Harder than you might think
The U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 have shown that waging war is often much easier than terminating it in a politically responsible manner. How do wars end? What factors make war termination successful?
War is an incredibly complex phenomenon that rarely meets initial expectations in its conclusion. Starting a war is always easier than ending one. The geopolitical aftermath is often very different from what decision-makers envisioned when they started. Terminating wars in a politically responsible manner is, perhaps, the most challenging aspect of waging modern war. Far too little attention is given to relating war-making means to their strategic ends. Almost no war ends how belligerents think it should end when the war begins. Often militaries do not plan for the end of wars. War is uncertain and there are often cases in which nothing short of total surrender will sufficiently end a conflict.
War’s end inconclusively, the eternal quest for the allure of decisive battle often devolves into wars of attrition rather than decision. Leading up to 1914, Germany, Russia, and France each believed offensive war plans would lead to an overwhelming decisive victory. World War I’s armistice — which provided no clear winner — proves otherwise. After the fighting ends, many wars involve troops undertaking occupation duties to include setting up provisional governments.
Often occupation duty requires fighting insurgencies and, therefore, a continuation of the war. It is usually the victors left to govern and occupy those areas they seized during the fighting. The United States has been reluctant to consolidate gains and reconstitute political order during and after combat from the Mexican War until today. According to Nadia Schadlow, “U.S. military and political leaders have consistently failed to devote appropriate attention and resources to organizing for the political requirements of military interventions.” This lack of planning has resulted in a denial syndrome that precludes effective war planning and perpetuates unpreparedness for this aspect of war.
The experience of the United States since its revolution offers a compelling case study full of salient examples. War termination is a fleeting topic, and one will search in vain for any definition of victory in American military doctrine.
After the American Revolution, the United States achieved its war aims — independence — but found itself with a weak government and saddled with debt to French (and Spanish) allies. This postwar reality forced Washington and the country to abandon such a loose confederation to create a stronger national government that would provide the power of taxation to pay its debts and a frontier constabulary to police its edges and protect its people.
The U.S. war with Mexico provides an example of the reality of occupation duty. Despite the victory over Mexico, the United States army encountered guerrilla warfare throughout Mexico and numerous problems building military government apparatuses in California and New Mexico. The war confirmed that most officers in the U.S. army would instead focus on conventional war than devote more troops to occupation duty and intellectual capital to the military government.
World War I ended in anticlimactic fashion. Germany launched a final spring offensive in 1918 but collapsed when it could not exploit its operational advantage. Their sudden collapse at the hands of the allies surprised German leaders and citizens and helped perpetuate the idea that the German army was never defeated. Advocates of the Dolchstosslegendpointed to the fact that when the war ended, German troops still occupied French soil and that the German army was “stabbed in the back” by politicians. As Allied forces moved in to occupy Germany in 1918, they could see why such a belief persisted — in Germany there was no “palpable evidence of defeat.”
The lack of a clear-cut victory for anyone in World War I emboldened Germans radicals who argued they had not been defeated at all. The spectacle of humiliation that followed — a draconian peace treaty that treated Germany as a second class nation and included the famous “war guilt clause” only exacerbated feelings of resentment. These feelings of resentment helped fuel the National Socialist Party and Adolf Hitler’s rise during the interwar period, thus directly precipitating the Second World War.
In the lead up to World War II, Allied planners decided that nothing short of total victory and surrender was acceptable — a lesson learned from World War I. Fighting in Europe and Asia reflected this, as Allied forces converged on Berlin and Tokyo. In the Pacific, Japan surrendered out of an existential fear of continued destruction. The war devolved into a brutal race war that only intensified each belligerent’s treatment of each other. While prosecuting a long, drawn-out island by island war of attrition against Japan, the United States burned cities to “de-house workers,” and released two atomic bombs before eliciting terms of surrender.
Dropping the bombs when they did, reflected the American recognition of a need to end the war with Japan before the Soviets became involved and could exert influence over the postwar order in Asia. The United States remained steadfast in their desire to achieve unconditional surrender but soon realized that the phrasing put the Japanese Emperor’s fate at risk — potentially alienating the entirety of Japanese culture and dooming postwar occupation before it started. This potential misstep led to continued fighting as many Japanese leaders believedprolonging the war would increase their bargaining position. After the war, Japan blossomed into an important economic and military ally in the international order, stewarded by the United States after their surrender.
The atomic bomb ushered in a new weapon for ending and possibly preventing war. As the American involvement in Korea wound to a halt, newly elected President Dwight D. Eisenhower was convinced that the threat of atomic weapons was the main reason the North Korean’s signed the armistice.
This conception of power derived from atomic weapons then drove his New Look national security policy placing massive retaliation at the core of American foresight policy. Of course, this was hardly the case in the American involvement in Vietnam, in which no amount of nuclear arsenal could deter a determined popular force. American efforts in southeast Asia quickly devolved into a quagmire between two asymmetrical forces from which the United States had a difficult time extricating itself.
War is a human endeavor subject to the sort of fog, friction, and chance that Carl von Clausewitz warns about in his volume. It is precisely these factors that undergird how war’s end. Belligerent aims shift as the war continues and changes according to the exigencies of the conflict itself. Singular monumental battles rarely decide wars, and the case of total surrender a la Japan at the end of World War II is rare — more often, both sides agree that ending the fighting is the best outcome following a terminal campaign.
