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Strategy in War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 July 2007

Stephen Biddle
Stephen Biddle
Affiliation:
Council on Foreign Relations
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Extract

The conduct of war is among the most important acts of the state. Inthe last century alone, failure in this undertaking has toppledgovernments and imposed hostile occupation under a conqueror's rulefor hundreds of millions from Paris to Warsaw and Tokyo to Jakarta.Military failure in World War I destroyed the Ottoman,Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires and created a host ofnew states in Eastern Europe and the Balkans in their stead. Alliedmilitary victory in World War II made global superpowers of theUnited States and the Soviet Union, and split Germany into twocountries; the success of Soviet arms ended Latvian, Lithuanian, andEstonian independence, and resulted in a generation of subjugationunder Soviet satellite rule for the peoples of Eastern Europe.Pyrrhic victory in two world wars exhausted Britain and brought anend to its global economic hegemony. Failure in internal war hastoppled governments from Afghanistan to Vietnam; variations in theconduct of such wars can mean the difference between decades ofmisery in grinding stalemates as in Lebanon or in a rapid, decisiveconclusion as in Rwanda's.

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SYMPOSIUM
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PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , July 2007 , pp. 461 - 466
Copyright
© 2007 The American Political Science Association

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