Strategy is about making a whole series of choices about one’s goals, priorities, resources, and risk tolerance. Strategy involves choices that respond to others’ actions and to changes in the environment. Sometimes all of the available choices will be less than optimal. Almost never is there a single perfect solution to a given problem—strategic choices require tradeoffs. Overwhelmingly, though, strategic aims and choices are framed in terms of winning and losing; this tendency, however, reflects poor strategic thinking and leads to false choices about what can and should and must be done. The language of strategy requires more options, more nuance, and better metaphors.

Strategists and policymakers not only have to consider the consequences of choices they make, but also must deal with the consequences of past choices—most of which they did not make and cannot be changed—but which have almost certainly narrowed their decision space. The strategic options the United States had available in 1943, amid the Second World War, were shaped by strategic choices the U.S. and its allies had made in 1942 and 1941 and even decades before, say, in 1937 or even 1919. Strategists cannot live in an alternate timeline, and any critique of a proposed strategy must deal with the world as it is, not as it might have been.

The twenty-first-century conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, still sometimes characterized by the moniker the “Global War on Terror,” are no different—every past choice has shaped the options available. And even by the time “getting out” became the consensus position, exactly how that might be done and what, exactly, that meant, were up for discussion. Should the United States really just pick up and leave? Should some forces stay? If so, how many and what kind? Should the United States try to negotiate a war-termination settlement with the Taliban? What would be the consequences of leaving? Of staying? What if things went south, as they appeared to do in Iraq between the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 2011 and the rise of Daesh in 2016? Would U.S. and allied forces have to return? What does the United States owe Afghanistan and its people; and what of Iraq, and Syria?

But the one thing American strategists could not wish away was the decision to invade Afghanistan to topple the Taliban regime in the Fall of 2001. Nor could strategists wish away the last eighteen years of conflict, the last eighteen years of failed governance, or the last eighteen years of poor strategic vision.

Early in 2019, Richard Haass wrote an essay titled “Agonizing over Afghanistan” in which he claimed, “Neither winning the war nor negotiating a lasting peace is a real option in Afghanistan. Just leaving, though, as we are about to do in Syria, would be a mistake. What we need is an open-ended, affordable strategy for not losing.” And people lost their minds (a common affliction on Twitter); but the sentiment was common across Twitter’s academic, policy, and punditry circles. The critics said Haass was wrong. That he was advocating for just staying in Afghanistan forever, and to what end? That eighteen years was enough to know it was time to get out. That this was a thinly disguised argument for ever-higher defense budgets. That not-losing was a terrible reason to lose your friends in combat. That this would just be another Vietnam.

There is, understandably, a lot of consternation at the prospect of designing a strategy for the explicit goal of not losing. But perhaps this is precisely what is required in many cases where the complexities of the actors, the environment, and the interests make clear-cut victories impossible. Maybe the goal in some places and circumstances can be only as ambitious as "make it suck just a little less tomorrow than it does today?”

But when American lives and billions of dollars are on the line, not-losing is incredibly unsatisfying. Loss aversion does not make for inspiring slogans or rousing speeches. It is, critics say, a recipe for endless war. It is not self-evident, however, that such a strategy necessarily involves the perpetual deployment of American combat troops or wartime mobilization. A national strategy will almost certainly have military elements, but Haass did not actually suggest there should be no change in troop levels or missions in Afghanistan. Rather, a coherent national strategy would account for past choices, present constraints, and future desires matched against the reasonable and feasible capacity for success.

The larger impediment to formulating such a strategy is the military’s can-do, “winning matters” culture. Military leaders demand strategic options that don’t look like not-losing. One influential anonymous military analyst, CDR Salamander, tweeted in response to Haass’ article:

If any of the 4-star staffs I was on received POLMIL [political-military] guidance to write or provide a revision to an existing Plan a design towards an, ‘open-ended, affordable strategy for not losing.’ we couldn't. Likewise, if as a planner I offered as a COA [Course of Action] to do same, I'd be fired.

In this culture, open-ended, iterative, affordable strategies just don’t go anywhere.

But when none of winning, not-losing, negotiating, staying, or leaving seem like good or viable options, it is time for strategists to move away from comfortable definitions and metaphors altogether. As Everett Dolman has written: “The first notion the military strategist must discard is victory, for strategy is not about winning.” To make the strategic aim of not-losing make sense, strategists should instead use Emile Simpson’s definition of strategy in War From the Ground Up: “Essentially strategy is the dialectical relationship, or the dialogue, between desire and possibility.” This mental shift makes the problem of what to do in Afghanistan and other messy places look different. In short, what the United States wants may not be possible at a price it is willing to pay. What the United States is willing to pay—in time, blood, treasure—depends, in part, on what it wants and how badly it wants it.

