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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.

In Defining and Achieving Decisive Victory, Gray (2002, p. 11) defined an operational decisive victory as "a victory which decides the outcome to a campaign, though not necessarily to the war as a whole".

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.

[edit] See also

• Strategic victory
• Tactical victory

[edit] References

• Gray, Colin (2002), Defining and Achieving Decisive Victory, DIANE Publishing, ISBN 9781428910928, http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3j5rW0GYzzEC&lpg=PR1&dq=Defining%20and%20Achieving%20Decisive%20Victory&pg=PR1