: Military Power

University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher, except for reading and browsing via the World Wide Web. Users are not permitted to mount this file on any network servers. Introduction WHAT CAUSES VICTORY and defeat in battle? Why do the winners win and the losers lose? What makes some campaigns bloody stalemates and others apparent cakewalks? How can states maximize their odds of winning and minimize their casualties? And are the answers changing in the information age? Will new technology or changing geopolitics transform warfare, creating new winners—and new losers—on the battlefields of the future? These are life-and-death questions, and not just for soldiers. They affect everyone: from infantrymen on the battlefield to office workers in the World Trade Center to entire nations and peoples. German victories in Poland and France condemned millions of French and Polish Jews to the gas chambers in World War II. Soviet victories in 1944–5 consigned a generation of East Europeans to a Communist oppression that was spared those who were reached first by American and British armies. The trench stalemate of 1914–18 sentenced millions to deaths that a quicker victory would have averted and ruined economies across Europe. By exhausting some countries and embittering others, it shaped the subsequent politics of the twentieth century. Today's world would be very different if European generals had fought differently in 1914–18. Defeat in battle has meant occupation and a conqueror's rule for nations from France to Poland and from Japan to Indonesia. Today, swift victory in a war against fundamentalist terrorism could spare the lives of thousands—or millions—in the West and Islam; failure could bring consequences too horrible to contemplate. With so much at stake, great effort has been spent on these questions. The answers, however, often fall short. As recently as 1991, a massive effort using state-of-the-art methods and the nation's best analysts radically overestimated U.S. losses in the upcoming Gulf War. The prewar congressional debate hinged on casualty expectations; these were widely seen as the key to Congress's vote on the use of force. With so much at stake, no effort was spared to achieve realistic estimates: prominent academics , government analysts, and senior military officials gave testimony using methods ranging from computer models to …