Add on top of this complexity the problem of even defining what winning, much less victory, might look like, and you've got a mess. But it is a mess made over decades, and it is a mess unlikely to respond to short, targeted interventions. So strategy is where you deal with the mess. All the insistence on talking about and defining strategy in terms of victory and winning, and then in terms of endstates and ends and objectives, blinds military and political leaders to the fact that strategy is iterative and ongoing. A common critique of American strategy in Afghanistan has been that it has not been a single war fought for eighteen years, but rather a year-long war fought eighteen times. No doubt, that is a problem. At the same time, to expect a single consistent war effort over eighteen years with no change in endstates or intensity would also be folly. Strategy must change as the environment changes—and that environment includes political will, strategic aims, and the global context. Strategy can’t be put on autopilot. Strategy does not end.

Wars, on the other hand, do end.[1] But strategy and war are not synonymous. Nor are war and the use of military force. An "open-ended, affordable strategy for not-losing” may involve the use of military force, but it should not be just that. In this open-ended affordable strategy for not losing the U.S. military may be called on to execute any number of missions. The U.S. military is, in fact, involved in just such missions all over the world—engaging, advising, training, and exercising in places where there is no war, but where there is too much at stake to simply leave. All of these places deserve serious strategic thinking, and this means moving beyond a war/winning paradigm.

When strategists think only about war, end states, victory, and winning, they rely on language that is linear and absolute to define success. Such language attempts to turn big, conventional wars into the ideal type. And it suggests that if the United States is not winning, that perhaps American leaders simply do not care enough, that Americans do not sufficiently value the lives of military service members, that the nation is confused, that the United States suffers from a great strategic deficiency, or that it is too distracted and stretched too thin.

The idiom and metaphor of war is pervasive in modern English; everything is presumably relatable to war. This spillage is evident in the language used to talk about the eradication of virulent disease, for example. Doctors wage war on infections and cancer. And these metaphors work in reverse, as well. In using a medical metaphor, wars that have clear end states and objectives, with clearly-defined enemies, and which produce clear-cut victories might be thought of as eradicating a disease. Killing off a virus. Developing immunity. Cutting out a cancer. War is acute. Its onset is sudden and its consequences severe. You treat the problem swiftly and with everything you have or close to it. So goes the conventional wisdom.

But what would happen if strategists used a different metaphor—one of chronic illness—to think about their approach to intractable, complex problems? One where not-losing is the goal.

Chronic illnesses often develop and change over time. Of course, chronic conditions may cause acute conditions, and you'd respond appropriately. But chronic conditions—asthma, diabetes, osteoporosis, even AIDS now—are managed, not vanquished, although certainly scientists and researchers and physicians continue to search for cures and new treatments.

Consider the metaphor of war as illness. Would you prefer not to have the chronic condition? Sure. Do you ignore it and hope it goes away? You probably should not. Do you imagine winning and risk your health in other areas with drastic and untested treatments? Perhaps—but only after serious consultation about the potential risks and rewards. More likely, you continue to treat the problem in consultation with medical professionals. You ratchet up treatments when symptoms flare. You back off when things are in remission. You keep an eye on it. You maintain a testing regime. You stay abreast of scientific advances and new research.

In this world you might never win using such a strategy—in fact, that might not even be the point. You will probably never feel like you’re at 100%. It may be extraordinarily costly and time consuming and depressing. It may prevent you from doing other things you'd rather be doing. But you, literally, live to fight another day. Such is the nature of the beast.

Are chronic conditions sometimes the result of past behaviors? Yes—see above the point about strategy existing in an environment shaped by past choices. This metaphor ought also to serve as a serious warning about getting involved in conflicts in the first place. Once the chronic problem has appeared, though, it may never go away. And there’s something to the aphorism that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The dialogue about what is desirable and what is possible must happen early and honestly. The risks of something that appears acute (9/11) developing into a chronic problem (Afghanistan now) should be carefully considered.

And so, in Afghanistan—and in Syria, in Iraq, in the broader counter-terrorism fight, and in a host of other messy circumstances (some of which the United States helped create)—perhaps the best the United States is going to do, at least for now, is to not lose. Perhaps the best that can be done is to manage costs and risk. American policymakers and political and military leaders must think wisely about the resources they have—military and not—and how to use them to achieve strategic effects. And even when the stakes of losing are higher, say, in Great Power Competition, the mental shift from winning to managing may create more helpful, sustainable strategies. The language of strategy matters; how strategists and military leaders talk about war and strategy affects how they execute the same. Engaging a metaphor of chronic illness will keep strategists in it for the long haul.

If we do it well—strategizing, that is—we may just be able to live with the world we have helped to create for a while.

Jacqueline E. Whitt is Associate Professor of Strategy at the United States Army War College and the author of Bringing God to Men: American Military Chaplains in the Vietnam War and with Kyle Longley, Grunts: The American Combat Soldier in Vietnam (2nd edition). She is Editor-in-Chief of War Room, the online journal of the United States Army War College. The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not represent the official position of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

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Header Image: Recursion (Rand On)

Notes:

[1] Fred Ikle's brilliant book Every War Must End should find its way onto every strategist's bookshelf. It's a little, compact tome. Whether U.S. military engagement in Afghanistan constituted a war is a topic for another essay.