The "endurance hunt", thought by anthropologists to be the hunting method that put humanity at the top of the food chain. It is a method of hunting by tracking and chasing a single target for as long as it takes for it to get tired. While many animals can easily outpace humans in short bursts, no other species has our potential for endurance (basically, you follow your prey at a brisk walk until it drops from heat exhaustion). As long as the human is persistent enough, eventually the animal will be too tired to run or fight and collapse. Then it's pretty much over. However, human endurance hunting is limited to warm or hot climates — humans' relative stamina relies on ability to sweat with access to water while their hunted prey will overheat, so that method doesn't work in temperate or cold climates.
Even in temperate and cold climates, One Hit Kills with arrow or spear weren't guaranteed even for skilled hunters, so wounded prey often had to be tracked overland. Bloodloss and panic would wear the prey's endurance down while the hunter followed.
Another real life example is wolves, which are as adapted to cold weather endurance as humans are to warm. When the two species started working together (with wolves becoming dogs), everything made of meat was basically screwed.
Komodo dragons. The Komodo has a very nasty venomous bite that causes, among other things, inhibition of blood clotting, lowered blood pressure, hypothermia (as a result of the previous two), and paralysis. It will chase and bite its prey again and again relentlessly, using its superior stamina compared to other lizards as a weapon, until the prey falls dead from shock.
Roadrunners prefer to hunt rattlesnakes around dawn so that the snake doesn't have a chance to warm up in the sun, as cold makes them slow and lethargic. They will also make the snake strike and miss until the snake is tired.
Ancient warfare
In a Real Life knife fight between two skilled opponents, if you can't get an easy kill, the idea is to nick the other guy and let him "bleed out". Which doesn't mean he bleeds to death, it means the blood loss tires him out and leaves him vulnerable to a killing stab.
It's also worth noting that this tactic not only can easily be applied to combat of just about any form, but often is the deciding factor. The more a fighter exerts themselves during an offensive, the quicker they will tire. Violence is one of the most physically draining activities that human beings can engage in, and if a victory isn't achieved within the first minute, it's extremely likely that the fight will end in favour of whoever has greater endurance.
A lot of historical sieges would end up this way, especially in eras prior to organized supply trains when armies fed off the surrounding land as a rule — Storming the Castle was relatively rare due to the difficulty of attacking well-fortified positions. Many sieges were endurance contests of which side could keep their army together and fed longer before the other side gave up.
Roman formations were used to capitalize on this.
That, and the front ranks could be easily allowed to retreat to the rear for a break while fresher troops stepped up (also, the knowledge that if they can survive the first 2 minutes of a battle, they would be rotated out to safety, goes a long way to encourage the front rankers to fight harder).
Speaking of the Romans, their victory in the First and Second Punic War fits the description, as they soaked up tremendous losses (in the First Punic War, Rome lost two entire fleets crewed by about 100,000 men each to storms) and crushing defeats (e.g. against Hannibal in the Second Punic War) but kept on fighting for years until they eventually won. Moreover, Rome could replace their losses at a quick pace and had a steady flow of resources, whilst Hannibal had a finite amount of troops and no means of replacing any of his losses.
This is either the or one of the first times this tactic was used as a military doctrine: They later named it the Fabian strategy after the guy who came up with it, Dictator Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus. Despite essentially keeping the Roman military from being destroyed, he still faced massive popularity losses since he refused to directly engage Hannibal while his troops pillaged Italy.
The Romans were also willing to work together and gear everything towards the war effort, whilst Hannibal was often undermined by in-fighting at home.
Early modern warfare
In a number of cases a war of attrition has been the way to prevail against an alliance, in effect by continuing to fight until the differences among the powers fighting you become so great that the alliance fractures, or you even succeed in wooing one of the allied powers away from the others.
In The Hundred Years War, Henry V of England was allied to the Burgundians, which put him into a seemingly unassailable position to rule France, yet the Dauphin (later Charles VII) fought on and in the end succeeded in coming to an accomodation with Burgundy, which enabled his forces to drive out the now outnumbered English during the reign of Henry VI.
France came out of the War of Spanish Succession in much better shape than expected because the war continued until the Habsburg claimant to the Spanish throne died, leaving the German emperor as next in line and thus creating the possibility of one Habsburg ruler of both the Holy Roman Empire and Spain. This led to the British concluding a separate peace and the French winning the final battle of Dinant against the Austrians and Dutch.
The Seven Years' War from the Prussian side became a war of attrition after the Prussians began to suffer serious defeats starting in 1757 at Kolin. Frederick the Great continued the fight until some of the powers fighting him dropped out of the alliance (first Russia, then Sweden) and Maria Theresia's other allies lost their determination to reduce Prussia to a marquisat of Brandenburg. But it was a close-run thing, and Frederick would have failed without British subsidies.
