Strategic surrender

Strategic surrender is a strategy of attrition. What the loser avoids by offering to surrender is a last, chaotic round of fighting that would have the characteristics of a rout. The victor can obtain his objective without paying the costs of a last battle.

In 1958, US Senator Stuart Symington accused the RAND Corporation of defeatism for studying how the United States might surrender to an enemy power. This led to the US Congress passing a prohibition on the spending of tax dollars on the study of defeat or surrender of any kind. However, the senator had apparently misunderstood, as the report was a survey of past cases in which the US had demanded unconditional surrender of its enemies, asking whether or not this had been a more favorable outcome to US interests than an earlier, negotiated surrender might have been.