War is the ultimate human failure--where reason, ingenuity and productive energy are bent to the purpose of organized killing, across continents and years. This book grew out of my realization that there were certain conflicts in history that stalemated for long periods of time--in a cacophony of brutal slaughter--but then were ended quickly with a military offense against the center of their enemy's political, economic and ideological power. To investigate the reasons why this has occurred became all the more important when I discovered that some of these conflicts resulted in long-term peace--peace that lasted more than a generation, and in some cases peace that has not been broken to this day. These cases--rare as they are--warrant our study.

Nothing Less than Victory considers seven major events in history--the Greco-Persian Wars (547-446 BC), the Theban / Spartan Wars (385-362 BC), the Punic Wars (262-146 BC),  the wars between the Romans and the Goths, Palmyrenes and Gauls (AD 270-275), the American Civil War (1861-1865), and the British appeasement of Hitler, as well as the American defeat of Japan, in the Second World War (1939-1945).

The reasons why human beings fight are not to be found in technology, economics, innate depravity or genetic predispositions. Wars begin when people choose to fight--often through years of preparation, negotiations and pretexts. The will to fight—a motivated decision and commitment to use military force—is the universal human element that transcends terrain and technology, and both starts and sustains a war. The distinctly political decision to wage war is a product of ideas, and is anchored in a social and ideological context, from which political leaders draw their strength. The willful decision and commitment to fight is the central, irreplaceable factor in the initiation and prosecution of every war.

The commitment to fight is founded on something deeper than military expediency: a sense of moral rightness. Strategist B. H. Liddell-Hart, calling upon Napoleon’s principle that in war, “the moral is to the physical as three to one,” credits “the predominance of moral factors in all military decisions” to their status as “the more constant factors, changing only in degree, whereas the physical factors are different in almost every war and every military situation.” The people in a city-state—or a continent—will rise up passionately into organized killing, and will maintain the passion through years of death and destruction, only if they think, on some level, that it is morally proper to use horrific force to attain their goals. This is true for aggressors, who are motivated to conquer cities, nations and continents for aggrandizement, loot or slaves--as well as for defenders, who want to maintain their own freedom.

Granting moral factors their proper place over physical capacities lends a certain perspective to the study of war, which is not the study of a physical system, like a turbulent air flow, a pinball machine, or a climate pattern. War is human action, directed by human minds, with choices taken for human motives. It is anchored in a political, social and moral context, which conditions the goals that are chosen (a nation’s policy), the means by which they are pursued (its strategies), and the energy behind the struggle (the will to fight). The study of war is part of the study of man.

Material used in this book has appeared in the following:

Article: "'Gifts from Heaven': The Meaning of the American Defeat of Japan, 1945" in The Objective Standard 2.4, Winter, 2007/2008

Article: “‘A Balm for a Guilty Conscience’: Moral Paralysis, Appeasement, and the Causes of World War II,” in The Objective Standard 2.2, 2007

Article: “William Tecumseh Sherman and the Moral Impetus for Victory,” in The Objective Standard 1.2, 2006

Conference: “A Re-evaluation of Aurelian’s Bloodless Eastern Campaign against Palmyra,” Society for Military History Conference, Kansas State University, May 18-20, 2006