Similarly, the first French Republic profited from Prussia and Spain leaving the anti-Revolutionary alliance in early 1795 and concluding separate peace treaties in Basel.
This was the Austrian strategy in the 1848 campaign of the First War of Italian Independence, against an alliance of all the Italian states except San Marino and the Duchy of Lucca (the two smallest ones): the Revolutions of 1848 had deprived them of their forward base in Milan and the naval base in Venice and caused assorted troubles that kept most of their forces outside Italy and even threatened the very existence of Austria, and the Piedmontese intervened in support of the Revolutionaries. They won initial victories and so feldmarshall Joseph Radetzky opted for a fighting retreat toward the Quadrilateral Fortresses (a system of four fortified cities that operated as rearguard bases and fortified line), knowing that while the Kingdom of Sardinia and many volunteers believed in the cause, everyone else was in only for the Revolutions of 1848 and didn't trust the king of Sardinia, Carlo Alberto, at all. As expected, the alliance collapsed when the Pope ordered the retreat of his troops, precipitating the retreat of the other large states, and while the Sardinians and the volunteers were able to breach the Quadrilateral with the conquest of Peschiera, it exhausted their forces, allowing Radetzky (who in the meantime had received some reinforcements) to defeat the Sardinians and launch a counteroffensive.
During the American Civil War, both sides wanted to use this after the initial battles of the war showed that neither side would end the fight quickly. The Confederate States of America hoped to fight a defensive war until economic pressure gave them foreign allies who would force the United States of America to stop fighting. The Union's Anaconda Plan intended to squeeze the fight out of the South by taking the Mississippi River and cutting the Confederacy into pieces while blockading it to keep it from using its control of cotton to stay solvent and gain allies. The South's strategy died after the battle of Antietam gave Lincoln an opening to use the Emancipation Proclamation and focus foreign attention on slavery rather than purely economic terms.note Previously Great Britain had favored the Confederacy simply as a means to weaken the United States for British economic gain. But slavery, which the British Empire had abolished decades earlier, was despised by the British people, and this not-quite-alliance had only been palatable because slavery was legal in both sides of the Civil War. Once the Union openly declared itself opposed to slavery, supporting slavers in a war against abolitionists was untenable in Britain. When the South tried to alter their strategy, Gettysburg forced them back on the defensive. Over the course of the war, the North realized that since the South had so much less manpower than the North (the North could field about twice as many soldiers as the South) that it actually benefited the South more than the North for the North to continue prisoner exchanges. The resulting end of the exchanges led to the South being ground down on the defensive, facing larger manpower shortages than ever before, with no hope of foreign allies coming to their aid, debts mounting, and Sherman's March to the Sea bringing the war to Southern civilians, providing a good incentive for slaves deep in the South to run away and hurt the economy even more.
General Sherman: I would make this war as severe as possible, and show no symptoms of tiring till the South begs for mercy.
This was the key to Mexico's victory against France and their Puppet King Maximillian Hapsburg during the French intervention in Mexico. A critical Hold the Line victory at Puebla on Cinco de Mayo delayed the French long enough for La Résistance to be organized, and also gave the Union the opportunity to turn the tables against the Confederacy. The Mexican republicans then held out long enough for a re-united U.S. to start using diplomatic and military pressure to "persuade" the French to leave Mexico. The French public was also getting increasingly irate at the huge amounts of money the French government was sinking into the Mexican adventure, despite their inability to defeat the Mexicans, and wanting military resources focused more on the rising threat of Prussia.
Modern warfare
Anglosphere popular culture would consider this "the Russia Gambit", as this is how people in English-speaking countries believe Russia won the The Napoleonic Wars and World War II, supposedly by Russia constantly retreating into colder and colder territory while using their near-limitless numbers to slowly wear the invaders down. The reality is that while weather and climate are significant factors in warfare within Russia, they are only problematic when you fail to respect them. Moreover while it is true that powerful combatants like France and Russia have fielded, destroyed, and lost forces on a vastly larger scale to countries like the USA and Britain, the actual resources of such countries are hardly infinite. In addition, that aforementioned tactic of retreating into colder environments doesn’t work when your opponent is Finland, which proved more than capable enough to humiliate Russia time and time again with their own resilience against the cold.
