Martin Van Creveld: The Changing Face of War

I don't pay much attention to military history, but Israeli historian Martin Van Creveld's The Changing Face of War: Lessons of Combat From the Marne to Iraq promised to cover a lot of territory in a brief space: two world wars, innumerable anti-colonial wars, the so-called "cold war" and its hot flashes, and the so-called "war on terrorism" -- fascism renascent disguised as liberal democracy. I haven't read anything else by Van Creveld, although Billmon tempted me by placing a previous book on his "recent reading" list, and it didn't hurt when he described Bush's invasion of Iraq as the biggest military blunder since Augustine invaded Germany. I don't care for his admiration for Assad at Hana here -- a rare example of successful counterinsurgency, which he attributes to sheer brutality, as if it might behoove Israel or the US to toughen up. This fondness for war is endemic among military historians, distinctly limiting their value. But looking over the long arc of a turbulent century, the underlying story comes clear enough: war after war gave us object lessons on the futility of war. It's a shame we've had to learn those lessons the hard way, and even worse that so many have yet to figure them out.

The Introduction starts thus (pp. ix-x):

As of the opening years of the twenty-first century, the mightiest, richest, best-equipped, best-trained armed forces that have ever existed are in full decline and are, indeed, looking into an abyss. Examples of their failure abound. Almost forgotten are the days when the Israelis had fought against, and triumphed over, all the armed forces of all the Arab countries combined. Instead, having spent seventeen years vainly trying to put down the Palestinianuprising,t he Israelis are even now giving up and retreating from Gaza and parts of the West Bank -- to be followed, no doubt, by most of the rest. Other armed forces find themselves in a similar plight. Having spent ten years fighting in Chechnya, thoroughly demolished the capital of Grozny, and killed, injured, and "dehoused" tens if not hundreds of thousands of their opponents, the Russians are still unable to pacify that country of two and a half million. In Thailand, in Indonesia, in the Philippines, in a dozen other countries, regular armed forces are engaged in so-called counterinsurgency operations. In terms of sheer military power, all are far stronger than their enemies. None, however, seems to be making any considerable headway, and most will probably end up in defeat.

Particularly disturbing is the case of the Americans in Iraq. Whether the American decision to attack Saddam Hussein was justified will not be considered here. Suffice it to say that the United States, as the world's sole superpower, has the most powerful forces by far, with technology at its disposal that hardly any other country can match. The chosen enemy was a small third-world country with a gross domestic product so much smaller than its own that comparisons were meaningless. Twelve years earlier, that country had already lost two-thirds of its armed forces. The remainder, it soon turned out, consisted of ill-trained, unwilling levies driving a few rusting hulks. Instead of getting their aircraft into the skies, they buried them in the sand; instead of fighting, they threw down their weapons and went home. Yet no sooner had "major combat operations" -- to quote President Bush's victory speech -- ended than it became clear that the US forces, which had taken only three weeks to occupy a country of 240,000 square miles and capture its capital, were unable to deal with a few thousand terrorists. In early 2005, having lost ten times as may troops to those terrorists as they did during the war itself, they were still floundering. So weak had their position become that their opponents hardly bothered to shoot at them any longer. Instead, preparing for the day after the inevitable American withdrawal, the terrorists were focusing on their own countrymen.

On buyer's remorse from the Great War (pp. 83-84):

If in 1914 most people welcomed the war, nowhere was the change in public opinion after 1918 more evident than in Britain. There, the replacement of the Liberals by Labor in 1919-20 was accompanied by the emergence of a powerful anti-militarist, anti-imperialist sentiment. And once the initial euphoria of victory had passed, the middle classes, too, turned their faces against anything vaguely resembling militarism. Writing from personal experience, authors such as Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves described the war as an exercise in futility filled with endless suffering, vain slaughter, and generals so obtuse that they sent hundreds of thousands to die in muddy swamps they had never even set their eyes on. From interviewing shell-shocked soldiers, Rebecca West presented the war as a mad episode that generated more madness. By 1933, Oxford students, hardly the kind of people from whom one would expect revolutionaries to emerge, were solemnly promising one another not to fight for king and country. The idea of appeasement was well on its way. Should it be any wonder then that when Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich waving a piece of paper and promising peace in our time, he was given a hero' welcome?

