Zero-Sum Victory: What We're Getting Wrong About War

by Christopher D. Kolenda

The military expert and author of Leadership presents "the most thoughtful analysis yet of America's recent conflicts--and future challenges" (Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal).

Why have the major post-9/11 US military interventions turned into quagmires? Despite huge power imbalances in America's favor, capacity-building efforts, and tactical victories, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq turned intractable. The US government's fixation on zero-sum, decisive victory in these conflicts is a key reason why these operations failed to achieve favorable and durable outcomes.

In Zero-Sum Victory, retired US Army colonel Christopher D. Kolenda identifies three interrelated problems that have emerged from the government's insistence on zero-sum victory. First, the US government has no way to measure successful outcomes other than a decisive military victory, and thus, selects strategies that overestimate the possibility of such an outcome. Second, the United States is slow to recognize, modify, or abandon losing strategies. Third, once the United States decides to withdraw, bargaining asymmetries and disconnects in strategy undermine the prospects for a successful transition or negotiated outcome.

Relying on historic examples and personal experience, Kolenda draws thought-provoking and actionable conclusions about the utility of American military power in the contemporary world--insights that serve as a starting point for future scholarship as well as for important national security reforms.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Military Fiction, War

529 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 26, 2021

About the author

Christopher D. Kolenda is President and CEO of Kolenda Strategic Leadership, LLC, which consults on leadership, strategy, and human security. He is also an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for New American Security. He recently served as the Senior Advisor on Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Department of Defense senior leadership and has served four tours in Afghanistan.

Chris graduated from the United States Military Academy and went on to serve in the United States Army with great distinction, to include leading large, complex organizations in the United States, Europe, and in combat in Afghanistan. He also served as an Assistant Professor of History at West Point.

In 2007-08, he commanded an airborne infantry task force in Kunar and Nuristan provinces and pioneered an innovative approach to counterinsurgency. Employing locally-tailored combinations of armed diplomacy, conflict resolution, personal relationships, and high degrees of leverage, his unit dramatically improved the levels of stability in what had been one of the most violent areas of Afghanistan. According to a 2012 study by the Center of Naval Analyses, his unit’s performance was among the most highly successful in America’s longest war.

In 2009 he was hand selected by the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy to develop a new U.S. strategy for the conflict, and was then ordered back to Afghanistan where he co-authored the groundbreaking McChrystal assessment, counterinsurgency guidance, and military strategy. He has since shaped every critical policy and strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. His advice has been adopted by three Secretaries of Defense and the President of the United States.

His efforts have been featured in two New York Times bestselling books: The Outpost by Jake Tapper and Stones into Schools by Greg Mortenson, as well as in numerous newspaper and journal articles and studies, such as the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Economist, and The London Times.

Christopher Kolenda holds a Master of Arts in European History from the University of Wisconsin, and a Master of Arts in National Security and Strategic Studies from the U.S. Naval War College. In addition to his books, he has written numerous articles on leadership and national security issues for professional journals.

A highly sought-after speaker and writer, Christopher Kolenda is the editor and coauthor of Leadership: The Warrior’s Art, which has appeared on the professional reading lists of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and many professional schools. His new book, The Counterinsurgency Challenge, serves as an experiential tutorial on adaptive leadership in complex environments in conflict zones.

(c) http://kolendastrategicleadership.com

Reviews

[Mary Vogelsong · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book reads like, and was in fact written as an academic paper.

[Phillip Murrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm serving in the U.S. Army and have for 22 years. I agree with every argument the author makes in this book. I feel it should be required reading at all military academies AND for all members of Congress. It shows significant holes in American foreign policy regarding war termination. I believe the arguments would help reduce the length and frequency of wars, especially those fighting insurgents.

[Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The war termination problems that the United States encountered during the major post-9/11 interventions may not be an aberration. The Vietnam conflict suffered from the same factors, albeit in subtly different ways…Examination of war termination challenges enriches these perspectives. An important difference from the Iraq and Afghanistan case studies is that a negotiated outcome—in the form of North Vietnamese capitulation—was discussed from 1964 to 1966 during deliberations over whether to escalate the Vietnam War,” Christopher D. Kolenda writes in his new book, Zero-Sum Victory: What We’re Getting Wrong About War. The title is simple enough, encapsulating Kolenda’s wide-ranging yet refreshingly succinct meditation on the nature of modern warfare. It’s clear where he sits on the position he’s covering topically. And Kolenda makes no apologies about being biased, rather in place of said apolog(ies) providing extensive examples, point-by-point breakdowns, and sometimes out-and-out damning statistical data models. As far as Kolenda is concerned, we both haven’t learned from and should be extensively studying our history with a contemporary lens. "America’s bureaucratic way of war encourage(s) military officials to stay in their bureaucratic lane and focus on military progress and risks,” he continues in this vein. “Officials from other agencies (report) metrics from their silos. What no one question(s) (is) whether a successful military campaign could still result in strategic failure. After all, the military could not make a dent in the Taliban’s sustainability and the government legitimacy problems (during Afghanistan). No one addressed those damaging cross-cutting issues, because no person below the president was accountable for strategic success and thus forced to confront them.”

