CONCLUDING CONFLICT: WHY ENDING WAR IS NEVER AN EASY STRATEGY

​​​​​​​Tactics sans Strategy

Despite their primacy in the creation of strategy, directed political objectives can be inappropriately tactically focused and impede the prosecution and termination of conflict, even when generated from outside the military. Political objectives that are inherently tactical will likely lack some larger theory of victory, resulting in protracted wars in which the best possible outcome is a stalemate. During the Vietnam War, the Johnson administration’s flawed policy of attrition within a limited conflict was translated by Pentagon officials into a series of essentially tactical tasks, such as killing more enemy troops or bombing certain targets. As a technologically superior force with over 500,000 servicemembers deployed to Vietnam, the United States was able to conduct these tasks with impunity, generating scores of data and analytics in doing so. The United States remained undefeated in all major battles throughout the war, but failed because its strategy focused on tactical actions and never established defined and feasible outcomes against an opponent fighting an unlimited conflict. The United States’ failure in Vietnam is an example of the pithy quotation often incorrectly attributed to Sun Tzu, “tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” It is essential for strategists to collaborate with policymakers to inform the best use of military force, including identifying political objectives obtainable through military power. Only then can a state work towards termination criteria and know when to end a conflict.