In the United States, the decision to enter the war soon came to be regarded as a huge mistake, brought about by the nefarious machinations of industrialists and bankers. Worse still, and even though Germany and Austria-Hungary had been defeated, the war had failed to bring about the kind of better world President Woodrow Wilson promised. Feeling that their idealism had been betrayed, most Americans wanted nothing more to do with Europe. The Neutrality Laws of 1936-39, which prohibited the sale of weapons to belligerents, capped the process. Far from being the handiwork of a few politicians, isolationism was so popular that when the time came to reverse course, doing so proved anything but easy.

This antiwar reaction shows how unsatisfying victory proved to the US and UK. Defeat, on the other hand, primed Germany for a revenge match, while militarism in Italy and Japan emerged from the 1914-17 war relatively unscathed (pp. 85-86):

Perhaps the most interesting cases were those of Italy, Germany, and Japan. Italy emerged from World War I as one of the victors. Although it did not succeed in realizing its territorial ambitions in Anatolia, it was the only belligerent to gain territory in Europe that had never previously belonged to it -- a fact that might have turned it into a "satisfied" nation. This, however, did not happen, and the Italians soon decided that they had been betrayed by their allies -- all fuel for the fascist regime that seized power in 1922.

During the first eighteen years of his rule, Mussolini threatened to wage war against virtually the entir eworld, sometimes citing reasons, sometimes simply because he believed, or professed to believe, that fighting was a nice way to spend one's time. However, as World War II was to show, the slogan "Credere, ubbidire, combattere" found an echo only among a very small number of adventurous youths. Neither the aristocracy, which remained loyal to the kind, nor the settled bourgeoisie, whom Mussolini called "slipper wearers," nor the broad masses were persuaded by his propaganda.

Germany entered the postwar world by undergoing a revolution of sorts, doing away with the kaiser but leaving power, for the most part, in the hands of the center and the moderate right. Once conditions had settled down, and influenced by best-selling writers such as Erich Maria Remarque and Ludwig Renn, much of German society seemed to retreat from war in the same way Britain had. Yet Germany differed from Britain in that, even during the heyday of the Weimar Republic, it had a number of right-wing, powerful, and politically very active veteran organiations with a membership in the millions. They did not content themselves with celebrating the past, assuring each other of the horrors of war, and promoting their members' interests. Instead they called for a war of revenge -- Germans often spoke of "the Day" -- to reverse its consequences, including both disarmament and territorial loss.

In Germany, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front was a huge best seller, but it was also an exception; far more numerous were writers, the most famous fo whom was Ernst Juenger, who relished war and glorified it. Nowhere else was willingness to engage in paramilitary activities and nostalgia for the so-called Schutzengrabenkameradschaft (comradeship of the trenches) as strong. Hitler himself built on these feelings, dressing in the uniform coat of a simple soldier with only one decoration and thus separating himself from his entourage of generals with their glittering arrays of epaulets, ribbons, and medals. Making full use of the German tendency toward discipline, the Nazi attempt to remilitarize society made use of every available medium to send the message, including painting, sculpture, and film.

Japan had been ruled by a military caste for centuries, and its social values, trickling down from the top, had prepared it for war. Though the Meiji Restoration of 1868 terminated Samurai rule, the new Japanese system of goernment was in many ways modeled on the German one and created a situation where only the emperor (or, since he did not meddle in day-to-day affairs, those who claimed to act in his name) commanded the army and the navy. This arrangement, as well as the series of military successes the country enjoyed from 1895 on, enabled the armed forces to play a decisive role in social and political life (though still not sufficiently so for some extremists who, in 1932 and 1936, attempted to mount mini coups). Japanese leaders tended to be self-effacing -- then as now, it was the collective that counted, not the individual. They were also less given to military display than their German counterparts. Still, in 1941, the year when the American political scientist Quincy Wright published his massive Study of War, he ranked Japan as the second most "aggressive" nation of all.

On R&D (p. 96):

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the idea that systematic research and development could result in a never-ending stream of new inventions had become firmly established, and indeed perhaps never before in history had the belief in "science" been stronger and more widespread. Book after book extolled the great inventors as well as the benefits they had bestowed on humanity; some public opinion surveys even pointed to Thomas Edison as the most important person of all. Militarily speaking, the principal innovations took place in the field of mechanized warfare, air warfare, and naval warfare, where the development of the aircraft carrier and amphibious landing vessels during the interwar years was especially dramatic. These elements were tied together by a vast array of communications and other electronic devices that, in retrospect, may have been the most important of all.

