War and Power in the Twenty-First Century

The State, Military Power and the International System

Paul Hirst

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780745625218, 9780745625201
• eBook ISBN: 9780745697581
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Future developments in war, armed conflict and international relations are central to our collective fate in this century. This book looks forward by considering the forces that will drive changes in military organizations, sources of conflict, the power of states and the nature of the international system.

New military technologies will alter how wars are fought and will influence the balance of power. Changes in the global environment will provide new causes of conflict and will change economic priorities. As a result, the state will survive as the key social institution and populations will look to it to acquire and to distribute scarce resources like water, energy and land. Many of the changes that seem transformatory today, like globalization, the internet and mass consumerism, will be shown to be less significant than we believe them to be.

Hirst puts such changes into perspective by comparing them with the revolutionary changes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe: the firepower revolution, the rise of the sovereign territorial state and the parallel development of the international system, and the creation of world trade. These basic structures of the modern world are still with us and will remain, despite major changes in twenty-first-century society.

This book will appeal to students of politics, political sociology & international relations as well as the interested general reader.

1

Military Revolutions

It is widely believed that we are in a period of revolutionary change in warfare, called by its proponents the ‘revolution in military affairs’ (RMA). Military technology, the organization of the armed forces, and the nature and purposes of war are possibly in the process of being rapidly transformed. These changes seem to have come together and to have accelerated with the end of the Cold War. Some of the claims made for the RMA, that it will eliminate the ‘fog’ of war and that it will cement the permanent dominance of the offensive over the defensive are so sweeping that it is necessary to place them in context. Revolutions in military affairs are neither new nor does the present one seem to be unprecedented in scale, despite the claims of some of its advocates. The modern world has been shaped by two major military revolutions and by two significant changes in military technology that followed rapidly after the second transformative revolution.

The gunpowder revolution of the sixteenth century that coincided with the formation of the modern sovereign territorial state is the first major military revolution. The application of the industrial revolution to war that began in the mid-nineteenth century is the second. This latter revolution led to the total wars that dominated the first half of the twentieth century and that have shaped to a considerable degree the institutions and the balance of power in the world we now inhabit. The mechanization of war and the advent of nuclear weapons followed closely in the wake of this second great transformation at fifty-year intervals. The one has defined the current conventional forces of the major powers, and the other has determined why such forces cannot be effectively used by such powers one against the other.

The causes, courses and effects of these two major revolutions have much to teach us, in particular what rapid change in military technology does to create pressures for change in armed forces, societies, and interstate relations. Technological change emerges from a set of social conditions and social pressures for new technical adaptations. It is itself caused and is not a pure exogenous force. But certain changes once set in train seem to act as if they were just such a force and oblige the ensemble of social relations around them to adapt to them. Thus specific technological innovations are closely followed by major changes in military organization and in the wider society. Such subsequent organizational and social changes are by no means simple and direct effects of the changing means of warfare. They are specific social innovations and are in turn necessary in order to realize the full power of the new weapons.¹

This chapter will focus mainly on technological change in warfare, but as it progresses it will become clear that such changes often have complex and even contradictory effects on political structures and international relations. This should caution us against predicting direct and unmediated political and social effects from the current military changes. The long period of technological stagnation between 1650 and 1850 should also remind us that technical change is not necessarily continuous. This was a period in which the defence was dominant and was counteracted chiefly by social and political factors that changed the size, competence or motivation of the armed forces of one of the major powers. It may thus be possible that after a period of rapid and major change in the next half-century military technology will begin to come up against basic limitations of information and engineering technologies. A burst of radical change followed by stasis is thus perfectly possible.

In both the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries contemporaries were well aware of the changes taking place and sought to understand and master them. The periods 1500–1650 and 1815–1950 both produce a large literature of military commentary and wider reflection on war. Intellectuals and military intellectuals struggled to come to terms with the new changes and to reconfigure them in ways they thought appropriate. The caricature view of a hidebound aristocracy unable to adapt to gunpowder weapons in the first period and a rigid military set in the Napoleonic mode unable to understand the killing power of the new weapons in the second is just too neat. Established elites proved remarkably responsive to change. War is driven by ideas about how to use weapons and military systems almost as much as it is by technical and organizational changes themselves. Ideas are thus crucial and we shall pay considerable attention to current ideas about future wars and future weapons in chapter 3. We shall be lucky to achieve the same levels of understanding and effective response as intellectuals, both military and civilian, did in earlier periods of radical change.

