By Louis Rene Beres

Gen. David Petraeus GS ’87, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, still speaks in ordinary military terms of  “victory” and “defeat.” Yet the criteria of demarcation between these two possible war outcomes are plainly fuzzy. They will never allow us to know for certain what actually has been won and what actually has been lost.

Whatever happens in Iraq and Afghanistan, there will be no formal signings of meaningful peace documents, nor will there be any celebratory parades on Fifth Avenue or Main Street — only protracted uncertainties.

There are other serious problems with outdated talk about “winning” and “losing.” In essence, whatever happens in these two wars may have little or no real bearing on our national security. Our core enemies are already mobilizing in assorted new staging areas around the globe, most notably in Yemen, Somalia and other parts of Africa. To be sure, the vulnerability of American cities to both mass-destruction terrorism and ballistic missile attack will remain basically unchanged. Strangely enough, although nothing could be more obvious, this basic military reality is generally still unrecognized.

Until the Nuclear Age, states, city-states and empires had been secure from homeland destruction unless their armies had first been defeated. For prospective aggressors before 1945, a capacity to destroy had always required a prior capacity to win. Without a victory, therefore, intended aggressions could never really express anything more than offensive military intentions.

This is no longer the case. From the standpoint of ensuring any one state’s national survival, the goal of preventing a classical military defeat has become secondary. The strategic implications of this transforming development are enormous.

For those countries currently in the crosshairs of a determined jihad, including the United States, Israel and much of Europe, there is no real need to focus on singular defeats per se. But there are also significant caveats or ironic downsides to any such “freedom from worry.”

From our present vantage point, preventing any form of classical military defeat will no longer assure our safety from either aggression or terrorism. We might now be perfectly capable of warding off any more-or-less tangible defeat of our military forces, and perhaps even of winning more-or-less identifiable victories in Afghanistan and elsewhere. But, in the end, we may still have to face extraordinary or even existential harms.

A good general always puts himself in the shoes of the enemy. What does this relatively new military reality mean for our current and widely dispersed adversaries? From their point of view, it is no longer necessary to actually win any particular military engagement, or even to prevail in any single war. They needn’t figure out highly complex land or naval warfare strategies; they don’t really have to triumph in Kandahar or Mosul in order to bring death and chaos to New York or Washington.

For our multiple enemies, there is no longer any reason to work out what generals call  “force multipliers,” or even to calculate any pertinent “correlation of forces.” Today, whether we choose to admit it or not, these enemies, with or without a compelling “order of battle,” can conceivably wreak havoc upon us without first firing a shot.

None of this is because we have necessarily done something wrong. It is largely the natural consequence of constantly evolving military and terrorist technologies. Nor can this admittedly frightful evolution be stopped or reversed. On the contrary, our substantial current vulnerabilities in the absence of prior military defeat represent a straightforward fact of strategic life that must simply be acknowledged and then effectively countered.

In war, good strategic theory is a “net” — only those who cast can catch. This is especially true in military planning, where adapting current strategy and tactics to antiquated assumptions can yield disaster.

There is also some very good news. What is threatening for us is also threatening for our enemies. They, too, must now confront major homeland vulnerabilities in the absence of any prior military defeat. We can and must properly exploit these critical vulnerabilities. This would mean a far more precise focusing of our strategic and tactical objectives on very specific operational outcomes, rather than on traditionally broad notions of victory. We don’t need to win in order to best confront and immobilize the multiple, increasingly dispersed forces of jihad. In this connection, U.S. military planners should also pay especially close attention to possible interactions between certain critical harms that we can impose, synergies that could further weaken the fragmenting enemy most efficiently.

Our thoughtful engagement with a mutuality of weakness could force our enemies to proceed with greater caution, but only if they, too, were primarily concerned with survival. In the absence of true enemy rationality — a disturbingly plausible situation that could soon be faced in Iran, North Korea or even Pakistan — we might still have no reasonable alternative in certain circumstances to undertaking preemptive strategies of anticipatory self-defense.

This is the case whether we like it or not, and whether a Democrat or a Republican sits in the White House. This is not the time for narrowly partisan political bickering, which — like the traditionally comforting ideas of victory and defeat — can only distract us from what is truly important.

Louis Rene Beres GS ’71 is a professor of international law at Purdue University and publishes widely on military strategy issues. He may be reached at lberes@purdue.edu.