The End of Victory [pdf]

Chapter 2 of Dolman's "Pure Strategy" is titled "The End of Victory". Everett Dolman was an instructor at the USAF's Air College, and in 2005, he wrote this. So he wrote this two "forever wars" back. It's a classic that military officers read but few others do.

"The first notion the military strategist must discard is victory, for strategy is not about winning. The pure strategist understands that war is but one aspect of social and political competition, an ongoing interaction that has no finality. ... Thus strategy, in its simplest form, is a plan for attaining continuing advantage. For the goal of strategy is not to culminate events, to establish finality in the discourse between states, but to influence states’ discourse in such a way that it will go forward on favorable terms. For continue it will."

"It’s not the winner who typically decides when victory in a war has been achieved. It’s the loser."

This is a useful mindset in an era of long-running wars. Russian leaders get this, but US leaders rarely do. The objective of US wars is to win and go home. That's not how US leaders think and talk. Leaders of the classic European empires got this, though. It's very 19th century.