Description
As a distinctive corpus of knowledge, military doctrine has been grappling with the question of military victory for a long time. Nevertheless, war scholars across traditions have neglected doctrinal sources in their studies of victory. Rectifying this shortcoming, this paper re-grounds the inquiry into victory’s meaning within UK doctrinal texts and argues that victory is best understood as a (socially constructed) narrative, rather than an outcome. Indeed, for doctrinarians, ‘facts on the ground’ are only a part of the story and narratives have the capacity to radically alter them. Firstly, the paper embarks on a critical reading of cross-service strategic and operational military doctrine to reconstruct the ‘UK doctrinal imaginary’ and meta-theorise its key features. While victory is only rarely mentioned in this corpus, I argue that the notion still informs military doctrine to an exceptional degree – victory is, in other words, hidden in plain sight. Secondly, the paper zeroes in on the concepts of end-state(s), objective(s), aim(s) and success(es). Far from being proxies – or descriptions of conflict outcomes at different levels of war – I find these ideas to be constitutive of victory as a concept. Lastly, I focus on the politics of victory’s hidden presence, suggesting that victory operates as a temporal and affective device to manage different audiences.
