Decisive victory

A decisive victory is an indisputable military victory of a battle that determines or significantly influences the ultimate result of a conflict. It does not always coincide with the end of combat. The Battle of Midway, for example, is considered "decisive" despite the fact that the Pacific War ended more than three years later because it represented a shift of power in the emerging Pacific naval conflict—one the Empire of Japan was unable to reverse.^{[citation needed]}

In Defining and Achieving Decisive Victory, Colin Gray defined an operational decisive victory as "a victory which decides the outcome to a campaign, though not necessarily to the war as a whole".^[1]

The term has also been used to describe victories in which the prevailing side utterly overwhelmed the losing side. For example, the attack on Pearl Harbor is sometimes described as a decisive victory for the Japanese, even though it did not decide the ultimate outcome of the war in the Pacific.^{[citation needed]}

Writing in Military Review, Thomas Goss attributes the popularity of the closely related term "decisive battle" to Sir Edward Creasy and his 1851 book, The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World. Goss recounts a variety of different definitions for the term used by historians and military leaders (neither of which typically define the term before using it): a battle that (1) achieves its operational objectives; (2) ends the conflict because one side has achieved its strategic objectives, or; (3) directly ends the conflict and results in a lasting peace between the belligerents. He concludes that "A decisive battle must directly lead to a rapid resolution of the contested political issues because the results on the battlefield caused both sides to agree that a decision had been reached."^[2]

See also

• Strategic victory
• Tactical victory

Notes

1. ^ Gray, p. 11.
2. ^ Goss, pp. 11, 16.

References

• Goss, Thomas J. "Gettysburg's 'Decisive Battle'." Military Review (July–August 2004): 11-16.
• Gray, Colin (2002), Defining and Achieving Decisive Victory, DIANE Publishing, ISBN 9781428910928, http://books.google.com/?id=3j5rW0GYzzEC&lpg=PR1&dq=Defining%20and%20Achieving%20Decisive%20Victory&pg=PR1