Because you’d be surprised how few texts about warfare actually lay this out, and how few military/grand strategic appeals actually phrase it in these terms…
Given that war is waged against people, you can eliminate all large-scale resistance/return the scale of violence to small scale attacks by:
– Attrition via physical destruction or other subversion of their soldiers and war weapons, killing them all and leaving no means of resistance
– Blitzkrieg/shock and awe/maneuver warfare that takes territory, followed by an occupation that prevents the enemy from gathering in numbers without suffering massive losses
– Siege/blockade, leaving the enemy with no means to resist
– Alliance/bribery, inducing the enemy to stop fighting via rewards and promises
– Demoralization, causing the enemy to abandon the fight. This could be via purely logical or humanitarian appeals, or it could be the result of propaganda or war-weariness.
The evaluation of an attrition plan is the examination of the relationship:
Number of enemy fighting assets (is being reduced by) friendly fighting assets actually in battle (adjusted by results of ongoing) kill ratio
Of the three optimization parameters, by far the most frequently implicated in attrition failure is low utilization of friendly fighting assets.
The evaluation of a maneuver warfare plan is fairly complicated and is the subject of most war texts, but the basic elements required are:
– The neutralization or bypass of enemy air and space forces (which itself is subject to these same considerations)
– If applicable, the neutralization or bypass of the enemy naval forces
– The identification of one or more key land attack points, coupled with the deployment of sufficient fighting assets in a position to overcome those key points
– A follow-on plan, usually consisting of elements of attrition or siege, that exploits the breakthrough at the key locations to gain combat advantage
– Upon the completion of a follow-up plan, the deployment of sufficient occupation forces to detect and counter any large-scale enemy actions
The evaluation of a siege plan is the evaluation of the enemy supply curve, where the success of the siege plan is when the enemy supplies dip well below zero, and the enemy must surrender, sally forth for battle, or starve to death. In particular, the siege plan must roughly adhere to the following key constraints:
– At any given time t, the defenders must consume significantly more supplies than they receive from internal production, relief convoys or airdrops, or from outward expeditions
– At any given time t, the blockading forces must maintain sufficient strength to maintain pressure on enemy supplies, while also protecting against a combined enemy relief operation and an attack from the besieged enemy
– The amount of initial defender supplies must be exhausted within the stated duration
The evaluation of an alliance plan is difficult, as it relies upon predicting future human behavior and not on physical constraints on the enemy force. Factors commonly considered are:
– The past behavior of the party when bribed
– Coherence of previous enemy actions (i.e. is the enemy acting rationally)
– A rational sequencing of events, according to the enemy’s value function, in which the alliance or bribery path leads to a more optimal conclusion
The evaluation of demoralization is even more difficult, particularly because wars are unpopular for quite a while before fighting actually ceases. Nor is it guaranteed that the enemy will ever give up, so it is an error to propose a war plan relying only on demoralization in an offensive operation. While demoralization is the conventionally attributed explanation for belligerents ceasing battle outside of total war, a defender relying on this phenomenon still commits to endless war; as such, the defender must plan for and mitigate the other strategies (e.g. by guerilla warfare to lower the intensity of attrition).