Beyond the Battlefield: War as a Phase, Not an Endpoint
A still-common view of war treats it as a parenthesis: first comes competition among states, then armed conflict, and once hostilities cease, a return to politics and competition. Reality is more complex. Strategic competition does not stop when war begins. It continues through war and persists after it ends, but within a system that the war itself has helped transform.
War, therefore, is not the end state of strategic competition. It is one phase—an especially violent and destructive one—within a permanent competitive process. The longer a war lasts, the deeper that transformation becomes, affecting not only the military balance but the entire competitive landscape.
This leads to a fundamental conclusion: a war should not be assessed solely by what is achieved on the battlefield. The more important question is what strategic position a country will occupy when the war is over. A state can win militarily and emerge strategically weaker. It can gain territory while losing economic capacity. It can destroy an adversary’s military forces while simultaneously damaging its alliances, reputation, social cohesion, industrial base, and ability to compete in the future.
War Changes the Strategic Environment in Which It Is Fought
Wars that are not contained in their early stages tend to develop dynamics that become progressively harder to control. Deaths and destruction increase, as do the resources committed and the political capital invested. Damage accumulates on both sides while the political space for compromise narrows. Each additional cost changes expectations, hardens positions, and makes it more difficult to accept an outcome that appears insufficient to justify the sacrifices already made.
But the problem goes beyond the increasing difficulty of ending the conflict. Over time, more actors become involved, more variables enter the equation, and the interdependencies among the military, political, economic, technological, and social dimensions grow. War no longer merely produces effects within the system in which it began; it progressively reconfigures that system.
The transformation eventually reaches virtually every dimension of national life. Economic resources shift toward security and defense. Industry redirects productive capacity and investment. Operational pressure accelerates technological innovation and changes priorities well beyond the military sphere. Domestic political balances shift as new priorities emerge, the costs of war are redistributed, and governments struggle to sustain public support. Societies themselves change under the pressure of casualties, fear, mobilization, and polarization. Alliances change as well, because the duration of conflict alters interests, dependencies, threat perceptions, and the willingness of individual states to bear continuing costs.
Geoeconomics is reconfigured as well. Energy, raw materials, infrastructure, trade routes, finance, technology, and supply chains become simultaneously instruments, vulnerabilities, and targets of competition. Decisions taken to meet the immediate demands of war can therefore produce structural consequences that survive long after the fighting ends.
War, in other words, does not simply unfold within a given strategic environment. It changes that environment while it is being fought.
Ukraine provides a clear example. Whatever the eventual outcome of the conflict, the Europe that emerges will not be the Europe of February 2022. The war has already changed NATO, European defense policies, energy relations with Russia, the defense industrial base, perceptions of deterrence, and the transatlantic relationship. At the same time, it has accelerated a transformation in how military technology is conceived and employed. This process is still unfolding, and its full consequences will only become clear over time.
The same can be said of the Middle East after October 7, 2023. The conflict did not simply alter conditions in Gaza. It progressively affected and transformed the wider regional system: the confrontation between Israel and Iran, the balances in Lebanon and Syria, security in the Red Sea, the role of Iran-backed armed groups, Washington’s relations with its partners, and the prospects for normalization between Israel and Arab states. Here too, war has reshaped the regional security architecture far beyond the theater in which it originated.
Time Is Not Neutral
The duration of war is a fundamental strategic variable. As a conflict continues, costs are not the only thing that increases. So does the number of variables and interactions within the system. New actors intervene; others change their positions. Technologies evolve, economies adapt, militaries learn, industries redirect production, public perceptions shift, and alliances redefine their interests and priorities.
At the same time, damage and mutual hostility accumulate. Every loss makes it politically harder to accept a compromise that might have been possible only months earlier. Every act of destruction generates expectations of compensation or retaliation. Every sacrifice creates a political and social need to give that sacrifice meaning. Gradually, the costs already incurred can themselves become a reason to continue fighting.
This is one of the most dangerous paradoxes of prolonged war: the greater the price already paid, the more difficult it becomes to accept an outcome below the expectations that were used to justify that price. Time, therefore, is not simply a measure of how long a conflict lasts. It changes the political, military, economic, and psychological conditions of the conflict and narrows the space available for a negotiated settlement.