On the development of guerrilla war as resistance against colonial powers, like France in Morocco and Britain in Iraq after 1918 (p. 116):

Of the two, Iraq ultimately proved easier to deal with. Summoned by civilian advisers who knew the area well, British armored cars roamed Mesopotamia shooting up any opposition they came across, a feat made possible by the fact that light, handheld anti-tank weapons in the form of bazookas and RPGs had not yet made their appearance. British military aircraft assisted, dropping bombs and machine-gunning villages suspected of harboring insurgents. As contemporaries realized full well, the main effect of their operations was on the rebels' morale, and in fact the number of casualties was very low. What the oft-repeated air patrols really did was not so much inflict death and destruction as disrupt daily life sufficiently to convince the village elders that opposition had to cease. The outcome enabled advocates of air-power to convine themselves, and their political masters, that they had found a new, cheap, and easy way ofpolicing a country. It would not be the last time such a conclusion was reached.

By contast, the Riff uprising in Morocco proved a much tougher nut to crack. France's original occupation of the country dated to 1906 when the other Great Powers gave Paris permission to go ahead. In the event, occupying and holding the main towns proved to be one thing; doing the same in the remote, mountainous, practically roadless interior, quite a different matter.

What we today would call counterinsurgency operations began almost immediately and went on practically without interruption until the end of the First World War. Although such operations achieved little -- and indeed, from 1920 on much of the country was in a state of open revolt -- it was also true that the rebels' greatest victories were won not against the French but in the Spanish-occupied part of the country. At Annual in May 1921 the Riff tribesmen, emerging into the open, actually succeeded in trapping nineteen thousand Spanish troops -- out of a total of sixty-three thousand -- killing many of them, their commander included. This Spanish Adowa was followed by another rebel victory at Sheshuan, which effectively put an end to Spanish rule there.

WWII between Japan and the US (p. 165):

This, too, was a war without mercy. At Kwajalein in January and February 1944, the Americans used 41,000 men and lost 400 killed. For the Japanese, the respective figures were 8,000 and 7,870 -- probably a record for a force that size. Japanese atrocities in China, first meant to intimidate the population, then to combat incipient guerrilla warfare, and finally to perfect methods for waging biological warfare, have become deservedly infamous. Waged as it was against the background of racism that had taken decades, if not centuries, to form, the war against the Western powers was also marked by intense hatred. Allied prisoners who had surrendered to the Japanese were considered by their captors to have forfeited their honor and were often deliberately humiliated, maltreated, starved, and worked to death.

The Allies in their turn often refused to take Japanese prisoners at all. Sometimes they used flamethrowers to exterminate the garrisons of occupied islands almost one by one, as if they were rats; there were also instances when body parts, such as fingers and ears, were severed and taken as souvenirs, and enemy dead subjected to sexual abuse. Cut off from the world, unable to receive reinforcements, and ordered to fight to the end, the Japanese troops' fear of what might await them reinforced their determination and sometimes led to actions of mass suicide. And so on in a vicious cycle of violencce and cruelty that, if anything, became worse as the war went on.

On nuclear weapons (p. 179):

We cannot go into all the fantasies, often bearing strong sexual overtones (as when people talked of "penetration aids"), that for decades on end masqueraded as serious doctrine and sought to make the use of nuclear weapons possible. Suffice it to say that, as of the time of this writing in 2006, Brodie's analysis remains as relevant as if it had been written yesterday. A reliable defense against nuclear weapons and their delivery vehicles does not appear more feasible than it was in October 1945 when President Turman told Congress that "every weapon will eventually bring some counter defense." Instead, the attempt to develop it is one more reason why teh United States is teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. Though the Bush administration has developed a National Security Strategy that advocates pre-emptive attacks, and though it wants to develop so-called "mini-nukes" in order to launch a strike, in reality Brodie's warning that such weapons have created an entirely new situation remains in force. There is, of course, no absolute guarantee that the United States, or some other country, will never resort to nuclear weapons, and indeed this fact itself is a cardinal factor in mtaintaining deterrence and securing peace. Either don't use your sword or be prepared to die on it: such has been the central logic of the last sixty years.

