The Ashgate Research Companion to Modern Warfare

John Buckley, George Kassimeris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317042488
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This research collection provides a comprehensive study of important strategic, cultural, ethical and philosophical aspects of modern warfare. It offers a refreshing analysis of key issues in modern warfare, not only in terms of the conduct of war and the wider complexities and ramifications of modern conflict, but also concepts of war, the crucial shifts in the structure of warfare, and the morality and legality of the use of force in a post-9/11 age.

PART I
STRATEGY AND CONDUCT OF WAR

1
The Western Way of War

Jeremy Black1

The conceptualisation of war and of military history is a sparse field. This might appear a surprising remark given the number of words deployed about Clausewitz, Jomini, Sun Tzu, Mahan, Corbett and others, but is in fact the case. Firstly in comparative terms, the writing on the theory of social, gender or cultural history, for example, is far more extensive. Secondly, although particular writers, themes and episodes in military affairs and history have attracted conceptual literature, many have not. Moreover, the conceptualisation has frequently been fairly simple. Whiggish notions of improvement in terms of a clear teleology are rampant, not least with regards to weapons technology. War and Society approaches have also attracted teleological treatment, not least with the idea of improved social mobilisation in modern industrial warfare. Alongside teleology came determinism, notably with the assumption that superior resources explained results. Thus, determinism has become bound up with the material-culture approach to war.

A contrary approach, albeit one related in its simplicity, was the notion of national or cultural ways of war. This was an approach that drew on a number of roots, but particularly on the organic ideas of identity that became more prominent in the nineteenth century, which was very much an age influenced by biological approaches and Darwinian ideas of competition. These organic ideas of a distinctive response to environmental circumstances creating a synergetical basis for identity proved particularly interesting for those concerned with international competition. They led, moreover, to vitalist notions in which ‘environment’ was linked to ‘will’. The concept of a national will proved especially conducive to commentators considering the nature of capability in an age of mass-conscript armies. The idea of superior national will seemed to offer a method for ensuring success, not least through better morale.

A separate strand contributing to the same end emerged from the idea of cultural competition. The concept of distinctive cultures appeared to match that of different national identities. Each drew on a notion of essentialism, which can be seen as indicative of the strength of neo-Platonic ideas. Cultural essentialism was potent in the nineteenth century as a description of both present and past. It appeared to provide an explanation for Western expansion and also to link it with past conflicts that could be seen in cultural terms. The key rivalry was between civilisation and barbarism and, to that, all else could be subordinated. This idea drew on the attractive notion that the then modern West was the embodiment of the Classical world. This linkage between Classical Greece and Rome and modern Europe and the USA seemed obvious to commentators reading the Classics in their original languages and seeing their legislators emerge from neo-Classical buildings. If the neo-Gothic Palace of Westminster did not appear to match this, prime ministers such as Derby and Gladstone not only read the Classics in the original Greek and Latin, but also wrote knowledgeably about them.

The idea of a linkage was scarcely new at this juncture. While important during the Middle Ages, the idea had received a powerful boost from the Classical revival that had been so significant during the Renaissance. This had a direct military manifestation with interest in writers, such as Machiavelli, who employed Classical ideas and models. The practice was taken forward by the Princes of Orange during what was later seen as the Military Revolution of 1560–1660, and again by Maurice of Saxe and French commentators in the early eighteenth century. The sense of parallelism emerged through varied manifestations over the following century, ranging from the response to Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), indicating that Britain in the age of the American Revolution was moving in the same direction, to the conscious use of Classical echoes by the French Revolutionaries and Napoleon. Indeed, the latter was a modern Caesar, with his coup, his legions and his imperial aspirations.

Western imperialism during the post-Napoleonic century took this cultural approach to new heights. It drew on a revived Romanitas, with modern Western Proconsular generals and governors seeing themselves as successors of the Romans. Napier’s ‘Peccavi’ [‘I have sinned’] in response to his conquest of Sind in 1843 was commentary as much as joke: Punch portrayed him sending this telegram; he never did it. Here was another view of the modern Caesar, not a Napoleon making war on fellow Europeans, but a warrior bringing barbarians to heel. This idea also drew on a strong notion of religious superiority and, in particular, on an activist pulse that was also seen in large-scale missionary activity.