The Strategic Tipping Point
There is also a threshold beyond which the accumulation of change produces a qualitative transformation of the system. This is the tipping point characteristic of complex systems. It does not necessarily coincide with a major battle or a single, readily identifiable event. It may instead result from the accumulation of many smaller changes that, interacting with one another, eventually alter the overall configuration of the system.
Beyond that threshold, returning to previous conditions becomes increasingly difficult, unlikely, or prohibitively costly.
At that point, the nature of negotiation also changes. Negotiations are no longer simply about stopping the fighting or addressing the issues that originally caused the conflict. They take place within a different strategic system—one in which war has created new balances of power, new interests, new vulnerabilities, and new perceptions of security.
One of the most common mistakes in analyzing conflict is to imagine peace as a return to the status quo ante. After a sufficiently prolonged war, that status quo often no longer exists. Even when the fighting stops, many of the transformations produced by war continue to shape the strategic environment.
The decisive question therefore becomes not simply how the war will end, but what kind of system will emerge from it.
The Limits of Great-Power Influence
A second assumption also deserves reconsideration: the idea that a great power providing weapons, intelligence, economic support, or diplomatic protection can exercise influence over the recipient state in proportion to the resources it provides.
Recent experience points to a more complex reality.
The United States still possesses military, financial, technological, and diplomatic capabilities of extraordinary scope. Yet it has encountered significant difficulties in consistently shaping the decisions of partners to whom it has provided critical support, from Ukraine to Israel and, before that, in other regional conflicts.
This does not necessarily mean that American power is declining. The problem is more fundamental: possessing power is not the same as being able to convert it into political influence.
Every state interprets war through its own perceptions of survival, security, and national interest—in other words, through its own geopolitical imperatives. Ukraine fights for Ukraine, not for the United States. Israel fights according to what it considers necessary for its own security, not according to a strategy devised in Washington. The same principle applies, in different ways, to other actors in the international system.
Great powers can provide capabilities, create incentives, impose costs, and exert pressure. They can expand or restrict the range of options available to other states. But they cannot assume that they will be able to consistently shape the decisions of states whose vital interests differ from their own.
Indeed, influence can become bidirectional. States receiving support are not merely objects of great-power influence. They are strategic actors that seek, in turn, to shape the decisions of the country supporting them, using their geopolitical value, their position within the conflict, and the consequences that their possible failure would create for the supporting power itself.
This phenomenon is not limited to the Western system. The relationship between China and Russia does not imply an identity of interests. Strategic convergence coexists with national priorities that do not necessarily coincide. Similarly, regional actors supported by Iran retain their own objectives, interests, and degrees of autonomy. Comparable dynamics characterize relations between major powers and many countries of the so-called Global South, which are increasingly inclined to build diversified relationships rather than align permanently with a single center of power.
The international system is therefore becoming less compatible with a linear model of influencing powers and influenced states. Influence is increasingly distributed, negotiated, and reciprocal—and for precisely that reason, harder to exercise consistently over the behavior of others.
Alliances Do Not Eliminate National Interests
The same phenomenon applies to alliances. An alliance does not erase the national interests or geopolitical imperatives of its members. It seeks to make them sufficiently compatible around shared strategic objectives. Convergence of interests does not mean identity of interests.
Alliance cohesion therefore depends on the ability to preserve that compatibility. During war, it comes under increasing pressure because costs, risks, and threat perceptions are not distributed equally among allies.
A country geographically close to a conflict will perceive the threat differently from one farther away. A country heavily dependent on particular energy resources will face constraints different from those of a state with greater autonomy. A nuclear power will assess escalation risks differently from a state whose security also depends on an ally’s extended deterrence. These differences reflect distinct national interests, but also strategic priorities that an alliance can reconcile but cannot eliminate.
War makes these differences visible. When it continues for long enough, however, it can do something more: it can progressively alter the strategic convergence on which alliance cohesion was originally built.
Nuclear deterrence, for its part, does not interrupt permanent competition; it changes the thresholds, forms, and arenas in which that competition continues. It reduces the probability of a direct existential confrontation between nuclear powers without eliminating conflict, which can continue through conventional wars, proxy conflicts, cyber operations, economic coercion, and competition in the information and cognitive domains.
In Long Wars, the Ability to Endure Matters
As conflict continues, an often underestimated variable becomes increasingly important: the capacity to endure and adapt over time. Technological and military superiority remains fundamental, but it does not by itself guarantee political success.
