Abstract
The sociologist Jean Baechler obtained a grant from the Institut de France to sponsor a series of conferences on the impact of war on society throughout the ages and across the continents. The conferences began in Paris in 2013 and have continued, with the proceedings being handsomely published shortly afterwards. The range of these first two themed volumes is enormous in time and space, from ancient Greece to Tupinamba cannibalism, from ancient India to the contemporary United States. The second volume moves equally widely from Polybius to early theorists of the Jihad, thence through to Machiavelli, Vauban, Clausewitz, Mahan, and Liddell Hart. This breadth of interest will doubtless be reflected in the later volumes, covering war and religion, civil war, wartime economy and taxation, war and psychology, and other topics. Baechler states that the idea for the series came to him because sociologists tended to exclude war and its many facets from their analyses.
In the first volume, Lucien Bély gives a fairly straightforward account of early modern European wars which he sees as having been motivated largely by regular attempts to maintain a balance of power. Against this, it could be argued that the dynamics of princely dynasticism had little time for maintaining or striving for a balance of power. In the long run, those dynamics exhausted themselves through war, and the end result was compromise, based on a negotiable equilibrium of forces. Béatrice Heuser, who contributes to both volumes, presents a thoughtful view of ‘La Guerre asymetrique’ in volume I, examining insurrectionary wars, and seeking to establish some patterns to behaviour. Faced by large, organized armies, rebels have recourse to partisan warfare, usually involving handfuls of men. Many insurrections have a xenophobic motive or a nationalist basis. In these cases, it is usually less important to know whether the insurgents can be described as ‘reactionary’ or ‘progressives’. Of greatest interest is the section which she devotes to counter-insurgency, simple repression, and genocide. The stark choice here is between winning ‘hearts and minds’ and ‘severe repression’. The former approach has a long history, going back at least to Christine de Pisan and Santa Cruz de Marcenado, thinkers apparently unknown to General Petraeus and the other authors of the US Army manual on counter-insurgency. The essence of this approach is that the purpose of the war can only be a just and durable peace: its practice is to show clemency. The other approach, that of severe repression, has a much longer history. Marshal Bugeaud summed it up coldly when describing his activities ‘pacifying’ Algeria in the 1840s. Villages had to be burned, crops destroyed, women, children, old people, and flocks of animals seized. If the rebels took to mountain caves, then they had literally to be ‘smoked out’. A useful manual for this kind of activity was produced by Colonel C.E. Callwell in a neat work, Small Wars, Their Principles and Practices (HMSO, 1896).
Alain Besançon does not see modern Russian strategy as concerned with conquest; in a significant emphasis he proposes that throughout their history Russians have not sought to conquer but to ‘reunite’. On a practical level, he shows how Soviet Russia did not allow ideological differences to prevent them from keeping abreast of the military innovations of the Reichswehr or the Wehrmacht in the interwar years, and sometimes improved on them. Their subsequent military efforts greatly benefited from their T.34 tanks, Yak and Tupolev planes, and the all-purpose and perennial Kalashnikov. The American way of war is studied in a detailed article by Yves Boyer. He shows the American reaction to Marshal Ogarkov’s reorganization of Soviet military strategy from 1977 onwards, which aimed at using Warsaw Pact forces to knock out NATO rapidly in Europe before it could have recourse to nuclear arms. The American response was to develop and to exploit its technological advantage, which has remained characteristic of their way of war for the last 20 years. Also of primary importance has been the impact of public opinion, especially on presidents who increasingly will not have had first-hand experience of war. Some 6,587 American soldiers were killed between 2001 and 2012 (2,174 of them in Afghanistan), but 50,114 were wounded, a large number necessitating the amputation of limbs. Moving back in time, other contributions include a discussion of the king as conqueror in ancient India, based on an analysis by Charles Malamoud of the Arthashastra, and Philippe Contamine’s essay, which takes the form of a question: Why were there castles in the eleventh and twelfth centuries? Essentially they were defensive, protecting small territories and serving in place of the limes that might have been provided by great walls or natural barriers.