The military revolution of the sixteenth century

The first ‘military revolution debate’ began with the publication of Michael Roberts’s The Military Revolution 1560–1660 in 1956 and it has produced a vast and evergrowing historical literature.² This controversy largely turns on how, where or when the revolution happened. There were huge changes in war, state and society between 1500 and 1700. Historians squabble about which changes and which specific subperiod were the most important, or they pick the whole period and say a revolution happened because things were vastly different at the end of the whole period than at the beginning. It would be tiresome to summarize this historiographical battle in great detail in a book that tries to anticipate the future, but some attention to the issues is essential. In particular it helps to challenge the excessive claims made for the political effects of the Military Revolution by many social scientists. I shall contend that the initial forces driving change were technological and that their effects were well in train before Roberts’s revolution begins in 1560. Indeed, the changes he describes can be seen as a subsequent process of adaptation of military tactics and organization to these effects and to fully exploit the potential of the new weapons.

Something radical did happen at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In 1494 the French King Charles VIII led an army into Italy and in the process transformed warfare in the peninsula and began a decisive period of military change up to 1559. During this time France and the Spanish-Habsburg Empire fought for supremacy. Central to the early French success was a large siege train of modern highly mobile bronze cannon firing iron shot. These guns rapidly demolished the fragile and often illmaintained walls of the Italian cities and fortresses. This unlocked the positional warfare that had brought stasis to war in Italy for the better part of a century. Within a year the French had traversed the peninsula and entered Naples, an unprecedented feat. Contemporaries were well aware of this. The historian and politician Francesco Guiccardini rightly saw the French invasion as both a revolutionary form of war and a fundamental transformation of Italian politics.³

Guns, of course, were not new in 1494. They had been in use since the fourteenth century and had grown dramatically in effectiveness since the mid-fifteenth. In 1453 the Turks used cannon to breach the walls of Constantinople. In the same year the new artillery created by the Bureau brothers completed the destruction of the English position in France. This had depended on a network of castles and fortified towns laboriously acquired in the course of the Hundred Years’ War. The castle and the fortified town had evolved to the point where relatively small garrisons could hold out against a large besieging force. This gave the defending state the time to mobilize a field army to threaten the besiegers and thus relieve the place. The rapid fall of place after place in the face of the new artillery overwhelmed the capacity of the English to respond with the limited field forces available to them. Warfare shifted from the dominance of the defence to that of the offensive.

What was new in 1494 was the further advanced mobility and hitting power of cannon, but what was revolutionary was the response to them. The scale of the shock in the Italian city-states set off a rapid adaptational response in fortification. Italian fortifications had been changing in response to gunpowder since the 1470s and Italian architects were the most advanced in producing new ideas. The early sixteenth century was a period of experimentation and sustained innovation. By the 1530s the first complete examples of the new system of fortification were built and would become the accepted standard solution to artillery for the next three hundred years. This was based on curtain walls that were covered against artillery fire by being sunk behind ditches and screened by an earth glacis. The walls had arrowhead bastions at their corners, each capable of supporting the others nearest to it with interlocking fields of fire. Contemporaries were sufficiently aware of the source of the innovation that they called the new layout of arrowhead bastions the trace italienne.

What the new system of fortification did was to restore the balance between defence and offence, and then shift it back strongly in favour of the former as the century progressed. By the 1580s, wherever the new fortifications were widely adopted, warfare became a positional struggle, once again dominated by sieges. Thus the Eighty Years’ War, which secured the independence of the Netherlands from Spain, was essentially an attempt by the Spaniards to break through the dense fortified belt of Dutch towns. The new siege warfare was expensive both in manpower and money. It helped to make warfare protracted and indecisive, with armies slowly marching and countermarching within the fortified zones or tied down in major sieges.

