Well, giving up is taboo in the military. As is fragging etc.
I think there is a big correlation between being defeated and thinking you are.
The quote seems to imply a one way causality. Like as if the realization causes the defeat.
e. g. US thought it defeated Taliban by the end of 2001, Taliban certainly didn't think so. Similar thing with Palestinians vs. Israel.
Exactly. The (British) soldier who answered this was channelling Sun Tzu
> ...such is man, that most individuals will stop fighting at some point short of extinction; that point is reached when one of two things happens:
> Either, the defeated people may lose their sense of organization, fail to decide on leaders and methods, and give up because they can no longer fight as a group. This happened to the American Southerners in April, 1865. The President and Cabinet of the Confederate States of America got on the train at Richmond; the men who got off farther down the line were "refugees." Something happened to them and to the people about them, so that Mr. Davis no longer thought of himself as President Davis, and other people no longer accepted his commands. This almost happened in Germany in 1945 except for Admiral Doenitz.
> Or, the defeated people can retain their sense of organization, and can use their political organization for the purpose of getting in touch with the enemy, arranging the end of the war, and preparing, through organized means, to comply with the wishes of the conquerors. That happened when Britain acknowledged American independence; when the Boers recognized British sovereignty; when Finland signed what Russia had dictated; and when Japan gave up.
Note that Linebarger claims the high point of his PsyWar career to have been figuring out a formula by which outgunned chinese during the Korean War* could stop fighting, in a way that seemed to them not cowardly but honourable.
* a conflict which has yet to reach either of the endings above
No. It is only taboo at basic training. Mission-focused delegation of authority in modern militaries specifically adresses this. Leaders are encouraged to take initiative, which often means abandoning a failing plan. The ability to quickly recognize failure, "give up" and reattack a problem is what separates western forces from the drills-based approach of the post-soviet block.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission-type_tactics
(Even at basic training, giving up is a thing. The only true failure at basic is getting oneself or others injured.)
The quote was about the 'enemy'. Many civilian governments will end a war, before the military would have.
I'm sure there are a lot of examples in both directions, they should have just walked away sooner, or they should have stuck it out and all died gloriously.
Example: The German Military didn't want to end WW1, wasn't it the civilian government. But, weren't they actually really beat?
Or Vietnam. Did we lose? Or were we convinced we had lost.
It is possible to be 'defeated' but just not accept it. The never give up attitude leads to extra deaths.
What if Japan had this attitude, and we just kept dropping atomic bombs until the country was gone.
Guess goes back to some other quote I can't cite. War is easier to start than to end.
Not true. Following the breaking of the Hindenberg line on 1918-09-29 Ludendorff realised that further resistance would likely lead to communist revolution in Germany. On 1918-10-01 he explained this to the heads of department of his General Staff and said he had therefore asked the Kaiser and Chancellor to ask Woodrow Wilson for an armistice based on his Fourteen Points. It took six more weeks for the armistice to be agreed partly because Ludendorff was trying to ensure that someone else could be blamed the defeat.
Its all in "On a Knife Edge - How Germany lost the First World War" by Holger Aflerbach, 2022.
Maybe Vietnam is better example. One could argue that after the Tet Offensive, that the North was out of resources and the US could have won. But the Tet Offensive had convinced the US that there was no winning, so by 'believing' they had lost, they lost.
"Q: when is the enemy defeated? A: when he thinks he is"
I was just commenting on the original quote, that there is large part of psychology to winning/losing. If you can make the enemy 'think they lost' then you have won, even if it doesn't look like it on paper by the number of units, position, etc...