The second volume, Penseurs de la strategie, allows plenty of scope for comparisons over time. In examining Thuycidides’ principles of warfare, Jean-Nicolas Corvisier draws out his notions about the human factor involved, such as the psychology of crowds, the role of leaders, and of their knowledge of strategy. Thuycidides anticipated some of Mahan’s thinking in his emphasis on sea power, while a ‘modern’ concern with diplomacy in attaining strategic objectives is no less evident. In his study of Jihad as statecraft, as exemplified in the mind of Ibn Khaldûn (1332–1406) in his Muqaddimah, Malik Mafli points out that the great virtue of Islam lies precisely in how effectively it attends to matters pertaining to civilization, including war. The extent of this mission civilisatrice appears in a quotation from Ibn Khaldun in which he reports the fate of an Indian community that gave offence by its abhorrent practices (such as the killing of unwed daughters) and by taking up arms against the empire, noting with satisfaction that the Muslim commander ‘slaughtered them and sent [back] the heads of their notables to be displayed . . . so that the condition of the land was set right’ (p. 61). Béatrice Heuser pursues her interest in Christine de Pisan, showing how she supported the creation of permanent, but salaried, armies so that they would not be a danger to civil society. Hervé Drévillon offers a stimulating re-evaluation of Louis XIV’s defence strategist and critic, Vauban, noting that Lazare Carnot was the first to remark that Vauban placed his military thinking within a broader context of his ideas concerning the state and the general situation of the French kingdom. Drévillon also asserts that siege warfare and pitched battles should not be seen as rival choices in warfare: fortresses halted the advance of victorious armies, but they also complemented a strategy of movement.
In other essays, Jean-Paul Bled shows how necessity turned Frederick II from an offensive strategist into a defensive one. During the Seven Years’ War he was constantly trying to prevent his enemies on all sides from linking up and overpowering him. When they finally did unite, as at Kunersdorf in 1759, he rose to the occasion and added speed and surprise to his defensive strategy. Napoleon, who had told his officers to remove their hats when he stood before Frederick’s grave after Jena in 1807, adopted the Prussian king’s strategy in his last campaign of 1814. Frederick’s element of luck – the ‘Miracle of the House of Brandenburg’ when the Czarina died – was not repeated for Hitler following the death of Roosevelt. Bruno Colson sensibly questions David A. Bell’s claim that Napoleon became the exponent of total war (no more than 100,000 men fought each other before 1790, but there were 500,000 at Leipzig in 1812), arguing instead that total war only comes into being with the Industrial Revolution, which made possible mass armies, civilian support systems, and saw the loss of millions of men in the First World War. Heuser offers another stimulating essay, this time on Clausewitz. Having observed Napoleon’s Russian campaign of 1812, Clausewitz shifted his position from Marshal de Saxe’s view that the best outcome to be sought was a victorious war without battles, to an acceptance that Prussia should accept and prepare for the necessity of big and decisive combat. In a lengthy reappraisal of Thomas M. Mahan, Martin Motte places his theories about the predominance of sea power in the context of late nineteenth-century American empire building. Critics of Mahan point inevitably to the appearance of submarine warfare, which was underestimated by Mahan and which came close to inflicting defeat on the Allies in both world wars. He underestimated also the impact of railways, and Motte quotes the example of the Bagdadbahn which enabled the Germans to reinforce the Turks rapidly with weaponry at the Dardanelles in 1915. Finally, Mahan saw naval power as making possible the occupation of the seas. But the seas could not be occupied. Defeated one day, an enemy fleet could return to the same place the next day. Motte draws one of the general conclusions of the volume, which is that many strategic thinkers adopted a static vision of the conduct or war. But it was no less the case that thinkers like Mahan could exercise a powerful practical influence over military decision-making and procurement. The art of winning over politicians is also in part the subject of Olivier Zajek’s piece on Basil Liddell Hart. Liddell Hart subscribed to the cliché that Napoleon was the inventor of mass warfare, the ‘Mahdi of the masses’, and he attacked Foch and Haig for their belief in killing men to achieve a ‘knock-out’ blow against the enemy. Faced by what he considered the senseless waste of lives in the Great War, he saw defence as the best form of strategy for Britain, relying on the use of the fleet to support the military action of continental allies. His belief that ‘defence will win the war’ lent support to Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement. France and Germany could not defeat each other, and Liddell Hart did not have the foresight of his friend, J.F.C. Fuller, who regarded the Maginot line as ‘the tombstone of the French army’. His reputation recovered after the war, largely because of his clever manipulation of the testimonies of German generals, whom he claimed had learned the techniques of what became Blitzkrieg from his pre-war writings. Another important element in modern warfare, the development of air power, is discussed in the article by Jérôme de Lespinois, which focuses convincingly on the trio of Drouhet, Billy Mitchell, and Trenchard.
Some fairly obvious but emphatic comparative points emerge. There is conflict between offensive and defensive strategy throughout history and on a worldwide scale. There is the challenge of new military technology and static thinking, and the clash between military intervention and public opinion with its influence on democratic politics. In counter-insurgency the conflict between ‘hearts and minds’ and severe repression is perennial. The remaining volumes of this worthwhile series will doubtless produce similar dichotomies. Certainly, the joy, rather than the devil, has been in the detail.