The Napoleonic Wars were actually a subversion in many ways, as the Russian Army in 1812 was heavily outnumbered by the French and their allies, and the Grande Armée sustained the majority of its losses (through exhaustion, dysentery and typhoid fever) in the summer and early autumn, on the way to Moscow. But the war still lasted well over a year after the French re-crossed the Russian border, and in the spring of 1813, despite one major ally (Austria) declaring itself neutral and another (Prussia) joining the Russian side with a much-expanded army, Napoleon succeeded in assembling an army in Germany well superior in numbers to the Russo-Prussian forces. It was only after Austria joined the anti-Napoleonic alliance that Napoleon's forces became numerically inferior.
The Eastern Theatre of World War II was won by endurance, but this had nothing to do with "weather" or "limitless numbers". Soviet resources were perilously finite, and carefully husbanding what was left after the first Winter Counter-Offensive was the key to victory.
This was Italy's initial strategy in World War I: the Italian commander-in-chief Luigi Cadorna knew his troops couldn't match Austria-Hungary in terms of equipment (even if they did ultimately manage to almost bridge the gap, with Italy actually achieving a superiority in artillery), so he gambled on the enemy having to fight on two fronts (with the other being Russia) to achieve local superiority. It ended up failing, but barely: Austria-Hungary ended up breaking through the Italian lines and giving Italy a hell of a Curb-Stomp Battle at Caporetto (to this day, over a hundred years after the battle, Italians still use the name "Caporetto" to indicate "crushing defeat"), but the Austro-Hungarians were on the verge of collapsing and in an untenable position (that's why they attacked in the first place), and the only reason they managed to pull it off was a combination of idiocy from Italian officers (who could have spoiled the attack had they been smart enough to act on the intelligence they had), the unexpected Russian collapse allowing the Austro-Hungarians to bring most of their forces to the Italian front, and Italian politicians declaring war on Germany too, thus giving them the excuse they needed to send in some elite forces to soften up the Italian lines.
Then done successfully by Cadorna's successor Armando Diaz: the Italians were on the defensive and forced to mobilize their last reserves, but their main weapon factories (a major target of the Austro-Hungarian offensive) were intact and free (thanks to a mountain Cadorna had filled with artillery specifically for this case), Germany had recalled their troops, Allied support had finally bridged the equipment gap, and Austria-Hungary had mobilized their last reserves before Caporetto, thus they couldn't replace the losses from their attempts at breaking the new Italian defensive line.
In World War II, this was the ultimate motivation for Hitler launching the Battle of the Bulge; he hoped that he could either inflict such disproportionate losses on the American side that they'd quit on Great Britain, accusing the later of using them for Cannon Fodder, or failing that, delay the Western Allies advance long enough for tensions between them and Stalin's USSR (which he saw as a fundamental unnatural alliance) to boil over and allow him to make a separate peace. Unfortunately, everyone involved hated the Nazis so much that they were willing to see the war through to the end, after which the alliance did collapse into the Cold War.
This had also been the Nazi strategy against Britain prior to American entry into the war. Britain was not self-sufficient, and as an island nation, the only way to import the necessary supplies was by sea. Thus, Germany sent out hundreds of U-boats (eventually over a thousand of the submarines) and a handful of surface ships to act as commerce raiders, with the goal of sinking as many British merchant ships as possible. The thinking was that if British merchant ships could be sunk faster than replacements could be built, eventually Britain would run out of ships entirely and be forced to surrender, while Germany (which could bring in fuel and raw materials by land rather than by sea) could outlast them.
China. Jiang Jieshi gambled on the Japanese suing for peace rather than prosecuting a protracted war, which he believed that his Chinese government could well withstand — if not quite win, as such — and figured that when faced with the prospect of a full-out war the Imperials would accept a face-saving settlement note protracted warfare is expensive, and both sides had much better things to be doing with their time. Like stamping out socialism. Unfortunately, the Japanese expected that the prospect of protracted warfare would cause Jiang to fold and come to the negotiating table first, also failing to understand that the ''Nationalist'' Party couldn't be seen to cave in to Foreign Imperialism in an unequal settlement of the kind that the Japanese wanted from the conflict, because doing so would be tantamount to political suicide. So both sides escalated the war. They were still dogging it out when the USA used Japan's occupation of Indochina as a pretext for embargoing Japan in an attempt to get them to negotiate an end to the war. Because the ruling clique back home couldn't be seen to back down to 'American Imperialism', Japan entered the wider war with an all-out naval-based invasion and occupation of south-east Asia. Allocated secondary importance in the Pacific War — the USA decided that it would use its own forces to 'island hop' its way over to Japan, instead of deploying US forces in China and/or equipping Jiang's forces such that they could go on the offensive themselves, both of which would require ridiclously complex supply lines — the Guomindang was basically made to sit out the rest of the war and given just enough lend-lease material not to become a liability to the Allied cause. In the end, the Guomindang survived the war — but once the supply of American money was cut off at the war's end, their regime imploded. They'd been on the edge of doing so in 1942, and American money had staved it off for a while, but they hadn't been given enough to actually fix their problems — just enough to put them off for another day. In 1946, that day came hard.
