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The Transformation of War: The Most Radical Reinterpretation of Armed Conflict Since Clausewitz, by Martin Van Creveld
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At a time when unprecedented change in international affairs is forcing governments, citizens, and armed forces everywhere to re-assess the question of whether military solutions to political problems are possible any longer, Martin van Creveld has written an audacious searching examination of the nature of war and of its radical transformation in our own time.
For 200 years, military theory and strategy have been guided by the Clausewitzian assumption that war is rational—a reflection of national interest and an extension of politics by other means. However, van Creveld argues, the overwhelming pattern of conflict in the post-1945 world no longer yields fully to rational analysis. In fact, strategic planning based on such calculations is, and will continue to be, unrelated to current realities.
Small-scale military eruptions around the globe have demonstrated new forms of warfare with a different cast of characters - guerilla armies, terrorists, and bandits—pursuing diverse goals by violent means with the most primitive to the most sophisticated weapons. Although these warriors and their tactics testify to the end of conventional war as we've known it, the public and the military in the developed world continue to contemplate organized violence as conflict between the super powers.
At this moment, armed conflicts of the type van Creveld describes are occurring throughout the world. From Lebanon to Cambodia, from Sri Lanka and the Philippines to El Salvador, the Persian Gulf, and the strife-torn nations of Eastern Europe, violent confrontations confirm a new model of warfare in which tribal, ethnic, and religious factions do battle without high-tech weapons or state-supported armies and resources. This low-intensity conflict challenges existing distinctions between civilian and solder, individual crime and organized violence, terrorism and war. In the present global atmosphere, practices that for three centuries have been considered uncivilized, such as capturing civilians or even entire communities for ransom, have begun to reappear.
Pursuing bold and provocative paths of inquiry, van Creveld posits the inadequacies of our most basic ideas as to who fights wars and why and broaches the inevitability of man's need to “play” at war. In turn brilliant and infuriating, this challenge to our thinking and planning current and future military encounters is one of the most important books on war we are likely to read in our lifetime.
- Sales Rank: #353357 in Books
- Brand: Martin Van Creveld
- Published on: 1991-03-31
- Released on: 1991-03-31
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.25" h x 1.00" w x 6.12" l, .98 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 272 pages
Features
- The Transformation of War
From Publishers Weekly
Most wars since 1945 have been low-intensity conflicts and, according to the author, incomparably more significant than conventional wars in terms of casualties suffered and political results achieved. Citing the dismal record of regular forces vs. irregulars in Vietnam, Lebanon, Afghanistan and elsewhere, he suggests that as small-scale wars proliferate, conventional armed forces will shrink and the burden of protecting society will shift to the booming security business. Van Creveld, who teaches history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, argues that the theories of Karl von Clausewitz, which form the basis for Western strategic thought, are largely irrelevant to nonpolitical wars such as the Islamic jihad and wars for existence such as Israel's Six-Day War. In the future, he prophesies, wars will be waged by groups of terrorists, guerrillas and bandits motivated by fanatical, ideologically-based loyalties; conventional battles will be replaced by skirmishes, bombings and massacres. Weapons will become less, rather than more, sophisticated and the high-tech weapons industry (which "supports itself by exporting its own uselessness") will collapse like a house of cards. A bold, provocative, frightening book.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
A primer on "low-intensity conflict", with a lot of questionable speculation thrown in
By Robert J. Crawford
Van Creveld has one idea to advance: the old state-run military strategy, as articulated by Clausewitz, is being overtaken by "low-intensity conflict". All the old rules, he argues, need to be thrown out because they are ineffective, prohibitively expensive, and too dangerous. The ultimate upshot, he speculates, is that the state itself will deteriorate in favor of the rise of feudal robber barons, frontiers will disappear, and identity politics will dominate amorphous regions. There is a lot to this line of reasoning, but I simply cannot accept the degree to which he ratchets up the volume.
On the one hand, there is Clausewitz's classic formulation of modern strategy. Following the horrendous carnage that took place in the 30-year war - the last gasp of the feudal order, in which various entities fought chaotically, as based on personal obligation and ambition with an overlay of religious fanaticism - the emerging absolutist monarchies imposed a new order on Europe. From then on, the state became the principal actor in international relations, a kind of locus for intelligent, rational decisionmaking. To wage war, three groups emerged: the state itself, the armed forces, and the general population. As the rules evolved, so long as the general population stayed out of it (i.e. not attacking the other side), it became illegal to kill, enslave, pillage, and rape them.
As a result, war became a professional activity, a "continuation of politics by other means", with clear goals that were largely territorial as well as uniforms to distinguish their identities and a separate tradition of law. Other consequences were the development of a capacity to mobilize the armed forces, requiring not only manufacturing capability but also an administrative infrastructure of unprecedented exactitude, better means of communications, and logistics. Strategy consisted of defense and/or attacking in the right place at the right time (i.e. massing forces at a weak point); its dangers included uncertainty (e.g. deception by the adversary), inflexibility (inability to adapt on the field), and friction (one part failing and impacting the function of the whole).
