There could not be a more timely moment to study the meaning of victory. For the past decade, the United States has been involved in an intense and passionate public debate about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: Are these wars being conducted effectively and – ultimately – is it possible to achieve victory and in what form (tactical, strategic, grand strategic)? In early 2011, in the case of Iraq, U.S. combat forces have withdrawn and violence continues while Iraq struggles to form a stable government. In Afghanistan, conditions are continuing to deteriorate if not at quite the same rate in the period of 2007 through early 2010 as newly deployed U.S. forces renew an offensive campaign in the fight against the Taliban insurgency. The central issue with these two wars is that there is no fundamental, systematic, or detailed agreement to guide the deliberations of scholars or policymakers on what victory means. I argue that the historical failure to develop a theoretical narrative of victory on which to base decisions exacerbates the tendency in modern societies to engage in divisive debates about war.

To complicate matters for this study, ideas about victory historically emerged haphazardly and erratically rather than as a coherent theory of what it means to achieve in terms of the outcomes of wars and the aspirations of policymakers.