In fact this was quite basically the entire Allies' modus operandi for the entire war: with 60% of the world's industry and 80% of its manpower, the Allies never really had to worry about losing once it became clear that the Soviet Union wasn't going to sue for peace in 1941-42 — not that Hitler would've accepted their proposals, of course. Nor could even Stalin have survived consigning 40 million of his people to death and another 120 million to slavery by a foreign dictator — if the Soviet leadership hadn't lynched him for trying it, the proletariat would've done it themselves.
The RAF, US Army Air Force, and US Navy Air Force firebombing and anti-barge campaign against Germany, Occupied Europe, and Japan eventually began to have a noticeable effect upon Axis military production by early 1945. Until then, it had cost the lives of fifty thousand airmen and hundreds of thousands of civilians to get to that point, and still wasn't anywhere near worthwhile from a pure cost/benefit perspective.
Japan's initial strategy in WWII was a fast war, defeating the US Navy in a decisive sea battle and suing for an advantageous peace before the American industrial capacities put that goal out of reachnote the loss of four fleet carriers at Midway six months after Pearl Harbor was the beginning of their downward spiral, and things became much worse once the US began churning out warships and planes at a rate that the Japanese could never afford. Later, when they were losing, that changed to giving the US losses so horrendous that the latter would sue for a peace where they at least could have a somewhat upper hand. Unfortunately, Japan's determination to make traditional boots-on-the-ground battles so bloody convinced the Americans to concentrate on aerial bombings of Japanese cities, culminating in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Vietnam War also counts, with North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh famously declaring "if the Americans want to make war for twenty years then we shall make war for twenty years. If they want to make peace, we shall make peace and invite them to afternoon tea." In the end, the Americans underestimated the North's will to fight for years against a technologically superior foe while also taking horrendous losses. In other words, the U.S. military could go home after the war whether they won or lost, while the North Vietnamese's only option was to win the fight because they had nowhere else to go.
In fact, this is one of the two most often employed strategies by the Vietnamese (the other being guerrilla warfare). The longest war in their history lasted for 1000 years (Nghìn năm Bắc Thuộc or 1000 Years of Northern Oppression). Entirely justified since their opponents almost always have superior resources.
Law
Businesses competing with each other have been known to do this. For instance, business A lowers prices to undercut business B, which then lowers to undercut business A, until both businesses are operating at very low profit margin, or sometimes even at a loss. The business who can keep on tanking the low margins longer will eventually win; the loser either goes bankrupt or sells out to the winner, after which the winner can raise prices again because there's no more competition. This is a particularly viable strategy for mega corps such as Amazon who are diversified into multiple sectors of business: they make so much money off of certain high-margin divisions that they can afford to support new ventures into low-margin industries even if they lose money for the first several years of operation.
For that matter, many, many legal cases in the United States, both civil and criminal, never see the light of a court room as many are settled out of court before they ever face a trial. This is often done by the defense in civil cases, either to avoid revealing inconvenient information during Discovery or to avoid setting an inconvenient precedent. In criminal law, it can depend on how likely the prosecution is to get a conviction on the charges as well as the defense's unwillingness to risk going to jail.
This is more or less how The Emu War was won... by the emus. While the emus couldn't really fight back against people with guns, killing the emus was surprisingly difficult due to their speed, durability, and scatter tactics, meaning the people tasked with killing the emus ran out of ammo while barely making a dent in the emus' population.
Other
This is the reason an internet raid or counter-attackinvoked is basically impossible to fight against, and the only real option for the poor saps on the receiving end is to unplug their computers and wait for it to blow over. The raid is a large, ever-growing number of people online, all in different parts of the world, in different timezones — this horde never sleeps, never rests, never eats, never takes breaks, and never stops, while their target does. Small victories over the raid mean nothing to them, rather it incentivizes them to attack even harder, and even taking members of the horde down by the dozens will have no discernible effect, while every small victory the horde has will chip away at its target. It's like fighting a never-ending swarm of zombies: the horde will win, and it's only a matter of time.
and suing for an advantageous peace before the American industrial capacities put that goal out of reachnote . Later, when they were losing, that changed to giving the US losses so horrendous that the latter would sue for a peace where they at least could have a somewhat upper hand. Unfortunately, Japan's determination to make traditional boots-on-the-ground battles so bloody convinced the Americans to concentrate on aerial bombings of Japanese cities, culminating in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.