nolan convincingly argued in his 2019 book The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost, they are seldom decisive. Indeed, for all their brilliance, famous commanders like Napoleon and Lee both ultimately lost.
Austerlitz was a triumph for Napoleon, and the Seven Days Battles rightly contributed to Lee’s legend. But in the end, battlefield brilliance wasn’t enough to overcome greater forces, be it via coalition or otherwise, marshaled against both men. “Exhaustion of morale and material rather than finality through battles marks the endgame of many wars,” Nolan observes. This has long been the case, he notes.
“Many who won hugely lopsided battles went on to lose the wars of which they were apart: Hannibal won at Cannae; Napoleon at Ulm; Hitler’s panzer armies took 650,000 prisoners outside of Kiev in 1941, yet all three went down to defeat.” But “in each case, strategic losses came after protracted attritional wars against enemies who refused to accept those earlier tactical outcomes as decisive in the greater conflict.”
Quick wars and conclusive victories, such as Israel’s 1967 Six-Day War, are the exception. Indeed, even in that instance, while Israel was able to defeat the numerically superior Arab armies in less than a week, it took two additional conflicts, the War of Attrition and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, before the foremost leader of the Arab world, Egypt, set down its arms.
There are, of course, other exceptions. But often attrition is the decisive factor. In fact, as Nolan ably points out “more often war results in something clouded, neither triumph nor defeat.” When surveying the overarching history of warfare since the Napoleonic Age, protracted and inconclusive conflicts are the norm, not the exception. Brief wars like the Spanish-American War are unusual, and even that conflict eventually descended into a long-running and bloody insurgency in the Philippines.
Real “victory,” Nolan writes, “must usher in political permanence.” Otherwise, hostilities are likely to continue—it is often just a matter of when they will break out again. The Hundred Years War, the wars of Louis XIV and Louis XV,