Kolenda is all about deconstructing the American exceptionalism mindset, specifically when it comes to how we have approached our foreign policy. It’s a gutsy position to take, particularly these days when divisions are running high, and certain positions are likely to shoehorn someone into a specific, political think tank regardless of the specificities of their respective position. As far as he’s concerned, Kolenda writes that with increasingly complex times come mandated, increasingly complex methods for how to deal with both ongoing and potential conflicts. Gone are the days of black being white, up being down being something that can be politically advantageous when it comes to the initiation of modern warfare. If anything, such an approach can prove disastrous. “Bureaucratic frictions, lack of vision, poor coordination, inadequate strategic empathy, and sloppy execution damaged reconciliation,” he writes, using Afghanistan as an example. “The lack of agreed conceptual frameworks for war termination inhibited clear communication and consensus-building within the US government, making the status quo harder to change…Individual actions in one, like the abortive opening of the Taliban political office, created setbacks in others. In the end, reconciliation further poisoned the relationship with Karzai, undermined American credibility in Afghanistan and the region, and heightened political uncertainty and instability as Afghanistan approached the 2014 elections and the end of the international combat mission.” In short, it’s about time we actually did discuss what treading carefully means - particularly in an era where a new cold war could be brimming on the horizon.

[Matthijs · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Zero-Sum Victory, Christopher Kolenda sets out to "understand and isolate what appear to be systemic US policy and strategy errors in recent large-scale interventions against insurgencies." These recent interventions refer to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, which both ended disastrously from a US point of view. Kolenda aims to develop a new methodological framework by which US civilian and military leaders would be better adept at winning wars, particularly irregular wars against insurgents. In order to arrive at this framework, he undertakes a chronological review of the two conflicts and attempts to identify errors in US decision-making and their causes.

Kolenda's main argument is that the US needs to move away from a zero-sum victory doctrine and strategy, by which success is either not defined or solely defined in absolute military terms (i.e., wiping out the enemy), and instead adopt a more dynamic framework which allows for several outcomes and turns waging war in a more winnable enterprise. By changing the mindset of decision-makers (e.g., more empathy for the attitudes and goals of belligerents and more consensus-seeking attempts in patron-client relations), undertaking organizational reform (e.g., removing bureaucratic 'silos', promoting interagency frameworks, and decentralizing authority), and reducing cognitive biases that impair decision-making, future US-led counterinsurgencies would likely be much more successful.

Kolenda fails to discuss and account, however, for various additional factors that might also help to explain the lack of success in America's recent war enterprises. Amongst those would be:

- the fact that US political/military aims were destined to fail from the get-go, with the War on Terror having been a colossal failure in part because of unattainable goals and an enemy that didn't truly exist
- a massive cultural clash of values and failure to recognize the impossibility (and possibly undesirability) of imposing Western liberal democracy through political and military shock therapy
- the two interventions were examples of asymmetric, high-technology wars wherein only a very low number of own casualties is accepted, both by political/military leaders and the public at home. This would reasonably impose severe restraints on military capability and effectiveness against an enemy which fights mostly on the ground
- Kolenda appears to show little consideration for the huge numbers of civilian casualties, in particular in Afghanistan, which were in part caused by a disregard for Afghani lives and an emphasis on limiting US/NATO casualties, and which in turn fuelled anti-US/Afghani regime sentiments

Overall, Zero-Sum Victory is a recommended read for anyone who wishes to gain insight into US considerations and decision-making in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and offers a reasonably persuasive argument for an explanation of Washington's failures.

[Henry · Rating 4 out of 5]

As Western Powers strive to adapt to a world enmeshed in great power competition, with the lines blurred between peace, crisis, and conflict, they must strive to not only comprehend the methods but also the goals. Military planners and political leaders must become more nuanced in their approaches and can no longer default to ‘decisive victory – a vague and dangerous belief that the expert application of military power will force an adversary to capitulate’ (p. 9).

Christopher Kolenda’s Zero-Sum Victory explores the contemporary history of US military campaigns to demonstrate policy shortfalls with regards to war termination criteria. These recent experiences serve as prime examples for setting realistic political and military objectives prior to entering a conflict, as well as the difficulties which might be encountered trying to adjust to a poorly developed framework once the fight has begun.

Military planners must develop an understanding ‘of the political and diplomatic dimensions of national power,’ and appreciate that ‘outcomes broader than decisive victory can help policy- and strategy-makers develop a more realistic array of options,’ (p. 257) and this book greatly assists in that effort.