This indecisiveness of war had one major political effect; it helped to prevent the formation of an imperial hegemony in Europe. Fortifications were central in checking the Habsburg bid for mastery in Europe and also in containing the Ottoman attempt to break into Central Europe and into the Western Mediterranean. The Habsburg Empire failed to overcome the Protestant powers in Germany, and Spain failed in the Netherlands. The Ottomans were checked at two major sieges, Vienna in 1529 and Malta in 1565. Spain and the Ottomans could not fully exploit the advantages in manpower and fiscal resources that followed from their extensive empires and turn them into a stable hegemony over other states. This ensured the survival of a population of roughly equal competing territorial states. The states system that formed coherently in the second half of the seventeenth century and that characterized Europe until the First World War thus owed a considerable amount to the underlying indecisiveness of warfare brought about in large measure by this first part of the gunpowder revolution. Lest this be thought to overstate the case, bear in mind that Spain and the Turks had numerical superiority over lesser states and were the most effective military powers of their day.⁴ Had warfare favoured the offensive, the outcome could well have been two imperial hegemonies, one Catholic and one Muslim, confronting one another.

The success of France in Italy was short-lived. In 1495 the Spaniards landed in Italy to check the French. At Cerignola in 1503 the Spanish inflicted a serious defeat on the French. They did so by using entrenched infantry armed with firearms. In a series of engagements up to Ceresole in 1544 the arquebus (an early musket) and field artillery transformed tactics. Gunpowder weapons made the defence decisive in the field as well as in the new fortifications. Combat tactics now turned around achieving a strategically advantageous position and fighting from behind prepared defences if possible. Heavy cavalry became more and more ineffective as the century proceeded. Pikes (long spears), from being a decisive weapon of war in the fifteenth century in the hands of the Swiss, became increasingly a cover for the growing numbers of arquebusiers in armies.

A minimally competent arquebusier could be produced with about six weeks basic training. Printing made simple basic training manuals available throughout Europe. They broke down into a series of simple and easily repeated steps the actions of loading and firing a musket and handling a pike.⁵ The result was that small cadres of experienced soldiers and enthusiastic amateurs could quickly train large improvised armies. Such manuals helped to train the rapidly assembled armies of the English Civil War. Gunpowder weapons made soldiers easy to recruit and replace. This reduced their status. The new systems of training represented a kind of early-modern Taylorism and deskilling. The new weapons also made soldiers cheaper. This, combined with the large numbers of poor and unemployed produced by the economic changes and the price revolution of the sixteenth century, made it possible to raise larger armies. It also meant that it was possible to replace armies after a major defeat and to create rebel armies to defy hated rulers.

It is widely held that military changes in the sixteenth century increased the cost of war and thus favoured the centralization of power and the rise of the modern state. The central state was able to eliminate all lesser powers and establish a monopoly of the means of violence. This might hold true in relation to the lesser nobility, who could stretch to a few armed retainers and a run-down castle, but they had not been in the business of challenging monarchs for some time. Major wealthy cities and lesser powers had the chance with the new weapons to defy centralization or annexation. Thus the Grand Duchy of Mantua used the modern fortifications to preserve its independence during the Italian wars.⁶ The armies of the religious wars in France and Germany, of the Dutch rebellion, the English Civil War, and the various localist revolts of the mid-seventeenth century were raised in defiance of established authority and many of these challenges succeeded. The modern sovereign territorial state was formed in a century and a half of religious, localist and social struggles in which the large centralizing powers were not always victorious. Spain was defeated in the Netherlands, so was the Imperialist cause in Germany, and so was the Stuart monarchy in England.

Gunpowder did not destroy the feudal order. Its economic and political foundations were in advanced dissolution by 1500 in Western Europe. The nobilities of Europe reinvented themselves as commercial landowners or as state servants. The new states competing against one another and struggling with internal religious conflicts and localist revolts were administratively fragile and often unable to impose anything resembling a monopoly of the means of violence. All the major states faced repeated crises of authority in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Religious conflicts divided society ideologically. Catholics and Protestants fought for dominance within states, tearing the political fabric apart, and states aided religious rebels in other countries for either ideological affinity or reason of state. The Reformation sparked off a European civil war far more extended and savage than that between Communists and Fascists in the 1930s.