The amalgam of these ideas was important because war was waged outside Europe, not only with those who could be presented as barbarians (not least by the application of a stadial [stages] theory of development), but also because there was conflict with states that were seen as products of decayed civilisations. It was thus that China and Persia, Burma and Egypt, Turkey and Ethiopia were presented. Only Japan escaped this conceptual trap, and then because it Westernised so rapidly. Thus, the modern Europeans were akin to the Classical Greeks resisting Persia under Xerxes and Darius, while their generals were latter-day Alexanders the Great. The notion of Western warfare therefore drew on strong cultural impulses and these gave it an identity that helped explain and justify success. Christian providentialisation and cultural superiority were also present in the explanation of technological progress, which, in turn, was held to demonstrate them. Different commentators presented this account with contrasting emphases, but it was, nevertheless, a key element in the positioning and explanation of warfare.

The Western interpretation of warfare in terms of Christian providentialism and cultural superiority became far less prominent in the twentieth century, although again for varied reasons that were of different importance for particular commentators. First, the emphasis from 1914 to 1989 on struggle or confrontation within the developed world – Sarajevo to the fall of the Berlin Wall – did not encourage such a clear-cut and consistent cultural and moral approach. Looked at differently, such approaches were deployed during both the two world wars and the Cold War, but they were short-term and particularly associated with one or other side. Thus, German assumptions of a right to rule and of cultural superiority were discredited, as were Communist counterparts. These changes underlined the extent to which there is also a philosophical and conceptual problem with defining ‘Western’. Indeed, what counts as Western is always a particular political construction, and depends on the writer and the context. Thus, Western is not a natural category, a point that needs emphasis over against essentialist (and nationalist and racist) claims.

Secondly, the failure of the West in sustaining imperial rule or even post-imperial power across the Third World was a prominent feature of the period 1919 to 1975 and, more particularly, 1945 to 1975. Ideologies of cultural superiority did not provide victory for the French in Indo-China and could not sustain the Portuguese in their resistance to insurgencies in their African colonies. Lastly, the warfare of the age of total war appeared so different to what had come before that historicist accounts of conflict seemed redundant.

The Western way of war was thus not to the fore in the late twentieth century. Indeed, one of the key concepts of the 1990s, the revolution in military affairs (RMA) was particularly unreceptive to such a designation, because its technological impetus and definition were presented as possibly for diffusion across cultural boundaries.

The 2000s witnessed a rediscovery of the concept, most prominently with the writings of the American historian Victor Davis Hanson, although not only with him. This rediscovery was very presentist in character, resting as it did on the concatenation of expeditionary warfare and the ‘war on terror’ with the need to provide a new doctrine and exegesis to replace, or at least supplement, the RMA. Hanson, an expert on warfare in Classical Greece, sought to provide reassurance and certainty, arguing that cultural factors brought strength and success and that, once this was understood, it should encourage a firmness of purpose. He also proposed a clear lineage, linking the ancient world to modern conflict. To Hanson, two elements of Greek warfare were central to Western warfare: first, the civic militarism of warfare conducted by a population of citizen soldiers whose participation in war reflects democratic political engagement; and second, a tradition of the search for decisive battle and an accompanying practice of warfare. To Hanson, these two elements combined to produce an unmatched effectiveness.

