With the United States currently fighting protracted wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the question of what it means to achieve victory in war has never been more important for U.S. foreign policy. While policymakers, scholars, and military strategists have studied for millennia how to achieve victory in armed conflict, Victory in War seeks to provide an answer to a more fundamental question: What precisely is the meaning of victory in war and how do we know when victory is achieved? William C. Martel begins this book with the basic premise that there is currently no theory, framework, or set of organizing principles for understanding victory, yet paradoxically, “the implicit assumption [is] that the unalloyed purpose of [war] strategy is to achieve it” (p. 3). To address this glaring omission, the author sets out to develop a “pretheory” of victory, which entails the organization of principles about victory that can provide an analytic foundation for examining the concept of victory more systematically.

This book proceeds in roughly three parts. The first part is a broad survey of the idea of victory in strategic thought that reviews its “historical” origins, as portrayed by strategists ranging from Sun-Tzu to Alfred von Schlieffen (Chapter 2), as well as its “modern” origins, exemplified by thinkers such as Eric von Ludendorff and Henry Kissinger (Chapter 3). In the second part, Martel develops the principles of his pretheory for understanding victory (Chapter 4) and traces the forces that have shaped America's understanding of victory since the Revolutionary War (Chapter 5). The final part consists of six case study chapters on U.S. interventions in Libya, Panama, Iraq 1991, Bosnia/Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq 2003 (Chapters 6–11), followed by an analysis of the different forms of military power (i.e., land, maritime, and air) and the suitability of each form for achieving different levels of victory (Chapter 12).

The central contribution of this book is the author's attempt to provide conceptual clarity to the idea of victory (Chapter 4). To this end, Martel advances four organizing principles intended to capture the essence of how various thinkers and strategists of war have employed the idea, with each expressed on a continuum that depicts the degree of activity and involvement in war. The first and most significant organizing principle is what the author calls the “level of victory,” the simplest level being that of “tactical victory,” proceeding to the broader category of “political-military victory,” with the most comprehensive level being that of “grand strategic victory” (p. 94). The other three principles are “change in status quo,” “mobilization for war,” and “postconflict obligations,” all of which operate on similar continua ranging from limited to comprehensive.

While this framework is both logical and intuitive, certain conceptual weaknesses nevertheless emerge when Martel applies it to his cases. For example, the author classifies the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq 2003 as “grand strategic victories” (the latter in a more hypothetical sense and with the obvious qualifications) (pp. 241, 255–56). This, however, sits uneasy with his understanding of a grand strategic victory as one “of such magnitude that it leads to profound re-ordering in the strategic foundations of international politics” (p. 97). The emergence of a democratic Iraq that does not sponsor terrorism and is at peace with its neighbors would certainly have profound implications both regionally and globally. It nevertheless seems doubtful that such a development would fundamentally reorder the world in a manner akin to the ending of World War II or even the end of the Cold War. The same could be said of replacing the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. In fact, given that the position of the current U.S. administration is that these wars are related but discrete theaters in a broader “global war on terror,” one may reasonably label them “tactical victories,” which occur “when the state or an army achieves victory in a battle or in a series of military engagements” (p. 95).

Part of the problem seems to be that Martel conflates profound international systemic change with forcible regime change (pp. 97–98). The invasion, occupation, and rebuilding of states has actually occurred quite frequently, but has only led to such profound systemic changes in the context of great power wars (e.g. World War II), and would thus seemingly only occur as a result of similar hegemonic or global-scale conflict. Whether the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq belong in this category is further called into question when he suggests that “grand strategic victory exists when the fundamental ideas of the opponent, whose contested ideas provide the underlying source of war, are defeated” (p. 241). To say that the extremist ideologies that compelled U.S. interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq have been defeated is premature at best.

Furthermore, while it is to be expected that the case study material in a book about “victory in war” will tend to emphasize the successful aspects of wars, in some cases the author perhaps overlooks the mistakes and unintended consequences of these interventions that may be relevant to understanding victory. For example, Martel's conclusion that the Kosovo campaign was a “clear political-military victory” (p. 215) seems to downplay the fact that the ethnic cleansing during the Kosovo crisis actually escalated during the three-month bombing campaign. This is particularly relevant when one considers that quickly and decisively stopping ethnic cleansing was perhaps the most important objective of that intervention p. 212). One thus wonders whether the author's assessment of certain mixed outcomes in war actually employs a typology of victory, as opposed to placing them on a continuum of achievement where certain outcomes are tantamount to “partial victory.” While Martel clearly wants to represent “levels” of victory p. (94), his discussion tends to obfuscate whether a state achieves a different type or a different degree of victory if it successfully accomplishes some, but not all, of its objectives in war.

Victory in War does make a useful scholarly contribution and will be of great interest to academics, policymakers, and military thinkers alike. Though not necessarily excelling at precision, the author's pretheory of victory offers a useful vocabulary and organizational schema that will no doubt contribute to an improved understanding of the meaning of victory in contemporary warfare. Thus, his fine treatise promises to be a valuable analytical starting point for those scholars interested in undertaking more formal and systematic analyses of the relationship between war and victory.