Decisive victory

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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 war ended more than three years later because it represented a shift of power in the emerging Pacific naval conflict-one the Japanese were never able to reverse.

From the book Defining and Achieving Decisive Victory, the author defined the word as "a victory which decides the outcome of 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.