TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Highlands Today

War And Winning

ADVERTISEMENT

Randy Ludacer

Published: February 15, 2009

Recent observations concerning whether we lost or won a given war suggest that we have begun to perceive war and its consequences by the same standards that apply to sporting events. The score board is the final arbiter of results and there must be a winner and a loser. Contests which formerly could end in a tie are now resolved by overtime, shoot outs, or extra innings in order to achieve the necessary determination.

War is not a contest which lends itself to the scoreboard mentality although there have been times in conflicts where something as mundane as the "body count", the number of persons killed in a given engagement is the measure. Although the massive slaughter achieved in specific battles, from our own Civil War through World War I should have persuaded the experts as to the unreliability of this statistic as a true measure of winning or losing, this mentality persisted into the Vietnam War, ignoring the fact that disproportionate size of forces and a tendency to exaggerate reporting to enhance resupply distorted the importance and accuracy of these numbers. Although the wiser heads, like Clauwitz had long ago sagely observed that war was the pursuit of those same objectives which a nation had sought through diplomatic means, some historians and politicians still focus on the extent of destruction and the numbers of the dead.

Now viewing our entanglement in Iraq; a war we entered to protect the U.S. from Saddam's WMD, or to extinguish the evils of his oppressive regime, or more recently to establish an outpost of democracy in the region, even with the perpetual moving of the goal posts, (the definition and redefinition of winning) the "experts" harbor a secret view that there must be a clear scoreboard result.

Logic and history demonstrate that when the initial objectives for entering into a war has been achieved; that this, Q.E.D. is a victory, a win. Contemporary conflicts have become too complicated, too multi-issued to be judged by the standards of the playing field and we would all be better off if our politicians and pundits would learn to read the message of history more thoughtfully.

Randy Ludacer
Lake Placid

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT