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Copyright © 2017 by Lawrence Freedman.

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3
CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE

1 Decisive Battle
2 Indecisive Battle
3 The House of Strife
4 Victory Through Cruelty
5 Failures of Peace
6 Total War
7 The Balance of Terror
8 Stuck in the Nuclear Age
9 A Surprise Peace

PART TWO

10 A Science of War
11 Counting the Dead
12 Democracy and War
13 New Wars and Failed States
14 Ancient Hatreds and Mineral Curses
15 Intervention
16 Counter-Insurgency to Counter-Terrorism
17 From Counter-Terrorism to Counter-Insurgency
18 The Role of Barbarism
19 Cure Not Prevention

4
PART THREE

20 Hybrid Wars
21 Cyberwar
22 Robots and Drones
23 Mega-Cities and Climate Change
24 Coming Wars
25 The Future of the Future of War

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY LAWRENCE FREEDMAN

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NOTES

INDEX

5
For Sir Michael Howard

Teacher, Mentor, Friend

6
 INTRODUCTION

My trade is courage and atrocities.

I look at them and do not condemn.
I write things down the way they happened,
as near as can be remembered.
I don’t ask why, because it is mostly the same.
Wars happen because the ones who start them
think they can win.
–MARGARET ATWOOD, The Loneliness of the Military Historian1, 1995

In Greek mythology the gods of war brought misery and mayhem. Ares, once let loose, be-
came dangerous and terrifying. His companion, Enyo, destroyed cities, and his children em-
bodied strife, fear, and dread. From Enyo’s brother Polemos came the rarely used word ‘pole-
mology’ for the study of war and the more frequent ‘polemic’ for aggressive language. Pole-
mos appeared in Greek literature as war’s vicious personification. One of Aesop’s Fables de-
scribes how, as the gods chose their mates, Polemos struggled to find a partner. Eventually
only Hybris was left. She was the goddess of reckless, arrogant pride, from whom we get the
word ‘hubris’. Polemos fell madly in love with Hybris and followed her wherever she went.
The moral of the story was that the nations of the world should never allow Hybris to come
among them for if they did war would not be far behind.
The Romans also linked war with the intrigues of the gods. Virgil’s Aeneid described how
war can become all-consuming, its furies sparing neither side, especially when it erupts into
discordia—a civil war. Yet they also could see nobility and purpose in war. As Ares trans-
formed into the Roman god Mars, he gained dignity and praise as a guardian of the people
rather than as a source of disruption. Enyo became Bellona, who came with shield and sword.
She had her own temple for meeting foreign ambassadors, proclaiming victorious generals,
and declaring wars. But Bellona was in no sense sedate. In early Roman times she was hon-
oured by human sacrifices and drinking blood. Her role was to inspire and urge on the sol-
diers to violence. Virgil describes her as carrying a blood-stained whip.
Bellona’s name derives from the Latin word for war, bellum. This word lives on when we
talk of people inclined to war as being bellicose or belligerent. The English wordsmiths of the
first millennium, however, considered bellum to be inappropriately close to the word for
beauty, bellus. They therefore looked for alternatives. The term that came into use was an old
English word for struggle or strife—gewin. This was eventually replaced by the German wer-
ran, which meant something similar, and is linked to our word worse. Werran became weorre
and then warre in English, and guerre in French.
War therefore has a long association with confusion and discord, but also with honour
and the defence of all that is most valued. This duality of war means that it is driven forward
because something that really matters is at stake, yet shaped by means that are inherently de-

7
structive, unruly, hard to control and contain. This is why war invokes such contrary emo-
tions. On the one hand it describes the grim consequences of conflict. War can tear the heart
out of communities. On the other it can be a source of extraordinary solidarity. It tends to be
filled with desperate moments of tragedy and sorrow, of cruelty and waste, but also of inspir-
ing moments of heroism. The gadgetry of war fascinates just as much as its effects appal.
States continue to prepare for war while professing to wish to legislate it out of existence. If
they must fight, they insist, they will do so only for the most righteous of reasons, as a last re-
sort, and in the most civilized manner. Western culture, not at all uniquely, is infused with a
keen sense of this duality, of war as a terrible thing to happen but on occasion a noble and
necessary thing to do. We define war through this duality, acknowledging its inescapable vio-
lence but requiring that at least this be organised and purposive. Random acts of violence or
conflicts that are conducted without violence do not count as wars.

THE INDICTMENT OF WAR IS THAT THE PURPOSES SERVED can never justify the costs. While in-
stances might be found to refute this charge attempts to defend war as a means of resolving
disputes have struggled since the arrival of nuclear weapons in 1945. The possibility that they
would be employed in a Third World War created a catastrophic prospect, and not only for
the belligerents but also for humanity as a whole. In such a war there could be no nobility and
no purpose, and the confusion and discord would reach unimaginable levels. This is one rea-
son why the major powers held back from another great war, even as they kept up their mili-
tary inventories and conducted research into new generations of weaponry. Without much dif-
ficulty, they looked into the likely character of a future war and decided that this was not one
they could survive. Observing this in 1985, the historian John Gaddis coined the term ‘the
Long Peace’ to describe the years since 1945. This was a period in which millions had died in
violent conflicts. The great powers were often involved, but there was comfort to be drawn in
the absence of war directly between them.2 Perhaps by reaching such horrific peaks of de-
structiveness, great-power war had almost abolished itself.
Optimism on this score grew in the 1990s after the end of the Cold War. The Long Peace
continued, leading to speculation that perhaps humankind had learnt something about war.
The historian John Keegan wondered whether: ‘War… may well be ceasing to commend it-
self to human beings as a desirable or productive, let alone rational, means of reconciling their
discontents.’3 The political scientist John Mueller had long taken a similar view: ‘like du-
elling and slavery, war does not appear to be one of life’s necessities’. It was a ‘social afflic-
tion, but in certain important respects it is also a social affectation that can be shrugged off.’4
The cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, pub-
lished in 2011, marshalled a great array of sources to offer an even more encouraging
prospect. Slowly but surely over human history, he reported, there had been a steady move
away from reliance on violence to settle disputes.5 The reason for this was normative
progress, for among ‘influential constituencies in developed countries’ there was a growing
‘conviction that war is inherently immoral because of its costs to human well-being.’ On this
basis, he argued, interstate war among developed countries would surely go the way of those
domestic customs that over time had moved from being ‘unexceptionable to immoral to un-
thinkable to not-thought-about’. Here he had a long list of obnoxious practices, starting with
slavery and serfdom, and moving on to include disembowelling and heretic-burning before
concluding with flogging and keelhauling (a particularly nasty naval punishment).6
He had evidence to support his general thesis on the decline of violence. Fifteen per cent
of our early ancestors met with a violent death; by the sixteenth century this was down to
some 2 per cent; over the last century around 0.7 per cent of the world’s population died in

8
battle.7 After the book’s publication, the Human Security Project, based at Simon Fraser Uni-
versity in Canada, confirmed a positive trend. The number of interstate wars had shrunk from
six a year during the 1950s (including anti-colonial wars) to barely one a year in the first
decade of the twenty-first century. More startling was their report that the total number of all
conflicts over this period had dropped by some 40 per cent while the deadliest had gone down
by more than a half. In terms of fatalities the decline was even more remarkable. In 1950 the
annual rate was approximately 240 reported battle-related deaths per million of the world’s
population; in 2007 it was less than 10 per million. Even taking account of the growth in the
world’s population, and noting that the trend has been far from linear, that was still an ab-
solute and not just relative decline.8 This positive conclusion was picked up not only by com-
mentators but also by governments.9 Pinker was careful not to promise that humankind was
on the eve of an ‘Age of Aquarius’ in which violence had been abolished.10 Combinations of
personalities, circumstances, and chance could produce unexpected surges of death and de-
struction. Nonetheless the effect of his work was calming. He acknowledged that the situation
might change, perhaps abruptly, but no reason was given to suppose that it would. ‘[F]rom
where we sit on the trend line, most trends point peaceward.’11
The long-term decline in rates of homicides and state cruelty and in the incidence of all
wars reflected, he argued, the progressive triumph of our ‘better angels’ of empathy, self-con-
trol, and morality over the ‘inner demons’ of instrumental violence, domination, revenge,
sadism, and ideology. This had come together as a ‘civilising process’.12 The contributing
factors were: ‘gentle commerce’ encouraging trusting relationships across boundaries; ‘femi-
nisation’, as women were less belligerent than men; an ‘expanding circle of sympathy’, as
more cosmopolitan societies could not dismiss the pain and feelings of others as irrelevant or
demonize them as subhuman; and, lastly, ‘the escalator of reason’, allowing for an intelligent,
educated critique of claims that might once have been used to justify appalling practices. Un-
derlying his argument, therefore, was a liberal scepticism about state power, opposition to
militarism, disdain for mercantilism, and support of cooperative action and internationalism.
There were two big problems with Pinker’s thesis. The first was the methodology. His
focus was not the actual number of violent acts but the chances that an individual alive at a
particular time would suffer a violent death. The yardstick therefore was the proportion of the
world’s population affected by violence and homicides as well as wars, measured as the num-
ber of deaths per 100,000 people.13 On this measure he wished to show that there had been a
persistent trend over centuries, even including the Second World War, the worst bloodletting
of our time. Though past acts of violence may have been less deadly in their time, they repre-
sented larger proportions of the global population. Here he got himself into a tangle. As we
shall see there is an enormous range of casualty estimates for the Second World War, and he
was by no means taking the highest. Moreover, the speed of killing matters. Some terrible vi-
olence took place in the past but was over an extended period.14 More seriously, the decline in
deaths was not only a measure of violence but also of improvements in medical and social
care and therefore longevity. With more people living past their fifties, the proportion of the
population prone to street fights and military service declined. Over time the risk of being
killed in battle went down.15 Recruits now are likely to be healthier, and so able to cope better
with injury. The only violence Pinker consistently considered was fatalities, but his charts
might look different if he had looked at attempts to inflict bodily harm. Death tolls from de-
liberate violence measure consequences rather than intentions.
Knowing the proportion of the total world’s population killed by war (and violence more
generally) is unhelpful if the aim is to understand social and political processes. Numbers
need to be related to particular contexts. Even during the Second World War some parts of the

9
world were barely affected by hostilities. Governments and individuals do not assess risks by
reference to global possibilities but to actual situations. To know that one is living at a time
when less than one per cent should expect to die in battle is of little value when facing a heav-
ily armed enemy any more than it is of interest for a new mother in Africa to know the life ex-
pectancy of babies in North America.
The second problem with Pinker was his desire to demonstrate the progression of civilisa-
tion. With industrialisation and easier trade it was harder to see the gain in war, while the
costs were invariably large and the risks high.16 Imperial conquests once promised cheap ac-
quisitions, but by the middle of the last century the urge to seek out more pieces of the earth’s
surface to control and exploit was largely spent, and by its conclusion most of those pieces
taken as colonies had been handed back to local people. War imposed heavy demands in
terms of debt, diverted industrial effort, and the loss of trading opportunities. Simply put,
wars became not only more dangerous but also less profitable.
Pinker pushed this a step further, seeking to demonstrate that humankind was advancing
on a long learning curve so that, with regrettable exceptions and occasional setbacks, it was
getting progressively better at avoiding violence. When history was viewed as a sort of
Manichean struggle between the angelic good and demonic evil, only the civilising process
could explain war’s decline. Armed force described the problem and so could never be part of
the solution. Relying on balances of power was distasteful because they consigned nations to
permanent anarchy by assuming leaders would ‘act like psychopaths and consider only the
national self-interest, unsoftened by sentimental (and suicidal) thoughts of morality.’17 The
idea that considerations of power might have recently worked to reduce violence by encour-
aging countries to avoid war out of common prudence was rejected. He saw no consistent ef-
fect at work and no correlation over history ‘between the destructive power of weaponry and
the human toll of deadly quarrels.’18
It is certainly now rare for states to come directly to blows, but it was also rare in earlier
periods. The numbers of all interstate wars stayed low during the post-1945 period, and there
was no major war involving the great powers (though the 1950 Korean War was close). The
position on civil wars, however, was much more mixed. The recorded conflicts showed a pro-
gressive rise from 1945, peaking in the early 1990s. There were forty armed conflicts in the
world in 2014, the highest number since 1999. The number had risen from thirty-four in 2013,
and they were becoming more deadly, with about a quarter accounting for all but a few per
cent of the casualties.19 There was no consistent and reliable trend line. A few of the conflicts
had an enormous effect on the amount of violence around at any given time, such as Vietnam
during the 1960s, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the 1990s, or Syria in the
2010s.
In 2011, the year Pinker’s book was published, five Norwegian researchers, taking ac-
count of all the available research, sought to develop a model to predict internal conflict. This
was done with considerable precision. They considered ‘the most important structural factors
that explain the onset, risk and duration of armed conflict’ as an aid to good policymaking. If,
for example, there was a high probability of conflict in Tanzania around 2030 then, the au-
thors argued, ‘the UN should monitor the country closely in order to be able to move early if
this conflict should happen, and seek measures to address the underlying causes of conflict.’
Overall their conclusion was optimistic: by ‘2050, the proportion of countries in conflict will
be reduced to half the present rate.’20
They looked at the factors prominent in analyses of origins of civil war and the persis-
tence of conflict, such as size, demography, including the numbers of unemployed young peo-
ple, and the rate of socio-economic development. With economic growth, improved educa-

10
tion, and healthcare came a measure of internal stability. On this basis, the ‘main driver of the
reduction in conflict that we predict’, they reported, was the ‘poverty reduction that the UN
expects to continue over the next decades’. Just a few years of peace could make a real differ-
ence to a battered country’s chances of escaping forever from violence. They highlighted ‘the
importance of assistance to post-conflict countries in the form of peacekeeping operations and
other interventions.’ These interventions could involve a range of actions from peacekeeping
forces monitoring ceasefire arrangements to more robust engagements to impose a settlement
on recalcitrant parties.
Unfortunately a problem with the analysis was revealed quite quickly. The data stopped
in 2010, so it did not include conflicts in countries not mentioned at all in the study, notably
Syria. In an interview in late 2012 one of the leaders of the project acknowledged that con-
flicts in the Middle East had weakened the clear correlation between socio-economic develop-
ment and the absence of civil war. The fighting in Syria and Libya had shown that ‘we also
have to include democratisation processes in the model’.21 The problem was actually larger.
By focusing on factors which made states prone to civil war the model could not take account
of political developments, and in particular the upheavals within the Muslim world, which
had unleashed a new wave of uncompromising, hard-line movements.
The incidence of war therefore is hard to predict. After a period of optimism at the start of
the 2010s there was a turn to pessimism. Vicious conflicts in Ukraine and Syria caught the
headlines and reminded of war’s terrible cost. The rise of China into full great-power status
promised turbulence in the international system. The attitude of the Russian leadership hard-
ened, with President Putin stressing the importance of his country’s military strength, while
the replacement of President Obama by President Trump also appeared to put the United
States on a more nationalist course. There were concerns about how well states would cope
with the stresses and strains of economic downturns or climate change without coming apart
in civil wars or finding themselves clashing with neighbours in a struggle for scarce re-
sources.

QUESTIONS ABOUT THE RISKS AND LIKELY CHARACTER OF future war have long preoccupied
politicians, military practitioners, diplomats, jurists, journalists, and novelists. They concern
the ambitions of powerful states, the reliability of allies, potential performance in battle, the
attitudes of oppressed peoples, the likely impact of the latest weaponry, means to mitigate
war’s harmful effects, and whether much might be expected from the latest international con-
ference. These questions are now addressed with added professionalism in specialist think
tanks, university departments of international relations, planning staffs at the top of govern-
ments, dedicated cells in command centres, and horizon-scanning groups reporting to the
chief executives of major defence contractors. How they answer determines whether their
customers assume the risks of peace or anticipate those of war, or get taken by surprise in ei-
ther avoidable war or in a fight that they might have expected to win.
A variety of agendas therefore have long informed writing on future war. The intent has
rarely been deliberately predictive. This was not only for the obvious reasons—prediction is
difficult and likely to be wrong—but also because the concern was often to make the audience
aware of lurking dangers or exciting prospects. The aim was to prescribe courses of action
that would improve security or avert catastrophe, encouraging governments to put more re-
sources into the military, or shift priorities, or recognize the threat posed by some rising
power, or redouble their efforts to resolve the most pressing disputes, or find a way to abolish
categories of weapons or even outlaw war. Some were works of cool rationality, demonstrat-
ing the folly of war. Others displayed passionate advocacy to alert people to war’s horrors.

11
Some conveyed their message analytically, increasingly employing the methodologies of the
social sciences, while others relied on more literary forms.
Whether we go back to what can now seem the naïve optimism from before the First
World War, the fearful realism that preceded the Second World War, or the attempts to come
to terms with the utterly terrifying prospect of a nuclear conflict, this literature is valuable for
what it reveals about the assumptions of earlier times, what was feared and why, and the
remedies proposed. It tells us what was thought about the sort of disputes that could trigger
wars, the rivalries that mattered, and the critical capabilities that could make all the differ-
ence. Observing how our past appeared when it was the future can help us understand why
events occurred as they did, how individuals became prisoners of their experiences and
missed what was blindingly obvious to later generations, and occasionally saw with Cassan-
dra-like clarity what was coming, only to be ignored by their contemporaries. In short, the fu-
ture of war has a distinctive and revealing past.
There are examples of imaginative fiction that looked far ahead, most obviously the nov-
els of H. G. Wells. Most writers on future war, however, described worlds resembling their
own. They wrote about possibilities inherent in the current state of affairs. Whether or not
these would be realised depended on whether the right measures were taken, be they prudent
forms of military provision or sensible efforts to resolve conflicts. This is why books about
war were often books about peace, including schemes to eliminate war forever. Lastly, they
were also about the past, because they picked up on observable social, political, economic,
and technical trends. A plausible prospectus referred to events and tendencies that readers
would recognise.
Two larger themes recur in this literature. First, a growing appreciation of the difficulties
of containing war so that its destructiveness could be bounded in time and space, and second,
linked to this, a search for a form of decisive force that might inflict a knockout blow on an
enemy and so end a war quickly and successfully. Thoughts of future war often quickly
alighted on a compelling strategy that might bring it to a speedy conclusion, promising if fol-
lowed by one’s own country but dangerous if adopted by an enemy. Far less thought was
given to the consequences of a first blow that failed to floor the opponent, or how a war’s
course might be increasingly determined by non-military factors, including the formation and
breaking of alliances, underlying economic and demographic strength or the public’s readi-
ness to make sacrifices and tolerate casualties.
Explanations for why the first moves in a coming war might be more successful than
those attempted in previous wars tended to point to new technologies or tactics. It was easier
to anticipate the hardware than the politics, because there was normally some idea on what
was in the developmental pipeline. Machine guns, submarines, aircraft, armoured vehicles,
radar, missiles, nuclear weapons, precision guidance, digitisation and artificial intelligence all
challenged in their time established ways of thinking about the forms battle might take and
the effort required for victory.
Although technology was presented as the main driver of change in warfare, its influence
was shaped by the political context. The dismantling of empires, and later the implosion of
European communism, led to the creation of many new states, a number with fragile political
institutions, undeveloped economies, and social divisions. Much contemporary conflict has
been bound up with the efforts of the governments of these countries to cope in conditions of
continuing instability, the regional reverberations of their inability to do so, and attempts by
outsiders to identify and deal with the causes and consequences of these conflicts.
Compared with the continuing and intensive study of how a great-power war might come
about and what would happen if it did, until the 1990s far less effort was expended on civil
wars, although these were far more frequent and often extremely deadly. There were always

12
available scripts for great-power war and even great-power peace: when it came to civil wars,
and external interventions to soften their impact and bring them to a close, the scripts were al-
most entirely improvised. The more it became necessary to look into particular societies at the
violence within them, the more the definitions of war came to be stretched. The category
could include both a nuclear war of short duration destroying whole civilisations, and some
vicious local combat that had continued for years while neighbours barely paid attention. It
has become reasonable to ask whether the more ferocious forms of gang warfare, hidden from
view in the slums of modern mega-cities, should now count as armed conflict.
The reason that the future is difficult to predict is that it depends on choices that have yet
to be made, including by our governments, in circumstances that remain uncertain. We ask
questions about the future to inform choices not to succumb to fatalism. By stressing this as-
pect of thinking about war, peace, and the use of armed force this book provides a reminder
that history is made by people who do not know what is going to happen next. Many develop-
ments that were awaited, either fearfully or eagerly, never happened. Those things that did
happen were sometimes seen to be inevitable in retrospect but they were rarely identified as
inevitable in prospect. ‘History’, as John Comaroff has observed, can be usefully studied as
‘any succession of rupturing events which together bring to light our misunderstandings and
misrecognitions of the present’.22
This book locates the writing on future war in the concerns of the time. The aim is not
just to assess how prescient different writers were, or whether they could have done better
given what was known about new weaponry or the experience of recent wars, but to explore
the prevailing understandings about the causes of war and their likely conduct and course.
How people imagined the wars of the future affected the conduct and course of those wars
when they finally arrived. Unanticipated wars, in forms that had not been imagined, left par-
ticipants and commentators struggling to understand where they had come from and how they
might best be fought. The focus is largely but not solely on the United Kingdom and the
United States. These countries are chosen not just because they happen to be the two that I
know the best but because they have been at the top of the international hierarchy for some
time. Due to their position, they worried more than most about a range of threats: they had a
global perspective, and they were anxious about any disruptive challenge to a status quo
which suited them well.
The book is divided into three parts. The first looks at the period from the middle of the
nineteenth century to the end of the Cold War from around 1990. During this period there
were dramatic developments in the technology and practice of warfare, including two world
wars and concern about an even more cataclysmic third. The starting point, however, was an
idealised model of warfare geared towards decisive battles that could be used to regulate rela-
tions among the great powers. This model encouraged efforts to achieve the maximum effect
with the first blow in the hope that the resulting conflict could be contained and kept short.
This model came under strain not only because of the difficulty of keeping wars short but also
because of the progressive importance of the civilian sphere—as a source of resistance but
also as a target. Attacking civilians became a way of disrupting the enemy war effort, coerc-
ing a society into seeking peace terms, and, at the extremity, eradicating a hostile population.
These tendencies all peaked in the Second World War, with the Nazis seeking to exterminate
European Jewry, partisan warfare in occupied territories, and massive air raids against major
cities, culminating in the two atomic bombs of August 1945. Nuclear technology raised the
possibility of the obliteration of whole civilisations. The effect of this was to introduce great
caution into great-power relations, as war became an extraordinarily high-risk venture, and to
encourage searches for ways to fight using new technologies that would reduce dependence

13
upon nuclear threats. Because these were the wars that Western countries had to prepare to
fight they dominated writings on future war, in both imaginative fiction and professional com-
mentary.
Part II covers the period after 1990. The great surprise turned out not to be the cunning
ways that adversaries found to catch out the West but the speed with which the Soviet Union
and its Warsaw Pact alliance fell apart. The Soviet Threat that had so dominated all considera-
tions of future war was suddenly absent. With no obvious scenarios for major war, a whole in-
tellectual and policy effort ground to a shuddering halt. Attention soon moved to civil wars,
not so much because they were a new phenomenon but because they began to draw in West-
ern powers. As this happened there was no body of theory to illuminate the character of civil
wars and provide guidance on intervention. The supposition had to be that the pattern for the
future was being established. In trying to make sense of present conflicts, academics and prac-
titioners hoped to set the terms for future engagements. But they struggled to do this. A better
understanding of the nature and character of these wars meant that they often appeared even
more complicated and intractable than previously supposed.
It was not humanitarian considerations but the al-Qaeda attack on the United States of 11
September 2001 that created the strategic imperatives for intensive Western intervention in
Afghanistan and Iraq. The experience was sobering. It proved difficult to find the right mix of
armed force and social reform that would make it possible to defeat insurgencies and bring
stability to war-torn countries. Somehow to escape from the trap of perpetual conflict it was
necessary to address the sources of fragility in states, but this required levels of external sup-
port that in most cases was difficult to provide, especially without credible indigenous politi-
cal leadership. The quarter century after the end of the Cold War thus combined an improving
academic appreciation of the sources of conflict in non-Western conflicts, deeper and more
realistic than anything available in 1990, with an arc of Western engagement. The arc began
tentatively, fuelled by greater commitment and ambition, until disillusion set in, confirming
the early inclination to stay clear of these conflicts. There had been a search for a new type of
future for war, but it had not been found.
In Part III we see how as enthusiasm for overseas interventions waned, great-power con-
flict made a comeback. Russia asserted its distinctive interests while China’s rapid economic
growth began to put it in a position where American predominance in the Asia-Pacific region
might be challenged. Technological advances in robotics and artificial intelligence gave credi-
bility to visions of future battle populated by automatons and offered the prospect of sleek and
almost dehumanised versions of the ideal type of classical warfare. The practice suggested
continuing tentativeness by the major powers when contemplating war with each other, re-
flected in the adoption of forms of warfare short of all-out war—perhaps involving attacks on
cyber-systems or using information warfare as much as armed force. At the same time,
against these idealised models of future combat, or the persistent fears of a nuclear confronta-
tion, there was the everyday reality of grim, grinding civil wars, drawing in outsiders whose
interventions were as likely to keep them going as bring them to a conclusion. There is no
longer a dominant model for future war, but instead a blurred concept and a range of specula-
tive possibilities.

14
PART ONE

15
 [1]

Decisive Battle

And yet we had plenty of warnings, if we had only made use of them. The danger did not come on us
unawares. It burst upon us suddenly, ‘tis true; but its coming was foreshadowed plainly enough to open
our eyes, if we had not been wilfully blind.
GEORGE CHESNEY, The Battle of Dorking, 18711

On 1 September 1870 a French army, on its way to relieve another under siege at Metz, was
enveloped and then overwhelmed at the battle of Sedan. A report described how ‘the battle
had commenced at five in the morning, and at five in the afternoon the apparition of a French
general waving a flag on the summit of the parapet of Sedan announced to the Germans their
astonishing victory.’ The report continued with the subsequent note sent by the French Em-
peror Napoleon III to King Wilhelm of Prussia: ‘My brother, having failed to die at the head
of my troops, I lay my sword at the feet of Your Majesty’.2
This described a classical, textbook military victory. The power balance of Europe had
been transformed in a clash of arms, culminating in a battle that was concluded in a single
day. That defeated party accepted that conclusion and the political consequences—except that
Napoleon III was soon in no position to honour his promises to Wilhelm. He was deposed and
the Third Republic was declared on 2 September 1870. The new government refused to ac-
cept the verdict of battle and decided to continue the fight. As the Germans put Paris to siege,
the French raised new armies in the rest of the country, including snipers, or francs-tireurs
(‘free shooters’), who caused heavy casualties and complicated the defence of lines of supply.
The German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck became increasingly anxious that prolonged
resistance would encourage other countries to enter the war on France’s behalf and so he de-
manded ruthless action. Yet even when Paris fell at the end of January 1871, after two months
of siege, it then became the scene of a revolutionary uprising. The regular French Army in
turn crushed the Paris Commune. Only then could Germany agree terms with the republican
French government. These were harsher than they would have been had the initial verdict of
battle been accepted, including the transfer of Alsace and part of Lorraine to Germany, as
well as reparations of five billion gold francs.
Sedan demanded the attention of all those concerned with the military art. The German
victory had been made possible by impressive mobilisation of its forces, appreciating the role
of railroads in getting men to the front. By contrast France’s chaotic response to its own dec-
laration of war, into which Bismarck had goaded them, meant that it missed the chance to
mount an early offensive. The power of modern artillery had been fully on display. The tac-

16
tics of Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke showed how to manoeuvre with modern armies in
a way that inspired later generations of military strategists. But if order had not been restored
in the chaotic aftermath of Sedan the war would have been remembered differently. The Ger-
mans drew two crucial lessons. First, good strategy really could produce guidance for a quick
victory in a regular war. Second, unless ruthless steps were taken, this victory might be
thwarted should irregular resistance develop in a defeated nation.
In this case the resistance failed. It was also viewed as being something uniquely French,
reflecting the country’s insurrectionary traditions. For the moment, the main conclusion was
that Germany was a very powerful state and an accomplished military actor, capable of mov-
ing boldly and ruthlessly against its enemies. The European order was now unsettled, with the
balance of power weighted in its favour though its long-term intentions were unclear. Von
Moltke’s stunning victory reinforced a classical model of warfare despite hinting at its limita-
tions.

IN MAY 1871, THE MONTH IN WHICH THE TREATY OF FRANKFURT formally concluded the Franco-
Prussian War, Blackwood’s Magazine in London published an anonymous short story, The
Battle of Dorking. Written by Sir George Tomkyns Chesney, a colonel in the Royal Engi-
neers, it caused such a sensation that it was soon available as a stand-alone pamphlet. It sold
over 80,000 copies and triggered a national debate on the state of Britain’s preparedness for
war.This was the author’s purpose. As Chesney explained in his original submission to his
publisher, he sought to encourage the reorganisation of the British military system by demon-
strating how England might be invaded ‘and the collapse of our power and commerce in con-
sequence’. His effectiveness can be measured by the fact that the furore prompted the prime
minister of the day, William Gladstone, to complain publicly about how such alarmist talk
could lead to unnecessary military expenditure sufficient to ruin the public finances.
Those seeking to counter Chesney’s arguments often did so with their own fictional ac-
counts, demonstrating that when you invent the story you can at least decide who wins.3
These stories about the future made it possible to make polemical points with more vigour
than reasoned argument or dissections of old campaigns. The Battle of Dorking’s success
meant that it became more than just a sensation of 1871: a whole literary genre was created
that provided, in the years leading up to the First World War, one medium by which patriotic
anxieties might be stirred, nationalism fed, military innovations described, and preparations
assessed. Writing on the future of war was designed to demonstrate what might happen if
governments failed to get the writer’s message and then act upon it with urgency.
Chesney was not of course the first to write on this subject or to express his ideas in a fic-
tional form. The Napoleonic Wars had produced a mass of literature imagining invasions in
one direction or another, in which the unwary were caught by cunning schemes and devices.
There was also a comforting ‘desire to see the enemy as contemptible, inferior, and already
defeated’.4 What made a difference in Chesney’s case was that he was a gifted writer and able
to take advantage of the rise of the popular press, which had created a growing audience for
such provocations. Discontent over the handling of the Crimean War in the 1850s had already
helped to move issues of war and peace out of the area of elite consultations and into democ-
ratic debate. In addition, his timing was excellent and not coincidental. Coming just after the
German victory it reflected the pervasive belief, in retrospect perfectly justified, that the old
order had been destabilised. Great-power relations would be in a state of flux for some time.
If France with its famed army could be so defeated, who might be the victim of the next
upset? In this uncertainty some vital development in weaponry or military methods might
make all the difference, leaving the ill-prepared or faint-hearted badly caught out.

17
 Chesney’s story was about how Britain was invaded by a foreign power, not named but
evidently Germany (the victorious invaders spoke German). The enemy had been hatching
plans for some time. The moment to strike came when Britain’s guard was down. The Royal
Navy was more dispersed than usual on a variety of colonial duties, while the army was deal-
ing with the Fenians in Ireland, an uprising in India, and a challenge to Canada from the
United States. The Germans pounced, taking care to honour the formalities by at least declar-
ing war. Telegraphic communication to Britain was cut off so there could be no real warning.
A well-prepared invasion force was soon off across the channel, facing minimum resistance
when it reached the shore. The narrator of the book was a volunteer, one of many called to a
ridge between Guildford and Dorking where, with available regulars, they were to take on the
enemy force. Unfortunately the enemy turned out to be far better organised and disciplined.
The British fought, as one would expect, valiantly. But without decent intelligence, logistics,
and leadership, they were overcome.
To get the requisite knockout blow Chesney had to ensure that everything went right for
the aggressors, even before the point was reached where the unpreparedness of the British
army made a real difference. The operational key to the German victory lay in overcoming the
major problem facing any would-be invader of Britain, its double advantage of being an is-
land and in possession of the world’s most powerful navy. Those earlier anxieties about the
possibility of Napoleon invading had supposed that the great moat of the English Channel
could be overcome using methods such as tunnelling and balloons. In 1784 an anti-British
American satirist imagined how ‘if the English should venture to sea with their fleet, a host of
balloons in a trice they shall meet’.5 Long after Napoleon had been seen off, the British con-
tinued to fret about all possible challenges to their naval supremacy, including that posed by
steamships which offered increased speed and a capacity to overcome the limitations hitherto
set by weather and tides. Chesney had the Royal Navy being caught out by a deft manoeuvre
by the German fleet and then, most dramatically, by ‘fatal engines which sent our ships, one
after the other, to the bottom’. These he makes clear were torpedoes, although at the time the
term was used to refer to the floating bombs that later came to be known as mines. It was only
in 1870 that the first Admiralty trials took place of the propelled bombs that we now call tor-
pedoes.6 During the next decade navies began to fit them to both their capital ships and
smaller vessels, and set in motion a debate about the relationship between the long-range big
guns upon which they had previously relied and the new torpedoes with extra range but also
uncertain accuracy.
Chesney was therefore up to date but did not move much beyond recent experience. For
example, he made no mention of submarines, yet these turned out to be the most important
imminent innovation in naval warfare. A crude form of submarine had been in use during the
recent American Civil War, although it took until the end of the century for a more reliable
version to be introduced by the French. More seriously, he showed little interest in the gru-
elling nature of the American war. Along with other Europeans he tended to assume that there
was little to learn from the supposedly ill-disciplined and alcoholic American armies, other
than what might happen with a swift and improvised expansion of relatively small volunteer
armies into something much larger.7
According to Chesney the consequences of Britain’s defeat were enormous. A once-proud
nation was stripped of its colonies, ‘its trade gone, its factories silent, its harbours empty, a
prey to pauperism and decay’. It had been obliged to hand over its position as a leading naval
power to Germany. This dire conclusion was solely the result of an attack that had caught the
British completely by surprise. It was a surprise not only because of a sly military operation
but also a lack of a triggering crisis. German success depended on there being no obvious rea-

18
son to attack when it did. The war just happened because of an aggressive and opportunistic
enemy. As a result Britain’s position in the international hierarchy was altered forever.
The Battle of Dorking, and its subsequent imitators, described an inglorious defeat but not
a bloody slaughter or a long-drawn out, agonising conflict. All could be won or lost in a short
time. A nation caught by surprise would have no hope of recovery from the first setbacks;
once defeated it could expect no mercy.8 Losing such a war meant a loss of sovereignty, a
way of life, and a pattern of trade. In this melodramatic view, international affairs would be
forever reconfigured by the decision of battle. When Prime Minister Gladstone denounced
Chesney’s pamphlet as alarmist and a scheme to spend public money, he observed, ‘Depend
upon it that there is not this astounding disposition on the part of all mankind to make us the
objects of hatred.’9
Chesney, who eventually became a Conservative MP, did not share the liberal optimism
of the free-traders, such as Gladstone, who looked forward to economic interdependence pro-
moting peace by providing formidable disincentives to war. Chesney’s world, shared by many
of the military establishment, was one in which all could be lost in a misjudged campaign.
This was a view of war which combined urgency with complacency. Military defeat would
equal political disaster, but the war itself would not be so bad. The lesson to be drawn from
this and similar tracts was that great powers must stay alert and prepare properly for the com-
ing tests, but not that the whole character of war was undergoing a change.

THIS WAS A CLASSICAL MODEL OF WAR, SHARED BY THE POLITICIANS, generals, admirals, and
commentators of the time. It was classical in that it was based on a deeply embedded under-
standing of what war was about and how it should be fought. This view could be traced back
to the Greeks and Romans. It was an ideal type in that it was understood that in practice every
war might not correspond to the model, and in some cases the deviations would be severe; but
it was still the best guide to preparing for war. It was also normative in that it would serve the
interests of governments best if war could be fought in this way. If war could be kept short
and contained then it could be retained as a serviceable instrument of policy while limiting its
wider, disruptive social and political effects. Lastly, it was empirical in that Germany’s suc-
cess at Sedan confirmed the model, in a way that flattered its continuing validity and played
down how it might be adapted in the light of the enormous changes then underway in science,
industrial methods, forms of political participation, and the development of a mass media.
The wars of German unification—those with Denmark in 1864 and Austria in 1866 as
well as France in 1870—led to the conviction that von Moltke’s swift victories were the
strategic precedents for the future. The German General Staff held to this conviction fiercely,
and took exception to those who warned that future wars might not turn out so well, with vic-
tory coming only after a gruelling campaign of attrition rather than a swift battle in which the
enemy would be annihilated. The belief framed thinking about future war elsewhere in Eu-
rope, not necessarily because that was how a war was bound to turn out but because the Ger-
mans had shown how it could be done and they might well do it again.

THE MOST POWERFUL THEORIES OF WAR OF THE TIME WERE those drawn from the Napoleonic
Wars. The most influential theorist was Baron de Jomini who had served with Napoleon’s
army and was recognised as the keenest exponent of those principles of warfare exemplified
by the Emperor. Following early writings which explored the campaigns of Frederick the
Great and Napoleon, his The Art of War, first published in 1838, was the most widely ac-
cepted textbook for the armed forces of Europe, and a major influence in the United States.
Napoleon himself claimed that Jomini had revealed his closest secrets.10 During his lifetime

19
he was much more celebrated than his contemporary, the Prussian Carl von Clausewitz, who
is now considered to be the greater theorist. Jomini also outlasted Clausewitz by almost four
decades, passing away aged 90 only a couple of years before Chesney published his pamphlet.
In his book,11 Jomini explored the dynamics of war apart from its political context. His advice
was geared to explaining how generals needed to mass their forces against weaker enemy
forces at some decisive point. Clausewitz, who remained more influential in Germany, had a
keener sense of why plans went awry and the varied forms warfare might take, but his was
still essentially a theory of battle and the circumstances in which it could be decisive. From
Napoleon through Jomini, confirmed by Clausewitz and then demonstrated by von Moltke,
the core assumption was that a great commander would eliminate the enemy army in battle,
and in so doing deliver the enemy state up for whatever humiliation and punishment the victo-
rious sovereign thought appropriate. In their classical form battles would begin at first light
and be over by the end of the day, when the winner would be the side occupying the battle-
field. For a truly decisive victory the defeated army side would be so depleted by casualties
and men taken prisoner that it could no longer serve as an effective fighting force. That being
so, the enemy state would have to accept terms. When the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz
Joseph was defeated by France and Sardinia in the 1859 Battle of Solferino, he conceded: ‘I
have lost a battle, I pay with a province.’12
The assumption that wars could be settled by a well-constructed campaign, culminating in
a decisive battle, was the received wisdom of the time. In 1851 Sir Edward Creasy published
The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World: From Marathon to Waterloo, which in its title and
its premise confirmed the view that some battles were not only masterpieces of the military
art but also, in their effects, a source of significant impact on world history. Creasy noted ‘the
undeniable greatness in the disciplined courage, and the love of honour, which makes the
combatants confront agony and destruction’, and also the intellectual power and daring of the
most effective commanders. Unfortunately, he observed, these qualities were ‘to be found in
the basest as well as in the noblest of mankind.’ He quoted the poet Byron: ‘’Tis the Cause
makes all, Degrades or hallows courage in its fall.’
What mattered to Creasy was whether battles were part of

the chain of causes and effects, by which they have helped to make us what we are; and also while we speculate
on what we probably should have been, if any one of those battles had come to a different termination.13

Turning points in history had regularly been marked by battles. There was no reason to
assume that this pattern would not continue into the future. Creasy’s book set a challenge for
those with their own favourite yet neglected battles to make a case for inclusion. There were
regular updates which included the more recent ‘decisive battles’. Thus when the book was
republished in 1899, Gettysburg from the American Civil War and Sedan were added, along
with contemporary encounters from the Spanish-American War.14
The appeal of battle lay in the thought that a climacteric encounter between two armies or
navies, expending resources accumulated over decades, might, in a matter of hours, change
history’s course. Battles offered concentrated and acute drama as the fate of civilisations came
to depend on the weaponry, bravery, and tactical acuity of a few—‘we happy few, we band of
brothers’, as Shakespeare had Henry V say in his speech before Agincourt. But for battles to
be ‘decisive’ depended on their influence upon a wider chain of events and not just who
walked away alive and triumphant at the end of the day’s fighting. The word ‘decisive’ had an
air of finality, confirming that some large matter had now been concluded, but in other re-
spects—unlike words such as ‘victory’ and ‘defeat’—it was quite neutral. The decision could

20
take the form of a negotiated settlement that left neither side satisfied. The essential feature
was that they both accepted the result and that it reflected a situation largely achieved by mili-
tary means.
There were specific battles upon which history appeared to have pivoted. Posit a different
result from Napoleon’s stunning victory over the Russians and Austrians at Austerlitz in 1805
and almost everything that happened thereafter looked different, or suppose Gettysburg had
been lost and wonder whether the Union could have recovered. But a truly decisive battle was
unusual. It was a rare war that turned on a single encounter. More often the difference made
by individual battles could be understood only in the context of a wider war effort. Some of
the most important battles were essentially defensive so that a war which might have been
over quickly instead dragged on. Others had a cumulative impact, as one side’s resources, re-
serves, and morale were steadily depleted because of successive defeats. Some gained their
impact as they interacted with sieges (potentially as important as actual battle in shaping
wars) or with irregular, guerrilla combat. Once all the other factors that determined military
superiority were acknowledged, then battle became a means by which these factors could be
demonstrated, a way of proving a capacity that was always there. In this respect some battles
deserved a ‘landmark’ status not because of the nudge given to history but more as revelations
of a wider cultural and material superiority.15 By confirming this superiority a battle was a
form of ‘proof’ of what might otherwise only have been suspected, now presented starkly and
without nuance so all would appreciate the message.16
The moment could still be fleeting, and the next battle might prove something else, per-
haps about the previous loser’s capacity for finding allies or reviving its national morale. The
key question was not the difference made by individual battles but whether wars could be
concluded quickly. For those starting wars this was always the hope and in some cases the ex-
pectation. If the enemy proved to be resilient then over time non-military factors would be-
come progressively more important. When a decisive battle was being considered before a
war as a speculative possibility or a planning directive, what was in mind was the first, de-
signed with ingenuity, planned with care, and fought by fresh and fearless soldiers eager to do
their duty, but not the very last, fought by exhausted and scared soldiers, wondering if they
could survive the final encounter. A first battle catching the enemy by surprise and inflicting a
blow from which there could be no recovery could help avoid a long war. This was the ‘allure
of battle’ that led to states gambling on aggression. Few states knowingly entered into an attri-
tional long war, yet that was often what they got, and they suffered as a result.17

21
 [2]

Indecisive Battle

In this final struggle for Britain’s freedom the invader had been crushed and his power broken; for,
thanks to our gallant citizen soldiers, the enemy that had for weeks overrun our smiling land like packs
of hungry wolves, wantonly burning our homes and massacring the innocent and unprotected, had at
length met with their well-merited deserts, and now lay spread over the miles of pastures, cornfields,
and forests, stark, cold, and dead.
WILLIAM LE QUEUX, The Invasion of 19101

The influence of the classical model was evident not only in The Battle of Dorking but also
in numerous books that followed, up to the start of the Great War in 1914. Although the liter-
ature adapted to shifts in international politics and developments in military technology and
tactics, the essential framework remained largely the same. ‘Save for rare exceptions’, I. F.
Clarke observed, these publications were ‘distinguished by a complete failure to foresee the
form a modern war would take.’ They held to the possibility that any future European war
would be marked by brief battles and heroic deeds. The application of science would work
here, as in so many other areas of human affairs, to make matters better rather than worse.
The conflict might be more ferocious, but the methods would also be more efficient so that
the dispute would be concluded, one way or the other, quickly. The character of this war fic-
tion was a ‘compound of complacency, ignorance, and innocence’. The possibility of war
seemed real enough, yet there were few guides as to its likely character; this allowed either
wishful thinking or crude alarmism full play.2
With the rapid expansion of the audience for newspapers and journals, war stories were
good for circulation. In 1891 a new venture, a serious-minded journal called Black and White,
hit upon the idea of a serial outlining the course of the next European war in a documentary
fashion, with fictitious but plausible dispatches from the front, official telegrams, and newspa-
pers’ editorials, laced with exciting narrative and technical detail. When this was announced
at the start of the next year the editor introduced the series by explaining:

The air is full of rumours of war. The European nations stand fully armed and prepared for instant mobilisation.
Authorities are agreed that a GREAT WAR must break out in the immediate future, and that this War will be
fought under novel and surprising conditions.3

To help explain how this war might unfold the editors had consulted the ‘chief living au-
thorities in international politics, in strategy, and in war’, led by Admiral Sir Philip Colomb, a

22
former officer who had published widely on issues of sea power. His team used established
military units and existing dispositions of fleets. In terms of prediction the most impressive
aspect was that the war was triggered by an assassination attempt in the Balkans on Prince
Ferdinand (unlike 1914 it was unsuccessful and the Prince was Bulgarian and not Austrian),
which showed some understanding of the possibility of wars developing out of a clash be-
tween small states that drew in larger powers. In this case Britain was on the side of Germany
against France and Russia. Other than that the war followed known strategies, and was de-
cided by a series of battles on land and at sea, with great generals manoeuvring into position
to land a heavy blow on the weakest point in the enemy line. In terms of new technologies,
the authors appreciated the importance of the telegraph (including the ability to impose a
news blackout by preventing its use) but were tentative about other developments, including
the machine gun.4
In 1894 journalist William Le Queux wrote a book for the new Daily Mail newspaper
about The Great War in England in 1897, starting with a French and Russian invasion.5 The
credibility of such a clash was underlined by the Fashoda Incident of 1898 when Britain and
France almost came to blows as their imperial agendas clashed in North Africa. Six years later
with the Entente Cordiale these two countries agreed to make up, and instead of being
Britain’s ally Germany now took centre stage as its most likely enemy. This prospect was re-
inforced by the developing naval arms race between the two. So when in March 1906 Le
Queux revisited the topic for the Daily Mail with the serialisation of The Invasion of 1910, the
Germans were now the enemy. There was the same combination of letters and reports to de-
velop a dramatic story. It was a great success, with a million copies sold and translations into
twenty-seven languages. The story was much more elaborate and sensational, with images of
German troops marching through a battered London. The underlying strategy was one of a
quick knockout blow, taking London and then assuming that a broken country would quickly
agree terms. The scenario was always incredible, both in terms of the modest size of the in-
vading force and the low casualties it faced, even when it got into trouble. One of the major
editorial changes demanded by the Daily Mail was that the fighting take place near the larger
cities where their readers were to be found rather than out of the way places. Maps were pub-
lished showing where the German army was due to turn up the next day.
One message readers would take away was the importance of spies who had mischie-
vously insinuated themselves throughout British society. Le Queux here and elsewhere was
instrumental in encouraging the development of the Secret Service. Spies had also been pre-
sent in his 1894 book, as had vivid descriptions of innocents being slaughtered as their cities
were shelled. 6 In the earlier book civilians did come forward to help resist the enemy, but as
volunteers, supporting regular forces. In the new book the invasion was largely defeated by
resistance forces developed as the ‘League of Defenders’, who became more substantial and
effective as the fighting moved up the country, and were somewhat more successful than their
French counterparts of 1870. In this respect, Le Queux’s approach was inspired by Field Mar-
shal Lord Roberts’s campaign to prepare for war with universal conscription and step up mili-
tary training for the country’s young men.7

THE 1906 BOOK CONTRIBUTED TO ANTI-GERMAN FEELING (xenophobia was a general conse-
quence of much of the war fiction of this period across Europe), but it did not prepare its read-
ers for what was to come. The core criticism of this body of literature has been that it failed to
anticipate the stalemate and trench warfare of the Great War and the possibility that a war
could go on so long in the face of such carnage.
Was this actually possible to anticipate? In the decades since the Napoleonic War the

23
growing range and lethality of weapons combined with more efficient forms of transport and
communication. Mass armies with new defensive capabilities supported by vast reserves of
men and machinery steadily undermined the prospects for brilliant and irresistible offensive
thrusts. Early versions of the machine gun made their appearance during the American Civil
War. The deadly Maxim gun was first deployed by British forces over 1893–1894 in the First
Matabele War in Rhodesia. Yet remarkably few of these or any comparable guns were pur-
chased before 1914. It was only after their defensive value became apparent in the early
months of the First World War that this situation changed.8 Improvements in the range, accu-
racy, and ease of use of rifles and artillery had already extended the amount of ground an at-
tacking force must pass and the dangers faced before they could engage with the enemy. This
killing zone of concentrated fire in front of the defender’s position was some 150 metres in
the Napoleonic era. By the time of the Franco-Prussian War it was some 400 metres, and was
as much as 1,500 metres by the mid-1890s. There were also tactics to get round this, includ-
ing directed artillery fire to force the defenders to keep their heads down, and the use of ter-
rain to reduce the open ground the attackers had to traverse. With larger armies and more in
reserve, generals might have to expect greater losses in battles, but in principle offensives
could still succeed.9
The military did not so much ignore new developments as struggle to comprehend their
implications. As the battlefield became more deadly, and improving forms of transport got
more men and materiel to the front, it was going to be harder to achieve an early result against
an enemy of similar size and capabilities. But as the exact form a future war would take was
becoming increasingly speculative, all that could be hoped was that it would be sufficiently
familiar to be manageable so long as prudent preparations were set in motion and a sufficient
offensive spirit was nurtured.
The weakness of the theory lay in the claim that whatever the material balances and the
quality of the weaponry, battle came down to motivation and will power. It was a test of char-
acter, a readiness to press forward, even in the face of likely death, a surge of bravery and
dash that would propel sufficient men across the field of fire to engage with the enemy and rip
into them. Thus, the British Cavalry training manual of 1907 said: ‘It must be accepted as a
principle that the rifle, effective as it is, cannot replace the effect produced by the speed of the
horse, the magnetism of the charge, and the terror of cold steel.’10 If all else failed, mass
would make the difference. The defence would be spread thinly: the offence would choose
where to attack.
It was possible to imagine a different sort of war. In 1898 Polish banker Ivan
Stanislavovich Bloch published a dense, six-volume study, entitled The Future of War in Its
Technical, Economic and Political Relations. The last volume was published in English under
the more provocative title Is War Now Impossible? Bloch’s basic ideas were set out at the
front of the book in the form of an interview with the radical journalist William Stead. He
mounted the most formidable challenge to the view that offensives could succeed under mod-
ern conditions, that troops with high morale and élan could storm through whatever obstacles
were put in their way. Instead Bloch insisted that the balance of advantage was shifting from
the offence to the defence in land war. When troops moved into the open they would be cut
down before they could engage with the enemy. The defence would dig in. ‘The spade will be
as indispensable to the soldier as his rifle’. The future war would, therefore, be ‘a great war of
entrenchments.’
Bloch’s research was assiduous and few commentators found fault with his technical
analysis. It was a prognosis built upon the armaments of the time, which made it harder for
those who disliked his message to dismiss. The critiques were often to the implications of his

24
logic. When he came to London to demonstrate how the Boer War of 1899–1901 had rein-
forced his views on the strength of the defence, he was accused not only of ‘so-called non-jin-
goism, or non-militarism, the namby-pamby so-called humanitarianism’ but also more seri-
ously of a stress on ‘ballistics’ at the expense of the ‘qualifications and idiosyncrasies of the
personnel.’11 To the traditionalists his sin was to deny that cavalry charges and bayonets
would still have their place against intense firepower.
The implications of Bloch’s pessimistic assessment were profound: ‘instead of war fought
out to the bitter end in a series of decisive battles, we shall have as a substitute a long period
of continually increasing strain upon the resources of the combatants.’ The ‘future of war’ did
not so much involve ‘fighting, but famine, not the slaying of men, but the bankruptcy of na-
tions and the breakup of the whole social organization.’12 Thus Bloch assumed a war brought
to a conclusion not by battle but by economic and social collapse. A great war might begin
but there would soon be demands to bring the conflict to a conclusion.

For the vital interests of nations are all closely interwoven as they never were before, and, like people joining
hands with him who receives an electric spark into his body, they all feel the shock. As soon as they perceive that
the hardship is more than they can reasonably be expected to bear they will find ways and means of putting a
speedy end to the war, whatever the belligerents may think and feel on the subject.13

Here Bloch was assuming that societies could not cope with the privations of war and ab-
sorb costs. Yet there was already the example of the American Civil War as one in which
even in the face of military setbacks governments continued the fight in preference to accept-
ing the dire consequences of defeat. He understood why a war might settle down into one of
mutual attrition but not why both sides might continue fighting despite the pain. At each stage
the incremental costs of carrying on would seem less than the costs of admitting defeat. Gov-
ernments could bring in reserves and step up industrial production to sustain the war effort.

THE REAL RISK, THEREFORE, WAS NOT JUST OF UNNECESSARY pain before the impossibility of a
decisive victory became apparent, but also of wars dragging on for some time. The longer a
war dragged on the more factors beyond the military’s control would become important, most
importantly the relative economic and demographic strength of the belligerents, the degree of
popular support that could be sustained in the face of continuing hardships and sacrifices, and
the ability to split alliances or draw in extra allies. Then there was the question of irregular
forces. It was one thing to prevail in battle and quite another to occupy enemy territory in the
face of local hostility.
Although they may have had only a limited grasp of how battle might develop under
modern conditions, writers of war fiction did recognise the importance of these considera-
tions. The whole theme of Le Queux’s fiction was that a successful military campaign could
be challenged by a popular uprising, tying down an occupying force at every turn, adopting
guerrilla warfare and even terrorist methods, despite facing harsh reprisals. Such books
showed more acuity than formal military strategy in picking up on the importance of political
and social changes in deciding the future of war as much as on new technologies. This did not
mean that the fiction writers approved—far from it. They were often appalled by democratic
trends that led governments to placate the masses with populist policies that risked eroding
national will and defences.
For example, although Chesney was well aware of the Paris Commune, underway as he
was writing, he drew no conclusions from it about the potential importance of irregular forms
of warfare or civil strife. This ‘foolish communism’, which ‘ruined the rich without benefiting

25
the poor’, had brought down the French. Such tendencies led leaders to pander to popular,
short-term, selfish demands at the expense of the nation’s defences. He lamented the passing
from power of ‘the class which had been used to rule, and to face political dangers’, and
which had brought the nation with honour unsullied through former struggles. It was now
moving ‘into the hands of the lower classes, uneducated, untrained to the use of political
rights, and swayed by demagogues’.14 Tory despair over liberal weakness grew over the fol-
lowing decades, reflected in the laments in Le Queux’s 1906 book about the decline in fight-
ing spirit. He also deplored the loss of a strong aristocratic government to one ‘swayed by
every breath of popular impulse.’ It was the mark of the harm done to the country by the Ger-
man invasion that the country succumbed to

socialism, with its creed of “Thou shalt have no other god but Thyself,” and its doctrine, “Let us eat and drink, for
tomorrow we die,” had replaced the religious beliefs of a generation of Englishmen taught to suffer and to die
sooner than surrender to wrong.15

Another follower of Lord Roberts and his campaign to get the country’s youth ready for
the struggle to come was General Baden-Powell. When he began the Boy Scouts movement
in 1908 it was to address the problem as he saw it of a deteriorating race that was ill-equipped
to cope with the demands of war and the defence of the empire. His famous motto for the
scouting movement was ‘BE PREPARED’. The preparation required was ‘to die for your
country… so that when the time comes you may charge home with confidence, not caring
whether you are to be killed or not.’16
From the other end of the political spectrum this militarism, xenophobia, and alarmism
looked like the real danger, encouraging a war fever among people who had no reason to feel
hostile to each other. This was the line taken in successive conferences of the Second Socialist
International until class unity gave way to patriotism in August 1914. For those who saw in
war only misery and futility the rational course was to demonstrate this prospect and hope that
good sense would prevail. This meant confronting popular belligerence and deploring tenden-
cies towards aggressive, nationalistic ‘Jingoism’.17 The risk was that in the face of such atti-
tudes it was unrealistic to expect measured and calm responses at times of crisis. Popular en-
thusiasm might fan the flames rather than dampen them down. War could be even more de-
structive as rational restraints were overcome.

THE NOVELIST AND ESSAYIST H. G. WELLS WAS THE MOST influential writer on future war of his
time. Although a socialist, his vision owed as much to a gloomy view of humanity under
stress as it did to his fascination with the potential of new types of weapons. As an advocate
of world government, Wells sought consistently through his futuristic novels to demonstrate
just how bad war could be, and how its abolition could only take place once this came to be
appreciated. He saw fiction as ‘the only medium through which we can discuss the majority
of the problems which are being raised in such bristling multitude by our contemporary social
development.’18 In 1902 he also issued a manifesto, Anticipation of the Reaction of Mechani-
cal and Scientific Progress on Human Life and Thought. This was the basis for his claim to be
recognised as the first exponent of futurology. It included a chapter on ‘War in the Twentieth
Century’.
For Wells, the ability to embrace science represented the dividing line between the an-
cient and the modern, between those wedded to old practices and those embracing the most
advanced methods—people he called ‘the efficients’. In his 1902 essay he saw how this might
be reflected in the practice of war. Instead of a ‘dramatic little general spouting his troops into

26
the proper hysterics for charging’, the efficient would be represented ‘far in the rear’ by a
‘central organizer’ who would ‘sit at the telephonic centre of his vast front.’19 The war would
be won with the seizure of the ‘vital apparatus of the urban regions’, such as water supply,
electricity generating stations, and food distribution, despite the efforts of guerrilla bands to
prevent the advance.
If we concentrate only on Wells’s prescience we will miss the point of his military imagi-
nation. He can be credited with the invention of the tank, although the ‘ironclads’ he envis-
aged in 1903 were enormous at over 100 feet long and in their size and armament more like
battleships (from which he took the name) than the sort of vehicles that could make a mark in
a land battle. And while he saw the potential of aircraft at first he assumed that they would
take far longer to develop than was in fact the case. Meanwhile he could not take the subma-
rine at all seriously, as it was unlikely to do little more than ‘suffocate its crew and founder at
sea’. He was very excited by balloons which he thought would be everywhere on the first day
of a new war. The new weapons of his imagination rarely suffered mechanical breakdowns or
fell victim to obvious countermeasures.
More impressive was Wells’s ability to appreciate the problems the new weapons might
be trying to solve and those they would create. While the generals were arguing with Bloch’s
claim that trench warfare might be the natural response to the strength of the defence, he was
thinking about the next steps if Bloch was right. While others produced more realistic models
of how armoured tracked vehicles might be made to work, Wells’s visions became much bet-
ter known; his concept had sufficient credibility to encourage those searching in the early
months of the Great War for ways to deal with the stalemate on the Western Front.20
For futurists the most exciting prospect was that of flying machines. Some of the possibil-
ities had been indicated by the military use of balloons. The beleaguered citizens during the
siege of Paris used balloons then to move people and post in and out of the city, bombard the
Germans with propaganda messages although not much else, and attempt to get in supplies. In
his 1887 novel, The Clipper of the Clouds, Jules Verne had backward-looking balloon enthu-
siasts confounded by Robur, a mysterious hero who had actually built a ‘heavier than air’ ma-
chine, that was as much helicopter as winged aircraft. At the novel’s end Robur left the scene,
taking with him the secret of his machine, observing that he was ‘before his time’ and that the
divided nations were not ready for union. He would return when people were educated
enough to profit from the invention and not abuse it.21 In a dark sequel, published in 1904,
Robur returned with a new machine, ominously called the Terror, which operated as a speed-
boat, submarine, automobile, or aircraft. The book’s title, Master of the World, now indicated
the inventor’s intention. It would allow him, he proclaimed, to ‘hold control of the entire
world, and there lies no force within the reach of humanity which is able to resist me, under
any circumstances whatsoever’. Yet before exercising control, he died with his machine, and
its secrets, in a massive thunderstorm.22
1904 was the year of the Wright Brothers’ first manned flight. Wells, who had already an-
ticipated that aircraft would play a role in future war,23 published in 1908 The War in the Air.
In this story German airships terrorised American cities until surrender terms were accepted.
Instead of New Yorkers being cowed into submission, however, they became angry and war-
like, defying the Germans and so inviting their own destruction. This reflected Wells’s view
that war triggered intense, violent, and contagious emotions, so that once begun it was uncon-
trollable. ‘Nation rose against nation and air-fleet grappled air-fleet, cities blazed and men
died in multitudes.’24 Thus air power was not a means to a decisive victory but instead a
means by which war would be spread across previously impassable borders and into all areas
of life. It posed a challenge precisely because it took war away from the classic battle, ‘inex-

27
tricably involving civilians and homes and all the apparatus of social life.’ This he saw, apoc-
alyptically, as leading to complete chaos and the breakdown of civilisation.
Wells was not the only writer to consider how a terrible new experience of war might en-
courage humankind to accept that war was now obsolete. The year before the publication of
The War in the Air, the American writer Roy Norton published The Vanishing Fleets.25 As
Wells did a few years later (although more accurately), Norton picked up on the recent dis-
covery of radiation. Norton saw this being used as an anti-gravity weapon. He had the presi-
dent of the United States exclaim that access to the ‘most deadly engine ever conceived’ cre-
ated a responsibility to use it ‘as a means for controlling and thereby ending war for all time’.
The same year, another book, with the title The Man Who Ended War26, also drew on radioac-
tivity, with a pacifist scientist, John King, working out how to turn it into a death ray that
could paralyse seamen and melt battleships. King travelled the world in a submarine taking
out individual warships from each of the great powers until they agreed to end war, at which
point he destroyed himself and his invention.
Wells therefore was not alone in his fascination with deadly scientific breakthroughs that
would enable the folly of war to be driven home in a great confrontation. But he had the
greater literary capacity and broader social imagination.27 He appreciated the two key features
of air power. The first was the unequal fight between the airmen and their victims: ‘men who
were neither excited… not in any danger, poured death and destruction upon homes and
crowds below’.28 Second, he recognised that while air power allowed for new levels of de-
struction it was limited in what it could achieve militarily. As he observed in a new preface to
The War in the Air in 1921:

[W]ith the flying machine war alters its character; it ceases to be an affair of “fronts” and becomes an affair of
“areas”; neither side, victor or loser, remains immune from the gravest injuries, and while there is a vast increase
in the destructiveness of war, there is also an increased indecisiveness.29

Because they could not hold territory, aircraft could not on their own ‘win’ wars, a point
that we shall see was generally missed by the air power enthusiasts of the interwar years.
The world’s problems, for Wells, were the result of nations refusing to accept the ‘wider
coalescence’, the ‘reasonable synthesis’, of world government. They were so consumed with
their national interests and so suspicious of each other that they could not embrace such wis-
dom. Instead they were behaving ‘like ill-bred people in a crowded public car, to squeeze
against one another, elbow, thrust, dispute and quarrel.’ These habits of mind, according to
Wells, produced an almost instinctive urge to violence and vengeance once the fragile con-
straints of civilisation and peace were broken. His argument, therefore, was that without so-
cialism and world government, there would be compulsive destruction. Men and even whole
nations were unable to help themselves. He first set out his credo in his 1901 Anticipations,
looking forward to ‘a Republic that must ultimately become a World State of capable rational
men, developing amidst the fading contours and colours of our existing nations and institu-
tions’, and until the end of his life was making this case.30
His approach reflected assumptions, not uncommon of his time, about the possible devel-
opment of a rational, scientific society that would displace capitalism and the system of nation
states. The message was that future wars would be run through an educated and disciplined
population. ‘The law that dominates the future is glaringly plain. A people must develop and
consolidate its educated efficient classes or be beaten in war and give way upon all points
where its interests conflict with the interests of more capable people.’ This thought was com-
bined with some alarming social engineering. Advantage would go to the ‘nation that most

28
resolutely picks over, educates, sterilizes, exports, or poisons its People of the Abyss’, and the
one that dealt with gambling and the ‘moral decay’ of women, extinguished ‘incompetent rich
families’, and turned ‘the greatest proportion of its irresponsible adiposity into social muscle’.
He had little confidence in the ability of the masses to make sensible decisions about peace
and war. He assumed that social order would soon break down when they were subject to at-
tack. In his novels the dominant impression is often less future inventions or the guidance of a
highly competent elite and more the supposed immaturity of public opinion, prey to danger-
ous passions.

THE LIKELY RESPONSES OF THE WORKING CLASSES TO WAR, whether in or out of uniform, was a
subject of both fascination and anxiety at this time. Wells was very familiar with Gustave Le
Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind,31 published in 1895, which encouraged the
view that ordinary, rational people could lose their reason once they got caught up in the mass
psychology of the crowd. This influenced views about what soldiers might be persuaded to do
in battle as well as what might happen to civilians under fire. The uncertainty about the future
of war was less about the hazards of modern battle but how well men could be motivated to
meet them. In this respect the greatest vulnerability as far as the military class was concerned
was degeneracy and moral decay. Ivan Bloch shared the assumption that modern man lacked
the stomach for war, except that he welcomed this as antidote to militarism. He assumed that
the stalemate of war would be broken not by a military breakthrough but by popular disgust at
its misery and cost. Behind many of the developing theories of war at this time therefore were
assumptions about how people in the mass would react to the experience.
This was not the concern of the generals as they advised governments across Europe.
They did not assume that war would be easy but only that somebody’s offensive would suc-
ceed, and if not their own it would be the enemy’s. Hence the focus on the speed of mobilisa-
tion to get into position while the enemy was disorganised and imbuing troops with a spirit of
patriotism and self-sacrifice that would propel them forward. Massive loss of life was envis-
aged but stalemate was not. A German military magazine in 1908 insisted that the 1904
Russo-Japanese war had ‘proved that even well-defended fortifications and entrenchments
can be taken, even across open ground, by courage and cunning exploitation of terrain… The
concept of states waging war to the point of absolute exhaustion is beyond the European cul-
tural experience’.32 A Russian military commentator dismissed Bloch’s claim that ‘the resolu-
tion of such questions by arms in the presence of modern, colossal, peoples’ armies, techno-
logically sophisticated materiel and social relationships is impossible’.33 At the time of the
Boer War the humourist Hector Munro (known as Saki) wrote a parody of Alice in Wonder-
land. At one point he has the Secretary for War, caricatured as the White Knight, telling
Alice:

“You see, I had read a book… written by someone to prove that warfare under modern conditions was impossible.
You may imagine how disturbing that was to a man of my profession…”
Alice pondered. “You went to war, of course—”
“Yes; but not under modern conditions.”34

Munro died in action in 1916.

29
 [3]

The House of Strife

A day will come when bullets and bomb-shells will be replaced by votes, by the universal suffrage of na-
tions, by the venerable arbitration of a great Sovereign Senate.
VICTOR HUGO, address to the Second International Peace Congress, 18491

Wells’s assumption that only the full experience of a catastrophic war would propel hu-
mankind to peace was discouraging to those who believed that all war was self-evidently
wretched and futile. Those who populated the peace movement in the second half of the nine-
teenth century did not believe that there was much new to learn. New types of weapons only
made matters worse. Enough was known to get on with the business of outlawing war and
finding better means to resolve disputes.
In 1816, Quakers organised the first formal peace society as the British Society for the
Promotion of Permanent and Universal Peace. This movement spread rapidly in Europe and
North America. There was always tension between the absolute pacifists, who believed that
all differences could be transcended, and those who could not see how an enduring peace
would be possible without social justice, which to be achieved might require some violence.
Their mainstream agenda, however, focused on avoiding disputes by means of a congress of
nations and international arbitration.2 It also required a sustained act of political will, based on
a moral appreciation that it was wicked to prepare to slaughter other human beings as acts of
policy. Such a dramatic departure from past practice might have seemed too much to hope
for, but this was a time of a belief in progress and the advance of civilisation. With the growth
of trade, nations were becoming bound together by shared economic interests; so common
sense without the necessity for complex negotiations and new treaties might suffice to render
war obsolete.
Ivan Bloch added to the case for war’s obsolescence by pointing to the probability that a
future war would not see quick victories through dashing offensives. Yet he was unconvinced
that in making the case against war it was good enough to describe its ‘appalling conse-
quences’. In addition it was necessary to turn back the ‘obstinate fanatics of militarism from
the road which they have mapped out for themselves.’3 Militarism meant allowing military
figures, arms manufacturers, and patriotic themes to dominate public life. Those who would
benefit from war had a stake in its perpetuation—the politicians dazzled by the prospect of
national grandeur, the generals by the prospect of glory, and the manufacturers by the
prospect of profits. The arms dealers were considered to be particularly culpable, viewing
every new type of weapon, from machine guns to torpedoes to heavy artillery, as a business

30
opportunity, ready to create faux crises to generate a war fever and then sell to both sides.4
It was therefore not enough to rely on war becoming obsolescent on its own accord. Ac-
tion had to be taken at the highest level to ensure that this was so. In 1899, encouraged by
Bloch, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia decided to convene an international peace conference to ad-
dress the issue. Russia’s Foreign Minister wrote to his counterparts to urge them to attend this
conference. He referred to the ‘grave problems’ caused by the unproductive effort currently
being put into armaments. As ‘terrible engines of destruction’ were acquired their value was
neutralised by the similar efforts others were making to acquire their own, and then lost alto-
gether as new scientific discoveries left them obsolescent.
That May delegates from twenty-six countries met in a royal chateau just outside The
Hague. There they were joined not only by Bloch but also by representatives of the various
peace societies that would now be described as non-governmental organisations claiming to
speak for civil society. Although the initiative came from a surprising quarter, the peace
movement hailed the gathering. Bertha von Suttner of the Austrian Peace Society, whose
hotel flew a white flag in her honour while she attended the conference, confided to her diary
that ‘from this time on [our] movement is incalculably nearer its goal; new ways are opening
up before it’. The British Peace society thanked ‘Almighty God’ for recognition that its ideals
were ‘practicable’ and that ‘such a proposal be made to carry them into effect by one of the
great potentates of the world’. Leo Tolstoy, an ardent pacifist but also a foe of the Tsar, was
less impressed by such a ‘childish, silly and hypocritical project of universal peace’ at a time
when spending on the army was being increased.5
Similar scepticism, if not for the same reason, was expressed by the leader of the Ameri-
can delegation, Andrew White. He complained of being inundated with ‘queer letters and
crankish proposals’, and an enormous number of people with ‘plans, schemes, notions, nos-
trums, whimsies of all sorts who press upon us and try to take our time’, which was combined
with ‘the pest of interviewers and photographers’. While surrounded by all this enthusiasm for
peace he observed of the delegates that no such group had met ‘in a spirit of more hopeless
scepticism as to any good result’.6 Delegations had turned up more because it would have
been impolite not to than because they took the Tsar’s views seriously.
This contrast between the enthusiasm for peace as a principle and a project on the one
hand and the harsh realities of international politics limited what the first Hague Conference
could achieve. It was not judged a success. To encourage states to seek arbitration instead of
war to resolve disputes, the participating states agreed to establish a Court of Arbitration at
The Hague (which still exists). It had some success, but there were no enforcement mecha-
nisms, an issue which confused pacifists because enforcement implied force.7 Nor were sub-
stantial restraints agreed on military expenditures or new armaments, another issue which
troubled pacifists as it required distinguishing good from bad weapons. Only in the third area,
agreeing a code for the conduct of war, was there progress. The first Hague Peace Conference
of 1899 was followed by the second in 1907. This had been scheduled for 1904 but then de-
layed because of Russia’s war with Japan. A Peace Palace was built for the third, scheduled
for 1915, but owing to the First World War it unsurprisingly did not take place. The net effect
of this considerable effort had been to confirm war’s role in international affairs while doing
little to mitigate its effects.
Joseph Conrad, a novelist with a sharp eye for the political currents of his day, provided a
thunderous critique. In an essay written in 1905, as Russia was losing its war with Japan, he
expressed his pessimism about the future. The moral infancy of mankind was contrasted with
the pressing material interests that drove the great powers to become rivals and grind against
each other. The European peace was no more than ‘temporary’, dependent upon alliances

31
based on mutual distrust and preparations for war. Only the ‘fear of wounds’ acted as a re-
straint. Even though the ‘speeches of Emperors, Kings, Presidents, and Ministers’ were ‘mo-
notonous with ardent protestations of fidelity to peace,’ in practice war had never before ‘re-
ceived so much homage at the lips of men, and reigned with less disputed sway in their
minds.’ Nor had ‘the right of war been more fully admitted in the rounded periods of public
speeches, in books, in public prints, in all the public works of peace’. Because this was the
right of a sovereign state and must be protected, the humanitarian effort that might have been
directed against the very institution of war had instead concentrated on limiting its effects.
This process of codifying the laws of war had served, Conrad noted in a telling phrase, to ac-
knowledge ‘the Earth as a House of Strife’. Conrad recorded the ‘alarming comicality’ and
‘touching ingenuity’ with which this mitigation sought ‘to steal one by one the thunderbolts
of their Jupiter’, transforming war from a scourge into ‘a calm and regulated institution’. ‘At
first sight’, he added, ‘the change does not seem for the better. Jove’s thunderbolt looks a
most dangerous plaything in the hands of the people.’8

THE LOGIC OF THE HAGUE CONFERENCES, AS CONRAD RECOGNISED, was not to outlaw war but
to make it more palatable by smoothing down its rougher edges. This was a time, as one his-
torian notes, when war had reached its ‘pinnacle of legal prestige’. There was

an impressively detailed edifice of legal rules dealing with the entire phenomenon of war from the opening of hos-
tilities to the signing of the peace, plus all stages in between—including conduct on the battlefield, the occupation
of enemy territory, relations with neutral powers, treatment of prisoners and spies, medical treatment for the
wounded and much else.9

So long as the rules were followed then acts rightly considered criminal in all other cir-
cumstances became legal and were even celebrated.
As the international system assumed the autonomy and sovereignty of states, there was no
higher authority to adjudicate on whether a particular war was unjust or improper. Since the
1648 ‘Peace of Westphalia’, which concluded the deadly Thirty Years War, it was understood
that the best way to avoid war was for states to mind their own business. The interests of
states would be interpreted by whoever happened to be in charge at any particular time, on the
dictum ‘cuius regio eius religio’ (‘whose realm, his religion’). These interests, however, also
had meaning and durability well beyond the personalities and whims of particular rulers.
States acquired their own legal personalities, distinct from the person of their ruler. Thereafter
strategic imperatives were more likely to be followed than moral advice, and alterations in the
configuration of power mattered more than legal guidance. Because no hierarchy or prece-
dence could be agreed then all states enjoyed in principle a similar status, even if their actual
power varied enormously. The rationales for war were still left entirely to the discretion of
sovereigns.
The justification for war could be opportunistic, a sense that a natural enemy was weak, a
reaction to a perceived slight, or in honour of alliance obligations. All that was required, once
a decision was made, was to notify the chosen enemy in a declaration. Once made, a ‘state of
war’ was in place. At this point governments and their armed forces could engage in practices
that would have been illegal, piratical, and objectionable moments earlier but were now noble
and praiseworthy. A declaration might be coupled with an ultimatum, to offer the adversary a
chance to agree to a last-minute deal to avert hostilities. Alternatively it might be almost coin-
cidental with the first military action, to avoid giving the new enemy time to prepare de-
fences. The requirement for a formal declaration was captured in Article 1 of the Hague Con-

32
ventions of 1907, which stated that hostilities should ‘not commence without previous and ex-
plicit warning, in the form either of a reasoned declaration of war or of an ultimatum with
conditional declaration of war.’
Though the laws of war did not seek to make war illegal they did try instead to make it
less miserable. Thus the 1868 Declaration of St Petersburg, an earlier initiative of the Tsar,
produced a solemn declaration to eschew ‘the employment by their military or naval troops of
any projectile of a weight below 400 grams, which is either explosive or charged with fulmi-
nating or inflammable substances.’ The preamble carried the following sentiments, conveying
the underpinning philosophy demonstrating how what was in practice a somewhat futile mea-
sure was supposed to help contain war:

That the progress of civilization should have the effect of alleviating as much as possible the calamities of war;
That the only legitimate object which States should endeavour to accomplish during war is to weaken the mili-
tary forces of the enemy;
That for this purpose it is sufficient to disable the greatest possible number of men;
That this object would be exceeded by the employment of arms which uselessly aggravate the sufferings of dis-
abled men, or render their death inevitable;
That the employment of such arms would, therefore, be contrary to the laws of humanity…

The contracting parties wished to set ‘the technical limits at which the necessities of war
ought to yield to the requirements of humanity.’10
The impetus for this lay in reports of the misery of combatants post-battle. In 1859 Swiss
businessman Henry Dunant came across the aftermath of the Austro-French Battle of
Solferino, in which some 40,000 men had been killed or wounded. Appalled at its ‘chaotic
disorder, despair unspeakable, and misery of every kind’,11 he urged that every effort should
be made to bring relief to those suffering as a result of war, whether from the winning or los-
ing side. This led to the formation in 1863 of the International Committee of the Red Cross as
a permanent relief agency and the adoption of the first Geneva Convention ‘for the Ameliora-
tion of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field’. The next year
the first Geneva Convention for ‘Bettering the Condition of Wounded Soldiers’ accepted this
as a status that transformed combatants into suffering human beings. It required respect for
the neutrality of those trying to help. This would now be recognised by the symbol of the Red
Cross on a white ground.
These rules on the conduct of war should be applied even-handedly. The quality of the
cause would be no excuse for ignoring the rules. Essentially, ‘war would be fought with more
than a trace of the sporting ethos—on the basis of strictly even-handed rules agreed by both
sides prior to the conflict, with low practices such as deception kept to a minimum’.12 This
was a legacy of the practice of limited war. A limited war was an unfortunate but occasionally
unavoidable mechanism for dispute resolution, undertaken between parties who would expect
to have a degree of diplomatic intercourse once the unpleasantness was closed off by a treaty
of some sort. A yearning for a return to this model was evident in Article 22 of the 1899 Con-
vention: ‘The right of belligerents to adopt means of injuring the enemy is not unlimited.’13
There were conventions to minimise the suffering caused by war, and to ensure the appropri-
ate treatment of prisoners and the wounded. These were legacies of the old chivalric code,
matters of honour and mutual respect, and worth keeping in mind in a system in which
today’s enemy might be tomorrow’s ally. Yet they did little to alleviate the worst effects of
war, and this was why there had been pressure to develop new rules that would provide a de-
gree of protection for those who were effectively hors de combat, no longer able to fight.

33
 A systematic code for the conduct of war was developed for the Union Army at a critical
stage in the American Civil War. The author was Francis Lieber, a professor of law at Colum-
bia University. The occasion was President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1 Janu-
ary 1863, which proclaimed the freedom of slaves in ten rebel states. Against the Confeder-
acy’s insistence that blacks serving for the Union side deserved to be shot as traitors, Lieber
asserted that they were entitled to the same protections as any combatants. A belligerent must
‘declare that enemies of a certain class, color, or condition, when properly organized as sol-
diers, will not be treated by him as public enemies.’ This now seems obvious, yet it also went
to the heart of the war’s core issue; it meant that slaves could no longer be treated as private
property.
Lieber had an unsentimental view of war.14 Within its domain, it should be acknowledged
as an unavoidably ferocious business. Beyond its domain, civilisation should be preserved.
The question was where to draw the line, and here he was flexible. If victory was at risk,
civilised values had to be put aside. His key concept for drawing the line was military neces-
sity. What constituted military necessity, however, was hardly an objective test and, in the
end, would depend on a military commander’s judgement. The Emancipation Proclamation it-
self could be an example of military necessity as it was not just about why the war was being
fought but also about how it might be won by galvanising a faltering war effort.
Lieber defined military necessity as ‘those measures which are indispensable for securing
the ends of the war, and which are lawful according to the modern law and usages of war.’ It
allowed for the ‘direct destruction of life or limb of armed enemies’ but also ‘other persons
whose destruction is incidentally unavoidable in the armed contests of the war’. Also permit-
ted was the ‘destruction of property, and obstruction of the ways and channels of traffic,
travel, or communication, and of all withholding of sustenance or means of life from the
enemy’.15
Indispensability should take the priority. So, for example, while prisoners of war should
not be executed, Lieber allowed for an exception in extreme circumstances where there might
be no other choice if an operation was to succeed. If the cause was just, humanitarian re-
straints should not be allowed to prevent victory. Lieber did not claim to have identified any
absolute standards of conduct and could be quite tolerant of harsh practices.16 Humanity was
best served, in the end, if a war was short, ‘and the way to ensure short wars was to fight them
as fiercely as possible. The prospect of fierce wars might even prevent war from breaking out
in the first place.’ When the Geneva Convention was revived and expanded in 1906 the issue
of military necessity was to the fore. The phrase ‘so far as military exigencies permit’ made
regular appearances. The President of the Conference observed the principle: ‘No rules what-
ever can absolutely bind generals; what binds them are the directions they have been given’.17
This pointed to the flaw in the efforts to control the future of war through international legis-
lation. Whatever the consensus on best practice and appropriate restraint the conduct of wars
would be shaped by the strategic imperatives that set them in motion and what appeared to be
militarily necessary at any time. Moreover, any restraints would now be tested in circum-
stances in which the stakes were higher than before and popular passions more engaged.

34
 [4]

Victory Through Cruelty

Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background of countless minor
scenes and interiors, (not the official surface-courteousness of the Generals, not the few great battles)
of the Secession war; and it is best they should not—the real war will never get in the books.
WALT WHITMAN, ‘The Million Dead, Too, Summ’d Up’, 18811

The concept of the civilian as a distinct category from the military can be traced back to the
start of the nineteenth century, but it was not in general use until its end. It was too broad to
be of much value in making sense of war. Whole populations might be affected if a war was
won or lost, but ordinary people were not supposed to be relevant to its actual conduct. It was
true that they occasionally got in the way, even in wars between professional, regular armies.
They might be unfortunate enough to be in the path of marauding armies, and see their land
plundered and their homes requisitioned. Even worse they could be caught in a city under
siege, subject to privations and bombardments, or in a country under naval blockade.
Little attention was paid to this in the laws of war. The key distinction was between those
involved in combat and those who were not. The distinction followed naturally from the ideal
of war as a specialist activity for military professionals, acting as champions for their respec-
tive states. The laws were largely about protecting those who might have been combatants but
were now no longer in a position to be so, either because of their wounds or imprisonment.
They had little to say to those with no role in fighting. The interest was in where and how the
line between combatancy and non-combatancy might be blurred, and what sort of protections
might be expected either side of this line. Lieber spoke of the citizen of a hostile country as an
‘enemy’ to be subjected to the ‘hardships of war’, yet if ‘unarmed’ to be ‘spared person, prop-
erty, and honor as much as the exigencies of war will admit’.2
The effort to contain war through international agreements depended on shared values.
These values, however, were under strain as the inspirations for war became more ideological
and nationalist. Greater democracy meant that popular feelings were becoming increasingly
influential. Civilians were not really passive bystanders, observing the results of decisions
taken by their governments. If they could urge a war could they then expect to be protected
from its consequences? If their country faced defeat and they took up arms to resist foreign
occupation, had they become part of the military sphere? This question of partisan warfare
proved to be especially intractable, as irregular fighters looked to the civilian population for
sanctuary and sustenance. The most famous example was the guerrillas of Spain who fought
against Napoleon, but there was also the example of Mexicans who continued to fight after

35
the defeat of their armies by the Americans in the war of 1846–8.
Before his code, Lieber had written a treatise on guerrilla warfare which expressed the
common disdain among professionals for irregulars, who were assumed to be no better than
mobs. The distinction between regular and irregular forces referred to whether or not they
were subject to the laws of war. These required keeping up the appearance of military profes-
sionalism: wearing uniforms (some men had operated in full uniform behind enemy lines dur-
ing the Civil War), having a command structure, and being able to cope with prisoners of war.
He stressed that those who took up arms ‘do not cease on this account to be moral beings, re-
sponsible to one another and to God’ and his code proscribed pillage, rape, and murder of un-
armed inhabitants, but ‘military necessity’ still trumped all, and provided a reason why people
might be starved or moved from their homes.

THE HYPOTHETICAL WARS FOR WHICH PLANS WERE MADE AND codes of conduct developed were
those between great powers, the ones that would involve huge armies with the most modern
weapons engaging in climacteric battles for the highest political stakes. The wars in which a
number of these great powers were actually engaged over the second half of the nineteenth
century and into the twentieth were quite different. These were wars of conquest against peo-
ple without the military technology and organisation enjoyed by the Europeans who found
their lands occupied, their people subjugated, and their resources exploited. From 1837 to
1901 Britain fought more than 400 battles in some sixty colonial campaigns.3 Sometimes the
indigenous people managed to accommodate and adjust; sometimes they resisted and were
suppressed. The Hague Treaties were not extended to colonial conflicts: at both the 1899 and
1907 conferences, all imperial issues were deliberately excluded.4
These wars were of a separate type, described as ‘small wars’, with their own logic and
character, often exasperating but never requiring the same amount of effort and resource as a
conflict with another great power. The term was popularised by Charles Callwell of the
British Army, drawing on extensive colonial experience, first in an essay and then in an 1886
book.5 Occasionally the colonial forces were embarrassed in an ambush, but in a straight fight
their material superiority and, it was assumed, superior culture and intelligence would always
win through. ‘The way to deal with Asiatics’, observed Callwell, is ‘to go for them and cow
them by sheer force of will.’6
In practice the development of military technology from steam ships, which aided supply,
to machine guns, which meant firepower that was both superior and portable, made a consid-
erable difference, although this can be exaggerated. Machine guns were not plentiful. Most
colonial armies depended on rifles. The view at the time was that the real problem with small
wars lay not with the opponents but the need to fight them in such inhospitable places creating
problems of supply and movement, and vulnerabilities to disease. This is why Callwell de-
scribed them as ‘wars against nature’, and why medical progress, including disease control,
had often more impact than new military technologies. Over time as the colonialists became
more embedded, they drew on the most supportive elements of the local population to help
them deal with the more unruly.
Those who contemplated the future of war considered these small wars to be of little in-
terest. Bloch dismissed the evidence of such campaigns. He expressed no interest in ‘frontier
incidents or punitive brawls’, or ‘such trumpery expeditions against semi-barbarous peoples’.7
If they were relevant it was as a potential cause of a big war. In an argument later picked up
by Lenin, the British liberal theorist John Hobson warned of the combination of unscrupulous
arms manufacturers and colonialism. Reflecting on the Boer War, he argued in 1902 that capi-
talism could not be satisfied by domestic markets and so required the acquisition of new terri-

36
tories to plunder for their resources and as new sources of trade.8 Colonialism was thus seen
as a potential source of a great-power war but not really a guide to its conduct.
The experience of colonisation was often extremely violent. At times there were battles as
local leaders sought to resist conquest by Europeans, but as often resistance was low level,
spasmodic, and not very effective. A study of Queensland, Australia over the nineteenth cen-
tury concluded that over 65,000 Aboriginal Australians were killed from the 1820s until the
early 1900s as a result of mass killings that were ‘profligate, furtive and unprosecuted’.9 In
Tasmania, the native community fought a vicious war with settlers (the ‘Black War’) in the
late 1820s. This, coupled with a lack of immunity to diseases brought in by the settlers, led to
them being virtually wiped out.
The case of the Tasmanians led Wells to one of his greatest novels. In his 1897 master-
piece War of the Worlds, he invited his readers to imagine what it would be like if an alien
power came to conquer as it had conquered others. In his story those on Earth had no answer
to the superior power of the aliens. This was one step ahead of the invasion literature with
which it is naturally compared because of the complete helplessness of the population in the
face of the methods used, which included a ‘black smoke’, a form of poison gas. People had
no choice but to flee from the devastating methods. In the end the Martians were brought
down not by human resistance but by microscopic bacteria against which they had no immu-
nity. Yet while Wells could show sympathy with the fate of colonised people, and often ex-
pressed anti-racist sentiments, a passage in The War in the Air from 1908 suggests that what
was truly shocking about future war was that so-called civilised people might suffer the same
fate as the colonised. He described the bombing of New York’s Broadway: ‘Below, they left
ruins and blazing conflagrations and heaped and scattered dead; men, women and children
mixed together as though they had been no more than Moors, or Zulus, or Chinese.’10
Colonialism established the idea of whole populations as legitimate targets. Such prac-
tices as massacring local people, destroying villages, eradicating crops, and slaughtering do-
mesticated animals arose for largely strategic reasons—as the best available means Western
armies had ‘to defeat elusive, highly mobile peoples who were adept practitioners of guerrilla
war’.11 If that was the case when dealing with ‘semi-barbarous peoples’ then the same strate-
gic logic would suggest that similar methods might work when used against supposedly more
‘civilised’ people.
This was demonstrated during the American Civil War. In the spring of 1864 the Confed-
eracy was moving closer to defeat. It was pushing old men and young boys into its army. The
Union’s armies were beginning to move with freedom into its territory. As they did so they
adopted a strategy that showed little regard for non-combatants. They had to live off the land
which provided a rationale for plundering what they could. Among the troops, hostility to-
wards the rebels ran deep, fortified by stories of maltreatment of slaves or the murder of sol-
diers when taken prisoners. The people of the Southern states were blamed for attempting se-
cession and doing their best to sustain the war effort. Add to this mix General Sherman, who
as a young officer had fought the Seminole Indians by avoiding their fighters and instead at-
tacking crops and food supplies. He was convinced that measures directed against civilian life
and property might compel the rebels to abandon the war at last. The scene was set for a puni-
tive campaign.
The opportunity came when Sherman realised that the Confederates had left Georgia un-
defended. The intent was not to massacre the inhabitants but for them to see their wealth de-
stroyed as they were pushed back to a subsistence economy. Sherman wanted the Confeder-
acy to ‘fear and dread’ the Union’s forces. His explanation showed the shift in focus from a
war against armies, which he saw as the common type of European war, to one against peo-

37
ple: ‘we are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and
young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as their organized armies.’12 The de-
struction of Atlanta, the commercial centre of Georgia, was explained in terms of its role in
the war: ‘We have been fighting Atlanta all the time in the past: have been capturing guns,
wagons, etc., etc., marked “Atlanta” and made here, all the time: and now since they have
been doing so much to destroy us and our government, we have to destroy them, at least
enough to prevent any more of that’. On the burning of Columbia, South Carolina, he ob-
served that though he had neither wished nor ordered it, ‘I have never shed many tears over
the event, because I believe that it hastened what we all fought for, the end of the war.’13
When all was done he told the people of Atlanta: ‘War is cruelty and you cannot refine it.…
You might as well appeal against the thunderstorm as these terrible hardships of war.’ As he
ordered their evacuation he urged them to look after their ‘old and feeble’ and wait until ‘the
mad passions of men cool down’.14
The important point about Sherman’s strategy is that it worked. Taking Atlanta raised
morale in the North and helped secure President Lincoln’s re-election in 1864. The devasta-
tion caused by his troops moved the Confederacy, as its military position became increasingly
hopeless, from defiance to surrender. This success influenced German strategy. We have al-
ready noted the frustration with French resistance after the 1870 defeat at Sedan. Initially von
Moltke was complacent about this resistance, because he did not see it lasting, but the poten-
tial of ‘People’s War’ began to make a deep impression on him. Chancellor Bismarck was
frustrated from early on because of his anxieties over the French getting help from other
countries unless the war was concluded swiftly. He took advice from an American general,
Philip Sheridan, then in Berlin, who drew on the Civil War’s merciless conclusion. Sheridan
urged the need to cause the people ‘so much suffering that they must long for peace, and force
their governments to demand it. The people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with
over the war’. Bismarck was impressed and ordered villages to be raised and male inhabitants
hung in areas where there had been guerrilla activity. There must be no ‘laziness in killing’.15
While von Moltke wanted to mount a traditional siege of Paris, waiting until exhaustion over-
took the city, Bismarck did not want to wait and preferred bombardment. He got his way. His
aim was coercion—to force the French into concessions. He then allowed the French govern-
ment to hold Paris (in doing so they showed little mercy to the Commune) so long as they ac-
ceded to other German demands. He was prepared to act ruthlessly where necessary against
civilians but then limit his demands on the French for the sake of political order. Von Moltke,
by contrast, saw this pattern of warfare recurring, with France always likely to lend it encour-
agement, so wished to wage what would in effect have been total war against the French pop-
ulation to prevent them ever rising again.16
One German officer who had participated in this war, Colmar von der Goltz, saw in this
the direction of future war as a ‘life and death struggle’ between whole nations, with the war
ending with the subjugation of one by the other.17 He followed Clausewitz explicitly, except
that he now saw the ‘absolute’ not as an ideal to which war might tend but a new practical re-
ality. A collision of interests might trigger a war, but it would be the ‘passions of nations’ that
would be decisive. Goltz expressed his desire to shift strategy away from the excessive atten-
tion that had been given to the idea of ‘generalship in battle’ to future wars that would be de-
cided only through the ‘exhaustion of belligerent nations’. Even once defeated, the population
might be so ‘obstinate’ that there could be a need to ‘exert extreme pressure’ upon them for a
number of years.
It was away from Europe, in colonial wars, that this ruthless approach was most evident.
Any restraints on inflicting suffering on whole populations if they refused to accept defeat

38
were intentionally disregarded. During the Second Philippines War (1899–1902), as the
Philippines Republic struggled to win independence from the United States, rebel support was
undermined using internment camps, which led to large numbers of civilians dying in insani-
tary conditions. The United States lost some 4,000 troops and killed some 20,000 insurrec-
tionists, but the war had a generally devastating effect on the local population as a whole, with
some 200,000 dying largely because of the spread of disease.18 At the same time the British
were fighting the Second Boer War as the Afrikaner (Boer) South African Republic and the
Orange Free State resisted incorporation into the British Empire. The British commander-in-
chief, Herbert Kitchener, described his tactics as being to:

flush out guerrillas in a series of systematic drives, organised like a sporting shoot, with success defined in a
weekly “bag” of killed, captured and wounded, and to sweep the country bare of everything that could give suste-
nance to the guerrillas, including women and children… It was the clearance of civilians—uprooting a whole na-
tion—that would come to dominate the last phase of the war.19

Some 28,000 women and children died in the British concentration camps, not because of
a deliberate policy of extermination but because cramped conditions and poor sanitation,
along with inadequate supplies of food and medicines, meant that malnutrition and disease
were rife. They were not helped by primitive medical practices. The concept of military ne-
cessity was extended to genocide when German troops were sent to suppress the Herero Re-
volt in south-west Africa from 1904 to 1907, under orders to execute those captured and
wounded, whether fighters or women and children, to the point where as many as three quar-
ters of the population may have been killed.20
The enormous brutality shown in colonial territories was disconnected from the common
view that any war fought among the European powers could be contained. In the event it was
the practices developed in colonial wars that shaped the conduct of European war, just as
Sherman’s experience in dealing with the Seminole influenced his approach to the Confeder-
acy. This tolerance of extreme violence in pursuit of the total annihilation of the enemy was
taken through to the First World War.
The key principle was that if putting pressure on the population could get a war over
quickly then that could be justified as military necessity. Von Moltke expressed this view suc-
cinctly in a letter of 1880:

The greatest good deed in war is the speedy ending of the war, and every means to that end, so long as it is not
reprehensible, must remain open. In no way can I declare myself in agreement with the Declaration of St. Peters-
burg that the sole justifiable measure in war is “the weakening of the enemy’s military power.” No, all the sources
of support for the hostile government must be considered, its finances, railroads, foodstuffs, even its prestige.21

The safety and welfare of the army was the priority. At the second Hague Conference a
German general observed, without irony, that ‘soldiers also are men, and have a right to be
treated with humanity.’ When, exhausted by ‘a long march or a battle’, they ‘come to rest in a
village [they] have a right to be sure that the peaceful inhabitants shall not change suddenly
into furious enemies.’22 Smaller countries that could imagine needing to fight partisan wars
objected. The compromise was that so long as civilians volunteered to serve in units that were
essentially organised as if they were regular then their status could be recognised. A further
dispensation was made to those who were defending their actual homes.23
The implications of this trend in thinking were not fully recognised. The idea of war as a
sporting contest with rules to ensure fair play had yet to be banished. Ordinary people might

39
be caught up in war, through no fault of their own, and suffer greatly, but the idea that they
might be targeted as a deliberate strategy was widely considered repugnant, at least when it
came to war between supposedly civilised countries. When Arthur Conan Doyle, known best
for the Sherlock Holmes stories, published a story just before the start of the 1914 war in
which eight German submarines sank merchant ships to starve Britain into submission, it was
dismissed by admirals not so much because of any technical deficiencies but because they
were unable to accept a form of warfare based on bringing down civilian ships: ‘I do not think
myself that any civilised nation will torpedo unarmed and defenceless merchant ships.’24
Somehow, warfare was to be kept separate from wider social forces, though this begged the
question of what civilised nations were doing fighting each other in the first place.
As the First World War began, the Germans remained anxious that every male capable of
fighting might decide to do so. From the moment Belgium was invaded in August 1914 Ger-
man forces were rounding up and executing civilians, as if they were certain to meet civilian
resistance. These were pre-emptive reprisals against those not entitled to fight who might be
tempted to do so. The fear of being sniped at by franc-tireurs, left hanging over from 1871,
led to men of military age being executed for actions they had not taken. As some 5,500 were
killed, and homes burnt, large sections of the Belgian population fled.25

THE COURSE OF THE WAR CONFOUNDED EXPECTATIONS. IT should have been evident that a war
between two coalitions ‘approaching equilibrium… would be long and evenly matched.’26
The German war plan sought to escape the logic of this equilibrium by catching out French
forces with a quick offensive. It honoured the spirit of 1870, relying on the speed of mobilisa-
tion to create an early winning position, but could not match the achievement. The main effect
of the rush to mobilise was to impose urgency on the civilian leadership, leaving little time for
any strategic discussion about whether the plans would work as advertised and the conse-
quences if they did not, whether diplomacy might be given more time, and how well they re-
lated to political objectives. If the politicians had pushed harder they might have become
more aware of the misgivings in the military ranks. The German general staff knew that they
were engaged in a gamble as they launched their massive offensive to take out France, but
they feared that the longer they waited the more of a gamble it would become. In the event the
gamble, with its violation of Belgian neutrality, was sufficient to bring Britain into the war
but not enough to take France out. The demands the plan placed on German troops and their
logistical support turned to be excessive. Whether or not they really expected it to be over by
Christmas, none of the belligerents had prepared for a war that would be fought with such in-
tensity for so long. Within months they had almost run out of munitions. The lengthening ca-
sualty lists were also far more severe than anticipated. Instead of a decisive battle, the West-
ern Front settled down to trench warfare. Attempted breakthroughs through artillery barrages
followed by infantry dashes across ‘no-man’s land’ became synonymous with futile slaughter.
The consequence of a frustrating stalemate was a build-up of social and political pres-
sures, which over time led to mutinies, revolutions, and civil wars. There were unpleasant in-
novations, such as poisoned gas, bombing from the air and attacks on merchant shipping.
These all made their appearance in the spring of 1915 as a result of German frustration with
the impasse and a sense that their enemies were better able to cope with a long war.27 The
limits of the ‘cult of the offensive’, which was more of a rhetorical than practical feature of
pre-war military plans, had become apparent.28 The naval blockade helped sap German
strength and resources. Its attempt to gain some initiative at sea through unrestricted subma-
rine warfare provided another example of bold military moves having larger political conse-
quences, as this was the issue that brought the United States into the war. Yet the classical

40
model of war remained intact. The war concluded with two large offensives, the first by the
Germans in the spring of 1918 which left them exhausted and the second that autumn by the
Allies which was successful and led to a formal German surrender. In addition, possibilities
for new forms of warfare had been opened up, notably involving tanks and aircraft. These
kept alive hopes for future wars ending quickly with knockout blows.

41
 [5]

Failures of Peace

The passionate desire to prevent war determined the whole initial course and direction of the study.
Like other infant sciences, the science of international politics has been markedly and frankly utopian.
E. H. CARR, The Twenty Years Crisis, 19391

In a book first published privately in 1909 as Europe’s Optical Illusion and then the next year
across the world as The Great Illusion, Norman Angell, Paris editor of the Daily Mail, sought
to demolish the idea that war made any sense at all. He noted the widespread assumption that
‘a nation’s relative prosperity is broadly determined by its political power; that nations being
competing units, advantage in the last resort goes to the possessor of preponderant military
force, the weaker goes to the wall, as in the other forms of the struggle for life.’ He then went
to challenge ‘this whole doctrine’, arguing that:

[war] belongs to a stage of development out of which we have passed; that the commerce and industry of a people
no longer depend upon the expansion of its political frontiers; that a nation’s political and economic frontiers do
not now necessarily coincide; that military power is socially and economically futile, and can have no relation to
the prosperity of the people exercising it; that it is impossible for one nation to seize by force the wealth or trade
of another—to enrich itself by subjugating, or imposing its will by force on another; that in short, war, even when
victorious, can no longer achieve those aims for which people strive…

He insisted later that the illusion in the title referred to the idea that war could be benefi-
cial, not that it could occur at all. Economic interdependence made such a war unwise but not
impossible.2 Nonetheless the pre-war popularity of the book and its confident message meant
that Angell was thereafter doomed to be cited as an example of a false prophet, one who as-
sumed that economic rationality could triumph in the face of narrow concepts of national in-
terest and the harsh logic of geopolitics.3 He could claim vindication in that the economic
consequences of the war were indeed dire, and possibly if bankers, industrialists, and traders
had been actively consulted in the summer of 1914 their views would have caused govern-
ments to pause before risking so much. But they were not consulted.
The problem was that governments in the summer of 1914 paid no attention to the eco-
nomic consequences of war and were instead caught up in a series of misapprehensions, mis-
judgements, and miscalculations that served to turn a potentially manageable crisis, at most a
localised conflict, into all-out war. The war was far from inevitable as the crisis began. It was
the outcome of some spectacularly poor decision-making. Those in government were ham-

42
pered by having no idea what a war between these powers at this time would mean in prac-
tice. Margaret MacMillan described a ‘failure of imagination in not seeing how destructive
such a conflict would be’. Clark called those responsible ‘sleepwalkers’, because they were
‘watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were
about to bring to the world’.4

ANOTHER PROPHECY THAT HAS NOT STOOD THE TEST OF TIME was one made by H. G. Wells
early on in the war. Keeping in mind his conviction that only a great conflagration would per-
suade the nations of the world to eliminate war, this appeared to be the moment. Once Ger-
many, a ‘nest of evil ideas,’ was defeated, good sense would reign. This would be, he wrote,
‘the war that will end war.’

It is a war not of nations, but of mankind. It is a war to exorcise a world-madness and end an age.… For this is
now a war for peace. It aims straight at disarmament. It aims at a settlement that shall stop this sort of thing for
ever. Every soldier who fights against Germany now is a crusader against war. This, the greatest of all wars, is not
just another war—it is the last war!5

The most pernicious of the evil ideas for which Germany was then held responsible was
that of ‘realpolitik’, characterised as an amoral approach to international affairs, concerned
solely with power and the narrowest definition of the national interest. The original view of
realpolitik was no more than a hard-headed and unsentimental approach to international af-
fairs, but still potentially constructive. Over time it became associated with a cynical disre-
gard for all norms and laws and a reliance on force. In a book on Germany and the Next War,
published in 1911, a veteran Prussian general, Friedrich von Bernhardi, took realpolitik into
social darwinism. Notions of arbitrating disputes were not simply dismissed as naïve in their
idealism but actually ‘immoral’. War was presented as a ‘biological necessity’.6 In his influ-
ential study of imperialism, Hobson described realpolitik as having ‘remodelled the whole art
of diplomacy and erected national aggrandisement without pity or scruple as the conscious
motive force of foreign policy.’7
In 1919, with this supposedly poisonous ideology now discredited and its sponsors de-
feated, there was an opportunity for an alternative, more enlightened and civilised approach.
This alternative approach, long nurtured by high-minded liberals in Britain and the United
States, was ready with its own analysis and prescriptions. It was an approach associated in the
previous century with former Prime Minister William Gladstone, who had campaigned vigor-
ously on behalf of the persecuted of Europe, and now with President Woodrow Wilson. It was
highly judgemental, offering a view of war as not so much an unfortunate consequence of an
unresolved conflict of interests as of culpable aggression, less the result of miscalculation or
mischief and more of criminality. Any military action must therefore be motivated by con-
science, undertaken in a spirit of selflessness and without expectation of material advantage.
This was a ‘liberal vision’, animated by a ‘fundamental optimism about intervention in for-
eign conflicts, in strategies of redemption that could put right the wrongs that had been
done.’8
The liberal project for the aftermath of the Great War involved a new international order,
edging towards world government, promoting democracy, and replacing arms races with dis-
armament.9 Pushing hard on this agenda until his stroke in 1919, was American President
Woodrow Wilson. He sought to guide the world away from the bad old ways, with his Four-
teen Points announced to Congress as his agenda for peace in January 1918. The key princi-
ples were that:

43
 First, that each part of the final settlement must be based upon the essential justice of that particular case and upon
such adjustments as are most likely to bring a peace that will be permanent;
Second, that peoples and provinces are not to be bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were
mere chattels and pawns in a game, even the great game, now forever discredited, of the balance of power; but
that
Third, every territorial settlement involved in this war must be made in the interest and for the benefit of the
populations concerned, and not as a part of any mere adjustment or compromise of claims amongst rival states;
and
Fourth, that all well defined national aspirations shall be accorded the utmost satisfaction that can be accorded
them without introducing new or perpetuating old elements of discord and antagonism that would be likely in time
to break the peace of Europe and consequently of the world.10

In addition to open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, reduced barriers to trade, disarma-
ment, and ‘autonomous development’, he urged an association of nations that would guaran-
tee the political independence and territorial integrity of nations. This was to be under ‘spe-
cific covenants’, meaning that these guarantees must of necessity be enforced through eco-
nomic and military sanctions.11 Although his fellow leaders were wary (French Prime Minis-
ter George Clemenceau quipped that compared with Wilson’s Fourteen Points, ‘the Good
Lord only had ten’) it set allied war aims and became the basis of the German surrender.
Wilson’s language captured a mood, a rejection of power politics in favour of strong
global institutions that could introduce the civilising influence of the rule of law. Underlying
this rejection was a positive view of human nature and potential, but one that had been denied
through the determination of elites to manage international affairs in a secretive way. Just as
the ‘rule of law’ had proved to be the method for combining order with justice within states it
was natural that international law, enforced through a collective security system, was pre-
sented as the answer to international insecurity. Disarmament would allow an escape from the
logic of arms races, as one state built up its military strength in response to the moves of an-
other, aggravating suspicions and in the end provoking an unwanted war. Sir Edward Grey,
Foreign Secretary when the war began, looked back to the naval rivalry between Britain and
Germany with which the century had started. ‘Great armaments’, he observed mournfully,
‘lead inevitably to war’.12

THE NEW ARRANGEMENTS THAT EMERGED OUT OF THE 1919 Treaty of Versailles, far from calm-
ing the international order, ended up disrupting it further. Realpolitik turned out not to be the
preserve of Imperial Germany but was embraced by the victorious powers; the punitive terms
imposed on Germany meant they could never be accepted as legitimate; while the League of
Nations, denied American participation, struggled to impose its authority. It was not that Ver-
sailles made another great war inevitable, for there were many fateful choices still to be made
by political leaders, but that too much was attempted in the face of too many contradictory
pressures and competing demands.13
Of particular importance was the demand by many nations for self-determination, the
support given to this demand by Wilson, and the disarray within the imperial European states
that made this the moment to realise these demands. The struggles of national groups for inde-
pendence in the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires during the nineteenth century had
excited liberal opinion in Europe and North America. They then contributed to the tensions
which had led to the war, and even provided the trigger. There was an inherent tension be-
tween liberalism and nationalism, although this was at first hidden by their shared opposition
to the conservatism and oppression embodied in the 1815 Congress of Vienna and their

44
shared demands for freedom. The liberals believed in an order based on universal rights and
the growing irrelevance of national barriers; the nationalists wanted most of all freedom for
their own nations.14
During the second half of the nineteenth century as Germany and Italy were unified, the
United States held together, and great empires were constructed in the name of some national
destiny, nationalism appeared as an expansionist ideology. Yet within states attempting to im-
pose uniformity on groups which had quite distinct cultures, nationalism was also a potential
source of fragmentation. Groups took on identities quite distinct from the rest of their coun-
tries. For liberals this began to pose something of a dilemma. They were arguing that states
need not resort to war to resolve disputes but found it difficult to extend that argument to na-
tional-minorities demanding self-determination, lest they gave a carte blanche to the oppres-
sors.
Self-determination was according to Wilson more than a ‘mere phrase’ but ‘an imperative
principle of action’. He explained that ‘national aspirations must be respected; people may
now be dominated and governed only by their own consent’.15 It was never easy to establish
what Wilson actually meant. He largely had in mind those whose nationality was already
‘well-defined’ and had a reasonable demand for self-government. It was therefore most ap-
plicable to those who lacked democratic means to express themselves (which is why he had
little sympathy for Irish demands for independence). Yet once it was raised as a core principle
the application potentially went much wider. His Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, had deep
misgivings about where this could lead. There were problems of defining the self to be deter-
mined—was Wilson referring to ‘a race, a territorial area, or a community’? Because the con-
cept was so vague, Lansing feared, it would ‘raise hopes which can never be realised’ and
would ‘cost thousands of lives’, before eventually being discredited.
Wilson did not create the demand for self-determination, but he offered an extension
without limits. Once the principle was asserted many claimants stepped forward, without
there being any obvious ways of evaluating one claim as against another. Half the people of
central Europe could describe themselves as a member of a national minority and the presi-
dent had implied that anyone who wanted their own state should have one.16 Nationalism
turned out to be a much more formidable ideology, precisely because it could be fashioned to
local needs, than the liberal democracy Wilson had sought to promote. When the great multi-
national empires of the defeated powers came apart after the war the process was disorderly.
What one group needed for its emancipation had an unhappy tendency to cut across what was
demanded with equal conviction and historical precedent by another.
The armistice which concluded the Great War on 11 November 1918, a moment still
marked with solemnity, allowed the victors to demobilise and tend to their wounds. But it was
combined with extraordinary upheavals around the rest of Europe. Republics replaced emper-
ors, territories either broke away or were taken away as new states were forged from the
wreckage, and new ideologies offered a promise of a better world. Between 1917 and 1920
Europe experienced some twenty-seven violent transfers of political power.17 In addition to
the economic blockade of the defeated powers, maintained until peace terms were agreed and
which led to misery and starvation, and the devastating impact of the Spanish flu on a weak-
ened population, some four million people died in Europe as a direct result of the wars that
followed the armistice.
In principle self-determination should have reduced the pressures for future war. If na-
tions had their own states there would be less to fight about in the future. But what came
about was insufficiently neat. New states were created out of the wreckage of the old, such as
Ukraine (briefly), Poland, and Czechoslovakia, but they were not homogenous and contained

45
their own ethnic mix, with old hierarchies upended, so previously oppressed groups were now
on top. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, which eventually became Yugoslavia,
had a name which warned of an inherent lack of unity. Numerous Germans, Magyars, and
Bulgarians were stranded in new states in which they were minorities. Cutting across ques-
tions of nationality, defined using various permutations of territory, language, and religion,
were those of class and ideology. There were wars between Russia and Poland, Greece and
Turkey, Romania and Hungary, as well as civil wars in Russia, Finland, Hungary, Germany,
and Ireland. With boundaries uncertain and loyalties open to question, the distinction between
what was an interstate war and what was civil was invariably blurred, as militias took on na-
tional armies. These wars encouraged the idea that whole populations were the enemy, for
reason of class or ethnicity.
In all of this were harbingers of conflicts to come—when after the Second World War the
great maritime empires also fell apart and then again when the Cold War ended with the im-
plosion of European communism. There were clear links between these sets of wars. They
took place over the same lands, and concerned the same issues of national identity and sover-
eignty. These were also wars which blurred the boundaries between the civil and the military,
and were often fought by paramilitaries and with civilians as targets, not just because they
were caught up in a battle, but also because categories of people had been dehumanised as
representing evil and danger. Such views made possible massacres and expulsions. Those in
the 1920s who wanted to understand future war would therefore have done well to pay more
attention. But when it came to understanding future wars these were ignored. The focus re-
mained on the great powers and what needed to be done to prevent another great war.
It took until 1923 before most of these conflicts were sorted out, either as a result of ex-
haustion of one side or, on occasion, international mediation. There was then a brief period
when it appeared that previous promises designed to make the world a safer place were being
implemented. Gradually the major powers accepted the need for a new way of doing business.
Initiatives were taken to institutionalise peaceful practices. There were pledges to disarm, in
line with the first substantive article of the League of Nations’ Charter. Military capabilities
must be sufficient for self-defence and no more. The 1925 Locarno Treaties, which confirmed
Europe’s new borders, were said to generate a special ‘spirit’. German Foreign Minister Gus-
tav Streseman proclaimed that they signified ‘that the states of Europe at last realize that they
cannot go on making war upon each other without being involved in common ruin.’18 Under
the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, the brainchild of the US secretary of state and the French for-
eign minister, the sixty-three signatory states pledged that they would not employ war to re-
solve ‘disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may
arise among them’. In the end this was not enough.

SALVADOR DE MADARIAGA Y ROJO TRAINED AS AN ENGINEER, worked as a journalist, and then

moved into the new League of Nations in 1921, first as a press secretary and then as Head of
the League’s Disarmament Section. He left the job in 1928 in order to become professor of
Spanish at Oxford University, and wrote a book to explain why progress towards disarma-
ment had been so slow. He was in no doubt about the need for disarmament, and his support-
ing argument was one that would still be widely accepted by its proponents. Military expendi-
ture was wasteful. Vast sums were spent on preparing for war while only a minuscule provi-
sion was made for peace. Weaponry absorbed tax revenues, scarce resources, and the finest
appliances yet had no productive or enduring value. They encouraged ‘a spirit of distrust’,
with fear of dependence on others and competition for raw materials and territory. Armament
firms encouraged conflict to increase demands for their products, while general staffs looked

46
for credible adversaries to justify their existence.19
Yet de Madariaga stopped well short of the clinching argument that armaments were the
sole cause of war. If this was the case and all weapons were abolished there would only be
peace, but some weapons were needed, for both national and international policing purposes.
War could never be truly outlawed, as no state would ever admit to be acting for any reason
other than self-defence. The Kellogg-Briand Pact just led to wars being started without being
declared, as when Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 and Italy invaded Abyssinia in 1935.
When it came to even modest disarmament proposals the security concerns of individual
states left them watered down or meaningless. Setting numbers for force levels was compli-
cated not only by the need for measures for counting tanks or aircraft, when the same system
performed different roles in their nations’ strategies, but also methods for taking into account
the size of countries and the nature of their rivalries, the ability to turn resources from peace
to war, as well as the logistical capabilities that could ensure a supply of materiel to the front.
All nations claimed to be at their minimum levels of provisions because of the threats they
faced. All would estimate their own requirements in ‘the most extravagant manner’. De
Madariaga anticipated an approach that was followed in the 1932 Geneva disarmament con-
ference, which was to distinguish armed forces on the basis of whether they were suitable for
aggressive or defensive purposes. Unfortunately, he noted, it was intention that turned a
weapon into an instrument of aggression.
As a result of these practical and political problems, disarmament conferences became yet
another arena in the struggle for relative advantage, and so had fomented rather than reduced
mistrust. De Madriaga’s analysis did not, however, lead him to abandon the peace project but
to emphasise the demanding nature of the challenge. He kept on returning to the need for a
well-organised ‘World Community’ to settle disputes and protect smaller states. Rivalry must
be replaced by cooperation: ‘The world is one. It must be thought of as one, governed as one,
kept in peace as one.’ His was a robustly realistic analysis leading to an idealistic conclusion.

SO DESPITE THE SETBACKS UNTIL THE 1930S THE IDEALISM that had underpinned the League of
Nations was still in place. During the 1930s it became increasingly hard to sustain. This can
be seen in a book published in 1933. In The Intelligent Man’s Way to Prevent War, a collec-
tion of authors committed to the peace project made the attempt. The editor, Leonard Woolf,
compared war to other social phenomena ‘like cannibalism, witch-burning, murder, drunken-
ness’ that might be prevented if only it was possible to discover the conditions which caused
it and those that would then make it ‘extremely unlikely or impossible’.20 The framework was
set in a chapter by Norman Angell, the author of The Great Illusion. After 1918 Angell had
continued to seek to demonstrate the folly of war. He won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1933,
as much for effort as for achievement. Like many peace campaigners he was a philosophical
rationalist and so devoted himself to addressing the potential sources of irrationality. Post-war
Angell veered between isolationist and internationalist positions, between believing that the
best way to stay out of war was to avoid getting too entangled in the affairs of other states and
then that only engagement with other states could create a new system in which war became
impossible. By the time of his 1933 essay, entitled ‘The International Anarchy’, he was in in-
ternationalist mode. The problem was neither human nature nor capitalism. He rejected ‘the
guilty nation theory of war’ as suggesting that some states were naturally wickeder than oth-
ers. All nations going to war thought that their enemy was frightful and their own cause was
just. Though nations fought for their ‘rights’ the meaning of such rights was often properly
disputed and should not be decided by the disputant. The real problem was that ‘we have
made of national sovereignty a god; and of nationalism a religion’, which led to the impulsive

47
rejection of international cooperation. The best alternative, in order to achieve the ‘gradual
elimination of force’ was a pledge that it should only be used to defend the law.
By the time the book was published, this proposal faced the formidable barrier of Adolf
Hitler, who had become German Chancellor in January 1933. All the contributors to Woolf’s
book did what they could to sustain their convictions. They were prepared to make some al-
lowances for Germany because of the unreasonable pressures resulting from the Versailles
Peace Conference. This had created a fertile ground for Nazi propaganda. One contributor
found reassurance in a speech Hitler had made in the Reichstag making the case against war:
‘neither politically nor economically could the use of any kind of force in Europe create a
more favourable situation than exists today.’ Another hoped that responsibility ‘might teach
prudence to these men’ while ‘economic necessity may compel them to pursue a policy of
great patience and moderation’. Yet the words of Hitler’s manifesto, Mein Kampf, were hard
to ignore:

Oppressed territories are not restored to the bosom of the mother country by flaming protest but by a sword that is
able to strike. To forge this sword is the task of the leaders of domestic policy; to secure that it be forged undis-
turbed and to seek comrades in arms is the task of foreign policy.

Training was already underway for war and children were being taught hatred and re-
venge. Germany must therefore be viewed as ‘a peril to the world’s peace.’ Woolf concluded
his introduction by referring to ‘the turn to Fascism and Hitlerism’. Since the book had been
first planned there had been a ‘tremendous acceleration of the movement towards nationalism
and violence and dictatorship and away from the idea of internationalism and the League’.
Those with these retrograde views could make war inevitable, but they could also choose an-
other path. There was, he insisted, ‘nothing to be ashamed of in refusing to hurrah with the
barbarians’.21
Within a few years one hope that Hitler would learn moderation gave way to another that
his ambition would be satiated if only some limited demands were met.22 The man who em-
braced appeasement most enthusiastically, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, be-
came a byword for feckless naiveté. After he had met with Hitler in Munich and accepted the
German move into Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, Chamberlain spoke of ‘peace in our time’,
observing: ‘How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and
trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom
we know nothing.’23 At the start of September 1939, the Nazis marched into Poland. Just over
two decades after the end of one catastrophic war Europe was embroiled in a second. Unlike
the never-ending debate about the origins of the First World War, there was little controversy
surrounding the origins of the Second.

AS THE WAR BEGAN, EDWARD HALLETT CARR, A FORMER DIPLOMAT, published The Twenty
Years’ Crisis, a trenchant critique of the inter-war peace project. Carr was the fourth incum-
bent of the first chair of International Relations, named in honour of Woodrow Wilson, at the
University of Aberystwyth. The donor, Liberal MP David Davies, an active and enthusiastic
supporter of the League of Nations, had hoped that with a sufficiently rigorous understanding
of how the international system worked measures might be identified to prevent a new slide to
war. Hence his consternation with Carr’s developing critique of his most cherished beliefs.
The Twenty Years’ Crisis did not so much argue for a ‘realist’ alternative to ‘utopianism’ as
for a synthesis between the two, although the tenor was definitely realist. This he described as
placing ‘emphasis on the acceptance of facts and on the analysis of their causes and conse-

48
quences’ and ‘to maintain, explicitly or implicitly, that the function of thinking is to study a
sequence of events which it is powerless to influence or to alter.’ It was only in this rejection
of purpose that Carr parted company with realism.
His critique pointed to three basic problems with the utopianism of the previous two
decades: first, an unwarranted belief in progress, as if humankind was bound to improve its
forms of government; second, a disregard of factors of power; and third, the attempt to ‘base
international morality on an alleged harmony of interests which identifies the interest of the
whole community of nations with the interest of each individual member of it.’ When govern-
ments talked of principles, justice, and rights, he warned, they were all, perhaps subcon-
sciously, actually talking about their national interests.24 Given the timing, the argument that
the utopian project had collapsed was hardly contentious. It was painfully evident that efforts
to manage the problem of war through new international arrangements had failed.

49
 [6]

Total War

“What will the next war be like?” “Will it be anything like the last?” These are the questions that in the
present state of apprehension or resigned curiosity, are almost daily hurled at anyone who is a student
of the grim branch of knowledge which is sometimes called the science of war.
BASIL LIDDELL HART, Europe in Arms, 19371

Unlike the period leading up to the First World War there was no wishful thinking about the
nature of war in the years leading up to the Second. Memories of shuddering casualties
mocked ideas of war as ennobling and character-forming. War had broken away from prior
physical and normative constraints. The victors of 1918 had been left bruised and exhausted
along with the vanquished. A future war would be more of the same, except even worse be-
cause there were new ways of killing and no evident protections for civilians. No longer ap-
pearing as the ‘non-combatant’ deserving of protection, civilians entered the strategic lexicon
as a distinct category. They were central to the industrialised war machine and therefore tar-
gets, both ‘weak and critically important’. In 1923, in the context of concerns about aerial
warfare, jurists began to replace the old combatant/non-combatant distinction with that be-
tween the military and the civilian.2
The prospectus shaped the expectations for future war, assuming that the worst innova-
tions of the previous one, especially air raids, would dominate the fighting from the start.
After the attacks on Britain by airships in 1915 and aircraft over the summer of 1917, and de-
spite the absence of panic, the government started to worry about popular reactions to future
attacks. In the summer of 1918, the South African General Jan Christiaan Smuts wrote a re-
port for the British cabinet that envisaged a day, not too far off,

when aerial operations with their devastation of enemy lands, and destruction of industrial and populous centres
on a vast scale may become the principal operations of war, to which the older forms of military and naval opera-
tions may become secondary and subordinate.3

WELLS’S VISION OF AIR POWER IN USE AGAINST DEFENCELESS populations had been challenged
before the war. One reviewer observed that ‘we can be sure that although the air raid will
have its uses in the strategy of the future, it will remain subsidiary to other methods.’ Others
worried that civilised nations would be less likely to resort to such terrible methods, worrying
more about what anarchists might do with such weapons.4 After 1918 concerns about air war-
fare crystallised ideas about the importance of civilians in a national war effort and the possi-

50
bilities of a knockout blow if directed against them specifically. So while Wells doubted that
war could be won from the air and warned of a crazed competition in destruction, until world
government was embraced out of desperation, a more common view was that this could be a
route to victory. As early as 1909 the journalist R. P. Hearne described a war starting with a
‘smashing blow’ against cities that would be sufficient for national morale to collapse.5 Oth-
ers worried about the ‘paralysis’ that would result from a ‘single well-directed blow’ against
what would now be described as the ‘critical infrastructure’. A growing awareness of the
complex interdependence of modern societies raised the possibility that the disruption of one
part of the system would lead to a wider collapse. During the First World War the Zeppelin
raids encouraged the thought that a war conducted against the ‘very nerve centres and vital ar-
teries of any opponent who is ill-prepared’ could be decisive. This suggested an answer to the
conundrum posed by a long attritional struggle. If wars could no longer be ‘won on points’
using traditional means, then air raids might be one way to bring a future conflict to a quick
conclusion.6
After the war military planners evaluated the various forms of munitions that might be
dropped, from incendiaries to poisoned gas, not so much according to their material effects
and more by reference to the psychological. The most enthusiastic advocates of air power,
such as Billy Mitchell in the United States and Giulio Douhet in Italy, sought to show how
they could win wars with vigorous offensives that would bring the nation’s enemies to their
knees. They dismissed alternatives to mass raids against the enemy homelands just as earlier
proponents of sea power had insisted that worrying about coastal defences or supporting land
operations distracted from efforts best devoted to gaining command of the sea. Their claims
were popularised by Douhet, whose book The Command of the Air, published in 1921,
demonstrated how aircraft would render irrelevant the fighting underway on the ground by
taking the battle straight to the heartland of the enemy, where stricken civilians would soon
demand that their government capitulated.7
The likely impact on the popular mood of such attacks was based on little more than ob-
servation of the wartime raids on Britain, class prejudice, and the prevailing theories of crowd
psychology, such as le Bon’s, that stressed susceptibility to raw emotion. A close examination
of the evidence would have encouraged a more nuanced view of popular reactions and pro-
vided little encouragement to the idea that people would be unable to cope. Absent such an
analysis the idea that social chaos would be the inevitable result of a pounding from the air
took hold. In 1926 for example the military strategist Basil Liddell Hart, who had observed
the impact of Zeppelin raids in Hull, contemplated the potential destruction of a number of
great cities, including London with ‘the business localities and Fleet Street wrecked, White-
hall a heap of ruins, the slum districts maddened into the impulse to break loose and maraud,
the railways cut, the factories destroyed.’ In such circumstances, he asked: ‘Would not the
general will to resist vanish and what use would be the still determined fraction of the nation,
without organization and central direction?’8
Holman has described how the ‘theory of the knock-out blow solidified into a near-con-
sensus among military intellectuals during the 1920s and by the 1930s had become an ortho-
doxy, accepted and promoted by pacifists and militarists alike.’ The theory depended on the
assumption that civilians were essential to the wartime economy but also its most vulnerable
element, and also on a stereotyped script. This postulated a war starting with a surprise attack
by Germany with a huge air raid leading to massive civilian casualties, certainly into thou-
sands and possibly into the millions. In addition to the damage to the urban environment
would be the disruption or loss of essential services and rural areas, which would provide lit-
tle sanctuary because of the spread of famine and disease. ‘With its ability to wage war se-

51
verely compromised the government would have little choice but to surrender after only
weeks, days, or even hours.’9
In this way pre-war complacency about the impact of war was replaced by post-war
alarmism. What had appeared as fantasies of air fleets pounding the hapless multitudes now
appeared as inescapable reality, to be added to the memories of trenches and infantry being
slaughtered on an industrial scale. No great leaps of either imagination or logic were required.
If civilians kept the war going by providing fresh reserves for the front and workers for the
factories then they were legitimate targets, and probably more worth attacking because they
would be less able to cope than soldiers. Instead of war becoming more contained and limited,
the opposite appeared more likely.
The man who oversaw Germany’s defeat in 1918, General Erich Ludendorff, concluded
that the problem lay in a failure to understand that war must be recognised as a ‘total’ under-
taking. In 1935 Ludendorff urged that in the next war the whole nation must be mobilised
against the enemy nation. War was total, he observed, because it involved the entire territory
and population of the state and not just its armed forces. This required early preparation, from
before the start of hostilities, and the need to strengthen the morale of the population. In addi-
tion, total war was to be guided by one figure with supreme authority over all military actions,
a role exemplified by Hitler. The pre-1914 concepts of offensive action in a war of annihila-
tion were still present, only now it had to take in the enemy nation, because if it did not then
the result would surely be the annihilation of one’s own; the requirements went well beyond
military strength. ‘Victory is created by the spirit’.10
The prospect of a future war dominated by massive air raids, especially when combined
with poisoned gas, provided the backdrop for the literature of the period. Clarke lists some of
the titles, giving an idea of the bleakness of the theme and its ubiquity: The Poison War, The
Black Death, Menace, Empty Victory, Invasion from the Air, War upon Women, Chaos, and
Air Reprisal.11 Little support was given to the idea of quick and easy victories; the scenarios
pointed instead to the need for disarmament.
In 1922 Cicely Hamilton, a British feminist activist and writer, published Theodore Sav-
age, later republished in the US as Lest Ye Die, in which a crisis in the Balkans led to an ut-
terly destructive war. After London was struck ‘a wave of vagrant destitution rushed suddenly
and blindly northward—anywhere away from the ruin of explosive, the flames and death by
suffocation; while authority strove vainly to control and direct the torrent of overpowering
misery.’ The Gas War of 1940, written in 1933 by Stephen Southwold, under the pseudonym
Miles, was the reminiscence of a dictator who sent his son into orbit to spare him from an un-
safe world. In Nevil Shute’s What Happened to the Corbetts the story was one of a world
brought low by war and subsequent disease, and the need to survive and escape, although the
political message was that civilisation was not doomed, as the barbarity of the air attack
turned the world against the aggressor.12 The best known was H. G. Wells’s 1933 novel The
Shape of Things to Come, not least because a few years later it was made into a shocking
movie of the same name, opening with a ‘war scare’ set in the Christmas of 1940. Wells stuck
with his familiar message. Although at first brute force appeared to triumph, the war contin-
ued for decades, and eventually the world was saved by the intervention of the United Airmen
who stood for law and sanity, and ushered in a new age of science and enlightenment.13
In the tradition of the war fiction of thirty years earlier, in June 1935 the London Evening
News serialised as a ‘duty’ S. Fowler Wright’s The War of 1938.14 This eventually became a
trilogy of books, in which complex romances and adventures took place against a grim back-
drop of war. Wright was deeply conservative, fearful of the impact of science and contemptu-
ous of H. G. Wells’s view of progress. He had been to Nazi Germany in 1934, and his books

52
reflected his dismay at what he had seen. His first novel opened with Germany making de-
mands of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Prague was destroyed in an air raid, and the Czechs were
warned that there was worse to come unless they acceded to German demands. Germany, they
were told, had become ‘fit to enforce her will, as her great destiny required that she should be
able to do.’ Among the noxious inventions was a gas to freeze blood, and induce blindness
and imbecility. The British did not become engaged until the second novel, although there had
been a warning in the first of the country’s failure to prepare for gas warfare, because of its
stubborn and impatient resentment with ‘the depredations with which military science was ac-
tive to scourge mankind.’ When Germany demanded that Britain handed over the Suez Canal,
it refused only to discover how ill-disciplined and ill-prepared it was now that Germany had
become ‘an evil pitiless sword to subdue the world’. The Americans were even worse, hob-
bled by the ‘deep-eating cancer of communism’ and persuaded by propaganda that war must
be avoided at all costs. By the third novel, Germany and Russia were in combination while
the United States was totally preoccupied by the Pacific. The point about these novels, which
were to warn of Germany and to encourage air-mindedness, was how intimidating the
prospect of air raids had become. The Germans did not need to press forward with armoured
columns because they had destructive weapons against which their enemies had no answer.

ON 26 APRIL 1937 GERMAN AND ITALIAN AIRCRAFT, ACTING on behalf of the rebel Spanish nation-
alists, bombed the Basque town of Guernica. Figures circulating afterwards suggested that
over 1,600 people had been killed in the attack, out of a town with a population of some
7,000. Those were the numbers that informed the public debate on the meaning of Guernica,
although the actual number was probably closer to 300. In retrospect the episode illustrates
the murkiness of the distinction between attempts to terrorise the populace and to support mil-
itary operations. The objective was to trap Republican forces and stop them retreating to sup-
port the defence of Bilbao. Republican resistance did crumble in the aftermath of the attack,
thereby reinforcing the view that air raids were an efficient way of breaking the popular will.
The most immediate effect, however, was outrage at an atrocity. George Steer, a reporter for
the London Times had a full and vivid account published within a couple of days:

In the form of its execution and the scale of the destruction it wrought, no less than in the selection of its objective,
the raid on Guernica is unparalleled in military history. Guernica was not a military objective. A factory producing
war material lay outside the town and was untouched. So were two barracks some distance from the town. The
town lay far behind the lines. The object of the bombardment was seemingly the demoralization of the civil popu-
lation and the destruction of the cradle of the Basque race. Every fact bears out this appreciation, beginning with
the day when the deed was done.15

The artist Picasso used the event to inform a painting that had been commissioned for the
Spanish pavilion at the Paris International Exposition. This conveyed the calamity in a dra-
matic, striking and original image that remains a powerful depiction of the horror of any war.
Not long after, a simmering conflict between China and Japan suddenly turned into a total
war. The Chinese struggled against a Japanese advance, and were unable to protect their capi-
tal Nanking. In late December 1937 the Japanese entered the city. As they did so, all con-
straints were immediately abandoned. For some six weeks Japanese troops murdered, plun-
dered, and raped. They claimed to be seeking out Chinese military personnel, but that could
not explain, let alone justify, the atrocities. This time it was a New York Times reporter, F.
Tillman Durdin, who described the horrors he had seen. He described the intense violence as
strategic: ‘The Japanese appear to want the horrors to remain as long as possible to impress on

53
the Chinese the terrible results of resisting Japan.’ The result was that Nanking was now
‘housing a terrorized population who, under alien domination, lie, in fear of death, torture,
and robbery. The graveyards of tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers may also be the grave-
yard of all Chinese hopes of resisting conquest by Japan.’16 If that was the objective it only
worked to a degree. Japanese forces continued to make progress, but China was so vast and
the population so large that they could never quite finish the conquest.

THOUGH EXPECTATIONS HAD BEEN CREATED FOR A SECOND World War, when it came initially
the war was fought cautiously. In his The Shape of Things to Come, Wells had seen the war
starting between Germany and Poland in 1940, and to last between the two ten years. That is
how it began in September 1939 but then it was all over in six weeks. The French and British
hoped that a way might be found to break German will without major offensives. The French
army waited behind its defensive ‘Maginot Line’ while the Royal Navy prepared once again
to impose a blockade that would over time cripple the German war economy. After Poland’s
occupation there was relative calm, even talk of a ‘phoney war’. In the spring of 1940, which
saw the fall of Holland and Belgium, and eventually France’s capitulation, warfare seemed to
revert to the type anticipated in 1914. Germany conquered countries one-by-one through
quick and efficient offensives in a matter of weeks. This was accomplished along classical
lines, with regular armies fighting battles, and the political fate of nations decided accord-
ingly.
The potential role of the tank in future warfare had been discussed avidly since the
weapons first made their appearance during the First World War. All the major powers devel-
oped armoured vehicles while debating how they could best be used—for fast moves into
enemy territory on their own, or to reinforce infantry in more orderly offensive, or to act as
mobile firepower in a defence. The tank was always favoured by those who wrestled with the
challenge of how to return to the classical ideal of war between professional armies. Instead
of the pointless frontal assaults of the First World War they argued for fast-moving and en-
veloping manoeuvres. Now these had materialised with devastating effectiveness. Unlike the
air power enthusiasts who were convinced that aircraft should only be used for a ‘strategic’,
war-winning role, the Germans had seen how aircraft could support land operations.
The successful German offensives of 1939–40 had been made possible by a pact between
Hitler and Josef Stalin, leader of the Communist Soviet Union. At the time this was seen as
extraordinarily cynical. Both countries had been losers in the previous war and had become
radicalised as a result. Both were totalitarian, with the ruling elite controlling every aspect of
life. Ideologically they were polar opposites and wholly antagonistic. The cartoonist David
Low captured the cynicism of the pact as it was announced. The two dictators met in a setting
of desolation. ‘The Scum of the Earth, I Believe’, says Hitler. ‘The Bloody Assassin of the
Masses, I Presume’, says Stalin. If Hitler had been content to let Stalin have his own con-
quests the two men could have divided Europe between them, but he could never share the
continent with an ideology he deplored and a people he despised. Hitler had always assumed
that at some point he would move to the East to acquire ‘Lebensraum’ for the German people.
In late 1940, with Britain stuck in a defensive mode and the United States not yet a belliger-
ent, he concluded that the time was ripe. A Soviet defeat would convince the British of the
hopelessness of their position, while achieving what had always been the driving objective of
his whole ideology. On 18 December 1940 he set down his view: ‘The German Wehrmacht
must be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign even before the end of the war
against England.’17
As for method, Hitler intended to rely on the blitzkrieg that had served him so well in

54
1940. He did not believe that Soviet forces were in a fit state to cope with a sudden onslaught
and expected them to crumble quickly. His was a strong nation, with an iron will, against a
weak one. His generals were not so sure, but they had not been so sure prior to the invasion of
France either and had been proved wrong. They understood that everything depended on
speed. If Moscow managed to resist then the whole enterprise was probably doomed. A vast
German army of four million was assembled, but should the Soviet army get a chance to re-
group and recover it could draw on far greater numbers. As serious, if the war was not over
quickly then German forces lacked the clothing and the kit for the harsh Russian winters.
When the moment came on 22 June 1941 to launch Operation Barbarossa the surprise
was almost complete.18 Stalin had been warned, but had chosen to ignore the warnings, seeing
in them an attempt to disrupt a relationship that was proving to be satisfactory to both parties,
allowing both to establish their own domineering sphere of influence. Initially he floundered
but then regained his composure and the defence began. This became the Great Patriotic War,
and for the defence of the motherland rather than for communism. Evidence of German bru-
tality meant that those with little love for their own regime fought hard against the invaders.
The Germans got close to Moscow and Leningrad, where they instituted a terrible siege, but
they did not get close enough.
The important feature of Hitler’s strategy lay not in the supposed originality of his mili-
tary concepts and tactics. Hitler had in fact not fully appreciated the improvised quality of the
blitzkrieg in Western Europe and his good fortune in facing a France that was still geared to a
defensive campaign along the lines of the trench warfare of the previous war. The strategy
was far less suitable to the Russian steppes. His originality lay in war aims that involved not
just conquering other people but seeking to enslave and annihilate them. The damage to the
enemy’s society was not a means to an end: it was what the war was all about. The persecu-
tion of Jews was an established part of Nazi ideology and practice in the territories it had oc-
cupied, but a policy of indiscriminate killing and then organised extermination was formally
adopted as German forces moved into the Soviet Union. After top Nazis met in January 1942
at the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Problem’ was assumed to
require not only the systematic elimination of those Jews to the East but also those already
caught by the occupation of Western Europe.19 It was a commitment that gave meaning to the
war in the East but also ensured its failure. The determination to invade the Soviet Union was
‘buried so deep within the Nazi DNA that it could not be stopped’. But the diversion of re-
sources for purposes of extermination and a brutal occupation that alienated nationalities who
might have been won over to an anti-Soviet fight served to further ‘retard’ any chance Hitler
had of winning the war.20

IF THE GERMAN DECISION TO ATTACK THE SOVIET UNION represented a massive misjudgement
then the Japanese attack on the American Pacific fleet at its Pearl Harbor base was if anything
an even greater one. One explanation for this is that—as with Hitler’s Barbarossa—the Japan-
ese were confident in their ability to pull off a surprise attack. This had worked for them in
the past in the first Sino-Japanese war of 1894, and then in February 1904 when they attacked
the Russian Far East fleet anchored in Port Arthur having decided that war was the only way
to resolve a dispute over the status of Korea. This latter attack left Russian ships destroyed or
stranded, unable to get out of port, and Japanese forces moved unopposed into Korea. To re-
cover the situation the Tsar sent ships drawn from the Baltic fleet, but by the time they arrived
Port Arthur had fallen and the Japanese Navy was ready for them. Their route through the
Straits of Tsushima had been anticipated, and they were caught by surprise. In one of those
rare battles that could truly be described as ‘decisive’, the Russian fleet lost two thirds of its

55
ships and to avoid further catastrophe surrendered to the Japanese. Not long afterwards Russia
agreed peace terms. The victory left the Japanese emboldened and other maritime powers
looking to learn the lessons. Japan’s success had been the result of the speed of its warships
and their powerful guns, and its grasp of the potential of telegraphy.
One observer saw from early on how this success might tempt the Japanese into an attack
on the US fleet. Hector Bywater combined naval journalism with occasional espionage for the
UK Admiralty. After first setting out his thoughts in a 1921 book, Sea-power in the Pacific: A
Study of the American-Japanese Naval Problem, in 1925 he expanded on his ideas with a
novel, The Great Pacific War, which explored how a future US-Japanese war might occur and
develop.21 He noted, correctly, the importance of Japan’s paucity of raw materials and the
need to gain access to the Asian mainland to satisfy her needs, and that the ‘enslavement’ of
the Chinese would be resisted by the United States. Bywater imagined that the US Navy
would be caught off Manila Bay by a Japanese surprise attack, just as the Russians had been
caught in the Straits of Tsushima. The greatest damage was done by naval gunnery.
On 7 December 1941, waves of Japanese aircraft from six aircraft carriers attacked the
US Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, damaging or destroying eighteen ships, including five battle-
ships, and destroying or damaging most American aircraft in Hawaii. Bywater, who had died
the previous year, was rediscovered as something of a prophet.22 The Japanese were certainly
aware of him, as his books were translated into Japanese. But the key factor in developing
plans for Pearl Harbor was the Japanese Navy’s growing awareness of the possibilities of
naval air power.23 Bywater had seen a role for carrier-based aircraft, but he did not fully ap-
preciate their possible impact. As important, however, as Bywater’s forecast that a war might
start with a surprise attack was his view that Japan would still eventually lose this war. He an-
ticipated the island hopping strategy across the Pacific that the Americans eventually adopted
to push the Japanese back. In the novel, Japan surrendered after a ‘demonstration’ American
air raid on Tokyo with ‘bombs’ containing leaflets urging surrender rather than ‘waste more
lives.’ Japanese failure was essential to his purpose. He had chosen the ‘medium of fiction’,
Bywater explained, to demonstrate that ‘war is never a paying proposition from any national
point of view’.
While the Japanese saw merit in Bywater’s description of the first stages of the war, they
were less impressed by his description of their ultimate failure (which an officer in his intro-
duction to the book described as a ‘slander’). Yet the reasons why an attack might fail were
fully appreciated in Tokyo, even by the war faction. The earlier invasion of China might have
served as warning enough of the dangers of aggressive action. This was why relations with
the United States had deteriorated leading to Washington imposing economic sanctions. Dur-
ing the course of 1941 intermittent diplomatic conversations failed to resolve the impasse,
even though Japan was struggling to pacify China. Should sanctions continue, their economy
would eventually be crippled. But Japan refused to admit they had got it wrong in China, as
that would mean dishonour and probably yet more unreasonable demands from Washington.
The logic of this position was to accept the inevitability of war without an obvious route
to victory. No invasion or occupation of the continental United States was contemplated. The
objective was to remove American opposition to Japanese hegemony over East Asia. The plot
to attack Pearl Harbor was therefore hatched knowing that however successful there could be
no military defeat of the United States and that if the United States did not decide to cut their
losses and negotiate a peace on Japanese terms, superior American resources should lead to
their victory. The Americans never had any doubt that they would win an eventual war and
had explained clearly to the Japanese why this was so. This is why they kept on pushing the
Japanese, and it was why they got caught by surprise when the Japanese decided they could

56
take it no more.
A revealing conversation between the Emperor and the Chiefs of Imperial Japanese Army
and Navy (General Hajime Sugiyama and Admiral Nagano Osami respectively) took place at
a crucial September 1941 conference about the probability of victory. The Emperor observed
that the Army had told him when China was invaded ‘that we could achieve peace immedi-
ately after dealing them one blow with three divisions’. When Sugiyama made excuses
(‘China is a continent with a vast hinterland with many ways in and many ways out, and we
unexpectedly met big difficulties’), the Emperor was angry. ‘Didn’t I caution you each time
about those matters? Sugiyama, are you lying to me? If you call the Chinese hinterland vast,
would you not describe the Pacific as even more immense?’ With a stunned Sugiyama unable
to reply, Osami stepped in. He acknowledged that there was no 100 per cent probability of
victory. He then offered a metaphor:

Assume, however, there is a sick person and we leave him alone; he will definitely die. But if the doctor’s diagno-
sis offers a seventy percent chance of survival, provided the patient is operated on, then don’t you think we should
try surgery? And, if after the surgery, the patient dies, one must say that was meant to be. This is indeed the situa-
tion we face today… If we waste time, let the days pass, and we are forced to fight after it is too late to fight, then
we won’t be able to do a thing about it.

This satisfied the Emperor: ‘All right, I understand.… There is no need to change any-
thing.’24
Admiral Yamamoto, responsible for planning the attack, believed that ‘Japan’s Navy
must decide the fate of the war on the very first day’. The method was to ‘fiercely attack and
destroy the US main fleet at the outset of the war, so that the morale of the US Navy and her
people [will] sink to the extent that it cannot be recovered.’ The difficulty was that it was eas-
ier to sink ships than morale. Yamamoto considered the risks, including the ‘possibility that
the enemy would dare to launch an attack upon our homeland to burn down our capital and
other cities,’ but could see no other way out of Japan’s current strategic predicament.This was
a bold plan, but ‘conceived in desperation’. In practice the best Japan could hope for was a re-
sumption of negotiations and better terms than those available beforehand, but there was no
reason to suppose that the Americans would have any interest. Prime Minister Tojo admitted
that this was speculative: ‘With war, if you don’t try it, you can’t know how it will turn
out.’25

BARBAROSSA AND PEARL HARBOR REFLECTED THE SIMPLE logic that a state determined on war
with another would seek to maximise the military impact of the first move. Aggression and
surprise attack went hand in hand. In both cases the aggressions reflected a sense of in-
evitability. War was bound to come, and therefore it should be started on the best possible
terms. For Hitler a showdown with the Bolsheviks was historic destiny; for Tojo there was a
fundamental incompatibility between the United States and Japan. Without this sense of in-
evitability the case for war was poor in both instances because it meant taking on countries
with formidable resources. Hitler believed that the Soviet Union could be defeated; Tojo was
not so sure about the United States. Also in both cases, the idea that a bold first move could
ensure a quick victory, a legacy of earlier wars, had been contradicted by recent experience.
Germany and Japan were adding new enemies before the established enemies had been de-
feated.
When it came to the attacks, one over the land and one over the sea, both were helped by
the complacency of the victims. Stalin distrusted those warning that Hitler was about to attack

57
more than he distrusted Hitler. The Americans, who knew that an early attack was quite prob-
able, were looking to the Philippines as a target and had underestimated Japanese capabilities.
They had assumed that the strength of the Pacific fleet would serve as a deterrent. Moscow
and Washington miscalculated in their assessments of the risks they faced because they did
not appreciate that others might miscalculate so badly in the risks they were prepared to
take.26 Lastly, in both cases the military momentum gained was insufficient to bring the war
to a swift conclusion, and the greater strengths of the Soviet Union and the United States were
asserted, and eventually proved to be overwhelming.
The Second World War, like the First, confirmed the classical model in that its conclusion
depended on a clear military victory. The European and Pacific Wars ended with the formal
surrenders of the defeated armed forces. Still, the classical model was being stretched to the
breaking point. What made the difference was the enormous advantage of the Allies in their
combined air and sea power as this enabled them to deplete the war-making power of the
enemy, eroding their ability to fight on land.27 The blurred lines between the military and
civilian spheres of war particularly challenged the classical model. The Germans took a mer-
ciless view when facing any partisan resistance in the occupied territories of Europe. This
could still be accommodated within the classical model in terms of the risk that non-combat-
ants had to accept when they took up arms or directly aided enemy forces. Once the Nazis de-
cided to move against whole populations the model was abandoned. Attacks on civilians were
not just a matter of maintaining law and order, or unfortunate consequential damage resulting
from attacks on the main military-related objective, or desperate efforts to weaken the enemy
will when all else had failed, but part of the whole rationale for the war, a means of asserting
superiority over inferior races or of eliminating them altogether.
For the Nazis in Germany and the militarists in Japan, total war was not so much a matter
of strategy as of world-view. The logic was totalitarian, not only in terms of the state control-
ling all aspects of the economy and social relationships but also in the presumption that all in-
dividuals must act in its service. When France folded in 1940 the right-wingers who took con-
trol under the Vichy regime saw the defeat as a consequence of the country having becoming
‘pluralist, materialistic, and soft’. War was a test of a nation’s health and France had failed.
This logic, as it manifested itself in the Second World War, was the most ‘insidious legacy’ of
the First.28 Though the war had not begun as brutally as expected, at least in Europe, by its
end it had become brutal in ways that few at the start could have imagined, with the attempted
murder of a whole people, reckless violence against occupied populations, and single bombs
able to destroy entire cities.

58
 [7]

The Balance of Terror

Such was the crowning triumph of military science, the ultimate explosive that was to give the “decisive
touch” to war…
H. G. WELLS, The World Set Free, 19141

At the start of the First World War H. G. Wells had seen the need to defeat Germany be-
cause its embrace of realpolitik challenged his vision of world government. His line in the
Second World War was not so different. George Orwell observed that this was the ‘same
gospel’ Wells had been ‘preaching almost without interruption for the past forty years, always
with an air of angry surprise at the human beings who can fail to grasp anything so obvious.’
There was always the ‘supposed antithesis between the man of science who is working to-
wards a planned World State and the reactionary who is trying to restore a disorderly past.’
This, Orwell warned, left Wells unable to grasp the nature of the threat and the task ahead,
‘quite incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far
more powerful forces than what he himself would describe as sanity. Creatures out of the
Dark Ages have come marching into the present, and if they are ghosts they are at any rate
ghosts which need a strong magic to lay them.’2 This was not a war that could be compre-
hended in terms of the calculations of statesmen or narrow judgements of national self-inter-
est.
When it came to a possible Third World War, however, Wells turned out to be more
prophetic. One of his most impressive predictions was even more remarkable because he was
instrumental in it coming true. Always on the lookout for scientific innovations to help the
cause of political progress, he seized upon reports in the early 1900s of breakthroughs in the
understanding of atomic structures. His guide was Frederick Soddy, a pioneering student of
radioactivity who had gained his reputation while working with physicist Ernest Rutherford at
McGill University in Canada. The two had shown that there were circumstances in which
atoms might break up, in the process releasing large amounts of energy. Rutherford and
Soddy understood how much potential energy might be stored in small amounts of material
but could not see how this might be unleashed. Normally radioactivity was released over cen-
turies or even millennia. If a weapon was to be developed using this knowledge, the process
would have to be compressed into hours, perhaps less. Rutherford doubted that it would be
possible, but Soddy was not so sure. Although later he played this down, he recognised imme-
diately the hypothetical significance of such explosive power for warfare. In a 1904 lecture to
the Corps of Royal Engineers, Soddy speculated that if the energy—‘latent and bound up with

59
the structure of the atom’—found in heavy matter could be unlocked then ‘what an agent it
would be in shaping the world’s destiny’. The ‘man who put his hand on the lever’ to gain ac-
cess to this vast store of energy ‘would possess a weapon whereby he could destroy the world
if he chose’. By way of reassurance, however, he trusted nature to guard its secret.3
He largely put aside this unpleasant prospect in a popular guide to the new science, The
Interpretation of Radium, published in 1909.4 Such a bountiful source of energy would mean
the human race need not ‘earn its bread by the sweat of its brow’. The happier prospect was of
being able to ‘transform a desert continent, thaw the frozen poles, and make the whole world
one smiling Garden of Eden’.5 Soddy did not mention any weapons, but the implication was
there in an early paragraph comparing atoms as the building blocks of matter to bricks as the
building blocks of houses. Imagine, Soddy asked, if one were to demonstrate to an architect
that the bricks used for housing were ‘capable of entirely different uses—let us say, for illus-
tration, that they could with effect be employed as an explosive incomparably more powerful
in its activities than dynamite’.6
Wells was one of Soddy’s most attentive readers. In 1914 he acknowledged the scientist
as the inspiration for a new novel, The World Set Free. This was yet another homily on the
merits of world government, and how these would come to be universally accepted as a result
of an awesomely destructive weapon, named ‘The Atomic Bomb’. He had a scientist named
Professor Rufus giving lectures in Edinburgh in 1910, using Soddy’s words. Wells then
looked forward twenty years to 1933 when another scientist, Holsten, discovered how to mas-
ter atomic energy through a combination of ‘induction, intuition and luck’. It then took a fur-
ther two decades before atomic weapons were used in a war between an alliance of Britain,
France, and the US against Germany and Austria and almost spun out of control after an air
attack destroyed the Paris headquarters of the Allied High Command. Rather than put an end
to the fighting, it liberated a ‘rather brutish young aviator’ in charge of the French special sci-
entific corps. No longer under control, he enthused how ‘there’s nothing on earth to stop us
going to Berlin and giving them tit-for-tat.… Strategy and reasons of state—they’re over.…
Come along, my boy, and we’ll just show these old women what we can do when they let us
have our heads.’ When they dropped their atomic bombs, large black spheres containing a
heavy element ‘carolinum’, there was a volcanic effect—‘a shuddering star of evil splendour
spurted and poured up smoke and flame towards them like an accusation.’7
In Wells’s account, two hundred major cities were lost in this way, with the residual radi-
ation rendering them uninhabitable. He has his narrating historian observing that ‘nothing
could have been more obvious to the people of the early twentieth century than the rapidity
with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not
see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands.’ Thankfully, however, this dread-
ful experience shook men out of ‘old-established habits of thought’ and so led to the ‘world
set free.’

RUTHERFORD, SODDY’S COLLABORATOR FROM 1902, REMAINED sceptical. When Wells’s novel
was first published, he described the likelihood of mastering nuclear energy as not ‘at all
promising’.8 By 1933 his view had not changed. In September of that year, speaking to the
British Association, he restated his position: transforming atoms would be a very ‘poor and
inefficient’ way to release energy. The idea that it could be a source of power was dismissed
as ‘moonshine’. His remarks were duly reported in The Times, where Leo Szilard read them.
Szilard, a brilliantly inventive Hungarian scientist who had moved to London from Germany
because of the Nazis, was a fan of Wells, whom he had met. He had only recently read The
World Set Free. With the book still in his mind, Szilard was bothered by Rutherford’s scepti-

60
cal remarks. By his own account, the explanation of how the energy might be released came
to him as he crossed a London square. As he reached the curb, according to historian Richard
Rhodes, ‘time cracked open before him and he saw a way to the future, death into the world
and all our woes, the shape of things to come’.9 His insight was to recognise that there could
be a chain reaction capable of releasing extraordinary amounts of energy if an element could
be found that when bombarded with one neutron released two. Szilard, as with Wells’s Hol-
sten, the fictional and the real in 1933, were both suddenly seized with an insight that could
result in both terrible and wonderful developments. In 1934 Szilard filed a patent which de-
scribed a self-sustaining chain reaction but decided that the responsible thing to do was to
keep it secret.
In December 1938 nuclear scientists Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch were to-
gether in Sweden. They realised that they could show that a uranium atom could split into
two, a process they called fission. The community of nuclear scientists who heard the news
could see at once that this could mean a new form of explosive. Whereas before Szilard might
have hoped that the secret of an atomic bomb might be suppressed, now he began to fear that
Nazi Germany might exploit it first. He persuaded his friend Albert Einstein to write to Presi-
dent Roosevelt urging him to authorise an exploration of the possibility of ‘extremely power-
ful bombs’. It was some time before the United States joined the European war. By then
Frisch was in Britain and with another émigré scientist, Rudolf Peierls, had demonstrated for
the British government that an atomic bomb was feasible. In 1942 the British and American
projects merged to form the Manhattan Project.
Atomic bombs were used for the first and only time in a military campaign in August
1945 when they were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, obliterating
both and most of their residents. This was immediately recognised to be a step change in war-
fare. It was not, however, necessarily seen to be a transformation. The flattening of these two
cities could also be presented as the natural continuation of the merciless air raids of the Sec-
ond World War when great centres of population had been attacked regularly and remorse-
lessly, even though social structures and even productive capacity had proved to be remark-
ably resilient in the face of constant pounding. The levels of damage suffered by Japan in Au-
gust 1945 could have been inflicted by other means—the March 1945 air raid on Tokyo had
led to more deaths. Yet the means were spectacular and the consequences were immediate.
The bombs’ use was followed by Japan’s surrender.
It took time before the full implications of what had taken place were appreciated. In
1946 the New Yorker devoted a whole issue to the journalist John Hersey’s stark account of
the impact of the atomic bombs, including the harrowing accounts of survivors.10 He quoted a
report written to the Holy See in Rome by one of the German Jesuit priests present on the
moral dilemmas raised by the new weapons:

Some of us consider the bomb in the same category as poison gas and were against its use on a civilian population.
Others were of the opinion that in total war, as carried on in Japan, there was no difference between civilians and
soldiers, and that the bomb itself was an effective force tending to end the bloodshed, warning Japan to surrender
and thus to avoid total destruction. It seems logical that he who supports total war in principle cannot complain of
a war against civilians. The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it
serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever
good might result? When will our moralists give us a clear answer to this question?

Over the next decade, with tests of new and even more powerful weapons, the likely char-
acter of a nuclear war became clear. Human beings within a large radius of an explosion
would be killed by blast and fire. Those that were not would suffer severe burns, radiation

61
sickness, and psychological trauma. The effects of radiation might be felt far away, depending
on the nature of the detonation and the weather. Over time this would result in higher inci-
dence of leukaemia and cancer. Charting the longer-term social consequences was harder. Ev-
idently health services would be left in a terrible condition and be hard-pressed to treat even a
small proportion of the victims. Help from outside would be hampered by the damage to in-
frastructure. Agriculture and manufacturing would be set back and cultural heritage lost for-
ever. If significant numbers of weapons were used then distant lands would be contaminated.
There were soon speculations about whether human life could be sustained.
In August 1949, much earlier than the Americans and British expected, the Soviet Union
tested an atomic device. In response, the Americans moved to the next stage of nuclear tech-
nology, from atomic weapons based on nuclear fission to hydrogen or thermonuclear weapons
based on fusion. These threatened almost unlimited destructive capacity. In the 1940s there
had been very few atomic bombs available for American use. Over the 1950s scarcity gave
way to plenitude, with many weapons available to both superpowers. The assumption that the
next war would start with devastating exchanges of city-busting weapons took hold. Even
more alarming was the realisation that the consequences would not be confined to the bel-
ligerents. Anyone who happened to be in the path of nuclear fallout, the radioactive dust and
ash taken by the wind away from the site of a detonation, could be caught. Fallout would not
respect national boundaries, let alone personal culpability. To be released it was not even nec-
essary for there to be a war, as radioactive fallout made an unwelcome appearance in the
1950s as a by-product of atmospheric nuclear tests by the United States, Britain, and the So-
viet Union.11 Its impact was brought home in March 1954 when the US detonated a bomb
combining fusion with fission on Bikini Island (one of the Marshall Islands) equivalent to 15
million tons of TNT (megatons). This was some thousand times the yield of the bomb that
had destroyed Hiroshima, which had a yield equivalent to some 15 thousand tons (kilotons).
Because it was greater than anticipated, a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon, though
ninety miles away from Bikini, was caught in the path of the fallout as a result of which the
crew developed radiation sickness, and one member died. The furore this created in Japan
pushed awareness of fallout to the front pages.

AFTER THE MOVE FROM THE ATOMIC TO THE HYDROGEN BOMB the fear was that the scientists
might next come up with something worse—the cobalt bomb. The key feature of the cobalt
bomb was that its use would actually be truly suicidal. Leo Szilard had first mooted the idea
in 1950 when he spoke during a radio discussion of how governments might deliberately con-
struct weapons to maximise fallout by ‘salting’ them with cobalt. Whereas people might re-
turn after a couple of months to areas hit by fallout from most planned weapons, a cobalt
bomb’s radiation would have a much longer half-life and so anywhere contaminated would be
uninhabitable for up to a century. That was why it could be a doomsday device.
Szilard raised the idea not as an advocate but to warn about the possible consequences of
an unrestricted arms race. In 1956 presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson spoke of ‘the mil-
lions who tremble on the sidelines of this mad arms race in terror’ and demanded that Presi-
dent Eisenhower reveal the government’s plans for the cobalt bomb. Officials pointed to its
suicidal quality as refutation of the rumours that it was close to being designed, let alone con-
structed. They had little success. There was a growing presumption that whatever could be
built would be built. In practice there were no plans, and cobalt bombs were never built. Even
if they had been and then used this would not necessarily have led to a completely depopu-
lated planet, although the life remaining would undoubtedly have been utterly miserable.12
Cobalt bombs were a gift to writers of doomsday fiction, and soon became a feature of

62
the invariably dystopian literature that grew up around the possibility of a nuclear Armaged-
don. The drama often lay largely in exploring how people might cope with catastrophe as op-
posed to how they got there. As a result descriptions of the origins of the catastrophe tended
to be sketchy, combining barely plausible conflicts with some stunning misunderstandings.
This was the case with the apocalyptical bestseller On the Beach by Nevil Shute, a British en-
gineer who had emigrated to Australia, and who had contributed to the pre-war literature
about bombing campaigns with What Happened to the Corbetts.13 The new novel was one of
the bleakest stories ever told, for not only do the book’s main characters all die but so does all
humanity, leaving behind a lifeless irradiated planet. Shute had seen the potential of the topic
when he read in December 1954 a report in Time magazine on ‘The Cumulative Effects of
Thermonuclear Explosions on the Surface of the Globe’, which noted that the neutrons and at-
mospheric debris from bomb tests ‘may upset the natural conditions to which life has become
adapted’.14 The narrative power of the book came from the modest, low-key way ordinary
people faced the terrifying prospect of their certain death, from which there was no escape
and against which there could be no resistance. Shute’s people lapsed neither into panic nor
barbarity. Shute prefaced the book with a line from the poet T. S. Eliot, somewhat ironic in
the light of images of massive explosions, ‘This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang
but a whimper’.
The setting was Melbourne, the only place yet to be affected by fallout after a ‘short, be-
wildering war’ of thirty-seven days. The book began in Christmas 1962, already some four-
teen months after the war. Shute did not explain the origins of the catastrophe by reference to
a madman but instead to a combination of deliberate strategic malevolence compounded by
miscalculation which led to a war in which 47,000 weapons were used. The first chapter re-
ferred to a ‘Russian-Chinese war that had flared up out of the Russian-NATO war, that had in
turn been born of the Israeli-Arab war, initiated by Albania.’ Also cobalt bombs had been
used by the Russians and the Chinese. In a later chapter some of the key figures tried to piece
together what had happened, wondering whether it was worth writing a history of these events
that no one would ever read. They are sitting on an American submarine tasked by the Aus-
tralian prime minister to find out what happened around the country’s coast. Challenging the
general assumption at the time that China and the Soviet Union should be considered together
as one giant Communist bloc, Shute had his original conflict as being between these two.
Russia was after a warm water port, preferably Shanghai, and sought to cut down China’s
population by means of radiological warfare. For their part the Chinese wanted to use radia-
tion to eliminate the industrial regions of Russia. As the discussion progressed on the subma-
rine, the greatest revelation was that contrary to what had been supposed, the Russians had
not attacked Washington and London, although Russia had received retaliation. This led to a
thought so ‘horrible’ as to be ‘incredible’, that Russia had been bombed ‘by mistake’. The
real culprits turned out to be Egypt (Shute was writing at the time of the 1956 Suez crisis),
using long-range aircraft sold to them by Russia. Meanwhile a bomb that hit Naples came
from Albania, and nobody was now sure who had launched the one that struck Tel Aviv.
What was remarkable about Shute’s political scenario was not its realism any more than
his technical scenario, but his refusal to suggest that the predicament was the result of insane
or even wholly unreasonable decisions. The participants in the discussion looked back at deci-
sions that were rushed and taken blindly. (‘It’s mighty difficult to stop a war when all the
statesmen have been killed.’) Sympathy was expressed for someone with ‘a war on his hands
and plenty of weapons left to fight it with.’ When it was suggested to the American captain of
the submarine that he would have tried to find a negotiated solution he demurred: ‘With an
enemy knocking hell out of the United States and killing all our people? When I still had

63
weapons in my hands? Just stop fighting and give in? I’d like to think that I was so high-
minded but—well, I don’t know.’ The real blame was directed towards the small countries
that had initiated the war. That they could do so was the result of the weapons becoming too
cheap and too freely available. The scientist on board the submarine explained: ‘The original
uranium bomb only cost about fifty thousand quid towards the end. Every little pipsqueak
country like Albania could have a stockpile of them, and every little country that had that,
thought it could defeat the major countries in a surprise attack. That was the real trouble.’ The
scenario thus reflected a continuing belief in the possibility of a knockout blow. Its main ef-
fect was as a warning about fallout, which Shute helped to make a hot topic in 1957. But it
was also a warning about the consequences of the spread of nuclear weapons.15
Two years later when the film of the book was made by Stanley Kramer, there was a
greater readiness to blame human stupidity. Fred Astaire, as the scientist Julian Osborne, de-
nied that there was a ‘simple answer’ to how the war started. It was the result of people ac-
cepting ‘the idiotic principle that peace can be maintained by arranging to defend themselves
with weapons they couldn’t possibly use without committing suicide.’ The problem was still
proliferation—‘Everybody had an atomic bomb and counter-bombs and counter-counter
bombs’—but this was combined with loss of control as ‘the devices outgrew us’.
‘Somewhere some poor bloke…
Probably looked at a radar screen and thought he saw something.
He knew that if he hesitated one thousandth of a second…
His own country would be wiped off the map, so—
So he pushed a button…
And… And…
The world went… Crazy…’16

BY THIS TIME THE POSSIBILITY OF ACCIDENTAL WAR WAS becoming prominent.The idea that
great tragedy could be the result of a human error or mechanical malfunction was bound to
make an impression on a creative imagination.17 In a 1958 novel, Red Alert,18 a delusional
Air Force general launched an attack, using a war plan which assumed that the government
was no longer functioning. Once this was discovered, the president was determined to work
with the Soviet Union to prevent catastrophe, but the US aircraft countermeasures were too
good for Soviet defences. The general killed himself before he could be forced to reveal the
recall code for the bombers, but the code was found on a desktop pad. All aircraft were re-
called, save one which had been damaged by air defences. Fearing the worst, the president of-
fered up Atlantic City, New Jersey, by way of compensation, but this turned out to be unnec-
essary when just one hydrogen bomb partly detonated and fortunately only in open country-
side.
Another novel, Fail-Safe, had a similar theme, so much so that Red Alert’s author sued
for plagiarism. In this case a civilian airliner off-course triggered an alert as the intrusion into
American air space of an unidentified aircraft. The alert was cancelled but a ‘go-code’ was
sent in error to a group of bombers, an error exacerbated by a new Russian system success-
fully preventing communications between the aircraft and their headquarters. Even when the
jamming ended, the aircraft crew decided that their protocols required them to continue with
the mission. As in Red Alert, the president offered to trade one city for another, in this case
New York for Moscow.19 Somewhat chillingly the novel appeared as a three-part serial in the
Saturday Evening Post in October 1962, coinciding with the Cuban Missile Crisis, before
being published the next year as a book. The authors introduced the book saying: ‘Men, ma-
chines, and mathematics being what they are, this is, unfortunately, a “true” story. The acci-

64
dent may not occur in the way we describe but the laws of probability assure us that ulti-
mately it will occur.’ The implication was that a simple, apparently minor, mechanical failure
could have unthinkable, catastrophic effects.20
Both novels were turned into well-regarded movies. The first and most memorable was
Red Alert, except that director Stanley Kubrick turned it into a black comedy and renamed it
Dr. Strangelove.21 The deranged general responsible for the disaster became Jack D. Ripper,
convinced that Russia was seeking to pollute the ‘precious bodily fluids’ of Americans. He
was in command of a wing of nuclear-armed B-52 bombers, which he ordered to attack Rus-
sia. As the president brought in the Soviet ambassador to warn him of the danger to his coun-
try, and to help the Russians shoot down the planes if they could, it transpired that the Soviet
Union had created a doomsday device consisting of many buried bombs, laced with cobalt, to
be detonated automatically should any nuclear attack strike the country. As in On the Beach,
the result would be to wipe out all human and animal life. The doomsday system might have
had a deterrent effect had it been public knowledge. Unfortunately its existence was to have
been revealed the next week. As with George’s ending in Red Alert, the recall code was
seized from Ripper’s base, and most planes were successfully recalled, though one continued
on its mission, damaged by Russian defences and without communications. This time, how-
ever, when the bomb was released it detonated and the Doomsday device was triggered.
Kubrick introduced Dr Strangelove, a civilian strategist with a Nazi past. There was no
such character in Red Alert, although there was an equally sinister Professor Groeteschele in
Fail-Safe. Both Groeteschele and Strangelove were modelled on Herman Kahn, who had writ-
ten the bestselling account of nuclear strategy, On Thermonuclear War, published in 1960,
and had become something of a celebrity as a result of his provocative analyses and an appar-
ent tendency to playfulness when talking about mass death. Kahn was a favourite target of
critics, and his humanity had been questioned—‘no one could write like this; no one could
think like this.’22 He had written his book at the RAND Corporation, the most famous of the
‘think-tanks’ where the mysteries of nuclear strategy were explored, although he left soon
after its publication to set up his own Hudson Institute, in part because his colleagues at
RAND objected to his showmanship and because he felt they were becoming too bureau-
cratic.23
In both movies the Kahn character allows nuclear war to be discussed in terms of a cold
rationality, detached from any human emotion. The role is to illuminate the perverse logic be-
hind plans for mass murder and the continuing dilemma of extracting strategic benefit from
these plans by demonstrating how they just might be implemented. Groeteschele explains
coolly the reasoning behind a first strike, pointing out that from ‘their point of view’ the
Japanese were ‘right’ to attack Pearl Harbor in December 1941 because the United States was
their ‘mortal enemy’. ‘As long as we existed, we were a deadly threat to them. Their only
mistake was that they failed to finish us at the start. And they paid for that mistake at Hi-
roshima.’ This is the importance of the knockout blow. If there was one thing worse than fail-
ing to take your chance, it was taking your chance and then failing. Groeteschele assumed that
the risk of an American doomsday machine would persuade the Russians to stay their hand
even if the unauthorised aircraft were allowed to continue with their mission. There would
only be more loss if they retaliated. He saw the communists as mortal enemies and wanted to
bring the Soviet Union down. ‘They are not motivated by human emotions, such as rage and
pity. They are calculating machines; they will look at the balance sheet and they will see they
cannot win.’
Kahn had explored the idea of a doomsday machine in On Thermonuclear War, describ-
ing it as being

65
 protected from enemy action (perhaps by being put thousands of feet underground) and then connected to a com-
puter which is in turn connected, by a reliable communications system, to hundreds of sensory devices all over the
United States. The computer would then be programmed so that if, say, five nuclear bombs exploded over the
United States, the device would be triggered and the earth destroyed.

He did explain that such a device was never likely to be adopted by a government, al-
though this appears to be for reasons of expense as much as operational considerations.24 In
the movie, Dr Strangelove reported on a study he had commissioned from the ‘Bland Corpo-
ration’ on ‘a doomsday machine’ that would reinforce deterrence, which was the ‘art of pro-
ducing in the mind of the enemy the fear to attack’. The credibility of the doomsday machine
derived from automaticity that ‘rules out human meddling’. The trigger conditions would be
programmed into a deep computer memory bank.25
The nuclear age was still young. A strategy of deterrence had been adopted as demon-
strating resolve without provocation, a way to be firm but not suicidal. The weapons would
not be allowed to support aggression, but they were there, available and on alert, to respond to
aggression. So long as both sides understood the risks, and by the end of the 1950s they
clearly did, then there could be an awkward but durable stalemate. The concerns raised by
Red Alert, of a pre-programmed nuclear holocaust resulting from combinations of human and
mechanical errors, independent of any political crisis, not only touched deep popular concerns
but also pointed to a real weakness in the deterrent strategy. Kahn himself was well aware of
George’s novel, having used it for training courses, and praised ‘the clever way the general
negates the elaborate system set up to prevent unauthorized behaviour’.26
Thomas Schelling, who had also spent some time at RAND and eventually got a Nobel
Prize for Economics, took the scenario seriously and advised Kubrick on the screenplay of
Dr. Strangelove. After reading the novel he developed his ideas for a communications link be-
tween Moscow and Washington to reduce the dangers the book described.27 In a 1960 article,
which he passed on to Kubrick, Schelling observed that what might appear as accidents re-
flected past choices that then made possible the loss of control. ‘The point is that accidents do
not cause war. Decisions cause war.’ He was urging people to think about the structure of a
nuclear relationship to make these decisions less dangerous.28 This was the point of nuclear
strategy. We need deterrence, he explained, not only to get at the ‘rational calculator in full
control of his faculties’ but also the ‘nervous, hot-headed, frightened desperate decision that
might be precipitated at the peak of a crisis, that might be the result of an accident or false
alarm, that might be engineered by an act of mischief’. To do that it was necessary to make it
self-evident that starting war would be unattractive in all circumstances, even if an enemy at-
tack was feared. In practice, policymakers were becoming all too aware of the dangers of es-
calation into nuclear war and were becoming more inhibited than reckless as a result. In 1961,
at the height of the Berlin crisis, Schelling set up a crisis game that involved members of the
government to see how matters might unfold. The ‘single most striking result’, according to
one of his colleagues, was ‘our inability to get a fight started’.29

66
 [8]

Stuck in the Nuclear Age

If the picture of the world I have drawn is rather bleak, it could nonetheless be cataclysmically worse.
ALBERT WOHLSTETTER, ‘The Delicate Balance of Terror’, 19591

Over six futile weeks spent at the end of 1958, a number of representatives from five NATO
and five Warsaw Pact states met in Geneva. This was the ‘Conference of Experts for the
Study of Possible Measures Which Might Be Helpful in Preventing Surprise Attack and for
the Preparation of a Report thereon to Governments.’ A sense of futility was there from the
start as it became apparent that two sides were working on completely different agendas, re-
flecting their distinctive views about the likely source of a surprise attack. So different were
the agendas, noted one observer, that it was ‘difficult to understand how they could have been
drafted for the same conference.’2
President Eisenhower had proposed the conference to promote an inspection regime that
would reveal any preparations for a surprise attack. This was a time when the US was relying
on covert U-2 spy plane flights to try to work out what the Soviet Union was up to amid fears
that it was pushing ahead in the arms race. There were three problems with this approach. The
first was that the sort of inspections the president had in mind might pick up dangers from
long-range bombers but were less likely to do so with solid-fuelled rockets that could be pre-
pared quickly for launch and reach their targets in minutes rather than hours. The second was
that, in the secretive Soviet system, inspections were seen as just another form of espionage,
perhaps preparatory to a surprise attack, and for that reason were bound to be rejected.
The third and most crucial problem was that the American and Soviet leaderships feared
completely different sorts of attack. Both had been caught by surprise in 1941 and were ner-
vous about being so again. The Americans were worried about a nuclear Pearl Harbor, a bolt
from the blue that would take out its most vital nuclear assets and leave them without any
means of retaliation. By contrast, Soviet thinking went back to Operation Barbarossa. The
danger they saw lay in West German membership of NATO and its rearmament, just then get-
ting underway. Even as the conference was starting Nikita Khrushchev was challenging the
special status of West Berlin, threatening to give East Germany ‘its sovereignty on land,
water, and in the air’. Having already been attacked twice by Germany over the previous half
century the aim was to prevent it happening a third time with an even deadlier form of
blitzkrieg. The Soviet focus was not on missile deployments, an area of presumed advantage
(albeit illusory as it turned out), but on preventing troop concentrations on the border, and
German access to nuclear weapons of any sort. ‘Fundamentally’, noted Jeremi Suri, ‘the

67
salient ideological differences between the East and the West at the Surprise Attack Confer-
ence had little to do with capitalism and communism, and much more to do with geography
and memories of the preceding wars.’3
So both sides focused on fears of what the other side might get up to while insisting that
their own preparations were purely defensive in intent. This raised again the security
dilemma, ‘deriving from mutual suspicion and mutual fear’, as states were compelled ‘to
compete for ever more power in order to find more security’, even though the effort was
doomed to be self-defeating and potentially tragic.4 Misunderstandings and even accidents
might play a role, so that a Third World War might start inadvertently. With all these weapons
in existence and new countries starting their own nuclear programmes, how could there be
confidence that somewhere down the line something would not go terribly wrong? In 1960
the British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow warned of the ease with which plutonium could
be made and the number of states that could therefore build bombs. ‘We know’, he continued,
‘with the certainty of statistical truth, that if enough of these weapons are made—by enough
different states—some of them are going to blow up. Through accident, or folly, or madness
—but the motives don’t matter.… We genuinely know the risks. We are faced with an “ei-
ther/or,” and we haven’t much time.’5

THIS CONVICTION THAT THE WORLD’S LEADERS FACED A STARK choice—between international
action to control the bomb and complete tragedy—was present from the start of the nuclear
age. The scientists who built the bomb had rationalised their enterprise as ensuring that Nazi
Germany did not get this terrible weapon first and then as a way of shocking the international
community into accepting the imperatives of world government. Once the war was over they
took up the case forcefully. The objective was captured in a 1946 book with a title straight out
of Wells—One World or None.6
But the world was now hopelessly divided. In June 1946 the United States did put for-
ward a plan to the United Nations to develop nuclear energy solely for civilian purposes while
prohibiting military use. But with relations deteriorating the Soviet Union detected a plot.
Moscow saw that it might be denied the opportunity to build its own capabilities only to find
that the United States had found a loophole to maintain its monopoly. For their part the Amer-
icans worried that without strong enforcement mechanisms the Soviet Union would cheat, al-
lowing it to disclose a covert arsenal after everyone else had disarmed. Whether or not better-
constructed proposals might have prevented a nuclear arms race at this stage, this effort soon
petered out. The recent experience of another terrible war and the sudden revelation of a terri-
ble new weapon had not enabled governments to bridge their differences and cooperate for
the collective good. So if the choice was really one world or none the gloomy alternative to
world government and serious disarmament started to loom large.
For firm believers in disarmament the case appeared more compelling than ever. This was
no longer a matter of reducing armaments to reduce wasteful expenditure or levels of mistrust
but an urgent need to save the human race from annihilation. Philip Noel-Baker, for example,
had long been a vigorous proponent of general and complete disarmament. He had been in-
volved with the founding of the League of Nations and then, as a member of the British gov-
ernment, in founding the United Nations. Nothing, not even the dismal experience of the in-
terwar years, diminished his conviction in the supreme rationality of his cause. The only prob-
lem was that it had not been pursued vigorously enough. In 1958 Noel-Baker set out his be-
liefs in a book called The Arms Race: A Programme for World Disarmament. The next year
he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. In his Nobel lecture he reasserted his
long-standing principles: ‘[I]t makes no sense to talk about disarming,’ he asserted, ‘unless

68
you believe that war, all war, can be abolished.’ This was the heart of his beliefs. War was a
terrible way to settle disputes: there were far better forms of settlement, and they now needed
to be applied. ‘Unless there is an iron resolution to make it the supreme object of international
policy and to realize it now,’ he insisted, ‘I believe all talks about disarmament will fail.’
With this iron will then there could be success. Disarmament could come in stages, and an
eventual treaty of general and complete disarmament would be ‘a long and complex docu-
ment,’ but he was not of the view that the devil would be in the detail. Here he quoted Sal-
vador de Madariaga: ‘Technical difficulties are political objections in uniform.’7
When preparing his book, Noel-Baker recruited a bright young Australian to help him
out. The partnership did not last. Hedley Bull soon became convinced that Noel-Baker’s ap-
proach was both dated and mistaken. It could never prosper. This might be just as well, as
otherwise it would make a bad situation worse. In 1959 he published a trenchant review of
The Arms Race. At its heart was an analysis of the relationship between disarmament and
peace. Bull offered a succinct explanation of why general and comprehensive disarmament
was probably impossible:

In an international society in which war is a possible outcome between politically competing states, and there is no
supreme coercive authority, a state can provide for its security and protect its interests only by its own armed
strength and that of its allies: this is the context in which states have armaments and maintain their own control
over the level of these armaments.

Bull dismissed Noel-Baker’s goal of substituting a system based on states taking respon-
sibility for their own security with an alternative system based on collective security. This
would require that ‘any act of aggression, anywhere, by anyone, against anyone, will be re-
sisted by all the members of the system collectively; faced with this threat of overwhelming
power, no state will resort to aggression.’ This, Bull described as

a quite abstract and unhistorical conception of international relations, in which states are bloodless, passionless
units, having no natural sympathies or antipathies, loyalties, or hostilities and, like the citizens of Victorian tracts
on representative government, are moved only by the rational contemplation of right or interest.

The desirability question Bull answered by noting the growing view in the West ‘that the
nuclear stalemate is a preservative of peace, and should therefore be left well alone.’
This explained why Noel-Baker seemed such a lone voice. The focus was now on second-
order questions such as nuclear testing. Contrary to Noel-Baker’s view that it was possible to
dispense with armaments because war was an anachronism, Bull insisted that war between the
nuclear powers was only anachronistic because of the terrible armaments. In this respect,
therefore, the ‘function of nuclear armaments in the international system at the present time is
to limit the incidence of war.’ This situation might not be satisfactory, but it was unlikely to
be abandoned without confidence in some replacement. Bull concluded: ‘In the present world,
states are not only unlikely to conclude a general and comprehensive disarmament agreement,
but are behaving rationally in refusing to do so.’8
Bull here was capturing a shift in thinking that had been underway since the middle of the
decade. The international system was already starting to look surprisingly stable. One reason
for this was its stark clarity. The complications of a system with a number of competing great
powers and fluid alliances had been replaced by one dominated by two ‘superpowers’ (a term
introduced in 1944 to cover the United States and the Soviet Union, and then also the British
Empire9), each developing an arsenal of awesome destructiveness. Europe had been divided
quite neatly into two, with the fracture passing through Germany, and each side sharing criti-

69
cal features in its political and economic arrangements with its presiding superpower. Only in
Berlin, also divided but stuck in the middle of East Germany, was the position still uncertain,
which is why it was the main area of contention. The starkness of the divide meant that no
easy reconciliation was available, but also that an act of aggression would be unambiguous,
and would trigger fighting almost immediately. Because of nuclear weapons it was taken for
granted that this was would soon lead to a catastrophic war.
On the NATO side the conventional forces facing the Warsaw Pact were described as
having a ‘trip-wire’ rather than a purely defensive function. The need was to warn that a
wider war would be triggered by any move across the inner-German border. This prospect in-
troduced a degree of caution into international affairs. This was not a time to try out radical
approaches. The aim instead was to encourage respect for the status quo. If the First World
War had dashed confidence in the possibility of a stable balance of power, the nuclear age
helped revive it. In one of his last speeches as prime minister, Winston Churchill commented
on the ‘sublime irony’ that a stage had been reached ‘where safety will be the sturdy child of
terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.’10
In 1961 the new European order was put under its most severe challenge with a crisis
over West Berlin. The Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev challenged its special position, not
least because it was providing an outlet for tens of thousands of East Germans who wished to
escape communism. The tension grew as President Kennedy took a tough stance. In August of
that year the Communists solved their problem by building a wall across the city to stop peo-
ple leaving the East. The tension eased. But in October the next year there was an even
greater crisis when it became apparent that the Soviet Union was seeking to install nuclear
missiles in Cuba. Again the Soviet Union backed down, helped by a promise from Kennedy
not to invade Cuba.11 In both cases the logic of deterrence appeared to have worked itself
through.

THE ONLY WAY THAT A NUCLEAR WAR COULD BE WON CONCLUSIVELY would be by means of a
first strike that precluded enemy retaliation. The way to prevent this was to develop a second-
strike capability. This would demand sufficient forces to survive an attempted first strike to be
able to retaliate in kind, so the risks of attack would be too great. But if both sides were seek-
ing a first-strike capability a dangerous edginess might develop at times of crisis that could
lead to war through miscalculation. It was therefore vital to demonstrate without ambiguity
that there was no premium in a first strike. This should encourage both sides to be more cau-
tious and concentrate on diplomacy in a crisis. This was the aspect of the nuclear relationship
that Schelling had identified as the key to avoiding war through miscalculation.
Whether or not a first strike option could be developed was the pressing issue of the mo-
ment. In 1954 a team at the RAND Corporation, led by Albert Wohlstetter, was asked to con-
sider the optimum basing configurations for the US strategic bomber force. They introduced
as a key criterion vulnerability to a surprise attack and in so doing demonstrated how the
United States might be caught out by a calculating Soviet Union with a pre-emptive strike.12
This was the modern-day version of war fiction, except that there was no character develop-
ment or narrative tension. The approach was rigorously analytical based on the best available
data (accepting that what was known about Soviet capabilities was sketchy). The plotline,
however, remained focused on how an unscrupulous foreign enemy might catch the United
States unawares, piling assumption on assumption to show why a country that appeared se-
cure in its great strength was far more vulnerable than realised.
The idea that the US might just be caught out in this way gained credence from notable
Soviet successes in testing the first intercontinental ballistic missile and then the first artificial

70
earth satellite (Sputnik 1) in 1957. In an influential article, based on his study, called the ‘Del-
icate Balance of Terror’, Wohlstetter warned against assuming a nuclear stalemate just be-
cause both sides were acquiring a capacity to destroy the other. The danger would come if one
saw a realistic route to victory. A nuclear first strike would have hideous consequences for the
perpetrator if it failed, but it could also be an unequivocal success; any country so disarmed of
its means of retaliation would have no choice but surrender. For those contemplating such an
attack the difference between suicidal aggression and world domination could rest on fine cal-
culations. Whether the system was truly stable therefore would depend on many factors, such
as the range, yield, and accuracy of weapons and the hardness and mobility of targets, along
with issues of warning and sequencing.13
This analysis was not geared to a mass audience but to policymakers. As with Kahn’s On
Thermonuclear War, the idea that a nuclear war could be imagined and discussed in this way
was found by many to be chilling, normalising the idea of mass destruction. Yet this analyti-
cal framework shaped the way issues of nuclear war and deterrence were discussed in the pro-
fessional community over the coming decades. It demanded a degree of technical competence
while leaving questions of political motive and consequence unexplored. It influenced the
way many policy issues outside the nuclear arena came to be discussed with terms like
‘worst-case scenario’ and ‘damage limitation’ entering the vernacular, as well more obvious
terms such as ‘assured destruction’.

While the origins of this form of analytical literature were not dissimilar to those of The Battle
of Dorking, being a way of challenging official complacency, in this case the framework set
up by the analysts meant that as new information came in, the degree of danger could be mea-
sured. Initially, long-range bombers had to be kept on continual alert to prevent them from
being eliminated in a surprise attack. When intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) moved
into full production in the early 1960s they were placed in hardened underground silos so that
it would require an unlikely direct hit to destroy them. Even less vulnerable were submarine-
launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) which could take full advantage of the ocean expanses to
hide from enemy attack and so provide a second-strike capability. Meanwhile, attempts to de-
velop effective defences against nuclear attack proved futile. The standards for anti-aircraft
defence in the nuclear age had to be much higher than for conventional air raids, since any
penetration of the defensive screen would threaten the defender with catastrophe. Progress
was made, using surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) in developing defences against bombers, but
the move to ICBMs, with their minimal warning time before impact, appeared to render the
defensive task hopeless. Measures of civil defence, which could offer little protection to the
civilian populace against nuclear explosions and, at best, only some chance of avoiding expo-
sure to nuclear fallout, also appeared pathetic in the face of the overwhelming destructive
power being accumulated by both sides.

WHILE THESE ANALYSES WERE BEING DEVELOPED DURING THE 1950s and into the 1960s the ex-
pectations were of regular and destabilising technological breakthroughs. Kahn, who had been
inspired by science fiction, filled the last section of On Thermonuclear War with predictions
for the future, in the form of coming revolutions in military affairs, with four expected over
the next thirteen years. Those that stand out as accurate—a man on the moon from 1969—
have to be set against the others that were off mark. The problem was an exaggeration of the
financial and engineering effort required, as if major breakthroughs would materialise without
exceptional effort. A typical observation for 1965 was that though he had not seen any fig-
ures, ‘I surmise that relatively thin margins of cost prevent us from doing such extraordinary

71
projects as melting ice caps and diverting ocean currents.’14 In the nuclear field he sought
more defensive systems, believing these could make the difference between a recoverable so-
ciety and one that was completely lost.
The assumption that the Cold War would move into outer space was widely shared, with
orbiting bombs and space stations directing fire to the earth, as if this was the high ground al-
ways beloved of strategists. Perhaps because this was the new frontier that fascinated writers
of science fiction it seemed only natural to make military preparations. At least one writer
hoped that if the superpowers could be persuaded to fight out their battles in space then they
might spare the earth.15 In 1959 army researchers explained the vital importance of establish-
ing a lunar outpost before the Soviet Union had a chance to do so, even though they were not
yet quite sure of its military potential. By 1965 the US Army Weapons Command’s Future
Weapons Office was writing that:

Because of the entirely new and different environment and conditions facing man in space, we cannot wait until
the eleventh hour to “crash” a weapon program through with any hope of success, for we may even now be stand-
ing on the edge of the battleground of Armageddon.16

In the end there was a strong disposition to keep space free of weapons, not least because
in practice there was little point sending weapons out into orbit in order to bring them back to
hit targets on earth. Where space came to be of vital importance to military operations was not
for weapons but for reconnaissance, navigational and communications satellites.

DESPITE THE VISIONS OF ARMAGEDDON, BY THE MID-1960S fears had eased of a technological
arms race that might encourage either side to unleash a surprise attack. For the foreseeable fu-
ture each side could eliminate the other as a modern industrial state. Robert McNamara, the
US secretary of defense for much of that decade, argued that the two superpowers could im-
pose ‘unacceptable damage,’ put at 25 per cent of population and 50 per cent of industry, on
each other. Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) conveyed exactly what it was supposed to
convey—destruction would be assured and mutual and certainly unacceptable. Contrary to
what had been assumed, therefore, the system tended towards stability. This was not so much
a deliberate policy choice but recognition of a condition which confirmed the risks involved
in any attempt to achieve a decisive victory through a knockout blow.
Yet the idea that a daring and an accomplished enemy might exploit a critical vulnerabil-
ity did not go away. Albert Wohlstetter’s wife, Roberta, made her name in 1962 with the pub-
lication of an original critique of how the Americans were caught out by Pearl Harbor. She
understood that when designing their policies both the United States and Japan had assumed
that the other would react as they would wish them to react without asking carefully whether
they might react completely differently. Her answer to the question of how ‘honest, dedicated
and intelligent men’ could get so badly caught out was the ‘noise’ of misleading signals that
prevented them from appreciating the real clues. As a result they concentrated on the signals
that supported what they already thought. There was nothing unique, she argued, about Pearl
Harbor. The United States had been surprised by the North Korean invasion of the South in
1950 and then again when China entered the war months later on the North’s behalf after the
possibility had been dismissed by General MacArthur. As the book was published the US was
surprised again by the discovery of Soviet missile sites in Cuba. The development of ther-
monuclear weapons had raised the stakes. If anything ‘the balance of advantage seems clearly
to have shifted since Pearl Harbor in favor of a surprise attacker.’ Her lesson was that what-
ever improvements might be made to warning systems, the safest course was to ensure that

72
the country’s defences could cope even if caught out again.17
This was the gravamen of her husband’s position during the 1950s. His warnings had
been taken seriously in the design of US strategic forces during the 1960s, but then MAD sug-
gested a stage had been reached when there was no premium on a surprise attack. By the end
of the decade, however, Albert Wohlstetter was back to the fore challenging the complacency
this implied. He promoted a scenario that was presented as technical discourse yet had ele-
ments of fantasy. After a slow start the Soviet ICBM programme had been through a growth
spurt. According to Wohlstetter’s scenario, the numbers could soon reach a point where a sur-
prise attack by Soviet ICBMs might effectively eliminate the American ICBM force. The US
would be able to retaliate but, assuming long-range bombers bases were also hit, could only
do so with submarine-launched missiles. Unfortunately these were inaccurate, so while the
Soviets would have attacked military targets the US retaliation would be against cities. This in
turn would invite a Soviet response against American cities, thereby making the situation far
worse. This scenario was first set out in making a case for a new anti-ballistic missile (ABM)
system that could protect the US missile silos. This was a complex calculation, requiring as-
sumptions about missile and warhead numbers, their accuracy, and the hardness of the missile
silos. If the threat could not be confirmed then the ABM would be unnecessary. On the other
hand, if the threat was even greater than claimed, the ABM would be unable to cope.
These scenarios lacked a basic credibility. Such a strike would require confidence that
weapons would perform exactly as promised in an attack that had never previously been at-
tempted; that it would not be detected in time for missiles to be launched before they were de-
stroyed; and that, even successful, the victim would show restraint, because the attack would
somehow be experienced as one solely directed against the nuclear force and not against soci-
ety as a whole, despite mass casualties. Perhaps in the face of such carnage an American pres-
ident might hold back in a shocked paralysis. But the Soviet leader could not rely upon such
restraint, and would know that if the remaining US arsenal was used then his country would
no longer exist as a modern industrial society.
Almost as soon as this idea was introduced the proposed remedy became unavailable as
the United States and Soviet Union agreed to limit deployments of defences under the 1972
ABM Treaty. The schemes then designed to make land-based ICBMs less vulnerable became
ever more complex. One involved a large track with many spurs so Soviet targeteers could
never be sure where the missiles were hiding. The easiest place to hide long-range missiles re-
mained underwater on submarines, which were becoming more accurate. After years of anxi-
ety and expense addressing what was essentially a non-problem, an official commission de-
cided that this was not an issue worth worrying about. The concern soon faded away.18
Contrary to the laments of those who could not imagine anything worse than a situation in
which two huge, ideologically opposed and nuclear-armed alliances opposed each other, theo-
rists of international relations continued to follow Bull and insist that this was almost the best
of the possible worlds. The bipolarity produced a clarity and focus, without the complications
produced by shifting alliances, while nuclear weapons were just the trick needed to hold the
two behemoths back from war. There could be no doubt that war would be joint suicide. Ken-
neth Waltz observed in 1981 that the international system had developed a high ability ‘to ab-
sorb changes and to contain conflicts and hostility’. He was in no doubt of the contribution of
nuclear weapons to this happy state of affairs. They had made ‘the cost of war seem frighten-
ingly high and thus discourage states from starting any wars that might lead to the use of such
weapons’. So confident was he of this effect that he welcomed the spread of nuclear weapons
to other conflicts as a source of peace.19
The top British nuclear strategist Michael Quinlan emphasised how nuclear weapons car-

73
ried war’s potential ‘past a boundary at which many previous concepts and categories of ap-
praisal—both military and political—ceased to apply, or even to have meaning.’ They had
made ‘achievable what is for practical purposes infinite destructive power, unstoppable and
inexhaustible at any humanly-relevant levels.’ There was a spectrum of force, with nuclear
war at one end. It was tempting to divide this up to establish thresholds. But such a division
would be unreliable: ‘no conceptual boundary could be wholly dependable amid the stresses
of major war.’ Hence the restraining effect on all war: ‘non-nuclear war is not just appalling
in itself. It is also the likeliest route to nuclear war—in practice indeed the only likely route,
since scenarios of the holocaust being launched by accident or through technical malfunction
are absurdly far-fetched.’20
In 1983 six top Harvard scholars explained the international community’s adaption to the
nuclear age as a result of the ‘crystal ball effect’—foreknowledge of the probable effects of a
nuclear war. As a result of this knowledge there was a wise propensity to avoid war.21 On fur-
ther contemplation the Harvard team were not wholly convinced that they wished to rely on
this. In a project connected to their programme on avoiding nuclear war, they considered the
alternatives to deterrence, with ten scenarios for a lessened threat. These went from reducing
the vulnerability of populations, less dependence upon nuclear weapons or else their abolition,
to a variety of political possibilities, including accommodation with the Soviet Union and
even world federalism.22 In looking at the workings of the ‘crystal ball effect’ during the 1962
Cuban Missile Crisis, James Blight argued that the effect worked when combined with a ‘vis-
ceral fear’ that this might actually come to pass. Without the emotion that made the dangers
seem so real and immediate, the knowledge would just fall into the ‘trash heap of received
wisdom’, accepted ‘by rote and not from conviction’. To get governments to behave responsi-
bly they needed not only the crystal ball but also the fear that it might be shattered.23 Then, as
the book was published, the Cold War came to an end and the fear evaporated.

74
 [9]

A Surprise Peace

I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government,
where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.
VÁCLAV HAVEL, speech accepting peace prize, 15 October 19891

The major powers avoided catastrophe by scaring themselves into caution. But if, thankfully,
wars were unlikely to be fought that left those designing, constructing, and sustaining conven-
tional armed forces with a perplexing task. The word ‘conventional’ suggested some link with
the past ‘conventions’ of classical warfare, but it was hard to see their point when there was
no obvious route to a decisive battlefield victory against a nuclear-armed opponent. The resid-
ual role of conventional force could only be one of reinforcing deterrence, holding a defensive
line against an enemy offensive, or ensuring that the enemy’s advance was costly and painful.
At best this would allow sufficient time for second thoughts and active negotiations; at worst
it would create the powder trail that would take the war to its explosive climax.
During the Cold War it was assumed that the Warsaw Pact had numbers and geography
on its side, so that if it chose it could expand into Western Europe without resort to nuclear
weapons. The fateful choice would be up to NATO: to surrender or accept nuclear suicide.
The Americans, from the other side of the Atlantic, were deeply uncomfortable with the
thought that war in Europe could put their homeland so directly at risk. While in private they
doubted whether a president would ever actually take the nuclear initiative, in public they
played down their anxieties lest they undermine the credibility of the deterrent. The obvious
way out of the dilemma was to improve conventional forces so that at least they had alterna-
tive responses to aggression. The Americans worked to separate the nuclear from the conven-
tional, with a firebreak between the two, and to encourage NATO to build up its regular
forces. Eventually in 1967 a compromise doctrine of ‘flexible response’ was adopted,
whereby the Europeans recognised the US requirement for an extended conventional stage, so
that the first shots across the Iron Curtain would not lead automatically to a nuclear holocaust.
In return, the US accepted the need for a clear link between a land war in Europe and its own
strategic nuclear arsenal.2
It was impossible to know how well flexible response would work in practice, but the in-
troduction of flexibility into the response meant that it was at least possible that a major war
would not turn to nuclear exchanges as automatically as had been supposed. Nightmarish im-
ages of a Third World War had dominated the literature. As the risk of a superpower war ap-
peared to subside, the harder it was to conjure up any scenario in which a moderately sane

75
leader would risk a major war let alone authorise nuclear use. That did not prevent occasional
war scares. From the mid-1970s hawkish commentators began to conjure up scenarios involv-
ing Soviet invasions. In turn this led to fears, captured by well-supported anti-nuclear move-
ments, that an exaggerated response to this alarmism might lead to a nuclear apocalypse.3

IN LATE 1976 GENERAL SIR JOHN HACKETT, A FORMER NATO commander, brought together a
group of retired senior colleagues from the British military, bolstered by the deputy editor of
The Economist, to see whether they could describe how a Third World War might come
about.4 Their aim, in the tradition of The Battle of Dorking, was to use fiction to make a case
for greater military preparedness. The Third World War: A Future History was a surprising
bestseller (over 3 million copies worldwide), read by British prime ministers and American
presidents.5 Hackett’s team stuck to what was already in the public domain about weapons
and doctrines, using maps and illustrations. They envisaged a war starting in 1985, which was
quite soon. There were still so many unanticipated events that a new version had to be
brought out in 1982, now only looking a couple of years ahead.6 One reason for the short
timescale, according to Hackett, was that he was not trying to write science fiction, and he did
not want to give away any secrets about future weapons.
‘Without much in the way of characters or plot’, Brians observed, ‘the books are almost
unreadable; but they provide a fascinating glimpse into the mind of one of the military strate-
gists associated with NATO.’7 There had been a forerunner, written in 1977 by Belgian
Brigadier General Robert Close. This reflected concerns about the improvements in Soviet
conventional capabilities. The most alarming scenario was that the alliance could be caught
out by a ‘bolt from the blue’ standing start by the Warsaw Pact, with a minimum of mobilisa-
tion, leading to Europe being overrun in a couple of days. 8 This message was captured in the
stark title of Close’s book, Europe Without Defence?9 Another, potentially rival, book also
published in 1978, with a similar title to Hackett’s, had an equally bleak message, this time
with the alliance only managing to hold off for four days before the nuclear exchanges
began.10
After thirty years of cold war it was unlikely that the Soviet Union was itching to mount
an attack on the West or that Moscow had a convincing plan for a knockout blow. Hackett’s
view was that war between the two alliances was more likely to come ‘not by design but by
coincidence of miscalculation and mischance’. The danger would come if a number of crises
developed together and then some spark turned them into a conflagration, comparable to the
assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in 1914. If this happened, NATO would be in trou-
ble because its forces had been run down while those of the Warsaw Pact had continued to be
built up. NATO could not sustain a high intensity war for long. The scenario envisaged a
quick takeover of West Germany. All would not quite be lost because eventually, after a cou-
ple of years, the United States would gain command of the sea, sort out the Middle East and
then launch a liberating offensive from France. Hackett was told by ‘responsible people’ that,
however credible, this prospect was too dismal and harmful to the alliance. Close’s book had
undermined morale rather than strengthened resolve. He accepted the point, acknowledging
that ‘a cautionary tale that makes children pee in their beds, instead of frightening them into a
sense of doing better, has failed in its object’.11 So Hackett started again, this time assuming
that the West did something right and made serious efforts to improve defences, while the
Warsaw Pact did little more. Now the war could all be over within a few weeks. Instead of the
rush to a cataclysm which had been the hallmark of nuclear age fiction, the book envisaged
only tentative nuclear employment, somewhat late in the day. Having a limited nuclear ex-
change showed that it was still hard to write these weapons completely out of the script, but

76
now also hard to develop a convincing scenario for war when they were present. The purpose
of the Soviet Union’s limited strike was to hit Birmingham to get Britain out of the war. This
failed when Minsk was hit in retaliation and triggered the break-up of the Soviet Union. Just
as Chesney piled up negative assumptions with the result that Britain was narrowly defeated
at Dorking, Hackett piled up the positive assumptions so that NATO just won in 1985. The
message was that without extra defence spending NATO risked failure. Another message was
to keep alliances in good repair.
By contrast to Hackett, with his substantial military experience, Tom Clancy was an in-
surance agent who wrote in his spare time. This was until he got his breakthrough in 1984
with a thriller, The Hunt for Red October. Much of this book’s appeal lay in the technical de-
tail which Clancy had obtained from a voracious reading of naval literature. The story in-
volved the defection of a Typhoon class Soviet submarine, with a Lithuanian captain who
loathed the Soviet system. The drama resulted from the efforts of the Soviet fleet to prevent
the boat, containing the most advanced sonar technology, falling into American hands.
His next book, Red Storm Rising, was more in line with Hackett’s.12 Like Hackett,
Clancy did not go too far into the future and drew on the politics and technology of the time.
He had help on the military side from a former naval officer and material in the public do-
main. The possibility of a new aircraft (which turned out to be the F-117) employing stealth
technology so that it would be missed by radar was long discussed in the specialist technical
press before its existence was admitted in 1988, two years after Clancy’s book appeared. The
plot was complex. It included Islamic terrorists from Azerbaijan creating an energy crisis by
destroying vital Soviet oil facilities, leading to Soviet seizure of Gulf oil fields; a direct War-
saw Pact attack against West Germany, justified after framing West German activists for a
deadly attack on a Moscow school; and the NATO air station at Keflavik, Iceland, seized
(again using deception) allowing Soviet submarines to get into the Atlantic to disrupt resupply
convoys. The fight back involved stealth bombers, cruise missiles, and the Marines retaking
Iceland, before Soviet forces ran out of fuel, giving NATO an opportunity to turn things
around with a bold move. A split in the Soviet leadership allowed for a swift and negotiated
end to the fighting. No nuclear weapons were used and, in the end, no territory changed
hands.
President Reagan was a fan of Clancy’s. He described The Hunt for Red October as a
‘perfect yarn’. He was even more enthusiastic about Red Storm Rising for it vindicated his
own prejudices.13 The president suspected the Soviet leadership to be fully capable of the sort
of deception Clancy described, which included planning a war while offering the Americans
arms reductions. Yet at the same time he was appalled by the prospect of nuclear war. In 1983
he launched what he called a ‘strategic defence initiative’ to develop layered defences against
a Soviet missile attack. Better, he said, to save American lives from a nuclear attack than to
avenge them after one.14 This was why Clancy’s other message, that NATO could defend it-
self without resort to nuclear threats, appealed to him. In 1986 he discussed the book with ad-
visers en route to Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital, for a summit meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev,
the Soviet leader. There over two extraordinary days the two men almost agreed on drastic re-
ductions in their nuclear arsenals. Reagan’s refusal to concede his strategic defence initiative
resulted in failure. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a convinced advocate of nuclear
deterrence, was alarmed at how far Reagan had been prepared to go down the non-nuclear
route. When they met in October 1986 he urged her to read Clancy’s book to calm her fears.
A British official recorded: ‘It gave an excellent picture of the Soviet Union’s intentions and
strategy. He had clearly been much impressed by the book.’15
Both books picked up on the unease surrounding nuclear weapons and the possibility that

77
a major war could be won without mutual destruction. Hackett relied on a growing defence
budget: Clancy saw more clearly how the qualitative edge in conventional forces was shifting
to the United States and that this might reduce the need to depend on nuclear threats. Both
also were sensitive to the crisis in the Soviet system, although neither anticipated that the sys-
tem would implode at the end of the decade, let alone that this would be triggered by a loss of
legitimacy rather than failure in war. Clancy was still imagining a war between the United
States and the Soviet Union in 1991, even after the Warsaw Pact had fallen apart.16 Hackett
assumed, as did almost all commentators at this time, that Moscow would take a hard line
against dissidence. Yet it was essential to his plot that the old guard in the Kremlin knew that
‘time was running out’. In the event, instead of a war launched to hold the Soviet bloc to-
gether, 1985 saw Mikhail Gorbachev become president and the start of a process that would
soon lead to the peaceful break-up of the Soviet bloc.

JUST AS THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION WAS A RESPONSE TO the inability of the old regime to
cope with war it was not unreasonable to assume that it would take a war to create the crisis
that would break the Soviet system. There was always a possibility that a regime that saw a
deep threat to its position would take risks that in other circumstances would be rejected as
foolhardy. This was why much Cold War diplomacy accepted that it was best not to push the
Soviet leadership to a point where it might be provoked into recklessness. It was one thing,
however to follow this principle when considering geopolitical spheres of influence but quite
another when addressing the ideological contest at the core of the East-West divide. Western
countries were not going to stop promoting a liberal political philosophy for fear of upsetting
the Soviet leadership. This is why scenarios for war by the 1980s tended to involve a crisis of
legitimacy within the Soviet system, probably involving one of the satellite states. This devel-
oping instability on the one hand promised a way to bring the Cold War to a satisfactory con-
clusion but on the other hand might prompt precisely those conditions which might trigger
war.
Communist rule depended on the twin assumptions that any challenge would be dealt
with ruthlessly and that the West would do nothing about it. These assumptions had been vali-
dated by experience. In 1956 after a rebellion threw out the communists, a new Hungarian
government announced its intention to leave the Warsaw Pact. The Soviet Union sent in tanks
to crush the rebellion. Although the uprising was home-grown, it had been actively encour-
aged by the Voice of America.17 Yet American military action, warned US Secretary of State
John Foster Dulles, ‘would… precipitate a full-scale world war and probably the result of that
would be all these people wiped out.’18 The brutal logic of a divided Europe was underlined
again in 1968. This time the Czech Communist Party moved to liberalise the system, though
they were careful not to threaten to leave the Warsaw Pact. It made no difference. On 20 Au-
gust 1968 the tanks went in again. Following this sad episode, NATO countries concluded
that the political divide in Europe was permanent and began to develop policies of détente to
manage the relationship between the continent’s two halves. The implications of this were
spelt out in a document signed by Presidents Richard Nixon of the United States and Leonid
Brezhnev of the Soviet Union on the basic principles that could underpin a new superpower
relationship: ‘Differences in ideology and in the social systems of the USA and USSR are not
obstacles to the bilateral development of normal relations based on the principles of sover-
eignty, equality, non-interference in internal affairs and mutual advantage.’19
Yet as this statement was made a shift was taking place that encouraged the subversion of
the official Marxism-Leninism of the Warsaw Pact. Late in 1972 negotiations began on a
Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). For three years intense discus-

78
sions took place (it took four months to agree an agenda) over a declaration that had no legal
force. On 1 August 1975 the leaders of thirty-four states (plus the Vatican) met in Helsinki to
sign what was described as its Final Act. This involved four ‘baskets’. The first covered polit-
ical and military issues, territorial integrity, the definition of borders, peaceful settlement of
disputes, and the implementation of confidence-building measures between opposing mili-
taries. The second focused on economic issues like trade and scientific cooperation. The third
basket emphasised human rights, including freedom of emigration and reunification of fami-
lies divided by international borders, cultural exchanges, and freedom of the press. The fourth
and final basket was about further meetings and implementation.
Most of what Moscow wanted was in the first two baskets. It was the third that proved the
most controversial. In one respect it appeared pointless because of deep Soviet opposition to
any serious liberalisation. This is why the Nixon Administration was reluctant to expend valu-
able political capital on ‘gestures’ that would have no effect. West European governments
wanted to keep up the pressure on the issue. The Soviet bloc resisted, pushing instead
promises to refrain from the use of force, respect for territorial integrity, the peaceful settle-
ment of disputes, and especially ‘non-interference in internal affairs’. In the end, Moscow
wanted the first two baskets too much to let their problems with the third be an obstacle. They
chose to accept the language with the intention of then ignoring it. This meant signing up to a
statement about human rights as ‘deriving from the inherent dignity of the human person’ and
a requirement that they be not only respected but also promoted as a means to achieve peace
and friendly relations between states. Moscow just noted that none of this would be binding
under international law and there would be no legislative changes in the socialist states.20
US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s views had been shaped by his own experiences
of war and disorder, leaving him with little confidence in proposals for pooling sovereignty or
sharing values as means of reducing international conflict. His view was that if peace was the
ideal then that meant holding in check other ideals, and being prepared for the hard and often
bitter grind of compromise and accommodation, requiring patience, discretion, and occasional
guile. This was not a foreign policy for which there was a natural constituency in the United
States. It offended liberal idealism by its hard-headed, amoral focus on national interests, and
perturbed them by bringing results of which they approved, including détente, without a com-
plementary stress on the judicial settlement of disputes or disarmament. It offended conserva-
tives by shrinking away from a key principle that separated the Western bloc from the East-
ern. To play down human rights was to allow the Soviets the conceit that one great power was
as good as another, deserving of equal respect, despite the fact that the communist system was
oppressing whole nations, as well as denying basic political rights.21
In a speech on the ‘Moral Foundations of Foreign Policy’ in 1975 Kissinger reminded his
audience of the disastrous consequences of a major war and the obligation this created ‘to
seek a more productive and stable relationship despite the basic antagonism of our values.’
The US was now in a position common to most other nations in history, unable either to es-
cape from the world or to dominate it. It was not that it was impossible to use influence to
promote human rights, but it was best done ‘quietly, keeping in mind the delicacy of the prob-
lem and stressing results rather than public confrontation.’22
By contrast, President Jimmy Carter, who won the 1976 election, made human rights one
of the themes of his inaugural address. He denied the tension between the moral and the prag-
matic. The United States had a special obligation: ‘to take on those moral duties which, when
assumed, seem invariably to be in our own best interests’. He described an ‘absolute’ commit-
ment to human rights, a need to demonstrate to others that ‘our democratic system is worthy
of emulation’. This led to a promise for a new foreign policy: ‘We will not behave in foreign

79
places so as to violate our rules and standards here at home, for we know that the trust which
our Nation earns is essential to our strength.’ The times were changing:

The world itself is now dominated by a new spirit. Peoples more numerous and more politically aware are craving,
and now demanding, their place in the sun—not just for the benefit of their own physical condition, but for basic
human rights.23

By this time the 1975 Final Act was already providing dissidents in communist countries
with a new tactic. They could assume their governments’ sincerity and then challenge them to
uphold the Helsinki provisions and ask Western governments to provide support when they
did so. This was the case with the Czechoslovak movement, Charter 77. The Charter was a
four-page document with 242 signatures offering to help the government meet its various con-
stitutional and international obligations, drawing particular attention to the Helsinki Final
Act.24 The regime sought to discredit the document as ‘anti-state, anti-socialist, and dema-
gogic’. As signatories were denounced and thrown out of their jobs, international indignation
grew. Helsinki now gave Western governments a reason to comment, replacing caution about
interference in internal affairs with references to violations of the Final Act. For a while at
least, this gave the regime pause, although they could never acknowledge much of a choice
between being shown up as hypocrites and allowing a popular movement to develop that
could see them overthrown.
One of the most eloquent exponents of this ‘new spirit’ was Václav Havel, a successful
playwright, and one of the leaders of the movement behind Charter 77.25 He asked whether
human rights could be sacrificed for the sake of peace. His starting point was that life under
totalitarianism was a form of death. It was not true, he wrote, that Czechoslovakia was ‘free
of warfare and murder’. They had just taken different forms, and had ‘been shifted from the
daylight of observable public events, to the twilight of unobservable inner destruction’, pre-
senting as ‘the slow, secretive, bloodless, never quite-absolute, yet horrifyingly ever-present
death of non-action, non-story, non-life, and non-time.’ Thus to argue that it would be better
to accept communism for the sake of peace, better ‘red than dead’, was only to offer ‘an infal-
lible sign that the speaker has given up his humanity’, by being ready to sacrifice what makes
life meaningful and accept impersonal power. He recalled, as an example, ‘West German col-
leagues and friends’ avoiding him in the early 1970s for fear that contact with someone out of
favour with the government ‘would needlessly provoke that government and thereby jeopar-
dize the fragile foundations of nascent détente.’ Havel cited this voluntary renunciation of
freedom as an example of how easy it was ‘for a well-meant cause to betray its good inten-
tions’.26

WHEN MIKHAIL GORBACHEV BECAME SOVIET LEADER IN 1985 his aim was not to push human
rights but to reform the sclerotic system which he could see to be failing by every measure.27
Unlike those he replaced, his world-view had not been shaped by the war with Germany, and
he had not worked closely with the military-industrial complex that dominated the economy.
The more he discovered about the baleful, distorting influence of this complex, depriving all
other sectors of resources and talent, the more he was convinced that it had to be cut back. If
this was to be achieved then somehow relations with the West had to be calmed and put on to
a new and more cooperative path.
From the start Gorbachev was keen to meet with Western leaders and try to chart a new
way forward. A succession of summits encouraged commentators to believe that a healthy di-
alogue was underway and East-West relations should be calmer in the future. Gorbachev’s

80
problem was that he was still presiding over a continental empire. This included not only the
satellite states of Eastern Europe, each with their own Communist Party, but also those Soviet
Socialist Republics who had been acquired by Russia in the past and, in the case of the Baltic
States, recently against their will.
For the empire to hold together required local party bosses to follow the path of reform he
had set out for the Soviet Union. Yet many were unwilling or unable to follow him. In prac-
tice the choice was to accept dependence upon the security apparatus to maintain party control
or to allow the empire to fragment. It took until 1989 before this choice became stark. With a
number of Warsaw Pact countries already departing from the old ways and showing their in-
dependence, Gorbachev could not bring himself to side with the hardliners, especially those in
East Germany who were demanding resistance to the West’s ‘human rights demagogy’.
Those reformers who were in power, as in Hungary, were confident that their displays of in-
dependence would not result in military action.28
In a landmark speech to the United Nations in December 1988 Gorbachev effectively re-
nounced the use of force and asserted a ‘credo’ that ‘political problems should only be solved
by political means’.29 If Gorbachev really thought that the countries that had been coerced
into adopting a Stalinist system could move as one along the path of reform he was mistaken.
Without force to hold the system in place not only the Warsaw Pact but also the Soviet Union
itself fragmented. The system turned out to be rotten. The ideological glue which generations
of Soviet leaders had tried to spread so thickly failed to hold.30 Anatoly Dobrynin, Gor-
bachev’s former ambassador to the US, reported that the Soviet leader ‘never foresaw that the
whole of Eastern Europe would fly out of the Soviet orbit within months or that the Warsaw
Pact would crumble so soon. He became the helpless witness to the consequences of his own
policy’.31
Why did this rush of developments, viewed with a mixture of astonishment, suspicion, re-
lief, and gratitude, catch the Western intelligence and foreign policy communities so much by
surprise? The question was asked with the same intensity as if they had been caught out by a
surprise military attack. The same problems of prediction were evident: deciding how to inter-
pret the public pronouncements of the leadership (whose predecessors had been habitually de-
ceptive), picking up real indicators of change amid the noise of conflicting signals, addressing
the logic of the situation, and so appreciating the choices to be faced. Not only could there be
no certainty about how Gorbachev would actually choose, it was only late in the day that he
saw with any clarity the nature of the choice. In reviewing these events it is always important
to keep in mind that during that same summer of 1989, as dramatic events were unfolding in
Europe, the Chinese Communist Party was facing its own crisis, with mass demonstrations in
Beijing’s Tiananmen Square demanding reform. In this case the party leadership decided not
to take the risk of liberalising the system and instead clamped down ruthlessly.
Military strength had always been assumed to be the Soviet Union’s greatest asset, avail-
able in extremis to get the regime out of trouble. Whatever contrary evidence might be pro-
duced, the mindset was one in which the Soviet Union had enormous capabilities and would
do whatever was necessary for the sake of its security. It was unimaginable that when the mo-
ment came that Moscow would not deploy its armed forces, emphasised by the West for so
long, to prevent a catastrophic upheaval that would reduce forever its international standing.
There had been decades of talking up Soviet military power. The 1980s had begun with the
Reagan Administration issuing a series of alarming and lavishly illustrated publications with
projections on how it was going to get even stronger. The 1985 version spoke of an ‘unceas-
ing introduction of new nuclear and conventional Soviet military capabilities’. The secretary
of defense’s preface opened with a quote from a NATO document referring to the Warsaw

81
Pact’s emphasis on ‘the element of surprise and the necessity of rapid offensive operations’.32
The September 1990 edition published after the fall of the Berlin Wall acknowledged the
changes underway and the greater openness shown in Moscow when discussing the problems
posed by its excessively large military establishment. Yet it still insisted that it would be
wrong to conclude, ‘no matter how much we might wish it’, that this was ‘an eviscerated
force structure and an evaporating threat’.33 It was hard to accept that the USSR might one
day do what ‘other declining powers have been impelled to do in history: that is, retreat from
an empire it could neither afford to support nor hope to control over the longer term’.34
A National Intelligence Estimate of May 1988 noted how Gorbachev’s policies had ‘in-
creased the potential for instability in Eastern Europe,’ but offered comparatively mild scenar-
ios as its outliers, certainly compared with what was to come. Though the estimate noted that
Gorbachev faced ‘greater constraints than did his predecessors against intervening militarily
in Eastern Europe’, it still assumed that ‘in extremis’ he would ‘intervene to preserve party
rule and decisive Soviet influence in the region.’ Even as the real drama was about to begin in
1989 the CIA saw change coming but was still thinking in terms of years rather than weeks.
As the instability took hold the intelligence community was still debating how far this might
go.35
The problem in part was one of failing to appreciate the deep structural weaknesses of the
system, despite evidence of poor economic performance, awful demographic projections, and
a progressive loss of legitimacy. The failings were well known, and they had led to a number
of predictions that the system could not sustain itself. One of the most famous was dissident
Andrei Amalrik’s 1970 pamphlet, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? The date had no
significance other than the link with George Orwell. No state that devoted ‘so much of its en-
ergies to physically and psychologically controlling millions of its own subjects’, Amalrik ar-
gued, could survive indefinitely. Eventually the ‘Soviet Union will have to pay up in full for
the territorial annexations of Stalin and for the isolation in which the neo-Stalinists have
placed the country.’36 More significantly Ronald Reagan had asserted strongly at the start of
his presidency that in the ideological competition with the United States, the Soviet Union
was bound to lose.

What we see here is a political structure that no longer corresponds to its economic base, a society where produc-
tive forces are hampered by political ones… the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-
Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-ex-
pression of the people.37

Yet the weight of the Sovietology community, in both academia and government, was
much more cautious, convinced that the system was remarkably resilient and also capable of
adjusting. Warnings of collapse tended to be dismissed as the wishful thinking of mavericks
and right-wingers. Many asserted, almost to the last moment of the regime, that it would en-
dure. Having spent their careers exploring how the system survived decades of tragedy, in-
cluding revolution, civil war, famine, purges, and invasion, they assumed it could cope with
economic trouble. The mainstream view was expressed that ‘short of some unexpected cata-
strophe, the Soviet economy is unlikely to come close to collapse.… In the end, Gorbachev,
like his predecessors, will probably have to settle for an economy that has to rely more on its
natural riches than on its creative potential.’38 If anything Gorbachev appeared as the man
who would revive the system by reforming it. One problem here was that those economists
studying the Soviet economy did not realise just how bad things were, not least because offi-
cial statistics were largely fictional. The only exception to the sanguine view came from stu-

82
dents of the ‘nationalities problem’ in the Soviet Union who recognised that the system was
struggling to cope with its internal political tensions.39
The Bush Administration, which took over at the start of 1989, did not share Reagan’s
optimism about likely Soviet failure. Their concern was that a reformed Soviet system would
simply be a more challenging opponent. This was the view of former President Nixon who
when he published a forward look in 1988 saw Gorbachev as changing the Soviet image but
not the substance. He considered ‘a more prosperous, productive Soviet Union’ likely to be ‘a
more formidable opponent, not less, than it is today.’40 National Security Advisor Brent
Scowcroft worried that the whole Gorbachev phenomenon might lull the West into a false
sense of security. If his reforms revitalised the Soviet Union he would be ‘potentially more
dangerous than his predecessors, each of whom, through some aggressive move, had saved
the West from the dangers of its own wishful thinking’. Secretary of State James A. Baker III
recalled his belief that Gorbachev’s strategy ‘was premised on splitting the alliance and un-
dercutting us in Western Europe.’41 They soon changed their minds. In December 1989, not
long after the Berlin Wall was breached, a summit meeting was conducted between Presidents
George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev on a boat moored in choppy waters off Malta.
The Cold War began to be spoken of in the past tense. It had lasted, Gorbachev’s spokesman
quipped, ‘from Yalta to Malta’.42

83
PART TWO

84
 [ 10 ]

A Science of War

Until war has been systematically described it cannot be adequately understood, and with such under-
standing comes the first meaningful possibility of controlling it.
J. DAVID SINGER and MELVIN SMALL, The Wages of War, 19721

The speed with which this new situation had come about was remarkable. Almost as soon as
the possibility of its demise was raised the Soviet system had passed away. The change was
abrupt, and there was very little time to adjust. A whole literature on future wars, with contri-
butions from fiction and non-fiction, was rendered obsolete with nothing much available to
take its place. The greatest upheaval for decades had caught out the academic community
along with everyone else. There were questions about whether the most fundamental preoccu-
pation of the discipline of international relations—the risk of a great-power war—remained
relevant while it appeared to have virtually nothing to say about the civil wars which soon
came to dominate the agenda. The view that the behaviour of states could largely be explained
by reference to the strategic imperatives resulting from the structure of the international sys-
tem, so that the nature of regimes was at most of secondary importance, had been discredited
by the Soviet experience and was soon shown to be inadequate when coming to terms with
ethnic conflict and democracy promotion as a route to peace.
The challenge was greatest for the realists, who had dominated the theory and practice of
international affairs since 1945, stressing the factors of power and interest when explaining
the twists and turns of international affairs. Their boast was that they were not distracted by
idealistic and sentimental notions of how they would like the world to be but instead consid-
ered the world as it was. Realism might be described largely as an intellectual temper, which
is what E. H. Carr had in mind, but it had been turned into a strong theory under the influence
of such figures as Hans Morgenthau at the University of Chicago, schooled in the harsh and
uncompromising interwar German debates about politics and the state. For him international
politics was ‘like all politics… a struggle for power’.2 The prevailing metaphor saw states as
self-contained units with thick skins, like so many billiard balls, not so much directed by any
inner agency but more by the impact of the other balls, ricocheting and colliding round the
table. In this way the system created its own motivations for war. It was also about great pow-
ers. It would be as ‘ridiculous’ to construct a theory of international relations based on
‘Malaysia or Costa Rica’, Kenneth Waltz had observed, as it would be ‘to construct an eco-
nomic theory of oligopolistic competition based on minor firms in a sector of the economy.
The fates of all states and firms in the system are affected much more by the acts and interac-

85
tions of the major ones than of the minor ones.’3 The promise of theory was that it could
move beyond reflections on international history or commentary on current affairs to proposi-
tions about the future. These would not necessarily be predictive but could at least make
claims about cause and effect. For example, the theory might explain why deterrence might
work better when dealing with threats to the homeland than when an ally was in danger, or
suggest how to respond to another state’s military build-up. But without a great power con-
flict at the heart of the system realists were at something of a loss.
By 1990 realism was already subject to a number of criticisms: disinterest in economics
and ideology, in the practice of decision-making, and in supranational organisations.4 It was
accused of attaching far too much weight to military power and coercive measures, while dis-
missing the capacity of the international system to adapt to new circumstances.5 The realist
theorists had done no better than anyone else in anticipating the end of the Cold War,6 and
even then found it difficult to accept that any sort of reappraisal was required. Even as the old
order collapsed, one leading realist theorist dismissed the idea that ideological or civilisational
factors were as important as the insecurities inherent in an anarchic international system,
warning instead that with the end of the Cold War one form of great-power conflict would
simply be replaced by another. The new multipolarity was likely to be as violent as the old
East-West bipolarity.7 It was not clear, however, why this prognosis should be any more ac-
curate than the earlier ones that had been overtaken by events—or what might be said in a
world in which conflicts within lesser powers attracted more attention than relations between
great powers. Realism therefore struggled because it had little to say about the impact of
major ideological shifts within great powers or the drivers of instability within minor states,
or why any serious major power, secure within its own borders, would bother to try to sort out
this instability.
One response to this might have been to go easy on the theory, concentrating on observ-
ing carefully what was going on in the world, and only offering propositions on causal rela-
tionships as and when they seemed appropriate and always with regard for context. Yet the
dominant trend in the field was not to abandon theory but to make it even stronger. Only then
could it become more predictive. For some time there had been an endeavour to move the sci-
ence up a notch by developing theory along econometric lines, with a firm empirical base and
high-quality statistical analysis. This approach was no more suited to predicting discontinu-
ities than the realist approach being challenged. But the claims were larger, promising theo-
ries that would provide policymakers a much better idea of the levers to pull if they wanted to
influence situations for the better.

THE AMBITION TO PUT THE DISCIPLINE OF INTERNATIONAL relations on a more scientific footing
was not new. Quincy Wright’s major work, A Study of War, begun in 1927 but not published
until 1942, gathered information on everything that could be known about war and presented
it systematically. The key factors relevant to the origins of war identified by Wright were
technology, law, form of political organisation, and key values. A change in any of these fac-
tors could cause the system to lose equilibrium. Each could, in principle, be measured, for ex-
ample by looking at the properties of weaponry, demographics, opinion polling, the number
of states, and their adherence to international law. From these measurements inferences could
be drawn. Because he did not wish to exclude any relevant information, his analysis did not
rely wholly on what was measurable and nor did it lead to any elegant mathematics, but it of-
fered encouragement to those intrigued by the possibilities of giving the study of war a more
scientific foundation.8
Wright was among the first to appreciate the work of Lewis Fry Richardson, a pioneer in

86
the statistics of war. Richardson was a prizewinning meteorologist and also a Quaker. Horri-
fied by the First World War, in which he served as an ambulance driver, he sought to explore
the nature of war as one might a disease. He did not devote himself full-time to the topic until
1940, and then as a private scholar, alone in Scotland, with little contact with others. His re-
search reflected his scientific training. He kept his prejudices in check when seeking the best
possible information, found ways to express it quantitatively, and then engaged in statistical
analysis. Although his modelling had provided a foundation for weather forecasting, Richard-
son was sceptical about whether wars could be predicted in the same way, but he hoped that
clear patterns and relationships might be identified. His book The Statistics of Deadly Quar-
rels, published posthumously in 1960, contained information on more than 300 wars between
1820 and 1949. Setting the terms for later efforts in this area, Richardson highlighted casual-
ties in distinguishing one war from another. He was also the first to try to describe disruptive
international processes, such as arms races, using differential equations. The outcomes of his
equations were, he explained, descriptions of what would happen if people ‘did not stop to
think’, if ‘instinct and tradition were allowed to act uncontrolled’.9 This clarified his aim: to
identify the dangerous tendencies that a controlling mind would address to prevent war.10
Even with Wright’s help it took time before Richardson’s ideas were picked up and taken
seriously. A key figure in this effort was the economist Kenneth Boulding, also a pacifist by
conviction, and a Professor at Michigan. He was concerned that

the intellectual chassis of the broad movement for the abolition of war has not been adequate to support the pow-
erful moral engine which drives it and that the frequent breakdowns which interrupt the progress of the movement
are due essentially to a deficiency in its social theory.11

In 1955 he became involved with a group based at Michigan, influenced by Richardson

(whose writings had just become available although not yet published). They concluded that
quantitative methods could generate a new field of peace research. In a ‘race between knowl-
edge and disaster’, the ‘longer disaster is staved off, the better chance we have of acquiring
the knowledge to prevent it altogether.’ A new Journal of Conflict Resolution was established
to devise, as Boulding put it in an editorial, ‘an intellectual engine of sufficient power to move
the greatest problem of our time—the prevention of war.’ The second major centre of peace
research was set up in Oslo in 1959 by Johan Galtung. Its Journal of Peace Research was first
published in 1964.12
This scientific approach was by no means confined to those with a peace agenda. It was
already evident in the new think tanks, such as RAND, established to guide military policy
through the Nuclear Age, and responsible for the analytical foundations of deterrence theory.
The importance of meticulous gathering of data and careful analysis had been underlined by
the experience of the Second World War, and it was becoming easier to undertake as a result
of the development of computers capable of storing large amounts of information and sup-
porting advanced statistical techniques. As lone scholars in the library began to be displaced
by teams of researchers, funding had to be found for their projects, which were extremely ex-
pensive. To get access to funds, social scientists sought to demonstrate that they could provide
research that was comparable to natural scientists in their objectivity and ability to develop
systematic laws.13
If such laws could be developed then in principle they would allow the future of war to be
controlled. Policymakers could recognise the symptoms, make a diagnosis, and then identify
forms of treatment that could head off disaster. Writing in 1950 Harold Guetzkow claimed
that:

87
 the surest and quickest way to world peace is an indirect one—the patient construction over many years of a basic
theory of international relations. From this theory may come new and unthought-of solutions to end wars and to
guide international relations.14

In a book published in 2012 the political scientist John Vasquez cited Guetzkow as an in-
spiration in a collection of essays that sought to assess how far researchers had got with the
application of ‘the scientific method to identify those factors that promote the outbreak of in-
terstate war and those factors that promote peace’. Even after sixty years there was still some
way to go, Vasquez conceded, but there was now some core knowledge for theories of peace
and war to explain.15 In the introduction he explained how the scholarly movement to apply
the scientific method was ‘one of the best hopes of humanity for solving the intellectual puz-
zle of war.’ This was because it replaced ‘the solitary efforts of past great thinkers,’ and here
he mentioned Thucydides and Freud, with a ‘large number of researchers committed to using
the best method of inquiry humanity has invented.’16 Better than mere ‘speculation or intel-
lectual argument’ was to develop hypotheses that could be tested by a rigorous examination of
evidence.
But when Vasquez came to report on the main conclusions of the scientific school there
was not a lot that went beyond what would be obvious to any serious observer of international
affairs. He noted the importance of the ‘the issue at stake’, how alliance formation and mili-
tary build-ups could be mutually reinforcing, and that ‘rivals have a much higher probability
of going to war than other types of states’.17 In seventy-six general propositions offered else-
where he underscored the extent to which the challenge the scientific school posed to the real-
ist school followed the lines of the earlier idealists: ‘Realist norms and the practices of power
politics are more associated with war than with peace’. In addition the work pointed to inter-
nationalist remedies, in the ‘global institutional context’. A more orderly system in which
states felt obliged to follow rules of the game would restrict unilateral action and facilitate the
resolution of disputes.18 Much of this analysis, therefore, was a continuation of old debates
about the dangers of power politics. That rivalry could lead to military build-ups, alliance for-
mation, and eventually war, depending on the issue at stake, hardly represented a unique in-
sight. The general proposition that peace was more likely if all states avoided the crude logic
of power politics and followed international rules was compelling but it offered little to states
trying to play by the rules when confronted by states that were not.
With interstate war there were too few cases and too many factors in play for the scien-
tific approach to produce more than a general sense of what issues might lead to crises and
what behaviour might aggravate them. Historians, whose observations had been dismissed as
being too intuitive or speculative, could retort that the yield from the effort that went into re-
fining the methodologies and interrogating the data turned out to be meagre. There was also a
cost. The scientific ambition depended on reliable, objective evidence on war. Collecting and
interpreting this evidence was by no means straightforward. Just because numbers were in-
volved did not make a statement more correct than one expressed in a more literary form, and
there was a danger that spurious statistics could gain currency and even influence policy. This
approach insisted on the potential importance of every incident that could be recorded but at
the cost of simplifying the record of each incident. It sought to disaggregate conflicts into
time-limited two-sided violent relationships, disregarding factors that could not be quantified
while relying on flawed data sets. At a critical juncture in international affairs, with a shift in
focus from great power conflict to internal wars, involving a number of sub-groups, the acad-
emic community was ill equipped to rise to the challenge.

88
AN EXAMPLE OF THE DANGEROUS ALLURE OF NUMBERS, EVEN when baseless, could be found in
a piece of mischief perpetrated by Norman Cousins, the editor of the Saturday Review and a
leading campaigner for nuclear disarmament. In 1953 he wrote a hoax newspaper article
which included a purported observation from ‘a former president of the Norwegian Academy
of Sciences’ that since 3600 BC the world had known ‘only 292 years of peace’. This figure
was said to reflect work done on the history of war by an international team of researchers
using an ‘electronic computer’. This was not the only finding. Other equally dramatic and sus-
piciously precise numbers were on offer. Apparently 3.64 billion people had been killed in a
total of 14,531 wars during that period. Since 650 BC there had been 1,656 arms races. Of
these only 16 had not ended in war.19 Cousins repeated these numbers in an editorial in the
Saturday Review and lastly in a 1960 book entitled In Place of Folly.20 The research to which
Cousins referred was ‘imaginary’, a ‘fantasy’. He had not expected the numbers to be taken
seriously. Yet they were not wholly plucked out of thin air. ‘Some’, Cousins explained, ‘were
general, some were the result of extrapolation, some were estimates, some were fanciful. No
fully documented figures exist anywhere on the total casualties or total cost of all wars since
the beginning of recorded history’.21
Curiously there was another version of the ‘only 292 years of peace’ claim. In 1968, in
The Lessons of History, Will and Ariel Durant asserted that in 3,421 years of recorded history
there had only been 268 without war.22 The Durants were cited when Donald Kagan used the
same statistic in his book On the Origins of War published in 1995.23 It was then picked up
by such diverse people as left-wing polemicist Noam Chomsky and the hawkish former Sec-
retary of Defense and soon-to-be Vice President Richard Cheney.24
The Durants gave no reference. Two Dutch scholars identified the most likely source for
this as well as Cousins’ number of 292 years.25 Tucked away in Bloch’s massive study on
The Future of War was the observation that ‘from 1496 B.C. up to 1861 A.D., a period of
3,357 years, there were only 227 years of peace on a total of 3,130 years of war, or thirteen
years of war to every year of peace’. The figures used by both Cousins and the Durants could
easily be extrapolations from this source. This calculation, however, was not Bloch’s. He had
got the number, via a Russian military encyclopaedia, from a French philosopher Odysse
Barot. In his 1864 Lettres sur la Philosophie de l’Histoire, Barot had undertaken some ‘brutal
arithmetic’ that led him to conclude that in the 3,357 years up to 1861 there had been 227
years of peace and 3,130 of war.
Barot had not actually counted wars but treaties of peace and also of alliance and friend-
ship. His assumption was that alliance formation was tantamount to the start of war and that
all wars ended with peace treaties. Leaving aside whether Barot’s own sources on treaties
were reliable let alone comprehensive, his use of treaties as proxies for the start and conclu-
sions of war was patently unreliable.26 Even if the numbers were right the meaning was hard
to unpack. Did it mean that an otherwise unblemished year was lost to the peace column as a
result of one short, localised and relatively minor conflict? Here was a serious but misguided
effort to make sense of the history of war that produced the only figures available on the inci-
dence of conflict through the ages. For want of anything better, they were picked up 100 years
later, slightly updated, and used to make a profound statement about war—either a realist
point that it never goes away or an idealist point that it should.
To prevent this sort of misapprehension a major programme was begun in 1963 at the
University of Michigan known as the Correlates of War (COW) Project with a grant from the
Carnegie Foundation under the leadership of a political scientist, J. David Singer. When some
of the first results were published in 1972, Singer and his associate, Melvin Small, observed
that this represented the first ‘intellectual assault of promise’ launched against ‘tribal slaugh-

89
ter’.27 He was determined to be as careful as possible when gathering and ordering material.
By stressing correlation in the title, no claims were being made about causation. The research
would point to statistically significant relationships from which theories might then be con-
structed.

THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE RESEARCH, HOWEVER, WAS SHAPED by Singer’s determination to

address the claims of the then-dominant realists that everything was about an international
struggle for power. His priority was war between states rather than within them. His interest
lay in whether statistically interesting relationships might be established between inputs, such
as capabilities and alliances, and outputs, such as the length of the conflict and casualties,
rather than the actual choices made by states and the context in which they were made.
The focus on major war was reflected in the high threshold for inclusion. War was de-
fined, somewhat arbitrarily, as ‘sustained combat, involving organized armed forces, resulting
in a minimum of 1,000 battle-related fatalities’. This was later modified to be 1,000 battle-re-
lated fatalities within a twelve-month period, so that as a conflict built up or petered out it
would not necessarily be included. To be identified as a participant in one of these wars a
state must have a population of 500,000 and suffer at least 100 fatalities or contribute at least
1,000 armed personnel to active combat. The intention was to preclude skirmishes or border
clashes that did not trigger a wider conflict.28 But once the threshold was reached there were
no further distinctions. Thus the 1982 Falklands war between Argentina and the UK, which
just passed the threshold in a conflict that lasted less than three months, was there at the same
time as the Iran-Iraq War, which involved hundreds of thousands of casualties over eight
years. Another important feature of this schema was its focus on battle. Unless civilians died
directly as a result of battle their deaths were considered irrelevant.
The data set began in 1816, after the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars. This meant ex-
cluding the most intense period of fighting in the nineteenth century, and one that set terms
for conflict thereafter. In addition, COW discouraged interest in colonial or civil wars. A cate-
gory of ‘extra-systemic’ (later ‘extra-state’) wars included conflicts between major states and
non-state groups outside their own territory, and so included colonial wars. But only casual-
ties of the colonising states were collected because it was hard to collect those of the
colonised.
The material for the nineteenth century was heavily geared to the Western Hemisphere
because much of the rest of the world was then colonised. There were only three independent
states in Africa, the Middle East, and Oceania in the first half of that century, rising to ten in
the second half. The efforts by the European powers to acquire and hold overseas territories
explained the frequency of extra-systemic or extra-state wars. As these empires were disman-
tled during the twentieth century, wars in this category went into decline. They were picked
up in the COW database in the first decade of the twenty-first century because of Afghanistan
and Iraq, although whether these interventions were comparable to past colonial wars raised
important political and moral issues as well as those of appropriate coding.
COW distinguished between civil wars fought within the ‘metropole’ of a state, areas in-
tegrated under governmental control, and those between the metropole and the peripheral
areas which were not so integrated.29 At issue was the working of the state system rather than
totting up the costs of conflict. The focus on interstate wars meant that it took a long time be-
fore those working on COW, and like-minded researchers, took civil wars seriously.
The inadequate treatment of civil wars was one of the main criticisms of the COW, espe-
cially as they began to become a major preoccupation during the 1990s. New databases were
developed to meet this need. The Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) was one of the first

90
to collect material on civil wars, although they still focused on battle-deaths, with twenty-five
a year being the threshold for inclusion. This was despite civilian casualties being one of the
most salient and troubling features of most contemporary civil wars.30 Initially this only
recorded conflicts since 1989, but in 2001 in collaboration with the International Peace Re-
search Institute in Oslo (PRIO) a data set was developed for the whole of the period since
1946. In 1993, also at Maryland, a Minorities at Risk data set was published with information
of a range of factors contributing to sub-state violence.31 The growing enthusiasm for interro-
gating data collection aggravated rather than resolved key issues. There were debates between
the leading databases on the best indicators of armed conflict and on the quality of the evi-
dence. For want of anything better were guesses admissible? Should government statistics
known to be falsified be used? Whose account of inherently confusing events could be
trusted? The only safe assumption was that ‘knowledge’ of civil wars was ‘incomplete and
contested’.32
Statistical analysis required that complex conflicts be disaggregated into what might be
considered elemental units of war that could be compared and contrasted with each other.
These units were distinguished by having a clear beginning, middle, and end, and were
dyadic, that is they had only two belligerents, and could be classified as being interstate, ex-
tra-systemic, or civil. Factors which were ambiguous or could not be measured were ex-
cluded. This was problematic enough with interstate wars but risked a wholly skewed analysis
with civil wars. In these conflicts ‘battle deaths’ was often a meaningless measure, as there
were few battles and many causes of violent deaths. Individuals would often participate on an
occasional and informal basis, military and criminal activity were intertwined, and neighbour-
ing states were often closely involved.33

THIS METHODOLOGY DIVERGED SHARPLY FROM THAT OF HISTORIANS, who tended to look for
particular explanations rather than the general, and be less interested in how events were
coded than their conflicts across time and space. An approach based on disaggregation could
not, for example, view the period 1914–1945 as a European civil war dominated by the inter-
action between liberal democracy, communism, and fascism/Nazism that cut across state
boundaries.34 Nor could it consider great conflicts as a whole. Until December 1941 the wars
in Asia, which had begun on 7 July 1937 when Japan invaded China, and in Europe, which
began on 1 September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland, were separate. They merged
after Pearl Harbor. When Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States on 11 December it
was easier for President Roosevelt to persuade his people that for the time being Europe had
to take precedence over the Pacific. Up to this point the US was not a formal participant in the
war, but it was hardly a true neutral as Roosevelt had described it as the ‘arsenal of democ-
racy’ and was closely engaged with Britain on its war strategy. It might then be assumed that
all these wars ended together: German forces surrendered on 8 May 1945 and Japan on 14
August that year, although it took until September before Japanese forces in China surren-
dered. President Truman did not, however, declare a formal cessation of hostilities in Japan
until the end of 1946, noting that ‘a state of war still exists’. It remained an occupying power.
A peace treaty was not signed until April 1952. The state of war with Germany had been
ended the previous summer. This was partly because a state of war gave the US government
legal powers that it must otherwise relinquish but also because post-war situations tend to be
chaotic and an early claim that it was all over could have been premature. For COW it all
ended together in 1945, because that was when the battle deaths moved below 1,000.
The problem with the focus on dyads can also be illustrated by the case of Iraq. Over four
decades Iraq invaded neighbours and was invaded, suffered from civil wars and insurgencies,

91
and then became part of a conflict with the Islamist militants of ISIS who also controlled
chunks of Syria. This could be disaggregated into a series of dyads. The most prominent but
by no means only were: Iraq v. Iran, Iraq v. Kuwait, Iraq v. the United States (and allies), Iraq
v. ISIS. Three American presidents announced the end of combat in Iraq—George H. W.
Bush at the start of March 1991, his son George W. Bush on 1 May 2003 and then Barack
Obama on 31 August 2010. Each time it turned out that the announcement was premature.
Disaggregation might enable all these different strands to be coded and analysed as a series of
separate conflicts, and avoid double counting, but in practice they were intertwined as part of
a stream of conflict. Similarly, from the mid-1970s Afghanistan experienced constant war,
under various configurations but with external forces heavily involved. In the 1980s there was
an external intervention (Soviet Union), which then turned into a civil war (Taliban v. North-
ern Alliance), but began to turn into something else as the Taliban-backed al-Qaeda looked
for ways to attack the United States. After they succeeded in September 2001, the established
civil war and this extra-state war (United States v. al-Qaeda) became an interstate war (United
States v. Taliban regime). Attempting to disaggregate to code the individual parts, count casu-
alties, and allocate them did not in the end help understanding, for it made it difficult to ap-
preciate how conflicts with common sources transformed and developed over time, becoming
messier and more complex.

A FURTHER PROBLEM WITH WARS ONLY COMING INTO VIEW as they passed a certain casualty
threshold was that this missed out on the simmering conflicts from which they emerged. To
facilitate analysis of when wars were or were not avoided, during the 1990s the COW team
developed a Militarized Interstates Disputes (MID) database. It contained information about
all disputes since 1816 ‘in which the threat, display or use of military force short of war by
one member state is explicitly directed towards the government, official representatives, offi-
cial forces, property or territory of another state.’35 Potentially numerous incidents fitted into
MID; the data set expanded from under 1,000 for the 1816–1976 period in the first version to
over 2,000 in the second.36 So while the threshold for inclusion in COW was quite high, the
one for the MID was quite low. As it was geared only to interstate conflict it could not help
with analyses into the origins of colonial and civil wars.
Much of the MID was put together before the availability of modern search engines, and
so used whatever material was then available in libraries. In the 2010s, a team of researchers
going through the individual cases meticulously found the MID database to be unreliable, al-
though that was not a word they used. They praised the effort and the utility of the database,
insisted that they found no evidence of systematic bias, and offered detailed proposals to rec-
tify the problems they encountered.37 Nonetheless, their investigations identified problems
with almost 70 per cent of the MID cases, leading to proposals to drop 240, merge another 72
with similar cases, revise substantially a further 234, and make minor changes to another
1009.
Many incidents discussed took place on the edges of ongoing and substantial wars, for ex-
ample attacks on shipping of countries perceived by one belligerent to be supporting another.
During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s one or other of the belligerents attacked numerous
tankers. These were coded in MID as separate incidents though these make no sense when
considered as individual events. At the other extreme essentially trivial matters were included.
Over 300 disputes (over 13 per cent of the total) were coded as a ‘seizure’ of boats at sea.
There were some famous incidents, such as the North Korean seizure of the USS Pueblo and
its 83 crew members in 1968, an action that could well have escalated into something quite
serious. Mostly, however, boats were seized by authorities for reasons that had little to do

92
with interstate relations, but because their owners failed to register them properly or engaged
in criminal activities. In principle such cases should not be included, and in the study cited
above it was proposed that 53 should be dropped.
A separate study considered how disputes over fishing in contested areas of the ocean
were considered in the MID.38 Disputes of this type tended to involve mature democracies but
not militarised responses, and rarely escalated. By and large actions were taken by a state
against the private citizens (owners of fishing vessels) of another. But these were hardly
major incidents. In one incident a Canadian destroyer chased an American scallop-fishing
boat out of Canadian waters after firing warning shots. This was coded as an act of war, but
there was no evidence that the US viewed it as such. Such incidents did not carry the ‘impli-
cation of war’. The authors of this critique noted that 69 out of the 567 disputes between
democracies in the MID database involved fishing. Their probable irrelevance somewhat dis-
torted any conclusions to be made from this database about the relationship between democ-
racy and war. When it came to the Cold War, however, a whole stage of international rela-
tions that could be described as one large militarised interstate dispute, MID only included the
most visible manifestations of East-West tension, such as the standoff in Berlin in 1961, when
for a while actual military units faced each other and when the risk of escalation to major war
was high.
Two cases from 1969 illustrate the difficulty of categorising conflicts. One passed the ca-
sualty threshold and so reached the COW database and one stayed in the MID. El Salvador
and Honduras fought what came to be known as the ‘Football War’, though that description
trivialised the dispute. The origins lay in the treatment of Salvadoran immigrants in Honduras
who were seeking to escape from repression at home. The tension exploded into violence as
the two countries played each other in qualifying matches for the 1970 World Cup, in which
El Salvador came out on top. The violence led El Salvador to sever diplomatic relations with
Honduras, followed in mid-July with air raids and a ground offensive, and then Honduran
counterstrikes. A ceasefire was soon arranged, though relations between the two remained
tense. The impact was not minor but was largely confined to Central America.
Also in 1969 there was a period of deep conflict between China and the Soviet Union.
Tensions between the two had been building up since the start of the decade, and burst out
into the open in 1963 with some bitter polemics. The dispute was about the soul and leader-
ship of the world communist movement but also involved old-fashioned geopolitical consid-
erations, including a Chinese conviction that at times of previous weakness the Russians had
stolen its territory and it was time to get it back. At the start of 1968 Soviet armoured vehicles
attacked Chinese working on Qiliqin Island in the Ussuri River, causing four deaths. After
that the border was quiet until the end of the year. Then came the first of a series of incidents
on Zhenbao Island, largely instigated by the Soviet side. In early March Chinese leader Mao
Zedong decided to take the initiative with what was in effect an ambush of Russian soldiers.
He moved the rhetoric to a higher gear, though refrained from further action. Mao saw the
tension as a helpful contribution to the radicalising process of the Cultural Revolution. By this
point, however, the Soviet leadership was seriously alarmed and preparing for a major war
against China. Hardliners even argued for a pre-emptive nuclear strike before China’s nuclear
programme had become operational. This in turn alarmed the leadership in Beijing. They con-
sidered evacuating the capital as the Soviet foreign ministry wondered whether Russian na-
tionals should be advised to return home. In the event an opportunity arose for talks at a se-
nior level, and the immediate crisis was defused.
Although many died during these clashes, the COW threshold was not reached. This
episode therefore appears only as ‘incident 349’ in the Militarised Interstate Disputes data-

93
base, which has it lasting from March to December, with very few fatalities. The source mate-
rials were books published up to 1983. By this time it was known that thirty-one Russians had
died in the first main clash on 2 March, and that the Chinese had probably instigated this en-
counter.39 Prior to this there had been no consensus on attribution.40
This incident did not result in a war, although it might have done, but it did have an enor-
mous impact on military planning and the development of international affairs. The mutual
suspicions remained and led to a major build-up of forces on both sides during the 1970s. The
split between the two communist giants created opportunities for the United States, which
began to explore the possibilities of a rapprochement with Beijing. The Chinese, left feeling
isolated and vulnerable by the Soviet Union, responded positively to the American overtures.
A rich study of the events of 1969 therefore offered much of interest to those concerned with
the origins of war, from domestic issues encouraging a rise in tensions to concerns about nu-
clear war encouraging a decline in those tensions, and how balances of power could shift
quite abruptly.41 COW was not designed to support this sort of approach but was instead a
methodology that relied on extracting incidents from their historical and geographical context.

IT WAS NOT UNREASONABLE TO ASK FOR A BETTER WAY OF understanding the past in order to
be better able to anticipate the future. But instead of understanding war as part of the stream
of history, so that particular instances could be understood in context, past conflicts were
itemised and categorised in an artificial manner in order to facilitate comparisons that only
had any validity at a high and often banal level of generality. For those who were trying to
make sense of what was to come there were limits to what could be learnt from any number of
methodologically sound observations based on comparing bits and pieces of disparate evi-
dence of notionally similar occurrences. As Hannah Arendt observed when writing about vio-
lence:

Predictions of the future are never anything but projections of present automatic processes and procedures, that is,
of occurrences that are likely to come to pass if men do not act and if nothing unexpected happens; every action,
for better or worse, and every accident necessarily destroys the whole pattern in whose frame the prediction moves
and where it finds its evidence.42

For students of international relations who accepted that they were always exploring a
world of contingency and uncertainty, attempting to anticipate choices yet to be made, this
was not a great concern. But for those convinced that it was possible to establish a true sci-
ence, for whom some capacity for prediction was essential, it pointed to the problems in iden-
tifying compelling causal relationships that would hold in a significant number of cases or not
be upended altogether should there be some great discontinuity in the wider international sys-
tem. However sophisticated the methodology and meticulous the data gathering, the future
would still be full of surprises.

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 [ 11 ]

Counting the Dead

History counts its skeletons in round numbers.

A thousand and one remains a thousand,
as though the one had never existed:
an imaginary embryo, an empty cradle,
an ABC never read,
air that laughs, cries, grows,
emptiness running down steps toward the garden,
nobody’s place in the line.
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA, ‘Hunger Camp at Jaslo’, 19931

Death tolls are the simplest measure of the scale of wars, the purest description of cost and
the strongest indicator of sacrifice. Their detail allows martyrs to be mourned, monuments to
be erected, history books written and national myths sustained. The symbolic nature of the
death toll means that it can easily acquire political baggage. Casualties can be minimised to
sustain morale or exaggerated to arouse anger, used to highlight the bravery of those prepared
to die for a noble cause or the burden of a foolish military adventure. Those inflicting casual-
ties may play the numbers up, to depress the enemy, yet might also want to play them down to
show that they care about the Geneva conventions. The death tolls of the past are thrown back
at former enemies to recall their crimes and as a demand for contrition. The Chinese govern-
ment still regularly reminds their people of the atrocities committed by the Japanese after the
1937 invasion; the Russian government invokes the hardships of the early 1940s when ex-
plaining how harsh international conditions can be endured again; more positively, the Ger-
man government atones for past Nazi atrocities. The importance of these memories and myths
means that there can be anger against those who try to disturb them, suggesting that the sacri-
fices were pointless or that they have been exaggerated to sway popular consciousness.2
During the First World War the Turkish government wished to rid themselves of Christ-
ian Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire, believing them to be supporters of Russia. Their
effort to do so lasted until after the war’s conclusion. It left, according to some estimates, up
to 1.5 million Armenians dead and others expelled. Other estimates put the number much
lower, around half that amount. The question of how many died depends on what is believed
to have been the Armenian population prior to the massacre, those still living in the country at
its conclusion, and the numbers that escaped. The most contentious issue, however, is whether
this constituted genocide, a term not in use at the time. Turkey complains bitterly whenever

95
any reference is made to these events as genocide. They accept many Armenians died, if not
in the numbers claimed, but do deny that this was deliberate and systematic, and point to
Muslims killed by Armenians at the same time. One consequence of the determination with
which Turkey pursues this issue is that attempts to sort out the evidence soon get caught in the
crossfire.3
Many of the problems of counting were explored in a book published in 1923 by the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an organisation established in 1910 to promote
the abolition of war. ‘Perhaps’, observed one of its authors, ‘when people come to appreciate
what glory, pillage, and the desire for conquest really cost they will find the price too high:
and then peace will reign forever.’4 This book consisted of a rather sketchy, ‘preliminary’ ac-
count of the losses incurred during the recent war, preceded by a substantial analysis of all
available sources on the human cost of war up to that point, including, unlike COW, both the
Seven Years’ War and the Napoleonic Wars. The estimate of up to 11 million military deaths
for the Napoleonic Wars remains close to numbers in current use. Samuel Dumas, a French
professor, in discussing these previous wars acknowledged the problems of scanty and often
unreliable evidence, and the extent to which the numbers were often subject to deliberate de-
ception. He also stressed just how much greater the military losses were from disease than
from battle. This was also true with civilians. One measure used in the analysis was declining
birth rates.
Death tolls, especially when confined to battle, only capture one aspect of the tragedy of
war.5 When individuals die their families are left bereaved; of the injured some will die later
and others will be incapable of returning to normal life, left physically or psychologically
damaged; homes are destroyed and social infrastructure collapses. War leads to disease and
malnutrition or a breakdown in law and order which adds to the overall levels of violence in
society. Sexual assaults follow armies as they move through populated areas. Those seeking
to flee the immediate impact of war often put themselves through terrible hardships, becom-
ing either internally displaced or full refugees. As the fortunes of war change, some of these
might return home while others will be forever exiled. War may just be the worst of many bad
things afflicting a country that combine to make life progressively miserable, including op-
pressive governments and natural disasters. It is entirely possible that deaths from indirect
causes can be almost as high as those caused by deliberate killing.6
Ignoring the fate of civilians distorts the reality of war, even if including them results in
imprecision and uncertainty. The consequences of their exclusion can be seen by noting that,
while COW lists total battle deaths for Korea as 909,000 by some accounts, if civilians were
included the figure could reach some 4 million. It was starvation and disease that did for most
of the estimated two million people who died in Cambodia under Pol Pot in the 1970s. The
80–100,000 people killed directly was large enough by any standards, but still perhaps only 4
per cent of the total.
During the nineteenth century brutal attacks on civilians were a way of showing enemy
populations how they would suffer if they resisted. In the twentieth century the elimination of
whole groups of people of supposedly inferior race or dangerous belief was adopted as a war
aim. In the twenty-first century, extreme Islamist groups saw the murder of apostates and un-
believers a vital political goal. Murdering civilians with no capacity to resist in large numbers
is a category of killing that is war-like but involves no battle, of which the Nazi holocaust
against the Jews is the prime example. One of the most gruesome of recent times was the
Rwandan genocide of 1994, with estimates of those killed put at anywhere between 500,000
and 1,000,000.7 It did not figure in either the standard COW or PRIO databases. The PRIO
developed a new category of ‘one-sided violence’ to accommodate such events, but these can-

96
not really be considered separate from war, as war creates the conditions that make them pos-
sible.8 In Rwanda the lack of actual resistance indicated the speed and single-mindedness of
the militia offensive. Would some serious skirmishes in a couple of villages have suddenly
moved this whole episode onto a list of wars? The deaths suffered at the hands of an oppres-
sive government have at times been comparable to casualties in wars, but kept out of the data-
bases of war by a lack of organised resistance.9
All these issues created a problem for those who wished to base their studies on accurate
measurements of casualties. If the aim was to compare different wars, rather than convey their
full horror, then there was a case for using the narrowest and supposedly most reliable of
measures, those who died in battle. This was COW’s approach. But even here care is needed.
Many military deaths during a war occur away from actual battle. American battle-deaths in
the COW database record 116,516 for the First World War, 405,400 for the Second World
War, 54,487 for the Korean War of the early 1950s, 58,153 for the Vietnam War from 1965 to
1973, 376 for the 1991 Gulf War, but only two for the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and 140
for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. These numbers included those who were killed in combat but
also those who died as a result of accidents, disease, or also as a result of being prisoners of
war. COW did not distinguish these two types of causes, but they are relevant. Combat deaths
were less than half of the total in the First World War and still about half in the Second, a
ratio that was maintained into the 1991 Gulf War.10
Contrast the 22,000 French soldiers who died of yellow fever in Haiti at the start of the
nineteenth century and the approximately 18,000 British and French soldiers who died of
cholera during the Crimean War with zero British fatalities from 29 soldiers hospitalised be-
cause they had contracted an infectious disease in Afghanistan in 2002. By then recruits were
likely to be healthier, and so able to cope better with injury. They were inoculated against
what would once have been killer diseases as they moved into unfamiliar territory. Body ar-
mour provided better protection, and if troops were injured in battle they got much improved
treatment on the spot and were then speedily evacuated to a field hospital. Until the middle of
the last century Disease and Non-Battle Injury (DNBI) was the major cause of death for sol-
diers deployed to war. Instead of the evacuation of an injured soldier involving days of being
carried on a litter, a soldier fighting for a modern army should be whisked away on a heli-
copter and get to a well-equipped facility within an hour. So, Tanisha Fazal argued, war has
become ‘less lethal’. Between 1946 and 2008, there was a 50 per cent decline in known battle
deaths. By contrast there was only a 20 per cent decline in estimated battle casualties. Battle
deaths were therefore declining more than twice as quickly as battle casualties. The same con-
flict that produced 1,200 casualties in 1860 was likely to have produced 800 casualties in
1980. 11

WITH MODERN ARMED FORCES THERE ARE ESTABLISHED AND reliable means of recording death,
injury, or missing in action. With less organised armies the position is much more difficult.
Retrospective forms of accounting draw on whatever information comes to hand, whether
field reports from fighting units, newspaper stories, benefits claims, or medical records, but
these are often incomplete or ambiguous. Mortality rates over time can identify before and
after effects of a war. Census data can help work out the size of a dip in a country’s popula-
tion. Post-war surveys might sample the losses suffered by families and the prevalence of
war-related injuries. All these measures raise their own issues of comprehensiveness, repre-
sentativeness, and reliability.
The difficulties can be illustrated with the American Civil War. Not long after the event
the death toll was put at 620,000, of which just over 360,000 were from the North and the rest

97
from the South. This was the number used by COW. It was the result of painstaking work by
two Union Army veterans, William Fox and Thomas Livermore. As there were no procedures
in place during the war to identify and count the dead, wounded, and missing in action, Fox
worked through every report and record he could find. With the North there were claims for
pensions and survivors’ benefits, but there was no such evidence for the South. His initial,
sketchy analysis on the Confederate side offered a round number of 94,000. Livermore raised
this to 258,000 by assuming the same ratio of accident and disease-related deaths to combat-
related on the Confederate side as on the Union side.12 The 620,000 number was long left un-
challenged.13 In 2011 J. David Hacker, a demographer, demonstrated that the South’s losses
had probably been underestimated.14 It was less urbanised, so disease was probably much
higher than in the North; its young men would not have acquired the degree of immunity to
infectious ‘camp’ diseases. This would have become even more acute during the last year of
the war, as medical care and food supplies deteriorated. Using census data to measure the im-
pact on the overall population, Hacker concluded that ‘excess’ male deaths from the war were
between 650,000 and 850,000, with 750,000 a reasonable midpoint. That was about 20 per
cent higher than the previous estimate.
With the more confused and ambiguous situations found with insurgencies, different is-
sues arise. To illustrate the problems of counting even on a comparatively small scale, Kelly
Greenhill examined a report that the terrorist group Boko Haram had massacred between 150
and 2,000 people in a village in north-eastern Nigeria in early 2015. The incident took place
in a dangerous area controlled by insurgents, beyond modern connectivity, with only satellite
pictures for visual information. Getting reliable information from ‘morgues, hospitals, and
law-enforcement entities’ was hampered because they were ‘internally inept, externally ob-
structed, structurally inadequate, or simply corrupt’. Eyewitnesses’ reports also had to be
treated carefully because individuals might answer in such a way as ‘to protect themselves
from psychological and physical harm’ or to gain reward by concocting or embellishing an-
swers. It was difficult to distinguish irregular fighters from ordinary civilians, as they would
look the same in death, and even more so to distinguish direct deaths from the indirect. Was a
child drowning in a river as she tried to escape a victim of war or just of an unfortunate acci-
dent?
Greenhill noted that those who took the most care in counting casualties, by cross-refer-
encing media reports of fatalities with figures from hospitals, morgues, and NGOs, were
likely to generate lower numbers than more active methods, by getting data from statistically
representative selections of individuals and households that live in or have escaped from af-
fected areas. Here the risk was likely to be one of over-counting. In the case of this particular
incident, she observed that it suited both local officials, who wanted the government to take
action, and Boko Haram, who wanted to show off their strength, to inflate the numbers. And
then once the numbers reached the public domain, ‘they take on a life of their own.’15
That this could be true with one incident at a particular time threw into relief the problems
of developing reliable numbers for really large wars. The Second World War resulted in un-
precedented levels of killing, with conflicts in Asia and Europe merging, the murder of mil-
lions of civilians on an industrial scale, and every type of warfare, from naval encounters,
massive air raids, lightning offensives, dogged defending, and partisan resistance, concluding
with atomic bombs.
Germans died in many ways during the war—in battle and air raids, persecuted by their
own government, or in the mass expulsions at the end of the war. Adding all these up has led
to a total of some 7.5 million, but each of the component parts has been questioned. A total of
4.3 million for the losses during the military campaign is based on the German High Com-

98
mand’s wartime figures, although these figures became increasingly unreliable as the system
for their compilation broke down during the later stages of the war.16
These uncertainties are moderate compared with those surrounding Soviet casualties.
Stalin, perhaps conscious that his own poor decisions had allowed Hitler to catch his country
by surprise, at first referred to 7 million total deaths. By 1961 a much higher figure of 20 mil-
lion was in official use, although acknowledged as probably too low. In 1990, President
Mikhail Gorbachev spoke of ‘almost 27 million’. Then the military dead, based on a hitherto-
secret General Staff report from the mid-1960s, was put at 8,668,400. This was made up of
6,329,600 killed in action or died of wounds, 555,500 from non-combat deaths, and 1,783,300
missing in action who were never found and prisoners of war who did not return.17 These fig-
ures were criticised as underestimates.18 On civilian deaths the Russian Academy of Sciences
published an estimate in 1995 that put those in areas occupied by Germans at 13.7 million.
This number was made up of acts of genocide and reprisals, 7.4 million; deportations for
slave labour, 2.2 million; and famine and disease, 4.1 million. An additional 3 million deaths
was estimated for deaths due to famine and disease in the unoccupied regions.
Although these figures moved into general use there were many subsequent efforts from
within Russia and outside to refine them. Yet the margins of error in these calculations would
be enormous tragedies in themselves. How many died after being taken prisoner by Germans?
These numbers were complicated by those who had been captured but escaped to return to
their units, who avoided returning after the war, who did return and were then incarcerated
because considered tainted, or who were treated as POWs by Germans but were actually ordi-
nary civilians or partisans. Many deaths over this period were the result of the politics and
economics of the Soviet state and the pernicious ideology of Nazism, as well as the nature of
the armed conflict. The war followed years of deliberate political persecution and catastrophic
social and economic policies, notably the Soviet ‘gulag’, made up of concentration or labour
camps, or the forced starvation in Ukraine in the 1930s. According to Alexander Yakovlev, as
many as 35 million died because of repression.19 The gulag did not shut down over the war.
Perhaps as many as 1 million died in prison or forced deportations while it was underway.20
Demographic analysis suffered because the last pre-war census was falsified to play down the
impact of the forced collectivisation of the 1930s.21
So while most estimates of the costs of war to the Soviet Union stayed close to 28 mil-
lion, some reputable analysts considered it reasonable to go as high as 35 million.22 Estimates
of military deaths ranged from 5 to 14 million and of civilian deaths from 7 to more than 18
million. COW’s figure of 7.5 million Soviet battle deaths, with no mention of civilian deaths,
was certainly too low, and barely conveyed one aspect of the Soviet experience. In The Better
Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker used 55 million total dead for the Second World War,
but if numbers from the higher end of the range with Germany and the Soviet Union were
taken, as well as China, where the true numbers are also hard to calculate but have been put
conservatively at 14 million, then the total approached 85 million.23
With the more recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the cost of occupying those coun-
tries was much less than that of dealing with the insurgencies. The analysis was complicated
by COW’s methodology, as the counter-insurgency operations appeared separately under ex-
tra-state rather than intrastate wars, with local resistance in Afghanistan and Iraq leading to
552 and 3,985 casualties respectively. All these could be identified by their names and the cir-
cumstances in which they died. The same was generally true of civilian contractors and mem-
bers of international organisations.
On the Iraqi side the position was more complex. The number of civilians killed directly
in the 1991 war as a result of coalition bombing was reported by the Iraqis to be 2,278. There

99
were no precise estimates for military casualties. As the fighting ended, US commanders were
puzzled by the large discrepancy between the estimated size of the Iraqi army and the num-
bers taken prisoner. The gap, they assumed, must be Iraqi dead, perhaps as many as 100,000
killed, 300,000 wounded, and 150,000 desertions.24 But they had overestimated the size of the
Iraqi Army prior to the war by presuming Iraqi units to be at full strength, when large num-
bers had failed to report for duty and many more had deserted at the first opportunity, so that
once coalition air strikes started, there were perhaps only 200,000–300,000 troops to fight.
This led one analyst to put Iraqi combat deaths from the air campaign at 750–1,500 and a
maximum of 6,500 dead from the ground campaign.25 Another assessment opted for 20–
26,000 Iraqi troops killed.26 Little of this was based on actual counts.27
The most difficult area to evaluate was that of consequential civilian deaths. One estimate
put those for 1991 at some 100,000.28 After the 2003 war this became a controversial issue. It
was complicated by the extent to which Iraqi society had already been brutalised, its infra-
structure degraded and its resources depleted by a series of events since the 1970s, including
the war with Iran and repression of discontent, sanctions, and purges. To this was added new
strands of occupation, insurgency, civil war, and general lawlessness that marred the subse-
quent years.29 Most of these dead were not directly at the hands of coalition forces, though
that hardly absolved them from blame because of the impact of toppling the old regime on
law and order. One organisation, the Iraq Body Count, collated all available evidence on Iraqi
deaths since March 2003. For the period up to December 2012, it proposed a range of 110,937
to 121,227 deaths, accepting that this could be an underestimate.30 Yet their estimates were
higher than those for organisations such as the Uppsala Conflict Data Program as well as the
United Nations.31
Another approach, published in the medical magazine The Lancet, involved interviewing
a number of households and asking about family deaths, from which they concluded that
some 655,000 people had died beyond what might otherwise have been the case from March
2003 until June 2006.32 Questions were raised about the representativeness of the sample and
the extent of the extrapolation into a population of 26 million, and the accuracy of the as-
sumptions on pre-war death rates. It was almost certainly an overestimate.33 A better study in
2013, using a similar but more refined methodology, at a time when the situation in Iraq was
less fraught, concluded that there had been 461,000 excess deaths from 2003 to 2011. Of
these about 60 per cent were found to be due to violence, of which about a third were attrib-
uted to coalition forces (that is some 90,000). At the peak of the war men faced a 2.9 per cent
higher risk of death than they did before the war and women a 0.7 per cent higher risk of
death.34 These were not, of course, the only costs of war. Estimates from the numbers of
Iraqis who have migrated abroad since 2003 range from 1.7 million (the United Nations fig-
ure) to 2.3 million.35 Well over a million people also fled from violence to safer parts within
Iraq.36
These mortality rates show how much worse things were for Iraqis than they would have
been had things continued as they were before the invasion, but the tensions within Iraqi soci-
ety could well have come out in another way at another time and in an equally virulent form.
Next door, Syria, which appeared to be as stable as any Middle Eastern country, came to be
consumed by a civil war which gathered pace in 2011. This became extraordinarily violent
very quickly, largely as a result of the crude tactics used by the regime to defend itself, aggra-
vated by the large number of players involved and the role of external actors. The United Na-
tions tried to keep count of the death toll, seeking reasonable confirmation of deaths even
though this produced a conservative estimate.37 In August 2014 it reported that 191,369 had
died by that date. A year later it gave only a round number, putting the death toll at 250,000

100
and then gave up trying to update the figures because of a lack of good information. The Syr-
ian Observatory for Human Rights was able to document some 321,358 individuals’ deaths
by March 2017, but assumed that there were some 85,000 more that had not been docu-
mented. Of the documented, government forces and the various factions opposed to the gov-
ernment lost about 112,000 each. Some 96,000 civilians had been killed, of which over 80
percent were the result of government action. In addition, more than 2 million Syrians had
been left injured and with permanent disabilities, and about 12 million had been displaced.
This was out of a population of just over 20 million at the start of the conflict.38

DEATH TOLLS ARE COMPILATIONS OF PERSONAL TRAGEDIES. The meaning for each individual
and their family soon gets lost as the toll rises and the counting becomes more difficult. As
the numbers grow so too does anonymity until eventually the statistics defy human compre-
hension with margins of error equivalent to the populations of large cities. Analysts were
bound to make use of the best numbers available, however flawed, but there was no science
here, and the great uncertainties created opportunities for political manipulation and wilful
distortion. It was important to attempt to quantify suffering, but only if it was understood that
the figures were imprecise and usually relied on guesswork. Even when efforts were made to
report accurately on casualties, as in Syria, at some point the numbers overwhelmed. It be-
came impossible to keep count. As estimates were always involved there was no good reason
for excluding the inherently less measurable aspects of suffering, especially those resulting
from the collapse of infrastructure and the effects of disease, malnutrition, and poverty. Raw
numbers, however carefully put together, still only told part of the story of war.

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 [ 12 ]

Democracy and War

[I]f the consent of the citizens is required in order to decide that war should be declared…, nothing is
more natural than that they would be very cautious in commencing such a poor game, decreeing for
themselves all the calamities of war.
IMMANUEL KANT, ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’, 17951

The most important intersection of the developing number-crunching science of international

relations and the post-Cold War policy agenda came with the question of whether more
democracy could also mean more peace. The West’s victory over communism was seen as a
triumph for the democratic way of life. If others followed the same path there was a possibil-
ity of a transcendent community of shared values that would produce peace if only because
there would be nothing to fight about. But the spread of democracy was bound to be con-
tentious and would be resisted by autocrats.
As European communism imploded Francis Fukuyama of the RAND Corporation an-
nounced that this was not just ‘the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period
of post-war history’, but ‘the end of history as such’. By this he meant ‘the end point of
mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the
final form of human government.’2 Talking of the ‘end of history’ invited misinterpretation.
He was not suggesting that there would be no more conflict, or other transformational events,
only that there was now no serious ideological alternative to the political and economic model
that had been embraced by the Western world, to their enormous benefit.
The collapse of the Soviet empire and its fragmentation into states that all claimed to be
embracing democracy appeared as the latest stage in a benign trend. Samuel Huntington de-
scribed three waves of the democratic ascendance. The first began in the nineteenth century
and peaked at twenty-nine democracies, but then went into decline in the 1920s as dictators
took advantage of depressed economic conditions. By 1942 there were only twelve. After the
Second World War the second wave took the numbers up to thirty-six before there was a fur-
ther falling away, going down to thirty until the mid-1970s. Then the third wave began with
countries in Latin America and the Asia Pacific region adopting democratic forms of govern-
ment.3 Lastly, the former states of the Warsaw Pact, along with the Baltic States that had pre-
viously been annexed by the Soviet Union, embraced the Western ideology, and having so
demonstrated their commitment, were able to join NATO and the European Union. Once the
former communist countries were added the number of democracies went up to around eighty
(and on some measures even higher).

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 The momentum behind democracy had international consequences. The communist expe-
rience was taken to demonstrate that regimes without basic freedoms tended to instability but
spreading these freedoms reduced division and conflict. This challenged the idea that when it
came to maintaining international order, systems of government were irrelevant. This idea
was central to the UN Charter as drafted in San Francisco in 1945. Then the priority, above
all, was to prevent yet more aggressive wars. The preamble acknowledged both state rights
and human rights. It opened with a determination to ‘save succeeding generations from the
scourge of war’ while also reaffirming ‘faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and
worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and
small’. Yet, as the operating principles of the United Nations were described, the core objec-
tive became clear. ‘The Organization’, the charter explained, was ‘based on the principle of
the sovereign equality of all its Members.’ Each must accept the obligations to settle disputes
by peaceful means and ‘refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force
against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state’. Even if states were act-
ing against their people in an unjust or discriminatory matter, so long as they were not actu-
ally disturbing international peace and security, they should be left alone.

Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are es-
sentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to set-
tlement under the present Charter.4

So whatever was said about justice and human rights, the charter at its core was about re-
moving all excuses for wars of conquest and a celebration of sovereignty. What states did
within their own borders was up to them. No challenge was posed to this by President Bush
when he spoke of a ‘new world order’ in April 1991. This, he explained:

springs from hopes for a world based on a shared commitment among nations large and small to a set of principles
that undergird our relations—peaceful settlement of disputes, solidarity against aggression, reduced and controlled
arsenals, and just treatment of all peoples.

The vision, despite the use of the word ‘new’, was actually conservative. The new world
as presented was rather similar to the old except that it would lack some of its disagreeable
features. The president had been careful to avoid a promise of ‘an era of perpetual peace’. The
challenge was to keep the ‘dangers of disorder at bay’.5 Bush gave no indication that he ex-
pected the pursuit of justice to take precedence over the preservation of order and stability.
But the shift in the balance of power that had just occurred was bound to have more far-
reaching effects than a cautious president was inclined to admit. The United States and its al-
lies were now in a hegemonic position, accounting for the bulk of the world’s military assets,
and its strongest economies, with an enormous freedom of political manoeuvre. They were in
a position to rewrite the rules for the international order. For over seven decades they had
fought their internal and external battles with fascism and communism, and had now emerged
triumphant. Their constitutions reflected their liberal philosophy, requiring that the ‘impartial
rule of law, and not simply the political power of the individual or group, should govern the
outcome of state decisions’. Now there was an opportunity to work on the ‘constitution of the
society of states as a whole’.6 The key shift was to put more stress on the rights of individuals
and minority groups and less on the rights of states.
In November 1990 the heads of government of thirty-four European nations convened in
Paris under the aegis of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, their first

103
meeting together since Helsinki in 1975. They blessed the reunification of Germany and
signed a new arms control treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe. A Charter of Paris was
agreed. In this ‘new era’, democracy was ‘the only system of government for our nations’, as
based on ‘the will of the people, expressed regularly through free and fair elections’. It also
affirmed that ‘without discrimination, every individual has the right to freedom of thought,
conscience, religion or belief, freedom of expression, freedom of association and peaceful as-
sembly, freedom of movement’. In addition no one should be ‘subject to arbitrary arrest or de-
tention, subject to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment’.7
The challenge to the old order was fundamental. Instead of insisting that the best international
practice was to respect the sovereignty of other states no matter how they managed their inter-
nal affairs, it was now considered to be not only appropriate but also necessary to encourage
all states to embrace liberalism and democracy.

AT THIS CRITICAL MOMENT THE MOVE TO DEMOCRACY WAS reinforced by one of the most com-
pelling claims to emerge out of the statistical analysis of war. The idea had been given cre-
dence by Michael Doyle in 1986.8 It was set out clearly by Jack Levy in that transformative
year, 1989: ‘This absence of war between democracies comes as close as anything we have to
an empirical law in international relations.’9 This was picked up by Western leaders, buoyed
by the democratic surge of the last quarter of the twentieth century, who found further com-
fort in the thought that democracy promotion was a route not only to better governance but
also to more peace. At last, it seemed possible to realise the German philosopher Immanuel
Kant’s utopian vision of a Perpetual Peace, based on governments resting on reason and law
rather than force.
This combination of academic respectability and political enthusiasm led to closer
scrutiny. Democracies had not been as brutal to their own citizens as autocracies. Those gov-
ernments that turned on sections of their own people in a systematic way—in the Soviet
Union, Nazi Germany, and Cambodia—were usually in the grip of some totalitarian ideology.
But the records of the United States, the United Kingdom, and France demonstrated that they
had been regularly at war, and not exactly soft touches when fighting against supposedly ruth-
less and undemocratic countries. This was why the argument was not that democracy made
countries more peaceable: but only that they would not then go to war with each other.
Was this correct? The proposition set up a challenge to find instances where democracies
had fought each other in order to check whether the findings were as statistically significant
as supposed. As most of the time most states did not go to war with each other, did that mean
even one instance where two democratic states fought negated the theory?10 As the analysis
used the COW data how much did the high threshold for war influence it? COW might ex-
clude instances where democratic states intervened in the internal affairs of other democratic
states, though not to the extent of passing the threshold of 1,000 battle deaths.11 Or perhaps
states with similar types of regimes, even if autocratic, also rarely went to war with each
other.12 When there was no war might this have been for reasons that had little to do with
democracy, such as considerations of capacity and prudence?13
The debate added to the familiar problems of defining wars an even trickier question of
defining democracy.14 Democracy defined by majority rule and elected leaders did not always
come with liberalism, which required openness and tolerance of minorities. The standard fear
from the late nineteenth century onwards, after all, was of a belligerent public opinion, espe-
cially when aroused by demagogues, populists, and the press. The entry of the masses into
politics was one of the conditions for the rise of nationalism over the nineteenth century. At
what point did this rise of the masses turn into democracy? The obvious moment might be

104
said to have been when universal suffrage was achieved, but that arrived in stages, from upper
class men to working men, then women, and eventually young adults.
Most relevant, perhaps, was the ability of democratically elected civilian politicians to ex-
ercise actual control over decisions on war. This was clearly lacking in Germany at the start
of the First World War.15 Moreover, once a country had become a democracy the status could
be lost, as political processes become corrupted and liberties qualified. Russia, for example,
became less democratic over the 2010s as did Turkey. Nonetheless, the trappings of democ-
racy were still present in both. Iran had highly contested elections for the president, but
among a selected group of candidates, with the scope for public debate constrained and
supreme power resting elsewhere. The higher the threshold for war and the more restrictive
the definition of democracy, the more likely it was that the democratic peace theory would
turn out to be true.
There was also the question of causation. Was it that democracy caused peace or that
peace caused democracy? Peace made possible trade, investment, and economic growth,
which were supportive of democratisation.16 If democracy caused peace, what was the mech-
anism by which a country that might otherwise incline towards war instead turned away? One
hypothesis was that democracies must address differences to work out internal conflicts and
so come to appreciate the value of empathy, compromise, and reciprocation. These were then
in play when they addressed international disputes.17 Another was that democracies ensured
that executives were held accountable through legislatures and could be removed from office
through elections if they engaged in imprudent wars.18 Other democracies might also be con-
sidered reliable and suitable allies.
All this raised the possibility that there were a number of factors reinforcing each other.
Bruce Russett and John Oneal argued that democracies do go to war, just less often than
everyone else. Using the Militarized Interstate Disputes database, and taking 1886 as a start-
ing point, because democracy on any terms was relatively rare before that date, they looked
for pairs of countries that might go to war. They evaluated each according to an index of
democracy, and took account of alliances and power. The conclusion was that democracy
made a difference. Taking as a base the likelihood that tension between an average pair of
countries would turn into a militarised quarrel, this was doubled when a democracy faced an
autocracy and halved when a democracy faced a democracy. They found, however, that the
effect only kicked in after 1900. They also looked at economic dependence upon international
trade and found that the greater the dependence the less risk of getting involved in a mili-
tarised dispute, whether or not there was much trade with the potential adversary. Market
economies had even stronger pacifying effects than democracy. Lastly, they considered mem-
bership of intergovernmental organisations, and when the pairs had shared memberships. This
also encouraged peaceful responses.19
The absence of war among democracies, therefore, might be for a variety for reasons.
One alternative was that it was largely a ‘capitalist peace’. Thus Michael Mousseau consid-
ered that peace amongst the advanced capitalist nations was about much more than the high
costs of war, but also an interest in encouraging others to be like them. Their wealth created
loyalty and the capacity to better non-capitalist states in war. This led to encouraging capital-
ism as ‘the surest cause of peace and friendship among individuals, groups and states’.20 An-
other, and more firmly based, alternative was a ‘territorial peace’. According to Douglas
Gibler, ‘settled international boundaries decrease the level of threat to the territorial integrity
of states’. This in turn allowed states to cut their armed forces, keep public opinion calm,
while reducing the need for the centralisation of power.21
It was easiest to have peace when there was little substantial in dispute. These various ex-

105
planations brought the problem back to the declinist thesis with which this book opened, and
whether there was a single determining factor that might explain quite complex and often con-
tradictory trends. Azar Gat identified the underlying process which made a difference to lev-
els of violence, especially in Western societies, as ‘modernisation’, which had begun with the
industrial revolution. This made it possible to satiate human desires without recourse to war-
fare.22 The benefits of war went down as the costs went up. But that did not preclude terrible
episodes of violent conflict, that expanded and escalated. At the heart of the issue was the in-
teraction between social and economic developments with political choices, which could be
egregious or quixotic, as well as perfectly rational.

THE DEMOCRATIC PEACE THEORY WAS ESSENTIALLY A GENERALISATION from the post-1945 ex-
perience of North America and Western Europe. A mutually reinforcing set of relationships
developed among countries embracing liberal democracy, and open economies. The most re-
markable example of this determination to break away from the bad habits of the past came
when France and Germany, along with Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg
formed the original Coal and Steel Community, which grew into a full-fledged customs union
and eventually acquired a wide range of competencies and many more members to become
the European Union. Whatever else it achieved it gradually calmed one of the most destruc-
tive relationships in European history.
But while one set of relationships among liberal democracies became warm and intimate
another became hostile and frozen. The expansion of the Soviet system into Central and East-
ern Europe in 1945 created a sense of threat that led the United States to accept, once again,
some responsibility for European security. In 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
(NATO) was formed. In 1954 the Soviet Union established its own alliance, building on the
control it had already established over its satellite states in Europe. The positive peace that de-
veloped in Western Europe was therefore dependent upon the security provided by the At-
lantic Alliance. Any temptations for the West Germans to look east rather than west for their
political and economic relationships were cut off by the Iron Curtain, the line across the conti-
nent that separated the two ideological and military blocs. This is why democracy was such an
aggravating factor in the Cold War. This history helps explain the enthusiasm, once there was
a chance to heal the fracture that had divided the continent, to do this on the basis of bringing
democracy to the former communist states.
But even in Europe, where this effort was generally successful, there were reasons for
caution. In the Balkans, for example, violence and instability resulted from a combination of
moves to independence and democracy with nationalism and disputes over borders. There
were other demonstrations of problems with a capitalist peace with transitions from closed
economic systems to open systems that lacked the rule of law and so were susceptible to cor-
ruption. Jack Snyder noted how democratisation could produce nationalism ‘when powerful
elites within a nation need to harness popular energies to the tasks of war and economic de-
velopment’.23 A US government task force pointed to states in transition, or not quite democ-
racies, as being prone to conflict, especially when political participation was tied to parochial
interests:

By far the worst situation in terms of risks of instability were for a political landscape that combined deeply polar-
ized or facionalized competition with open contestation. The combination of a winner-take-all parochial approach
to politics with opportunities to compete for control of central state authority represents a powder keg for political
crisis.24

106
 Almost as the theory of the democratic peace was propounded, states becoming democra-
cies experienced conflicts and inner violence. In this way the question of democratisation be-
came linked with the other great issue of the 1990s—the apparent surge in the number of civil
wars.

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 [ 13 ]

New Wars and Failed States

A state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical
force within a given territory.
MAX WEBER, Politics as a Vocation, December 19181

We noted in Chapter 5 the aftershocks of the First World War as old states suffered up-
heavals and new states were created. Something similar happened after the Second World
War, in some cases with the same countries. A civil war in Greece continued until 1947. Yu-
goslavia only held together amid severe factional fighting, which combined elements of both
ideology and ethnicity.2 The most substantial and enduring upheavals took place in the over-
seas empires of European powers. After 1945 there was little that they could do to hold on to
their colonies. Their early military failures against Germany and Japan had robbed them of
their aura of irresistible power. They lacked the energy and resources to hold back popular
movements. Some tried more than others, taking and inflicting many casualties in doing so.
The French fought bloody wars in their efforts to hold on to Indochina and Algeria. Eventu-
ally they gave up. It took just about thirty years to complete the decolonisation process. Portu-
gal fought on the longest, until the strain of its colonial wars brought down its autocratic
regime in 1974.
The end of empire meant that there were many more states. The United Nations grew
from its 51 original members to the current 193. Of these new states, some fought with each
other, but many more suffered conflict inside their borders.3 Thus side by side with the Cold
War, marked by ever-closer relations among the Western democracies, there was another
process—decolonisation, of which arguably the implosion of European communism was the
culmination.

A NUMBER OF THE NEW STATES SUFFERED FROM CHRONIC instability and consequential vio-
lence. By the mid-1990s this violence seemed to be unusually intense and widespread and
was attracting attention. Though the risk of great-power war had eased, other types of war
now dominated the news. The good news, as a retired US Marine general told Congress in
1999, was that: ‘the days of armed conflict between nation-states are ending’.4 The bad news
was that this was combined with a sudden upsurge of unusually nasty and vicious conflicts.
One study claimed that 92 out of 108 armed conflicts identified during the 1990s involved or-
ganised communal groups, fighting each other or the government.5 From the 1980s on there
were between 15 and 25 countries suffering from civil war at any single point in time.6

108
 Mary Kaldor announced the arrival of what she prosaically described as ‘New Wars’ by
contrasting them with the old wars that had gone before by reference to their goals and financ-
ing. The new wars arose out of ‘national, clan, religious or linguistic’ conflicts, made possible
because of the ‘disintegration or erosion of modern state structures’,7 and were fought with
the methods of guerrilla warfare and insurgency. Others also noted the changes, even if they
expressed it differently. Kalevi Holsti referred to ‘Peoples’ Wars’, fought by ‘loosely knit
groups of regulars, irregulars, cells, and not infrequently by locally-based warlords under little
or no central authority’, to be contrasted with ‘organised armed forces of two or more states’.
Former NATO Commander Sir Rupert Smith declared that ‘war no longer exists’ when un-
derstood as ‘battle in a field between men and machinery’; and as ‘a massive deciding event
in a dispute in international affairs’. Instead there had been a shift to ‘war among the people’,
often involving non-state actors and apparently never-ending.8 Martin van Creveld wrote of a
‘new form of armed conflict developing’, marked by ‘much smaller, less powerful and, in
many ways, more primitive political entities similar to those existing before 1648’.9
There were reasons to question the novelty. Many past conflicts took place largely within
divided or fragile states, saw vulnerable groups set upon to the point of mass murder, created
opportunities for criminals and adventurers as well as political activists, and involved uncon-
ventional military methods.10 In addition, many that were prominent in the 1990s had their
origins well before the end of the Cold War and reflected weaknesses left over from the post-
1945 decolonisation.11
Nor was it the case, as Kaldor claimed, that these wars were unique in their viciousness.
‘At the turn of the twentieth century’, she reported, ‘the ratio of military to civilian casualties
in wars was 8:1. Today, this has been almost exactly reversed; in the wars of the 1990s, the
ratio of military to civilian casualties is approximately 1:8.’12 The claim that past wars barely
touched civilians was without foundation. For current wars others made similar claims. In
1996 the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reported: ‘In the later decades of this
century the proportion of civilian victims has been rising steadily; in World War II it was two-
thirds and by the end of the 1980s it was almost 90 percent.’13 This was a statistic with a pow-
erful political impact but also without sources.14
The claims could be traced to a 1991 paper detailing deaths and refugees in 36 major
armed conflicts ongoing in 1988–89, which stated that of ‘over five million people… killed in
the major armed conflicts’ about 4.4 million—or almost 90 per cent—were civilians. The
analysis, however, was flawed. It added to those who had died those who had been uprooted
by the conflicts. Once this item was excluded then the number of those left dead or injured as
civilians was around 60 per cent.15 A 1989 study had suggested that the proportion of civilian
war-related deaths since 1700 had been consistently around 50 per cent.16 When the Interna-
tional Committee of the Red Cross produced its own estimates in 1999 it reported that be-
tween 30 and 65 per cent of conflict casualties were civilian.17 Studies of the 1992–1996 con-
flict in Bosnia gave figures for war-related deaths of 97,207, broken down into 39,684 (41 per
cent) civilians and 57,523 (59 per cent) soldiers.18 So while civilian deaths were at terrible
levels they had not risen to an unprecedented height.
Yet there were differences between the newer civil wars and those that had gone before.
Past civil wars had often been conducted as if they were interstate wars (as with the American
and Spanish Civil Wars) with forces organised on regular lines.19 Even campaigns starting
with volunteer militias relying on ambushes and terrorism sought to graduate at some point to
an army sufficiently disciplined and well-equipped to defeat that of a state. Only rarely was
there a reluctant peace agreement between the belligerents, brokered by outsiders. Govern-
ments were reluctant to accept deals which by definition meant compromises with rebels.

109
They preferred to crush their enemies. Rebels were equally reluctant to prop up illegitimate
regimes. On one count, between 1946 and 1989 only twelve civil wars ended in a peace
agreement while eighty-two ended in a military victory for either the government or the
rebels. Although the shift was not abrupt between 1990 and 2005, twenty-seven wars ended in
peace agreements while only twenty ended in a military victory.20 If they ended with agree-
ment that was not normally because of a sudden embrace of reason by the warring parties and
a desire to put an end to the bloodshed, but because they were exhausted. The record of agree-
ments holding was poor and violence was often resumed. The distinguishing feature of many
of the wars highlighted during the 1990s (and which continue to this day) was their length, the
inability of either side to bring them to a conclusion, and the extent to which the international
community, with mixed success, tried to do so.21

AS INTEREST DEVELOPED QUICKLY IN THE TOPIC, IT BECAME apparent that despite the long his-
tory of civil wars, their academic study remained in its infancy. While interstate wars had
been subjected to intense theorising the same could not be said about intrastate wars. The es-
sential texts of international relations were preoccupied with great powers, and the databases
were geared to interstate wars. As civil wars began to attract attention, the gap in knowledge
and understanding became painfully evident. In 1993 the German commentator Hans Magnus
Enzensberger observed that there was ‘no useful Theory of Civil War’. Sixteen years later
David Armitage reported that these conflicts, though more common than those between states,
lasting longer and afflicting more people, were still an ‘impoverished area of inquiry.’22 Bill
Kissane described it as ‘a surprise, and an omission worthy of contemplation’, that civil wars
had ‘been ignored by political philosophy’, which he put down to the greater hold of interstate
war, the importance of revolutionary theory when looking at tensions within states, and dis-
taste for fratricide.23 To the extent that there were theories, they went back to the classics on
politics and the state, to Hobbes with his Leviathan bringing order out of the state of nature
and then on to the democratic theories about how to combine order with continuing consent.
There was little written about internal order as an intractable problem. It was one that it
was assumed could normally be solved, whether through coercion or consent, and that cases
where it broke down were exceptional. Thus theories of economic development barely men-
tioned the importance of security. The awkward features of many post-colonial countries,
from one-party rule to human rights abuses, were excused on grounds of immaturity or as-
sumed to be a painful early stage on the progressive road to development. The rule was not to
interfere but to let states make their own mistakes, recover from them as best they could, and
mature in their own time. The American preoccupation with wars of national liberation in the
1960s had prompted some research. This was skewed by Cold War considerations, including
the assumption that these wars were externally directed, and fuelled by socialist promises
rather than by angry nationalism. This effort fizzled out after the departure from Vietnam in
the 1970s, although there were still ongoing conflicts that were vicious in their own terms and
were capable of drawing in the major powers. Those who had been sympathetic to the wars of
national liberation tended to concentrate on the study of revolutions, which were more heroic
though also less frequent than civil wars. Challenges to authority were understood in terms of
responses to oppression.24 The Correlates of War Project, having made little effort to gather
data on civil wars, though there were five times as many as interstate wars after 1945, belat-
edly appreciated that this needed to be remedied.25
The 1990s saw ‘a boom in the study of civil war’.26 But the sudden interest and the past
neglect meant that there was no dominant single, established disciplinary approach or model
that could claim to encompass the causes, conduct, and consequences of all civil wars. There

110
was nothing to compare with realist theories of the state system or idealist proposals about
how to reform it. The sheer variety of ways in which internal order might break down chal-
lenged those attempting to construct a universal theory. The databases improved, but these
were conflicts in which the military, civilian and criminal spheres often merged, and in which
the notion of ‘battle deaths’ was ambiguous. Engagements were often localised and small-
scale. Fighters spent much of their time as civilians. The questions of what should be mea-
sured and what could be measured were difficult, especially in volatile situations in which
data gathering could be hazardous and unreliable. Though civil wars shared a number of fea-
tures, there were often many distinctive aspects which limited their comparability, including
the interaction with neighbouring states, which often had their own conflicts. A mass of mate-
rial came through but the analytical findings were often partial and contradictory, varying ac-
cording to the weight placed on structural or domestic factors. Some theorists saw the issue
largely in terms of which states were more or less prone to internal violence; others wanted to
dig deeper into the motivations and character of those causing the violence. Depending on the
studies consulted, the degree of ethnic heterogeneity or of democratic reform could be aggra-
vating or mitigating factors.27
The early post-1990 scholarship was influenced by the established state-centric approach
of international relations, that is instead of looking up from the level of the state to the wider
system they looked down to conflict below, and often did so with a similar conceptual frame-
work.28 It took time before serious investigations began on sub-state actors in their own
right.29 Over time the best studies were those that kept the statistical work on tap rather than
put it on top, combining it with field work and archival research. As a result their conclusions
were often less clear-cut, but they were more reliable.

IT WAS THE SUPERFICIAL FEATURES OF THE NEW WARS—THEIR savagery, ethnic polarisation,
and links with criminal activity—that initially attracted most comment. This led to a focus on
the factors that led to states falling apart. In June 1992 UN Secretary-General Boutros
Boutros-Ghali produced a report, An Agenda for Peace, which among many issues addressed
the problems of ‘post-conflict peace-building’, seeking ‘action to identify and support struc-
tures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into con-
flict.’30 The next year, in arguing for new forms of UN trusteeship to support states that
clearly could not cope, Gerald Helman and Steven Ratner opened their article with a dramatic
warning:

From Haiti in the Western Hemisphere to the remnants of Yugoslavia in Europe, from Somalia, Sudan, and
Liberia in Africa to Cambodia in Southeast Asia, a disturbing new phenomenon is emerging: the failed nation-
state, utterly incapable of sustaining itself as a member of the international community.… As those states descend
into violence and anarchy—imperiling their own citizens and threatening their neighbors through refugee flows,
political instability, and random warfare—it is becoming clear that something must be done.… Although alleviat-
ing the developing world’s suffering has long been a major task, saving failed states will prove a new—and in
many ways different—challenge.31

Others came to write of ‘collapsed states’,32 ‘troubled states’, ‘fragile states’, ‘states-at-
risk’, or just ‘weak states’. Fine distinctions might be made between these conditions, but the
basic idea remained that some states were a danger to themselves and their neighbours and
needed to be put into an international equivalent of intensive care. By 2002 US National Se-
curity Strategy, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, was observing
that ‘America is now threatened less by conquering states than by failing ones’.33

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 What did it mean to say that a state was failing? The German sociologist Max Weber’s
definition of statehood pointed to the importance of being able to monopolise violence and
exercise authority over a defined territory. The monopoly of legitimate force could be lost
without a fight, as the result of a military coup or because the army refused to suppress non-
violent protests such as food riots or strikes. Whenever a regime faced trouble because of pop-
ular unrest, an outright rebellion, an attempted coup, or a secessionist movement, the loyalty
of the armed forces could soon come to the fore as a key issue. Should violent challenges to
the state reach a point where the main mission of government forces lay in beating them off
then it was a civil war. Either the rebellions prospered or were suppressed.
The territorial side of the equation, and whether wars were between or within states, de-
pended on how borders were drawn. Those that were ‘not drawn along previously existing in-
ternal or external administrative frontiers’ were particularly likely to lead to disputes, along
with ‘borders that lack standing under international law’. As Toft observed, because people
identified with territory, and cared more about their homeland than other sorts of land, ‘wars
over territory tend to last longer and be more difficult to resolve than wars fought over other
issues’.34 For this reason much of the explanation for the ‘new wars’ lay in the way that bor-
ders had been set and states had been formed after 1945.
The basic principle adopted by the UN was that borders should be fixed and the new
states resulting from decolonisation should stick with inherited colonial borders. Certainly
when attempts were made to divide up countries to accommodate distinctive communities or
ideologies, the results were not encouraging. For example there were two acts of decolonisa-
tion in 1947 for which Britain was responsible and which left questions of borders unre-
solved. The partitioning of the Indian Raj between India and Pakistan and of Palestine be-
tween Israel and the Arabs caused immediate conflict and led to a series of wars that may not
yet be concluded. The ideological divisions of Germany and Korea between pro-Western and
pro-Soviet regimes provided the most dangerous issue in Cold War Europe and a vicious war
in East Asia, also not yet settled, well over sixty years after a ceasefire. In these cases the ten-
sions between communities turned into interstate wars. When the tensions had to be accom-
modated within established borders then the risk was of a civil war.

THE INTERACTION BETWEEN STATE CAPACITY, FIXED BORDERS, and political tensions could be
seen most sharply in Africa. The continent experienced rapid decolonisation from the 1950s,
and a series of wars that tended to be large, enduring, and complex. From the 1960s to the end
of the Cold War, while there were ten civil wars there were still eight interstate wars. Since
1960 at any time as many of a third of all African states were experiencing a degree of inter-
nal conflict. During the early 1990s the continent’s conflicts were regularly counted as the
most destructive of the ‘new wars’. On some estimates by the end of the decade Africa ac-
counted for as many as 80 per cent of the world’s conflict deaths.
The principles that shaped decolonisation followed the UN Charter, and so stayed with
established borders and deflected demands for self-determination. In 1960, as the process
gathered pace with thirty-seven new states having come into existence in Asia, Africa, and the
Middle East, the UN General Assembly issued its landmark declaration ‘on the Granting of
Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples’. This confirmed that self-determination was
about introducing self-government to colonies on the basis of existing borders and not about
accepting the territorial claims of distinctive nationalities. There was to be no support for se-
cession.
What was missing too often was state capacity. During colonial times these countries
were occupied, exploited, and administered by foreigners. Until late in the day the authorities

112
tended to suppress demands for independence rather than prepare the people for government.
The leaders and bureaucrats of the newly independent states rarely had much experience, their
previous careers spent in either minor roles in colonial governments or political agitation.
These deficiencies might have been remedied by a longer and more careful transition to self-
government, but this was rejected as patronising and an argument for delaying independence.
In its 1960 declaration the General Assembly insisted that the capacity for self-government
should not be a decisive criterion (although that had been the position in the UN Charter). In-
stead: ‘inadequacy of political, economic, social or educational preparedness should never
serve as a pretext for delaying independence.’35 At any rate, once it was clear that indepen-
dence was coming there was no incentive for the coloniser to stay.
Just as the great powers ‘scrambled’ to colonise Africa in the nineteenth century, during
the 1950s they began to ‘unscramble’ in haste. One striking feature of the period from scram-
bling to unscrambling was how little the borders of Africa’s fifty-five countries changed.36
This was despite their arbitrariness. Colonial authorities had drawn them with scant respect
for ethnography or geography, and an exaggerated appreciation for straight lines. In describ-
ing the process, Lord Salisbury noted:

We have been engaged in drawing lines upon maps where no white man’s foot ever trod. We have been giving
away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew ex-
actly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were.37

Yet these borders were confirmed in the early twentieth century in order to manage the
competing claims of Great Britain, France, Belgium, and Germany, and then again in 1963 by
the Organization of African Unity (OAU). The members of the OAU pledged ‘to respect the
frontiers existing on their achievement of national independence.’
The OAU also set a clear norm that any attempt to break up these states must be discour-
aged. When the first serious test came—as Biafra sought to break away from Nigeria in the
late 1960s—the OAU swung its weight behind the central government in Lagos. Despite the
hardships caused by the war, the OAU in 1967 condemned all attempts at secession. In this
way the logic of self-determination was contained. Governments resisted demands from dis-
gruntled minorities for greater autonomy and even secession. Statehood took precedence over
nationhood.
As countries kept their territorial formation, economic weaknesses and social tensions de-
veloped and struggled to find political resolution. This created what Robert Jackson described
as an unparalleled situation in which states, however chaotic internally, could still assume that
they would not face external aggression or even lesser forms of intervention. They were
‘quasi-states’, able to enjoy ‘the possibility of international legal existence as a sovereign en-
tity (juridical statehood) in the absence of internal socio-political existence as an effective
state (empirical statehood)’.38 Their statehood was not underpinned by a robust and collective
sense of nationhood.
No state followed the same political path, but certain pathologies soon became evident.
Because they neither inherited nor were able to construct the foundations for effective state
institutions, those in leadership positions, usually those who had led the campaigns for inde-
pendence, could not feel secure. In the first instance, the prestige of charismatic leaders and
pride in independence allowed little space for credible opposition parties. Warnings about the
dangers of factions in the face of the big challenges of development helped rationalise one-
party rule. With entrenched power came the associated risks of patronage and corruption,
used to enrich the elite and buy off opponents. Other obvious, and some not-so-obvious, rivals

113
for power who could not be co-opted were taken out of local politics using exile, assassina-
tion, and imprisonment.
Many of the first generation of leaders managed this effectively and those that succeeded
often had decades in power.39 For others any sense of security produced by such measures
was temporary. Africa’s armed forces were largely organised on traditional European lines, at
first often officered by Europeans, but small and ill-equipped. As the politicians sought to re-
form them and sometimes to suppress opponents, civil-military relations could become tense.
With no alternative political outlets, military leaders began to take matters into their own
hands. There were thirty-eight successful coups in Africa between 1963 and 1978.40 Though
these would be presented as saving the country, other motives were usually present, from per-
sonal ambition to fear of an imminent purge. Because of this risk, loyalty as opposed to com-
petence was the key criterion when governments chose military chiefs. This did little for the
operational effectiveness of the armies, as unity of command was discouraged and elite units
were held back to protect the government.
Grievances were left unaddressed. Minority tribal groups could feel excluded, lacking
representation in central government and experiencing discrimination in allocation of rev-
enues. As a result regions could become disaffected and occasionally in open revolt: with
their limited capacities and political distractions, armies were not always effective in putting
them down and in their efforts to try could make matters worse. None of this was helpful to a
country’s economic development. Unaccountable power and the need to look after supporters
encouraged corruption. When the Cold War ended only five sub-Saharan states were consid-
ered partially democratic.
In such unpromising settings, the demands of political survival shaped the policies of
leaders. At a minimum it was necessary to keep control over the capital city. A rebellion in a
distant region might be ignored, but once a government was ousted from the most iconic state
buildings, and unable to broadcast directly to the population, it was lost. The next priority
after the capital was revenue-generating regions even if that meant starving other areas of
funds. The location of natural resources, whether oil fields, diamond mines, or other com-
modities, was a key factor in setting priorities for territorial control. Should all these measures
prove to be insufficient then it was necessary to get external support. Rotten regimes could be
kept going by external finance, supplies of military hardware, and training, and, in extremis,
foreign troops. But then rebels might also get external support. Through ‘transnational al-
liances’, neighbouring leaders might see an opportunity to gain influence over an adjacent re-
gion or access to some key resources. They might support groups with whom they had some
affinity while denying sanctuary to their own rebel groups. In earlier times they might have
conquered relevant territory, but this was now precluded by the norms of fixed borders and
non-aggression.41 In many cases it was therefore more appropriate to talk of ‘regional war
zones’ than of civil wars, as groups and action moved without regard for national boundaries.
Borders had become progressively less relevant.42

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 [ 14 ]

Ancient Hatreds and Mineral Curses

Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global
politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will
dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.
SAMUEL HUNTINGTON, ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, 19931

An early explanation of why there seemed to be an upsurge of conflict in the 1990s was that
what was being observed was not really new but merely the resuscitation of enmities with
deep roots. In 1993 Samuel Huntington challenged the optimism of his former student
Fukuyama. As ideological divisions faded, he argued, more basic factors would come into
play, reflecting distinctive cultures and traditions which had been built up over centuries. The
origins of these divisions were of less interest than their persistence, and their growing impor-
tance in the complex geopolitical setting of the post-colonial age. He did not deny the strength
of Western civilisation, but he assumed it had peaked.
The conflicting civilisations had religious roots, but the actual importance of religion was
unclear because religiosity could take many forms. Religion was an easy tag of identity, but
then assigned to groups of people who might exhibit minimal observance of any religious
practices it meant little. Religion could also refer to deeply held beliefs that shaped all aspects
of life. Unless one was separated from the other, the argument could easily become circular. If
some sort of religious identity could be attributed to all political actors then all conflicts soon
appeared to have had a religious cause.2 A more discriminating approach tended to undermine
Huntington’s thesis. It certainly provided an unreliable explanation of past wars.3
As with Fukuyama the nuances of the argument were lost as his title, The Clash of Civi-
lizations, turned into a slogan that appeared to capture the developing importance of national-
ism and cultural identity in the conflicts of the 1990s. It reinforced an impression that the
slaughter was nihilistic and almost instinctive, a reflection of ancient hatreds that consumed
whole communities. The implications of a centuries-old conflict was that it was probably
doomed to continue well into the future, and so little could sensibly be done to bring it to a
close.
The wars in the former Yugoslavia seemed to fit Huntington’s thesis because they indeed
took place in and about the fault lines of Europe, the meeting points of the old Austro-Hun-
garian and Ottoman empires, and of Catholicism, the Orthodox Church, and Islam, and where
national identities had been forged during the previous century with claims for self-determina-
tion. One of these claims, marked by a shot in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, had triggered

115
the First World War. Early in the 1990s people were being forcibly moved from their homes
because of their ethnicity—a process which came to be known as ‘ethnic cleansing’. This was
linked to comparable events in the region’s history, notably the Croatian Ustashe’s commit-
ment to ‘cleansing the terrain’ during the German occupation of Yugoslavia, the euphemism
employed in their assault against Serbs who were as often massacred as moved. This had been
followed by equally brutal attacks by Serbs on Croats after the Germans had retreated, if not
quite on the same scale.
So when comparable behaviour was observed in the 1990s there was an implication that
this was such a deep-rooted process that it would not reach a conclusion until ethnically ho-
mogenous areas had been created:

With no sizable minorities left within any state and with the warring factions securely walled off behind “na-
tional” boundaries, the best that can be hoped for is that the motors of conflict will be disabled and the fatal cycles
of violence that have marred Balkan history will finally have reached their end.4

Acting US Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger described the Yugoslav conflict as

irrational. Ethnic conflict, he explained, ‘is gut, it is hatred; it’s not for any set of values or
purposes; it just goes on.’5 In 1993 the author Robert Kaplan published his book Balkan
Ghosts which encouraged the view that the current conflicts emerged from a region ‘full of
savage hatreds, leavened by poverty and alcoholism’, emerging out of ‘a morass of ethnically
mixed villages in the mountains.’6 One implication was that there was really little to be done.
President Clinton’s reluctance to get involved in the conflict was said to be the result of read-
ing Kaplan’s book, which, it was noted, ‘pointed out that these people had been killing each
other in tribal and religious wars for centuries.’7
In an article that appeared in 1994, also read with approval by Clinton, Kaplan warned of
a ‘coming anarchy’. In place of nation states, he spoke of ‘an epoch of themeless juxtaposi-
tions, in which the classificatory grid of nation-states is going to be replaced by a jagged-glass
pattern of city-states, shanty-states, nebulous and anarchic regionalisms’. The prospect was
grim:

Future wars will be those of communal survival, aggravated or, in many cases, caused by environmental scarcity.
These wars will be subnational, meaning that it will be hard for states and local governments to protect their own
citizens physically. This is how many states will ultimately die.8

Later Clinton publicly regretted his embrace of the ‘ancient hatreds thesis’. In 1999, now
engaged in a campaign against the Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milošević over Kosovo, he
apologised for blaming conflict on ‘some Balkan disease’ of endless ethnic blood feuds based
on implacable hatreds. ‘I, myself, have been guilty of saying that on an occasion or two,’ he
remarked, ‘and I regret it now more than I can say.’9
Although the language often suggested that these conflicts were marked by neighbours
killing neighbours, the numbers involved were usually only a tiny proportion of the adult
male population. In addition, the victims were often moderates of the same grouping who op-
posed the extremists. Even when communities had a long history of mutual antagonism, it still
had to be explained why violence broke out between them at a particular time.10 In other con-
flicts with similar levels of tension, violence was avoided.
Thus one critique of the ‘ancient hatreds’ meme argued that what went on in Croatia and
Bosnia was not so much about a ‘frenzy of nationalism—whether ancient or newly inspired—
but rather from the actions of recently empowered and unpoliced thugs.’11 Warren Zimmer-

116
man, who had been the US Ambassador to Yugoslavia, observed how ‘the dregs of society—
embezzlers, thugs, even professional killers—rose from the slime to become freedom fighters
and national heroes.’12 That still begged the question of who had empowered the thugs. They
were used for a purpose.13 The more the analysis pointed to mutual loathing that welled up
from within society rather than something that had been encouraged and developed at an elite
level, the more it appeared insoluble ‘rather than a mitigatable, deliberate atrocity carried out
by an identifiable set of perpetrators.’14 This did not mean that it was always so easy to iden-
tify the perpetrators. Each of the parties had its own narrative to explain why its fight was jus-
tified and in accord with the principles of self-determination.15
The antecedents of the Bosnian conflict were long and complex, but the origins of the im-
mediate crisis lay in the instrumental use of nationalism by Slobodan Milošević as the presi-
dent of Serbia. This put pressure on the unity of Yugoslavia. As the country broke up, then
Serb strategy was to eliminate or expel the non-Serb population in Serb areas. The violence
was not random but deliberate. The ‘scale, range and consistency of the methods used’, ob-
served James Gow, ‘required significant coordination and planning’.16 Focusing on the elite
without consideration of the circumstances which gave their nationalism credibility could be
taken too far. It simplified the causes of the conflict and also flattered ‘a deeply held convic-
tion that people, like children, are generally good, and that as a consequence, bad behavior is
best explained by bad leaders, teachers, or parents’.17 Events in Yugoslava still needed to be
understood by reference to the country’s history, which provided the themes for the national-
ist messages, or the social structures which conditioned the response. Yet in the end it was
politics that led to the country’s devastation. Those seeking to resolve the conflict had to
make sense of this politics.
The conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere developed because certain political
and military leaders willed them, and not because of a popular clamour. As a civil war was es-
sentially a contest between repression and dissent, it was perhaps not surprising that an inten-
sification of both, and in particular repression by an insecure regime, provided one of the best
guides to the onset of civil war (although this could be a bit like saying that the appearance of
tumours is a guide to the arrival of cancer).18 Notably the Yugoslav wars were predicted. A
US National Intelligence Estimate of October 1990 observed, without qualification or dissent,
that: ‘Yugoslavia will cease to function as a federal state within one year and will probably
dissolve within two. Economic reform will not stave off the breakup.’ Bosnia was seen as the
‘greatest threat of violence’.19 The cohesion of a country with ‘six republics, five nationali-
ties, four languages, three languages, two alphabets, and one party’ had long been of concern.
Pessimism about Yugoslavia’s chances for survival had grown during the 1980s, and by 1990
the belief that the country could ‘muddle through’ was untenable. Yet this estimate led to no
action. Not all policymakers agreed, the diplomatic agenda was incredibly crowded with the
end of the Cold War and the Gulf conflict, but also the message was so stark that it pointed to
no levers to pull to prevent catastrophe. Unlike so many of the warnings discussed in this
book, this one implied no remedies.20

ONCE CONFLICT WAS UNDERWAY, A SENSE OF ETHNIC IDENTITY could grow and acquire a harder
meaning. There was no natural correspondence between ‘nation’ and ‘state, which is why ref-
erences to ‘nation-states’ were rarely accurate. A state was a legal construct, a nation, tribe, or
ethnic group was a social construct, less embedded or ‘primordial’ than often assumed.21
Many were of relatively recent origin, encouraged in the past by colonial governments as part
of strategies of divide and rule, or nurtured by angry intellectuals and opportunistic political
leaders. Yet whenever and however identities were constructed they could still become vital

117
facts of political life and, once mobilised, less malleable than supposed. They could not be al-
tered at will as political agendas changed, as if tensions could be intensified at one point but
then played down for the sake of a later harmony.
When governments acted on the basis of identity, especially in a discriminatory or repres-
sive fashion, then identity grew in salience.22 The longer conflict endured in one form or an-
other, the more past grievances, atrocities, and betrayals became part of the cultures of
groups, and prepared them for future rounds. Ethnic and religious diversity might not invari-
ably lead to war, but once war occurred these animosities were likely to be aggravated and
then linger. Moreover, those who spoke for the distinctive groups, even when they were cul-
pable for the original violence, were hard to exclude from any peacemaking process. They
could still demand to be part of the solution to a problem they had created. This is why in
practice the combined logic of an ethnic focus and the self-determination principle led to pro-
posals for partition and relatively homogenous statelets, and why ethnically polarised con-
flicts could be amongst the hardest to conclude, unless one side was actually comprehensively
defeated in war.23 When national groups were spread across states (for example the Kurds in
the Middle East) then a neighbour might do its best to prevent a defeat of those with a shared
identity. The interaction between social and political structures was therefore complex.
Nonetheless, the starting point for any understanding of the prevalence of civil wars and the
difficulty of resolving them lay in the weakness of states and the political exploitation of divi-
sion.24

AFRICA WAS A PRIME EXHIBIT IN ROBERT KAPLAN’S 1994 warning of a ‘coming anarchy’.
‘Africa’s immediate future could be very bad’, he reported, to the point where ‘foreign em-
bassies are shut down, states collapse, and contact with the outside world takes place through
dangerous, disease-ridden coastal trading posts’.25 In 2000 a headline in The Economist spoke
of ‘Hopeless Africa’.26 The continent displayed too many of the features that made civil war
more likely. In addition to chronically weak states there was poverty, inequality, and not
enough gainful employment for young men. Even the terrain seemed to suit guerrilla warfare,
offering sanctuary and opportunities for ambushes and occasional territorial gains.27
At the heart of much of the worst African violence was the Congo, the second largest
country in the continent and at its centre, with troubled countries all around it—including the
Central African Republic and South Sudan to the north, Rwanda to the east, and Angola to the
South, all of which had their own bloody wars. The area around the Congo basin was first es-
tablished as almost a private venture of King Leopold of the Belgians until it was taken over
by his government in 1908. After the country gained independence in 1960, a struggle devel-
oped among the different factions in the independence movement. This turned into a full civil
war, which lasted for five years, drawing in the Belgium government, which regularly sent
forces in to rescue expatriates, the superpowers, and the United Nations, offering an early
demonstration of the problems of establishing a peacekeeping force without a peace. After a
1965 coup Mobutu Sese Seko came to power in the Congo, which he renamed Zaire. With in-
efficient and corrupt armed forces and massive debt, this apparently strong state became hol-
low inside. Mobutu’s reach barely stretched beyond the capital Kinshasa. He exacerbated in-
tercommunal violence to divide potential opponents. Gradually its own troubles became inter-
twined with those of its neighbours.
Angola only achieved its independence in 1974, after which the three different guerrilla
groups who had been fighting the Portuguese began to fight each other. The Marxist MPLA
formed a government in the capital Luanda. Fearful of a Soviet gain the United States encour-
aged Zaire and South Africa to intervene on behalf of the two other groups, the FNLA and

118
UNITA. With Cuban help the MPLA kept hold of Luanda but were unable to establish control
over the rest of the country. After 1990, though superpower rivalries no longer fuelled the
civil war, it was sustained by the country’s mineral wealth, which factions used to fund their
armies. UNITA relied largely on the sale of diamonds. The conduct of the war, which lasted
until 2002, was appalling on all sides, with young men forced to fight and young women
raped and abducted. Nobody knows how many died. The figure of 500,000 usually cited is so
round that it indicates the uncertainty.
On the other side of the Congo was Rwanda, one of the smallest countries in Africa,
which, with neighbouring Burundi, had also been run by Belgium after they took over the
colony from Germany following the First World War. There was tension between the Hutu,
favoured by the Belgians, and the disadvantaged and disaffected Tutsi. The Hutu continued to
control the country, often with brutal methods, but found it difficult to suppress the Tutsi
whose militants often raided from neighbouring countries. After a military coup in 1973,
Juvénal Habyarimana took power and seemed to stabilise the country, but with a fast-growing
population competing for scarce land, tensions built up. A civil war began in 1990, as the re-
sult of a Tutsi insurgency led by Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), fully backed
by Uganda.28 There was a tentative ceasefire in 1993, but Habyarimana was killed in a plane
crash the next year. The radical Hutu regime in Kigali that replaced him unleashed the geno-
cide that killed some 800,000 Rwandans over three terrible months.
The interaction between the existing tensions within Zaire and the Rwandan conflict pro-
duced a perfect storm of murder and mayhem.29 Rwandans, including Hutu who had been in-
volved in the genocide, flowed across the border into Zaire. The new Rwandan government
worked with Uganda, Angola, and local Tutsi forces to take the offensive against the Mobutu
regime. Mobutu was eventually deposed in May 1997. Laurent-Desire Kabila formed a gov-
ernment, and the country became the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Kabila
lacked the strength to disarm the Hutu militias so Rwanda invaded again, joined by Burundi
and Uganda with their own concerns about rebels finding sanctuary in the DRC. Zimbabwe
and other members of the South African Development Community (Chad, Sudan, Lesotho,
and Namibia) backed Kabila. To complicate matters further Angola switched sides because
Kabila, unlike Mobutu, did not back UNITA.
This was now a hybrid conflict of extraordinary complexity, with breakaway factions, in-
ternecine disputes, and side deals. Foreign forces clashed with each other on DRC territory;
UN peacekeeping forces were put together and then failed to make any difference. Eventually
Kabila was assassinated, to be replaced by his son. A peace deal was signed between the DRC
and Rwanda in July 2002. A transitional government was formed the next year. Neighbours,
and in particular Rwanda, still worried about threats to their own stability and meddled con-
tinually. Conflict and violence remained routine.30

THE SOCIOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS OF CONFLICT, ADDRESSING ethnic and religious differences,

tended to be most in play with the wars in the Balkans. Though they certainly had relevance
for the wars in Africa, here economic explanations had more influence. Until the 1990s econ-
omists, even those working in the development field, gave little consideration to civil wars.
The textbooks contained few if any references to war and conflict. The field was about how to
raise the living standards of ordinary people in the developed world. Military coups and ex-
travagant arms purchases distorted economic priorities, and wars set back the development
process, but beyond that there seemed little to add. The priority was to give sensible advice to
states able to take it and the international bodies striving to help them develop. In 1994 Jack
Hirshleifer, observing how little attention economists had paid to the ‘dark side’ of human af-

119
fairs, of conflict, crime, revolution, and warfare, urged them to explore this whole ‘intellectual
continent’. Economists who did so, he added, ‘will encounter a number of native tribes––his-
torians, sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, etc.––who, in their various intellectually
primitive ways, have preceded us in reconnoitering the dark side of human activity.’ Betray-
ing something of the imperial tendencies of economics, he confidently anticipated that these
‘a-theoretical aborigines’ would soon be brushed aside.31
As economists began to make their first forays into the field, one particular issue grabbed
their attention—how unauthorised groups could take control of natural resources in weak
states to enrich themselves. The backdrop was a steady rise in the number of conflicts in pe-
troleum-rich and diamond-rich countries. Up to 1974 they occurred at a rate of about one a
year, but over the next eighteen years this moved up to just less than five a year. One obvious
reason was the rise in the number of petroleum-rich states following the 1974 OPEC price
rises, up from fifteen to forty-two by 1980. The incidence of violence involving these states
went up sharply. It then dropped down between 1985 and 1995, along with the oil price, be-
fore rising sharply again. Conflicts involving diamond producers also grew, notably after
1986. Another trend was an increase in the use of contraband by rebels, including gemstones,
timber, and narcotics. Contraband funding was evident in seven of ninety-two civil wars be-
ginning between 1945 and 1988, but then in eight of the thirty-six wars that began after
1988.32 In the DRC, Namibia’s president was alleged to be interested in protecting his fam-
ily’s mining interests while Chad had connections with Congolese gold mines. Zimbabwe was
owed money by Kabila and also appears to have seen economic opportunities in the DRC’s
diamonds, gold, and copper. (Zimbabwean troops congregated around important mining
towns). On the other side Rwanda and Uganda exploited territory to export diamonds.33

THE TRIGGER CONDITIONS FOR CIVIL WARS BECAME A MATTER of intense academic debate. An
influential study of 2003 by Fearon and Laitin argued that:

The conditions that favor insurgency—in particular, state weakness marked by poverty, a large population, and in-
stability—are better predictors of which countries are at risk for civil war than are indicators of ethnic and reli-
gious diversity or measures of grievances such as economic inequality, lack of democracy or civil liberties, or
state discrimination against minority religions or languages.

As in the past insurgencies had been marked by rural guerrilla warfare (although by this
time urban fighting was becoming more important) and this could be sustained by as few as
500 to 2,000 active guerrillas then what mattered was ‘whether active rebels can hide from
government forces and whether economic opportunities are so poor that the life of a rebel is
attractive to 500 or 2,000 young men’. According to this strand of thinking, civil wars were
almost entirely opportunistic, an unsurprising response to a set of conditions rather than a de-
liberate political project. This approach discouraged attempts to look beneath broad indicators
of a troubled society to attempt to understand the specific sources of conflict or pay any atten-
tion to sub-state actors. It played down the motives and aspirations of those doing the fight-
ing, as if any cause would do.34
Even when looking at motives it was possible to argue that people did not really care
what they said they cared about. Oxford economist Paul Collier led the way, working closely
with the World Bank, arguing that in explaining the incidence of internal conflicts, ‘greed’
was more important than ‘grievance’ and ‘loot’ more so than ‘justice’. The presence of nat-
ural resources, and in particular oil and diamonds, made countries particularly war prone.
There might be no surprises in finding tendencies to violence in countries that were struggling

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to raise their per capita income and experiencing severe inequalities, or that young men with
not much else to do were available for armies and gangs. What really made the difference,
Collier and his colleagues argued, was the opportunity to make money. Here was the incen-
tive for rebellion and the means by which a conflict could be sustained. The opportunity alone
was sufficient. ‘Our model suggests that what is actually happening is that opportunities for
primary commodity predation cause conflict.’35
The most depressing conclusion was that even if a particular conflict could be stopped,
unless ways could be found to generate a healthier pattern of economic development it would
recur. Collier suggested that some 40 per cent of countries that had suffered conflict returned
to violence again in the decade after fighting had supposedly been brought to a close. In a
World Bank report he noted:

Once a country stumbles into civil war, its risk of further conflict soars. Conflict weakens the economy and leaves
a legacy of atrocities. It also creates leaders and organizations that have invested in skills and equipment that are
only useful for violence. Disturbingly, while the overwhelming majority of the population in a country affected by
civil war suffers from it, the leaders of military organizations that are actually perpetrating the violence often do
well out of it.36

The power of greed could be overwhelming: ‘neither good political institutions, nor eth-
nic and religious homogeneity, nor high military spending provide significant defenses
against large-scale violence’.37 Later Collier went further, taking an even more deterministic
view. ‘Where rebellion is feasible it will occur: motivation is indeterminate, being supplied by
whatever agenda happens to be adopted by the first social entrepreneur to occupy a viable
need’.38 This line of argument was criticised as being ‘extremely reductionist, highly specula-
tive, and profoundly misleading’.39 Collier himself moved away from his focus on greed to
explore a wider range of factors, including the influence of culture.40
One key issue was how to explain the relationship between natural resources and con-
flict.41 Diamonds were important in only a few conflicts, which rendered attempts to gener-
alise from them unsafe.42 With oil, which had the most pernicious effects, the impact de-
pended on whether it was found onshore (offshore reserves had little impact on war prone-
ness) and then in relatively poor regions with marginalised ethnic groups. Oil wealth was also
used by autocracies to help them stay that way, and so encouraged corruption and repres-
sion.43 Depending on circumstances, the desire to take advantage of natural resources could
result in a coup, a secessionist movement, a local rebellion, intervention by a neighbour, ei-
ther directly or using proxies, forms of extortion so that rents could be collected from those in
charge of the resources, or permutations of these possibilities. In addition, what might happen
when raw material prices were high would be different to when they were low, especially in
countries over-dependent on a single commodity. Then grievances could develop as people
became suddenly poorer.
The implication of the economic focus was that a more balanced economy, with a decent
manufacturing sector, would be more stable—with less inequality, and more commerce
within a country. This related to a similar case to that made before 1914 about how the inter-
penetration of economies reduced incentives for war and so could be a force for peace.44 As
with the question of ethnicity the question of economic incentives was different when consid-
ering the origins of a war than how it was sustained. With all wars, between states as well as
within them, a failure to achieve a quick victory meant that the ability to finance and sustain a
military effort was as important as the ability to prevail in battle. With both types of war, op-
portunities were created for criminal activities, especially those engaged in smuggling and

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trafficking. With civil wars they could become more important than the notional issues at
stake. In this respect rebel groups could suffer just as much of a ‘resource curse’ as the states
they were subverting. Opportunities for loot helped in recruitment, but this was not the same
as a deep ideological commitment to the cause and loyalty to the organisation. In poorer envi-
ronments activists understood that there was to be a long struggle before they could expect to
benefit.45 When the resources were available, fighting groups took money from wherever they
could, plundering resources, trafficking in arms, drugs, people, and diamonds, as well as seek-
ing remittances from diasporas and siphoning off funds intended for humanitarian assistance.
David Keen described how

members of armed gangs can benefit from looting; and regimes can use violence to deflect opposition, reward
supporters or maintain their access to resources. Winning may not be desirable: the point of war may be precisely
the legitimacy which it confers on actions that in peacetime would be punishable as crimes.

For this reason ‘civil wars that appear to have begun with political aims have mutated into
conflicts in which short-term economic benefits are paramount.’46 This was one explanation
for the indecisiveness of contemporary civil wars: they were not resolved by battle and were
often sustained by crime.47

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 [ 15 ]

Intervention

The most pressing foreign policy problem we face is to identify the circumstances in which we should
get actively involved in other people’s conflicts.
PRIME MINISTER TONY BLAIR, Chicago, April 19991

Until Western countries started to intervene in developing civil wars in 1991 there was every
reason to suppose this was something they would be desperate to avoid, especially now that
there were no Cold War imperatives to support beleaguered clients. Both realism and interna-
tional law warned governments away from another’s domestic quarrels. The principle of non-
interference, embodied in the UN Charter, meant that other states could continue with annoy-
ing and provoking behaviour, causing economic costs and affronting cherished values, pro-
vided that they stayed within their own borders. Here the most vicious tyrannies enjoyed the
same rights as the most harmonious democracies. If this was uncomfortable, so too could be
engaging with distant and intractable disputes. These promised pain and frustration in return
for very little reward. Peace between states took priority over peace within states.
The strength of the international norm meant those who did intervene were chastised. In
1971 Indian action helped turn East Pakistan, which was fighting a vicious civil war with
West Pakistan, into Bangladesh. Eight years later Pol Pot’s ‘killing fields’ in Cambodia were
ended by a Vietnamese occupation. Also in 1979 Tanzania toppled Uganda’s tyrannical
leader Idi Amin. In all cases there was a net gain for human welfare (or more accurately a re-
duced net loss), though the interventions were explained largely on security grounds. Still
they were all condemned internationally for breaching the non-intervention norm.2 Although
Michael Walzer had made the case for intervention as early as 1977 in cases of the most
shocking crimes against humanity, arguing that individuals could be the victims of aggression
and not just states, this gained little traction until after the end of the Cold War.3 Even after
1990, Russia and China remained wary of self-determination, conscious of how it might be
applied to their own minorities.
Why then did Western attitudes shift so sharply? There were self-interested reasons: to
deal with risk to expatriate communities; to push back against pernicious and repressive ide-
ologies; and to prevent war-torn states serving as sanctuaries for terrorists as well as bases for
organised crime and various forms of trafficking, including drugs, arms, and people. Should
the intensity of the fighting drive people out of their homes, as was normal, refugees could put
an enormous burden on neighbouring states. There were, however, also ways of addressing
these problems without direct intervention, including policing borders, transferring arms and

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funds to the government, and sometimes to the rebels, and working to absorb refugees, or
help these people stay safe in their own countries. Civil wars certainly became more visible,
and TV channels were now able to reach distant places and send back images of suffering to
feed continuing news channels, such as CNN. Reports of atrocities and misery took the edge
off the optimism of 1990 and the hopes of a coming epoch of peace and good governance. It
was also a matter of capacity. The West now enjoyed a remarkable military preponderance,
with the US alone spending as much on its armed forces as the rest of the world combined. It
was in a position to act if it chose to do so.
The main reason for the sudden shift in gears, however, was a case in which it was hard
not to intervene. It began with the firm opposition to Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait in August
1990. The decision to use armed force to push Iraq out of Kuwait was remarkable in itself, but
it was also wholly consistent with established international norms, confirmed by a series of
UN resolutions. By March 1991 Kuwait had been liberated but Iraq was left as a unitary state
within its recognised borders and with the regime that had caused all the trouble still in place.
Frustrated, Shia and Kurdish areas exploded in rebellion, and this for a while rocked the
regime. Western forces did not intervene. Saddam Hussein had kept enough in reserve, and
the revolt was ruthlessly suppressed. This created a massive refugee crisis as Kurds tried to
flee from northern Iraq into Turkey and Iran. The initial reaction from the United States and
its allies was that this was not their business, and they had no obligation to get involved. For a
moment the non-interference norm held. But then it broke. The media in the area which had
been following the war were still around to record the plight of these displaced people and
note words that might have encouraged them to expect Western support.4 Eventually the US,
UK, and France accepted responsibility and successfully created a protected safe haven in
northern Iraq which allowed the Kurds to return to their homes.
This set a precedent. An intervention took place and was successful. Then almost imme-
diately tensions became evident in Yugoslavia. Again the Western instinct was to stay clear or
to confine the response to offers of mediation. But this was a significant part of Europe, from
which conflicts had spread in the past. The fighting was taking place in and around popular
holiday destinations. In addition, TV broadcasting meant that images of suffering populations
could be transmitted directly into living rooms. British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd ob-
served that ‘mass rape, the shooting of civilians, in war crimes, in ethnic cleansing, in the
burning of towns and villages’, were not novel. What was new was that ‘a selection of these
tragedies is now visible within hours to people around the world. People reject and resent
what is going on because they know it more visibly than before’.5 Faced with heartbreaking
depictions of tragedy there were demands that something must be done.
These demands grew as casualties mounted and the Serb-dominated Yugoslav govern-
ment appeared indifferent to UN resolutions demanding restraint. Furthermore, following
German unification and with the Soviet Union about to split into its component parts, there
was less certainty that existing territorial boundaries must be upheld at all costs. The principle
of self-determination made a return as an alternative basis for state-making to simple adher-
ence to established borders, no matter how arbitrary. Diplomatic pronouncements combined
talk of the ‘territorial integrity of States’ with the ‘equal rights of peoples and their right to
self-determination’. European governments together deplored acts of ‘discrimination, hostility
and violence against persons or groups on national, ethnic or religious grounds’. When awful
things were going on in the neighbourhood, these were ‘matters of direct and legitimate con-
cern to all participating States and do not belong exclusively to the internal affairs of the State
concerned.’6
After trying mediation, backed by economic sanctions and sporting bans, gradually West-

124
ern countries became more forceful. From tentative beginnings, first in Croatia and then in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, external involvement moved from unarmed monitors to lightly armed
peacekeepers to more robust land forces backed by air power. The British and French, leading
the intervention, were torn between their reluctance to get too involved and their growing
awareness that the humanitarian mission was constantly being undermined by their inability
to stop the fighting. After the massacre of Muslims in Srebrenica, with Dutch peacekeepers
stuck in a passive role, air strikes began against Serb positions, which also came under pres-
sure because of Croat and Muslim ground offensives. This was followed by an agreement
which divided Bosnia up and curtailed local Serb ambitions. Serbian leader Slobodan
Milošević’s focus then shifted to Kosovo, a province of importance to Serbian national iden-
tity yet populated largely by Muslims. His intention appeared to be to push them into neigh-
bouring territories. This time the response was much firmer. Starting in March 1999 NATO
engaged in an extended air campaign against Serbia, leading eventually to Milošević climbing
down.7

THE GUIDANCE THAT FLOWED FROM A NORM OF NON-INTERFERENCE was absolutely clear—it
meant doing nothing everywhere. Guidance for a norm of possible-interference was much
harder—it meant doing something somewhere. A whole range of possibilities was being
opened up without agreed rules or helpful precedents. When, where and how to intervene
would have to be worked out on a case-by-case basis. In April 1999 during the Kosovo cam-
paign British Prime Minister Tony Blair set down some pragmatic criteria that could provide
guidance: confidence in the case, exhaustion of diplomacy, plausible military options, readi-
ness for a long haul, and relevance to the national interest.8 Some cases might be clear-cut,
with credible military operations available. At other times the case might be more ambiguous
and the military options poor.
There was only limited, and generally unimpressive, experience on which to draw. There
were essentially two models available, neither of which breached the non-intervention norm.
The first was ‘aid to the civil power’. This required the use of regular armed forces to help a
government impose law and order because the police authorities were no longer up to the
task. This was the basis for the attempts to defeat independence movements during the colo-
nial period, and was the rationale for both the US in Vietnam and the Soviet Union in
Afghanistan. The problem in these cases came with a civil power with little legitimacy or in-
dependent strength. Success on this model therefore meant building up the local government
so that it could cope on its own, relying on its own armed forces and police. The British inter-
vention in Malaysia during the early 1960s, conducted in extremely favourable circumstances,
was an example of how such an effort might be successful.
The second model was peacekeeping. This had been developed by the UN and was
largely about using contingents of foreign troops to ensure that a ceasefire line held. The UN
exercise to try to bring peace to the Congo in the early 1960s had been so chaotic, including
the death of Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, that similar endeavours had been viewed
warily thereafter. In this model impartiality was the key: the troops were present with the con-
sent of the parties to the conflict. Unlike those aiding a civil power, when the upper limit on
force was determined by the strength of the insurgency, and conflict could resemble a conven-
tional war, the model for peacekeeping required forces that were non-provocative and there-
fore only lightly armed, with just enough for their own self-defence. By and large these forces
were successful when marking a clear ceasefire line, although these lines tended to become
fixed, which meant that the forces also became fixtures. The United Nations Peacekeeping
Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP) for example was introduced in 1964 and never left, waiting for a

125
definitive settlement between the Greek and Turkish communities. The peacekeeping model
was adopted for both interstate and civil wars, and not only by the UN but also by multina-
tional groups, as with the Sinai (after the Egypt-Israel peace agreement) and Beirut in the
early 1980s.9
It was the peacekeeping model that was first employed in the Yugoslav conflicts, requir-
ing impartiality and consent, and non-provocative forces. This was inadequate. There was no
peace to keep, and lightly armed forces could not impose a peace. In addition, their mandate
began to expand during the course of the conflict. The model was about keeping warring par-
ties apart. The mission in Bosnia increasingly came to be about protecting civilians, including
providing the sort of safe havens that had been found for the Kurds in northern Iraq in 1991.
The difficulty was that this involved taking sides. There were few purely humanitarian acts in
the midst of a war. An urgent need to send in a convoy of food and medical supplies to relieve
people caught in a besieged town undermined the strategy of those laying siege who wanted
those people to get desperate. When it came to brokering a ceasefire or better still a peace set-
tlement the starting point was normally impartiality. But recalcitrance by one side could result
in more coercive measures. The next step was to conclude that the only way to a satisfactory
peace was for one side to win. By this time the intervention had moved a long way from the
starting mission. As, for all these reasons, the old peacekeeping model came under increasing
strain the talk was of ‘second-generation peace-keeping’ or ‘wider peace-keeping’ and then
‘peace support’ until eventually it was not clear that peace as such was present or obtainable,
so the aim came to be ‘stabilisation operations’.10
By the late 1990s intervention for humanitarian purposes had become not only acceptable
but also almost mandatory.11 In 1999 the UN Secretary-General reported for the first time on
the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict.12 The interventionist norm was captured by the
assertion of a ‘responsibility to protect’.13 Soon this was being invoked with such regularity
that it even had its own shorthand (R2P). The focus on individual responsibility for war
crimes was reflected in a new International Criminal Court (ICC), which began its work in
2002.
In 2003 the African Union, formerly the Organization for African Unity, was constituted
with a new act. This encouraged ‘respect for democratic practices; good governance, rule of
law, protection of human rights, and fundamental freedoms; and respect for the sanctity of
life.’ It established ‘the right of the Union to intervene in a Member State pursuant to a deci-
sion of the Assembly in respect of grave circumstances, namely: war crimes, genocide and
crimes against humanity.’ The next year a UN ‘High-Level Panel’ endorsed the ‘emerging
norm’ that there was a right of ‘military intervention [as a] last resort’.14 In a document
agreed by the General Assembly in 2005, the international community was to take ‘responsi-
bility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against
humanity’. 15
As the need to protect civilians took centre stage it was evident that the protectors would
need to be able to act robustly. This meant putting peacekeeping forces into dangerous and
difficult situations, with all the inherent problems of funding, command structures, and multi-
nationalism. In a mission to Sierra Leone in October 1999, UN peacekeepers were mandated
‘to afford protection to civilians under imminent threat of physical violence’.16 When describ-
ing in October 2014 yet another mission to deal with violence in the Democratic Republic of
the Congo, its head told the Security Council: ‘the protection of civilians is more than a man-
dated task, it is our raison d’etre in the DRC and a moral imperative of the UN’.17
The more African countries were contributing peacekeeping forces in their own region,
the more their own interests in influencing outcomes became apparent. The idea that peace-

126
keepers should come from the region was encouraged for Africa, by both the local nations and
the Security Council. The advantages in terms of cost and ease of deployment, and a readiness
to get involved, were evident. But this could be a mixed blessing.

While some may argue that this is all the better for promoting “African solutions to African problems”, this can
have negative consequences for African citizens, including exposing them to poorly paid and resourced troops
with low levels of training and little respect for civilians; further entrenching despotic regimes; or regionalising
existing conflicts.18

As with armies away from home through the centuries, sexual activity added to the mis-
ery of the communities that were supposedly being helped. This was especially true at a time
when HIV-AIDS was spreading. Peacekeeping forces were one means by which it spread, in-
cluding back to the contributing country.19
At times also they offered a promise of safety that they could not deliver. Thus in the
DRC after 2006 the UN force appeared as an ally of the government, but this meant an associ-
ation with an army that was still ill-disciplined and predatory.20 As a threatened population
moved in large numbers towards the UN camps for protection, they made themselves more
rather than less vulnerable. It was not only in the DRC but also the Central African Republic
and South Sudan, that when UN troops were ‘thinly spread out, logistically hamstrung and
devoid of reserves and critical force multipliers’, the locations where the desperate people
gathered ‘provided attractive targets for attack.’ In this respect there was a risk of the interna-
tional effort aggravating rather than easing the conflict trap.

DESPITE THE EVIDENT FAILURES THERE WERE INTERVENTIONS that worked. In 2000 Britain
helped stabilise Sierra Leone as a result of a somewhat opportunist but still successful inter-
vention.21 Despite the presence of a UN force, a rebel group was advancing on the capital
Freetown. The British government sent a team to prepare to evacuate foreign citizens, which
meant securing the airport. This by itself appeared to have a stabilising effect and soon the
British army was working with Sierra Leone forces to push the rebels back. As this operation
led to the rebels being disarmed and disbanded it was widely taken as a vindication of human-
itarian interventions and a demonstration of the potential of a small number of highly profes-
sional regular soldiers when taking on less-well-organised militias.
In Liberia the bloody regime of Charles Taylor, which had supported the rebels in Sierra
Leone, in part by illegal smuggling of diamonds and timber, eventually buckled as rebel
groups put his forces under severe pressure. He fled to Nigeria, opening the way for a democ-
ratic government, a UN peacekeeping force to provide security, and his indictment for war
crimes at the ICC. In 2011 French and UN forces worked together to ensure that the success-
ful winner of the Ivory Coast’s election was able to take power against the resistance of the
defeated incumbent, although their rationale also involved protecting civilians against atroci-
ties committed by both sides. The next year Islamist movements began to make their appear-
ance as a serious destabilising factor in Africa. One succeeded in gaining control of northern
Mali. At the start of 2013 a French intervention helped the Mali government defeat the Is-
lamists.
Peacekeeping operations could reduce the risk of a relapse into war, but it depended on
the type. Unsurprisingly, a peace was more likely to last if it had consent rather than if it was
imposed. Operations with consent were more effective if they were forceful in their methods.
Weak operations with limited consent were, again unsurprisingly, likely to fail.22 Much de-
pended on the grasp of the local situation, the ability to work with other missions on such

127
tasks as promoting the rule of law and economic development, the degree of support given by
neighbouring states, and the success in demobilising militias.23
The negative stories risked obscuring positive achievements. In a critique of the critics,
Roland Paris argued that there was a strong case still to be made for ‘liberal peace-building’,
included the promotion of representative governments. He warned of the consequences of
conflating those efforts that had followed the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan with those
that had followed negotiated settlements, and warning of over-simplifying endeavours that
were morally complex and exaggerating the imperial overtones.24 The need was to learn from
experience and adapt practices rather than abandon the enterprise altogether.

FOR EIGHT YEARS THE FRENCH DIPLOMAT JEAN-MARIE GUÉHENNO served as the head of peace-
keeping for the United Nations, with a later spell working on a UN mission to Syria. In his
memoir he described his first day in the office on 1 October 2000 with senior figures from the
UN and those who had been involved in its most prominent operations in recent years. As
they reviewed their record it was mixed. The end of the Cold War had meant that it was easier
to get Security Council approval for new missions, and it had also provided an opportunity to
settle some of the lingering conflicts of the past, including in Cambodia, Namibia, Mozam-
bique, and El Salvador, in which the UN ‘blue helmets’ had been able to help consolidate the
peace.
But then things had gone wrong within Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Somalia where the
peacekeepers had ended up as bystanders to tragedies, ineffectual when the moment came. By
1999 this had cast such a cloud over the organisation that it was assumed that the UN might
have had its day. Yet UN members suddenly agreed to three new missions, which had pro-
vided a new impetus. These were in two areas that had fought to break away from central rule
—Kosovo in Serbia and East Timor in Indonesia. The third was in the DRC. All had revealed
problems—with lines of command from the HQ in New York that inhibited those with field
responsibility and budgets that could not be stretched to include all the development work that
needed to go hand in hand with keeping the peace.
Guéhenno quoted another Frenchman, Bernard Kouchner, who had been in charge of the
UN effort in Kosovo, explaining how ‘humanitarian interventions are political interventions’.
The most humanitarian act was to fix the politics, but that could not mean forgetting the need
to fix injustice.25 Here was the core problem of peacemaking at any level. Peace required a
political settlement, but was that to be based on a calculation of the balance of power at the
time, or a sense of the rights and wrongs of the conflict, which might address the underlying,
and probably still simmering, grievances that had led to the conflict? There was also the issue
of whether the UN was now to become the effective government of these war-torn countries
or was to work on restoring sovereignty as soon as possible, and get in place an effective gov-
ernment.
The urgency of 2000 had dissipated by the middle of the decade. The Security Council
was more divided than it had been since the end of the Cold War, making life difficult for
those who had to get the organisation working to support those in the field. Moreover, a con-
troversial UN mission to Iraq after the US-led invasion came to a sad close when one of the
UN’s most experienced figures, Sergio Vieira de Mello, was killed along with twenty-two
colleagues by an act of terrorism. The mission in the DRC had lost credibility and suffered its
own scandal when peacekeepers were accused of widespread sexual abuse, yet new missions
had been agreed in Haiti and Côte d’Ivoire overstretching the organisation. Duties had been
added without the extra resources to enable them to be met.
Back in 2000 the senior UN official Lakhdar Brahimi had urged caution. The Security

128
Council should contain its ambition, avoiding sending peacekeeping missions unless there
was a peace to keep, and setting tasks with mandates marked by clarity, credibility, and
achievability.26 Yet soon, and against the backdrop of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’, twenty-
one new operations were established.27 Brahimi’s guidance was largely ignored. It was too
tempting to use these missions to signal resolve, appearing to take action while doing little to
ensure success.28 There was no cost in expressing ambition, only in trying to realise it. West-
ern interventions had fared little better. Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan achieved a stable peace.
Although a degree of order had been brought to both countries by 2011 in neither case was
the political order stable enough to cope as Western forces withdrew. Another intervention
that year in Libya, with UN backing, faltered.
In 2015, like de Madriaga over eighty years earlier, Guéhenno looked back ruefully to an
international community that could never have the cohesion of a national community, and
could authorise noble ends but not always the means to achieve them.

Grand plans were elaborated and immense hopes were generated among the people we had suddenly decided to
help. But hope was often dashed, and we then faced resentment if not outright hostility, while on the home front,
ambition has been replaced by a pressing desire to pack up and leave.29

The problem was not a lack of need or value, but too many disappointing experiences.

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 [ 16 ]

Counter-Insurgency to Counter-Terrorism

They did not know the simple things: a sense of victory, or satisfaction, or necessary sacrifice. They did
not know the feeling of taking a place and keeping it, securing a village and then raising the flag and
calling it victory. No sense of order or momentum. No front, no rear, no trenches laid out in neat paral-
lels. No Patton rushing for the Rhine.… They did not have targets.… They did not know strategies….
They did not know how to feel… they did not know which stories to believe.… They did not know good
from evil.
TIM O’BRIEN, Going after Cacciato,1 1978

While the British and French had embraced the interventionist role, the United States had
been much more cautious. One reason for this was the shadow cast by the long war in Viet-
nam. The outcome troubled the collective conscience, not only about the desolation of Viet-
nam and the impact of a communist victory but also about American losses and the poor treat-
ment of veterans. Those who had fought in Vietnam suffered pain and injury and yet could
not even find comfort in having played some part in a heroic struggle. Too much of what had
occurred was considered shameful. This traumatic experience became a vital reference point
in American culture, reflected in novels and movies that shaped both memories about what
this war had been about and expectations about what might happen if the US got involved in
similar wars in the future.
The Vietnam War was a product of the Cold War but this aspect tended to be missing
from its various fictional representations. The only movie that came out while the war was at
its height, and which did attempt to offer a rationale, was The Green Berets, directed by and
starring John Wayne. This was unabashed propaganda. Wayne had asked for government sup-
port so that ‘not only the people of the United States but those all over the world should know
why it is necessary for us to be [in Vietnam]’.2 In order to arrange government help Wayne
got involved in extended negotiations with the Pentagon who demanded that the war be por-
trayed fairly. This meant that by the time the film was eventually released in 1968 there were
very few Green Berets (special forces) left in Vietnam and the war had become deeply unpop-
ular at home. Wayne reprised his familiar role in Westerns as a decent but tough lawman,
fighting outlaws. He added a ‘hearts and minds’ aspect, promising the Pentagon that the film
would portray the professional soldier ‘carrying out his duty of death but, also, his extracur-
ricular duties—diplomats in dungarees—helping small communities, giving them medical at-
tention, toys for their children, and little things like soap, which can become so all-impor-
tant.’3 Even with the Westerns the simple dichotomy between goodies and baddies was histor-

130
ically dubious. With this conflict it was even more problematic.
After the war was over, and Saigon had fallen to the communists, a number of movies ap-
peared with a Vietnam theme which treated the actual fighting in an almost surreal fashion.
The war served as a backdrop for stories that could have been set at different times and
places. Michael Cimino, director of the Deerhunter (1978), which focused on Pennsylvanian
steelworkers caught up in the war, described it as having ‘little to do with the American expe-
rience in Vietnam …. It could be any war. The film is really about the nature of courage and
friendship.’ Francis Ford Coppola envisaged his Apocalypse Now (1979) as not necessarily
political but ‘about war and the human soul’. 4 Other movies were more realistic, but de-
scribed the war at the micro-level, far from considerations of grand strategy, as tests of char-
acter more than policy. The Boys in Company C (1978) emphasised the dehumanising basic
training and then the incompetence and callousness of the war. Its tag line was ‘To keep their
sanity in an insane war they had to be crazy’. Platoon (1986), reflecting director Oliver
Stone’s own experiences in Vietnam, described the experiences of an infantryman, and was
tagged with the line ‘The first casualty of war is innocence’. Hamburger Hill (1987) was
about seizing a piece of ground at immense cost, only for it then to be relinquished. Its tag
line was ‘War at its worst. Men at their best’. The cumulative effect was to reinforce anti-war
sentiment. They were not just about the discomforts and pain of combat but the lack of evi-
dent purpose. Jane Fonda, the anti-war activist, recalled crying with veterans as they watched
Platoon together. She told an interviewer: ‘A movie like this helps to insure that it [another
Vietnam] will never happen again.’5
In 1984, reviewing a number of novels to emerge out of war experiences, C. D. B. Bryan
identified a ‘Generic Vietnam War Narrative’. It started with an eager and patriotic young
man arriving in Vietnam and soon filling a gap in a platoon.

In his platoon our young man meets Day-Tripper, who is stoned all the time; Rebel, the crazy white guy who loves
killing; Juice, the cool black dude who can smell ambushes and booby traps; the Professor, who at some point will
explain why Ho Chi Minh should never have been our enemy. And he meets Doc (or Bones), the conscientious
objector medic; Bascomb, the psychotic company commander who gets fragged (that is, killed) by Day-Tripper,
Rebel, or Juice; Bailey, the good sergeant whose life is saved by Day-Tripper, Rebel, or Juice; Williams, the
young lieutenant who gets better with experience but is killed along with Doc (or Bones) near the end of the book.
By the end of the book all the characters have been killed except the young hero (who is often the narrator) and ei-
ther Day Tripper or Juice, who re-enlists.

Bryan described the iconic moments—the first patrol, with ‘the seductive excitement of a
fire fight’, atrocities when innocent civilians are gratuitously killed, lots of helicopter mo-
ments, dope scenes, and ‘R&R in Saigon with Susie the bar-girl’. When the hero arrived
home he found that he had become something of an embarrassment, and unable to get or hold
down a job: ‘he has nightmares, smashes up a few things, misses his buddies still in ’Nam,
and at the very end wonders what the hell it was all about. What did it mean? What good did
it do?’ The point of this narrative was to chart ‘the gradual deterioration of order, the disinte-
gration of idealism, the breakdown of character, the alienation from those at home, and, fi-
nally, the loss of all sensibility save the will to survive’. 6
This was a war without happy endings.7 The movies and novels raised broader issues but
the essential message was that the participants had all in some ways been left damaged. A
common complaint about the books and movies inspired by Vietnam was that the Viet-
namese, whether appearing as allies or enemies, spectators or victims, rarely appeared as
rounded characters.8 Their portrayal was often as tricky and malevolent, undeserving of the

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effort that the United States was making on their behalf. The country appeared as the back-
ground for a variety of individual melodramas. The war was therefore remembered less as a
cause and more as a backdrop to personal struggles and demons, for stories of survival and
coping. The theme was casualty, not only in death, but in physical and psychic wounds.
When, in 1978, the Vietnam memorial was unveiled in Washington, there was nothing to in-
dicate what it was about other than a list of 57,692 war dead, giving them a degree of honour.

IF THERE WAS A STRATEGIC LESSON IT WAS CONFLICTS SUCH as Vietnam moved in circles
rather than straight lines, lacking the moral clarity and military logic of previous wars. The
idea that such wars were bound to be both frustrating and deeply unpopular was further rein-
forced by a brief but unhappy period in Beirut when a US peace-keeping mission got too
close to the Christian government and was punished for its troubles by the radical Shia group
Hezbollah, with a suicide car bomb in October 1983. This caused the deaths of 241 marines
and undermined the will to continue. This was reinforced as American citizens began to be
kidnapped, leading to withdrawal in early 1984.9 The US Secretary of State George Shultz
and the Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger had been on opposite sides in the policy de-
bate and after the US withdrawal they drew distinctive lessons. In October the pro-interven-
tionist Shultz warned that the United States must not allow itself ‘to become the Hamlet of na-
tions, worrying endlessly over whether and how to respond. A great nation with global re-
sponsibilities cannot afford to be hamstrung by confusion and indecisiveness’.10 In his ri-
poste, Weinberger offered his own warning, this time of the dangers of getting too involved in
what he called ‘gray area conflicts’. His tests for US engagement in these conflicts required
that it be vital to national interests and a last resort, and that when combat troops were used
this should be ‘wholeheartedly, and with the clear intention of winning’ and with ‘some rea-
sonable assurance of the support of the American people and their elected representatives in
Congress’.11
An attempted humanitarian intervention in Somalia reinforced Weinberger’s message.
The collapse of Somalia’s government in early 1991 led to political chaos. A drought meant
that the population faced starvation and disease as well as violence. A small UN peacekeeping
force was unable to cope. In late 1992, in part as an alternative to getting involved in the de-
veloping crisis in the former Yugoslavia, President Bush sent a substantial force to provide
security for the relief effort. Although President Bill Clinton inherited the mission without en-
thusiasm, he presided over an escalation as US forces became engaged in conflict with one of
the warlords, General Mohamed Farah Aidid. In October 1993 an operation to capture some
of Aidid’s aides in the capital Mogadishu went badly wrong as two helicopters were shot
down by militiamen killing eighteen US soldiers, some of whose bodies were dragged
through the streets of the city. Many hundreds of Somalis also lost their lives in the battle.12
Although Clinton insisted at first that this incident would have no impact on the US commit-
ment within a few months American troops were withdrawn.
Clinton drew the lesson that it was best to stay clear of African conflicts. Unfortunately
the next test came with the vicious massacres engulfing Rwanda in 1994. Despite the evi-
dence of genocide the US avoided any involvement. The appalling death toll later weighed
heavily on the international (and Clinton’s) conscience.13 One study calculated that as few as
5,000 peacekeepers could have prevented much of the violence.14
Another who drew a lesson from the US withdrawal from Somalia, along with that of the
Soviet Union from Afghanistan, was Osama bin Laden, the leader of the Islamist terror group,
al-Qaeda, based in Afghanistan. In a 1997 interview with CNN’s Peter Arnett he remarked

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 After a little resistance, the American troops left after achieving nothing. They left after claiming that they were
the largest power on earth. They left after some resistance from powerless, poor, unarmed people whose only
weapon is the belief in Allah the Almighty, and who do not fear the fabricated American media lies.… The Amer-
icans ran away from those fighters who fought and killed them, while the latter were still there. If the US still
thinks and brags that it still has this kind of power even after all these successive defeats in Vietnam, Beirut,
Aden, and Somalia, then let them go back to those who are awaiting its return.15

His basic strategy was to inflict as much pain as possible on the US until they left the
Middle East. On 11 September 2001 famous symbols of US power took direct hits from air-
craft hijacked by members of al-Qaeda. The twin towers of the World Trade Center in New
York were brought tumbling down while the Pentagon in Washington was badly damaged.
The attackers, directed from one of the poorest of the world to one of the richest, employed
one of the oldest of weapons—knives—to hijack the airliners and turn them into deadly in-
struments of carnage.

AT THIS POINT ATTITUDES CHANGED DRAMATICALLY. IT TURNED terrorism, largely seen as an ex-
ceptional irritant and occasional inconvenience, into a cause of national trauma. A previously
unimaginable attack unlocked the most vivid imaginations. What would once have been dis-
missed as incredible now demanded to be taken seriously. Terrorism moved from a way of
pushing otherwise ignored grievances onto the international agenda, as with hijackings of air-
craft by Palestinian groups or attacks on US troops abroad, to a direct threat to homeland se-
curity. Past terrorism was violent and purposive, but it was hard to think of it as war. By con-
trast 9/11 was experienced as an act of war. It was an odd war that pitted a small band of Is-
lamist extremists against a superpower. The political motives of the enemy received less at-
tention than the opportunities available in open societies for those who wished to cause maxi-
mum havoc. Everything from energy facilities to food supplies could now be seen as a critical
vulnerability.
Concern about what was at first called ‘Islamic Fundamentalism’ had been around from
the 1980s, then largely associated with Iran, because of the stormy aftermath of the 1979 rev-
olution. The term later fell out of use because it implied that the problem was extreme piety
rather than a highly politicised form of Islam; eventually terms such as ‘Islamism’ or ‘Ji-
hadism’ were more widely used. During the Cold War those of this persuasion had been seen
as more threatening to atheistic communists rather than the West, which is why they had been
supported in Afghanistan. The most extreme Sunni writers were clearly very hostile to West-
ern ways, but it was not evident how this hostility might turn into war.16 Bernard Lewis
warned in 1990 of the revival of ‘ancient prejudices’ leading to Muslim rage against the
West.17 In his Clash of Civilisations (a term initially used by Lewis), Huntington cautioned
that ‘this century-old military-interaction between the West and Islam’ could become more
‘virulent’.18 Anthony Dennis described how the collapse of communism had given fundamen-
talist Islam, led by Iran, an opportunity to fill the gap. He anticipated that ‘Islam in its violent,
reactionary, fundamentalist form would continue to be the number one threat to world peace
and the very survival of the human species’.19 The austere Wahhabism, promoted by Saudi
Arabia, was fundamentalist but was combined with pragmatic policies towards the West. The
radicals were largely devoted to harassing Arab governments, including the Saudis, as much
as pursuing Western targets. Other than for the special circumstances of the Lebanese civil
war, terrorism in the Middle East had largely been associated with the secular Palestinian
cause.
In 1991 the plot of Tom Clancy’s novel The Sum of All Fears depended on a Palestinian

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group triggering a war between the United States and the Soviet Union by detonating a nu-
clear weapon (actually a lost Israeli device) in the Superdome, killing senior members of the
US administration. In an afterword to the paperback version the next year he observed: ‘All of
the material in this novel related to weapons technology and fabrication is readily available in
any one of a dozen books.… The fact of the matter is that a sufficiently wealthy individual
could, over a period of from five to ten years, produce a multistate thermonuclear device’.20
In practice the technical difficulties were hardly trivial, even if sufficient fissionable material
and capable engineers could be acquired, and there were obvious risks that would be faced by
anyone trying to put a crude weapon together. Nor did it seem to fit with the strategies of
most terrorist groups. Few seemed to need to cause mass casualties to make their political
points.21 Weapons of mass destruction had not been considered weapons of choice for terror-
ists. Their past priorities had been assumed to be getting ‘a lot of people watching, not a lot of
people dead’.22
The pattern had begun to change in the 1990s, although this only came to be fully appre-
ciated with hindsight, looking back after 9/11. They became integrated into the narrative of
the ‘war on terror’ almost in the form of a Star Wars prequel. An earlier attack on the World
Trade Center in 1993 made a limited impact because of the few casualties caused. Then al-
Qaeda had attempted high casualty attacks—on the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and
on the USS Cole from Yemen—but these had been away from the United States.23 In Febru-
ary 2001, CIA Director George J. Tenet reported that the threat from terrorism was his prior-
ity, noting that terrorists were becoming ‘more operationally adept and more technically so-
phisticated’, looking at softer civilian targets as military targets came to be better protected.
‘Usama bin Laden and his global network of lieutenants and associates remain the most im-
mediate and serious threat… capable of planning multiple attacks with little or no warning’.24
A number of high-level reports had urged that attention be paid to the threat of weapons
of mass destruction being used against unprotected American cites. The twin assumptions
were that such weapons would be the best way to terrorise population centres but also that
their use would most probably be organised and implemented by a capable state. Thus the
Hart-Rudman Commission, which had identified ‘unannounced attacks on American cities’ as
the gravest threat, also suggested that

terrorism will appeal to many weak states as an attractive, asymmetric option to blunt the influence of major pow-
ers. Hence, state-sponsored terrorist attacks are at least as likely, if not more so, than attacks by independent, unaf-
filiated terrorist groups.25

North Korea and Iraq appeared as likely culprits, so that the most credible form of this
threat was in fact a derivative of the standard scenarios used in defence planning.
There was all the difference between speculation about a potential threat, however plausi-
ble, from a panel of specialists and distinguished figures and a frightful reality hitting unsus-
pecting people out of the blue. Inevitably on 9/11 thoughts immediately turned to Pearl Har-
bor, the last time American territory had been attacked from overseas and the moment that
came to mind every time the US was caught by surprise. In the case of the 9/11 attacks there
was a sharp psychological impact and anxiety about the possibility of further attacks. There
was no risk of a defeat in any meaningful sense but there was a keen awareness of a new type
of vulnerability. From the president downward, the message was that this ‘changes every-
thing’ and all security issues had to be addressed with fresh eyes, so that the US was never
caught out in such a way again. An image of future war had been opened up that was quite
different from anything that had gone before.

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INEVITABLY RADICAL ISLAM NOW LOOMED LARGE IN THIS IMAGE of future war. Huntington had
already pointed to Islam as the most war-prone of civilisations. As this atrocity, and others at-
tempted or succeeded, was undertaken in the name of Islam, this appeared to vindicate at least
one reading of Huntington. For others this was a dangerous conclusion and every effort had to
be made to show that the terrorists were not at all representative of mainstream Islam. Either
way there was a surge in interest in whether the teachings of this religion were responsible for
the conflict. More books were published on Islam and war in the aftermath of 2001 than had
been published in all prior human history. Some 80 per cent of scholarly articles on the topic
ever published also came after 9/11. This was another example of academia trying to catch up
with a phenomenon that had caught it, along with government, by surprise. By comparison
there was far less interest in Christian, Jewish, or Hindu approaches to war. When Islam was
mentioned it tended to be in the context of extremism and violence.26
Now all the issues connected with ‘weak’ and ‘failing’ states acquired a harder edge. The
prompts to US action were far more profound than the humanitarian concerns of the early
1990s. Bin Laden’s intent behind the 9/11 attacks might have been to persuade the US to
avoid entanglements in the Middle East. Given the responses to Beirut and Mogadishu this
was not a wholly unrealistic expectation. Earlier, when mass-casualty terrorism was a more
abstract fear, it was noted that it might be wise to avoid further provoking the angry groups al-
ready making a nuisance of themselves in Middle Eastern politics.27 In the aftermath of the
attacks, however, with over 3,000 dead (and initial estimates much higher), the responses took
the form of an unremitting display of US military capabilities. Offending regimes were top-
pled, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, after the opportunity was taken in 2003 to over-
throw Saddam Hussein.

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 [ 17 ]

From Counter-Terrorism to Counter-Insurgency

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know,
there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known un-
knowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown un-
knowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country
and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.
US SECRETARY OF DEFENSE DONALD RUMSFELD, February 20021

When the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq it did so with equipment that had been concep-
tualised during the Vietnam era but with a great-power war still most in mind. The disinclina-
tion to get involved in more thankless overseas quagmires was combined with a determination
to stick with the regular wars for which the armed forces were best suited. From the start of
the 1970s full attention was given once again to the inner-German border and plans to hold
back a Warsaw Pact invasion. Academic strategic studies could also turn with relief away
from the perplexities of counter-insurgency to the more familiar terrain of preparations for
conventional war in the centre of Europe.2 The army began to rebuild its strength, now with
an all-volunteer force instead of conscripts, and with new weapons that were far more capable
than anything known in the past. The reconstruction effort originated in the determination to
reduce dependence upon nuclear threats, but this effort was then propelled forward by the po-
tential of these new technologies that could take information and turn it into a form that could
be processed, stored, and transmitted through digital circuits, equipment, and networks. A
new version of future war was opening up.
How this might develop was apparent by 1968:

The pinpoint of targets by land-based, airborne or satellite radar, the use of infra-red to reduce the concealment
obtained from darkness and overcast weather, and miniaturized battlefield computers will together allow for a cen-
tralized control of conventional fire-power; its efficiency will be further increased by the use of advanced proxim-
ity fuzes that detect their targets.3

A number of different strands of technological development came together. Satellites

were in use for reconnaissance purposes by 1961 and for communications in 1965. Work on
the development of integrated circuits, allowing complex processes to be managed in ever-
smaller packages, had begun in the 1950s. In 1965 Gordon Moore promulgated his famous
and remarkably prescient law that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit

136
would double every two years. The first ‘smart’ bombs, relying on these technologies, were
employed by the USAF during the closing stages of Vietnam.4 Whereas once it might have
taken numerous sorties for an important bridge to be destroyed, now this could be achieved
with a single weapon. The success of air defence and anti-tank weapons during the opening
stages of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War suggested that the trend could include moving as
well as fixed targets.5 It was now becoming possible to work out where enemy forces were
and what they were up to, and then they could be hit with a high probability of success.
In 1980 the futurologists Alvin and Heidi Toffler offered a schema for basic changes in
society. After the familiar move from an agricultural to an industrial age had come an infor-
mation age—the ‘third wave’. During the second wave, of industrialisation, the focus had
been on mass, standardisation, and bureaucratic organisation.6 With the third wave, knowl-
edge was at the centre of all decisions, and organisations would be more flexible. In the mili-
tary sphere this went beyond improved weapon design but to a new way of thinking about
warfare, along with all other human activities, in more systematic, holistic terms. The ability
to identify enemy vulnerabilities within a complex setting and target them swiftly raised pos-
sibilities for disruption and disorientation as well as pure destruction. Later, the Tofflers took
their investigations into the way the US army was adjusting to the information age as confir-
mation that ‘the way we make war reflects the way we make wealth’. Unusually for books on
future war they also explored the future of peace, or ‘anti-war’, showing the influence of the
Balkans conflicts in urging the need to think about war as a means of preventing even greater
violence.7

THE EXTENT OF THE CHANGE COULD BE MARKED BY A COMPARISON with Liddell Hart’s The
Revolution in Warfare, completed in 1945 just as the Pacific War concluded. He had then re-
gretted the transformation of war ‘from a fight to a process of destruction.’ He judged that the
rot had set in to modern warfare when it was realised that air raids could not be used to hit
specific military targets but instead large civilian areas. ‘Inaccuracy of bomb-aim resulted in
inhumanity of war-aim’. The corollary of this was that if now bomb aim was more accurate so
too could be war aim. War could become once again more of a fight.8
At first improved accuracy and lethality appeared to reinforce defence. Anything visible
and in range, whether aircraft, tanks, or warships, would be vulnerable to accurate missiles.
That put a premium on manoeuvrability as the best way to get round strong defensive posi-
tions. From their study of Warsaw Pact exercises and military literature, NATO planners con-
cluded that their adversaries had put a lot of effort into developing armoured divisions and
plans for their use geared to moving fast to outflank NATO defences.9 This led to pressure for
NATO to start preparing along the same lines, improving mobility to match that of the War-
saw Pact. Much more fluid and complex battles were envisaged, increasingly facilitated not
only by precise weaponry but also improved infrastructure, so that surveillance and communi-
cations became much easier.
Even prior to 1991 there had been indications of the possibilities of the new technological
generation. They were then employed in the Gulf War for the first time to fight an essentially
classical conventional campaign to a swift and decisive conclusion and with limited casualties
(especially on the coalition side). Helpfully Iraqi forces fought along Warsaw Pact lines (re-
flecting past training), only not as well. This demonstrated the advantages American comman-
ders enjoyed as a result of improvements in sensors, data management, and communications
as well as accuracy. Iraqi units were left stranded, picked off with ease, while cruise missiles
arrived at individual targets in the middle of built-up areas and destroyed them with minimal
damage to any other buildings in the vicinity. Desert Storm was proclaimed as the world’s

137
first ‘information war’.10 The Iraqi military were rendered blind, deaf, and dumb. Though the
weapons were not quite as effective as some of the initial propaganda suggested, it did not
take much imagination or leaps of technological fancy to see how this form of warfare could
be taken further. A rosy future for the American armed forces was at hand, in which they
might expect to be completely dominant. There was talk of a ‘revolution in military affairs’
(RMA).11
As described, the revolution would result from the interaction of systems that collected,
processed, fused, and communicated information with those that applied military force.12 As a
result, military force in the future would be directed against a discombobulated enemy still
working out what to do as they were rocked by incoming fire. A swift and unequivocal vic-
tory could be achieved with scant risk to troops, let alone the home population and territory.
What was once the ‘battlefield’ was now to be known as the multi-dimensional ‘battlespace’.
With ‘Dominant Battlespace Knowledge’, information could be processed to describe the
overall operational environment close to real time, making possible ‘Near-Perfect Mission
Assignment’ and thus ‘Precision Violence’. This sort of capability was well on its way to
being developed by the US Navy, because at sea, as in the air, it was possible to contemplate
a battlespace empty of all but combatants. The challenge of the RMA was to demonstrate that
this approach could work with ground forces, where warfare had always been subject to a
greater range of influences.
Historically, the infantry made up around 80 per cent of US combat deaths, even though
they accounted for just 4 per cent of the total force.13 There was therefore great interest in
finding ways of prevailing on land without putting troops at excessive risk. This naturally led
to greater reliance on directed firepower, especially from the air, to influence the course of
battle so that ground forces need not be committed too early in an operation. The idea was
that by striking with precision over great distances, time and space could become less serious
constraints. Enemy units within the battlespace would be engaged from outside. The com-
mand systems could cope with attacking many targets simultaneously.14 It would be less im-
portant for ground forces to close with the enemy, but if they needed to do so they could stay
agile and manoeuvrable, carrying only the firepower required for self-defence, with anything
else called in from outside. No longer would there be a need for large, cumbersome, self-con-
tained divisions and their associated potential for high casualties. The infrastructure of war,
which required the mobilisation of whole societies, could be reduced. The accuracy of
weapons meant that fewer would be required, putting less strain on industry and the transport
infrastructure. The ‘heavy dependence upon ports, munitions depots and a large transport net-
work’ would decline.15
The technological optimism underlying the RMA was overdone. While information tech-
nology might still be following Moore’s Law, other trends were less dramatic, for example
propulsion systems and ordnance. In many respects this was not a major problem for the
United States as in most contingencies it would enjoy an overwhelming advantage in fire-
power. This more brutal feature of American strength, however, tended to be missed in the
focus on qualitative developments. The smarter the technology, the sharper the choices. As
accuracy improved over time, it became possible to move the focus beyond large military for-
mations and facilities and on to specific units, and then particular buildings, even in the mid-
dle of civilian areas, eventually reaching designated individuals, isolated from whatever pro-
tection they might have hoped for from their surroundings. Range became irrelevant as a con-
straint. The same accuracy that was first available with short-range and air-launched missiles
was soon offered by long-range cruise missiles. Then unmanned drones, controlled from a
distance, could hover over an area, identify targets, and attack them on command.

138
 This whole trend of development pushed towards an idealised version of classical war-
fare, pitting regular forces against each other while barely touching the civilian population.
Hackett and Clancy had envisaged wars that must involve large armies and navies on the
move, fought across the world, with setbacks and close calls before combinations of raw
strength, political determination, and strategic acuity would save the day. Now a vision of war
was developing which would get the whole affair over quickly with few casualties. Extracting
the pain from war was essential to the project. If warfare could become both high-impact and
low-casualty, then it could be socially contained and retained as a political instrument.
When wars were fought on an industrial scale, suffering was both widely shared and
largely anonymous. With the new systems, levels of casualties, military as well as civilian,
which in the past might have been deemed to be tolerable, now appeared as excessive or dis-
proportionate.16 Poignant images and harrowing personal stories created a democracy of casu-
alty. Those killed, and not only one’s own personnel, acquired equality as victims because—
by and large—they were not personally responsible for the violence which consumed them.
With campaigns fought by smaller specialist, volunteer forces, individual deaths and injuries
stood out more. Dwelling on larger strategic considerations could appear heartless.
Western sensitivity to the casualty issue created its own strategic logic. It led to a strong
military presumption that popular support would drain away if significant numbers of casual-
ties began to be taken.17 If massive loss of life need no longer be tolerated as an unavoidable
consequence of war, the focus could be on disabling an enemy’s military establishment with
the minimum necessary force. In 1993 the US Joint Chiefs of Staff insisted that: ‘In all cases,
US military forces must be able to undertake operations rapidly, with a high probability of
success, and with minimal risk of US casualties.’18 No more resources should be expended,
assets ruined, or blood shed than absolutely necessary to achieve specified political goals. As
a result a high premium was put on the protection of one’s own force rather than the actual
mission objective. This affected the US approach to the way that forces were deployed, as if
they must be kept out of harm’s way.19 Even when the operations were less discretionary, as
with Afghanistan and Iraq, with government insisting that military success was vital, casualty
aversion encouraged a relatively small footprint on the ground and greater reliance on air
power.

THE NEW TECHNOLOGIES THAT INFORMED THE REVOLUTION in Military Affairs were celebrated
as promising a return to wars decided by battles between regular forces. In such wars not only
would civilians be spared but also casualties on all sides would be reduced to a minimum.
With accurate weapons targets could be chosen solely for their military relevance. Because
they could be launched from a distance, and from places relatively invulnerable to enemy at-
tack, the risks to those doing the launching were minimal. This was true whether the weapons
were cruise missiles launched from submarines or missiles from aircraft. This supported the
view that armed force could be used as a precise and not a blunt instrument, and could be di-
rected exactly against the armed forces of the opponent, with the minimum of associated dam-
age to civilian life and property. There would be no need to put innocents at risk either inad-
vertently or deliberately.
As an idealised form of warfare this fitted in entirely with American preferences. But for
that reason it was unlikely to be followed by others. The technologies and concepts behind the
RMA came to be applied in settings far removed from those for which it had originally been
envisaged. Michael O’Hanlon observed in 2000, not long before the point became painfully
apparent, that instead of situations which might show off these benefits, US forces might in-
stead be facing foes whose forces were ‘interspersed among civilian populations and in com-

139
bat settings where even relatively unsophisticated enemy units will have opportunities to am-
bush American troops or booby-trap and mine their likely paths of advance.’20 Instead of tak-
ing on other regular forces in some grand battle, they had to prove their worth coping with ter-
rorism and guerrilla warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Moreover, the abstract analyses about future combat surrounding the RMA had not really
addressed the problem of fighting in urban areas. Until modern times, cities, with their walls
and elaborate defences, had always posed a severe strategic challenge to the point where
armies had to break off from their advance through a country to lay siege. As a result of urban
sprawl and with armies shrinking, cities had become too large to be encircled and sealed off.
The alternative prospect of fighting through streets and alleys was deeply unattractive. Build-
ings allowed enemy fighters opportunities for concealment, ambushes, and snipers. Attempts
to dislodge them by artillery, bombs, and mortars might simply create rubble that would com-
plicate movement and provide new opportunities for defenders.
Cities therefore challenged the aspirations of the RMA. Their structures obstructed sen-
sors and reduced the scope for manoeuvre operations. Forces would need to fragment as they
moved through streets, becoming harder to coordinate as they did so. Because urban combat
tended to be greedy on ammunition, it posed extra logistical challenges. Faced with multiple
players and sudden movements the environment was stressful and frustrating. Yet in modern
conflict cities were hard to avoid. ‘We long for gallant struggles in green fields’, observed
Ralph Peters, yet ‘the likeliest “battlefields” are cityscapes where human waste goes undis-
posed, the air is appalling, and mankind is rotting’. Before it might have been jungles and
mountains but now cities were the ‘citadels of the dispossessed and irreconcilable’. Here war-
fare would be as much vertical as horizontal, ‘reaching up into towers of steel and cement,
and downward into sewers, subway lines, road tunnels, communications tunnels, and the
like’.21
This was not a prospect greeted with enthusiasm. Historically big battles for cities had
been painful. Stalingrad was just one example of how hard it was to defeat stubborn defend-
ers. In Vietnam marines took heavy casualties in the struggle for control of Hue, comparable
to some of the worst fighting of the Pacific War. More recently Beirut and Mogadishu had
seen American forces caught out. All commentators mentioned the painful Russian experi-
ence in the Chechen capital of Grozny during the mid-1990s where they took fearful casual-
ties while failing to defeat rebel militias. A 2001 study reported both historical cases and
training exercises as suggesting that it would require a rifle company (100-200 individuals) to
take a defended city block in about 12 hours. This would lead to an unsustainable level of 30-
45 percent casualties. The survivors would be both physically and emotionally exhausted and
modern Western armies, reliant on volunteers rather than conscripts, lacked reserves. Posen
noted that the active US Army then had ‘only perhaps 180 rifle companies’ and the Marines
another 60-70. An army or marine infantry division had 27 rifle companies; an army mecha-
nized division, a dozen.22 In 2016 the same point was made by observing that ‘America’s
treasure house of close-combat soldiers is only marginally larger than the New York City Po-
lice Department.23
If the Americans allowed themselves to get enticed into cities, warned General Robert
Scales in 1996, all its military advantages would be neutralised. He dismissed the possibility
that Western forces could render a city uninhabitable by pounding it with firepower. Instead
he argued for doing everything possible to avoid direct urban combat, if possible by prevent-
ing an enemy force retreating into a city but, if that were not possible, by establishing ‘a loose
cordon around the city and control of the surrounding countryside’. The aim would be to iso-
late the city from the outside world. ‘All avenues, including air, sea, and land arteries, would

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be blocked’, while the ‘coalition would seek to control sources of food, power, water, and
sanitation services’. Information entering the city would also be controlled. Accurate standoff
missiles could attack targets inside the city. In short, he envisaged a modern version of a
siege,24 though this would be a tall order with a large metropolis and the enemy enjoying the
propaganda advantage of being demonstrably in charge.
The test of the RMA came not in a conventional campaign but in the ‘war on terror’. The
US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld explained that Afghanistan was going to be a new
type of war, ‘like none other our nation has faced’.25 He saw opportunities to demonstrate that
future war could be won with only a modest force so long as it was backed by the most ad-
vanced ‘transformational’ capabilities. Instead the US found itself fighting with its allies in
Afghan and then in Iraq wars that were drawn out, with their own similarities to Vietnam. The
enemy adopted the traditional tactics of guerrilla warfare. The resultant wars were described
as ‘asymmetric’.26 A symmetrical war would involve two belligerents of similar capabilities.
The outcome would be determined by small differences growing in importance, whether su-
perior training, tactical prowess, strategic imagination, technical innovation, or the capacity to
mobilise national resources. In such cases the victor was likely only to emerge through attri-
tion, when the hurt reached a point where small margins of staying power could make the dif-
ference. By contrast, in an asymmetrical war, belligerents with quite different capabilities and
priorities would clash, with the outcome determined by one side’s superior ability to find
counters to the capabilities of the other.

AT FIRST ALL WORKED AS PLANNED. A RELATIVELY SMALL SIZED invasion force, backed by ad-
vanced air power, could overwhelm weak and outgunned adversaries. In both Afghanistan
and Iraq the initial stages of the war were asymmetrical only in the sense of being completely
one-sided as the Taliban and the Iraqis tried to fight like regular armies against the world’s
only superpower. In both cases the enemy lacked the organisation, morale, and numbers even
to offer a staunch urban defence. The fighting was less fearsome than anticipated. Later as the
insurgencies developed cities came to present different sorts of dangers. The environment
suited forms of guerrilla war, with scope for riots, ambushes, and improvised bombs, harass-
ing and stressing troops, at times leading to disproportionate and counter-productive re-
sponses.
Eventually the US military realised that their scripts were for the wrong sort of war. 27
The US Government had been warned before the invasion that a force of 500,000 would be
needed to maintain order once the old Iraqi regime had been toppled.28 The warnings were
dismissed. As a result the US and its allies struggled with a fraction of the necessary forces,
until a ‘surge’ in 2007 when they were able to take advantage of a more favourable political
situation. The lesson was that in this sort of war numbers mattered, despite all the advanced
equipment now available to American forces.
Their opponents often enjoyed substantial local support, were linked to broadly based po-
litical movements, and benefitted from considerable freedom of movement. Instead of rela-
tively civilised combat, professionally conducted by high-quality regular forces, the struggle
was against murky, subversive forms of insurgency and terrorism. The enemy did not oblige
by providing targets that could be attacked by accurate fire. Instead militias drawn from the
aggrieved sections of society moved in and out of civil society, with strategies geared to max-
imising pain. They relied on the assassination of senior political figures or indiscriminate as-
saults against civilians, with or without warning, or else the sabotage of critical infrastructure
and ambushes of army or police patrols. They preferred to remain hidden and, in some cases
were even prepared to accept a martyr’s death as human bombs. Unlike traditional armies, in-

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surgents did not expect to hold territory, as their priority was to play for time rather than hold
space, allowing them to gain in support while the enemy was drained of patience and credibil-
ity. All the clichés of guerrilla warfare, dimly remembered from the 1960s, of an enemy hid-
ing in the shadows and the tactics of darting flea bites, returned. The Americans and their al-
lies were caught in a prolonged, doleful, and disappointing form of warfare—the opposite of
that idealised in the Revolution of Military Affairs and exactly the sort they hoped to avoid.
Because the US had taken the initiative to topple the regime its commitment was much
greater than if it had intervened to try to calm an already fraught situation. It was, with the
UK, an occupying power and then, even after Iraqi governments took over, accepted a respon-
sibility to support them until they could cope on their own. The Iraqi governments were to
meet political standards that made them worthy of support. Though this was a divided country
that had suffered years of brutal rule and calamity, it too was to have a representative govern-
ment that would respect human rights. Success in this regard would turn Iraq into a beacon for
the rest of the region. President George W. Bush, and Prime Minister Tony Blair in Britain,
picked up this theme. In 2004, as he was promoting democracy as a solution to the numerous
problems of the Middle East, including in Iraq, Bush insisted that ‘the reason why I’m so
strong on democracy is democracies don’t go to war with each other.… And that’s why I’m
such a strong believer that the way forward in the Middle East, the broader Middle East, is to
promote democracy’.29

BY 2005 IT WAS EVIDENT THAT, FAR FROM IRAQ MOVING forward, it was beset by multiple prob-
lems, with a range of conflicts going on at once, within and between communities, with coali-
tion forces taking regular casualties. Somewhat sobered by this experience, the US Army and
Marines decided to revise their Field Manual on counter-insurgency (FM-3-24). Conrad
Crane, a professor at the US Army’s Strategic Studies Institute, coordinated the exercise.30
Prior to the US engagement in Iraq he had warned that the US Army had failed to learn
lessons from Vietnam. It had instead treated Vietnam as an aberration that must never be re-
peated rather than try to prepare for anything at all similar.31 The lack of preparedness was
evident in the run-up to the Iraq War, with little thought given to the impact of the ‘deep reli-
gious, ethnic, and tribal differences which dominate Iraqi society’. Crane warned how ‘US
forces may have to manage and adjudicate conflicts among Iraqis that they can barely com-
prehend’. An exit strategy would require a degree of political stability that would be difficult
to achieve given Iraq’s ‘fragmented population, weak political institutions, and propensity for
rule by violence’.32
Crane was in charge of the drafting the new manual for which he established a substantial
team of like-minded colleagues.33 It was a group that had gathered around General David Pe-
traeus, who was the main sponsor, having been frustrated by the poor management of the situ-
ation in Iraq post-invasion. The manual eschewed a rigid script and allowed flexibility in in-
terpretation of the guidance offered. The core to their message was that this was an essentially
political undertaking. The military role was to gain popular support for the government. This
required learning and adaptation.
Unusually for such an exercise it involved academics and was even eventually published
by an academic press.34 Harvard’s Sarah Sewell, a specialist in human rights, argued the ben-
efits of developing international human rights law, restraint in the use of military force and
more reliance on conventional policing. More controversially the anthropologist Montgomery
McFate encouraged improved cultural awareness as a means of avoiding foolish errors.
Working so closely with the military did not go down well with other anthropologists, reviv-
ing the old debate as to whether mitigating the harmful effects of war simply made it more ac-

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ceptable and easier to undertake.35 Yet one group of academics was absent. Stathis Kalyvas
noted that ‘the manual betrays zero impact by political science research’. This, he noted, was
because the political scientists had largely attended to the causes, duration, termination, and
aftermath of civil wars, rather than their content. In addition, ‘political scientists, including
large-n practitioners, have failed so far to produce startling results.’ He doubted ‘that the most
robust finding of the econometric literature, namely, that poor countries face a higher risk of
civil war, would have impressed (or been of much use to) the manual’s writers’. Nor had it
picked up on the supposedly central role of natural resources, sticking firmly with the pre-
sumption of ‘grievance’ and playing down ‘greed’.36
Instead the Counter Insurgency Field Manual was firmly placed within a tradition of
thinking about revolutions, insurgencies, and guerrilla warfare, going back to T. E. Lawrence
and Mao Zedong, with a nod in the direction of the French officer David Galula who had de-
veloped theories of counter-insurgency during the French war to hold on to Algeria in the
1950s.37 From this tradition came a focus on separating the enemy militants from the popula-
tion. The government would be rendered more attractive through reforms as the insurgent
cause would be shown to be hopeless. To achieve this, violence must be controlled, away
from killing as many militants as possible, which was the instinctive military approach, to
concentrating on the political effects. The use of deadly firepower was now described as ‘ki-
netic’, to be distinguished from softer forms of power.38 The ‘kinetic’ had its place, but if em-
ployed excessively risked driving even more people into the enemy ranks.
The authors were careful not to refer to ‘hearts and minds’, a phrase which now carried a
lot of baggage left over from Vietnam as a failed attempt at social engineering. The aim was
to change behaviour, but phrases such as ‘carrots and sticks’, which might be more accurate,
were also eschewed as too simplistic. To capture the emphasis, the non-kinetic approach was
described as ‘population-centric’ as opposed to ‘enemy-centric’. There were to be no hard and
fast rules. Action had to be sensitive to context. Officers needed to think about how they
might protect their forces without making people less secure and when it was best to do noth-
ing, even in the face of severe provocation. The document also recognised the inherent prob-
lem faced by outsiders, whose position, at least in the first instance, depended on superior mil-
itary strength. ‘Eventually all foreign armies are seen as interlopers or occupiers; the sooner
the main effort can transition to HN [Host Nation] institutions, without unacceptable degrada-
tion, the better’. The key objective was to isolate the enemy by winning over the population,
in part by rendering the government more attractive through reforms while also demonstrating
the hopelessness of the insurgent cause.

THE CREDIBILITY OF THE DOCUMENT BENEFITTED FROM BEING followed by a turn for the better
in Iraq in 2007, a result of disaffection with al-Qaeda among Sunnis and the additional re-
sources deployed as a result of the ‘surge’, combined with Petraeus’s leadership. This episode
illustrated that Iraqi civil society was much more complicated than the simple elite-mass dis-
tinction on which revolutionary theorists based their analyses or the broad ethnic distinctions
which Western policymakers tried to make sense of local politics. In addition to the broad
groupings of Sunni, Shia, and Kurds, there were also tribal and village allegiances, and local
leaders with their own connections to more senior figures. Loyalties could be fluid and flexi-
ble, groupings were prone to factionalism, and political authority was multi-layered. It was
thus not necessarily a shift in attitudes by the people as a whole that led to increased Sunni
support for the battle against al-Qaeda, but a decision by some local Sunni leaders to work
with the US military despite the risks and distaste for the occupation.
The document was subject to a number of criticisms. The most fundamental was that

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while there were techniques of counter-insurgency, which, if properly applied, could address
the timeless dynamics of insurgency, in practice there were formidable contingent factors at
work in all these conflicts.39 Another, to which we will return, was that it set impossible tar-
gets for political action. Critics of the approach later argued that Petraeus and his strategy
were flattered by political circumstances over which they had little control and the develop-
ment of misleading narratives with regard to what had gone right for the British in Malaya
and wrong for the Americans in Vietnam.40 For those who saw the enemy as implacable and
fanatical the approach was simply too soft.41 They argued that the only plausible strategy was
to kill militants until their numbers were depleted and they were demoralised. But as events in
Iraq later demonstrated, military successes depended on isolating the enemy politically. The
apparent victory achieved over insurgents in 2007 did not produce lasting benefits because the
politics was subsequently mishandled.42
The practical challenges revolved around the nature of the government’s relationship with
the people. The script pointed to putting more effort into studying and appreciating local cul-
ture and attending to grievances, so that the people could be persuaded to support a hitherto
unpopular government. This was given support by an underlying optimism that this was part
of an effort to ‘advance those societies mired in backward customs and the slough of authori-
tarianism along the road of socioeconomic improvement and democratic development.’43 The
difficulty with this was that reforms could only be implemented by local elites who were
often the beneficiaries of the structures that needed reforming.
There was another view. This accepted that a section of the population, if not the whole,
would always be hostile to the government, but that if life was made sufficiently miserable
then they could be persuaded not to support a rebellion. On this basis the most effective strat-
egy for dealing with insurgents was not to win the people over but by ‘out-terrorising them’.44
Those making this observation were not advocating this for the US and its allies. Their point
was that because the Americans could not adopt such a strategy their efforts were doomed to
failure, not least because their alternative, of achieving popular consent, could not succeed.

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 [ 18 ]

The Role of Barbarism

Be stirring as the time: be fire with fire;

Threaten the threatener and outface the brow
Of bragging horror.
SHAKESPEARE, King John, Act V, Scene I

There was an interesting contrast between film-making during the course of the Iraq War
and that during Vietnam. Whereas the main film that was made during the Vietnam era, The
Green Berets, was propagandistic, no comparable film was made on Iraq, although there were
regular rumours about the possibility of one being made about the 2004 battle for Fallujah.
Unlike Vietnam many other films were made about how the war was being fought while it
was still underway—Martin Barker identifies twenty-three Iraq war films. Some, like The
Hurt Locker (2008), about a bomb disposal specialist, gained critical acclaim and Oscar suc-
cess, though that was largely apolitical. Most were barely noticed and often lost money. They
were caught up in the contradictory emotions prompted by Iraq. The 9/11 aftermath stimu-
lated patriotic feelings but these were coupled with deep misgivings about the necessity for
and likely outcome of the war. The reaction to Vietnam had been to challenge the legitimacy
of US motives and the role of the military. With Iraq doubts about the government’s strategy
were unavoidable but it was more problematic to challenge the competence and motives of
the military. This meant that discussion of brutal behaviours towards Iraqis were rationalised
as responses to the stress of combat. ‘The crisis over America’s role in Iraq is being played
out’, observed Barker, ‘more than anything, through cracks in the image of the American
“soldier”.’ The soldiers might appear ‘crude, misogynistic and racist’ when off-duty, but ‘the
moment they step out onto the streets of Iraq they become innocent, bewildered and desper-
ate’. The net effect, as with Vietnam, was to emphasise the damage that war did to individuals
as much as countries, however much veterans might complain about being habitually por-
trayed as ‘drugged out, burned out, stressed out.’ 1
The more positive accounts of both the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns tended to reflect
the accomplishments of individuals and small units, acting against specific targets, often at
the edges of a larger battle or on some special mission, accepting personal risk while using su-
perior skill and technology to best a vicious enemy. This literature began with CIA operatives
working with anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan in late 2001 and peaked with memoirs of the
killing of Osama bin Laden in his hideaway in Pakistan by a Navy SEAL unit a decade later.
It provided an opportunity to highlight confrontations that had clarity and personal meaning
against the backdrop of campaigns that otherwise had so many uncertain and confusing ele-

145
ments. It also demonstrated how the need to avoid harming the wider population was encour-
aging efforts to identify and track the deadlier individuals, using biometrics (iris recognition,
DNA, as well as fingerprints). In one of the best books of the genre, Brian Castner’s All the
Ways We Kill and Die, this material becomes part of an effort to humanise an enemy that has
helped design and plant so many bombs resulting in the deaths of a particular comrade. The
man responsible, something of a composite figure, he described as ‘The Engineer’.2
These more personalised operations made it possible in principle if not always in practice
to avoid actions that hurt innocents. Given a counter-insurgency strategy that precluded pun-
ishing the wider population for allowing militants to live in their midst, the trend was bound
to be one of increasingly identifying and taking out militants. This approach emphasised the
break from the past. In earlier wars it was understood, if regretted, that they had to be won by
whatever means necessary, and sometimes that might mean inflicting harm on civilian popu-
lations. Now that approach was as unnecessary as it was unacceptable.

TERRORISING POPULATIONS INTO SUBMISSION HAD LONG been part of the logic both of conquest
and of maintaining order. Twentieth-century air power allowed civilians to be attacked inde-
pendently of campaigns of conquest, motivated by an urge for revenge or a determination to
intimidate. This led to nuclear weapons with their complete detachment of destruction from
conquest. Their use supposed the destruction of that which might be conquered. They were
kept as a form of intimidating reserve, rationalised by deterrence theory, available to inflict
terrible destruction on other societies, but there was no evident strategic value other than de-
terrence. The deliberate slaughter of civilians was discredited as serving no military purpose.
Analysis of the effects of the great air raids of the Second World War, confirming that bomb-
ing urban centres had achieved little, reinforced this judgement.3 The key lessons were that
societies absorbed pain in preference to surrendering, and if innocents were killed then popu-
lations would be turned against the perpetrators. In this way the moral dilemmas were eased.
A vicious and uncontained approach to war would not only be reprehensible but also counter-
productive.
A similar line of thought developed with civil wars. Although there were many prece-
dents from earlier centuries, the view that at times populations must be treated cruelly devel-
oped in the context of nineteenth-century colonial campaigns and the American Civil War.4
The coercive properties of air power were first explored in dealing with colonial rebellions
(the first bombs were dropped from aircraft during an Italian struggle with the Ottoman Em-
pire for control of Libya in 1911). When facing an uprising in Iraq in 1920 the British lacked
sufficient troops to quell it so they opted for air power instead. The strategy was described as
one of ‘identifying the most inaccessible village of the most prominent tribe which it is de-
sired to punish’. That a ‘relentless and unremitting’ attack on people, houses, crops, and cattle
was brutal was acknowledged, but this was the way to ensure that a lesson was learnt. The
draft manual for The Use of the Air Arm in Iraq observed that in 45 minutes ‘a full-sized vil-
lage… can be practically wiped out, and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured, by four or
five machines which offer them no real target and no opportunity for glory or avarice’. Sir
Aylmer Haldane, the Commanding Officer, took the conventional view that only harsh pun-
ishment would impress Arabs. His favoured method was burning villages. The best way to do
this was discussed in an appendix to his memoir of the campaign, advising on the need for
separate parties to fire houses and dig up and burn grain and loot, and noting that it could take
as much as an hour to do the job properly.5 Even after the Second World War, Western pow-
ers could be quite severe when countering insurgencies, whether the French in Algeria, the
British in Kenya, or the Americans in Vietnam.

146
 Counter-insurgency doctrine shifted over time. ‘Population-centric’ strategies came into
vogue, abjuring arbitrary killing and collective punishment. Yet the circumstances often chal-
lenged the doctrine. Whatever the intentions, civilians got caught up in fire-fights or struck as
a result of poor intelligence or stray bombs. To allow for this possibility the concept of ‘col-
lateral damage’ began to be employed during Vietnam. It recognised that there was such a
thing as ‘non-combatant immunity’ that meant that civilians should be spared but also that
even weapons directed at purely military targets could affect people with no combat role. If
civilians were killed unintentionally it was somehow more acceptable than if there had been
an intention, and so was ‘literally beside the point’.6 But over time, the excuse that ‘this is
what happens in war’ became less acceptable because of the expectation that in contemporary
conventional warfare the fortuitous discrimination made possible by new weapons meant that
commanders were expected to exercise an extraordinary amount of control. Any civilian
deaths therefore were likely to be castigated as premeditated choices rather than inadvertent
accidents.7
International humanitarian law was focusing increasingly on the rights of individuals over
those of states. Whereas the laws of war were largely utilitarian, and bowed in the direction of
military necessity, human rights law was much more rigorous on behalf of individuals.8 It
took their side even if the actions that were threatening them were legal under the customary
laws of war. For Western armies the shift was problematic. In 2001 Air Force Colonel
Charles Dunlap introduced the term ‘lawfare’ to capture the way which he believed that strict
rules on targeting and the need to avoid civilian hurt were being used to hamper Western mili-
tary operations. He evolved the definition into a ‘strategy of using—or misusing—law as a
substitute for traditional military means to achieve an operational objective.’ This would be
done by creating an impression, even if unwarranted, that the distinction between combatants
and non-combatants was being violated. In this respect it appeared as a form of asymmetric
warfare, allowing militants to exploit the values—and courts—of their Western opponents
while taking no notice of the same normative framework in their own operations. As an exam-
ple Dunlap cited a 2007 NATO statement in Afghanistan that promised that its forces would
not ‘fire on position if they knew that civilians were nearby’. This, he argued, gave the Tal-
iban comfort that if they chose their positions carefully they could continue with their opera-
tions without interference.9
If Western countries were shown to be responsible for civilian suffering then that risked
undermining claims that their campaigns were animated by a desire to protect innocents. The
reasons for Western intervention during the 1990s was the harsh treatment meted out by the
Iraqi government to Shiites and Kurds, and then the ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the former Yu-
goslavia. This humanitarian focus had strategic consequences. Addressing the problem of war
in terms of the suffering caused, and justifying any intervention as protecting the vulnerable,
shifted the focus from causes to consequences, from the politics to the violence. The rights
and wrongs of a conflict were reduced to the question of whose behaviour was the most outra-
geous. The judgement could shift with the latest atrocity and become totally confused when
yesterday’s victims turned into today’s villains. Ending the fighting might be the vital objec-
tive of the detached but caring observer, with no stakes in the fight, but to other states, with
their own stakes in the conflict, what mattered was who won rather than who had the most
brutal methods.10 The focus also inevitably encouraged the warring parties to stress their own
vulnerability and victimhood.
If the prime rationale for intervention was civilian suffering, this created its own perverse
incentives for those who wanted outside help. With little choice but to fight alone, the aim
would be to persuade the enemy that it was not a soft touch, that it would fight fiercely and in-

147
flict blows upon those who wished it harm. But a party with a chance of external support
could make known weakness, especially if a key factor would be perceptions of suffering
shaped by media reports. This tendency was evident with the 1991 defence of the Croat city
of Vukovar when there were suggestions that it was not properly defended against Serb attack
as it served the government’s strategic purpose more to use it to gain international sympathy.
In the former Yugoslavia, the need to demonstrate victimhood meant that, in Gow’s words,
‘media manipulation became not so much a complement for military engagement as a substi-
tute for it.’11 Evident massacres, such as those in 1995 in the Bosnian city of Srebrenica,
meant that the West was more ready to escalate. When NATO went to war against Serbia in
1999 because of its actions in Kosovo, much of the controversy surrounded just how bad the
authorities had been in their persecution of the Muslim population.

THUS DESPITE THEIR OWN HISTORY OF PUNITIVE STRATEGIES Western countries had come to as-
sume that such strategies were as inhumane as they were ineffectual and deserved to be op-
posed. The consensus position, supported by academic research and embraced by the senior
US military leadership, was that ‘if the desired objective is long-term political control, bar-
barism inevitably backfires’.12 In the debate over Field Manual 3-24 critics charged that this
was naïve. Given the difficulties of winning a disaffected population over by political re-
forms, which they were unlikely to find credible, the optimum way to deal with a rebellious
population was to make lives as miserable as possible until there was a return to docility.
When the West had taken this view, in colonial campaigns and with unrestricted air raids, the
rationale was that this was a way to get wars over quickly. Even if this involved a few mas-
sacres that might still be better—in some disturbing accounting—than a prolonged war that
never quite came to a conclusion. The critics acknowledged that democracies would ‘find it
extremely difficult to escalate the level of violence and brutality to that which can secure vic-
tory’,13 and also that such a strategy was contrary to international humanitarian law. But was
it really so clear that it was bound to fail?
The strategic rationale, going back to the classics of revolutionary warfare, started with
the dependence of guerrilla groups on the local population. The most famous formulation was
that of the Chinese leader Mao Zedong, who spoke of the people as being the ‘water’ and the
troops ‘the fish who inhabit it’.14 For those struggling with a rebellion, especially one moving
beyond the point where it was possible to appeal to the loyalties of the people, the idea of
‘draining the sea’ had some appeal. The civilian population were fixed while the militants
were mobile. If only the civilians could be moved the militants would be exposed. Such a
strategy risked international condemnation and stored up trouble for the future. But for des-
perate governments, with a greater capacity for massacre than their opponents, and bereft of
better alternatives, it could still make strategic sense.
Most governments facing substantial insurgencies over the 1945–2000 period did not go
down this route, but about a third (24 out of 75) did. In Chapter 14 we noted the role of popu-
lation attacks in the former Yugoslavia. Another example was Guatemala, in a war that began
in the late 1970s, when the wide civilian support for guerrillas left the army floundering.
Eventually the government vowed to ‘dry up the human sea in which the guerrilla fish
swim.’15 The result was civilians were treated as though they were combatants. The killings
were not ‘accidental “abuses” or “excesses”; rather, they represented a scientifically precise,
sustained orchestration of a systematic, intentional massive campaign of extermination’.16 In
some areas about a third of the local population was slaughtered, with about 750,000 killed in
total. In another example, which underscored the instrumentality of the approach, in Eritrea’s
war with Ethiopia for independence the civilian population was targeted by the government,

148
essentially forcing it into starvation.17 After Eritrea gained independence in 1991 there was in
1998 another war with Ethiopia, which, though bloody, was largely between competing
armies.18 Valentino et al considered the efforts by guerrilla groups who terrorised civilians in
Algeria during the 1990s. The violence was not driven by a radical ‘ideology that justifies the
extermination of a category of people’ or by senseless bloodlust, as many observers had sug-
gested. Instead, it was calculated to push people away from supporting the government.19 The
instrumentality of mass killings lay in their role as a way of removing political opponents, as
in the purges undertaken by communist countries, or in removing hostile populations, espe-
cially when it was difficult to expel them in sufficient numbers, or as a means of intimidating
civilian sources of support.20

THE EXAMPLE THAT GAINED MOST ATTENTION DURING THE 2000S, and which was used to show
that a harsh approach could be successful, was the Sri Lankan Civil War. Its origins went
back to British colonial rule and the early days of independence which saw discrimination
against the minority, and increasingly resentful, Tamils. Fighting began in 1983 with demands
for an independent Tamil state, led by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or the Tamil
Tigers. The tactics of the Tamil Tigers were vicious while Sri Lankan forces were hardly re-
strained. In the late 1980s India sought to keep the peace, but disengaged after a Tamil assas-
sinated Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. The Tigers were ruthless against non-Tamils in
their areas, and even against alternative militias, using suicide bombing as a regular tactic. A
ceasefire agreement was brokered in 2001, but hostilities soon resumed. In the end the gov-
ernment launched a remorseless offensive in 2006. The Tigers were pushed out of the east of
the country and then the north until they accepted defeat in 2009 with a deal which granted
Tamils more autonomy but not secession.
After the conclusion of what were described as ‘humanitarian operations’ in 2009 a Sri
Lankan model was identified, under the name of President Rajapaksa. Its basic premise was
that ‘terrorism has to be wiped out militarily and cannot be tackled politically’. Among the
‘eight fundamentals of victory’ were ‘political will’ to eliminate the enemy, a readiness to tell
the international community to ‘go to hell’ when negotiations were proposed as an alternative,
a refusal to negotiate because ceasefires had been used in the past by the enemy to get time to
refresh and recuperate, and then a readiness to shut the world out by maintaining silence about
operations and regulating the media to make sure they did not provide the reports of civilian
casualties that might lead to more international pressure.21 The Sri Lankan government’s de-
termination to resist pressure to negotiate may well have allowed the campaign to proceed
unimpeded, but the LTTE collapsed as much because it was already weak as because of the
ruthlessness of the onslaught. The area the LTTE dominated was impoverished and the organ-
isation was now ‘a shadow of its former self, bankrupt, isolated, illegitimate, divided, and un-
able to meet an invigorated government offensive of any kind.’22

ANOTHER INFLUENTIAL CAMPAIGN WAS THAT WAGED BY RUSSIA in the province of Chechnya
against secessionist rebels. From 1994 to 1996 Russian forces fought a hard and ultimately fu-
tile battle against secessionists. A settlement left the Chechen capital, Grozny, in secessionist
hands, although with an agreement on any new constitutional settlement delayed. In August
1999, with a new prime minister, Vladimir Putin, at the helm, the Russians decided that firm
action needed to be taken. There was a risk of contagion as a band of Chechen rebels moved
into neighbouring Dagestan. There were also exploding apartment buildings in Moscow
blamed on Chechens (although there were deep suspicions that this was an operation by Russ-

149
ian security forces).23 This time the Russian methods were unrelenting: air raids followed by
armoured columns. After a series of defeats in battle the insurgents resorted to guerrilla tac-
tics, but they suffered from internal divisions, largely between Islamist and Nationalist fac-
tions. Gradually the resistance subsided, with the occasional acts of terrorism.
There were a number of reasons for the success of Russia the second time round. One was
turning the conflict into more of an intra-Chechen war, engaging a local leadership who un-
derstood the country and were also able to take control and deal ruthlessly with any residual
opposition.24 A second factor was an uncompromising use of firepower. In the first war the
Russians tried to take the city with tanks and infantry, and then got caught up in urban warfare
for which they were poorly prepared. In the second war Grozny was battered with artillery
and air power, against which the defenders had no response.25
In 2011 Bashar al Assad had refused to compromise with a reform movement in Syria
and civil war began to take root. The West did little more than provide tentative support for
some rebel groups. The regime showed no compunction in seeking to blast away civilian re-
sistance, especially once it was apparent that there was little chance that with more restrained
tactics they could regain popular support. In September 2015 Russian forces intervened in
Syria to keep Bashar al-Assad in power. Mark Galeotti described their tactics as implement-
ing a lesson learnt in Gozny: ‘All war is terrible; sometimes the art is to be the most terri-
ble.’26 In late 2016 after a ceasefire quickly broke down, Russian aircraft attacked an aid con-
voy bringing relief to the besieged city of Aleppo. As they moved to force the rebels out of
the city they worked to make life as difficult for all inhabitants, including systematically
bombing hospitals. Eventually both the residents and rebel fighters evacuated the city. The
Russian air campaign underlined a point often neglected in the discussions of the impact of
the development of weapons of improved precision. This not only meant that civilian sites
could be easier avoided: it also meant that if so desired they could be targeted more effec-
tively.
There was no law which insisted that casualties would encourage people to continue with
a tough fight just as there was no law that suffering would cause them to give up. Individuals
who otherwise may have kept their heads down or given passive support to the government
might be turned into militants because of the loss of relatives. On the other hand, communities
giving insurgents vital support might feel that they had little choice but to flee. Micro-studies
on attacks on civilian populations tended to confirm that they could be successful. In one
meticulous piece of research Jason Lyall demonstrated that when the Russians employed in-
discriminate violence in Chechnya, by shelling villages, the effect was to suppress the insur-
gency. It weakened their local organisation and ability to deploy forces, showed that the insur-
gents could not protect their people, and caused division among their ranks. Lyall found that
in the aftermath of artillery strikes there was a decrease in insurgent attacks when compared
with nearly identical villages that had not been struck.27 Building on this, Souleimanov and
Siroky undertook further research on those caught up in the Chechen War. They distinguished
between random violence which hardened popular attitudes against the Russians, while ‘ret-
ributive’ violence in response to actions by the insurgents was more instrumental and effec-
tive, although the effects were largely short-term and often had the effect of displacing the re-
taliatory violence to other areas.28
Other studies showed that it made a difference to popular attitudes when foreigners perpe-
trated violence against civilians, even when it was not intended.29 There appeared to be a less
forgiving attitude towards casualties caused by foreigners than those caused by local forces.
One study in Afghanistan showed that when Western forces inflicted harm then their support
went down and that of the Taliban went up. The reverse, however, was not the case. Taliban

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violence made little difference either way. The Taliban had a ‘home team discount’ and were
more likely to be forgiven.30
The question of the effectiveness of the strategy was in some respects beside the point. By
and large, to the extent that it was even considered, the conclusions followed the general view
in Western political and military circles that a strategy involving deliberate attacks on civil-
ians was likely to stiffen the resolve of the victim population. Any short-term benefits would
be contradicted by a bitter legacy and a popular desire for revenge.31 It was normally chosen
for want of anything better by beleaguered governments rather than because they were sure
that it was effective. Once they started they had little choice but to see the strategy through,
given the bitterness generated, and if they could see it through then at one level the strategy
could be said to work. A regime prepared to use terror to sustain its position could do so, pro-
viding they had no compunctions about being utterly ruthless and there was no foreign inter-
ference.
In a rare study of why insurgencies often succeeded Seth Jones stressed the importance of
external support, in the form of intelligence and air power but not conventional forces. He
found no benefit from tactics ‘that inordinately punish the local population’.32 Barbarism
caused anger and bitterness, so once it failed to shut down a rebellion then the government
would be in even deeper trouble. A 2010 RAND study considered thirty cases of counter-in-
surgency since 1978 of which only eight were unequivocal victories for the government, with
others producing more mixed results, for example significant concessions to the insurgents.
The study showed that repression and collective punishment on occasion produced temporary
benefits for the government but they tended not to last. What made a real difference was tan-
gible support, such as from neighbouring countries, whether personnel, materiel, financing,
intelligence, or sanctuary. Ideally this would be coupled with popular support, but on its own
tangible support would trump popular support.
As this study came at the end of a decade in which the US had been involved in two
thankless operations, there was a big lesson for the US government. A lot depended on the
‘host-nation government’; that is the one that would go under if the insurgency succeeded.
The study described ‘democracy, government legitimacy, [and] strategic communication’ de-
pending on this host-nation government. Without them there would be no guarantee of vic-
tory. ‘The United States should think twice before choosing to help governments that will not
help themselves.’33 Most students of the problem came back to the limits of what a foreign
power could do in a country when the regime they supported lacked legitimacy. One scholar,
who had been developing hypotheses about the importance of organisational cultures in
armies tackling insurgencies, got the opportunity to serve in Afghanistan. After working with
Afghan local police and US special forces, he concluded that getting the command structures,
doctrine, and training right made little difference without effective local allies: ‘time and
again the program ran up against the local reality that the government was unpopular and in-
transigent’.34

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 [ 19 ]

Cure Not Prevention

I have often thought that you need a… kind of layered map to understand Sudan’s civil war. A surface
map of political conflict, for example—the northern government versus the southern rebels; and under
that a layer of religious conflict—Muslim versus Christian and pagan; and under that a map of all the
sectarian divisions within those categories; and under that a layer of ethnic divisions—Arab and Ara-
bized versus Nilotic and Equatorian—all of them containing a multitude of clan and tribal subdivisions;
and under that a layer of linguistic conflicts; and under that a layer of economic divisions—the more de-
veloped north with fewer natural resources versus the poorer south with its rich mineral and fossil fuel
deposits; and under that a layer of colonial divisions; and under that a layer of racial divisions related to
slavery. And so on and so on until it would become clear that the war, like the country, was not one but
many: a violent ecosystem capable of generating endless new things to fight about without ever shed-
ding any of the old ones.
DEBORAH SCROGGINS, Emma’s War, 20041

Weber’s definition pointed to the essential feature of statehood in monopolising force

within borders, and set a clear if limited marker for state failure. This was essentially the one
adopted by the US government’s State Failure Task Force, which identified 136 occurrences
of state-failure in the period between 1955 and 1998. It considered four kinds of internal crisis
—revolutionary war, ethnic war, adverse regime change, and genocide—and the task force
found that between 20 and 30 per cent of countries were in ‘failure’ during the 1990s.2
The modern state, however, was expected to perform against many other criteria. States
need administrative capacity and revenues (if only to wage wars). Over time their functions
expanded to include provision of health, education, and welfare. Their governance moved
from monarchs to political leaders more or less accountable to legislative assemblies and to
public opinion. After 1990, as Central and Eastern Europe embraced democracy and enjoyed
economic growth, the idea took hold that this experience could be replicated throughout the
world in a benign process of globalisation, generating virtuous cycles of prosperity, democ-
racy, and peace. Further support was found in the fact that the most successful new states, es-
pecially those in Asia, had gravitated towards the liberal capitalist model, and so there was
greater confidence that this was the best route for all who wished to raise their sights to a
more stable future.
A modern state could therefore be declared a failure against a range of criteria. As more
sophisticated indices of failure or fragility were developed by international organisations as a
form of early warning, it became apparent that the concept was broad enough to cover many

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disparate states with a range of problems. States such as North Korea, a dictatorship which
failed to meet the needs of its people, still effectively monopolised force within their borders.
The concept of a successful state, derived from the Western experience, was one which many
states would struggle to meet. States might fail their people in many ways yet still function.
As states were assessed by criteria well away from Weber’s basic definition involving mo-
nopolised violence and borders, the more could be judged to have failed.3
If a state was failing it was not sufficient to bring an end to violence. Success meant
strengthened institutions, ensuring that no minority was excluded and all enjoyed opportuni-
ties for political and cultural expression, competent economic management, an absence of
corruption, and responsive administration. Thus the high-level international Carnegie Com-
mission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, reporting in 1997, provided the headline answer to
the challenge posed by its title:

This is done by creating capable states with representative governance based on the rule of law, with widely avail-
able economic opportunity, social safety nets, protection of fundamental human rights, and robust civil societies.

This was not so much an answer to the question as reframing it. The same could be said
for the recommendation that it was important when there were signs of trouble to react
quickly and have a comprehensive, balanced approach to alleviate the pressures that trigger
violent conflict and ‘an extended effort to resolve the underlying root causes of conflict’,
which went back again to ‘fundamental security, well-being, and justice for all citizens’.4 The
basic requirement was to strengthen the state sufficiently enough to deal with violence and
then, with security, to collect taxes and rebuild infrastructure. The consensus was captured by
Francis Fukuyama’s observation that state-building, defined in terms of the creation or
strengthening of government institutions, was the major foreign policy challenge, because
weak or failed states were ‘the source of many of the world’s most serious problems.’5 An ar-
ticle urging a much more systematic global effort to promote better governance as ‘the only
real way to create lasting peace’ observed that: ‘These elements of state weakness constitute
structural threats akin to dead leaves that accumulate in a forest. No one knows what spark
will ignite them, or when.’6
It was easy to set standards to which states might aspire and reasonable to note that when
they were unable to do so that trouble might ensue. As a preventative measure shoring up the
quality of governance and on that basis pushing forward with economic and social reforms
would also make sense, although it could be noted that Western advice on these matters did
not always have the desired effects. The problem, however, when considering the question of
state failure in the context of counter-insurgency and peacekeeping was a backdrop of vio-
lence and degradation. The consequences of constant fighting could be seen in the infrastruc-
ture left damaged and never repaired, economic activity subdued, law enforcement minimal
and corruption rampant, displaced people unable to return, health and education services
stretched, grievances festering without satisfaction, and distrust dominating all political activ-
ity. The challenge here was one of cure rather than prevention. Wendy Brown expressed the
unreality of the expectations this could create in her critique of The Counter-Insurgency Field
Manual 3-24:

In short, it requires—from the US military no less—a degree of political intelligence and foresight worthy of
Rousseau’s Lawgiver, a degree of provision for human needs worthy of the farthest reach of the communist imagi-
nary, a degree of stabilization through governance worthy of Thomas Hobbes or perhaps Immanuel Kant, an abil-
ity to “decipher cultural narratives” (the manual’s words) worthy of a trained ethnographer, and an ability to ma-

153
 nipulate these narratives worthy of Plato. It also entails the paradox of fostering the strength and legitimacy of
what are often puppet regimes, and doing so while the occupiers are still on site. And all of this in a milieu of up-
heaval, violence, and complexly riven societies with weak or nonexistent states.7

It was always ambitious to expect that a state reconstructed in such unpromising circum-
stances would be other than disappointing when set against the highest standards. At best it
would be led by a strong man sufficient to function to a degree but well short of liberal
democracy. Once the new regime was strong enough to have agency it would likely begin to
clash with its external patron, for example to pursue sectarian interests or engage in corrupt
practices. While documents such as FM 3-24 assumed that the American interest and that of
the host government could be brought into close alignment that was usually overoptimistic, as
was the case in both Iraq and Afghanistan. An intention to change a client state’s behaviour,
so that it could be shown to be deserving of the support it was getting, required attaching con-
ditions to any assistance. Unfortunately once considerable resources had already been in-
vested in protecting and building up the client, the patron dare not let it relapse back into fail-
ure even if its state practice remained lamentable.8

THERE WAS NO FORMULA TO SATISFY ALL CASES. DIFFERENT countries started at different places
in terms of their economic and political capacity and the legacies of past conflicts. In some
cases there were political leaders who could reach out across communities, or commodities
that could ensure revenues. Some states had a history of centralisation, which tended to be the
case with oil-producing states, whereas in others demands from the capital were generally ig-
nored and more attention paid to local leaders. There were those who argued that the first pri-
ority was to get the state functioning, so that violence could be contained and economic activ-
ity organised. Others put more stress on nation building, so that divisions could be healed and
a sense of common purpose instilled. And then there was the question of democracy. Could
regular votes for parliaments create legitimacy and a sense of political access that had previ-
ously been lacking, or might it instead accentuate divisions, as parties were organised on reli-
gious or ethnic lines, and just provide the new political class with opportunities to indulge
their greed?
As we noted earlier, although stable democracies had many advantages introducing de-
mocratic practices at times of political turbulence did not always help the cause of order and
stability. Democracy was associated with elections, for that meant that all citizens could par-
ticipate and that there was a choice. But there were problems with elections. Political parties
were likely to reflect national divisions and their campaigns could aggravate a sense of griev-
ance. Without strong institutions, including an independent judiciary, winning an election
could be seen as an opportunity for patronage and corruption. It was to the good if one elec-
tion took place, but the challenge in these circumstances was always to get the second.9 Al-
though establishing democracy helped to stabilise a country this was only if it could be rein-
forced and sustained, lest the country drift back into authoritarianism and so become vulnera-
ble once again to civil war and military coups.10
Demanding that more attention be paid to popular views meant that less regard was
placed on state sovereignty and established borders while encouraging the principle of self-
determination as an expression of the rights of a free people. Once this principle was asserted
it was hard to know when to stop. It was one thing to assert the need for self-government
against rule from a distant and oppressive capital, but another to insist that any minority
should be allowed to govern itself. A new state, detached from its parent, could soon face the
same issue as some even smaller minority began to assert its rights and so challenge the new

154
borders. This became painfully evident as Croatia and Bosnia peeled away from the Yugoslav
Federation and then became subject to forms of partition.

A WHOLE NEW CADRE OF SPECIALISTS DEVELOPED AROUND all these questions, some working
for governments and other for the international organisations, including the various UN agen-
cies, the IMF, and the World Bank. There were the large NGOs, such as the International
Committee of the Red Cross and Oxfam, and smaller charities, perhaps with a focus on edu-
cation or getting relief to the victims of sexual abuse. They did what they could with projects
and contracts, offering advice on best practice and training, and developing theories on what
should be done. And there were also those addressing security issues, provided by the UN,
friendly governments, and private contractors. Others sought to get militias demobilised and
disarmed and reintegrated into a national army, weaning underpaid police forces away from
corrupt practices so that they could fight crime, working with local forces to deal with signs
of reviving rebellions or insurgencies as quickly as possible.
There was a degree of irony in all of this. Many of the states now being consumed by
their own weakness had emerged out of colonialism. By definition, a country that could only
be stabilised by outside intervention was no longer fully self-governing, and was likely to be
somewhat distant from a long-term settlement based on harmony, justice, and consensus. Was
the logic to take them back, to create a new form of trusteeship that would give authority to
the international forces and administrators that came into a country to provide order and start
reconstruction once the fighting had subsided? Jennifer Welsh, reporting on an Oxford semi-
nar, noted a ‘recurring theme’ that ‘humanitarian interventions contain within them imperial-
ist implications’. What might be necessary to create ‘lasting stability’ would also raise ‘thorny
questions not only about self-determination but also about the accountability of western-spon-
sored transitional authorities.’11
An imperial role, however, carried the implications of control, whereas the reality was
often getting caught up in situations that were hard to control, leaving those with good inten-
tions compromised. Deborah Scroggins used the story of Emma McCune as a vehicle for ex-
ploring the confused motives and mixed effects of Western aid efforts. McCune was a British
aid worker, full of enthusiasm for human rights and initially engaged setting up schools, who
went to Sudan in 1988 and died in a car crash in Kenya in 1993.
Sudan had gained independence in 1956, and then come to exhibit all the symptoms of
persistent conflict: division between the Muslim northern and non-Muslim southern parts of
the country (which had been administered separately until 1946 by the British); successive
coups in the capital Khartoum, resulting in Marxist, non-Marxist, and eventually Islamist
regimes; oil fields in the South the North wished to control; peace agreements of variable du-
ration; casualties that defied calculation (normally put at some two million); meddling exter-
nal powers with Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Uganda supporting the Sudan People’s Liberation
Army (SPLA) who led the fight against the north.12
When McCune died she was married to Riek Machar, an SPLA commander. Riek had
tried to overthrow SPLA leader John Garang, ostensibly in the name of a ‘secular, democratic
Sudan’, which led to vicious fighting. In late 1991 his forces killed some 2,000 civilians in
Bor and wounded several thousand, looting villages and raiding cattle. Some 25,000 died in
the ensuing famine and another 100,000 left the area. Yet the idealistic Emma became a com-
mitted partisan on her husband’s behalf, to the dismay of the rest of the expatriate aid commu-
nity.
In 2011 South Sudan eventually gained its independence from Sudan, but it remained
poor, with limited economic prospects, and full of weapons and fighters. It was divided from

155
the start between factions based on the Dinka and Nuer tribes, with little having been done to
bring them together after independence. The UN arranged a power sharing agreement and
sent in a force of 12,000 peacekeepers. Riek’s role in this ongoing tragedy continued. He be-
came vice president of South Sudan when it became independent. In 2016 he was dismissed
from office by the president and fled to Britain, vowing to return.13 As the fighting flared up
again a UN base was attacked along with foreign aid workers, who were beaten and raped.
Scroggins’s conclusion, reflecting her own disillusion, was that the wider expatriate com-
munity had become compromised in their own way, caught up in a vicious multifaceted con-
flict that they barely understood. Their ‘salvation fantasies’ combined a conviction that they
were doing something worthwhile and effective though their actions, which they often were,
though a consequence of the assistance they dispensed was to perpetuate rather than ease the
violence. She questioned whether external assistance did much good at all while providing no
reasons to believe that left alone matters would improve on their own accord.
There was certainly no shortage of assistance coming into South Sudan after indepen-
dence—with consultants pouring in to sort out the country’s administration, along with its ed-
ucation and health services. The Economist explained the problem:

But it was all carrot and no stick. With no conditions attached, the money rarely found its way to infrastructure
projects and public services. The consultants’ advice, especially when it was about boosting governance and re-
forming the army, was ignored. Chiefly focused on state-building, Western aid also failed to bring together es-
tranged communities. All this left plenty of leeway for factional chiefs to whip up tensions and consolidate power,
their rivalries culminating in a full-blown civil war in 2013.14

This fitted in with a general argument developed by Monica Toft, that a successful resolu-
tion of a civil war required not only the effective delivery of benefits, and withdrawal of fi-
nancial and other support from the warring parties, but also ‘a credible threat of harm or pun-
ishment to those who defect from the treaty.’15

THERE WAS THEREFORE AN ARGUMENT THAT FOREIGN INTERVENTION simply made bad situa-
tions worse and undermined natural forms of recovery. According to this argument the focus
on the vice of war, and especially its dire humanitarian impact, missed its virtue as a means of
resolving political conflicts which could lead to a lasting peace. The historian Ian Morris an-
swered the question ‘What is war good for?’ with peace. ‘What has made the world so much
safer is war itself.’16 War led to the development of strong states capable of keeping internal
violence in check, bringing an end to the more localised, unregulated, commonplace violence
of more ‘primitive’ times. After wars the winners were often able to incorporate the losers
into even larger states. ‘In retrospect’, observed Charles Tilly, ‘the pacification, cooptation, or
elimination of fractious rivals to the sovereign seems an awesome, noble, prescient enterprise,
destined to bring peace to a people’.17 There was evidence in more recent times that strong
states did emerge out of prolonged wars, having had to improve their abilities to raise funds,
maintain discipline, and manage complex operations. Arguably, therefore, if wars kept on
being interrupted and prevented from reaching a definitive conclusion, strong states would
never be given a chance to develop.
Edward Luttwak urged that wars must be allowed to run their natural course until a reso-
lution was reached. International intervention, of whatever sort, from demanding ceasefires to
interfering with the fighting, interrupted this process and so prevented lasting settlements.
Often they achieved no more than a pause in the fighting, as belligerents took the opportunity
to recuperate and revive their forces. The weaker side, which might have made the compro-

156
mises necessary for peace, was provided cover for intransigence. In Bosnia the factions had
been left with incentives to prepare for future war rather than reconstruct their societies. ‘Un-
interrupted war would certainly have caused further suffering and led to an unjust outcome
from one perspective or another, but it would also have led to a more stable situation.… Peace
takes hold only when war is truly over’.
Moreover, peacekeepers had given endangered civilians an illusion of security, when the
wise course would have been to flee, although in something of a contradiction Luttwak also
complained about large refugee camps as sustaining defeated populations in their anger and
providing a base for continued resistance. Luttwak’s claim was that conflicts did not end be-
cause ‘the transformative effects of both decisive victory and exhaustion are blocked by out-
side intervention’.18
There were obvious counter-examples to Luttwak’s analysis, not least the scale of vio-
lence that could overwhelm societies or the interventionist role played by neighbouring coun-
tries which were bound to look after their own interests. Yet research suggested that of all the
outcomes to a civil war, a clean military victory was the one that was most likely to result in a
stable peace. Civil wars did not recur in 85 per cent of the countries that experienced a mili-
tary victory, while war resumed in 50 per cent of the conflicts settled by means of negotia-
tion.19 Toft reported similar findings and also noted that the most satisfactory aftermaths
tended to be those following rebel victories.20 The problem with negotiated settlements was
that they did not resolve power struggles but instead left them in a state of suspended anima-
tion, making it harder for a government to act in a unified and consistent way. When a single
party dominated the government then it could act with more consistency and determination.21
Strong leaders, emerging out of tough conflicts, could manage economic recovery, even with-
out external assistance.22
Others pointed out that countries have capacities for economic self-generation that were
often missed in the belief that they are helpless without external assistance. This became a
similar argument to those about welfare-dependency, and finding the right balance between
encouraging individuals—and states—to become self-reliant and providing a safety net, upon
which they might become too dependent. The difficulty with this argument was that it implied
the possibility of keeping conflicts geographically contained, while neighbours and the wider
international community waited for them to burn themselves out or one side to win. In prac-
tice there were all sorts of reasons why they were likely to spread into neighbouring regions,
because of cross-border allegiances, opportunities for plunder, and refugee flows.
Weinstein used the example of Yoweri Museveni following the victory of his National
Resistance Movement (NRM) in Uganda in January 1986. This came after a succession of
disasters—coups (including the calamitous rule of Idi Amin) and civil wars. Per-capita GDP
had declined by 40 per cent in fifteen years. Museveni ushered in a period of political stabil-
ity, with the army in control around the country, and the country prospering and poverty
falling. The economic reforms followed Western guidelines but less so the political methods.
His achievements came as an ‘enlightened autocrat.’23 And like most autocrats as time passed
he found it harder to imagine how the country could manage without him. His view of politi-
cal parties was that they exacerbated sectarian divisions, and he therefore sought to govern
using a broad-based movement.
The hallmark of Western democracy was strong institutions that could manage competi-
tion, cope with transfers of power, and provide continuity of administration independent of
any particular leader. In other states with more fragile structures, stability tended to come in
the form of individuals whose rule might bring benefits at first until these were overtaken by
the costs of personality cults. This is why rebellions and coups at times offered the only hope

157
of refreshing government structures. So sticking narrowly to Weber’s definition of states gave
priority to internal order and stability, requiring backing strong leaders, even if they were
doing little to address popular grievances and creating troubles for the future. After all, the vi-
olence in the Middle East was the result of the old generation of anti-colonial, and largely sec-
ular, strong men losing their grip or being overthrown. The tradition, however, remained
strong. After Egypt’s President Mubarak fell the elected President Morsi’s Islamist policies
generated dissent and he was replaced in a coup by the military chief Abdel Fattah el Sisi,
adopting the ‘strong man’ governance model.

DESPITE OPTIMISM, EXPRESSED AS LATE AS 2014, THAT ‘Africa has become dramatically more
peaceful over the last 15 years’,24 this trend was already in reverse. Hopes that defeated lead-
ers would accept democratic, peaceful power transitions were regularly dashed. From 2008
there were marked declines in freedom of expression combined with rising levels of corrup-
tion and bureaucratic incompetence. Coups remained common.25 The lack of accountability
meant that rebels returned to the fray after a period of tenuous peace so that most wars were
‘repeats’. This repetition was a feature of some 90 percent of all civil wars, including in
Africa.26 The biggest cases involved the same countries that had experienced violent conflict
for many years. One consequence of this was cumulative misery in terms of disease, famine,
poverty, and large numbers of refugees and internally displaced people.27 In April 2017 it was
reported that 20 million people in four countries that had faced constant conflict—Nigeria,
South Sudan, Yemen, and Somalia—were at risk of starvation. Rebels often deliberately de-
nied them food while governments were either incompetent or diverted resources to regions
where they exercised more control. The conflicts had limited the ability of aid workers to
reach affected people, and they were too scared to move.28
The only new war in Africa was in Libya, one of the countries to fall under the spell of
the Arab Spring. This broke out with demonstrations against authoritarian regimes, beginning
in Tunisia in December 2010. In 2011 Libyan President Gaddafi was overthrown.29 This was
a small country with oil resources, and it was assumed that it could look after itself. Instead
the state fell apart; civil war developed, with Islamist groups getting footholds. The Western
interveners watched aghast as this country also descended into chaos. As part of the Syrian
civil war, which also began in 2011, the Islamist group ISIS was able to establish a base and
move into Iraq (where the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 had given the Islamists their
opening) prompting intense fighting and a massive refugee crisis that had an unsettling effect
on European politics as they tried to absorb an influx of desperate people. They were dis-
lodged from cities such as Mosul only with enormous effort and great suffering, leaving ruins
and rubble behind them.
Islamist groups, such as al-Shabaab in Kenya and Boko Haram in Nigeria, were becom-
ing a more important feature in African conflicts as elsewhere. Barbara Walter wrote of the
‘new new civil wars’. Not only had the number of conflicts gone up but the majority of those
starting up or reviving were in Muslim-majority countries and involved rebels embracing rad-
ical Islamist goals. These different groups were linked and their goals were as much transna-
tional as national. The ominous features of these wars were that they looked likely to last for
some time, were impervious to attempts to negotiate settlements, and carried the risk of conta-
gion into neighbouring territories.30 The extremism of Islamism was instrumental as a power-
ful recruiting and fund-raising tool, potentially capable of appealing to all Sunni Muslims
(some 90 per cent of total) though the majority were more moderate in their beliefs. It justi-
fied harsh measures against apostates and non-believers, adding to the intensity of the vio-
lence. Groups that had been seen in the 1990s as vicious but marginal had become major

158
players.
The choices got starker for the major powers. Failing to address humanitarian crises
meant becoming spectators to immense suffering, watching opportunities being created for
extremism, and then having to come to terms with the consequences in terms of pressure to
take refugees and risks of terrorism. Military interventions meant participation in frustrating
and often cruel wars, from which disengagement was difficult. Limiting the contributions to
advice and air power meant limiting political influence. Success came increasingly to depend
on the quality of local partners. Once the problems connected with transforming other peo-
ples’ states were recognised, the partners could not be expected to share all core values. The
first priority was that they were credible and competent which often meant working with old-
fashioned ‘strong men’ as the best available bulwark against Islamist movements. The objec-
tives were often more about preventing a bad situation deteriorating rather than easing con-
flict by raising societies to a new level of development. The compromises were awkward and
the results rarely matched the scale of the challenge. All this was far from the liberal opti-
mism of the early post–Cold War period.

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PART THREE

160
 [ 20 ]

Hybrid Wars

In the aftermath of the relative certainty of doctrine, training, tactics, adversary, and known terrain of the
Cold War, our military today is in a sense operating without a concept of war and is searching desper-
ately for the new “unified field theory” of conflict.
GENERAL DAVID BARNO, ‘Military Adaptation in Complex Operations’, 20091

By early in the twenty-first century it was apparent that the inherited scripts for future war
were inadequate. The US military had clung to an ideal type derived from the classical model
and then faced a more unruly form of warfare for which it was poorly prepared and from
which it struggled to extricate itself. Their British allies believed that they understood the re-
quirements of Iraq based on their peacekeeping experience of Bosnia and aid to the civil
power in Northern Ireland, but their scripts were also inadequate; they found themselves
struggling even more than the Americans.2
Was there a way of thinking about war that might prepare forces better for the sort of
challenges that they might meet in the future? It was evident that it was not sufficient to pre-
pare just for the type of war which Western armies wished to fight. But did that mean that it
was necessary to prepare for a great variety of contingencies, each with their own special
scripts, or might something else be going on, in which different forms of warfare were being
followed at the same time? In 1997 US Marine Corps Commandant General Charles C. Kru-
lak coined the term “Three Block War” to convey the special requirements of the modern bat-
tlefield.

In one moment in time, our service members will be feeding and clothing displaced refugees, providing humani-
tarian assistance. In the next moment, they will be holding two warring tribes apart—conducting peacekeeping op-
erations—and, finally, they will be fighting a highly lethal mid-intensity battle—all on the same day… all within
three city blocks.3

This idea that a number of different tasks had to be accomplished at the same time was
eventually turned into a form of strategy, capable of confounding an opponent. This would
stretch an adversary relying solely on conventional warfare. With problems in Iraq, this inter-
mingling of irregular with regular forces attracted more interest. In 2005 General James Mat-
tis and Lt. Col. Frank Hoffman described a ‘four-block war’, with the additional block dealing
‘with the psychological or information operations aspects’. They described this as a ‘hybrid
war’.4 The term was given greater prominence in 2007 by Hoffman, referring not just to how

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irregular forces might be used to add to the pressure on the regular but something more coor-
dinated and melded.5 Over time it came to refer to an approach drawing upon instruments
from across the full spectrum, including terrorism, insurgency, criminality, and conventional
operations, along with the extensive use of information operations.
Hoffman’s prime example of the concept at work was Hezbollah’s campaign against Is-
rael in the Second Lebanon War of 2006, in which the IDF relied on air power to attack
Hezbollah sanctuaries but then faced rocket attacks from Lebanon. They were then drawn into
Lebanon where they struggled to deal with the militia. Hoffman described this as ‘a classic
example of a hybrid threat’:

The fusion of militia units, specially trained fighters and the anti-tank guided-missile teams marks this case, as
does Hezbollah’s employment of modern information operations, signals intelligence, operational and tactical
rockets, armed UAVs and deadly anti-ship cruise missiles. Hezbollah’s leaders describe their force as a cross be-
tween an army and a guerrilla force, and believe they have developed a new model.6

Hezbollah was an interesting case, both well embedded in its community and sponsored
by Iran, which provided it with money and arms. In 2006 its tactics showed up those of Israel,
which judged the demands of the war poorly, relying too much on air power without a strong
ground presence. But the war was also costly for the militia, with a lot of fighters killed, and
the Israeli campaign battered its urban sanctuaries.7
Interest in the approach was revived as it was apparently followed by Russia in its cam-
paign against Ukraine that began in 2014. In early 2013 Valery Gerasimov, chief of Russia’s
general staff, had described how this might work. He noted how in Middle East conflicts there
had been a progressive erosion of the distinctions between war and peace and between uni-
formed personnel and covert operatives. Wars were ‘not declared but simply begin,’ so that ‘a
completely well-off and stable country’ could be transformed into ‘an arena of the most in-
tense armed conflict in a matter of months or even days.’ In these circumstances, military
means became more effective when combined with non-military means, including ‘political,
economic, information, humanitarian and other measures.’ These could be supplemented by
covert and thus deniable military measures as well as offers of peacekeeping assistance as a
means to strategic ends. ‘New information technologies’ would play an important role. As a
result, ‘frontal clashes of major military formations… are gradually receding into the past.’ At
issue was how these capabilities related to the local population, whose support could swing a
campaign one way or the other. Gerasimov suggested that they could be fired up as a fifth col-
umn and by ‘concealed’ armed forces.8 The Russians were also looking for way to prevail in
a conflict without having to rely on superior force in a classic battle.
A year later when in response to an uprising in Kiev, which saw the Ukrainian President
flee and an anti-Russian government take over, Moscow moved first to annex Crimea while
launching an incursion into parts of Eastern Ukraine, all while claiming that these were in-
digenous, spontaneous, popular movements managing without Russian military personnel.
The Russian claims did not survive scrutiny. There were professional soldiers in uniforms
without markings playing key roles. The role of the separatists had some similarities with
Hezbollah. They also had a state sponsor, which ensured that they had resources and modern
weaponry, though they were more of a proxy for Russian interests. Unlike Hezbollah they did
not have deep roots among local people, at least not in Eastern Ukraine.9
The experience demonstrated the limits of hybrid warfare as well as the possibilities.10
Complex command arrangements complicated Russian attempts to control the situation on the
ground, while efforts at deception were by and large ineffectual, as they became progressively

162
transparent. The aim was more to avoid accepting the political and legal implications of what
outside observers assumed to be true. Admitting the role Russian forces were actually playing
in Ukraine would have required admitting aggression. The pretence was therefore that the in-
dividuals concerned were volunteers or on holiday. When one of their anti-aircraft missiles
shot down a Malaysian Airlines aircraft in July 2014, with the loss of 298 lives, instead of ac-
cepting responsibility they sought to implicate the Ukrainians, with explanations of the shoot-
down becoming ever more fanciful. One possible success with this approach was in projecting
a more menacing image than Russia’s actual strength warranted, which served to deter the
West from escalating the conflict.
By and large, however, the result was that Russian officials were not believed about any-
thing, even when telling the truth. Russian propaganda played extremely well in Russia but
badly everywhere else, which had the effect of increasing Russia’s sense of isolation but not
of its influence. ‘Russia may have a megaphone’, observed Mark Galeotti, ‘but this just
means that when its message is laughable or offensive it can alienate more people at once’.11
In terms of the campaign on the ground, the Russian operation got stuck in September 2014
and despite a peace process there was little movement to bring the conflict to a close either
militarily or diplomatically. On the ground the fighting was reminiscent of so many wars, old
and new, with exchanges of mortar and small arms fire.
In this respect ‘hybrid war’ emerged as a lesser form of warfare, coming to the fore be-
cause of problems with regular warfare, and an appreciation of the possibilities of popular re-
sistance. It gave coherence to what was often no more than a set of ad hoc and improvised
arrangements. As with many similar concepts, such as asymmetric warfare, once adopted as a
term of art ‘hybrid war’ tended towards a wider definition. As the term came to be adopted by
the US armed forces, the theory became more elaborate, exploring the social and cultural
links between the disparate elements.12 If pushed it could encompass almost everything. It
could describe the mingling of types of operations and forces evident in many contemporary
conflicts but it lacked specificity. No conflicts could be considered in some sense ‘pure’. All
tended to include regular and irregular elements, and there were many precedents.13 Com-
manders had long faced the challenges of combining classical forms of conventional warfare
with partisan campaigns on the one hand and forms of civilian destruction (such as air raids)
on the other.
As a deliberate strategy it generated its own demands. A competent and extensive com-
mand structure was needed to pull together the different strands of activity so that they rein-
forced rather than contradicted each other. More seriously, there was a distinction between ca-
pabilities that were necessary to achieve the objectives of war, which normally meant reason-
ably disciplined and substantial forces able to take and hold contested territory, and support-
ing capabilities that could help to disorient and demoralise an opponent and erode the ability
to sustain a conflict over time (such as economic measures) but did not by themselves provide
for political control.
NATO nonetheless became sufficiently alarmed that this was a new type of warfare for
which it was unprepared that it issued its own report on how to counter the challenge in the
future. Thus in 2015 NATO’s Secretary General reported that:

Russia has used proxy soldiers, unmarked Special Forces, intimidation and propaganda, all to lay a thick fog of
confusion; to obscure its true purpose in Ukraine; and to attempt deniability. So NATO must be ready to deal with
every aspect of this new reality from wherever it comes. And that means we must look closely at how we prepare
for; deter; and if necessary defend against hybrid warfare.

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 He described hybrid warfare as ‘a probe, a test of our resolve to resist and to defend our-
selves’ but also as a possible ‘prelude to a more serious attack; because behind every hybrid
strategy, there are conventional forces, increasing the pressure and ready to exploit any open-
ing.’14
One part of the mix—information operations—was assumed to be the most original and
required the most attention.15
Russia had a long history of controlling media, but was also sensitive to the role played
by uncontrollable and subversive foreign media in stimulating the Soviet Union’s crisis of le-
gitimacy and then how a number of governments in post-Soviet states had been overthrown in
‘colour revolutions’ backed by the west.16 Although Marxism was no longer the official ide-
ology, it left an intellectual legacy in which issues of mass consciousness and how it could be
shaped were to the fore. In addition, the possibilities of disinformation as war-fighting had
been part of Soviet military doctrine.17 Russian efforts used social media to spread false mes-
sages and create misleading impressions to weaken opponents, especially with their own pub-
lic opinion. The EU spoke of ‘hybrid threats’ because it saw this as a form of activity that
could help undermine security even at times of comparative peace. Evidence was found in the
role, confirmed by the US intelligence community, played by Russia during the 2016 presi-
dential election, employing disinformation and leaks of hacked emails, in undermining Demo-
crat Party candidate Hillary Clinton.

THE TERM ‘INFORMATION WAR’ HAD BEEN AROUND SINCE THE early 1990s with two different but
easily confused meanings. The first referred to measures designed to disable systems depen-
dent upon flows of information; the second referred to attempts to influence perceptions by
affecting the content of information. The first was about engineering, the second about cogni-
tion. Information war as propaganda was a continuation of practices that had developed along
with the development of newspapers with mass circulation, then radio and TV. Each had in
their own way set new opportunities and limits on the ability of elites to shape popular atti-
tudes to war, both in anticipation and once the fighting was underway, and for enemies to sub-
vert their messages.
The two big changes made possible by the digital age were the ease of access to multiple
sources of information, international as well as national, and the ability to share thoughts and
plans with others. Communication with informal networks, without any commanding organi-
sation, could be achieved through numerous outlets, some protected and some open. RAND
analysts John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt saw how this created an opportunity for what they
called ‘netwars’, described as ‘an emerging mode of conflict (and crime) at societal levels,
short of traditional military warfare, in which the protagonists use network forms of organiza-
tion and related doctrines, strategies, and technologies attuned to the information age’. The
stress was on the features normally associated with insurgencies such as dispersal and limited
central control, coming at opponents from various and often unexpected directions. According
to Arquilla and Ronfeldt:

The most potent netwarriors will not only be highly networked and have a capacity to swarm, they will also be
held together by strong social ties, have secure communications technologies, and project a common “story” about
why they are together and what they need to do. These will be the most serious adversaries.18

These were features generally associated with radical social movements, as well as terror-
ist or insurgent groups.
The importance of the common ‘story’ or ‘narrative’ in this analysis was to provide not

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only an ideological rationale for political struggle but also an account of the struggle’s likely
course, explaining why one side was likely to prevail. The narrative therefore gave meaning
to events and so shaped responses. For those engaged in counter-insurgency operations this
was a very big issue as they needed communities on-side as they could offer the enemy sanc-
tuaries, recruits, and supplies. They appreciated that this was difficult to achieve whilst ordi-
nary people were suspicious if not downright hostile. David Kilcullen observed how the insur-
gents’ ‘pernicious influence’ drew on a ‘single narrative’, that was simple, unified, easily ex-
pressed, and could organise experience and provide a framework for understanding events. He
understood that it was best to be able to ‘tap into an existing narrative that excludes the insur-
gents’ involving stories that people naturally appreciate. Otherwise it was necessary to de-
velop an alternative narrative, which would be more challenging.19
This fitted in with longer-standing concerns about the need to win over disaffected popu-
lations as part of a counter-insurgency campaign, demonstrating that by backing the govern-
ment side they could expect protection from the insurgents and that life would generally get
better. Yet even an appreciation of the importance of popular perceptions and how they might
be influenced by social media, as well as by print and broadcasting, did not mean that they
could readily be reshaped. Attempts to encourage different thoughts might benefit from so-
phisticated forms of propaganda but would still fail if the messages did not make sense in
terms of local culture or accord with everyday experiences. It required considerable discipline
to sustain a set of messages, not only in what was said but also in ensuring that behaviour in
the field conformed to what was being claimed. It was especially difficult for those connected
with a foreign force to construct a credible narrative that would appeal to the indigenous pop-
ulation.20 Whatever was said would have to stay close to public opinion back home as well as
address local concerns. The greatest difficulty lay in addressing popular grievances effec-
tively, promising reform and military success, when it was often the failures of the host gov-
ernment to achieve any of this that was the reason for the insurgency in the first place.
With all military operations there was a constant and uneasy relationship with the media.
At the very least armies had to be aware of the impact of images of retreat, casual cruelty, or
just the regular miseries of war. Once smartphones became available in 2007, incidents could
be videoed and transmitted worldwide within seconds. Military operations became transpar-
ent. The sort of secrecy that commanders would have demanded in the past was no longer
possible. The only hope for surprise would be that with so much noise cluttering the Internet,
bits and pieces of crucial information could easily be missed. Because there was no longer
any control over what could be posted on the Internet, opportunities also grew for manipulat-
ing opinion. Information campaigns could put out misleading evidence to create completely
false impressions in order to construct or break allegiances and sympathies. The causal rela-
tionships were much harder to grasp when it came to the information aspects of war, as op-
posed to those that were more crudely kinetic. It was not possible to reshape belief systems
with the same care and precision that could now be put into lethal attacks. Distant messages
from unfamiliar sources competed for attention with the direct experience of war and its
human consequences. The most telling messages were often unintended as people observed
the actions of troops in their neighbourhood, or heard garbled reports of what politicians had
said, or picked up lurid stories from the Internet that reinforced their prejudices.
The concept of ‘hybrid war’ implied the possibility of disparate activities having a con-
trolling mastermind, ensuring that they were mutually reinforcing. In practice the activities
were likely to remain disparate, each with their own dynamic, thwarting attempts by govern-
ments and military commanders to assert control.

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 [ 21 ]

Cyberwar

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every

nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted
from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in
the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.
WILLIAM GIBSON, Neuromancer, 19841

The other form of information warfare was to interfere with the information flows necessary
to keep modern military and civilian systems working. In this respect it was as much an as-
pect of ‘cyber war’ as ‘hybrid war’. The idea of cyberwar was a natural inference from the
digital revolution. If all military activity depended on the rapid collection, processing, and
transmission of data then should not that be as important a focus of attention as launching
strikes or blunting enemy attacks? What if one side suddenly found itself in the dark, with
screens either blank or full of misleading information, and was unable to send out orders to
local commanders or else had these orders substituted by false instructions? In such circum-
stances even the strongest military machine would be left helpless and hapless. Take the
analysis a step further and look beyond military activity and then an even more alarming
thought developed. If all key functions of a modern society—energy, transport, banking,
health, and education services—depended on these flows of information, might it be possible
to bring a country to its knees without firing a shot? Stopping the flow would be like pulling
out a gigantic plug. Everything would go dark, screech to a halt, or clatter and bang, leaving
an economy in tatters and a society struggling to meet its most basic needs.
Unlike other visions of future war this was only in part a question of imagining how tech-
nologies might develop. The vulnerabilities created by the digital age were evident in every-
day stories of viruses and worms infecting computers, of foreign agents, disgruntled employ-
ees, would-be extortionists, or just curious youngsters hacking into supposedly secure sys-
tems, undertaking acts of malicious interference, sometimes no more than an irritating nui-
sance, sometimes causing serious damage and disruption. There were reports from past con-
flicts of enemy air defences caught napping, command systems confused, and propaganda op-
portunities exploited. From the start the question was not one of whether or not there was an
issue here but how the risks and opportunities were to be measured, and how the relationship
between this new arena of conflict and the nature of warfare as a whole was to be conceptu-
alised. The problem appeared as being somewhere on a spectrum from the equivalent of a nu-
clear war to a minor inconvenience.2

166
 There was a link to the post-Second World War thoughts about a coming ‘push button
war’, in which guided missiles would rule and armies might become redundant.3 As we saw
in Chapter 7, once nuclear warheads were added to these missiles and they acquired intercon-
tinental ranges, two types of fears began to dominate the debate on future war. The first was
whether one side might be able to configure its nuclear forces so as to launch a disarming first
strike, transforming an apparent balance of power into one-sided dominance. The other, even
if there was no premium in striking first, was the potential interaction of human failings and
technical malfunctions that would turn an otherwise manageable situation into a global cata-
clysm. Norbert Wiener, who had developed his ideas on cybernetics from his work on anti-
aircraft weapons during the Second World War, had become increasingly alarmed at the im-
plications of developing air defence systems which had to work so quickly that there was
barely a chance for human intervention.4 The theme of lost control over a situation hurtling
towards tragedy was the basis of the movies Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe.

IN 1979 TWO SCREENWRITERS, LARRY LASKER AND WALTER Parkes, developed an idea for a
movie based on the interaction between a dying old scientist and a smart, rebellious teenager,
which soon revolved around their shared understanding of computing. Aware of stories about
how the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) could mistake innocent
signals for an incoming Soviet attack, they toured NORAD. There they met with the comman-
der who, on their telling, shared his concerns about the risk of over-automated decision-mak-
ing. They also learnt about simulated war games. Out of this came the core plot of the movie
WarGames, released in 1983. A teenager, David Lightman (played by Matthew Broderick),
hacked into a supercomputer designed to predict outcomes of nuclear war known as War Op-
eration Plan Response (WOPR). Lightman noted a number of familiar games but then saw
one called ‘Global Thermonuclear War’ which he decided to play. This turned out to be a pro-
gramme that could convince the systems operating nuclear missiles that this was the real
thing. When he realised what he had done, and after arrest by the FBI for the hack, Lightman
reached the embittered, dying scientist who had invented the programme to persuade him to
give him the clue to turning it off. This was done seconds away from catastrophe. As WOPR
was a learning machine it could realise that some games led to futility, which became a
metaphor for mutual assured destruction. After this point was reached through a drawn game
of tic-tac-toe the computer had the last line: ‘A strange game. The only winning move is not
to play. How about a nice game of chess?’5
As with the doomsday machine in the earlier movies, the plot depended on a prior deci-
sion to give deterrence a form of automaticity that prevented human beings interrupting the
launch sequence. The movie opened with a surprise drill in which, when confronted with an
incoming nuclear attack, the USAF personnel supposed to turn the keys to launch retaliatory
strikes failed to do so. Instead of a Germanic think tanker the villain now was an all-American
systems engineer who, against the advice of the NORAD commander, insisted that the launch
process must be automated, which is why WOPR had this crucial role. When the movie was
released the Pentagon was at pains to point out that it was misleading about NORAD’s role
and also the possibility of the nuclear arsenal being out of human control. Whether or not the
intent was to make a film in the spirit of Fail-Safe or Dr. Strangelove, alerting the audience to
the risks of an inadvertent nuclear catastrophe, the main thought left by WarGames was the
ease with which an outsider might hack his way into the most vital computer networks, high-
lighting the risks posed by remote access and simple passwords. This was the message taken
away by President Reagan, a friend of Lasker’s parents, who was invited to an early showing
and was sufficiently disturbed to ask officials whether this movie had a basis in any conceiv-

167
able reality. As the issue was investigated it turned out to be more serious than had been re-
alised, leading to a set of studies into what was then described as ‘Telecommunications and
Automated Information Systems Security’.6
This was a time of exploration into this developing networked world of information, a
disembodied place where real things could be made to happen by anyone who could gain ac-
cess. WarGames had pointed to the possibility of a war starting from within cyberspace. Yet
not only was the term itself still unfamiliar, but the prefix also already had connotations of cy-
borgs, man-machine combinations with extended powers.7 The prospect of computers gaining
the upper hand in some future conflict was linked naturally to the idea of robotic warriors, a
standard feature of science fiction.
Robots were introduced in a 1921 play by Czech writer Karel Čapek about a company
that sold machines that looked like people as forms of slaves. He got the term from ‘robot-
niks’ or surfs. As he was aware that these robotniks had rebelled against their masters in 1848,
Čapek had his robots also turning on their human masters, introducing a regular theme into
science fiction.8 As mechanical devices increasingly performed simple but demanding house-
hold tasks during the twentieth century it was natural to consider how they might take over as
soldiers. In 1968 a professor of Mechanical Engineering described how it would not be long
before radars would be able to propel themselves forward, seek out enemies and kill them. ‘A
line of such robots spaced twenty metres apart might be deployed to move at fifteen kilome-
tres per hour through a jungle and destroy all men encountered there’. Within ‘a few years’
men would ‘cease to be valued in battle’. They would complicate matters because they would
lack comparable ‘information storage, decision-making, sensory input and pattern-recogni-
tion’. The human role was likely to be to ‘stand helplessly by as a struggle rages between
robot armies and navies, and air and rocket forces’.9
In the first article to talk of ‘cyberwars’, published in 1987, robots dominated the scene.
They were fearless and irresistible, pushing away any poor humans sent to confront them. If
everything was automated then future wars would be between machines with artificial brains,
with their controllers hidden away in command bunkers.10 Cyberwar dominated by robots
that ‘do much of the killing and destroying without direct instructions from human operators’
was also the theme of an article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in 1992. The idea of a net-
work was still missing. What was alarming about these systems, whether crewless tanks or
anti-missile satellites, was their autonomy.11
The team of Lasker and Parkes released another movie in 1992 called Sneakers. It had
been conceived while WarGames was being made, and took on a similar theme, this time in-
volving a device stolen from the National Security Agency (NSA) that could decode all en-
crypted data. It did not make the same impact, except for the fact that it was watched by the
NSA’s head, Admiral Mike McConnell, who was taken by a line in the script:

The world isn’t run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It’s run by ones and zeroes, little bits of data. It’s
all just electrons… there’s a war out there, old friend, a world war. And it’s not about who’s got the most bullets.
It’s about who controls the information: what we see and hear, how we work, what we think. It’s all about the in-
formation.12

This vulnerability had already been identified in a 1991 report by the National Research
Council:

We are at risk. Increasingly, America depends on computers. They control power delivery, communications, avia-
tion, and financial services. They are used to store vital information, from medical records to business plans to

168
 criminal records. Although we trust them, they are vulnerable—to the effects of poor design and insufficient qual-
ity control, to accident, and perhaps more alarmingly, to deliberate attack. The modern thief can steal more with a
computer than with a gun. Tomorrow’s terrorist may be able to do more damage with a keyboard than with a
bomb.13

An IT entrepreneur from Tennessee, Winn Schwartau, first in a journal article, then in

Congressional testimony, and eventually in a self-published novel, Terminal Compromise,
highlighted the danger. He told Congress: ‘Government and commercial computer systems
are so poorly protected today that they can essentially be considered defenceless’. Drawing on
the unavoidable analogy, he spoke of ‘an electronic Pearl Harbor waiting to occur’.14 The plot
of his novel had at its centre a Japanese survivor of Hiroshima, seeking revenge against the
United States, and involved ‘Arab zealots, German intelligence agents and a host of technical
mercenaries’ identifying ‘the weaknesses in our techno-economic infrastructure’ to land
blows that hurt the US economy, taking in Wall Street as well as the carmakers Ford and
Chrysler.15 In their 1993 book War and Anti-War, the Tofflers quoted Schwartau warning of
an electronic Pearl Harbor and others alarmed about the possibility of ‘info-terrorists’.16
The idea of the electronic Pearl Harbor gained more traction in policy circles following a
1995 crisis simulation led by RAND analysts Roger Molander and Peter Wilson who had
been engaged in a series of exercises on nuclear warfare. They put to decision-makers a de-
veloping crisis and asked them to consider issues of escalation. Now they envisaged a series
of attacks that disabled a Saudi Arabian refinery, derailed a high-speed train, crashed an air-
liner, took down power grids, and put CNN offline. An ‘electronic Pearl Harbor’ meant ‘that
some country or terrorist might attack US computers in one sudden, bolt-out-of-the-blue
strike, causing death, destruction, and mayhem.’17 Policymakers appeared to be at a loss to
know how to respond, yet could not deny the problem. ‘The electron’, explained CIA Director
John Deutch, ‘is the ultimate precision guided weapon’.18 In his confirmation hearings as Sec-
retary of Defense in 2011, Leon Panetta deployed the analogy yet again to warn of a ‘digital
Pearl Harbor’. A former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned the same year: ‘The sin-
gle biggest existential threat that’s out there, I think, is cyber.’19
The persistent use of the most searing experience in recent American military history to
frame future attacks pointed very deliberately to the potential for surprise. But Pearl Harbor,
of course, was not a knockout blow. The US recovered and defeated the perpetrator. This hy-
pothetical case, therefore, raised exactly the same questions of why an enemy would do this,
how they would follow up any achievements in the initial strike, and what political purpose
might be served. There was also the question of how confident the attacker could be that all
would work as planned. A lot would need to be known not only about the target’s vulnerabili-
ties, and whether defences had been improved, but also the degree to which the target was de-
pendent upon the systems being attacked. As Wilson, one of the designers of the RAND sim-
ulation, observed, these were more weapons of mass disruption than mass destruction, and
that ‘by painting doomsday scenarios, government officials lose credibility and, over time,
their ability to influence the public.’20 The issue was also perplexing because while some at-
tacks might cause loss of life most would not.
As one group worried about how the United States might take advantage of the vulnera-
bilities of information systems to mess with enemies, others worried about how the same vul-
nerabilities in their systems might allow the enemy to mess with them. Given the resources al-
located to this issue it could be assumed that the Americans were well able to interfere with
the systems of others. Small but significant acts illustrated the possibilities. First Iraqi and
then Serb air defences were degraded by messing with their software. The Israelis did some-

169
thing similar with Syrian air defences when they took out a nuclear reactor under construction
in 2007. The Stuxnet virus, probably a joint US-Israeli project, was designed to set back ura-
nium enrichment in Iran by disabling centrifuges.21 This had some effect but also showed
how hard it was to stop these attacks spreading away from the original target. The virus was
noticed when non-Iranian systems were hit.
Every time national systems were tested to see how well they could defend against inter-
ference from others, they were found to be wanting, and for all types of networks, malevolent
hacking became regular. In 2014 there were almost 80,000 security breaches in the US, more
than 2,000 of which resulted in lost data. Hackers stayed inside the networks they had
breached for an average of 205 days.22 Behind the attacks were criminal groups and political
activists as much as governments, although the line between them could get blurred. They
normally appeared as ‘bolts from the blue’, but they tended to be damaging more than crip-
pling, and usually had far more to do with the theft of business secrets, or malicious attacks
on individuals or companies, than with international affairs. Sometimes it was difficult to
work out what was deliberate interference and what was a consequence of the fragility of
some of the connections. Internet services regularly went down because of accident or error.
In one incident a 75-year-old Georgian grandmother cut off the Internet to Armenia with a
shovel, almost leading to an international incident as Russia was at first blamed.23
The assumption that it would be impossible to attribute attacks was challenged as the
forensics improved.24 The US became more ready to assign blame, whether it was a North
Korean attack on Sony Corporation for a movie which considered the possibility of the assas-
sination of its leader, or, more seriously, Russian attempts to swing the 2016 presidential elec-
tion. In these cases the US government also spoke openly of retaliation. The US became ex-
plicit about the deterrence aspects of its cyber-strategy in the military sphere as well, threaten-
ing to ‘use cyber operations to disrupt an adversary’s command-and-control networks, mili-
tary-related critical infrastructure, and weapons capabilities.’25
As with all new developments the question was whether this was a way to get a decisive
result in a conflict or just another means of engaging in a dispute without necessarily being
able to bring it to a conclusion. In earlier debates about the impact of first air power and then
nuclear weapons a distinction had been drawn between strategic and tactical effects, with the
former making possible a decisive victory and the latter only having their effects as a result of
working with other types of forces and in particular armies. Arquilla and Ronfeldt sought to
redefine cyberwar in a 1993 article away from automated forms of physical forces to the cen-
tres of knowledge and communication at the heart of modern military and social systems.26
This fitted in with a wider trend in thinking about warfare, represented as a shift from mind-
less attrition, which relied on physical destruction, to more intelligent manoeuvrist strategies,
which depended on getting inside the enemy’s head to confuse and demoralise.27 The next
shift was from interference with the information processes that kept military systems working
to those that did the same for a whole country.
According to Arquilla the purpose of this article had been to stress tactical effects, show-
ing how disruption of networks might interfere with one side’s ability to fight a conventional
war, while they were sceptical about the ‘strategic attack paradigm’ which saw the attacks
being directed against national information infrastructures. Yet, he observed, the academic
and policy debate soon got drawn to ‘a kind of information analog to strategic bombing’.28
This was not to deny the evident tactical value in exploring the weaknesses in enemy forces.
One general reporting on his experience in Afghanistan described how he ‘was able to use my
cyber operations against my adversary with great impact.… I was able to get inside his nets,
infect his command-and-control, and in fact defend myself against his almost constant incur-

170
sions to get inside my wire, to affect my operations.’29 The challenge lay in showing how cy-
berwar should be viewed strategically. The issue was not one of how hurt might be caused but
of linking the hurt to a political purpose, especially if that was the sole form of attack.
To do major harm would require substantial preparation, including considerable research
into the system being targeted to identify its vulnerabilities, in the hope that this would not be
detected, and then customising a package to implement the required sabotage. Whatever the
options developed during prior reconnaissance there were likely to be major uncertainties
about their effectiveness until an attack was actually launched, including whether the target
had noticed that its systems had been penetrated. These attempts therefore could not be spur
of the moment decisions but must be prepared well in advance of any attack, and the options
might degrade quite quickly. The adversary might have been doing its own probing and found
evidence of a planned offensive. A state picking up on an adversary’s preparation might de-
cide to make a fuss or simply make any attack harder to execute and wait to see what hap-
pened. None of this might be visible other than to those directly involved.30 These uncertain-
ties would all make cyberweapons an uncertain foundation for aggression.
An imagined cyberwar was the natural culmination of a yearning for non-kinetic wars,
forms of engagement that would disarm and disable a whole society without mass slaughter.
This is why there was continuing anxiety about the worst case of ‘an electronic Pearl Harbor’,
with a sudden attack leading to social and economic breakdown. The everyday reality, how-
ever, was more of a level of threat that was routine and ubiquitous. Not only was it the case
that any conflict, even one that was largely non-violent, exhibited cyber elements, but also
that this had become almost a preferred form of engagement, precisely because it was rela-
tively minor. It provided opportunities for soft forms of coercion, signalling concern, or hint-
ing at some future escalation. This is one way to interpret Russia’s electronic bombardment of
Estonia in 2007 and Georgia the next year.31 In neither case was the effect of the denial of
service attacks lasting, but both served as warnings of what might be done in the future. In
this way states behaved ‘more and more like individual hackers, carrying out crimes of petty
vandalism, theft, disruption, destruction, and even cyber-bullying.’ It was an unrestricted form
of conflict without obvious limits, probing while avoiding excessive provocation, but still un-
dertaken at a level inconsistent with responsible state behaviour.32 In this respect, cyber-at-
tacks became more analogous to irregular war than strategic bombing, another way to harass
and subvert, to confuse and annoy, but not a way to win a war.

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 [ 22 ]

Robots and Drones

The Three Laws of Robotics, from the “Handbook of Robotics, 56th Edition, 2058 A.D.”:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with
the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or
Second Laws.
ISAAC ASIMOV, ‘Runaround’, 19421

In the Star Wars series the most formidable of all weapons was the Death Star, a moon-sized
battle station constructed by the Galactic Empire. It had one weapon—a superlaser capable of
destroying planets. The aim was to suppress the rebels by confronting them with an irre-
sistible force, demonstrated when the planet Alderaan was destroyed. But the rebels got hold
of the Death Star’s plans and noticed that it had one vulnerability, a small thermal exhaust
port linked to the main reactor. Leading a desperate attack the young Jedi Luke Skywalker
managed to fire a torpedo through the port and destroy the whole system2. The Galactic Em-
pire then went on to construct a second, and even larger, Death Star but the programme was
subject to severe delays, prompting great anger from the evil Darth Vader.3 This was also
taken out by the rebels and this time before it had a chance to fire its weapon. In 2012 a peti-
tion was placed on the White House’s website urging that a real Death Star be built in order to
stimulate the economy and defend the nation. The Obama Administration offered three rea-
sons for rejecting the petition. First, the cost would be $850,000,000,000,000,000. Second, it
was not policy to blow up planets. Third, why ‘spend countless taxpayer dollars on a Death
Star with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship?’
Dan Ward, a specialist in defence acquisition, saw the Death Star as a metaphor for what
had gone wrong with weapons design in the Pentagon. It would always be a challenge to build
such a large and complex system without overlooking some critical vulnerability.4 Only one
of these could be built at a time so that if the vulnerability proved fatal there was no benefit at
all from the investment. By contrast, he noted, the simple, inexpensive and small droid—
R2D2—was constantly showing its value. Whereas Death Stars were about brute force, droids
were about finesse.5
The charge that the fixation with mighty and intimidating platforms would lead to unnec-
essarily complicated and unaffordable weapons was familiar. As the digital revolution pro-
gressed there were constant warnings that far too much attention was still being paid to ex-

172
pensive platforms, which were vulnerable to relatively cheap missiles, and not the long-range
weapons systems that they were supposed to carry and which would enable them to operate at
some distance from danger. The military attachment to its big-ticket items was hard to shake
off. In 1984 Norm Augustine plotted the exponential growth of unit costs for fighter aircraft
since 1910 and then pointed to an absurd conclusion:

In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one tactical aircraft. This aircraft will have to be
shared by the Air Force and the Navy 3½ days each per week except for leap year, when it will be made available
to the marines for the extra day.6

The $1.5 trillion F-35 programme, leading to unit costs of $100 million per aircraft, sug-
gested that the problem was a real one, and that eventually the qualitative edge that might be
provided by the most advanced platforms and missiles would be lost by reduced quantity.
While the US Navy and Air Force budgets grew in real terms at 22 per cent and 27 per cent
respectively from 2001 to 2008 the number of combat ships declined by 10 per cent and com-
bat aircraft by 20 per cent. Eventually, when faced with numerous targets, the military would
run out of weapons. One response was to look to droids equivalents. ‘Uninhabited systems’
could ‘help bring mass back to the fight’ by expanding ‘the number of sensors and shooters in
the fight’ at relatively low cost. With a lower premium on survivability a greater emphasis
could be put into having large numbers of systems in action at any time.7

EARLY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY THE FIRST UNINHABITED systems to attract wide notice
were unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, carrying deadly missiles. They could hover above
targets, relaying information back to a distant operator who could then decide whether to un-
leash a missile. Rudimentary drones had existed since the First World War, used for example
for target practice as well as intelligence gathering. The modern concept of drones could be
traced back to an Israeli designer Abraham Karem who was convinced that they could be used
to provide real-time intelligence. After the Gnat, which was deployed in the Balkans, came
the Predator.8 After 9/11 Predator was armed with Hellfire air-to-ground missiles and de-
ployed to Afghanistan. At the same time, the Bush Administration adopted legal guidelines
that gave the CIA wide powers to kill al-Qaeda terrorists anywhere in the world. Places where
the US had little to work with on the ground, such as Yemen, Somalia, and parts of Pakistan,
attracted particular attention. In November 2002, a drone struck a suspected al-Qaeda leader
and five of his associates in Yemen, signalling that the United States was prepared to take out
its enemies beyond a recognised combat zone. In 2007 the Reaper—described as a ‘true
hunter-killer’—came into service.
Drones brought together many critical technologies: highly efficient engines, advanced
sensors, the global positioning systems, and instantaneous communications. Their operators
could identify, monitor, and then strike a target thousands of miles away, without putting
American lives in direct danger. Because they hovered over their targets for hours there was
greater confidence than there could be with manned aircraft that appropriate targets were cho-
sen, with innocent civilians hopefully out of the way. They were nonetheless criticized on two
grounds. First, they created situations of complete asymmetry. The drone pilots faced no dan-
gers and could live a relatively normal life in their free time, picking up their kids from school
after killing someone on the other side of the planet: their victims knew nothing about their
impending doom and could not challenge their covert death sentences, let alone fight back.
Second, targeted killing was ethically and legally dubious, and of uncertain strategic value.
The first issue had been raised from the start of air power. It was thrown into relief once

173
Western air power enjoyed freedom of the skies. Michael Ignatieff described the 1999
Kosovo War as a ‘virtual’ conflict, at least for citizens in the NATO countries. Such one-
sided fighting he complained was too much like a ‘spectacle,’ which aroused ‘emotions in the
intense but shallow way that sports do.’9 Yet, if anything, drone pilots knew their human tar-
gets better than most, as they watched them before striking and then, after the strike, were
able to see what was left of the victim and whoever else stepped into the frame at the last
minute. Though the stress might be less than that experienced in actual combat, the drone pi-
lots were not just playing glorified computer games. Yet on the second issue there was a ques-
tion of impunity and moral hazard. Was it too easy to mount attacks without worrying much
about the ethical implications?
The practice of targeted killing was developed by the Israelis after they had withdrawn
from the Gaza Strip and were trying to find ways of coping with the threat posed by Hamas.
The Bush and then Obama Administrations picked up on the idea as a way of dealing with
radical Islamist groups, especially those operating in territories where it was difficult to reach
them on the ground. This reflected a sharp focus on hostile groups prepared to attack the US
homeland as well as its citizens and assets abroad. The numbers involved were small and the
casualties caused by terrorism were not in themselves large, but their randomness and vicious-
ness meant that the danger could not be ignored. The most important responses involved good
intelligence, domestic policing, and addressing the social position of Muslim communities in
Western countries. But even those militants living in the West gained their inspiration, and
sometime recruitment and training, from countries in which there were active Islamist groups.
The objective was to degrade them by taking out identified individuals, either because they
were leaders or had specific skills, such as bomb-making. Here drones seemed to be the per-
fect weapon for personalised killing.10
There was evidence that decapitating an insurgent group could reduce its effectiveness,
while relentless attacks on key cadres would leave them weakened.11 Occasional attacks,
however, risked creating gaps that would quickly be filled, possibly with leaders who might
be even more ruthless.12 In addition, finding the right people to kill was not always straight-
forward. There were, therefore, significant civilian casualties, resulting from haphazard intel-
ligence, local tipsters providing false information to help eliminate rivals, or excessive confi-
dence in ‘signature’ strikes, in which individuals were killed because their behavior suggested
that they were up to no good, even though there was no definite proof.13
While the number being killed was comparatively low, at least compared with what else
was going on in these conflicts, individual incidents (such as wedding parties being struck)
caused anger. The ‘blowback’ from killing civilians was said to be counterproductive, risking
a loss of local support and inspiring more recruits to join insurgent groups, thereby outweigh-
ing any gains from killing particular militants. The temptation to use drones to gain tactical
victories even though they provide scant strategic benefit was described as addictive.14 There
was little evidence of addiction. Perhaps because the benefits were hard to confirm, while pro-
found ethical and legal issues were being raised, the Obama Administration cut back on their
use in Pakistan in 2012, and then worked to develop guidelines on targeting. As the number
of drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen fell, so, too, did civilian casualties.15
Unmanned systems had other roles in counter-insurgency, for example in dealing with
Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). All this harked back to the early expectations of robot
war, with all the anticipated advantages: ‘They don’t get hungry. They’re not afraid. They
don’t forget their orders. They don’t care if the guy next to them has been shot. Will they do a
better job than humans? Yes.’16 Yet while they might allow their operators to stay out of
harm’s way they still needed to be controlled. So-called unmanned systems appeared to re-

174
quire large numbers of people to operate them effectively. Moreover these systems were flat-
tered when dealing with insurgencies. Against more capable opponents, drones, with their
slow speed, low altitude, and vulnerability to air defences and electronic countermeasures,
would be more restricted in their use. In conventional war the effectiveness of existing sys-
tems would be limited because of the the speed with which an automated system might
process and act upon evidence of danger or a vulnerable target, and the risks of malfunction
and enemy interference.
Under the Obama Administration, the US adopted a strategy (described as the ‘Third Off-
set’ to capture the idea that it must use technological strengths to compensate for the advan-
tages of its opponents) based on ‘collaborative human-machine battle networks that synchro-
nize simultaneous operations in space, air, sea, undersea, ground, and cyber domains’.17 To
the fore was artificial intelligence allowing decision-making authority to be delegated to ma-
chines. This strategy looked forward to systems capable of managing big data, supporting
human decisions so that they were better and faster, and also humans in combat, for example
with wearable electronics and apps, and getting better cooperation between manned and un-
manned systems. Defensive systems might work ‘at the speed of light’ to respond to attack
while offensives would be more efficient, so that the lead rocket in a salvo could ensure that
those following were sent to the best targets.
How far could this go? Nanotechnology, the manipulation of individual atoms and mole-
cules, particularly important in biomedicine, offered the prospect of extraordinary miniaturi-
sation. It was possible to imagine insect-like drones taking pictures at will and even injecting
individuals with poisons, perhaps after checking their DNA, or else uniforms that could sense
danger nearby, alert medics of injury, and even begin treatments of their own. In one particu-
larly alarming account a physicist described how nanoweapons might destabilise the balance
of power, with dramatic scenarios of ‘nano-electronics guiding hypersonic intercontinental
ballistic missiles or millions of insect-sized nanobots [nano-scale robots] capable of assassi-
nating the population of a nation’, leading mankind to extinction. Louis Del Monte envisaged
a line of development from computers designing nanoweapons, within parameters set by hu-
mans, to a ‘singularity computer’, one more intelligent than the whole human race, in place by
2050.18 All this required enormous technical problems to be solved in miniature—including
the furnishing of these tiny robots with a power source, antennae, communication, and steer-
ing.19
Well before such issues arose there were still troubling matters to be addressed. Artificial
intelligence referred to computer systems capable of performing tasks normally requiring
human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, and decision-making.20
This could involve quite mundane tasks. At issue therefore was the level of complexity that
could be achieved. In war this would require selecting and engaging targets without meaning-
ful human control, so that their behaviour would vary according to circumstances even in the
same broad operating environment. The levels moved from systems that were human oper-
ated, to those where humans delegated and then supervised, to full autonomy. The system’s
reasoning ability and choices would depend upon the quality of its sensors and the algorithms
through which information was processed. It would not be following a standard script but
would make up its own scripts as situations developed. The ‘Terminator Conundrum’, refer-
ring to the robotic assassin played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in a series of movies, described
the issues raised by an independent machine able to decide whom to kill. The choices would
require not only good information but also an ethical sensibility. ‘Should a drone fire on a
house where a target is known to be hiding, which may also be sheltering civilians?’21
In practice it was likely that machines would remain ‘teamed’ with humans, who would

175
remain ‘in the loop’, able to countermand the notionally autonomous systems if they made
poor choices. As with any soldiers the problems were likely to result not so much from formal
command arrangements as from the contingencies of battle. Ideal subordinates in any military
command chain were sufficiently obedient to follow orders as given but also capable when
necessary of taking decisions on their own, perhaps because communications were down or
senior commanders had been killed. In such circumstances soldiers might run away or fight
on their own initiative. So might robots, except they would turn off rather than run away.
Control might also break down when distant human controllers could no longer cope with the
speed and fluidity of a battle so that decisions on targets had to be delegated to the machines.
This could escalate a confused situation, so that fire from a friendly source could rapidly lead
to a fratricidal fight.

IT WAS ONE THING TO HAVE FAR BETTER SITUATIONAL AWARENESS or logistics, and even a de-
gree of automatic protection when a unit or individual might be caught by surprise. It was
quite another to have systems leading themselves with the humans playing supporting roles.
And then there were the obvious nightmares about rogue systems turning on their supposed
masters or just deciding against a critical mission. One way to interfere with drones (espe-
cially the simpler, commercial models) was to develop means of interfering with their elec-
tronics. Given the concerns about hacking, how much reliance could be placed on systems
that might be ‘turned’ if penetrated by a foreign power? There was a logical interaction with
the developing debate on cyber-war, which was all about a constant struggle between the of-
fence and defence over the security and integrity of information, and this debate which often
presumed that great trust could be put in the programmed decision-making of autonomous
systems.
The future may not arrive so quickly. There were always obstacles to technological ad-
vances. The introduction of new capabilities, especially without the urgency of an ongoing
war, was usually far slower than futurists supposed or enthusiasts found acceptable. Military
organisations had been known to resist anything which threatened human redundancy, for ex-
ample in the 1950s Strategic Air Command resisted ICBMs as alternatives to manned
bombers. In addition the record of turning exciting new technologies into actual systems was
less impressive than often supposed, with funding, bureaucratic, and engineering issues often
causing severe delays.22
Another factor affecting the introduction of autonomous vehicles was that the lead with
the new technologies was taken by the private sector. The most developed example was a dri-
verless car, a much more challenging machine than a drone and one expected to have much
more autonomy. As it moved forward on the ground it had to be aware of numerous potential
obstacles and other vehicles with their own dynamics. The challenge grew the more urban and
dynamic the operating environment. Driverless cars were first developed as a Pentagon pro-
gramme in 2004 but resources were only poured into it as a commercial venture, which not
only meant that the advances were out of state control but also that the state took second place
in competition for the skilled engineers and software developers needed to take the work for-
ward. Competition for a mass market and vast R&D expenditures moved driverless cars to vi-
able products while military programmes for autonomous vehicles lagged behind.
A key feature of many of the vital systems introduced for the digital age, including Inter-
net providers, search engines, hardware manufacturers, and software developers, was that
they were owned and operated by private companies with global interests. Smartphones car-
ried capabilities such as satellite imaging, navigations, data stores, and instant, encrypted
communications of a quality once available to only the most advanced military organisations.

176
Even drones were mass-produced, for aerial surveillance of local neighbourhoods and carry-
ing items over distances, and so opened up the possibility of also delivering crude explosives.
These readily accessible systems made it possible for individuals and small groups to hurt
others. They also showed how individuals and communities, living in apparent safety, were
becoming exposed to new risks. Attacks could come without reason and notice, from across
hemispheres yet with extraordinary speed, taking in the innocent as well as intended vic-
tims.23 Here the fears about new technology became linked with developing concerns about
terrorism. With many examples of extreme Islamist groups, or just ‘lone wolf’ supporters,
ready to attack random civilian targets in Western countries, it was natural enough to worry
about what might be done with access to the most lethal technologies. This had been high on
the security agenda since 9/11. Yet for extremist groups the most obvious advantages of the
Internet were found in their smartphone apps: the ability to disseminate messages to vast audi-
ences around the world without interference, harass opponents, post videos of their victims
and martyrs, while they took advantage of encrypted communications. When it came to
killing one feature of many terrorist atrocities was the simplicity of their methods—knives,
bombs and guns, or driving trucks into crowds. These weapons were crude but effective, well
understood by those using them and with proven capabilities, demanding no special expertise
to make them work.
So while the new technologies were developed with large wars in mind their applications
were found in the context of insurgencies and social disorder. The team of Arquilla and Ron-
feldt offered a conceptual way forward that might link the two types of warfare. They de-
scribed an approach to battle based on ‘swarming’, distinguished from ‘the chaotic melee,
brute-force massing, and nimble maneuver’ of the past. This required a progressive improve-
ment in the ability to coordinate and command individual units. With swarming targets were
attacked from all directions by ‘myriad, small, dispersed, networked maneuver units’. It was
relevant, they argued, to anything from social activism to high-intensity warfare yet to gain
the greatest advantage (so that action did not degenerate into a melee) there would need to be
some central strategic control.24 At a basic level this could be observed with guerrilla warfare.
At a higher level, technological developments might make it possible to synchronise attacks
undertaken by devolved robots to ensure maximum effectiveness. It was a natural approach
for a networked organisation because it could gain the maximum advantage from the ability
of a number of separate units to communicate with each other and execute complex move-
ments and patterns of fire.
As attention moved to robotic systems, Paul Scharre noted how well they were suited to
swarming. This would require moving from having individual units each with their own oper-
ators to a central command being able to manage many at a time, although at some point it
was possible to imagine the individual units being self-coordinating while seeking to disrupt
the capacity of an incoming enemy swarm.25 Conceptually the idea of swarming, and its po-
tential applications in war-fighting, was not difficult to grasp. It offered new ways to defeat an
opponent. As with much of the military thinking of the digital age, it was easier to imagine
swarming in the air or at sea (as in fighter aircraft or submarine wolf packs of the Second
World War) where there would be fewer obstacles or sources of confusion than there would
be on land. What it could not do was provide an answer to the problem of holding territory
and especially cities in the face of a hostile population.
It was territory that still mattered most. The most serious danger posed by Islamist
groups, for example, came in 2014 from their control of chunks of Syria and then Iraq, to the
point of proclaiming their own state.26 The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) attracted ac-
tivists from around the world to join its ranks and potentially offered a base which would

177
allow them to train these activists and send them around the world to cause trouble. Drones
had a role to play in the campaigns to dislodge them, not least in streaming real-time intelli-
gence, but little could be done without ground forces provided by local powers. Though the
technology would improve, the basic limitation of air power still applied. Territory could not
be won or controlled from the air, whether by drones, helicopters, or jets, without the benefit
of supporting ground forces. The idea of robot armies had a certain appeal, but they would
struggle with counter-insurgency when the enemy mingled with the local population, or if the
militants learnt how to confuse the sensors of the systems coming after them.27 It was a con-
stant temptation to believe that there were technical fixes for what were essentially political
problems, but they often turned out to be sub-optimal in their effects. In her history of the De-
fense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Sharon Weinberger noted that ‘press
releases tout devices that can help soldiers scale glass skyscrapers, while American forces
fight in a country dominated by mud houses’.28
Thus while the weapons demonstrated the possibility of attacks of ever-greater complex-
ity, precision, and speed over ever-greater distances, with reduced risks to the operators, they
did not answer the question of exactly what was being achieved. Numbers were still needed to
take and control territory, and it was the effort this required that put a strain on Western coun-
tries. After 9/11 President Bush accepted that if the United States neglected unstable parts of
the world it could get caught out. ‘We will fight them over there so we do not have to face
them in the United States of America.’29 By 2014 President Obama, after being faced with a
decision on Syria in 2013, decided that the public’s tolerance for expeditionary warfare of the
sort seen in Iraq and Afghanistan had been exhausted: ‘the time of deploying large ground
forces with big military footprints to engage in nation-building overseas, that’s coming to an
end.’30 The reliance on drones to engage in targeted killings was part of that determination. It
was also possible to note that defences in the form of intelligence and police work had not
done a bad job in preventing another 9/11. Indeed, for all the talk about developing vulnera-
bilities and the erosion of distance, defensive measures along with natural barriers—such as
oceans and mountain ranges—could still make a difference. Even a country as potentially ex-
posed as Israel put as much effort into improving its means of defence, from security walls to
anti-missile systems, as it did perfecting new means of attack. Despite the common assump-
tion about globalised war, geography still made a difference. Technology did not necessarily
‘trump terrain’.31
From Israel came proposals for another way of approaching threats emanating from terri-
tories that would be difficult to control directly. Instead of re-occupation of territory which
had been relinquished because past occupations had resulted in substantial harm and upset
over the years, an alternative was to rely on raiding. This had traditionally been a transient
strategy, knocking back an opponent, while lacking both the benefits and costs of taking full
control.32 Looking back at the Lebanon War of 2006, which been judged a failure at the time,
it seemed that enough had been done to dissuade Hezbollah from further provocations (al-
though it could also be noted that Hezbollah were stretched in Syria trying to preserve the
Assad regime). The point of a raiding strategy was to make it hard for hostile groups to as-
sume that they had sanctuaries from which to mount their attacks:

Raids offer a valid way to curb the threat and contain it at minimum risk and cost. In addition to continuous small
raids from the air and by special operations forces, larger raids with heavy ground forces are needed periodically
to “mow the grass”, that is, to inflict heavy losses and impair the opponents’ capabilities.33

At the heart of the exploration of this alternative was the search for a way of avoiding the

178
grief and cost of prolonged occupation. Arguably if US forces had left Iraq soon after Saddam
Hussein had been toppled in 2003, then most of the US goals would have been accomplished.
To be sure there could have been mayhem in Iraq as a consequence, but that was hardly ab-
sent with the occupation.34 But leaving behind disorder and chaos without any effort to set the
society on a more stable path would have just stored up trouble for the future. In 2011 West-
ern countries helped defeat President Gaddafi in Libya but refrained from getting involved on
the ground to help stabilise the situation in the aftermath.35 The result was vicious faction
fighting, opportunities for Islamists, and refugees desperate to get to the West by any means
available.
Raiding could wear down an opponent’s resitance and remove some capability, but it was
unlikely to do more than contain a problem, as Israel’s own history demonstrated. It was one
thing when used against a relatively stable opponent (Hamas in Gaza) but another when the
consequences could only be chaotic. H. R. McMaster saw raids as being of short duration and
limited purpose, unable ‘to effect the human and political drivers of armed conflict or make
progress toward achieving sustainable outcomes consistent with vital interests’.36

AS RESEARCH PROJECTS MOVED INTO CYBER WARFARE, artificial intelligence, and robotics, sci-
ence fiction was a natural place to go for insights.37 In 2015 journalist August Cole combined
with policy analyst Peter Singer in Ghost Fleet, a novel that combined concerns about China
with energy scarcity with the developing technologies of war. Their inspiration was Tom
Clancy’s Red Storm Rising.38 Their aim with this ‘useful fiction’, based on extensive research
(the book had 400 endnotes), was to wrestle with the issues surrounding a future great-power
conflict in order to ‘help prevent such a confrontation from straying from the novel to the ac-
tual battlefield.’
Ghost Fleet described an old-fashioned geopolitical war with China. It opened with a sur-
prise attack designed by the Chinese leadership, and so in the tradition of attempted knockout
blows. The trigger was an energy crisis, resulting from the aftermath of an Iran-Saudi war, a
combination of crashed global markets and a vastly inflated oil price. The Chinese leadership,
a military-industrial elite, were irritated at the way that the US, secure in its own energy sup-
plies, interfered with China’s ambitions, and threatened economic sanctions to get its way. A
large gas field, which only China could reach and exploit, promised economic security but
needed protection. The theme of the admiral who drove the war policy, as with his Japanese
counterpart in 1941, was that there was no choice. The Americans must be made to come to
terms with China’s rise. This was not the time to ‘grow meek on the brink of the next great
step.’ It was ‘a simple question of the arc of history: If now is not the time, then when?’
The surprise attack plan was complex. It involved taking out supporting infrastructure (in-
cluding space-based elements), and neutralising the most advanced components of the US
Navy and Air Force. This included disabling the software packages on the US F-35s (which
unfortunately for the Americans included a Chinese microchip) and tracking nuclear sub-
marines. The plan also depended on an alliance with Russia, which was otherwise assumed to
be on the brink of war with China. This all required skillful orchestration, reliance on untried
methods, and also a massive failure of American intelligence. It was also a gamble because it
was assumed that nuclear weapons would not be used. American ballistic-missile carrying
submarines were not attacked although they might have been. Sparing them signalled to
Washington that there was to be no escalation to the highest level. According to one of the
key characters, by the time the government worked out what was going on, there was no
point: ‘going nuclear would just be revenge to the point of suicide’. They could not even be
sure that the orders would get through.

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 The Chinese were still left with the problem that the United States was not actually de-
feated. The three classic problems with a surprise attack that fell short of a knockout blow
manifested themselves. First, popular resistance developed on Hawaii, which had been occu-
pied by the Chinese. Second, not all American forces were destroyed. The situation was saved
by the ‘ghost fleet’ of the title, referring to mothballed ships kept in reserve, which could now
be revived and refitted for duty, just as old aircraft were found to replace the sadly ineffectual
F-35s. Third, while most allies had been pathetic and no help at all to the Americans, the An-
glosphere of Britain and Australia were still supportive. The country still functioned and was
able to work out how to retrieve the situation. Manufacturing resumed, in part due to 3-D
printing. In the end the US fought back sufficiently to regain something of the old order. The
conclusion was a messy stalemate, both sides having ‘shown they could pound each other into
a weakened equilibrium’ with ‘most of each other’s fleets’ now sunk.
Ghost Fleet warned of the over-reliance on advanced technologies and a failure to think
through their software vulnerabilities, and reminded of the importance of patriotism, heroism,
and individual initiative. The preference of Singer and Cole was simpler and more agile sys-
tems, with quick impact, such as drones, rail guns, and lasers. They also show how person-
alised war could become, including individual aids to fighting whether in the form of stimu-
lants that make it possible to cope with fatigue and strain, or a version of Google glasses
which enabled immediate access to information. In its core scenario for the surprise attack,
Ghost Fleet fitted in with what The Economist described as a distinctive feature of the genre
that began with The Battle of Dorking, by presenting ‘new technologies as decisive, both a
thrilling idea and a necessary device if… dominant nations were to be portrayed, initially at
least, as victims,’ and as a means of imparting a stark message ‘of the wrongheadedness of
politicians or senior officers, of national decline, of geopolitical change’.39
Cole was to the fore in an Atlantic Council project encouraging authors to generate in-
sights in its ‘Art of Future Warfare Project’.40 One early product was a slim volume of short
stories to demonstrate how fiction might alert policymakers to future possibilities. The themes
varied from an American senator making an effective political pitch by encouraging crowd-
sourced cyber-attacks on Russian and Chinese systems to British intelligence analysts at-
tempting to profile the population to pick out likely terrorists (in this case missing the brother
of one of the analysts), to drone operators who could see distant battles better than those fight-
ing them and so advise constantly on coming dangers and vulnerable targets. The heroes,
male or female, achieved their goals because of their mental rather than physical toughness.
They tended to be super-smart graduates of the best universities, grasping the powerful tech-
nologies at their command. Following the long traditions of military literature they were often
mavericks, unimpressed by authority yet patriotic to the core.
The origins of their wars were often traced back to previous wars, the details of which
were dimly remembered though they had left the world unstable and prone to yet more con-
flict. Despite this wretched history of chaos and mayhem, somehow the science of war had
progressed and even more ingenious methods found for taking out the enemy. The drama
came from the tactical and operational, as these super-smart people made their complex sys-
tems do whatever they needed them to do. The strategic picture remained murky. They were
fighting the evil and malign because they could not let them win. Behind all this lay some
great political failure, but that was not where the story was to be found.

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 [ 23 ]

Mega-Cities and Climate Change

In our world there are still people who run around risking their lives in bloody battles over a name or a
flag or a piece of clothing but they tend to belong to gangs with names like the Bloods and the Crips
and they make their living dealing drugs.
FRANCIS FUKUYAMA, The End of History, 19921

As Fukuyama looked with optimism at the West’s liberal triumph in the early 1990s, there
was also anxiety about whether a lack of anything serious to fight about would lead it into a
soft decadence. The Bloods and the Crips were two famous Los Angeles street gangs. The
Bloods were formed at first to resist the influence of the Crips in their neighbourhoods. They
later came to be known for a ‘take-no-prisoners’ attitude and violence. During the 1980s they
had divided up into smaller sets and began to compete for control of different neighbour-
hoods. Their involvement in narcotics led them to grow in size and take their rivalry across
the United States, often in alliance with other city gangs.2 Gang warfare pointed to an impor-
tant feature of contemporary violence that would grow in salience, although it was normally
discussed as if it had little to do with actual war.
Edward Newman, writing when analyses suggested a definite decline in the numbers of
civil wars, argued that this focused on a ‘classical’ model of civil war which essentially in-
volved major forces in competition, those of the government versus those challenging it for
anti-colonial, ideological, or secessionist reasons. What was neglected and excluded, he
warned, were ‘a broad phenomenon of political and social violence characteristic of low-in-
tensity conflict, low-level insurgencies, and state weakness.’3 The statistics of war only ac-
knowledged deaths that occurred in battle, but battle accounted only for a moderate percent-
age of the annual tally of violent deaths—some 17 per cent of the total between 2010 and
2015. By contrast intentional homicides counted for 69 per cent. While it was the case that
countries racked by civil war were dangerous places to live, even more so were many Latin
American and Caribbean countries that, strictly speaking, were not at war. This was the only
region in the world where rates of lethal violence increased after 2000. It was also the most
urbanised part of the world, with 80 per cent of the population living in cities. Some forty-five
of the fifty most dangerous metropolises in the world were in Latin America. In general inter-
nationally, while rural violence had been in decline, urban violence was rising.4
A focus on cities developed as the international organisations concerned with develop-
ment found the concept of ‘fragile state’ more useful than the loaded concept of ‘failed state’.
If the problem was seen largely as one of disorder and violence then military coups and re-

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pression could be presented as solutions, not least by those responsible, even though this was
rarely peaceful or durable. A fragility framework, by contrast, could take in a range of issues,
keeping a sharp focus on issues of governance. A fragile state was one lacking representation
and accountability, stable legal standards, and checks to coercive action by the state, com-
bined with an inability to control territory and borders.5 It also took in economic management
and social cohesion. As states were examined for signs of fragility, and by these standards
most states had some, it became apparent that in many cases the fragility was concentrated in
particular spaces, especially cities. The growth of cities was a striking trend that was set to
continue. According to the United Nations in 2016, there were 512 cities around the world
with at least 1 million inhabitants, and 31 megacities with at least 10 million inhabitants. By
2030 these numbers were projected to grow to 662 and 41 respectively.6 More than half of the
world’s population lived in cities. As the bulk of population growth took place in cities this
number would grow.
By and large urbanisation was a positive development, promoting economic growth and
bringing people out of poverty. There were reasons why people gravitated to cities as places
to find work and enjoy life. Much of the urban growth was in medium-sized cities that coped
well. Yet there were places where this rapid urbanisation resulted in a miserable, stressed en-
vironment damaging the inhabitants. Tensions were generated as people became compressed
into relatively confined urban areas, competing for scarce resources in ramshackle housing,
amidst poverty and poor sanitation, without effective governance and ineffectual policing. Vi-
olence was an unsurprising result. Robert Muggah described cities as ‘the new frontier of
warfare.’7 Cities have long been the setting for insurrections, mob violence, and crime, but
this was reaching a new level. Christopher Coker noted how the fate of their inhabitants was
compared with junkyards and waste-disposal, and, with extreme wealth often being found not
far away, of being ‘supersaturated with Darwinian competition’.8 In 2003 Richard Norton
wrote of ‘feral cities’, defined as ‘metropolises with population of more than a million people
in a state the government of which has lost the ability to maintain the rule of law within the
city’s boundaries yet remains a functioning actor in the greater international system.’ In many
cases not only was effective policing absent but also the police force had ‘become merely an-
other armed group seeking power and wealth. Citizens must provide for their own protection,
perhaps by hiring independent security personnel or paying protection to criminals.’9 In such
settings gangs controlled the slums and shanty towns, whether in the form of structured crimi-
nal organisations, groups that just hung about together, watching over their territory, or vigi-
lante groups put together by local communities who had given up on the police.10
Most had little interest in directly challenging the state, so long as they were left alone,
but those with both muscle and wealth, often because of drug trafficking, could challenge
governments. When insurgencies did develop they were suited to urban areas. Battles have
tended to be rural affairs. As we have noted already cities had always been seen as trouble by
advancing military forces, which is why they went out of their way to bypass them or else re-
lied on frustrating sieges. The equipment and tactics of sophisticated armies usually worked
better in the open.11 Yet the issue of cities could not be avoided. In any war with North Korea
one of the South’s greatest vulnerabilities was the location of its capital and mega-city Seoul
close to the border, within artillery range. Even if the urban fights in the invasions of
Afghanistan and Iraq had proved to be less demanding than anticipated this was not the case
with the subsequent insurgencies. When it came to terrorism, prosperous cities offered many
targets, with an outrage likely to shut down city centres, close down transportation networks,
and gain early media commentary as those on the spot distributed details almost immediately.
This was far more than could ever be achieved in a rural outpost. Refugees, especially if they

182
had been forced out of city homes, tended to pour into other cities when possible, putting a
strain on public services and potentially creating new tensions. This could be seen in the im-
pact of the Syrian War on Jordan and the Lebanon. The latter hosted 1.1 million registered
refugees, compared with a total population of 4.4 million, and the influx threatened the bal-
ance of sectarian power within the country.
A US Army study described megacities as ‘becoming the epicenters of human activity on
the planet and, as such, they will generate most of the friction which compels future military
intervention’. The study looked, inter alia, at two Brazilian cities: São Paulo in May 2006
when over 1,300 attacks were launched by individuals associated with First Command of the
Capital (PCC) drug gang and, at the same time, riots occurred in seventy-three prisons. The
government found itself negotiating with the prison drug gang in Rio in November 2010
when over 3,000 police officers and military personnel were required to end city-wide vio-
lence emanating from a single favela (slum community) out of the city’s 600.12 San Pedro
Sula in Honduras regularly appeared as one the most violent cities in the world. The reason
for this was that so much economic activity was channelled through the city, offering rich op-
portunities for extortion, and so it became a place where criminal gangs fought each other for
the privilege. It was also vital to trafficking in cocaine, and so engaged other gangs, including
from neighbouring countries. In Mexico, which could never be considered in any way a failed
state, there was horrific violence resulting in well over 120,000 deaths, connected with gov-
ernment attempts to crack down on drug trafficking syndicates, responsible for the bulk of the
cocaine reaching the United States. The potential interaction with political violence could be
seen in Colombia. There had been a full-blooded civil war from 1948 into the early 1950s,
followed by fighting between left-wing guerrilla groups and right-wing paramilitaries that
lasted until the 1990s, and then, after subsiding, picked up again, as the government decided it
was time to crack down on the main militia, FARC, which subsidised its insurgency with
drug-trafficking, and was also able to use neighbouring Ecuador and Venezuela for sanctuar-
ies.13
One view was that fighting for profit came under a different heading to fighting for ideol-
ogy or power. Yet, as FARC demonstrated, the categories could not easily be distinguished.
Those criminal groups that moved beyond the level of street gangs to organised business with
their own distribution systems, political and financial networks, and coercive means could
challenge states and undermine their authority, or else become part of their power struc-
tures.14 In an examination of the situation in Rio de Janeiro in early 2017 Robert Muggah
asked whether the violence in the city had reached a stage where it deserved to be considered
as ‘armed conflict’. Over 6,000 people had been assassinated in 2016, a rate of 41 homicides
per 100,000 residents. The military police were involved in killing 920 residents, while the
casualty rate among the city’s security forces was described as being higher than combatants
in recent wars. As they moved into communities with armoured vehicles and assault rifles
they faced well-armed groups, often fortified by former policemen who had swapped protec-
tion for extortion, and on occasion with access to heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled
grenades. Stray bullets penetrate the walls of hospitals and schools. The norms of interna-
tional humanitarian law, intended to protect civilians, needed to be applied as much in Rio as
in any armed conflict.15 Phil Williams observed that violence in Mexico, also comparable to
civil wars elsewhere, was multi-layered. Some was personal and careless, but much related to
the rivalry between criminal organisations engaged in the drug trade as well as factionalism
within them. It resembled, he noted, ‘Mafia clan violence in Sicily, blood feuds among crimi-
nal organizations in Albania, and the upsurge in contract killings in Russia during the
1990s.’16 While terrorism was readily included in analyses of contemporary conflict this was

183
less so with criminal organisations. Yet while the state might be functioning unimpaired the
society was still being damaged.

WHAT WAS DISCUSSED MUCH MORE WAS ‘RESOURCE WARS’. One feature of many war scenarios
involved a struggle to control energy supplies. These often assumed that oil reserves had
peaked and that expanding economies (with China an important addition) were going to strug-
gle to find what they needed. For some analysts this, as much as any other geopolitical factor,
was likely to drive future conflict.17 Countries such as Russia, with its vast energy resources,
could well find itself in a pivotal position, able to dictate terms, and influence European for-
eign policies because it could turn gas supplies on and off. From the moment he took power,
Vladimir Putin of Russia saw the country as a potential ‘energy superpower’ and the means
by which it could be restored to its rightful place in the international hierarchy.18
Energy resources were not only vital to the functioning of modern economies but also a
great wealth generator for those fortunate enough to be sitting atop oil reserves or playing
major roles in its extraction and distribution. The distribution of oil reserves had a continuing
geopolitical influence over the twentieth century. It helped identify strategic parts of the
world, notably the Middle East, and also shaped military campaigns in fights to seize oil as-
sets. It was an important aggravating factor in civil wars. Those with oil wealth were able to
buy off domestic opponents and fund an assertive foreign policy, from military adventures to
supporting proxies in other states. Greater risks might be taken than would otherwise be the
case in addressing conflicts, such as the Iraqi takeover of Kuwait in 1990, because of the im-
plications this might have for control of the oil market (especially if Iraq had moved into
Saudi Arabia as well), or fears about control of transit routes, whether pipelines or choke
points such as the Straits of Hormuz. At the most extreme, the value of oil assets provided a
rare economic incentive for conquest.19 There was an easy assumption, common among inter-
national relations students as much as radical conspiracy theorists, that oil was at the heart of
the strategic calculations of the great powers.
At times when energy prices were high these concerns gained currency. This was true in
the 1970s after the massive increase in the price of oil, the coincident imposition of an em-
bargo by Arab oil producers on some Western states following the 1973 Arab-Israeli War,
and the later impact of events such as the Iranian revolution. Yet in the 1980s the price fell
dramatically, even while two oil producers—Iraq and Iran—were at war with each other. Dur-
ing the 2000s the price rose again, encouraging Russia in its optimism about becoming an en-
ergy superpower, but then in 2014 prices fell dramatically. Russia was left facing budget
deficits but also a loss of markets, as its past attempts to coerce countries using its market po-
sition had led the targeted countries to seek alternative suppliers.20 Meanwhile, because of the
exploitation of shale gas, the US had become once again a major energy producer.
There was a familiar pattern to future projections of energy security, which was to assume
that supply was close to its peak while demand was continuing to grow. Such claims tended to
ignore more sanguine market information, failed to think about the impact of prices on dis-
covery of new reserves or the development of more efficient alternatives to fossil fuels, and
assumed that consumers would be left helpless after supplies were cut off without being able
to find alternative routes.21 It was less straightforward than assumed to disrupt supply for a
long period. If anything, the United States might be as well placed to take advantage of the oil
weapon (as it was on economic measures more generally) than others.22 So while there was
an oil dimension to many conflicts it was rarely the sole reason why a country would go to
war. Cases attributed to oil motives often turned out to be about other issues. At most they re-
flected concerns about security of supply rather than greed.23

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 Although the oil issue had long been a feature of discussions about future conflict, in the
1990s another issue began to gain prominence. This posed more general problems of resource
scarcity, made worse by the consequences of climate change. In 1994 Thomas Homer-Dixon
of the University of Toronto reported the findings of a major research programme into what
he called ‘environmental security’. It opened with a stark prediction:

Within the next fifty years, the planet’s human population will probably pass nine billion, and global economic
output may quintuple. Largely as a result, scarcities of renewable resources will increase sharply. The total area of
high-quality agricultural land will drop, as will the extent of forests and the number of species they sustain. Com-
ing generations will also see the widespread depletion and degradation of aquifers, rivers, and other water re-
sources; the decline of many fisheries; and perhaps significant climate change.

These scarcities, he warned, were ‘already contributing to violent conflicts in many parts
of the developing world’. This was just the early stages of what would probably be an ‘up-
surge of violence in the coming decades that will be induced or aggravated by scarcity’. This
would not lead to interstate wars but instead violence that would be ‘sub-national, persistent,
and diffuse’, evident most in poor societies. The immediate causes would be population
movements and the impoverishment of already weak states, possibly leading to their fragmen-
tation.24 Over the following two decades this concern grew and became bound up with the
wider controversies about the extent of global warming, its consequences, and how it should
be tackled.25
In 2007 UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon observed that while the conflict in Sudan’s
Darfur region was discussed as ‘an ethnic conflict pitting Arab militias against black rebels
and farmers,’ it was one that had begun as an ‘ecological crisis, arising at least in part from
climate change.’ A drought lasting two decades had meant that there was insufficient food
and water, and this was in part responsible for the crisis.26 One claim from the Intergovern-
mental Panel on Climate Change was that glaciers in the Himalayas would melt rapidly (this
was later disputed), affecting agriculture in Pakistan and potentially aggravating the dispute
with India over Kashmir.27 In 2011 it was suggested that a sudden rise in food prices, which
reached record highs, was one reason for the waves of protest and a factor in the protests that
toppled Tunisian president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.
Researchers for the UN’s World Food programme noted that while there was little evidence to
link food insecurity to interstate war it did increase the risk of ‘democratic breakdown, civil
conflict, protest, rioting, and communal conflict’. The evidence linking food insecurity to in-
terstate conflict was less strong, though there was some historical evidence linking declining
agricultural yields to periods of regional conflict in Europe and Asia.28
By 2015 the US National Security Strategy was identifying climate change as ‘an urgent
and growing threat to our national security contributing to increased natural disasters, refugee
flows, and conflicts over basic resources like food and water’. The next year President Obama
cited national security as a major reason why climate change had to be taken seriously, point-
ing to the refugee flows likely to result from rising sea levels and drought. He mentioned a
case study that showed how ‘the droughts that happened in Syria contributed to the unrest and
the Syrian civil war. Well, if you start magnifying that across a lot of states, a lot of nation
states that already contain a lot of poor people who are just right at the margins of survival,
this becomes a national security issue.’29 A September 2016 presidential memorandum urged
more analysis of the threat,30 while a report from the National Intelligence Council set out the
issues.

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 Long-term changes in climate will produce more extreme weather events and put greater stress on critical Earth
systems like oceans, freshwater, and biodiversity. These in turn will almost certainly have significant effects, both
direct and indirect, across social, economic, political, and security realms during the next 20 years. These effects
will be all the more pronounced as people continue to concentrate in climate-vulnerable locations, such as coastal
areas, water-stressed regions, and ever-growing cities.

As examples it cited how the terrorist group al-Shabaab exploited the 2011–13 famine in
Somalia to coerce and tax international aid agencies, while insurgent groups in northern Mali
used deepening desertification to enlist local people in a ‘food for jihad’ arrangement.31
As with energy security there was a presumption that issues of environmental security
were unavoidable and were bound to intense disputes between communities and even states.
This presumption was criticised as being too deterministic, not allowing for ways by which
human ingenuity and economic incentives would lead to new ways of managing resources. A
definite trend would have been evident in rising raw material prices, yet these had often
fallen. Gloom-laden projections of this sort were not new, and their record was unimpressive.
Societies coped more effectively than anticipated. Governments were capable of recognising
that in the event of shortages cooperation often made more sense than conflict. This was evi-
dent even with water shortages—an issue which was often highlighted as the most likely
source of conflict. Those predicting a dark future could not point to any established causal
mechanisms.32 One study described war over water as ‘neither strategically rational, hydro-
graphically effective, nor economically viable’. Another, looking hard at the causes of
African civil wars, saw no ‘robust correlational link between climate variability and civil
war’.33 Studies attempting to identify direct causal links between shifts in weather patterns
and conflict produced spurious results because they ignored all the highly influential contex-
tual factors. It was not that factors such as ‘deforestation, land degradation, and scarce supply
of freshwater, alone and in combination with high population density’ were irrelevant to fu-
ture conflict. They increased the risk of it happening within states. But they were unlikely to
trigger war. The evidence pointed to the importance of levels of economic development and
the nature of the political regime.34
The need to separate factors affecting the conduct of a conflict from those causing it was
evident with claims about the impact of drought on Darfur. The International Peace Research
Institute in Oslo questioned the claim:

Warlords—who foster conflict—may exploit drought, flooding, starvation, agricultural or natural disasters in their
strategies, like they did in Somalia and Darfur. But what will drive their fight is not the rain, the temperature, or
the sea level—they will always fight for the same goals of power, territory, money, revenge, etc.

Similarly with Syria, a broad range of factors was behind the war. Drought did play a role
in the country’s economic decline,35 but this was an aggravating factor. Wars, in the end,
were not responses to poor living conditions but culminations of political struggles.
The main area where there did seem to be a correlation with environmental degradation
was with non-state conflict, particularly in the rural areas of Sub-Saharan Africa. Non-state
conflict was between armed groups neither of which represented the state. It was not about
seeking to seize control of the state apparatus or about the overall balance of political power
between rival groups within a state. It was more likely to involve local groups competing for
scarce resources. When governments were weak and unable to exercise control over many
areas within their notional borders, then peripheral communities coped as best they could on
their own. By far the largest number of these conflicts were in Africa, often in countries suf-

186
fering full-blown civil wars at the same time, and most appeared to be connected with local
issues, including access to ‘water, land, and livestock’. Environmental changes would be
likely to trigger or aggravate these conflicts.36 There was an obvious parallel here with urban
gang warfare discussed earlier in this chapter, in forms of conflict that might not normally
count in the mainstream discussions of war and peace but nonetheless reflected on the inabil-
ity of some states to monopolise the legitimate use of physical force within their given bor-
ders.

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 [ 24 ]

Coming Wars

Well, at any rate, judging from this decision of yours, you seem to us to be quite unique in your ability to
consider the future as something more certain than what is before your eyes, and to see uncertainties
as realities, simply because you would like them to be so.
THUCYDIDES, the Melian Dialogue1

T
‘ he least successful enterprise in Washington DC’, observed Major General Bob Scales,
was ‘the one that places bets on the nature and character of tomorrow’s wars.’ It was a vast
enterprise, involving ‘the services, defense industries, and their supporting think tanks, along
with Congress, academia, and the media’. Yet the success rate was poor. ‘Virtually without
exception, they get it wrong’.2
He identified five schools: ‘Scenario Development’, which simulated ‘excuses for going
to war with one of the usual suspects with serious military capabilities—China, Iran, North
Korea’, with Russia as the ‘nostalgic favourite’. The ‘Emerging Technology School’ con-
sisted of ‘frightened and well-remunerated techno-warriors who constantly scan the threat
horizon anxious to alert the security community to enemies who they sense are harnessing the
diabolical genius of home-grown weapon makers’. They mistakenly assumed that enemies put
the same trust in technologies as did the United States. The ‘Capabilities-Based Assessment’
school created a ‘huge military toolbox from which weapons and forces can be retrieved and
tailored to meet unforeseen threats.’ The ‘New Concepts Masquerading as Strategy’ school
was after a new ‘war-fighting concept’. He cited examples such as ‘shock and awe’,3 ‘Net-
centric warfare’, and ‘Effects-based operations’. Lastly the ‘Global Trends School’ sought ‘to
launder politically and socially popular global concerns into future military threats. These in-
cluded global water supplies, HIV epidemics, [and] urbanization’ but without actually ex-
plaining why they all led to war.
Reviewing the various prospectuses for future war published since the end of the Cold
War, the influence of all these schools was there to be seen. They revealed much about pre-
vailing perceptions about international and sub-state conflict and likely sources of trouble in
coming years. The scenarios tended to be based on conflicts which were active, or at least la-
tent, but currently lacked the spark that would turn them into war. The effort to find that spark
provided the impetus to the literary creativity that went into generating scenarios for future
war.4

AFTER THE SOVIET UNION COLLAPSED, THOSE LOOKING FOR a suitable ‘peer competitor’ to fill

188
the large gap left had to cast about. The struggle to find a compelling prospective enemy was
exemplified by the reliance upon Japan as a candidate. At the time Japan’s reputation and in-
fluence were at its post-war peak, buoyed by its spectacular recent economic performance,
based on its manufacturing strength. In 1988 the historian Paul Kennedy had assumed Japan’s
growing importance when considering The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, especially when
set against relative American weakness.5 This importance could be reflected in trade and fi-
nancial policy without turning into a power struggle. Japan had been at war with the United
States in living memory, but that was unlikely to be an experience that it wished to repeat.
In The Coming War with Japan, however, George Friedman and Meredith Lebard warned
that, without the Cold War framework holding the United States and Japan together, deep
economic differences were developing.6 These pointed to a trade war as Americans worked to
squeeze Japanese exports, first out of the US and then elsewhere. As Europe followed this
protectionist logic, Japan was bound to create its own regional market, excluding the US. The
US would push against this, leading to a military confrontation. This was the same logic that
led to Pearl Harbor and the disaster of the last war, as if everything could be gambled in an ef-
fort to escape from dependence upon others for vital commodities. In a sympathetic review of
Friedman and LeBard’s book, James Fallows considered talk of war ‘extreme’ but still
warned that ‘there is sure to be more antagonism than we have seen in the last forty years’.7
The expectation was reflected in fiction, with economic tension (and racist depictions of the
Japanese) behind Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun,8 and Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor, which
involved combined military and economic action against the United States.9
As so often with predictive work of this sort, the trends were turning even as the books
were published. Japan was entering into a long period of stagnation, and would struggle to
hold on to its market position. Instead of aggressive economic policies, which tend to lead to
market collapse, the Bush Senior and Clinton Administrations promoted the benefits of open
trade. The scenarios also strained credibility by suggesting that Japan would think itself to be
in a position to challenge the US militarily or that if it did this would be on a better basis than
1941. By 1998 the same team of Friedman and LeBard in a book on The Future of War had
concluded that Japan would be ‘loath to challenge American power’ in the Pacific, although it
could—unlike the Indians and Chinese who would never be able to find the resources to cre-
ate a blue-water navy. Their core conclusion now was that, largely because of ‘precision-
guided munitions’, this was ‘a dramatically new global epoch in which the United States
holds, and for the foreseeable future continues to hold, center stage’.10 A decade later Fried-
man was still confident that the United States would remain the dominant global superpower
through the twenty-first century but, in some flights of geopolitical fancy, the possibility of a
Japanese-American war was revived, inevitably involving a ‘sneak attack’ (on Thanksgiving
Day 2050). Japan was allied with Turkey, and eventually France and Germany, while on the
American side was Britain, the ‘Polish Bloc’, India, and China. Friedman was less impressed
with China than other forecasters. He predicted it would fragment in the 2010s.11
The most common reason to show how the United States might be in more peril than
commonly realised was to encourage a higher level of military preparedness. In 1998 the for-
mer US Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger warned of ‘victory disease’, a complaint fol-
lowing success that meant the victims ignored the dangers they faced and so failed to make
proper preparations. He offered a collection of complex scenarios combining fact and fiction,
in a form somewhat derivative of Tom Clancy. Governments had to cope with more than one
crisis at a time. While a full-scale war was raging on the Korean peninsula, escalating to nu-
clear use, China decided to seize Taiwan. Iran not only inspired Islamic fundamentalists to
overthrow secular Arab governments but also organised terrorist attacks in the United States,

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and a nuclear weapon was exploded in Europe. Mexico might be invaded in 2003 to topple a
corrupt regime dealing in drugs and propelling vast numbers of refugees across the border
into the US. Weinberger also revisited old struggles as a resurgent Russia sought to conquer
Europe using its nuclear power, while in his version of Japan picking up from 1945, ‘cyber-
strikes’ were involved as well as chemical and nuclear weapons. The focus was still on dan-
gerous states and classical forms of war, with the added complications of weapons of mass
destruction, rather than irregular threats involving guerrilla warfare and terrorism. As the US
could get into so much trouble in so many ways, the key message was that it must rebuild its
conventional forces and continue its pursuit of effective missile defences.12
By this time China was emerging as the most serious long-term challenger to the United
States. This was always a more credible prospect than Japan. China was a much larger coun-
try than the United States, with a massive population, and by the late 1990s its economic
growth was staggering. Its government was authoritarian, notionally communist, and histori-
cally antagonistic to the United States, even though relations had been warmer since the early
1970s and there was considerable economic interdependence. Most importantly, China was a
genuinely revisionist power. It was dissatisfied with its current borders, considering them
relics from a period when it was weak and regularly humiliated. Lastly, its civil war, which
had led to the Communists dominating the mainland, still left its old enemies, the National-
ists, in charge of the island of Taiwan. Much of its diplomatic activity went into denying that
Taiwan had any legitimacy as an independent entity.
Jed Babbin and Edward Timperlake, a conservative commentator and a former naval offi-
cer respectively, argued with a mixture of fact and fiction that as soon as China had a capabil-
ity to strike the United States it would do so. They were not tied to any specific scenario, con-
sidering not only Taiwan but also the continued division of Korea (China had fought Ameri-
can troops in defence of North Korea in 1950) and its various claims around the Pacific
Rim.13 They imagined a President Hillary Clinton conceding most of Asia to China rather
than have a fight, but also US nuclear use against North Korea and even Iran after they had
used their nuclear weapons on other countries—Japan and Israel. Nonetheless, a nuclear ex-
change between China and the US was not in the plot. As with other such books the key
themes depend on the rise of a new superpower, which it was assumed must come at the ex-
pense of the United States, an energy crisis of some sort which provided the trigger for con-
flict, and a conviction in Beijing that war was inevitable.
More than any of the other prospective threats the question of the rise of China acquired
importance because it provided an occasion for a major debate on the future of naval power.
Most scenarios for war inevitably involved the movement of forces on land, for wars were
normally about the control of chunks of prized territory. The focus on civil wars had rein-
forced this preoccupation with land warfare. The naval consequences of the instability they
represented tended to come down to the need to deal with piracy and people trafficking, as
refugees took to dangerous boats to flee from violence in the Middle East to Europe.
Yet a backdrop to all post-1945 international affairs had been US mastery of the seas, and
its ability to reach distant lands and exert power around the world. It was US naval strength
that had allowed it to forge alliances in both Europe and Asia, to reach out to them with mili-
tary reserves and essential supplies at times of crisis, and to threaten enemies with bombard-
ment from the sea, economic blockade, or an amphibious landing. This had been very much in
evidence during the 1991 Gulf War.14
As China grew economically so did its navy as the most palpable manifestation of its
strength, posing a short-term challenge to the US in terms of its ability to assert freedom of
navigation and in the longer-term to come the aid of its allies. The capability required by the

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Chinese if they were to get control of the seas close to their shores was described as ‘Anti-Ac-
cess/Area Denial’, with its own acronym ‘A2/AD’.15 This focused debate on how far the Chi-
nese military really had to go before they could challenge American naval predominance.16
The A2/AD concept became too vague—either ‘an impenetrable “keepout zone” that forces
could enter only at extreme peril to themselves’, a ‘family of technologies’ or a ‘strategy.’17
The issue pointed to a larger issue of whether the US could expect to continue to use its naval
mastery to project power close to enemy shores, reflecting the problems of quality coming at
the expense of quantity, so there were fewer platforms to go round, and how each expensive
unit might be vulnerable to a variety of anti-ship weapons, including small, unmanned sub-
marines. In this way the US-China strategic relationship came to be framed as a classic form
of great-power rivalry—a developing contest for control of the Western Pacific, detached
from the political considerations over whether there were other ways of managing their con-
flicts of interests or the extent to which the key factor would remain the extent of their eco-
nomic inter-dependence.

IN 2007 ANDREW KREPINEVICH, WHO HAD BEEN ONE OF THE first to talk about the revolution in
military affairs, offered his scenarios for the period up to 2016.18 His hierarchy of enemies
now had North Korea and China at the top. Iran was assumed to be behind most mischief in
the Middle East. His book opened with Pearl Harbor and the blitzkrieg to show how surprise
might happen. His scenarios included a collapse of Pakistan and a scramble to make sure its
nuclear weapons did not fall into the wrong hands, a real worry at this time, while a multifac-
eted Islamist ‘Wall of Fire’ took to an extreme every fear about the worst terrorists could do.
The most interesting scenario, in that it related to an actual development, was a US with-
drawal from Iraq leading to chaos. Krepinevich assumed America’s loss of resolve would lead
to Russia and China coming to take responsibility for stabilising the Middle East. The prob-
lems with the scenario lay in the detail: the assumption that Prime Minister Maliki in Iraq
would reach out to Kurds and Sunni (which he notably failed to do), the neglect of Syria
(where Russia did take responsibility), overstating Iran’s role and President Obama’s eventual
recognition that he could not let ISIS overcome Iraq.
By 2015, following its invasion of Ukraine (including the annexation of Crimea), Russia
had put itself back into the running as a threat to be taken seriously. That year, General
Richard Shirreff, recently retired as Deputy SACEUR, published his account of a coming war
with the explicit purpose of demonstrating the dangers of the decline in British defence spend-
ing, and the ‘semi-pacifist’ inclinations of the government, who had made an ‘appalling gam-
ble’ that the international scene would remain benign. They had neglected the danger posed
by Russian President Putin, determined to reunite ‘ethnic Russian speakers under the banner
of Mother Russia’ and ready to grab the Baltic states that had been part of the Soviet Union
up to 1991 but were now members of NATO. Shirreff did not try to invent a scenario for war.
He took a contingency already being taken seriously by the alliance19 to its most alarming
conclusion. In doing so he followed the standard form of the genre. A cunning enemy, free
from democratic constraints, surprises feckless Western countries that find themselves in a
war for which they are unprepared.20 The situation was only recovered because it turned out,
perhaps surprisingly, that the West was better at cyberwar than the Russians.
Douglas Cohn, another retired officer, offered scenarios for World War 4 (assuming the
Cold War was World War 3)21 that also occurred because states inclined to aggression could
barely help themselves when opportunities came their way. Any weakness and they would
pounce, in order to revenge old defeats or achieve long-held ambitions. Compared with the
scenarios from the early 1990s, Cohn’s forward look was dominated by fragmentation—old

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NATO allies coming to blows, the collapse of the Eurozone and a Belgian civil war, Russia
attempting to reverse its post-1990 losses, including a move into the Baltic states, China be-
coming expansionist or succumbing to its own civil war, and then conflicts developing be-
cause of a rush to colonise the polar regions or even the moon, or gain access to fresh water,
as well as more familiar concerns related to nuclear terrorism, currency manipulation and cy-
berwar.
The theme of all these books was that the improbable could always happen and so, in ef-
fect, it was essential to be prepared for everything. This was Cohn’s conclusion. National de-
fence could not be ‘predicated upon easily defined threats’ and so the United States must be
prepared ‘for the whole gamut of possibilities’. His worry appeared to be less that the US
government lacked the capabilities to deal with these challenges than, in a common lament, it
would lack the will to do so.22 But in practice governments needed to set priorities, and to ac-
cept that there were some problems that could not be addressed adequately and the national
interest would not be served by trying to do so.
There were some forecasters who were not making a point about looming dangers but
were attempting to develop methodologies for forward planning. A book such as Inevitable
Surprises by Peter Schwartz, published in 2003, sought to identify ‘pre-determined elements’
that were bound to shape the future. In this category he mentioned refugee movements, the
impact of Islam on European societies, and an aging population. He also exaggerated eco-
nomic growth and productivity gains, doubted that worries about globalisation would gain
much traction, and assumed that financial regulation would work. His optimism extended to a
rather muddled view of strategic defences as providing ‘American military dominance of the
planet, in near perpetuity’. In addition ‘willingly or not the US will be drawn into the role of
high-tech global policeman’. He was even optimistic on Europe’s behalf forecasting stability
for the EU and success for the Euro. Russia might even eventually join the EU. While all this
was positive, elsewhere there would be trouble. The Saudis might succumb to an Islamic re-
bellion, Pakistan and Egypt to coups, Indonesia to ethnic conflict, Mexico to drug wars. Much
of Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East could be almost written off. 23
These books, with their range of speculations and contingencies, were of little value to
policymakers in terms of deciding how to allocate their energies and resources. If the aim was
to push for policy responses then it was to keep the focus sharp. How to do this could be seen
in two books by Graham Allison, the Dean of the Belfer Center at Harvard University. The
first concerned the nightmare of a non-state group getting hold of some sort of nuclear device
and carrying it into a city centre. This concern gained credibility after 9/11. Al-Qaeda was
clearly keen on killing as many people as possible and there was evidence that it had explored
the possibility of building its own weapon or buying one on the open market, perhaps taking
advantage of the disarray in the former Soviet Union that created risks of pilfering of poorly
secured nuclear materials or even devices—the so-called ‘loose nukes’. Then there was the
shock of the discovery of the A. Q. Khan network in Pakistan which had been selling relevant
technologies to Iran, North Korea and Libya.24
In 2004 Allison explored the possible ways in which terrorist groups might be able to get
hold of a nuclear device or build their own and then use it to cause carnage. He reported ex-
perts from within government who considered such an attack as being a matter of ‘when not
if’. This was classic ‘worst case’ for no other act of terrorism could compare with a nuclear
explosion. Even those next in the list had a nuclear element, such as crashing aircraft into a
nuclear power station or creating a ‘dirty bomb’ using radioactive materials, although this
would be more disruptive than destructive. Though these were the worst forms of terrorism
imaginable there were others, using for example chemical or biological weapons that could

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cause great panic. They were far easier for non-state groups to construct. Chemical weapons
had been used by states and terrorists had tried biological attacks. There had been a scare after
9/11 in the US when five people died from posted anthrax spores. So there was no reason to
suppose that an attack with these weapons was either less likely or needing of prevention.
Allison kept his focus on the most dire case:

Given the number of actors with serious intent, the accessibility of weapons or nuclear materials from which ele-
mentary weapons could be constructed, and the almost limitless ways in which terrorists could smuggle a weapon
through American borders…. In my own considered judgment, on the current path, a nuclear terrorist attack on
America in the decade ahead is more likely than not.25

Without determined action, largely to make sure that weapons and fissionable material
were kept secure, a disaster was almost certain.
Michael Levi did not dismiss the concerns or the need for robust policies but did chal-
lenge the methodology of adding worst case upon worst case to produce the most alarming
conclusion. He doubted that there was a ‘nuclear black market’, or that building a nuclear
weapon was ‘as simple as surfing the Internet’, or that smuggling nuclear materials was ‘the
same as smuggling drugs’. The best test of defences, he suggested, would be not so much
against ‘an infallible ten foot tall enemy’ but against a ‘possible failure-averse, conservative,
resource-limited five-foot tall nuclear terrorist’.26 A decade later, with fortunately no nuclear
incident, and some limited progress on defensive measures, the concerns had not gone away.
One analyst expressed surprise that there had not yet been any nuclear terrorism, and took lit-
tle comfort from that absence for the future.27
By this time Allison had moved on. In 2017 he published another book, focusing on an-
other looming tragedy that was also preventable so long as the right measures were taken. In
this case it was a war between the United States and China. The method was similar with au-
thoritative figures being quoted to underline the gravity of the situation, and the same layering
of worst case assessments, until a series of recommendations explained how to keep the peace
between the two great powers. ‘On the current trajectory’, Allison warned, ‘war between the
US and China in the decades ahead is not just possible, but much more likely than currently
recognized’. It was not, however, ‘inevitable’. 28 China would soon overtake the United States
in economic, and then potentially, military power. Huntington was invoked to explain the
clash of cultures between the two. There were also the real points of tension over Taiwan, the
South China Sea, North Korea, and trade, from which Allison could generate plausible sce-
narios for conflict.
Allison’s ‘big idea’ was to frame this moment as part of a recurring historical pattern,
when predominant powers saw their positions threatened. This he called the ‘Thucydides
Trap’, referring to the Greek historian’s famous explanation for the Peloponnesian War: ‘It
was the rise of Athens and the fear that it instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable’. Allison
provided many examples of this trap in action over the centuries, including the rivalry be-
tween Germany and Great Britain which led to the Great War. Leaving aside the question of
whether this really was a good explanation for the war between Athens and Sparta, there were
other difficulties with this formulation. China’s rise unsettled a whole region. There were lots
of great-power interactions in play.
Until 1990 China’s most likely antagonist was the Soviet Union. In 1983 Edward
Luttwak had forecast a major war between the two. For two decades Soviet military power
had grown spectacularly—‘the product of an armament effort of entirely unprecedented di-
mensions’—which enabled Moscow to cope with NATO countries that in every measure

193
other than the military were much more powerful. Now it would take down an enemy that the
Soviet leadership clearly feared, despite their shared ideology, so that it did not grow into a
major threat.29 To take another example, in 2014 China’s claims over the Japanese Senkaku
Islands (which it knew as the Diaoyu Islands), led Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to
wonder aloud about the disturbing similarities between the situation a hundred years earlier in
Europe and the current position in Asia.30
The Chinese leadership might also look to India. This was a country with which it had
gone to war in 1962, over a disputed border, which was in constant dispute with China’s ally,
Pakistan, and which also had a massive population and had moved into a higher economic
gear.31 The issue for China was not its struggle for power with the United States so much as
its potential struggle with most of the other big players in the region. Returning to the China
question in 2012, Luttwak saw the danger facing China as an almost autistic tendency for self-
aggrandizement, common to great powers, that was bound to ‘evoke adversarial reaction’.
The real challenge for China, if it did not want its neighbours to gang up on it, was to learn
humility and restraint. If it did, and managed to avoid an unnecessary war, then this suggested
its rise could be irresistible.32

THE MOST SYSTEMATIC ATTEMPT TO ANTICIPATE HOW THE world might develop in the future
and the potential security implications was the US National Intelligence Council’s quadren-
nial assessment of global trends, published after a presidential election but before the inaugu-
ration. The series began in 1997. The first looked forward to 2010: the one after the 2012
election to 2030. The most recent, published in January 2017, did not restrict itself by a time-
frame. The issues covered did not change very much, with consideration of demographic
trends, the impact of climate change, developments in the world economy, the rise of Asia,
the violence in Africa, and turmoil in the Middle East. There were always questions to be
asked about how Russia was coping with its reduced circumstances and the meaning of
China’s ascent. Because this was a series it was possible to comment on what had been
missed and the implications for the methodology. It was not surprising that the council was
caught out by specific events that in principle might have been foreseeable (the 1998 financial
crash was an early example), but each successive edition considered how they might do better
in anticipating a discontinuity, something that was not a trend at the time of writing, or a
‘black swan’, a rare event that seemed to come from nowhere yet changed everything.33
When the series started, the document picked up on the key themes of the 1990s—the im-
pact of globalisation, that most conflicts were internal to states rather than between them, that
precision-guided munitions and information technologies would ‘continue to be the hallmarks
of the revolution in military affairs’ and the likelihood that adversaries would attempt to blunt
this US advantage using ‘asymmetric means—ranging from the increased use of terrorism to
the possible use of weapons of mass destruction’. ‘Increasingly, the national security agendas
of policymakers will be dominated by five questions: whether to intervene, when, with whom,
with what tools, and to what end?’34 By December 2000, the relationships of states to crimi-
nal and terrorist groups had more focus, including the observation that ‘asymmetric ap-
proaches—whether undertaken by states or nonstate actors—will become the dominant char-
acteristic of most threats to the US homeland’.35 By December 2004, after the dramas of 9/11
and the invasion of Iraq, the authors dressed up their scenarios as works of fiction set in 2020.
Thus a continuing Pax Americana was illuminated by a UN Secretary-General’s diary entry
noting the US still exercising leadership but in ‘an increasingly diverse, complex, and fast-
paced world’, a letter by a grandson of Osama Bin Laden recounting an attempt to establish a
‘New Caliphate’, and an exchange of text messages between two arms dealers exploring a

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WMD deal as states intensified security measures.36
The 2008 document was published just as the international economy was reeling under
the shock of another financial crisis, which was barely reflected in its pages. It saw consider-
able continuity with little expectation of a great-power war, but problems arising in an arc of
instability ‘spanning Middle East, Asia, Africa’. The uncertainties revolved around the possi-
bility of ‘precipitating events leading to overthrow of regimes’ and the ‘ability to manage
flashpoints and competition for resources’. This was a ‘story with no clear outcome’.37 The
‘shape and nature of international alignments’ were in a ‘state of flux’. The world described
showed an increased tendency for internal conflict, in which some states would fail, causing
more grief and disrupting neighbourhoods, while even the more prosperous and stable states
were finding it difficult to control national agendas because of globalisation. It also recog-
nised that American policies were ‘an important variable in how the world is shaped, influ-
encing the path that states and nonstate actors choose to follow’. This was both obvious yet an
important insight—the world is unpredictable because it depends on choices that your country
must make.
By 2012 the US role was more under question. Aware of the optimism engendered by the
idea that war was in decline, the document accepted that ‘the disincentives will remain strong
against great-power conflict: too much would be at stake’. But it urged caution ‘about the
prospects for further declines in the number and intensity of intrastate conflicts’, while noting
how the shifts in the international system were increasing the risks of interstate conflict:

The underpinnings of the post-Cold War equilibrium are beginning to shift. During the next 15–20 years, the US
will be grappling with the degree to which it can continue to play the role of systemic guardian and guarantor of
the global order. A declining US unwillingness and/or slipping capacity to serve as a global security provider
would be a key factor contributing to instability, particularly in Asia and the Middle East.38

The next document, published a few weeks after the 2016 election, was bleaker than those
that had gone before. Since 2012 there had been Russian interventions in Ukraine and Syria
and growing tensions over Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea. It noted the mood of
‘anti-immigrant and xenophobic sentiment’ in the core Western democracies. Nationalism
was being employed in countries where ‘leaders seek to consolidate political control by elimi-
nating domestic political alternatives while painting international relations in existential
terms’. It warned of ‘rising tensions within and between countries’ over the coming five
years, with ‘an ever-widening range of states, organizations, and empowered individuals’
shaping geopolitics.

For better and worse, the emerging global landscape is drawing to a close an era of American dominance follow-
ing the Cold War. So, too, perhaps is the rules-based international order that emerged after World War II. It will
be much harder to cooperate internationally and govern in ways publics expect. Veto players will threaten to block
collaboration at every turn, while information “echo chambers” will reinforce countless competing realities, un-
dermining shared understandings of world events.

Despite temptations to ‘impose order on this apparent chaos’ this would ‘ultimately
would be too costly in the short run and would fail in the long.’ The lessons of the past cen-
tury were summoned to note how difficult it would be to overcome less powerful adversaries.
It warned of Russia and China being emboldened, curtailed international cooperation, and a
tendency towards the revival of ‘spheres of influence’.39 Donald Trump was inaugurated as
45th president of the United States on 20 January 2017.

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 [ 25 ]

The Future of the Future of War

I had been at the start of something: of a new era in which conflict surges, shifts, or fades but doesn’t
end, in which the most you can hope for is not peace, or the arrival of a better age, but only to remain
safe as long as possible.
MATTI FRIEDMAN, Pumpkinflowers, 20161

This book opened discussing a period when politicians and commentators had a shared idea
about the nature of war, how it would be fought and also how it might be contained. Accord-
ing to the classical model of war, political struggles were decided by means of battle. In the
great wars of the modern era this was the case. The belligerents threw everything into the
fight, the end was marked by victory and defeat, and this was sufficient for the international
system to be set on a new course with a hierarchy of powers confirmed. But these were long
and arduous struggles, involving enormous sacrifices and terrible devastation. It was not what
the strategists of the nineteenth century had in mind, which was to achieve their objectives as
quickly as possible. This was why surprise attacks loomed so large in thinking about future
war. The need for a quick victory put a premium on making the most of the very first blows
directed against the enemy. Whatever the expectations about the war’s likely course, it would
be foolish to move only tentitively once it had begun or give an opponent a chance to prepare
and defend by signalling an imminent offensive. Surprise would always gain some advantage.
The aim would be to leave the enemy floundering and helpless. If the first blow was indeci-
sive that could mean a long, hard struggle with an uncertain outcome.
The importance of the opening moves in wars is why writing on their future was always
full of imaginary first blows that caused the defeat of their victims. Far less was written on
second and third blows, and less still about those later years when an impasse had been
reached and the fighting ticked over, with casualties but no breakthroughs. After the First
World War the strategists looked to tanks and aircraft to ensure that the next war was shorter.
The writers who did dwell on the possibility of even longer and deadlier wars did so not to
dream up clever campaign plans but to grasp how societies might cope and adapt to such a sit-
uation. The entry into the nuclear age provided another boost to dystopian imaginations while
turning strategic design into a form of abstract reasoning. Now even more than before, any
war plan would have to gamble everything on the first strike, because anything less than the
complete elimination of the enemy’s nuclear capabilities would mean that that their own
country must suffer a terrible revenge. Over time, as new forms of warfare emerged, includ-
ing the use of cyber-attacks that barely involved armed force, surprise attacks still dominated

196
the literature. This was the case even as military practice gravitated towards long, drawn-out
struggles which lacked clear beginning and endings.
The prominence of knockout blows in writing about future war was the result not only of
their potential strategic impact or their drama but also because they helped make a point. They
warned of a country left vulnerable to cunning aggressors as a result of political negligence
and popular complacency. The same theme appealed to those intending to take the military
initiative with an irresistible offensive. Wars usually started with at least one side confident
about the outcome. John Stoessinger argued that the origins of war lay in the persistent influ-
ence of misperceptions about adversaries and about what armed force could achieve. On the
brink of war, ‘each confidently expects victory after a brief and triumphant campaign’.2 Even
leaders aware of the pitfalls when making their decisions became more confident as war was
seen to be virtually inevitable, reassuring themselves that victory was within reach.3
Both Operation Barbarossa and Pearl Harbor underlined the point. They were such shocks
to those on the receiving end that they exercised remarkable holds over their strategic imagi-
nations thereafter, although in both cases surprise was achieved but victory was not. They
were not taken as warnings of the folly and futility of aggression but instead of how the un-
wary might get caught. And because surprise remained of the essence when starting a war,
there have been a number of attempted knockout blows since 1945—North Korea’s attacks
against the South in the summer of 1950, Argentina’s seizure of the Falkland Islands in 1982,
and Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait in 1990—all of which failed to achieve their objective. Even
when a first blow was successful, as in Israel’s demolition of the Egyptian air force on 5 June
1967, the aftermath could be frustrating, with the defeated parties refusing to accept the result
and a conquered population putting up resistance.
One regular assumption was that the odds of success might be shifted decisively as a re-
sult of some new technology. Gunpowder to muskets, steam turbines to aircraft, missiles to
digital networks, all changed the character of warfare, opening up new possibilities while
closing off others. But the technology was rarely monopolised or else, even if one side en-
joyed superiority, adversaries found ways to limit their effects. Even for modern Western
forces, technology encouraged a fantasy of a war that was fast, easy, and decisive: yet they
still found themselves facing ‘slow, bitter and indecisive war’.4 The conviction that ‘future
conflict will be fundamentally different from all historical experience’ led H. R. McMaster to
identify a ‘vampire fallacy’, so called because it was impossible to kill. ‘New concepts with
catchy titles’ promised ‘fast, cheap and efficient victories in future war’. Doubters were ‘dis-
missed as being wedded to old thinking’. As an example he cited how ‘information and com-
munication technologies’ were said to lead to the ‘Quality of Firsts’, by which forces would
‘see first, decide first, act first and finish decisively’. The fallacy lay in neglecting ‘war’s po-
litical and human dimensions’ and equating ‘targeting to tactics, operations and strategy’. It
failed to recognise the ‘uncertainty of war, the trajectory of which is constantly altered by var-
ied interactions with determined and elusive enemies.’5
The vampire is unlikely to be killed off soon. It has become natural to explore new devel-
opments by pushing them to their most extreme potential impacts. Should another major war
start to loom larger as a serious prospect then all forms of offensive scenarios, however im-
probable or difficult to execute, will demand careful attention. Colin Gray has warned against
assuming that just because we have avoided a war between great powers for some time that
this will continue indefinitely, and also of becoming so beguiled by new types of war that we
forget to think about classical war.6 When a Harvard group explored the parallels between the
rise of Germany as a great power at the start of the twentieth century and the current rise of
China, they considered poor diplomacy, unreasonable allies, insufficient economic interde-

197
pendence, domestic upheavals, offensive doctrines, and the logic of the rise of one power in-
evitably coming at the expense of another. The main conclusion drawn from the comparison,
however, as a guide to how to avoid a major war with China in the future, was to watch out
for the ‘little things’, contingent features of the situation, chance factors and then specific de-
cisions, that might have gone another way but together worked to turn a manageable crisis
into a catastrophe.7 From this perspective any thinking about future war geared to prevention
should look to innovation in diplomacy and international communications as much as to mili-
tary strategy. Problems could emerge not out of the blue with some all-or-nothing attack but
instead out of an assertion of rights in contested territory, a principled stand that embarrassed
a rival, probing actions to explore weaknesses that came up against strength, military manoeu-
vres to ‘send a message’, or displays of resolve that turned into actual clashes and escalated
quickly.

THE INNOVATION THAT DID MOST TO TRANSFORM THINKING about war, and why the risk factors
at play during the first decades of the twenty-first century were so much more severe than
those in the first decades of the twentieth, was the development of nuclear weapons. These
weapons were first introduced at the end of a war that had seen the Holocaust, carpet-bomb-
ing, and attacks from long-range missiles. Atom bombs were a logical culmination of what
had gone before, and also apparently brutally successful in bringing a total war to an end. The
simplest if depressing assumption was that war had become progressively more murderous,
with ever more sophisticated means being found to slaughter people on a large scale, and that
future wars would be even more intense and existential. This prospect encouraged great cau-
tion, even when it came to quite minor crises. The risks were just too great and reliable offen-
sive strategies were out of reach. This caution has been internalised by successive generations
of world leaders—expressed in a slogan shared by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev: ‘a
nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought’.8 But will this last?
In the past, credibility about any war ‘going nuclear’ depended on the likely passions
raised by the preceding conventional campaigns, in which many would already have died. In
1945 nuclear war appeared as a natural extension of what had gone before but now there is
much less of a connection between the two types of war. The trend in conventional war, at
least in the West, has been increasingly to adopt strategies that sought to spare civilians, not
always successfully. The United States and its allies have also been confident enough in their
overall strength to see nuclear weapons as a reserve, deterring extreme actions by another nu-
clear power. But under the strain of war, attitudes could switch, as they have switched before,
into a position where the old arguments about getting at governments through their miserable
populations will appear credible again. Countries lacking comparable conventional strength to
the US will also continue to see nuclear weapons as a vital leveller.9 When President Putin
wished to dissuade the United States from acting on behalf of Ukraine in 2014 he observed:
‘Thank God, I think no one is thinking of unleashing a large-scale conflict with Russia. I want
to remind you that Russia is one of the leading nuclear powers.’10
There are scenarios separate from a great-power conflict which could see nuclear use, for
example involving India and Pakistan. In addition, a number of the big crises of this century
had a nuclear dimension. The US and its allies went to war against Iraq in order to preclude a
future nuclear programme, threatened war, imposed sanctions and eventually cut a deal with
Iran to prevent them acquiring enough enriched uranium for their own nuclear weapons, and
began 2017 seeking to stop North Korea taking its already advanced nuclear and missile pro-
grammes further, though facing a risk of nuclear retaliation. If and when nuclear weapons are
again used in anger this will affect all subsequent discussions on war, either because it was as

198
bad as feared or alternatively because it helped one side come out on top.11
Chemical weapons might have been seen as a lesser form of nuclear weapon. Their
human effects would undoubtedly be horrific, but their strategic effects still limited compared
to what can be achieved by traditional forms of bombardment. Biological weapons are also
potentially unwieldy and their use would carry an even greater stigma. Both give counter-ter-
rorism forces cause for concern.
Another key question is whether and how much the United States will play a role in fu-
ture conflicts. The literature at least as it applies to interstate wars, assumes that the United
States is actively engaged in the generality of the world’s problems. Americans have written
the key works, not least because of the country’s role as the guarantor of a certain sort of in-
ternational order. It is hard to think of a single development that would transform security cal-
culations around the world, including whether or not to build national nuclear arsenals, than a
decision by the United States to disentangle itself from its alliance commitments. This is why
allies spent so much time following Washington security debates and wondering how much
they could continue to rely on US support in a crisis. Any discussion about the various mar-
itime challenges posed by China to the Japanese, or by Russia to the Baltic States, takes on a
completely different light should these challenges come to be seen as tests of the principle of
alliance.
This in turn raises the question of whether the United States will continue to enjoy such a
predominant military position. It remains the only power with a truly global reach in conven-
tional forces, but it can no longer assume straightforward victory even in battles fought on its
own terms. US forces have been blown up by hidden roadside bombs, but it is a long time
since they have faced serious threats from the air (possibly Korea in 1953) or expected to lose
ships in a confrontation at sea. Russia would pose a serious threat so long as it did not stray
too far from home territory, but its economic weakness works against it becoming an even
greater power. So long as it maintains internal stability China can expect to get stronger. This
is why, when coupled with the complexity of its regional politics, Asia provides a more likely
setting for a future great-power war.

WITH CIVIL WARS THE EXPERIENCE HAS BEEN EVEN MORE salutary. The category has never been
clear-cut because internal conflict often prompts external intervention—by like-minded mili-
tants supporting a religious or ideological cause, neighbours with local interests, and major
powers acting out of humanitarian or security concerns. At times external forces have sought
to hold the ring or monitor a fragile ceasefire in the guise of a peacekeeping force. Sometimes
there was no peace to keep, and external intervention effectively took sides, either by prevent-
ing one side from winning by unacceptable means—starving or massacring civilians, for in-
stance—or ensuring that the most ideologically sympathetic party came out on top, as was at-
tempted in both Iraq and Afghanistan. On the ground, instead of being fought by disciplined
regular forces serving the purposes of either the state or its challenger, civil wars often pitted
relatively disorganised militias against each other. In these cases, the conflicts tended to be
driven by ground-level considerations of individual and group security, and the violence was
often more personal. They broke up communities that had previously been apparently harmo-
nious, and left legacies of bitterness, division, and impoverishment.
Whatever the higher cause they were notionally supporting, individuals and groups could
develop their own agendas, geared to criminal activities, such as smuggling and trafficking in
drugs, natural resources, and people. These interests could keep a conflict bubbling along, de-
spite the efforts of peace mediators or armed peacekeepers. If state structures remain imma-
ture or contested, the situation might never improve, leading to outside powers and interna-

199
tional organisations accepting a quasi-permanent role in the politics of the host country and
some continuing responsibility for pacifying hostile elements.
After the end of the Cold War, Western countries, out of a mixture of motives, found
themselves getting involved in conflicts far from home. What might have started with ene-
mies being rolled over by the sheer weight of firepower and sophisticated equipment turned
into long, complex, and messy campaigns. Their troops entered a world of shadowy militias,
with accomplished bomb-makers, angry mobs, cynical warlords, and energised youngsters
brandishing their AK-47s. Protest movements morphed into militias and then militias mor-
phed into criminal gangs or into rival factions, fighting each other with the same ferocity that
they once fought their shared enemy. The conflict zones were populated by altruistic volun-
teers for NGOs, private security contractors, offering protection for all those who were not in
the military (and whose numbers often exceeded the military), conciliators and journalists,
smugglers and traffickers. All had to navigate their way through broken social structures, cor-
rupt economies, and unreliable political institutions. No one was truly safe. For those living in
these countries this form of warfare could become something habitual, routine, to which it
was necessary to adjust. Those intervening were able to walk away. They could decide that
engagement was not such a good idea. Perhaps, they might conclude, the people were beyond
help, or no longer deserved support, as they had done insufficient to help themselves. In this
way they might accept outcomes that would have been characterised as defeat while the fight-
ing was at its height but became tolerable when the alternative was persisting with what had
become a futile endeavour.
This left another large political question—the answer to which will influence the future of
war. The reputation of interventions suffered after Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, although
Syria was a poor advert for holding back. What may make a difference in the future may not
only be the extent of the human distress being caused by the conflict but also the desperation
of fleeing refugees and the opportunities for terrorism. Humanitarian motives may not be suf-
ficient to ensure engagement, but that may mean conflicts that do not spill out of their borders
will be left alone until exhaustion sets in. Some influence could be exercised by relying
largely on air power and on others to provide the land forces. That might see the major enemy
pushed back or even defeated, but it would also empower those who were making the sacri-
fices. It would mean relinquishing control over events on the ground, and accepting the
agenda of local allies, with their distinctive interests, so that the relationship between military
action and political objectives became further attenuated. To side with a government could
mean propping up those whose practices had created the conflict in the first place; to side with
rebels was not only more problematic in terms of international law but could mean promoting
a radical political project that went well beyond resisting oppression.
Over this century approaches to intervention have moved from humanitarianism with na-
tion-building to counter-terrorism with nation-building to counter-terrorism on its own. Is-
lamist extremism is now seen as a global challenge—networked, ruthless, and capable—and
one that requires a robust response. The form this response should take has been the subject of
an intense debate since the opening of the ‘war on terror’, including the extent it can and
should be fought in line with established Western values and respect for human rights. This
debate has yet to be concluded.12 There has also been a corresponding shift from a Cold War
understanding of civil wars as largely anti-colonial and ideological struggles, to what might
be expected with states with weak foundations and high poverty, to a phenomenon with many
different strands, but showing the increasing influence of hard-line Islamist movements.

A COMMON THEME OF THOSE REFLECTING ON THE STATE OF the military art was of the blurring

200
of boundaries—between peace and war, the military and the civilian, the conventional and un-
conventional, the regular and the irregular, the domestic and the international, and the state
and the non-state, the legitimate and the criminal.13 The talk was of ‘grey zone’ conflicts,
found somewhere between peace and war, where the action chosen was deliberately kept
below the threshold that would spark a major war.14 Another term referring to the same phe-
nomenon, but with a double meaning, was ‘Cool War’:

On the one hand, it is a little warmer than cold because it seems likely to involve almost constant offensive mea-
sures that, while falling short of actual warfare, regularly seek to damage or weaken rivals or gain an edge through
violations of sovereignty and penetration of defenses. And on the other, it takes on the other definition of “cool,”
in that it involves the latest cutting-edge technologies in ways that are changing the paradigm of conflict to a much
greater degree than any of those employed during the Cold War—which was, after all, about old-fashioned geopo-
litical jockeying for advantage in anticipation of potential old-school total warfare.15

The risks attached to major war and the reluctance to commit substantial forces to lesser
conflicts have led major powers to search for ways, whether subversion of the political
process, economic coercion, cyber-attacks, or brazen disinformation campaigns, to influence
events while keeping their liabilities limited and risks managed. Again there was the difficulty
that these methods were unlikely to bring much to a conclusion but instead encouraged nig-
gling, persistent conflicts until at some point a way was found to sort out the underlying is-
sues or else some spark moved them out of the grey zone and back into open warfare.
War therefore has a future. It can make an appearance wherever there is a combination of
an intensive dispute and available forms of violence. The international system has its known
fault lines, between and within states, and there is always a possibility of some eruption. The
violence may be connected with parochial or even private issues, will often be linked with
criminality and connected with simmering social tensions. At first it may bear little resem-
blance to our common views of war, but any continuing violence has the potential to turn into
something bigger, just as wars always leave their traces when they have notionally concluded.
So long as forces are maintained, weapons developed, and the plans kept up to date, there is
the risk of another clash of arms that will resemble the regular wars of the past.
It would be against the spirit of this book to predict the incidence and form of future wars.
A number of factors make it hard to anticipate the future. One is that prediction is often pur-
posive, closely bound up with advocacy, and so is about the present as much as the future. In
principle by following the advocated course of action the direst outcomes will be avoided
while the more optimistic realised. When it comes to urging war this can lead to an almost
willful underestimation of the resourcefulness of adversaries, their capacity to find reserves or
acquire allies. Those lamenting national complacency, decadence and spinelessness often un-
derestimate the resilience of their own people at times of emergency. Such underestimates
help explain why the biggest surprises in war often lie in what happens after the first engage-
ments.
Similarly, lobbyists for one branch of the armed services, new weapons systems, or even
peace proposals, paint alternative pictures of the future according to whether their arguments
are accepted or ignored. Even academics find it hard to look forward without offering some
recommendations about how the future might be improved. The aim is to identify strategies,
investments and actions to enable us to retain a degree of control over our destinies. In these
ways security debates get framed and priorities set, with some issues deemed highly salient as
others are pushed to the margins. When governments are caught by surprise, as with the col-
lapse of the Soviet Union or mass-casualty terrorism, or engage in activities for which they

201
were poorly of prepared, such as the interventions of the 1990s and 2000s, this was often not
because they were unthinkable but because there had been no prior reason to push them to the
top of the security agenda. As other possibilities were being illuminated they had been left un-
explored.
Another tendency is to assume that the recent past can be extrapolated into the future, that
trend lines will continue, as with claims that war as an institution is in inevitable decline. An-
other and quite different tendency is to assert that we are on the verge of a great, transforma-
tional discontinuity. The possibility that much will carry on as before is far less interesting.
Yet the continuities in warfare are striking, as can be seen in those countries that have long
forgotten the experience of peace, and by observing how much modern killing is achieved by
relatively old-fashioned weaponry that would have been recognised by earlier generations. As
much guidance on the future is provided by the unending wars of sub-Saharan Africa as by
the promise of artificial intelligence.
These tendencies so evident in the history of the future of war are therefore likely to per-
sist in its future. As in the past there will be a stream of speculative scenarios and anxious
warnings, along with sudden demands for new thinking in the face of an unexpected develop-
ment. Whether couched in the language of earnest academic papers, military appreciations or
fictional thrillers, these will all be works of imagination.16 They cannot be anything else be-
cause the future is not preordained. This is the main reason why prediction is so difficult.
There are decisions yet to be made, even about challenges that are well understood, along
with chance events that will catch us unawares and developments already in train that have
been inadequately appreciated. These works of imagination will often have value in helping to
clarify the choices that need to be faced and at times will even turn out to have been prescient.
For that reason many will deserve to be taken seriously. They should all, however, be treated
sceptically.

202
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The issues discussed in this book have been topics for discussion through my professional ca-
reer and I have benefitted enormously in particular from all my colleagues in the Department
of War Studies at King’s College London. I have also learnt much from my newer colleagues
in the twitter community where a lively debate on all national security issues can be found. I
am especially grateful to a number of people for specific advice and comments: John Bew,
Ryan Evans, Sam Freedman, Matthew Harries, Beatrice Heuser, Frank Hoffman, Stathis Ka-
lyvas, Milton Leitenberg, Jack Macdonald, Jeff Michaels, Robert Muggah, Funmi Olinasakin,
and Monica Toft. I am grateful for the excellent advice from my agents Catherine Clarke and
George Lucas, and to two of the best editors in the business—Clive Priddle and Stuart Proffit
—who have pushed me hard to make the most of this topic. Thanks also to Marco Pavia and
his team for getting the book in a fit state to be published. To my wife Judith who had har-
boured some hope that retirement from King’s would mean that I would not spend so much
time in my study writing I can only—once again—apologise.

203
Lawrence Freedman is emeritus professor of War Studies at King’s College London.
Elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1995 and awarded the CBE in 1996, he was ap-
pointed official historian of the Falklands Campaign in 1997. He was awarded the KCMG in
2003. In June 2009, he was appointed to serve as a member of the official inquiry into Britain
and the 2003 Iraq War. Professor Freedman has written extensively on nuclear strategy and
the Cold War as well as commentating regularly on contemporary security issues. His most
recent book, Strategy, was a best book of 2013 in the Financial Times and A Choice of Ene-
mies: America Confronts the Middle East won the 2009 Lionel Gelber Prize and Duke of
Westminster Medal for Military Literature.

204
 ALSO BY LAWRENCE FREEDMAN

US Intelligence and the Soviet Strategic Threat (2nd ed. 1986)

Britain and Nuclear Weapons (1980)
The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (3rd ed. 2004)
Co-author, Nuclear War and Nuclear Peace (2nd ed. 1988)
The Atlas of Global Strategy (1985)
The Price of Peace: Living with the Nuclear Dilemma (1986)
Britain & the Falklands War (1988)
Co-author, Signals of War: The Falklands Conflict of 1982 (1990)
Co-author, The Gulf Conflict 1990–91, Diplomacy and War in the New World Order (1993)
The Politics of British Defence Policy, 1979–1998 (1999)
Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam (2000)
The Cold War (2001)
Deterrence (2004)
The Official History of the Falklands Campaign, two volumes (2005)
A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East (2008)
Strategy, A History (2013)

205
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 NOTES

INTRODUCTION
1. Margaret Atwood, Morning in the Burned House. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995).
2. John Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries Into the History of the Cold War (London: Ox-
ford University Press, 1989). This first appeared as ‘The Long Peace: Elements of Stability in
the Postwar International System’, International Security 10.4 (1986).
3. John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Knopf, 1993) 59.
4. John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York:
Basic Books, 1989) 13.
5. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (London:
Penguin Books, 2011).
6. Pinker 290–1.
7. Pinker 50.
8. Human Security Report Project, Human Security Report 2013: The Decline in Global Vi-
olence: Evidence, Explanation, and Contestation (Vancouver: Human Security Press, 2013).
9. A British military think tank reported in 2014, citing Pinker as evidence, ‘that the fre-
quency and intensity of wars, as well as the number of violent deaths, has been declining
sharply and is likely to continue to fall.’ Ministry of Defence, Strategic Trends Programme:
Global Strategic Trends—Out to 2045 (Shrivenham: Doctrine, Concepts and Development
Center, 2014) 96. For similar forecasts see Frank Hoffman, Foresight into 21st Century Con-
flict: End of the Greatest Illusion (Philadelphia: Foreign Policy Research Institute, 2016).
Other key contributors to this debate have been Joshua Goldstein, Winning the War: The De-
cline of Armed Conflict (New York: Dutton, 2011), and Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization
(Oxford: OUP, 2008). See also Azar Gat, ‘Is War Declining and Why?’, Journal of Peace Re-
search 50.2 (2013). See also a collection of pre-Pinker assessments found in Raimo Väyry-
nen, ed., The Waning of Major War: Theories and Debates (London: Routledge, 2006). The
post-Pinker debate is assessed in a number of contributions, including one by Pinker, to a
symposium edited by Nils Petter Gleditsch, ‘The Decline of War—The Main Issues’, Interna-
tional Studies Quarterly 15.3 (2013). Other books with a similar thesis are Richards Jesse,
The Secret Peace: Exposing the Positive Trend of World Events (New York: Book & Ladder,
2010), and John Horgan, The End of War (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2012).
10. Pinker 361.
11. Pinker 672.
12. Pinker takes the term from Norbert Elias who wrote of a ‘civilizing process’ in a two-
volume book published in German on the eve of the Second World War. See Norbert Elias,
The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, eds. Eric Dunning et
al. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000).
13. Pinker 97.
14. Human Security Report 37. Perhaps aware of the danger of appearing to rest his case on

239
a statistical trick, Pinker acknowledged that uncertainties in the numbers might mean this war
did disrupt the trend and so should be understood as an outlier, a ‘last gasp in a long slide of
major war into historical obsolescence’ (Pinker 107).
15. Tanisha M. Fazal, ‘Dead Wrong? Battle Deaths, Military Medicine, and Exaggerated
Reports of War’s Demise’, International Security 39.1 (2014) 95–125.
16. Carl Kaysen, ‘Is War Obsolete?: A Review Essay’, International Security 14.4 (1990):
42–64.
17. Pinker 291.
18. Pinker 672.
19. Therese Pettersson and Peter Wallensteen, ‘Armed Conflicts, 1946–2014’, Journal of
Peace Research 52.4 (2015) 536–540.
20. Håvard Hegre et al., ‘Predicting Armed Conflict, 2010–2050’, International Studies
Quarterly 57 (2013): 250–270.
21. Daniel Howden, ‘The future of war is looking bleak’, Independent, online, 22 Nov.
2012. Available: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/the-future-of-war-is-
looking-bleak-8344462.html
22. John L. Comaroff, and Paul C. Stern ‘New Perspectives on Nationalism and War,’ The-
ory and Society, 23:1 (1994), 35.

240
CHAPTER 1
1. George Chesney, ‘The Battle Of Dorking: Reminiscences Of A Volunteer’, Blackwood’s
Magazine (May 1871), online, Project Gutenberg Australia. Available: http://gutenberg.net.
au/ebooks06/0602091h.html
2. Cited in James Q. Whitman, The Verdict of Battle: The Law of Victory and the Making
of Modern War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012) 207–8.
3. See I. F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars, 1763–3749 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1972), and Patrick M. Kirkwood, ‘The Impact of Fiction on Public Debate
in Late Victorian Britain: The Battle of Dorking and the “Lost Career” of Sir George
Tomkyns Chesney’, The Graduate History Review 4.1 (2012): 3.
4. Clarke 9.
5. Clarke 8.
6. Katherine C. Epstein, Torpedo: Inventing the Military-Industrial Complex in the United
States and Great Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
7. Brian Holden Reid, ‘A Signpost That Was Missed? Reconsidering British Lessons from
the American Civil War’, The Journal of Military History 70.2 (2006): 385–414. See also Jay
Luvaas The Military Legacy of the Civil War: The European Inheritance (Lawrence, KA:
University Press of Kansas, 1959).
8. Clark 45.
9. Cited by Clarke, 34.
10. On Jomini, see John Shy, ‘Jomini’, Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the
Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986) 143–185, and
Michael Howard, ‘Jomini and the Classical Tradition in Military Thought’, Studies in War &
Peace (London: Temple Smith, 1970) 31.
11. It was first translated into English in 1854. Baron Antoine-Henri de Jomini, The Art of
War (London: Greenhill Books, 1992).
12. Hew Strachan, European Armies and the Conduct of War (London: Allen & Unwin,
1983) 71.
13. Sir Edward Creasy, The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World: From Marathon to Wa-
terloo (Boston: IndyPublish, 2002). Available: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4061/4061-h/
4061-h.htm
14. Other examples of the genre are J. F. C. Fuller, The Decisive Battles of the Western
World and Their Influence Upon History, Vol. 1–3 (London: Eyre & Spotiswood, 1963), and
Paul K. Davis, 100 Decisive Battles: From Ancient Times to the Present (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999).
15. Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western
Power (New York: Doubleday, 2001).
16. Yuval N. Harari, ‘The Concept of “Decisive Battles” in World History’, Journal of
World History 18.3 (2007): 251-266.
17. Cathal J. Nolan, The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

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CHAPTER 2
1. William Le Queux, The Invasion of 1910: With A Full Account of the Siege of London
(London: Nash, 1906). Available: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36155.
2. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War, p. 73
3. Cited by Clarke,62–3.
4. Rear-Admiral P. Colomb et al., The Great War of 189_: A Forecast (London: Heine-
mann, 1893). Available: https://archive.org/details/greatwarof18900colorich
5. William Le Queux, The Great War in England in 1897 (London: Tower, 1894). Avail-
able: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/37470/37470-h/37470-h.htm
6. A subsequent fiction, Spies of the Kaiser: Plotting the Downfall of England (London:
Hurst & Blackwell, 1909), ostensibly ‘based on serious facts within my own personal knowl-
edge’, encouraged a major spy scare. Philip Knightley, The Second Oldest Profession (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1987).
7. Le Queux, (1906). The book is discussed in Clarke and also in Charles E. Gannon, Ru-
mors of War and Infernal Machines: Technomilitary agenda-setting in American and British
Speculative Fiction (Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).
8. In the decade up to 1914 the arms manufacturer Vickers was supplying the War Office
with under eleven machine guns per year, which was increased to about ten a week after the
war started. Thereafter, thousands were produced, so in 1918 Vickers delivered almost
40,000. John Ellis, The Social History of the Machine Gun (London: Cresset, 1975) 39.
9. Antulio Echevarria, Imagining Future War: The West’s Technological Revolution and
Visions of Wars to Come, 1880–1914 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007).
10. Echevarria 55. See also Brian Bond, ‘Doctrine and Training in the British Cavalry
1870–1914’, The Theory and Practice of War, ed. Michael Howard (London: Cassell, 1965).
11. Jean de Bloch, ‘The Transvaal War: Its Lessons in Regard to Militarism and Army Re-
organisation’, Journal of the Royal United Service Institute 45 (1901), and T. H. E. Travers,
‘Technology, Tactics, and Morale: Jean de Bloch, the Boer War, and British Military Theory,
1900–1914’, The Journal of Modern History 51.2 ( 1979) 264–286.
12. I. S. Bloch, Is War Now Impossible? Being an Abridgment of The War of the Future in
Its Technical Economic and Political Relations (London: Grant Richard, 1899). Available:
https://archive.org/details/iswarnowimpossib00bloc. On Bloch’s reception, see Michael
Welch, ‘The Centenary of the British Publication of Jean de Bloch’s Is War Now Impossible?
(1899–1999)’, War in History 7.3 (2000): 273–294, and Christopher Bellamy, ‘“Civilian Ex-
perts” and Russian Defence Thinking: The Renewed Relevance of Jan Bloch’, RUSI Journal
(1992): 50–56.
13. Jean de Bloch, ‘The Wars of the Future’, The Contemporary Review 8 (1901): 305–32.
14. Chesney, 95.
15. Le Queux 269.
16. Robert Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizen-
ship (London: H. Cox, 1908) 328. On prevailing ideas of degeneracy in western societies, see
Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European disorder, c.1848-c.1918 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1989), and Travers 280.
17. The term comes from a musical hall song in Britain at the time of the Russo-Turkish
war of 1878 (in which the British did not get involved):

We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do

We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too

242
 We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true
The Russians shall not have Constantinople.

It was soon in common use on both sides of the Atlantic to describe any enthusiasm for
war.
18. Quoted by Gannon, 81.
19. H. G. Wells, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon
Human Life and Thought (London: Chapman & Hall, 1902). Available: http://www.
gutenberg.org/files/19229/19229-h/19229-h.htm
20. T. H. E. Travers, ‘Future Warfare: H. G. Wells and British Military Theory’, War and
Society: A Yearbook of Military History, eds. Brian Bond and Ian Roy (London: Croom
Helm, 1975).
21. Jules Verne, The Clipper of the Clouds, (London, Sampson Low, 1887), 233-4. Avail-
able: https://archive.org/details/clipperclouds00verngoog,
22. Jules Verne, Master of the World, (London: Sampson Low, 1904). Available: http://
www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3809/pg3809.txt
23. In War of the Worlds (1898) and When the Sleeper Awakes (1889).
24. H. G. Wells, The War in the Air (London: George Bell & Sons, 1908). Available: http://
www.freeclassicebooks.com/H.G.%20Wells/The%20War%20in%Twentiethe%20Air.pdf, p.
241
25. Ray Norton, The Vanishing Fleets (London: Forgotten Books, 2015).
26. Hollis Godfrey, The Man Who Ended War (New York: Little Brown & Co., 1908).
27. W. Warren Wagar, ‘H. G. Wells and the Genesis of Future Studies’, World Future So-
ciety Bulletin (1983): 25–29.
28. Wells, War in the Air, 84.
29. Ibid., Preface to the 1921 Edition.
30. Wells, Anticipations 280. On the development of Wells’s social and political thought,
see Gordon D. Feir, H. G. Wells at the End of His Tether: His Social and Political Adventures
(Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2005). Edward Mead Earle, ‘H. G. Wells, British patriot in search of
a world state’, World Politics, 2:2 (1950), 181–208
31. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: The Macmillan
Co, 1896).
32. Max Hastings, Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914, (London: Collins, 2013), 3
33. Bellamy 52.
34. Saki, The Complete Saki (London: Penguin, 1982) 821, with editor’s notes. Cited in
Bellamy 51.

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CHAPTER 3
1. David Cortright, Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008) 34.
2. Sandi E. Cooper, Patriotic Pacifism: Waging War on War in Europe, 1815–1914 (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
3. Jean de Bloch, ‘The Future of War’, The Contemporary Review 80 (1901): 305–32.
4. The prize exhibit here was Boris Zaharoff, a Greek-born arms dealer and the man for
whom the term ‘merchant of death’ was invented. In the late 1880s he managed to sell a
steam-driven submarine of doubtful quality, rejected by the major powers, first to the Greeks
and then to the Turks, on the grounds that they were now threatened by this new Greek capa-
bility, and then to the Russians because they should be worried about what was going on in
the Black Sea. None of these submarines ever saw service. See Anthony Alfrey, Man of
Arms: The Life and Legend of Sir Basil Zaharoff (London: Thistle Publishing, 2013).
5. John Gittings, The Glorious Art of Peace: From the Iliad to Iraq (London: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2012) 145.
6. White’s biography cited by Diana Preston, A Higher Form of Killing: Six Weeks in
World War One That Forever Changed the Nature of Warfare (New York: Bloomsbury
Press, 2015) 16–7.
7. Cooper, Patriotic Pacifism, Chapter 4.
8. Joseph Conrad, ‘Autocracy and War’, Note on Life and Letters. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004) p. 89.
9. Stephen Neff, War and the Law of Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005) 161, 168.
10. D. Schindler and J. Toman, The Laws of Armed Conflicts (Boston: Martinus Nihjoff
Publisher, 1988) 102.
11. Henry Dunant, A Memory of Solferino, 1862, online, International Committee of the
Red Cross. Available: https://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/publication/p0361.htm.
Michael Barnett describes this book as ‘one of the first unvarnished accounts of war’. Empire
of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011) 78.
12. Neff, War and the Law of Nations, 189.
13. International Committee of the Red Cross, Convention (II) with Respect to the Laws
and Customs of War on Land and its annex: Regulations concerning the Laws and Customs of
War on Land, 29 July 1899.
14. On Lieber’s wider views, which allow him to be identified as an early theorist of inter-
national relations, see David Clinton, ‘Francis Lieber, Imperialism, and Internationalism’, Im-
perialism and Internationalism in the Discipline of International Relations, eds. David C.
Long and Brian Schmidt (New York: SUNY Press, 2005).
15. The Lieber Code of 1863, Article 15, General Orders No. 100. Available: http://www.
civilwarhome.com/liebercode.htm
16. John Fabian Witt, The Laws of War in American History (New York: The Free Press,
2012).
17. Geoffrey Best, Humanity in Warfare: The Modern History of the International Law of
Armed Conflicts (London: Methuen, 1980) 155.

244
CHAPTER 4
1. Walt Whitman, ‘The Million Dead, Too, Summ’d Up’, in ‘North Carolina’s Futile Re-
bellion Against the United States, 1860-1869’, Walt Whitman, Complete Prose Works,
(Philadelphia, PA: David Mckay,1892), 80. Available: http://whitmanarchive.org/published/
other/CompleteProse.html#leaf043r1
2. Lieber Code, Articles 20–22.
3. Bruce Vandervort, ‘War and Colonial Expansion’, The Cambridge History of War, Vol.
IV, War and the Modern World, eds. Roger Chickering et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2012) 69.
4. Jean Quataert, ‘War-making and restraint by law’, in Chickering et al. 156.
5. Colonel Charles Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice (London: HMSO,
1886).
6. Callwell 72.
7. Bloch, Is War Now Impossible? x.
8. J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (New York: James Pott & Co., 1902). Available:
http://files.libertyfund.org/files/127/0052_Bk.pdf
9. Paul Daley, ‘Why the number of Indigenous deaths in the frontier wars matters’,
Guardian, 15 July 2014. The article is based on paper given to the 2014 Australian Historical
Association Conference by Raymond Evans and Robert Ørsted-Jensen, ‘“I Cannot Say the
Numbers that Were Killed”: Assessing Violent Mortality on the Queensland Frontier’.
10. Wells, The War in the Air 278.
11. Vandervort 93.
12. Williamson Murray and Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh, A Savage War: A Military History of
the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 483, and Matthew Carr, Sher-
man’s Ghosts: Soldiers, Civilians, and the American Way of War (New York: New Press,
2015) 75.
13. Murray and Hsieh 483.
14. Best 209.
15. Paul Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1999) 204–5, and Geoffrey Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest
of France in 1870–1871 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 279.
16. Stig Förster, ‘The Prussian Triangle of Leadership in the Face of a People’s War: A Re-
assessment of the Conflict Between Bismarck and Moltke, 1870–71’, On The Road to Total
War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861–1871, eds. Stig
Förster and Jorg Nagler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the German Historical
Institute, 1997) 115–140.
17. Colmar von der Goltz, The Nation in Arms, trans. Philip A. Ashworth (London: W. H.
Allen, 1883). Available: https://archive.org/details/nationinarms00ashwgoog. See Robert
Foley, German Strategy and the Path to Verdun: Erich von Falkenhayn and the Development
of Attrition, 1870–1916 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
18. Stanley Karnow, In Our Own Image: American Empire in the Philippines (New York:
Random House, 1989) 194.
19. Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War (New York: Random House, 1979) 493.
20. Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and The Practices of War in Im-
perial Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).
21. Helmut Moltke, ‘On the Nature of War’, Letter to Johann Kaspar Bluntschli, 11 De-
cember 1880, online, Brigham Young University, 28 May 2009. Available: https://wwi.lib.

245
byu.edu/index.php/On_the_Nature_of_War_by_Helmut_Moltke_(the_Elder). It was in this
letter that von Moltke associated himself with the ‘humanitarian striving to lessen the suffer-
ings that come with war’, but went on to add: ‘Eternal peace is a dream—and not even a
beautiful one. War is part of God’s world-order. Within it unfold the noblest virtues of men,
courage and renunciation, loyalty to duty and readiness for sacrifice—at the hazard of one’s
life. Without war the world would sink into a swamp of materialism’.
22. Amanda Alexander, ‘The Genesis of the Civilian’, Leiden Journal of International Law
20.2 (2007) 364.
23. Neff 204–210.
24. Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘Danger! Being the log of Captain John Sirius’, The Strand Mag-
azine, July 1914. See Clarke 91, and Tom de Castella, ‘Arthur Conan Doyle’s eerie vision of
the future of war’, online, BBC News Magazine, 28 August 2014. Available: http://www.bbc.
co.uk/news/magazine-28954510
25. John N. Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities of 1914: A History of Denial
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
26. David Stevenson, ‘Strategic and Military Planning, 1871–1914’, The Fog of Peace and
War Planning: Military and Strategic Planning under Uncertainty, eds. Talbot Imlay and
Monica Duffy Toft (London: Routledge, 2006) 91.
27. Diana Preston, A Higher Form of Killing: Six weeks in World War I That Forever
Changed the Nature of Warfare (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2015).
28. Jack L. Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Dis-
asters of 1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984).

246
CHAPTER 5
1. E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis (London: Macmillan, 1939). 16.
2. Norman Angell, The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to Na-
tional Advantage (London: G. P. Putnam’s, 1910). Available: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/
38535/38535-h/38535-h.htm. It was first published in 1909 under the title Europe’s Optical
Illusion. For a biography of Angell, see Martin Ceadel, Living the Great Illusion: Sir Norman
Angell, 1872–1967 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
3. See for example Paul Krugman, ‘The Great Illusion’, New York Times, 14 Aug. 2008.
4. Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York:
Harper, 2012); Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (New
York: Random House, 2013); and Thomas Otte, July Crisis: The World’s Descent into War,
Summer 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
5. H. G. Wells, ‘The War That Will End War’, The Daily News, 14 Aug. 1914. This was
published later in the year as a book with the same title by Frank and Cecil Parker. Available:
https://archive.org/stream/warthatwillendwa00welluoft#page/n5/mode/2up
6. John Bew, Realpolitik: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016) 96.
7. Hobson, Imperialism, 13.
8. Peter Clarke, The Locomotive of War: Monet, Empire, Power, and Guilt, (London:
Bloomsbury, 2017), 22.
9. William Mulligan, The Great War for Peace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014)
233–5.
10. ‘President Wilson’s Address to Congress, Analyzing German and Austrian Peace Utter-
ances’, 11 Feb. 1918, online, The World War I Document Archive, 12 July 1997. Available:
http://www.gwpda.org/1918/wilpeace.html
11. ‘President Wilson’s Fourteen Points’, 8 Jan. 1918, online, Brigham Young University,
28 Feb. 2008. Available: http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/President_Wilson’s_Fourteen_-
Points
12. Viscount Grey of Fallodon, KG, Twenty-Five Years, 1892–1916, Vol. 1 (London: Hod-
der & Stoughton, 1925) 89.
13. Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers Six Months that Changed The World: The Paris
Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (London: John Murray, 2011), and Ca-
role Fink, ‘The search for peace in the interwar period’, The Cambridge History of War, Vol.
IV, eds. Chickering et al., 285–309.
14. Michael Howard, The Invention of Peace (London: Profile Books, 2000) 45. See also
his War and the Liberal Conscience (London: Temple Smith, 1978).
15. Wilson’s Address to Joint Session of Congress, 11 Feb. 1918. https://wwi.lib.byu.edu/
index.php/President_Wilson’s_Fourteen_Points
16. MacMillan, Peacemakers 19–21.
17. Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End (London:
Allen Lane, 2016) 7.
18. Mulligan 339.
19. Salvador de Madariaga, Disarmament (New York: Coward-McCann, 1929) 12.
20. Leonard Woolf, ed., The Intelligent Man’s Way to Prevent War (London: Victor Gol-
lancz, 1933) 10.
21. Woolf 270, 408, 18.
22. David Faber, Munich, 1938: Appeasement and World War II (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2009).

247
 23. Broadcast (27 Sept. 1938), quoted in ‘Prime Minister on the Issues’, The Times, 28
Sept. 1938, p. 10.
24. The 1946 edition of Carr can be found at http://www.spa.zju.edu.cn/eclass/attachments/
2015-04/01-1427863185-17726.pdf. See also Jonathan Haslam, The Vices of Integrity: E. H.
Carr, 1892–1982 (London; New York: Verso, 1999).