On the other hand, as the power of weapons increased with R&D (e.g. thermo-nuclear devices) and the capability of mobilization extended to entire societies for "total war", the political value of military conflict declined precipitously - total annihilation or complete ruin of economic resources did not appear desirable to potential aggressors. Moreover, as mutual assured destruction (MAD) moved the battle grounds to the periphery in, say, Vietnam or Afghanistan, adversaries created a new kind of counter-strategy, the low-intensity conflict. Rather than mass forces, the Vietcong and Mujahideen attacked with guerilla tactics; their weapons were light and cheap; without uniform, they could melt into local populations, which often directly participated in actions; and their goals were not traditionally "political" - they were ideological, religious, even ethnic, targeting not the acquisition of territory, but rather, radical self-determination. As a result, the weapons of the traditional powers were ill-adapted and are becoming too expensive to maintain. You cannot defeat terrorists with bombs or even search and destroy missions, you cannot kill ideas or traditions. Just look at the stalemate on the West Bank and Gaza, territories that van Creveld (who is Israeli) asserts are not worth fighting for.
This is a very valuable analysis, even if the book was written at the time that the USSR still existed. Van Creveld claims that his conclusions are original, a fundamental and complete repudiation of Clauswitz's universe, which perhaps was true at the time. I agree with a lot of this, but I believe that he goes a bit too easily into predictions that are, at the very least, apocalyptic.
While he acknowledges that "the new rules are yet to be written", he argues that the state will break down almost completely. What will emerge, he argues, are unstable territories controlled by gangs, robber barons, and privately hired mercenary forces. This is a frightening vision and though I cannot disprove it, I remain skeptical. It would seem he is going back to something on a par with the 30-Years War, perhaps much worse. Certainly there is awful carnage in many areas, such as the Middle East, but whether or not the ethnic populists like Trump or Le Pen will win out in the developed world remains an open question.
This is an important book for understanding how the world is evolving. Its reasoning is tight and elegant, the historical examples detailed and fun to read. Van Creveld covers a huge range of ideas, such as war psychology, whereby adversaries come to resemble each other over time, undermining the mission of military conflict if the actions of commanders egregiously violate the norms of their side and their initial purpose - that is what happened in Vietnam and in Irak, Afghanistan, and Pakistan with Obama's drones. But there are many, many other ideas covered here.
I recommend the book for a careful read, though do not endorse his predictions of complete anarchy and all-encompassing brutality.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
A very advanced book
By Runamuck
This is one of the best books that I have read on war. The book covers history, government, religion, economics, law (both domestic and international). All of these areas are apart of warmaking. The author writes the book with the assuption that the reader as an indepth understanding of all these areas. If you do not have a good understanding of each of these areas, then reasoning of this book will be lost on you.
The age of this book having been written in the early 90's is what caught my eye. That made this author not one of the current glut of the new trend of writting on counterinsurgency, Islam, and the current trends of warfare now. The author speaks of many of the same techniques as the new Army/Marine's counterinsurgency manual. Again this was written 16 years ago.
I only gave this four stars because with the obvious knowledge that the author has, the conclution that the modern state and its military is going to come crumbling down is completely wrong. Even given the date of this book I find the conclusion too large of a stretch, making it an emotional arguement and one not based on sound scholary work. Which completely surprizes me with it being set in the middle of such an amazing work.
Over all this an excellent work and is a must read for those who want to learn about war and how it is wage. It is also superior to most of all the new books that have been published in the last five years.
52 of 57 people found the following review helpful.
Amazing!!!
By Dimitrios
When I finished reading this book I could hardly believe that a writer could prophesize the future war events in such a clear way. Van Creveld's thesis is that war as we know it in the last 3,5 centuries (waged between states and organized armies) has reached its end and is now in a process of radical tramsformation. Analyzing many examples from the military history he suggests that we are entering into an era where states lose the monopoly of waging war and confront non-state actors who do not embrace the same philosophical values.
Van Creveld overturns Clauzewitz's traditional views one by one, using very convincing arguments, and unfortunately he is confirmed by international events today. While reading the book there were many cases when I was dumbfounded by the fact that a writer completing his work near the end of the Cold War could see our era with such a clarity, and I was really amazed by the fact that the book was written in 1991. It is more modern than anything else I have read on the subject of modern war and surpasses even contemporary analysis. Van Creveld does not avoid to touch even hot topics, like the sheer joy of fighting (paraphrasing Clausewitz he states that war is more the continuation of sports by other means than politics) the taboo of introducing women in the armies, the role of religion in the motivation of war and the very important argument that war does not begin when someone is willing to kill but when he is willing to die for a cause.
The accuracy of his predictions is often so amazing that it becomes terrifying, especially when he states that in the future the war leaders will not be legitimate government officials but something like "The Old Man in the Mountains", meaninig the kind of warfare waged by assassins in the Middle Ages. He is also very critical against the current military-industrial complex and its super-expensive creations of high tech weapons, saying that all this paraphernalia of old war are like dinosaurs about to face extinction. This is a highly recommended book and it is sure that it will challenge many of your establised views on war.
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