- Law professors who are military veterans discussed how the idea of military victory has evolved across conflicts.
- Military leaders and politicians must avoid rhetoric and provide clear goals for soldiers and the public during wars.
- Words like victory and total victory imply an end state that is no longer achievable in the modern world.
A former lieutenant colonel in the Israeli Defense Forces knows what it’s like to send a soldier into harm’s way.
Years ago, Amos Guiora, now a University of Utah law professor, ordered a lieutenant to go to Gaza. The words the young officer spoke before he left have stuck with Guiora the past three decades.
“‘If anything happens to me, you’re the one who will tell my parents and not the family notification unit,’” he quoted the lieutenant as saying. “And I promised him that.”
“Thankfully nothing happened to him,” Guiora said. “But for me it was one of those powerful moments in life where you assume responsibility for endangering someone else’s child. And if you don’t know why you’re doing it, don’t do it.”
In honor of Veterans Day, Guiora and other law professors with military experience explored how the concept of “military victory” has evolved across conflicts in a discussion titled, “Defining Military Victory: From Vietnam to Iraq/Afghanistan to the Gaza Strip.”
Clearly defining military goals
How do you define victory? What’s the goal? Who sets the goal? Who articulates the goal? The answers to those questions are often elusive, and without answers, the outcomes are dire.
“Much of this talk is personal. Obviously, I don’t want to get into family details. But for me when I discuss this notion of defining victory, it is at the end of the day a deeply personal issue for me given everything my family and all the other Israelis have been through for two years,” said Guiora, who splits his time between Israel and Utah.
Guiora spent 19 years in the IDF serving in several senior command positions, including as a legal advisor to the Gaza Strip and commander of the IDF School of Military Law.
Politicians must be honest about the reasons for sending soldiers into battle and military leaders need to provide them clear mission directives, he said. It is a terrible thing when leaders cannot clearly articulate what it is they want a soldier to do, he said, but it’s easy to be a politician engaging in rhetoric.
His paper about defining military victory attempts to explain how soldiers feel in the context of rhetoric and the consequences of what he calls “cheap rhetoric.” Guiora said bad things happen when soldiers are stressed, confused and anxious.
“We can talk about victory until forever. But if the goals are not clear . . . we are doing them an extraordinary disservice,” he said.
“There is nothing more damning, damaging and horrible than mere rhetoric of politicians who are engaged in cheap sloganeering which has one result, and that’s the death of soldiers.”
Each and every decision made by military and political command must have clear-eyed articulation as to whether it contributes to victory, Guiora wrote in the article. That, he said, tragically eluded leaders in the Vietnam and Israel-Hamas wars.
The only victory in Israel is the return of the hostages, he said. Israel did not defeat Hamas, he said, and there are still hostage bodies that must be returned.
Why we fight
Lawyer David Irvine, a retired Army general and strategic intelligence officer, called Guiora’s article an interesting effort to come to grips with what victory is. He referenced a Winston Churchill speech at the beginning of World War II in which the British prime minister said:
“You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.”
“There have not been very many leaders in our history who have been able to crystallize why we go to war so dramatically, so clearly and so succinctly as that comment from Churchill,” he said.
Every British citizen who heard or read those words knew what the stakes were and what would be required of them, Irvine said.
Irvine said he agrees with Guiora that a fundamental obligation of decision-makers mandated to place soldiers in danger is to provide clarity as to the goals of the operation and failure to do so contributes to the inability to define victory. But, he said, it needs to go farther.
“Policymakers don’t always tell the truth,” he said. “We have been lied into a war. We have been drawn into a conflict that the nation didn’t understand.”
Irvine noted that when ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz pointed out to then Vice President Dick Cheney in a 2008 interview that public opinion polls showed Americans oppose the Iraq war, he responded with one word, “So?”
“That’s not a satisfactory answer if your son or your daughter is coming home in a box,” Irvine said. “And we haven’t figured out very well how to address that.”
But for all of the maneuvering and shifting of politicians, he said, there is one inescapable fact: Even though military units in combat deserve clarity, they still fight. And they fight for each other. Unit cohesion is a powerful force which carries armies, navies and air forces to victory in murky circumstances.
“And we cannot be sufficiently grateful for those willing to fight for each other,” Irvine said.
Victory or success?
David Schwendiman, a former Department of Justice and international war crimes prosecutor in Bosnia and Herzegovina, said the word victory and the concept of victory in the military sense are anachronisms, adding they imply an end state that is no longer achievable in the modern world.
“We should be suspicious and extremely critical of their use and anyone who uses them to justify the deployment of military force anywhere at any time,” he said.
Words such as victory, total victory and defeat create assumptions that are unrealistic, unachievable and justify actions that have deadly consequences. They also prolong a war and frustrate negotiations, he said.
Schwendiman, an adjunct law professor at the University of Utah, suggests using words like success and failure rather than victory because they’re not “loaded with the historical baggage” of terms like victory or total victory, winners or losers. Those words, he said, better describe the reality of conflict at all levels — strategic, operational and tactical.
In writing the article, Guiora asked experts around the world whether the U.S. won or lost the Vietnam War. The overwhelming response was that the U.S. lost.
That makes the wall, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in D.C., so poignant because there are 58,220 names of men and women who died in vain," said Jim Holbrook, a Vietnam veteran and professor emeritus at the University of Utah law school. “And there’s no other way around that wall but to accept that fact.”