On North Korea (p. 185):

North Korea, as one of the msot backward, most isolated countries on earth, is also located in a rather dangerous part of the world, the so-called Iron Triangle where it is surrounded on all sides by countries much more powerful than it. All either have nuclear weapons or can produce them at short notice -- to say nothing of the presence, in South Korea, of powerful American forces complete with their tactical nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles. Under such conditions, Pyongyang's apparent decision to go nuclear makes perfect sense. Its objective seems to be to guarantee the survival of a pariah regime that has practically no assets of any other kind.

Similar logic applies to Iran, concluding "possession [of nuclear weapons] may increase the mullahs' self-confidence and lead to aggression, but it may also increase self-confidence and lead to restraint. Given the historical record since 1945, the second is more likely than the first." On the other hand, the US (pp. 185-186):

As the country that was the first to introduce nuclear weapons (and the only one, so far, to use it on an enemy), the United States has every incentive to prevent other countries from entering the nuclear club. As a result, each time that club expanded Washington immediately started painting apocalyptic pictures of the consequences that would follow. To a lesser but still considerable extent, this policy even applied to its closest allies, Britain and France, causing the latter to remove its armed forces from under the NATO command. In regard to nuclear issues, as to so many others, Americans see their country as uniquely chosen and uniquely moral. Yet it could certainly be argued that, long before the Bush administration produced its aforementioned National Security Doctrine, the United States had behaved less responsibly than any other country on earth. If it did not actually use nuclear weapons after Nagasaki, it has certainly threatened to do so many times and against more than one opponent. Not by accident, the term brinkmanship itself is an American invention.

Flowing from a discussion of blaming the media for counterinsurgency failures, such as the US in Vietnam (pp. 225-226):

Nor is it true, as a great many writers have claimed, that the problems in question are limited to "democratic" societies. At the time the USSR invaded Afghanistan, it was no more "democratic" than Vietnamw as when it invaded Cambodia. Indonesia, too, in its struggle against East Timor, and Russia in its attempt to subdue Chechnya, were not exactly model democracies. In fact, "democracy," like "media," has become an excuse for failure.

Granted, totalitarian societies can do a lot of bad things to their own citizens, silencing them, arresting them, and killing them. However, as the Italian experience under Mussolini suggests, making them fight and die willingly is not one of them. Even in totalitarian countries, bad news will spread whether the rulers permit it or not. One cannot lie to all the people all the time. The fact that information must be passed along secretly can even exaggerate its impact as people invent stories or magnify those they may have heard. The more secretive the regime and the more it muzzles the media, the less its credibility.

Thus, by and large, decision makers and others who blame the media for their defeats are talking nonsense. Indeed, as long as things go well, those decision makers like nothing better than to bask in the glory that only the media can provide.

Such being the case, it is no wonder the record of failure did not stop with Vietnam; what changed was the fact that, whereas previously it had been the main Western powers that failed, now the list included other countries as well. Portugal's expulsion from Africa in 1975 was followed by the failure of the South Africans in Namibia, the Ethiopians in Eritrea, the Indians in Sri Lanka, the Americans in Somalia, and the Israelis in Lebanon. In 2005, Israel evacuated the Gaza Strip -- proof, if proof is needed, that even one of the world's most advanced, most sophisticated armed forces operating against an extremely weak opponent could fail. In favor of the armies of some countries, such as the Philippines and Thailand, it should be said that they only failed in the sense that they did not succeed in completely eliminating the insurgents. Many others, though, had to let go of entir eprovines they had long considered integral parts of their own territories, whereas others came close to disintegration.

Van Creveld ends by asserting that the threat of terrorism is worse than the threat of nuclear weapons proliferation. What he doesn't say is that his assertion reflects that we have not yet learned to change our behavior to minimize the risks of terrorism, whereas we have successfully limited the threat of nuclear weapons by discipling ourselves against acting in ways that would provoke their use. Nuclear-armed nations simply don't go at each other like they did before the advent of nuclear weapons. But powers like the US and many others still cling to the notion that they can defeat "terrorists" by superior force, thereby pushing the "terrorists" toward ever more ingenious ways of resistance. But the actual record of counterinsurgencies that Van Creveld maps out offers little evidence that such strategies can work -- the Truman quote above appears to apply to counterinsurgent weapons as well as nuclear ones. So is there a behavior change that can draw potential terrorists away from violence and into the normal political process? That's something to work on.

posted 2007-06-20