The Transformation of War

Martin van Creveld
The Free Press, 1991
x + 254 pages

“War is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means.” I memorised Clausewitz’s famous dictum, for reasons that escape me, nearly thirty years ago. War, according to Clausewitz, is fought so states can achieve political ends. National Socialist Germany wanted Lebensraum, so it tried to conquer Eastern Europe. Military planners, theorists, generals still live in the Clausewitzian Universe because they think it is universal regardless of time and space. According to Professor van Creveld, they do so at their own peril and ours.

The author’s argument is as simple as it is profound: Clausewitz’s principles, as laid down in On War, are not universal. They are very much a product of their time just as Clausewitz was. War between states is a modern phenomenon dating only to the early seventeenth century. These wars reached their apogee in 1945, and since then have declined sharply in both frequency and scale. The key reason why is nuclear weapons. Any war between great powers would likely “go nuclear” and destroy human life on the planet. But it is not just technology that has led to the breakdown of the Clausewitzian Universe. Low-intensity conflict (i.e., guerrilla warfare and terrorism) has grown with a vengeance.

This is academic history as it is meant to be written. Use the historical record to craft strong arguments. Van Creveld spends the bulk of his work proving that warfare, in all its aspects, changes over time. Taking just one example, what war is fought for, the author demonstrates that political ends by states have not always been at the heart of war. For instance, Sun Tzu argued that the favour of heaven was “the first condition of success; the idea that war be considered exclusively as a problem in power-politics would have struck him as both impious and stupid.” (p. 126) This is the jumping off point for our author. He then spends several pages explaining how the ancient Romans and medieval Europeans did not fight for political ends, but instead for justice:

Since war was regarded as a continuation of justice, not politics, any armed conflict necessarily involved a violation of law on one side if not both. It thus became vital to distinguish between good and bad belligerents, between war conducted with the authority of law and that waged without and against it. Either one of the two sets of law, the ecclesiastical and the secular, might be consulted. (p. 128)

What this meant for the warriors of the Middle Ages was fighting to see who was right. The knight would fight for justice defending his cause; that cause might be his own or God’s or even a poor widow’s.

Van Creveld is on even stronger ground when he examines why individuals fight. Again, returning to means and ends, he points out that war is often its own end because men love to fight. The reader is reminded of Lee’s famous observation, “it is good that war is so terrible or else we would love it too much.” We are then treated to a list of leaders (Churchill, Teddy Roosevelt, Patton) who absolutely loved warfare. Not wanting us to make the wrong conclusion, van Creveld points out that these men were not warmongering exceptions. Indeed, he makes the seemingly obvious point that men across time and cultures have loved making war. Again, men do not fight for calculated “interests”; they fight because war can be a euphoric end unto itself. Moving away from history briefly, the author notes that some of Western Civilisation’s greatest literary works are almost obsessed with the glory of war.

Indeed, if all the world’s a stage, war is the greatest stage. It is the place where men can test themselves by putting everything on the line. This is surely not fighting for political ends:

War, in short, is grand theatre. Theatre changes place with life, becomes life, life in turn becomes theatre. We hard-headed strategists are free to deride the theatrical aspects of war as irrelevant and silly, and indeed to do so is easy and somewhat cheap. Still, we have the entire history of war as testimony to the fact that – provided only they are experienced deeply enough- it is just such silly baubles that make people willing to brave danger, act heroically and put their lives at risk. (p. 171)

Or to put it another way, men will not risk their lives to fulfil dry political interests or grand strategies. They will fight, however, for love of nation, the defence of the faith, national existence, the taking of women and slaves or the pure joy of it.

In some parts of his book, van Creveld is almost pleading with his peers to pull themselves out of the Clausewitzian box they have placed themselves in. To cleave to war as politics by other means leads modern strategists to errors in the present and the future too:

The above discussion does not exhaust the list of modern strategic follies. One and all, they go back to the original sin: namely the idea that war consists of the members of one group killing those of another “in order to” achieve this objective or that. As I have pointed out, however, war does not begin where some people take the lives of others but at the point where they themselves are prepared to risk their own. Since it is absurd for a person to die for the interest of somebody or something else…Since to die for one’s own interests is almost equally absurd, there is a sense in which people will fight only to the extent that they experience war itself and everything pertaining to it as an end. (p. 191)

Ultimately, why men fight, and van Creveld explains elsewhere why it is men, is because war is its own end. As an aside, the author’s digression on women’s role in warfare is worth the price of admission. To give you a flavour of his thinking, van Creveld argues that the easiest way to stop men fighting is to let women join in the fun.

I have stated in other reviews that the historian can find himself in big trouble when he stops being an historian and becomes a prognosticator or worse a policy consultant. Given how great this book is, I was not shocked to find van Creveld’s final chapter “Future War” a delight and in many ways right on the button. Note he published this book in 1991; the reader can see how correct he is thirty years later.

“To understand the future, study the past.” From this sensible starting point, the author reiterates one of his observations, the state is a recent invention; therefore, warfare between states is a recent invention. Because of nuclear weapons, warfare between powerful states is a non-starter. What kind of warfare do we see before the 1600s? We see mercenaries, private armies, local defence forces, ad hoc armies raised by princes and even armies raised by corporations (e.g., the East India Company). What we will see in the future, indeed van Creveld argues we are already seeing it, is war waged not by armies but by “groups whom we today call terrorists, guerrillas, bandits, and robbers, but who will undoubtedly hit on more formal titles to describe themselves.” (p. 197). Our author could have been presaging the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant or “the Foundation” (aka Al-Qaeda) with this quotation. Ultimately, inter-state warfare will continue to fade in significance and low-intensity conflict will be the chief way men wage war. Have we not seen this play out across the globe since 1991? We are watching it play out every day on our screens.

Academic historians are often criticised for becoming hyper-specialised to the point of absurdity. The history of a furniture company in a small Ontario city may have moments of interest if the historian can write a good yarn, but in the grand scheme of human affairs, what is the point? Professor van Creveld goes in the other direction with this study. This is the multi-disciplinary approach at its best. Yes, he knows his history, but he has a mastery of literature, psychology, legal theory and political philosophy. To write such a profound and important work, the historian needs to be a master of all these fields. Professor van Creveld is a master, and this book is masterful.