However, by the mid-seventeenth century most states had mastered internal armed conflicts and had begun to control religious dissent. The French state defeated the Huguenots militarily in 1628 and had managed to overcome a series of noble and localist revolts called the Fronde by 1653. Spain defeated the revolt of the Catalans, but was unable to prevent the reassertion of Portuguese independence. England achieved a measure of political stability by restoring Charles II in 1660. The effect of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 that ended the Thirty Years’ War was to stabilize the relationship between religion and territory in Germany. Germany was the key centre of the religious wars and the ‘black hole’ that undermined what forms of stability there were in the emerging international system by sucking in external powers to interfere on behalf of their co-religionists. The treaty recognized that certain states were henceforth Catholic or Protestant, accepting the balance of power as it stood, and it represented the defeat of the aim of the Imperial party to assert Catholic hegemony. The external powers that had intervened in Germany, France and Sweden, in particular, agreed to abide by the religious truce in Germany and not to interfere in the internal affairs of the member states of the Empire.

Westphalia initiates the widespread acceptance of the principle of non-interference. That principle and the corresponding obligation of mutual recognition are what make states sovereign. Each state is accepted as a legitimate member of the system without reference to ideology. Given non-interference in its internal religious affairs by other states, the state can effectively use its administrative and military capacities against internal enemies. Thus the international dimension of mutual recognition is central to the state’s acquisition of a monopoly of the means of violence within its territory. Non-interference and mutual recognition require that the political entities conform to the model of the sovereign state, each of which is the exclusive controller of a definite territory.

The reason for raising these international system issues here, returning to them in chapter 2, is that they are central in explaining both the periodicity of the major states’ acquisition of the capacity for external violence – why there is a dramatic change around 1660 – and the nature of the wars fought, with the shift from complex wars with mixed motives, including intervention to aid religious compatriots, to wars based on interstate rivalries. Agreements between states were crucial in fostering their capacity to control their own societies. Once they had done so they could systematize their means of violence and direct it outwards.

It would be ludicrous to derive all these changes from the gunpowder revolution. But fortresses and muskets did play a crucial role in creating the balance of power that was formally recognized in 1648. Writing in the latter part of the eighteenth century Edward Gibbon contended that gunpowder weapons had made civilized peoples secure against barbarians, thus avoiding the fate that befell the Roman Empire.⁷ Certainly gunpowder weapons vastly increased the power of European states against non-European peoples, but if anything one could turn Gibbon on his head. Gunpowder made Europe safe against anything resembling the Roman Empire, that is, the hegemony of one state.

The new gunpowder weapons were at first inserted into late medieval armies. These were mostly mercenary forces, augmented with a component of nobles and retainers serving under feudal obligations. By the end of the sixteenth century modern military organizations had begun to emerge. The most advanced were the Spanish, followed by the Dutch. The combination of pike and shot encouraged the formation of relatively small units that could coordinate fire and protection (although large pike squares continued to be formed). Such units created an articulated army capable of being deployed by strategic direction. In the sixteenth century interest in Roman military writings was widespread. The Roman legions had been the last great European army capable of being deployed tactically in organized multiple units: cohorts and centuries. In the sixteenth century most of the modern military ranks (general, colonel, captain and lieutenant) emerged.

However, most armies until well into the seventeenth century were tactically and administratively ramshackle. They were raised by states that were still fiscally fragile and could not bear the costs of large standing armies, let alone administer them efficiently. Most soldiers were mercenaries engaged for a campaign by private military contractors acting on an official commission. Standing armies of disciplined troops were a creation of the later seventeenth century and most soldiers were not housed in barracks and subject to twenty-four-hour supervision until the late eighteenth century, if then. The widespread adoption of the bayonet in the 1690s enabled every soldier to become a musketeer, greatly increasing the firepower of armies. This put a strong emphasis on linear formations to maximize fire effect and, therefore, an even greater emphasis on drill in order to keep such extended lines level. This improved the firepower effectiveness of armies greatly but was not equivalent in scope to the revolution brought about by gunpowder weapons in the early 1500s.

The revolution in weapons was not paralleled by any corresponding change in the conditions of warfare. War was limited by certain fundamental constraints. First, low agricultural productivity. This limited the number of men who could be sustainably taken from civilian life into the army in normal times and, even in times of economic dislocation when there was a large surplus labour supply, restr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Themes for the 21st Century
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Military Revolutions
• 2 The International System in the Westphalian Era
• 3 The Future of War
• 4 The Future of the International System
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Index