The control of territory is fundamental to the power of governments and the opponents they confront in civil wars. And yet considerable variation exists not only in the extent to which armed groups control territory over the course of a conflict, but, more importantly, the extent to which they engage in military operations with the intention of taking and holding territory in the first place. The literature on ethnic and sectarian conflict explains patterns of violence according to the identify-based division that defines the war. Fighting to control territorial is predicted to occur largely at the outset of such conflicts, generating sorting into homogenous enclaves; subsequent violence is largely non-territorial and linked to a bargaining process between the warring sides. Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war is thought to be a case in point. According to common accounts, armed groups in Lebanon fought to create, enlarge, and then defend sectarian enclaves; indeed, the front lines became largely static after the war's first two years. I subject these accounts to theoretical and empirical scrutiny. I provide a theory of the operational goals of violence that captures the trade-offs that armed groups face between responding to tactical pressures in combat and the pursuit of post-conflict political objectives. I then use interviews with former Lebanese commanders and a unique dataset created from local newspapers covering events from 1975-76 at the neighborhood level to test the theory's predictions in Lebanon. I assess the extent to which patterns of fighting in Lebanon resulted from the theorized trade-offs between short-term military necessity and long-term political agendas. The results show that a purely sectarian logic has limited ability to explain patterns of violence; violence that appears sectarian in nature can only be fully understood when placed in the context of armed groups' political aspirations.