What Do Yesterday’s Wars Tell Us About Tomorrow’s Wars?
The Changing Face of War: Lessons of Combat, From the Marne to Iraq, recently published by Presidio Press (320 pages, $25.95), is either Martin van Creveld’s seventeenth book or his twentieth, depending on who’s counting. Van Creveld, an Israeli of Dutch origin, is one of our time’s most highly regarded military historians; his most influential book, Supplying War: Logistics From Wallenstein to Patton, pretty much invented a key field, the history of logistics. This one, which looks at the evolution of war over the last century, has remarkable sweep. It divides the military history of the twentieth century into three distinct phases: the era of the world wars, the ongoing nuclear revolution, and what he calls the New World Disorder, the age of the insurgent.
He begins his story on the eve of World War I, when seven or eight great powers had recently and pretty much effortlessly conquered almost the whole of the earth. They faced no conceivable danger from any adversary other than one another. “Around 1900,” van Creveld writes, “the idea that the only possible threat to a ‘Great Power’ could come from another ‘Great Power’ was taken very much for granted,” for “political power rested on an equally impressive accumulation of economic muscle.” Between them, those great powers produced around 88 percent of world manufacturing output (in 1750, the same societies had produced something like a quarter of world manufacturing output). Nowadays, a few years into the twenty-first century, this group of nations’ relative share of economic power has fallen quite remarkably, and now, van Creveld says, they are menaced not by one another but only by non-state threats.
In the first half of the past century, great powers waged total wars, in which industrial capacity fused with nationalism and the efficiency of modern states to produce mass conscript armies of remarkable tenacity and destructive power. For van Creveld, World Wars I and II were phases of a single struggle, and he describes the years between them as no more than a truce. He thinks the two halves of the struggle have more in common than is generally acknowledged, that their era is unrepeatable, and that therefore the world wars of the twentieth century have few lessons to teach us about the future of war.
If that is true, ordinary people may understand it better than experts. Though many people assume that military history is an archaic and irrelevant field of study, many specialists, both military and academic, assume that the lessons of the world wars are durable and pertinent, and they even tend to dismiss the lessons of the wars waged since 1945. That’s pretty much the opposite of what this book suggests.
The war that broke out in 1914 was of course not what anyone expected. It was not short and decisive but a protracted struggle of attrition. Both world wars were defined largely by the growing power of defensive warfare, van Creveld argues, and because neither side was ever conspicuously more efficient at mobilizing resources or political will, the victories went to the larger coalitions. In World War II, striking innovations—such as mechanized warfare and the successful integration of tanks, airplanes, artillery, and infantry— initially allowed Germany to defeat a Franco-British alliance that at first controlled much larger resources, but after six years the bigger battalions again prevailed. Both world wars were essentially wars of attrition.
For van Creveld the main drama of the second half of the twentieth century is the rise of the non-state actor, and the crucial fact is the emergence of nuclear weapons. Some say those weapons have made war a luxury that only the poor can afford. Van Creveld more or less agrees, believing that no nuclear state can defeat another in a total war, since everyone would suffer hideous and unprecedented damage, and so nuclear powers can’t fight at any level. Therefore more and smaller states will deploy nuclear deterrents. He thinks the United States is now unique in its ability to project substantial conventional power around the globe, and its conventional power has recently been able to swiftly crush adversaries who try to fight on its terms, but that capability backfires as it compels more and more potential enemies to acquire their own nuclear weapons. Moreover, American weapons and techniques are nowhere near as effective as their proponents contend, except against dwarf powers like Saddam’s Iraq.
Van Creveld fears that guerrillas and other irregular forces, especially those that employ terror as a main tactic, cannot under normal conditions lose. Their political willpower will exhaust the modern states that choose to fight them. Small numbers of insurgents and terrorists will not so much effectively bleed as inevitably brutalize modern armies, and the states deploying modern armies will recoil in disgust from the levels to which those armies will necessarily descend when fighting antagonists who scorn the laws of war. He points out that insurgents began to do much better against modern armies in the 1920s—he is very sobering about the French and Spanish warfare in Morocco back then—and he thinks they have gone from strength to strength ever since.
He concludes that there are only two possible ways to prevail against modern terrorist insurgencies, either through extreme self-discipline and vast patience, as in the British Army’s decades-long fight against the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland, or by extreme and open brutality, as in Syria’s destruction of the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1980s, during which the Syrian army may have killed as many as 25,000 people in the city of Hama in a couple of days, mostly with artillery (when you do it the Syrian way, the state’s wholesale terror terrifies the retail terrorists). At times van Creveld seems to be suggesting that the fight against insurgents is likely to be hopeless and vicious and should be avoided, but by the end of the book it’s not clear he thinks the fight always can be avoided. He clearly thinks the war in Iraq will be a defeat the United States need not have courted, but he also believes that terrorists are coming to the West, armed with more and more terrible weapons, and that Western states will need to fight them. It is not so clear that he thinks the Western states will win, but in a rare note of optimism he proclaims that they can: “The choice, as always is ours.”
This is often a sour book, and it is not always fair in its judgments (actually, most terrorist insurgencies have lost their wars). But it is written by someone who knows an immense amount about warfare over the last hundred years. People who study modern war at this level of competence and breadth reach conflicting conclusions, but not many of them know as much as van Creveld does. Such a very dark and at times nasty view is very much worth reading when it is written by such an authority.