The Taliban provide one of the clearest examples. They did not need to become militarily superior to the United States. They needed to prolong the conflict beyond America’s political willingness to sustain its costs indefinitely. In that profoundly asymmetric competition, time became a strategic resource.
The principle applies, with the necessary distinctions, to conflicts between states as well. In prolonged wars, it is not merely armies that compete, but entire national systems: industrial capacity, economic and financial resources, demographic depth, technological innovation, political cohesion, social resilience, institutional strength, and international support.
What matters above all is the ability to regenerate over time the resources consumed by war and to adapt organizations, technologies, and strategies to changes in the adversary and in the strategic environment.
The duration of war therefore changes the meaning of superiority itself. The actor that prevails is not necessarily the one possessing the greatest resources at the beginning of the conflict, but the one that can preserve, regenerate, adapt, and translate them into political and military power for longer.
Prolonged war thus becomes a competition among capacities for endurance, regeneration, and transformation—what we can collectively define as adaptive capacities.
From Management to Navigation
This brings us to the central issue.
If war were a linear system, it would be possible to define objectives, identify the resources required, calculate costs and benefits, and rationally manage its evolution. But war is not a linear system. As it continues, the number of interactions, feedback loops, and emergent effects increases, and no actor can fully control them.
War therefore increasingly takes on the characteristics of a complex system in which actors continually adapt to one another and to emerging circumstances, while their own decisions modify the system in which they continue to operate. Actors learn. Technologies evolve. Interests change. Alliances react. Societies alter their perceptions. Every decision changes the context in which the next decision will be made and may generate consequences different from those originally anticipated.
For this reason, as complexity and uncertainty increase, the ability to manage the overall evolution of a war diminishes and the need to navigate it grows.
The distinction is not semantic.
Management assumes sufficiently reliable knowledge of variables, probabilities, and cause-and-effect relationships to assess alternatives and consequences. It belongs primarily to the domain of risk, where the tools of management make it possible to plan, allocate resources, assess probabilities, and monitor deviations from objectives.
Navigation means operating when some decisive variables are unknown, probabilities cannot be estimated with sufficient reliability, and interactions among the elements of the system can generate emergent effects that are difficult to predict. This is the domain of uncertainty, where the quality of leadership becomes decisive—not because leadership can eliminate uncertainty, but because leaders must be able to make decisions within it, interpret incomplete signals, preserve room for maneuver, and continually adjust direction as the system evolves.
Under these conditions, strategy cannot consist in predicting the future. It must above all build the capacity to adapt: diversity of options, redundancy, modularity, rapid feedback, experimentation, continuous learning, and the ability to change direction when the evolution of the system renders previous decisions inadequate.
Navigation, however, does not mean abandoning strategy or passively accepting uncertainty. It means recognizing the limits of prediction while preserving sufficient adaptive capacity and room for maneuver to respond to the system’s evolution and, where possible, influence it before it crosses thresholds beyond which it may assume profoundly different configurations.
Winning the War—or Winning the Competition?
The fundamental strategic question should therefore be asked before entering a conflict or, when war is imposed, from its earliest stages:
How do we want to be positioned when this war is over?
It is not enough to know what territory must be defended or what military capability of the adversary must be neutralized. We must define what victory means and, above all, what conditions must exist the day after the fighting ends so that a military victory does not become a strategic defeat.
War consumes precisely the resources required for future competition: economic strength, demographics, industrial capacity, technology, political capital, public support, international credibility, and alliance cohesion.
It is therefore possible to win a war militarily and lose the strategic competition of which that war was a part. And an apparently weaker actor may ultimately prevail because it possesses greater capacities for endurance and adaptation—or simply because it can sustain the costs of conflict longer than its adversary.
Strategy should exist precisely to avoid this paradox.
War is not the conclusion of strategic competition. It is one of its possible phases—certainly the most violent, costly, and unpredictable. When it is not contained in its early stages, it progressively changes the strategic environment in which states and alliances will have to continue competing.
A state, therefore, should not ask only whether it possesses the power required to enter a war, or to sustain one imposed upon it. It should ask a much more difficult question:
What kind of power will I be when I emerge from it?
That, perhaps, is the true measure of victory.