For hundreds of years of military history, and certainly since the mid-nineteenth century, the formula for victory has been to use overwhelming firepower, technologically advanced weapons, and economic production to overcome and defeat the enemy decisively. In the case of the American “way of war,” the objective was to use these economic and technological foundations to achieve victory while minimizing the cost in lives and societal destruction. The emphasis in U.S. defense planning on minimizing the loss of life was expressed by the authors of the Strategic Bombing Survey, who asked in 1946 whether “the weakness of the United States as a democracy would make it impossible for her to continue all-out offensive action.” This question was raised during the debate about whether the United States could withstand the human losses that would occur from an invasion of the Japanese home islands. This logic of war was altered during the cold war, when U.S. policies shifted toward the principle that the United States would do better to develop, deploy, and sustain smaller and more technologically advanced forces than to compete directly with the Soviet Union in numbers of weapons or troops.

Beyond the scale of war or the extent of preparations for war, the unifying theme in analyses of the nature of war is how and to what extent military forces contribute to the state's ability to achieve victory. In debates about winning a war, the classic twentieth-century assumption among policymakers and defense planners is that the various forms of military power – ground, maritime, and air – all contribute in different but equal ways to the state's ability to achieve victory.