Zero-Sum Victory
What We're Getting Wrong About War
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The military expert and author of Leadership presents “the most thoughtful analysis yet of America’s recent conflicts—and future challenges” (Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal).
Why have the major post-9/11 US military interventions turned into quagmires? Despite huge power imbalances in America’s favor, capacity-building efforts, and tactical victories, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq turned intractable. The US government’s fixation on zero-sum, decisive victory in these conflicts is a key reason why these operations failed to achieve favorable and durable outcomes.
In Zero-Sum Victory, retired US Army colonel Christopher D. Kolenda identifies three interrelated problems that have emerged from the government’s insistence on zero-sum victory. First, the US government has no way to measure successful outcomes other than a decisive military victory, and thus, selects strategies that overestimate the possibility of such an outcome. Second, the United States is slow to recognize, modify, or abandon losing strategies. Third, once the United States decides to withdraw, bargaining asymmetries and disconnects in strategy undermine the prospects for a successful transition or negotiated outcome.
Relying on historic examples and personal experience, Kolenda draws thought-provoking and actionable conclusions about the utility of American military power in the contemporary world—insights that serve as a starting point for future scholarship as well as for important national security reforms.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Retired Army colonel Kolenda (editor, Leadership: The Warrior's Art) examines in this persuasive if wonky study why America's post-9/11 military interventions have not gone as planned. He contends that the U.S. government has been unable to devise a durable plan for securing peace and stability after initial battlefield victories, and criticizes the inflexibility of U.S. military leaders who remained wedded for years to the idea of keeping the Afghan army small and highly professionalized, rather than building a large force through conscription or voluntary service. According to Kolenda, this inflexibility made Afghanistan's military too small to serve the country's internal security needs, and helped transform it into a clique rather than a representative institution. Furthermore, once America's political leaders decide to withdraw from a conflict, Kolenda alleges, opposition forces have little reason to negotiate with the U.S. government and its allies. The Taliban, for example, used talks with the Obama administration to "gain concessions that improved their legitimacy while coaxing the United States to complete the withdrawal of its forces." Though the academic prose can be slow going, Kolenda is a lucid explainer of foreign and domestic affairs and "America's bureaucratic way of war." This is an insightful call for rethinking U.S. military strategy.