The details of Hanson’s approach have been much criticised and its lacunae and flaws are clearly highlighted. Thus, there was not the continuity that Hanson asserts: civic militarism was absent for much of the period 0–1790 AD; Western forces were frequently unsuccessful; some Western militaries favoured the avoidance of battle; and Hanson’s combination was more truly demonstrated by Eurasian nomads such as the Mongols of the thirteenth century. Less attention has been devoted to a more central flaw, that of essentialism or a central identity. In short, whatever the questionable nature of the belief in a Western way of war having certain characteristics, there is the issue of whether there is something that can be defined as a Western way of war. The questioning of the latter can come from a number of directions. It can be argued that the key element is national military culture and that there was/is such a powerful variety among the latter that the idea of an aggregate Western way of war falls to the side. It can also be suggested that the national dimension has been overplayed, not in order to privilege a Western way of war but, instead, because most military development is task-driven, and changes in the context that condition and affect tasks are crucial. For example, talk of a way of war means little for militaries and societies that have to adapt to the changes entailed by switching into and out of the practice and consequences of conscription. Variety occurs across space as well as time. A Western way of war in 1650 would have to encompass the ‘regular’ forces of Western Europe, the greater role for cavalry in Eastern Europe, colonial forces, most obviously in Latin America, and those thrown forward by civil wars. Moreover, it would be necessary to show that these were recognisably different in type to the forces seen elsewhere in Eurasia. Once external contrasts are taken out of consideration, were the force structures and doctrines sufficiently contrasting to think in terms of distinctive European patterns, whether or not they were to be aggregated in terms of a Western way of war? The answer is probably not. In particular, there was considerable overlap between methods of war-making and fighting in Eastern Europe across the Christian-Moslem divide and comparisons with the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) can then be extrapolated by asking about the extent of contrast between, say, the armies of Tsar Alexis of Russia and John Sobieski of Poland and those of the Kangzi Emperor in China or Aurangzeb, his Mughal counterpart in India. If contrasts emerge more clearly by 1750 and, even more, by 1850, it can be asked whether this was due to essential differences or to stages in a developmental process, the latter a thesis advanced by those interested in Westernisation and diffusion, and, notably, in some of the writing on Indian military history, or to contingency. Moreover, contrasts between West and non-West have to be set alongside a reality of variety in both West and non-West, with these variations also involving overlap with the other category. This has remained the case throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the present age.

Parallels are also instructive. The ability of governments, not limited to Western, to impose their will on the state or nation in order ultimately to achieve their objectives, and the extent to which they are willing to expend resources, including population, to achieve that end, are crucial. If this war-making is defined as a ‘Western’ characteristic, then it has to be noted that war among states beyond the West, such as Ottomans and Persians, or the modern Iran–Iraq and India–Pakistan wars, are conducted in an analogous fashion. Indeed, the ability and willingness of these governments to sustain heavy casualties to achieve their objectives suggests that the notion of a Western way of war should be questioned or perhaps simply stated as the way governments wage war, irrespective of geographic region.

If the idea of a distinctive Western way of war is therefore suspect from a number of different directions, this does not mean that a Western-dominated mindset has not conditioned much of our understanding of warfare, with war understood as a largely Western vision. A similar point can be made elsewhere. The Chinese understanding of war in the nineteenth century was even more flawed because the relevant range of experience was more limited (no recent trans-oceanic or naval warfare), and the same point can be made about other states and ‘cultures’, whatever the latter are to be understood as meaning.

Whether a Western-dominated mindset can be successfully detached from belief in a Western way of war is unclear, but the freedom of expression in the West and the breadth of scholarly discussion (within the academy but also outside it) offer some encouragement on this head. The extent of sophisticated debate within the American military and related military academies and think tanks is particularly impressive. In large part, there has been a strong critique not only of the RMA but also of any notion of technological determinism. There has also been much call for a need for task-based warfare rather than the capability-centred emphasis on output. An interest in outcome entails an attempt to place warfare more centrally in its political context. All this can be seen as conforming to or clashing with the/a Western way of war, which simply highlights the questionable nature of the latter concept if it is to be employed as a coherent analytical tool and building block.

Yet, approached differently, it is precisely because the idea of a Western way of war is so loose, that it has proved so valuable, not least to broad-brush writers such as Hanson. Indeed, it is the very looseness of concepts that makes them useful. It can be argued that this is particularly the case with military history, not least because many of the writers are popular historians or military figures who are not ade...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I STRATEGY AND CONDUCT OF WAR
• PART II ASPECTS OF MODERN WAR
• PART III MORALITY AND LAW
• PART IV PERCEPTIONS AND REPRESENTATIONS OF WARFARE
• Index