A Struggle of Will

November 2nd, 2025

Whenever anyone talks about planning, one thing that is always stressed is that “You need to eliminate all the assumptions.” Of course, you never do. In fact, there are a series of really massive assumptions that can never be eliminated. Perhaps the most important one is an assumption on how wars will end; the US has, in the post-World War II world, assumed that “If I break all your toys [weapons] you’ll stop fighting.” Discussions on AI and its role in future war fighting seem to fixate on this idea, as well as its subset: “if we demonstrate overwhelming technological superiority, they’ll give up.”

Is that true?

A number of years ago, I heard a lecture at the Naval War College in Newport, RI in which the professor offered for our consideration a study he was working on (I don’t remember his name, and I’m not sure he ever published it, but if anyone has seen something suggesting he finished his sturdy, please tell me). At the root of his study was the Clausewitz dictum that war is a struggle of will. As such, he was asking “simply:” how much must a society lose before it gives up, before its will “breaks?”?

A look through history will find many cases of societies that never give up, just as there are cases when countries or civilizations seem to have given up very easily. But, as a whole, as I recall the lecture, what he had come upon was that most countries don’t give up easily. Rather, the gist of his study was that most wars require a good deal more killing than anyone wants to admit. Countries can be devastated and yet keep fighting.

There are, in fact (as he readily admitted), many cases where societies will fight to the death (think of Masada), or suffer huge losses and keep fighting; Poland and Lithuania with 17 and 14.5% of their populations, respectively, killed during WWII, more recently East Timor, which lost something on the order of 15% of their population (numbers are estimates because all the census data was lost), and it may be above 20%.

Curiously, writers of fiction, and the general public, seem to understand the problem better than some planners; every sci-fi movie in which we meet a superior race is predicated on just the opposite, that we feisty humans will never give up no matter how superior the aliens are.

The US, meanwhile, has a moral and ethical constraint on all planning, an insistence that casualties, civilian casualties, be kept to a minimum. But what if that means that, for all practical purposes, the war cannot be won?

Certainly there are wars in which the removal of the regime allows for a collapse of organized, armed resistance and the fairly rapid breaking of will. This is what happened in Grenada and Panama. In that case the intelligence assessment that forecast that result was correct.

But it’s worth observing that in 2003 there was a similar assumption that the Iraq army would collapse, and once Saddam Hussein was captured or killed that the resistance would die down. That didn’t quite play out. This was essentially the same thing that Putin was told in February 2022. As Yogi observed: “It’s tough to make predictions, particularly abut the future.”

Iraq was long (arguably from 1990 to 2009) and resulted in somewhere between 150,000 and 650,000 deaths (some estimates go higher). The war in Afghanistan lasted 20 years (and if you ask Pakistan, it’s still going on), and resulted in more than 170,000 deaths and perhaps twice that number.

In a way, World War II was too easy. It was not only an easy sell that we were fighting bad guys, but when we rolled over Morocco, Algeria, Italy, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands - the people were genuinely ecstatic to see us. The same applied in the islands of the Pacific - the Philippines and elsewhere. When the allied armies rolled into Germany there was a different story. And of course, when the US landed on Okinawa that was a thoroughly different story. Anyone who has taken a hard look at the fight for Okinawa will agree that landings in, and the fight for, Japan would have been a world apart from fighting across France or up the Italian peninsula.  

But we didn’t need to. So the organizational memory is that when we roll over folks they rejoice. We reinforced that during Desert Storm when US and allied forces liberated Kuwait. The story gets fuzzy in Iraq. And much more fuzzy in Afghanistan.

So, what can we learn from all this?

The first is that we need to be leery of net assessments that dovetail nicely with planning assumptions. We might lob a few shells into the palace in Zanzibar and the Sultan will surrender in under an hour. Or, we might drop 7.5 million tons of ordnance on a country the size of New Mexico and, in the end, have to leave.

The second point is that the fascination with ever more sophisticated weapons won’t change the real calculus of war. Clausewitz’s warning remains accurate:

Kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed: war is such a dangerous business that the mistakes which come from kindness are the very worst. The maximum use of force is in no way incompatible with the simultaneous use of the intellect. If one side uses force without compunction, undeterred by the bloodshed it involves, while the other side refrains, the first will gain the upper hand. That side will force the other to follow suit; each will drive its opponent toward extremes, and the only limiting factors are the counterpoises inherent in war.

To introduce the principle of moderation into the theory of war itself would always lead to logical absurdity.

We need the best weapons we can afford, and we need full ammunition magazines, and we need the very best training.

And we need to avoid wars whenever we can. But we also need to recognize that  no matter the weapons, no matter our technological advantages, in the end, the war will be decided based on will. Let’s not fight unless we must, but if we must, recognize that what we need to do is not destroy the enemy’s weapons, we need to break his will. And if our planning isn’t directed at that end, we have a problem.