that the basic law of military science – as yet unformulated – was to be a law of victory; and that victory was to be achieved by means of a decisive defeat of the enemy in armed conflict.68 The military were arguing, in other words, that victory had to be thought of in terms of military operations, and not only as the inevitable outcome of a historical process, which was how Malenkov, for example, had presented it in his November 1949 speech when he said that a third world war would lead to the collapse of the capitalist system.