248
CHAPTER 6
1. Basil Liddell Hart, Europe in Arms (London: Faber & Faber, 1937) 269.
2. Amanda Alexander, ‘The Genesis of the Civilian’, Leiden Journal of International Law
20.2 (2007): 360.
3. Cited by Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of
British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2002) 33.
4. Michael Paris, Winged Warfare: Literature and Theory of Aerial Warfare in Britain,
1859-1917 (Manchester: Manchester University Press,1992), 38.
5. R. P. Hearne, Aerial Warfare (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1909).
6. Claude Grahame-White and Harry Harper, Air Power: Naval, Military, Commercial
(London: Chapman & Hall, 1917).
7. Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air, trans. Dino Ferrari (Washington DC: Office of
Air Force History, 1983). Available: http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/readings/
command_of_the_air.pdf. This is discussed in my Strategy: A History (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2013), Chapter Ten.
8. B. H. Liddell Hart, Paris or the Future of War (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1925).
9. Brett Holman, The Next War in the Air: Britain’s Fear of the Bomber, 1908–1941 (Lon-
don, Ashgate: 2014) 23–4.
10. Erich Ludendorff, The Nation at War, trans. A.S. Rapaport (London: Hutchinson, 1936)
101, and Hans Spieir, ‘Ludendorff: The German Concept of Total War’, Makers of Modern
Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler, ed. Edward Mead Earle (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1943) 306–21. On total war in practice see Jeremy Black, The Age
of Total War, 1860–1945. (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Security International, 2006).
11. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War 169–170.
12. These novels are discussed in Susan R. Grayzel, At Home and under Fire: Air Raids
and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2012), and Holman, The Next War in the Air.
13. In his pre-1914 stories on air power With The Night Mail, (1905) and As Easy as ABC
(1912) Rudyard Kipling had introduced the idea of the ‘Aerial Board of Control’ which had
turned into a de facto world government. Kipling’s novels are also interesting because while
he suggested that the possibility of air raids had put war ‘out of fashion’ they might be useful
for quelling riots and so serve as a form of social control. Paris suggests that British use of air
power for imperial policing owes something to Kipling. Winged Warriors, 40–1.
14. Evening News, 14 March 1935, cited by Holman. It was published in book form as S.
Fowler Wright, Prelude in Prague: A Story of the War of 1938 (London: George Newnes,
1935). It was followed by Four Days War (1936) and Megiddo’s Ridge (1937). For plot sum-
maries, see Mary Weinkauf, Sermons in Science Fiction: The Novels of S. Fowler Wright
(Rockville, MA: Wildside Press, 2006).
15. ‘The Tragedy Of Guernica: Town Destroyed In Air Attack: Eye-Witness’s Account’,
The Times, 26 April 1937, online. Available: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/
europe/article2601941.ece
16. Cited by Rana Mitter, China’s War with Japan, 1937–1945: The Struggle for Survival
(London: Allen Lane, 2013) 137.
17. Christian Hartmann, Operation Barbarossa: Nazi Germany’s War in the East, 1941–
1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) 13.
18. Barton Whaley, Codeword Barbarossa (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974), and Steve

249
Twomey, Countdown to Pearl Harbor: The Twelve Days to the Attack (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2016).
19. Christian Gerlach, ‘The Wannsee Conference, the Fate of German Jews, and Hitler’s
Decision in Principle to Exterminate All European Jews’, The Journal of Modern History
70.4 (1998): 759–812, and Richard Evans, The Third Reich at War: How the Nazis Led Ger-
many from Conquest to Disaster (London: Allen Lane, 2008).
20. Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War (London:
Penguin, 2009).
21. Hector Bywater, Great Pacific War: A History of the American-Japanese Campaign of
1931–33 (New York: Applewood Books, 2002).
22. The book was republished soon after Pearl Harbor with the subtitle ‘A Historic
Prophecy Now Being Fulfilled’. In an introduction, Hanson W. Baldwin, military editor of the
New York Times, described the book as ‘deeply prophetic’.
23. W. H. Honan, Visions of Infamy: The untold story of how journalist Hector C. Bywater
devised the plans that led to Pearl Harbor (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991).
24. Jeffrey Record, A War It was Always Going to Lose: Why Japan Attacked America in
1941 (Washington DC: Potomac Books, 2011) 86–7.
25. Craig Nelson, Pearl Harbor 76–8, 166.
26. Richard Betts, Surprise Attack: Lessons for Defense Planning (Washington DC: Brook-
ings Institution, 1982).
27. Phillips Payson O’Brien, How the War Was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in
World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
28. Joseph Maiolo, Cry Havoc: How the Arms Race Drove the World to War, 1931–1941
(New York: Basic Books, 2010) 337.

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CHAPTER 7
1. H. G. Wells, The World Set Free (London: Macmillan, 1914).
2. George Orwell, ‘Wells, Hitler and the World State’, Horizon, (August 1941) 133–9,
http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/wells/english/e_whws. Wells always understood that science
could be employed for evil purposes. John S. Partington, ‘The pen as sword: George Orwell,
H. G. Wells and journalistic parricide’, Journal of Contemporary History, 39:1 (2004); 45–
56; John Stone, ‘George Orwell on politics and war’, Review of International Studies, 43:2,
(2016) pp. 221–239.
3. Cited by Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schus-
ter, 1986) 44.
4. Frederick Soddy, The interpretation of radium: being the substance of six free popular
experimental lectures delivered at the University of Glasgow (London: John Murray. 1908) 8,
and Richard E. Sclove, ‘From Alchemy to Atomic War: Frederick Soddy’s “Technology As-
sessment” of Atomic Energy, 1900–1915’, Science, Technology, & Human Values 14.2
(1989): 163–194.
5. Soddy 251.
6. Soddy 172.
7. Wells, The World Set Free 55–8.
8. P. D. Smith, Doomsday Men: The Real Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the Super-
weapon (London: Allen Lane, 2007).
9. Rhodes 13, and William Lanouette, Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard,
the Man Behind the Bomb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
10. John Hersey, ‘Hiroshima’, New Yorker, 31 August 1946. Available: http://www.
newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima
11. In the event, the Soviet Union tested the biggest ever device—some 57 megatons—in
1961 on the island of Novaya Zemlya. They lacked any means of delivering a weapon of this
size to a target.
12. See Smith, Chapter 18.
13. Nevil Shute, On The Beach, (London: Heinemann, 1957).
14. His knowledge of cobalt bombs came from Ernest Titterton, a nuclear scientist at the
Australian National University who had a chapter on ‘radiological warfare’ in his 1956 book
Facing the Atomic Future, (London: Macmillan, 1956) ‘If some madman decided that he
wished to poison the whole of the human race with radioactivity’, observed Titterton, ‘it
would be possible to arrange for a shell of cobalt around a fission or fusion bomb to absorb
the excess neutrons and make radiocobalt’.
15. A 1953 speech at the United Nations by President Eisenhower offered ‘atoms for
peace’. This was an effort to enable states to harness atomic energy for peaceful purposes in
return for promises not to exploit it to build weapons. This became a good example of the law
of unintended consequences. The United States offered developing states research reactors,
fuel, and scientific training in return for the commitment to use the technology only for civil-
ian purposes. Among the early beneficiaries of the initiative were India, Pakistan, Iran, and Is-
rael—all of whom went on to develop military programmes. See Leonard Weiss, ‘Atoms for
Peace’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 59.6 (2003): 34–44.
16. Screenplay, On the Beach (1959), http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/o/on-
the-beach-script-transcript.html
17. Paul Brians, Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction 1895–1984 (Kent, OH: Kent
State University Press, 1987). An updated electronic version is available at http://public.wsu.

251
edu/~brians/nuclear/.
18. Peter Bryant, Red Alert (Rockville, MD: Black Mask, 1958). This was a pseudonym for
Peter George (who, when he wrote this book, was an RAF officer). After the movie’s release
he published a new version based on its script. It has been republished with an introduction by
George’s son and a note by George on the Strangelove character in Peter George, Dr
Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Cardiff: Candy Jar
Books, 2015).
19. Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, Fail-Safe (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962).
20. Gannon 141.
21. Smith cites a letter from Alastair Buchan, then-Director of the Institute for Strategic
Studies, claiming to have handed Kubrick a copy of George’s book after trying to dissuade
him from making a movie based on such a far-fetched premise. Somewhat later in his career
Buchan examined my PhD.
22. The quotation comes from James Newman’s eviscerating review of Kahn’s On Ther-
monuclear War in Scientific American (March 1961). Newman published this and some other
pieces in The Rule of Folly, with a preface by Erich Fromm (London: Allen & Unwin, 1962).
Kahn had a mischievous sense of humour to the point that one biographer considers his poten-
tial as a stand-up comic. See Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The In-
tuitive Science of Thermonuclear War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
23. The first book on RAND was Bruce L. R. Smith, The RAND Corporation; Case Study
of a Nonprofit Advisory Corporation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966). The
personal rivalries come out in Fred Kaplan’s Wizards of Armageddon (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1983).
24. Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960)
144.
25. The actor who played Strangelove, Peter Sellers, modelled him on Wernher von Braun,
the German rocket scientist whose skills had been put to use after the war at the Army’s Red-
stone Arsenal. See Eric Schlosser, ‘Deconstructing “Dr. Strangelove”’, New Yorker, 18 Jan.
18 2014. Available: http://www.newyorker.com/News/News-Desk/Deconstructing-Dr-
Strangelove
26. Kahn 228.
27. See Ghamari-Tabrizi.
28. Thomas Schelling, ‘Meteors, Mischief, and War’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 16
(1960): 292–296, 300.
29. Alan Ferguson quoted in Freedman, Strategy 173.

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CHAPTER 8
1. Albert Wohlstetter, ‘The Delicate Balance of Terror’, Foreign Affairs 37.2 (1959).
2. Bernhard G. Bechhoefer, Postwar Negotiations for Arms Control (Washington DC:
Brookings Institution, 1961) 470.
3. Jeremi Suri, ‘America’s Search for a Technological Solution to the Arms Race: The Sur-
prise Attack Conference of 1958’, Diplomatic History 21.3 (1997).
4. John H. Herz, Political Realism and Political Idealism (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1951).
5. C. P. Snow, ‘The Moral Un-Neutrality of Science’, American Association for the Ad-
vancement of Science (1960).
6. The Federation of American Scientists, One World or None: A Report to the Public on
the Full Meaning of the Atomic Bomb, ed. Dexter Masters (New York: McGraw Hill, 1946).
The New Press republished it in 2007.
7. Philip Noel-Baker, ‘Peace and the Arms Race’, Nobel Lecture, 11 Dec. 1959.
8. Hedley Bull, ‘Disarmament and the International System’, Australian Journal of Politics
& History 5.1 (1959): 41–50.
9. William Fox, The Super-Powers: The United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union—
Their Responsibility for Peace (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1944).
10. William Churchill, ‘Never Despair’, 1 Mar. 1955 speech to the House of Commons, on-
line, The International Churchill Society. Available: http://www.winstonchurchill.org/
resources/speeches/1946-1963-elder-statesman/never-despair
11. I deal with these episodes in Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos
and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
12. Albert Wohlstetter et al., Selection and Use of Strategic Air Bases (Santa Monica, CA:
RAND Corporation, 1954). Available: http://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/R0266.html
13. Albert Wohlstetter, ‘The Delicate Balance of Terror’, Foreign Affairs (1959): 211–234.
A discussion of Wohlstetter and his writings can be found in Robert Zarate and Henry Sokol-
ski, eds., Nuclear Heuristics: Selected Writings of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter (Strategic
Studies Institute: US Army War College, 2009). Also see Fred Kaplan, Wizards of Armaged-
don 108.
14. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War 484. This was, of course, something that eventually took
place as a result of climate change. Kahn developed his career largely as a futurologist. In
1967 he published with Anthony J. Wiener The Year 2000. A Framework for Speculation on
the Next Thirty-Three Years. (New York: Macmillan, 1967), which contains a similar mix of
spot-on and off-the-wall projections.
15. M. N. Golovine, Conflicts in Space: A Pattern of War in a New Dimension (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1962).
16. Joseph Trevithick, ‘Bizarre weapons never left the drawing board: The U.S. Army’s
Gun-Toting Space Soldiers’, War is Boring, 9 Nov. 2015, online. Available: https://
warisboring.com/the-u-s-army-s-gun-toting-space-soldiers-ea9f1f1d48d0#.5u0wb9fyb
17. Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1962) 399–401. The book had originally been published as an internal
RAND document in 1958. The importance of Roberta’s work and its influence on that of Al-
bert’s is brought out in Ron Robin, The Cold War They Made: The Strategic Legacy of
Roberta and Albert Wohlstetter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
18. David Dunn, The Politics of Threat: Minuteman Vulnerability in American National
Security Policy (London: Palgrave, 1997).

253
 19. Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Random House, 1979),
and Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Better, Adelphi Paper no.
171 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1981).
20. Michael Quinlan, Thinking About Nuclear Weapons: Principles, Problems, Prospects
(London: OUP, 2009). 9–14.
21. Albert Carnesale et al., Living with Nuclear Weapons (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1983).
22. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Graham T. Allison, Jr., and Albert Carnesale, eds., Fateful Visions:
Avoiding Nuclear Catastrophe (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).
23. James Blight, The Shattered Crystal Ball: Fear and Learning in the Cuban Missile Cri-
sis (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1990) 172–4.

254
CHAPTER 9
1. The speech was published as Václav Havel, “Words on Words”, New York Review of
Books, 18 January 1990.
2. Jane Stromseth, The Origins of Flexible Response: Nato’s Debate over Strategy in the
1960s, (London: Palgrave, 1988).
3. These various scares are discussed in Philip Sabin, The Third World War Scare in
Britain (London: Macmillan, 1986).
4. General Sir John Hackett, ‘A Third World War’, Third Jubilee Lecture, Imperial College
of Science and Technology, University of London, 13 Mar. 1979. For background I am in-
debted to Jeff Michaels, ‘Revisiting General Sir John Hackett’s The Third World War’,
British Journal for Military History, 3:1, (2016), 88–104.
5. For an enthusiastic endorsement see I. F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War 198. He
specifically describes it as the modern equivalent of The Battle of Dorking.
6. General Sir John Hackett, The Third World War: The Untold Story (New York: Macmil-
lan, 1982).
7. Brians, Nuclear Holocausts. Available at http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/nuclear/index.
htm
8. A ‘standing start’ attack was a theme of an influential report by Senators Sam Nunn and
Dewey F. Bartlett, NATO and the New Soviet Threat, US Senate, Armed Services Committee,
95th Congress, First Session (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1977). See
also Phillip A. Karber, The Impact of New Conventional Technologies on Military Doctrine
and Organization in the Warsaw Pact, Adelphi Paper no. 144 (London: International Institute
for Strategic Studies, 1978).
9. Robert Close, Europe Without Defence?: 48 Hours That Could Change The Face of the
World (Brussels: Editions Arts and Voyages, 1976).
10. Shelford Bidwell, ed., World War 3 (London: Hamlyn, 1978). I was a contributor to the
first half of this book, which contained some scene-setting essays, but not to the fictional sce-
nario.
11. Cited in Sabin, 29.
12. Tom Clancy, Red Storm Rising (New York: Putnam Publishing, 1986).
13. George Winston, ‘Was Reagan Influenced By Reading Tom Clancy’s “Red Storm Ris-
ing” Before A Cold War Summit with Gorbachev?’ online, War History Online, Internet, 22
Feb. 2016. Available: https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/was-reagan-influenced-
by-reading-tom-clancys-red-storm-rising.html
14. President Ronald Reagan, Address to the Nation on Defense and National Security, 23
Mar. 1983.
15. Valerie Edwards, ‘How Ronald Reagan based his foreign policy on Tom Clancy books:
President told Margaret Thatcher to read Red Storm Rising thriller to understand Russia’,
Daily Mail 30 Dec. 2015, online. Available: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-
3378683/Ronald-Reagan-advised-Margaret-Thatcher-read-Tom-Clancy-s-thriller-Cold-War-
strategy.html
16. Tom Clancy, The Sum of all Fears (New York: Putnam, 1991)
17. Ray Garthoff, A Journey Through the Cold War (Washington DC: Brookings Institu-
tion, 2001) 16. On this episode, see Jonathan Haslam, Russia’s Cold War (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2011) 168–174.
18. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War (London: Penguin, 2007) 180.
19. Text of the “Basic Principles of Relations Between the United States of America and

255
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” 29 May 1972, Available: http://www.presidency.
ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=3438.
20. Daniel C. Thomas, The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights and the
Demise of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
21. Kissinger describes the debates around détente in Chapter 29 of his Diplomacy (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
22. Secretary Kissinger, ‘The Moral Foundations of Foreign Policy’, Department of State
Bulletin, LXXII: 1884, 4 Aug. 1975. Available: https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/
document/dosb/1884.pdf#page=15
23. Jimmy Carter, ‘Inaugural Address’, The American Presidency Project, UCSB, 20 Jan.
1977, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=6575
24. Thomas 179.
25. Michael Zantovsky, Havel: A Life (London: Atlantic Books, 2014).
26. Václav Havel, Open Letters: Selected Prose (London: Faber & Faber, 1992) 329, 265,
385.
27. Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
28. Andrei Grachev, Gorbachev’s Gamble: Soviet Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold
War (Cambridge: Polity, 2008).
29. Mikhail Gorbachev, ‘Address to the United Nations,’ 7 Dec. 1988. Available: http://
astro.temple.edu/~rimmerma/gorbachev_speech_to_UN.htm
30. Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: Soviet Collapse since 1970 Updated Edition
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
31. Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to Six Cold War Presidents
(New York: Times Books/Random House, 1995) 632.
32. Soviet Military Power 1985 (Washington DC: Department of Defense, 1985) 4–5. Offi-
cial publication.
33. Soviet Military Power 1990 (Washington DC: Department of Defense, 1990) 5.
34. Mick Cox, 1989 and why we got it wrong, Working Paper Series of the Research Net-
work 1989 1 (2008): 5.
35. Center for the Study of Intelligence, At Cold War’s End: US Intelligence on the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe, 1989–1991 (Langley: CIA, 1999).
36. Andrei Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? (New York: HarperCollins,
1981)
37. President Ronald Reagan, Address to British Parliament, 8 June 1982. His substantial
build-up of America’s military strength at the start of the 1980s is also credited, not least by
members of his administration, for persuading the Soviet leadership that it could not compete
in an arms race, although that has been disputed. Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein,
‘Reagan and the Russians: The Cold War ended despite President Reagan’s arms buildup, not
because of it—or so former President Gorbachev told the authors’, The Atlantic Monthly
(1994). Available at http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/politics/foreign/reagrus.htm
38. Marshall I. Goldman, Gorbachev’s Challenge: Economic Reform in the Age of High
Technology (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978) 262. See also Cox 8–9.
39. For example Rasma Karklins, Ethnic Relations in the USSR: The View from Below.
(Boston, MA: Unwin and Hyman. 1986)
40. Richard Nixon, 1999—Victory without War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988) 26.
41. George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Knopf, 1998) 13,
and James A. Baker III, The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War, and Peace, 1989–1992
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995) 70.
42. Jim Hoagland, ‘From Yalta To Malta’, Washington Post, 9 Nov. 1989.

256
CHAPTER 10
1. J. David Singer and Melvin Small, The Wages of War, 1816–1965: A Statistical Hand-
book (New York: John Wiley, 1972) 4.
2. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 5th ed.
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978) 26. See also Christoph Frei, Hans J Morgenthau: An In-
tellectual Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), and Hans Mor-
genthau, ‘The Four Paradoxes of Nuclear Strategy’, American Political Science Review 581
(1964): 23–35.
3. Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw Hill, 1979) 72.
Waltz was aware of the Soviet Union’s weaknesses, but this was largely by way of compari-
son with America’s strengths rather than an indicator of a coming collapse (183). See Marco
Cesa, ‘Realist Visions of the End of the Cold War: Morgenthau, Aron and Waltz’, The British
Journal of Politics and International Relations 11 (2009): 177–191.
4. Robert O. Keohane, ed., Neorealism and Its Critics (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1986).
5. Richard Ned Lebow, ‘The Long Peace, the End of the Cold War, and the Failure of Real-
ism’, International Organization 48.2 (1994): 249–277.
6. John Lewis Gaddis, ‘International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War’, Inter-
national Security 17.3 (1992/93): 5–58.
7. John Mearsheimer, ‘Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War’, Inter-
national Security 15.1 (1990): 5–56
8. Quincy Wright, A Study of War, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965);
Karl W. Deutsch, ‘Quincy Wright’s contribution to the study of war: a preface to the second
edition’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 14 (1970): 473; and William T. R. Fox, ‘“The truth
shall make you free”: one student’s appreciation of Quincy Wright’, Journal of Conflict Reso-
lution 14 (1970): 449.
9. Lewis Fry Richardson, Arms and Insecurity: A Mathematical Study of the Causes and
Origins of War (Pittsburgh, PA: Boxwood Press, 1960) 12.
10. Lewis Fry Richardson, Statistics of Deadly Quarrels (Pittsburgh, PA: Boxwood Press,
1960), and Arms and Insecurity; Oliver M. Ashford, Prophet or Professor? The Life and
Work of Lewis Fry Richardson (Bristol: Adam Hilger, 1985); and Michael Nicholson, ‘Lewis
Fry Richardson and the Study of the Causes of War’, British Journal of Political Science 29.3
(1999): 541–563.
11. Kenneth Boulding, Conflict and Defense: A General Theory (New York: Harper &
Bros., 1962) vii.
12. Cynthia Kerman, ‘Kenneth Boulding And The Peace Research Movement’, American
Studies 13.1 (1972): 149–165.
13. I discuss this in Lawrence Freedman, ‘Social Science and the Cold War’, Journal of
Strategic Studies 38:4 (2015): 554-574
14. Harold Guetzkow, ‘Long Range Research in International Relations’, American Per-
spective 4 (1950): 421–40. Cited by John Vasquez, ed., What Do We Know About War?, 2nd
ed., (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012) 329.
15. Vasquez 330.
16. Vasquez xiii.
17. Vasquez, xiv-xvi.
18. John A. Vasquez, The War Puzzle Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009) 405, 417.

257
 19. For one relatively late citation, see William Hawkins, ‘New Enemies for Old’, The Na-
tional Review, 42.18, (1990): 28–29. For some reason this claim still appears regularly in
books on theology. According to John Gittings in The Glorious Art of Peace (22), the num-
bers appear in Edmund Osmanczyk, Encyclopaedia of the United Nations and International
Agreements, 3rd ed., ed. Anthony Mango (London: Routledge, 2003) 1783.
20. Norman Cousins, ‘Electronic Brain on War and Peace: A report of an Imaginary Exper-
iment’, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 13 Dec. 1953. In Cousins, In Place of Folly (New York:
Harper, 1961), the number of those killed was reduced to 1.24 billion.
21. One of his statistics that attracted special attention was the claim that the value of the
destruction inflicted would pay for ‘a golden belt around the earth 156 kilometers in width
and ten meters thick’.
22. Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968)
81.
23. Donald Kagan, On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace (New York: Dou-
bleday, 1995) 4.
24. For references see Barry O’Neill, ‘Policy folklists and evolutionary theory’, Proceed-
ings of the National Academy of Scientists of the United States 111.3, (2014): 10854-10859
25. B. Jongman and H. van der Dennen, ‘The Great “War Figures” Hoax: An investigation
in polemomythology’, Security Dialogue 19.2 (1988): 197–202.
26. O. Barot, Lettres sur la Philosophie de l’Histoire (Paris: Germer-Baillière, 1864).
27. Singer and Small, The Wages of War, 1816–1965 4. See also Melvin Small and J.
David Singer, Resort to Arms: International and Civil War, 1816–1980 (Beverly Hills: Sage,
1982); J. David Singer and Paul Diehl, eds., Measuring the Correlates of War (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1990); and Meredith Reid Sarkees, Frank Whelon Wayman,
and J. David Singer, ‘Inter-State, Intra-State, and Extra-State Wars: A Comprehensive Look
At Their Distribution Over Time, 1816–1997’, International Studies Quarterly 47 (2003): 49–
70.
28. By having more relaxed criteria, Kalevi J. Holsti, Armed Conflicts and International
Order: 1648–1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) identified 105 wars from
1815 of which twenty were not on the COW list.
29. Small and Singer, Resort to Arms 211–212. John Vasquez was amongst those who cri-
tiqued the original COW war typology in The War Puzzle (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993) 15–29. This artificial distinction was later abandoned, replaced by a distinction
between wars for control of the central government, and those over local issues, including se-
cession.
30. For a guide see Kristine Ecke, A Beginner’s Guide to Conflict Data: Finding and Using
the Right Dataset (Uppsala: Uppsala Conflict Data Programme, December 2005). Another
database set up in 2006 is the ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project) ‘de-
signed for disaggregated conflict analysis and crisis mapping. This dataset codes the dates and
locations of all reported political violence and protest events in over 60 developing countries
in Africa and Asia.’ Available: http://www.acleddata.com/
31. Bethany Lacina and Nils Petter Gleditsch, ‘Monitoring Trends in Global Combat: A
New Dataset of Battle Deaths’, European Journal of Population 21.2–3 (2005): 145–166;
Ted Robert Gurr, Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflicts. (Washington,
DC: United States Institute of Peace Press. 1993). Another early data base was published in
Roy Licklider, ‘The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil Wars, 1945-1993,’
American Political Science Review, 89: 3 (1995), 681-90.
32. Paul D Williams, ‘Continuity and Change in War and Conflict in Africa’, PRISM 6:4

258
(2017), 33–45.
33. Edward Newman, ‘Conflict Research and the ‘Decline’ of Civil War’, Civil Wars, 11:3
(September 2009), 255-278
34. For example, Donald Cameron Watt, Too Serious a Business: European Armed Forces
and the Approach to the Second World War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).
35. Daniel M. Jones, Stuart A. Bremer, and J. David Singer, ‘Militarized Interstate Dis-
putes, 1816–1992’, Conflict Management and Peace Science 15.2 (1996): 163–213, 169.
36. Paul Hensel, ‘The More Things Change’, Conflict Management and Peace Science 19.1
(2002): 48.
37. Douglas M. Gibler, Steven V. Miller, and Erin K. Little, ‘An Analysis of the Milita-
rized Interstate Dispute (MID) Dataset, 1816–2001’, International Studies Quarterly 60:4,
(2017) 719-730.
38. Jessica Weeks and Dara Kay Cohen, ‘Fishing Disputes, Regime Type, and Interstate
Conflict A Research Note’, Stanford University, Stanford International Relations Workshop,
7 Mar. 2006, http://citation.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/0/9/8/1/0/
pages98104/p98104-1.php. They also found that 10 per cent of cases in the set they were con-
sidering could not be verified.
39. Richard Wich, Sino-Soviet Crisis Politics: A Study of Political Change and Communi-
cation (London: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1980). This was not one
of the books used by MID as a source.
40. Lyle J. Goldstein, ‘Return to Zhenbao Island: Who Started Shooting and Why it Mat-
ters’, The China Quarterly 168 (2001): 985–997.
41. Y. Kuisong, ‘The Sino-Soviet Border Clash of 1969: From Zhenbao Island to Sino-
American Rapprochement’, Cold War History 1.1 (2000): 21–52.
42. Hannah Arendt, On Violence, (New York: Harcourt, 1970), p. 6.

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CHAPTER 11
1. Wislawa Szymborska, ‘Hunger Camp at Jaslo’, trans. Grazyna Drabik and Austin Flint,
Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, ed. Carolyn Forché, (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1993).
2. A court in Bangladesh, for example, found a British man guilty of contempt for chal-
lenging the official death toll of 3 million from the 1971 war of independence when other re-
searchers tend to put it closer to 500,000. See ‘UK journalist guilty of querying Bangladesh
death toll’, BBC News, online, 2 December 2014. Available: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/
world-asia-30288785
3. See, for example, the controversy surrounding the work of Justin McCarthy who came
up with a number for Armenians killed of 600,000. See Muslims and Minorities: The Popula-
tion of Ottoman Anatolia and the End of the Empire (New York: New York University Press,
1983). Among his critics see Vahakn N. Dadrian, ‘Ottoman Archives and Denial of the Ar-
menian Genocide’, The Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics, ed. R. G. Hovannisian
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992) 294–7, and Raymond Kevorkian, The Armenian Geno-
cide: A Complete History (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011).
4. Samuel Dumas and K. O. Vedel-Petersen, Losses of Life Caused by War, ed. Harald
Westergaard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923) 127. Available: https://archive.org/stream/los
sesoflifecaus00samu#page/n4/mode/1up. Quincy Wright reviewed the book positively, point-
ing to the importance of accurate information in serving the cause of peace, in American Jour-
nal of Sociology 30.6 (1925): 722–725.
5. Milton Leitenberg, Deaths in Wars and Conflicts in the Twentieth Century, Cornell Uni-
versity Peace Studies Program, Occasional Paper #29, 3rd ed., 2006. This is an important
guide to these issues.
6. Hazem Adam Ghobarah, Paul Huth, and Bruce Russett, ‘Civil Wars Kill and Maim Peo-
ple—Long After the Shooting Stops’, American Political Science Review 97:2 (2003): 189–
202.
7. United Nations Commission of Experts Established to Security Council Resolution 935
on Rwanda, Final Report (Geneva: UN, 25 Nov. 1994). See also Gerard Prunier, The Rwanda
Crisis: History of a Genocide (London: Hurst & Company, 1998). Marijke Verpoorten, ‘Le
coût en vies humaines du génocide rwandais : le cas de la province de Gikongoro’, Popula-
tion 60 (2005) put the Tutsi death toll at between 600,000–800,000 using a demographic
analysis.
8. Kristine Eck and Lisa Hultman, ‘One-Sided Violence Against Civilians in War: Insights
from New Fatality Data’, Journal of Peace Research 44.2 (2007) 233–246.
9. R.J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers,
1994).
10. ‘Fact Sheet: America’s Wars—May 2016, revised’, Department of Veterans Affairs,
online, http://www.va.gov/opa/publications/factsheets/fs_americas_wars.pdf
11. Fazal, ‘Dead Wrong?’
12. Thomas Livermore, Numbers and Losses in the Civil War in America, 1861–65.
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1900).
13. Historians did debate how awful the war really was. See Mark E. Neely Jr., The Civil
War and the Limits of Destruction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), and James
McPherson, ‘Was It More Restrained Than You Think?’ New York Review of Books, 14 Feb.
2008.
14. J. David Hacker, ‘A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead’, Civil War History

260
57.4 (2011): 307–348.
15. Kelly M. Greenhill, ‘Nigeria’s Countless Casualties, The Politics of Counting Boko
Haram’s Victims’, Foreign Affairs, February 9, 2015.
16. For a full discussion of the various sources see Wikipedia entry on German Casualties
in World War II, wikiwand.com/en/German_casualties_in_World_War_II
17. G. I. Krivosheev, Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses (London: Greenhill, 1997).
18. V. E. Korol, “The price of victory: Myths and reality”, Journal of Slavic Military Stud-
ies, 9:2 (1996), 417-426. This cites sources that put the numbers as high as 16.2 million en-
listed men and 1.2 million officers.
19. Alexander N. Yakovlev, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2002).
20. Maureen Perrie, The Cambridge History of Russia: The twentieth century (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006) 225–227; Michael Ellman and S. Maksudov, ‘Soviet
Deaths in the Great Patriotic War: a note—World War II’, Europe Asia Studies 46:4 (1994):
671-80; and Boris Sokolov, ‘The cost of war: Human losses for the USSR and Germany,
1939–1945’, The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 9.1 (1996): 152–193
21. Michael Haynes, ‘Counting Soviet Deaths in the Great Patriotic War: a Note’, Europe
Asia Studies 55.2, (2003): 300–309.
22. B. V. Sokolov, ‘The Cost of War: Human Losses for the USSR and Germany, 1939–
1945’, The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 9.1 (1966): 151–93. Leitenberg opts for the
slightly lower figure of 35 million. Other estimates go as high as 50 million.
23. Mitter, China’s War with Japan.
24. ‘Report puts Iraqi dead at 1500’, Jane’s Defence Weekly, 19:11, (1993) 5.
25. He noted that of the 71,000 Iraqi soldiers taken prisoner, only around 2,000 were
wounded, while US forces buried 577 Iraqis.
26. Carl Conetta, The Wages of War: Iraqi Combatant and Noncombatant Fatalities in the
2003 Conflict: Project on Defense Alternatives, Research Monograph # 8, 20 Oct. 2003, Ap-
pendix 2: Iraqi Combatant and Noncombatant Fatalities in the 1991 Gulf War. Available:
http://www.comw.org/pda/0310rm8ap2.html
27. The Gulf War Air Power Survey concluded that the ground war ‘total could easily have
been as high as 10,000’: Thomas Keaney and Eliot Cohen, Gulf War Air Power Survey: Sum-
mary Report (Washington DC: Department of the Air Force, 1993), 249, and also 109–110.
See also Michael Gordon and Gen. Bernard Trainor, The General’s War: The Inside Story of
the Conflict in the Gulf (Boston: Little, Brown, & Company, 1995); Maj. Lewis D. Hill, Doris
Cook, and Aron Pinker, Gulf War Air Power Survey: Statistical Compendium (Washington
DC: Department of the Air Force, 1993) 109–110; and ‘Appendix: Iraqi Death Toll’, The Gulf
War: An in-depth examination of the 1990–1991 Persian Gulf Crisis, PBS Frontline, 9 Jan.
1996. Available: www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf
28. Beth Osborne Daponte, ‘A Case Study in Estimating Casualties from War and Its After-
math: The 1991 Persian Gulf War’, PSR Quarterly, 3:2 (June 1993) 57–66.
29. COW uses numbers of 7,000 for Iraqi casualties during the actual invasion and 10,800
for those who died in an extra-state war after 2004. Nothing has yet appeared under intrastate
war. Those numbers are meaningless, reflecting a devotion to coding rules while conveying
very little about the meaning of the multiple conflicts that have engulfed Iraq. Carl Conetta,
who did the study on the 1991 casualties, also did a study on the initial combat deaths, from
19 March to 30 April 2003. He concluded that the combat over this period led to ‘between
7,600 and 10,800 Iraqi combatant fatalities, plus some 3,200 and 4,300 noncombatants’. This
relied on gathering reports of incidents and then adjusting for the regular inflation of reported
deaths. Carl Conetta, ‘Disappearing the Dead: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Idea of a “New War-

261
fare”’, Project on Defense Alternatives, 18 Feb. 2004. See also Lawrence J. Korb and Stephen
Biddle, ‘Violence by the Numbers in Iraq: Sound Data or Shaky Statistics?’ Council on For-
eign Relations, 25 Sept. 2007.
30. Figures available at the Iraq Body Count website, http://www.iraqbody-count.org/
database/. When official American figures reached the public domain as a result of the release
of classified documents by wikileaks, they were not too far from those of the Iraq Body
Count, which raised its assessment by 12,000. The US numbers were 109,032 deaths between
January 2004 and December 2009, of which 66,081 were civilians, 15,196 Iraqi forces,
23,984 insurgents, and 3,771 friendly. See David Leigh, ‘Iraq War Logs Reveal 15,000 Previ-
ously Unlisted Civilian Deaths’, Guardian, 22 Oct. 2010. https://www.theguardian.com/
world/2010/oct/22/true-civilian-body-count-iraq
31. Keith Krause, ‘From Armed Conflict to Political Violence: Mapping and Explaining
Conflict Trends’, Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2016):
117.
32. L. Roberts et al., ‘Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample
survey’, Lancet 364 (2004): 1857–1864.
33. Beth Osborne Daponte, “Wartime estimates of Iraqi civilian casualties”, International
Review of the Red Cross, 89:868 (Dec.2007), 943-957
34. Amy Hagopian et al., ‘Mortality in Iraq Associated with the 2003–2011 War and Occu-
pation: Findings from a National Cluster Sample Survey by the University Collaborative Iraq
Mortality Study’, PLOS 15 (2013). Available: http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?
id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1001533.
35. UNHCR Statistical Online Population Database, United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees, Geneva, 2011, and SK Lischer, ‘Security and displacement in Iraq: responding
to the forced migration crisis’, International Security 33.2 (2008): 95–119.
36. UNHCR Iraq fact sheet—May 2011, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees,
Geneva, 2011. http://reliefweb.int/report/iraq/unhcr-iraq-fact-sheet-may-2011
37. For best practice in casualty counting see Standards for Casualty Recording (London:
Every Casualty Worldwide, 2016). For a discussion of the wider issues connected with count-
ing civilian deaths see Taylor Seybolt et al, Counting Civilian Casualties: An Introduction to
recording and Estimating Nonmilitary Deaths in Conflict, (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013)
38. Figures from The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 17 March 2017, http://www.
syriahr.com/en/?p=62760. They did not include those held and tortured by the various parties.
Another Syrian policy centre estimated in February 2016 that the true number was 470,000,
including 15 percent indirect deaths. ‘Quantifying carnage’, The Economist, 20 Feb. 2016.
Available: http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21693279-how-many-
people-has-syrias-civil-war-killed-quantifying-carnage

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CHAPTER 12
1. Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991),
100.
2. Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History’, The National Interest (1989). The original
essay was developed into a book: Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man
(New York: Free Press, 1992).
3. Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century
(Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). A key factor according to Huntington
was not only the active promotion of democracy by the US and the snowball effect within re-
gions but also the growing opposition of the Catholic Church to authoritarian rule.
4. The Charter of the United Nations, signed 26 June 1945, San Francisco. http://www.un.
org/en/charter-united-nations/
5. President George Bush, ‘Remarks at Maxwell Air Force Base War College in Mont-
gomery Alabama’, The American Presidency Project, UCSB, 13 April 1991, http://www.
presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=19466
6. Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History (New
York: Knopf, 2002): 9.
7. Charter of Paris for a New Europe, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Eu-
rope, Paris, 19–20 Nov. 1990, http://www.osce.org/mc/39516?download=true
8. Michael Doyle. ‘Liberalism and World Politics.’ American Political Science Review 80
(1986): 1151–69.
9. Jack S. Levy, ‘Domestic Politics and War’, The Origin and Prevention of Major Wars,
eds. Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989) 88. For good surveys see Håvard Hegre, ‘Democracy and armed conflict’, Journal of
Peace Research 51.2 (2014): 159–172, and Boris Barth, The Democratic Peace Controversy:
A Critical Survey (Oslo files on Defence and Security, 2008).
10. Matthew White, ‘Democracies do not make war on each other—or do they?’ Historical
Atlas of the Twentieth Century, online, 2005. Available: http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/
demowar.htm. Some candidates: American Civil War (1861), as both sides had elected gov-
ernments; Anglo-Boer War (1899); Spanish-American War (1898); Peru and Ecuador Border
War (1995); Russia and Ukraine (2014).
11. Charles Kegley and Martin Hermann, ‘Putting military intervention into the democratic
peace’, Comparative Political Studies 30.1 (1997): 78–107, and Sebastian Rosato, ‘The
flawed logic of democratic peace theory’, American Political Science Review 97: 4 (2003):
585–602.
12. Suzanne Werner, ‘The effects of political similarity on the onset of militarized disputes,
1816–1985’, Political Research Quarterly 53.2 (2000): 343–374, and Mark Peceny, Caroline
C, Beer, and Shannon Sanchez-Terry, ‘Dictatorial peace?’ American Political Science Review
96.1 (2002): 15–26.
13. Christopher Layne, ‘Kant or Cant. The Myth of the Democratic Peace’, International
Security 19 (1994): 5–49
14. The measures are not simple—abuses of human rights, corruption, and limits on politi-
cal expression can all reduce the working of a democracy, even if elections are still held regu-
larly. Thus in 2016 the Economic Intelligence Units ‘Democracy Index’ judged that there
were only twenty ‘full democracies’, with a further fifty-nine countries considered ‘flawed’,
with another thirty-seven combining democratic and authoritarian features, and fifty-one ‘au-
thoritarian’ (Economist Intelligence Unit, ‘Democracy in an age of anxiety’, 21 Jan. 2016).

263
They set high standards for full democracy, so Italy and France are not actually included in
this list.
15. Scott Gates, Torbjørn L. Knutsen, and Jonathan W. Moses, ‘Democracy and peace: A
more skeptical view’, Journal of Peace Research 33.1 (1996): 1–10, and Carles Boix,
‘Democracy, development, and the international system’, American Political Science Review
105.4 (2011): 809–828.
16. See previous references. Quincy Wright had made this point: Study of War 841.
17. Michael W. Doyle, ‘Kant, liberal legacies, and foreign affairs’, Part II, Philosophy &
Public Affairs 12.4 (1983): 23–353, and also Doyle, ‘Liberalism and world politics’, Ameri-
can Political Science Review 80.4 (1986): 1151–1169. See also Zeev Maoz and Bruce Rus-
sett, ‘Alliance, contiguity, wealth, and political stability’, International Interactions 18.3
(1992): 245–267, and Zeev Maoz and Bruce M Russett, ‘Normative and structural causes of
democratic peace, 1946–1986’, American Political Science Review 87.3 (1993): 624–638.
18. Seung-Whan Choi, ‘Re-evaluating capitalist and democratic peace models’, Interna-
tional Studies Quarterly 55.3 (2011): 759–769, and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita et al., ‘An in-
stitutional explanation of the democratic peace’, American Political Science Review 93.4
(1999): 791–807.
19. Bruce M. Russett and John R. O’Neal, Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdepen-
dence, and International Organizations (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).
20. Michael Mousseau, ‘A Market-Capitalist or a Democratic Peace’, in Vasquez (2012)
208.
21. Douglas Gibler, ‘The Implications of a Territorial Peace’, in Vasquez 226. See also
Douglas Gibler and Jaroslav Tir, ‘Settled Borders and Regime Type: Democratic Transitions
as Consequences of Peaceful Territorial Transfers’, American Journal of Political Science
54.4 (2010): 951–68.
22. Azar Gat, Causes of War and the Spread of Peace: But Will War Rebound? (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
23. Jack L. Snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Violence
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2000). See also Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, Electing
to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).
24. Goldstone et al, A Global Forecasting Model of Political Instability, Paper prepared for
the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington DC 1-4 Sept
2005, p. 20. Cited by Newman, ‘conflict research’, p. 272.

264
CHAPTER 13
1. Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures: ‘Science as a Vocation’; ‘Politics as a Vocation’
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004).
2. Odd Arne Westad, ‘The wars after the war, 1945–1954’, in Chickering et al 452–471.
3. Paul Hensel, ‘The More things Change…; Recognizing and responding to Trends in
Armed Conflict’, Conflict Management and Peace Science 19.1(2002): 27–53, and Kalevi
Holsti, The State, War, and the State of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
4. General Charles Krulak, cited by Raimo Väyynen, in his introduction to Väyynen, ed.,
The Waning of Major War.
5. Peter Wallensteen and Margareta Sollenberg, ‘Armed Conflict, 1989–98’, Journal of
Peace Research 36.5 (1999): 593–606.
6. James Fearon and David Laitin, ‘Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War’, American Politi-
cal Science Review 97.1 (2003): 75–90.
7. Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1999) 78.
8. Kalevi Holsti, The State, War, and the State of War 27; General Sir Rupert Smith, The
Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2005); and Her-
fried Münkler, The New Wars (Cambridge: Polity, 2005).
9. Martin van Creveld, Nuclear Proliferation and the Future of Conflict (New York: The
Free Press, 1993) 126.
10. Errol Henderson and David J. Singer, ‘“New Wars” and Rumors of “New Wars”’, In-
ternational Interactions: Empirical and Theoretical Research in International Relations 28.2
(2002): 165–190.
11. Mats Berdal, ‘The “New Wars” Thesis Revisited’, in The Changing Character of War,
eds. Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) 109–133.
See also Stathis N. Kalyvas, ‘“New” and “Old” Wars: A Valid Distinction?’, World Politics
54.1 (2001): 99–118.
12. Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars 8.
13. UNICEF, ‘State of the World’s Children 1996: Children in War’, Graça Machel, Im-
pact of Armed Conflict on Children, UN doc. A/51/306, 26 Aug. 1996, para. 24. Available:
http://www.unicef.org/graca/graright.htm. Cited by Adam Roberts, ‘Lives and Statistics: Are
90% of War Victims Civilians?’, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy 52.3 (2010): 115–
136.
14. Kelly M. Greenhill, ‘Counting the Cost’, Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts: The Politics of
Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict, eds. Peter Andreas and Kelly M. Greenhill (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2010) 128–9. Although the UNICEF report referred initially to the
1986–1996 period, this point was often missed when the formulation was repeated without
amendment in subsequent years.
15. Christer Ahlström, with contributions by Kjell-Åke Nordquist, Casualties of Conflict:
Report for the World Campaign for the Protection of Victims of War (Uppsala: Department of
Peace and Conflict Research, 1991) 19. See also The Human Security Report 2005 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005) 75. Available: http://www.humansecurityreport.org. Another
possible source was the annual World Military and Social Expenditures produced by Ruth
Leger Sivard with analyst Fred Buckhardt. The 1991 issue stated that ‘in the decade of the
1980s, the proportion of civilian deaths jumped to 74 percent of the total and in 1990 it ap-
pears to have been close to 90 percent’. These numbers, however, were very dependent upon
war-related deaths, including famine, and so were unavoidably guesses. Ruth Leger Sivard,

265
World Military and Social Expenditures 1991 (Washington DC: World Priorities, 1991) 20.
16. William Eckhardt, ‘Civilian Deaths in Wartime’, Bulletin of Peace Proposals 20.1
1989: 89–98. This used the 1923 Carnegie report as a source. Eckhardt’s main aim appears to
have been to draw attention to ‘structural violence’, the deaths resulting from the reduced life
chances of those without money or power, which he argued far exceeded those caused by war.
17. The International Committee of the Red Cross, Arms Availability and the Situation of
Children in Armed Conflict (Geneva: ICRC, 1999). See also Kelly Greenhill, ‘Counting the
Cost’.
18. The methodology used in this analysis may have exaggerated the proportion of soldiers,
but not enough to get anywhere close to the 90:10 ratio. A similar 60:40 military to civilian
ratio emerged from work undertaken by the Demographic Unit of the International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Jan Zwierzchowski and Ewa Tabeau, ‘The 1992–
95 War in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Census-based Multiple System Estimation of Casualties’
Undercount’, paper for International Research Workshop on ‘The Global Economic Costs of
Conflict’, Berlin, 1–2 Feb. 2010, pp. 1 and 18–21. Available: http://www.diw.de/sixcms/
detail. php?id=diw_01.c.338475.en. On 2007 report, see ‘Justice Report: Bosnia’s Book of
the Dead’, Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, 21 June 2007, http://www.birn.eu.com/
en/88/10/3377/.
19. Stathis N. Kalyvas, ‘The Changing Character of Civil Wars’, Strachan and Scheipers,
202–219.
20. Joakim Kreutz, ‘How Civil Wars End (and Recur)’, Routledge Handbook of Civil Wars,
eds. Edward Newman and Karl DeRouen Jr. (London: Routledge, 2014).
21. Ann Hironaka, Neverending Wars: The International Community, Weak States, and the
Perpetuation of Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
22. David Armitage, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (New York: Knopf, 2017) 7. The En-
zensberger quote comes from Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Civil War, trans. Piers Spence and
Martin Chalmers (London: Granta Books, 1994) 12.
23. Bill Kissane, Nations Torn Asunder: The Challenge of Civil War (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2016).
24. Ted Robert Gurr,. Why Men Rebel. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970)
25. Errol A. Henderson and David J. Singer, ‘Civil War in the Post-colonial world, 1946–
92’, Journal of Peace Research 37.3 (2000): 248–5. For an extended discussion of the prob-
lems with COW when extended to civil wars, see Christopher Cramer, Civil War is Not a Stu-
pid Thing: Accounting for Violence in Developing Countries (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2006)
57–86.
26. Stathis Kalyvas, ‘Civil Wars’, The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics, eds. Car-
les Boix and Susan C. Stokes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) 416–34, and T. David
Mason and Sara McLaughlin Mitchell, What Do We Know About Civil Wars? (Lanham:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).
27. Newman, ‘Conflict Research’.
28. For example Barry Posen considered developing civil wars in Europe as a problem of
‘emerging anarchy’ comparable to the realist view of the international system as anarchic.
‘The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict,’ Survival, 35:1, (1993) 27–47.
29. This is a theme of Monica Duffy Toft, ‘The Origins of Ethnic Wars: An Historical and
Critical Account’, in Manus Midlarsky, ed., Handbook of War Studies III, (Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press, 2008).
30. An Agenda for Peace: Preventive diplomacy, peacemaking and peace-keeping, Report
of the Secretary-General pursuant to the statement adopted by the Summit Meeting of the Se-
curity Council, 31 Jan. 1992.

266
 31. Gerald Helman and Steven Ratner, ‘Saving Failed States’, Foreign Policy
[vol.]89(1992–93): 3–20.
32. William Zartman, Collapsed States: The disintegration and restoration of legitimate
authority (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1995).
33. The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington DC: The
White House, 2002) 1.
34. Monica Duffy Toft, ‘Territory and War’, Journal of Peace Research 51 (2014): 185–
198.
35. ‘Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples’,
Adopted by General Assembly Resolution 1514 (XV), 14 Dec. 1960.
36. Jeffrey Herbst, ‘The Creation and Maintenance of National Boundaries in Africa’, In-
ternational Organization 43.4 (1989): 673–692; Saadia Touval, The Boundary Politics of In-
dependent Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972); and Rene Lemarchand,
‘Patterns of State Collapse and Reconstruction in Central Africa’, African Studies Quarterly
1: 3 (1997) pp. 5–6; and Stuart J. Kaufman, ‘An “International” Theory of Inter-ethnic War’,
Review of International Studies 22.2 (1996): 153.
37. Quoted in Adkunle Ajala, ‘The Nature of African Boundaries’, Afrika Spectrulm 83
(1983): 180.
38. R. H. Jackson, The Global Covenant: Human Conduct in a World of States (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000) 207. For an earlier version see Robert H. Jackson and Carl G.
Rosberg, ‘Why Africa’s Weak States Persist: The Empirical and the Juridical in Statehood’,
World Politics 35 (1982): 21. See also Boaz Atzili, ‘When Good Fences Make Bad Neigh-
bors: Fixed Borders, State Weakness, and International Conflict’, International Security 31.3
(2006/07): 139–173.
39. For recent examples, see Yoweri Museveni in Uganda, Paul Kagame in Rwanda, and
Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.
40. Patrick J. McGowan, ‘African Military Coups d’Etat, 1956–2001: Frequency, Trends
and Distribution’, Journal of Modern African Studies 41 (2003): 339–70. See also Samuel
Decalo, Coups and Army Rule in Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).
41. Henning Tamm, ‘The Origins of Transnational Alliances: Rulers, Rebels, and Political
Survival in the Congo Wars’, International Security 41.1 (2016): 147-181See also the essays
in Jeffrey Checkel, ed., Transnational Dynamics of Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2013).
42. Fredrik Söderbaum and Rodrigo Tavares, ‘Problematizing Regional Organizations in
African Security’, African Security 2.2–3 (2009): 69–81.

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CHAPTER 14
1. Samuel Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs 72: 3 ( 1993), 22–49.
As with Fukuyama, the original essay was later turned into a book: Samuel Huntington, The
Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1996).
2. Ron Hassner, Religion on the Battlefield (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016). Hass-
ner sees this as one reason for the contradictory and disappointing findings arising out of re-
search into religion and war.
3. Errol Henderson and Richard Tucker, ‘Clear and Present Strangers: The Clash of Civi-
lizations and International Conflict’, International Studies Quarterly 45 (2001): 317–338, and
William Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Mod-
ern Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
4. Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, ‘A Short History of Ethnic Cleansing’, Foreign Affairs 72.3
(1992): 110–121.
5. Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York:
Basic Books, 2002) 282.
6. Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1993).
7. Elizabeth Drew, On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1995) 157. Kaplan was a supporter of intervention and disclaimed responsibility for the use
Clinton had made of his book. See his exchange with Timothy Garton Ash, ‘The Foul Balkan
Sky’, New York Review of Books, 21 Mar. 1996, following the latter’s review in ‘Bosnia in
our Future’, New York Review of Books, 21 Dec. 1995.
8. Robert Kaplan, ‘The Coming Anarchy’, The Atlantic Monthly, February 1994. On Clin-
ton’s approval see Toby Lester, ‘Beyond “The Coming Anarchy”’, The Atlantic Online, Aug.
1996. Available: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/96aug/proport/kapsid.htm
9. Katharine Q. Seelye, ‘Clinton Blames Milosevic, Not Fate, for Bloodshed’, New York
Times, 14 May 1999. Available: http://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/14/world/crisis-in-the-
balkans-washington-clinton-blames-milosevic-not-fate-for-bloodshed.html
10. Benjamin A. Valentino, ‘Why We Kill: The Political Science of Political Violence
against Civilians’, Annual Review of Political Science 17 (2014): 189–103.
11. John Mueller, ‘The Banality of “Ethnic Conflict”’, International Security 25.1 ( 2000)
47.
12. Warren Zimmerman, Origins of a Catastrophe: Yugoslavia and its Destroyers (New
York: Times Books, 1996) 152.
13. V. P. Gagnon, ‘Ethnic Nationalism and International Conflict’, International Security
19.3 (1994/95) 164.
14. Samantha Powers, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York:
Basic Books, 2002).
15. James Gow, ‘After the Flood: Literature on the Context, Causes and Course of the Yu-
goslav War: Reflections and Refractions’ The Slavonic and East European Review 75.3
(1997): 446–484. For a thorough review of the literature see Dutch Institute for War Docu-
mentation (NIOD), Srebrenica, A ‘Safe’ Area: Reconstruction, Background, Consequences
And Analyses Of The Fall Of A ‘Safe Area’, November 1996, Appendix VI The Background of
the Yugoslav crisis: A review of the literature. Available: http://www.niod.knaw.nl/nl/
srebrenica-rapport. Thus, John Zametica, in a paper emphasising the need for disinterested
policy analysis, attributed the problems of Bosnia to it being hijacked by a Muslim-Croat

268
coalition and wrote of the legitimacy of Serb demands. John Zametica, The Yugoslav Conflict
(London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1992). Not long after its publication
John became Jovan and re-emerged as a senior adviser and spokesperson for the Bosnian Serb
leader Radovan Karadžić. For background, including the influence of Zametica’s paper, see
Brendan Simms, Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia (London: Allen Lane,
The Penguin Press, 2001) 228.
16. James Gow, The Serbian Project and Its Adversaries: A Strategy of War Crimes (Lon-
don: Hurst & Co., 2003). For an argument that the rhetoric of ethnic conflict was used for
elite political purposes see Gagnon, ‘Ethnic Nationalism and International Conflict’.
17. Toft, ‘The Origins of Ethnic Wars’.
18. Joseph Young, ‘Repression, Dissent, and the Onset of Civil War’, Political Research
Quarterly 66.3 (2012): 516–32, and also his chapter ‘Antecedents of Civil War Onset’, in
Mason and Mitchell, What Do We Know about Civil Wars? 33–42.
19. NIE 15-90, ‘Yugoslavia Transformed,’ 18 October 1990, in Yugoslavia from National
Communism to National Collapse: US Intelligence Community Estimative Products on Yu-
goslavia, 1948–1990 (NOIC 2006-004), (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office,
2006).
20. Gregory Treverton and Renanah Miles, ‘Unheeded warning of war: why policymakers
ignored the 1990 Yugoslav estimate’, Intelligence and National Security, 32:4 (2017), 506–
522.
21. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).
22. Lee J. M. Seymour and Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham, ‘Identity Issues and Civil
war’, in Mason and Mitchell 43–57.
23. J. Wucherpfennig et al., ‘Ethnicity, the State, and the Duration of Civil War’, World
Politics 64.1 (2012): 79–115.
24. Hironaka, Neverending Wars.
25. Kaplan, ‘The Coming Anarchy’ 54.
26. The Economist, 11 May 2000. David T. Burbach and Christopher J. Fettweis cite other
examples of this gloom: Chris Allen, ‘Warfare, Endemic Violence, and State Collapse in
Africa’, Review of African Political Economy 26.81 (1999): 367–84; James D. Fearon and
David D. Laitin, ‘Neotrusteeship and the Problem of Weak States’, International Security
28.4 (2004): 5–43; Peter Schwab, Africa: A Continent Self-Destructs (New York: Palgrave,
2002); and Howard W. French, A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa
(New York: Vintage Books, 2004).
27. Fearon and Laitin, ‘Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War’.
28. John Clark, ‘A Constructivist Account of the Congo Wars’, African Security 4.3
(2011): 147–170.
29. Gerard Prunier, Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making
of a Continental Catastrophe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
30. The numbers and uncertainties connected with counting the costs of these events are
huge. When looking at the violence that afflicted Zaire/DRC, the International Rescue Com-
mittee (IRC) concluded on the basis of a number of mortality surveys that the war must have
cost some 5.4 million lives, largely due to ‘infectious diseases, malnutrition and neonatal- and
pregnancy-related conditions’. Children had been particularly hard hit: they ‘accounted for 47
percent of deaths, even though they constituted only 19 percent of the total population’. Dr
Benjamin Coghlan et al., Mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo: An ongoing crisis
(International Rescue Committee, 2007). Available: https://www.rescue.org/sites/default/files/
migrated/where/g_belgium/2006-7_congomortalitysurvey_a4.pdf. This estimate was con-

269
tested by the Human Security Report Project (HSP), who argued that the original surveys
were not carried out scientifically, relying too much on the most badly affected regions. In ad-
dition, any estimate depended on the baseline mortality-rate figure, and that the IRC’s figure,
based on an average for sub-Saharan Africa, was too low. Instead of 2.83 million excess
deaths, the HSP argued a better number would be 860,000 (Human Security Report Project,
The Human Security Report 2009/2010: The Causes of Peace and the Shrinking Costs of War,
Part 2, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) 123–31).
31. Jack Hirshleifer, ‘The dark side of the force’, Economic Inquiry 32 (1994): 3. For a sur-
vey of the economic literature on civil wars, see Christopher Blattman and Edward Miguel,
‘Civil War’, Journal of Economic Literature 48.1 (2010): 3–57.
32. Michael Ross, ‘A closer look at oil, diamonds, and civil war’, Annual Reviews of Politi-
cal Science 9 (2006): 265–300.
33. See Abiodun Alao, Natural Resources and Conflict in Africa: The Tragedy of Endow-
ment (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2007).
34. Fearon and Laitin, ‘Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War’, 88. They acknowledged that
grievances could be produced by civil wars.
35. Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, ‘Economic causes of civil conflict and their implica-
tions for policy’ in Managing Global Chaos, ed. Chester A. Crocker, et al. (Washington, DC:
United States Institute of Peace, 2000).
36. Paul Collier et al., Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil War and Development Policy
(Washington DC: World Bank and Oxford University Press, 2003). See also Paul Collier,
Anke Hoeffler, and Dominic Rohner, ‘Beyond greed and grievance: feasibility and civil war’,
Oxford Economic Papers 61 (2009): 1–27.
37. Collier et al., Conflict Trap 53–4.
38. Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, ‘Greed and grievance in civil war’, Oxford Economic
Papers 56.
39. C. Cramer, ‘Homo Economicus goes to war: methodological individualism, rational
choice, and the political economy of war’, World Development 30 (2002): 1849.
40. Paul Collier, ‘The Cultural Foundations of Economic Failure: A Conceptual Toolkit’,
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 126, (2016), 5-24.
41. M. Humphreys, ‘Natural resources, conflict, and conflict resolution: uncovering the
mechanisms’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 49 (2005): 508–37.
42. Ross, ‘A closer look at oil, diamonds, and civil war’. He found more statistical signifi-
cance in the occasional cases of ‘primary’ diamond extraction from deep-shaft mines, con-
trolled by large firms and governments, than with ‘secondary’ diamonds, near the surface and
commonly mined by unskilled workers.
43. Michael L. Ross, ‘What Have We Learned about the Resource Curse?’ Annual Review
of Political Science 18 (2015): 239–59.
44. In making this point, Humphreys refers to Angell 513.
45. Jeremy M. Weinstein, ‘Resources and the Information Problem in Rebel Recruitment’,
The Journal of Conflict Resolution 49:4 (2005): 598–624.
46. David Keen, The Economic Functions of Violence in Civil Wars, Adelphi Paper no. 320
(London: Taylor & Francis for IISS, 1998).
47. Dennis Rodgers and Robert Muggah, ‘Gangs as Non-State Armed Groups: The Central
American Case’, Contemporary Security Policy 30.2 (2009): 301–17; Jeffrey Gettleman,
‘Forever Wars: Why the Continent’s Conflicts Never End’, Foreign Policy 178 (2010): 73–5;
and John Mueller, The Remnants of War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).

270
CHAPTER 15
1. Prime Minister Tony Blair, Speech to Economic Club of Chicago, PBS, 22 April 1999,
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/international-jan-june99-blair_doctrine4-23/
2. Nicholas Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
3. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations,
(New York: Basic Books, 1977)
4. On 15 February 1991, President Bush invited the Iraqi people to “take matters into their
own hands, to force Saddam Hussein the dictator to step aside.” Margaret Dowd, ‘War in the
Gulf: The President; Bush, Scorning Offer, Suggests Iraqis Topple Hussein’, New York
Times, 16 February 1991, http://www.nytimes.com/1991/02/16/world/war-in-the-gulf-the-
president-bush-scorning-offer-suggests-iraqis-topple-hussein.html.
5. The Times, 18 August 1992, cited in Martin Bell, In Harm’s Way (London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1995) 137. At the time this was described as the ‘CNN Effect’. See Piers Robinson,
‘The CNN effect: can the news media drive foreign policy?’, Review of International Studies,
25:2 (1999) 301–09. The original CNN Effect referred to the ubiquity of the channel (so that
all sides were using the same information source) as much as to the particulars of its effects.
The term itself originated during the Gulf War and was naturally promoted by CNN’s owner,
Ted Turner. See Thomas Allen, F. Clifton Berry, and Norman Polmar, CNN: War in the Gulf
(Atlanta, GA: Turner Broadcasting, 1999).
6. Document of The Moscow Meeting of the Conference on the Human Dimension Of The
CSCE, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, 4 Oct. 1991. Available: http://
www.osce.org/odihr/elections/14310
7. Albrecht Schnabel and Ramesh Thakur, eds., Kosovo and the Challenge of Humanitar-
ian Intervention: Selective Indignation, Collective Action, and International Citizenship (New
York: United Nations University Press, 2000), and Ivo Daalder and Michael O’Hanlon, Win-
ning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2000).
8. Blair, Chicago speech (fn 1). For background to the speech, to which the author con-
tributed, see Lawrence Freedman ‘Force and the International Community: Blair’s Chicago
Speech and the Criteria for Intervention’, International Relations, 21:3 (2017), 1-17.
9. John McKinley, ed., A Guide to Peace Support Operations (Providence, RI: The Thomas
J. Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies, Brown University, 1996), and Alex J. Bel-
lamy, ‘The “Next Stage” in Peace Operations Theory?’ International Peacekeeping 11:1
(2004): 17–38.
10. Lawrence Freedman, ‘Bosnia: Does Peace Support Make Any Sense?’, NATO Review,
43: 6 (1995), 19-23.
11. For a sample of the literature, see Nigel Rodley, ed., To Loose the Bands of Wickedness
(London: Brassey’s, 1992); Lawrence Freedman, ed., Military Intervention in European Con-
flicts (London: Blackwell, 1994); and Stephen A. Garrett, Doing Good and Doing Well: An
Examination of Humanitarian Intervention (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999).
12. See discussion by Adam Roberts, “The Civilian in Modern War”, in Strachan and
Scheipers 373.
13. International Commission on Intervention, The Responsibility to Protect: The Report of
the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (Ottawa: International
Development Research Centre [IDRC], November 2002); and Thomas G. Weiss, Military-
Civilian Interactions: Humanitarian Crises and the Responsibility to Protect (New York:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).

271
 14. High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, A More Secure World: Our
Shared Responsibility (New York: United Nations, 2004), 66 (pt. 3, para 203).
15. Resolution Adopted by the General Assembly, 2005 World Summit Outcome Docu-
ment, 24 Oct. 2005, http://www.un.org/womenwatch/ods/A-RES-60-1-E.pdf. The resolution
notably did not refer to Chapter 7 so it did not in principle authorise force in support of this
responsibility.
16. UN, Security Council Resolution 1270 (Sierra Leone), S/RES/1270, 22 Oct. 1999.
17. Cited by Mats Berdal, ‘The State of UN Peacekeeping: Lessons from Congo’, Journal
of Strategic Studies 39 (2016): 1–30.
18. Simone Haysom and Jens Pedersen, ‘Robust peacekeeping in Africa: the challenge for
humanitarians’, Humanitarian Practice Network, online, Oct. 2015. Available: http://odihpn.
org/magazine/robust-peacekeeping-in-africa-the-challenge-for-humanitarians.
19. This became the subject of a Security Council meeting in 2001. UN Security Council,
‘Security Council Meets on HIV/Aids and Peacekeeping Operations; Hears from Peacekeep-
ing Under-Secretary-General, UNAIDS’, (19 January 2001), http://www.un.org/press/en/
2001/sc6992.doc.htm. On efforts to educate forces on the dangers see: UNAIDS, ‘Fact Sheet:
HIV/AIDS and Peace-Keeping’, (June 2004), http://data.unaids.org/Topics/Security/fs_pea
cekeeping_en.pdf?preview=true
20. Emily Paddon Rhoads, Taking Sides in Peacekeeping (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2016).
21. Andrew M. Dorman, Blair’s Successful War: British Military Intervention in Sierra
Leone (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2009).
22. Virginia Page Fortna, Does Peacekeeping Work? Shaping Belligerents’ Choices After
Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). Michael Gilligan and Stephen Sted-
man, ‘Where Do the Peacekeepers Go?’ International Studies Review 5.4 (2003): 37–54.
23. Paul Diehl and Daniel Druckman, Evaluating Peace Operations (Boulder, CO: Lynne
Rienner, 2010).
24. Roland Paris, ‘Saving Liberal Peacebuilding’, Review of International Studies, 36:2
(2010), 337-365
25. Jean-Marie Guéhenno, The Fog of Peace: A Memoir of International Peacekeeping in
the 21st Century (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2015).
26. UN, Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations, ‘Brahimi Panel Report’,
S/2000/809, 21 Aug. 2000.
27. By early 2017 there were 16 current operations with over 107,000 personnel deployed
by the UN. Peacekeeping Fact Sheet, United Nations, http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/
resources/statistics/factsheet.shtml.
28. Berdal, ‘The State of UN Peacekeeping’, 6.
29. Guéhenno, Epilogue.

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CHAPTER 16
1. Tim O’Brien, Going after Cacciato, (New York: Delacorte Press, 1978), 225–6.
2. Mark Taylor, The Vietnam War in History, Literature and Film, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2003), 51. This was loosely based on Robin Moore, The Green Berets,
(New York: Crown, 1965).
3. Lawrence H. Suid. Guts & Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film
(Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky 2002), 248.
4. Suid, 356, 332. Apocalypse Now was a free adaption of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Dark-
ness which had been set in the 1890s.
5. Suid, 514.
6. C D B Bryan, ‘Barely Suppressed Screams’, Harper’s, (1 June 1984).
7. Albert Auster & Leonard Quart, How the War was Remembered: Hollywood & Vietnam,
(New York: Prager, 1988).
8. This is a recurring theme in Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud, eds., From Hanoi to
Holywood: The Vietnam War in American Film, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 1990).
9. The US intervention in Beirut is described in my Choice of Enemies: America Confronts
the Middle East (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009).
10. George Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State, (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), p. 648.
11. Caspar Weinberger, “The Uses of Military Power,” Speech to National Press Club, No-
vember 28, 1984, at www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/military/force/weinberger.
html.
12. Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (New York: Atlantic
Monthly Press, 1999). Theo Farrell, “Sliding into War: The Somalia Imbroglio and U.S.
Army Peace Operations Doctrine,” International Peacekeeping 2:2 (1995). 194–214.
13. See Powers, A Problem from Hell. Arguably, Rwanda was a rare situation in which
there was an established obligation to intervene, as this was genocide. The genocide conven-
tion had come into force in 1948 in reaction to the Nazi holocaust against the Jews. Genocide
was defined as acts committed with the ‘intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, eth-
nical, racial or religious group’. States had a duty to prevent or punish these acts, an exception
to the UN Charter’s obligation not to intervene. As Clinton did not want to take on another
African intervention, his administration went to some lengths to deny that Rwanda was geno-
cide.
14. The Carnegie Commission for the Prevention of Deadly Conflict (New York: Carnegie
Corporation, 1998). For a contrary view see Alan J. Kuperman, The Limits of Humanitarian
Intervention: Genocide in Rwanda (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2001).
15. Transcript of Osama Bin Ladin interview by Peter Arnett, March 1997, http://news.
findlaw.com/cnn/docs/binladen/binladenintvw-cnn.pdf.
16. See John Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1992), and Fawaz Gerges, America and Political Islam: Clash of Cultures or Clash of
Interests (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
17. Bernard Lewis, ‘The Roots of Muslim Rage’, The Atlantic, September 1990. https://
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1990/09/the-roots-of-muslim-rage/304643/
18. Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ 31.
19. Anthony J. Dennis, The Rise of the Islamic Empire and the Threat to the West (Ohio:
Wyndham Hall Press, 1996).

273
 20. Tom Clancy, The Sum of all Fears (New York: Berkely Mass market publishing,
1992), p. 913.
21. Gavin Cameron, Nuclear Terrorism: A Threat Assessment for the 21st Century, (Lon-
don: Macmillan, 1999).
22. Brian M. Jenkins, Will Terrorists Go Nuclear? (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1975).
23. The 1993 attack on the World Trade Center left six killed and 1,000 wounded. The in-
tent was to topple one tower on to the other, which would have caused mass casualties. On 7
August 1998, the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed, killing 300 people, in-
cluding 12 Americans, and injuring 5,000 more. In December 1999 attacks on millennium
celebrations in Israel and the United States were thwarted.
24. Remarks by Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet on the ‘World-wide Threat
2001: National Security in a Changing World’, 7 Feb. 2001). http://u2.lege.net/avalon.law.
yale.edu/21st_century/tenet_001.asp.
25. US Commission on National Security/21st Century, New World Coming: American Se-
curity in the 21st Century (Washington DC: US Government printing Office, 1999) 48. For a
similar emphasis, see also National Commission on Terrorism, Countering the Changing
Threat of International Terrorism (Washington DC: US Congress, 2000). Pursuant to Public
Law 277, 105th Congress. The issue of attacks using nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons
had been addressed in a number of studies prior to 9/11: Richard A. Falkenrath, Robert D.
Newman, and Bradley Thayer, America’s Achilles’ Heel: Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical
Terrorism and Covert Attack (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); Peter R. Lavoy, Scott D.
Sagan, and James J Wirtz, eds., Planning the Unthinkable: How New Powers Will Use Nu-
clear, Chemical and Biological Weapons (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Jan
Lodal, The Price of Dominance: The New Weapons of Mass Destruction and Their Challenge
to American Leadership (New York: Council on Foreign Relation, 2001); and Jessica Stern,
The Ultimate Terrorists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
26. Hassner, Religion on the Battlefield 3–5.
27. Richard K. Betts, ‘The New Threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction’, Foreign Affairs
77.1 (1998): 26-41.

274
CHAPTER 17
1. DoD News Briefing—Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, 12 Feb. 2002. http://
archive.defense.gov/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=2636.
2. John J. Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1983).
3. André Beaufre, ‘Battlefields of the 1980s’, in Nigel Calder, ed., Unless Peace Comes: A
Scientific Forecast of New Weapons, (London: Allen Lane, 1968), 19.
4. Mark Clodfelter, The Limits of Air Power: The American Bombing of North Vietnam
(New York, Free Press, 1989).
5. Richard Burt, New Weapons Technologies: Debate and Directions, Adelphi Paper no.
126 (London: IISS, 1976) 3.
6. Alvin and Heidi Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Morrow, 1980).
7. Alvin and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century
(New York: Little Brown, 1993). This provides a thorough guide to the debates on military
technology of the time.
8. Basil Liddell Hart, The Revolution in Warfare (London: Faber, 1946).
9. Richard Simpkin, Race to the Swift: Thoughts on Twenty-first Century Warfare (London:
Brassey’s, 2000).
10. Alan Campen, ed., The First Information War: The Story of Communications, Comput-
ers, and Intelligence Systems in the Persian Gulf War (Fairfax, VA: AFCEA International
Press, 1992), and Edward Mann, ‘Desert Storm: The First Information War?’, Airpower Jour-
nal (1994): 4–14.
11. On the origins and development of the Revolution in Military Affairs, see Freedman,
Strategy, Chapter 16.
12. Admiral William Owens, ‘The Emerging System of Systems’, US Naval Institute Pro-
ceedings (1995): 35–39.
13. Robert H. Scales, Yellow Smoke: The Future of Land Warfare for America’s Military
(Lanham, MD.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
14. Ben Lambeth, ‘The Technology Revolution in Air Warfare’, Survival 39.1 (1997): 72,
and John A. Warden III, ‘The Enemy as a System’, Airpower Journal 9.1(1995): 40–55.
15. Martin Libicki, ‘DBK and its Consequences’, Dominant Battlespace Knowledge, eds.
Stuart Johnson and Martin Libicki (Washington DC: National Defense University, April
1996) 18.
16. Edward Luttwak, ‘Towards Post-Heroic Warfare’, Foreign Affairs 74.3 (1995): 109–
122.
17. Eric V. Larson, Casualties and Consensus: The Historical Role of Casualties in Do-
mestic Support for U.S. Military Operations (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1996); Steven Kull
and Clay Ramsay, ‘The Myth of the Reactive Public: American Public Attitudes on Military
Fatalities in the Post-Cold War Period’, Public Opinion and the International Use of Force,
eds. Philip Everts and Pierangelo Isernia (London: Routledge, 2001); and Peter D. Feaver and
Christopher Gelpi, ‘A Look at Casualty Aversion: How Many Deaths Are Acceptable? A Sur-
prising Answer’, Washington Post, 7 Nov. 1999. Available: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
wp-srv/WPcap/1999-11/07/061r-110799-idx.html.
18. US Department of Defense, Joint Military Net Assessment (Washington DC: Depart-
ment of Defense, 1993) 3. Quoted in Keith Payne, ‘Post-Cold War Deterrence and Missile
Defense’, Orbis 39.2 (1995) 203.
19. Jeffrey Record, ‘Force-Protection Fetishism: Sources, Consequences, and (?) Solu-

275
tions’, Aerospace Power Journal (Summer 2000); Andrew Erdmann, ‘The U.S. Presumption
of Quick, Costless Wars’, Orbis (Summer 1999).
20. Michael O’Hanlon, Technological Change and the Future of Warfare (Washington DC:
Brookings Institution, 2000) 197.
21. Ralph Peters, ‘Our Soldiers, Their Cities’, Parameters, (1996), 43–50.
22. Barry R. Posen ‘Urban Opertions: Tactical Realities and Strategic Ambiguities’ in
Michael C. Desch, ed. Soldiers in Cities: Military Operations on Urban Terrain (Carlisle,
PA: U.S. Army War College, 2001) 153-4.
23. Michael Evans, Future War in Cities: Urbanization’s challenge to strategic studies in
the 21st century’, International review of the Red Cross, 98:1 (2016) 37–5.
24. Major General Robert H. Scales, Jr. ‘The Indirect Approach: How U.S. Military Forces
Can Avoid the Pitfalls of Future Urban Warfare’, Armed Forces Journal International, 136:3
(1998).
25. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, ‘A New Kind of War’, New York Times, 27
Sept. 2001. Available: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/27/opinion/a-new-kind-of-war.html
26. For an early use of the term, in a Vietnam context, see Andrew Mack, ‘Why Big Na-
tions Lose Small Wars: The Politics of Asymmetric Conflict’, World Politics 27.2 (1975):
175–200. See Steven Metz and Douglas V. Johnson, Asymmetry and U.S. Military Strategy:
Definition, Background, and Strategic Concepts (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, US
Army War College, 2001).
27. Steven Metz, Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy (Washington DC: Potomac
Books, 2008).
28. See Freedman, Choice of Enemies 431–2.
29. “President and Prime Minister Blair Discussed Iraq, Middle East, The East Room” 12
November 2004, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/ releases/2004/11/20041112-5.html.
30. Conrad C. Crane, Cassandra in Oz: Counterinsurgency and Future War (Annapolis:
Naval Institute Press, 2016).
31. Conrad C. Crane, Avoiding Vietnam: The U.S. Army’s Response to Defeat in Southeast
Asia (Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2002)
32. Conrad C. Crane and W. Andrew Terrill, Reconstructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges,
and Missions for Military Forces in a Post-Conflict Scenario (Carlisle Barracks, PA: US
Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, Feb. 2003).
33. A literate group of officers was involved: John A. Nagl, Counterinsurgency Lessons
from Malaya and Vietnam: Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002);
David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One
(London: Hurst & Co., 2009); and Lieutenant General David H. Petraeus, ‘Learning Counterinsur-
gency: Observations from Soldiering in Iraq’, Military Review (2006): 2–12.

34. U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (FM 3–24) (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2007).
35. See the exchange between Robert J. Gonzalez, ‘Toward Mercenary Anthropology?’ and
Montgomery McFate, ‘Building Bridges or Burning Heretics?’, Anthropology Today 23:3
(2007): 14–21. See also Montgomery McFate and Janice Laurence, eds., Social Science Goes
to War: The Human Terrain System in Iraq and Afghanistan (London: Hurst, 2015).
36. Stathis N. Kalyvas, ‘The New U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Man-
ual as Political Science and Political Praxis’, Perspectives on Politics 6.2 (2008): 351.
37. David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (Westport, CT:
Praeger, 1964).
38. The distinction between kinetic and non-kinetic was noticed in Bob Woodward’s, Bush

276
at War, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002). See Timothy Noah, ‘Birth of a Washington
Word: When warfare gets “kinetic”’, Slate, 20 Nov. 2002. Available: http://www.slate.com/
articles/news_and_politics/chatterbox/2002/11/birth_of_a_washington_word.html. However,
the word was introduced during the development of concepts for destroying missiles in space
as part of President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (including a Kinetic Kill Vehicle).
The kinetic energy of an object is the energy that it possesses due to its motion.
39. M. L. R. Smith and David Martin Jones, The Political Impossibility of Modern Coun-
terinsurgency: Strategic Problems, Puzzles and Paradoxes (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2015).
40. Colonel Gian Gentile, Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency
(New York: The New Press, 2013).
41. Ralph Peters ‘Progress and Peril, New Counterinsurgency Manual Cheats on the His-
tory Exam,’ Armed Forces Journal International, 144 (2007), http://armedforcesjournal.com/
progress-and-peril.
42. Carter Malkasian, Illusions of Victory: The Anbar Awakening and the Rise of the Is-
lamic State, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
43. Smith and Jones 182.
44. Edward Luttwak, ‘Dead end: Counterinsurgency warfare as military malpractice’,
Harpers, February 2007, 33–42.

277
CHAPTER 18
1. Martin Barker, A ‘Toxic Genre’: The Iraq War Films, (London: Pluto Press, 2011), p.
32–3.
2. Brian Castner, All the Ways We Kill and Die, (New York: Arcade, 2016). Castner’s pre-
vious book, The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows, (New York: Double-
day, 2012), chronicled his struggles with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which he
called his ‘Crazy’, after returning from the war. On the killing of bin Laden see Robert
O’Neill, The Operator: Firing the Shots that killed Osama Bin Laden, (New York: Scribner,
2017); Mark Owen, No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission that Killed Osama
Bin Laden, (New York: Dutton, 2014).
3. The definitive account, confirming both the high cost of waging strategic bombing cam-
paigns and their limited achievements is Richard Overy, The Bombing War: Europe 1939–
1945, (London, Allen Lane, 2013).
4. For a historical survey see Beatrice Heuser, ‘Atrocities in Theory and Practice: An Intro-
duction’, Civil Wars, 14:1, (2012), 2–28.
5. James Corum and Wray Johnson, Airpower in Small Wars: Fighting Insurgents and Ter-
rorists (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2003), p. 58 It was in Iraq that Arthur
Harris as a Squadron Leader developed his ideas of strategic bombing which he later applied
ruthlessly as Head of Bomber Command against German cities. Aylmer Haldane, The Insur-
rection in Mesopotamia, 1920 (Edinburgh, Blackwood, 1922; Mark Jacobsen ‘Only by the
sword’: British counter insurgency in Iraq, 1920, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 2:2, (1991)
323-363,
6. Sahr Conway-Lanz, Collateral Damage: Americans, Noncombatant Immunity, and
Atrocity after World War II (New York: Routledge, 2006) 2.
7. Matthew Evangelista and Henry Shue, The American Way of Bombing; Changing Ethi-
cal and Legal Norms from Flying Fortress to Drones (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2004).
8. Thomas Smith, Human Rights and War Through Civilian Eyes (Philadelphia, PA: Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
9. Charles J. Dunlap, Jr., ‘Lawfare Today… and Tomorrow’, International Law and the
Changing Character of War, eds. Raul A. ‘Pete’ Pedrozo and Daria P. Wollschlaeger, vol. 87
(Newport, RI: US Naval War College International Law Studies, 2011); and Charles Dunlap,
Law and Military Interventions: Preserving Humanitarian Values in 21st Conflicts (Cam-
bridge, MA: Carr Center for Human Rights Policy Kennedy School of Government, Harvard
University, 2001).
10. Stephen Saideman, The Ties That Divide: Ethnic Politics, Foreign Policy, and Interna-
tional Conflict (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
11. James Gow and James Tilsey, ‘The Strategic Imperative for Media Management’,
Bosnia by Television, eds. James Gow, Richard Paterson, and Alison Preston (London: British
Film Institute, 1996) 107.
12. Ivan Arreguın-Toft, ‘How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict’, In-
ternational Security 26.1 (2001): 93–128.
13. Gil Merom, How Democracies Lose Small Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003) 15.
14. Mao Zedong, On Guerrilla Warfare, trans. Samuel B. Griffith (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2000).
15. Beatriz Manz, Paradise in Ashes: A Guatemalan Journey of Courage, Terror, and

278
Hope (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2005), and Jennifer Schirmer, The
Guatemalan Military Project: A Violence Called Democracy (Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1998).
16. Schirmer 45.
17. Alex de Waal, The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War and the Business of
Power (London: Jon Wiley, 2015).
18. Ian Fisher, ‘Playing by the Rules: From an Old Fashioned War, a Very Modern
Calamity’, New York Times Week in Review, 4 June 2000, 5; and Ian Fisher, ‘Awful War,
Real Peace: The Model of Eritrea’, New York Times, 6 April 2001, A3.
19. Benjamin Valentino, Paul Huth, and Dylan Balch-Lindsay, ‘“Draining the Sea”: Mass
Killing and Guerrilla Warfare’, International Organization 58 (2004): 375–407.
20. Benjamin A. Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth
Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Studies in Security Affairs, 2005).
21. VK Shashikumar, ‘Lessons from Sri Lanka’s War’, Indian Defence Review 24.3
(2009). Available: http://www.indiandefencereview.com/spotlights/lessons-from-the-war-in-
sri-lanka.
22. Niel A. Smith, ‘Understanding Sri Lanka’s Defeat of the Tamil Tigers’, Joint Forces
Quarterly 59 (2010): 40-44 Samir Puri points out that this ‘cruel affair’ followed attempts by
the government to combine dialogue with coercion, Fighting and Negotiating with Armed
Groups: The Difficulty of Securing Strategic Outcomes (London: Taylor & Francis for IISS,
2016), 36.
23. Amy Knight, ‘Finally, We Know About the Moscow Bombings’, New York Review of
Books, 22 Nov. 2012, review of John Dunlop, The Moscow Bombings of September 1999: Ex-
aminations of Russian Terrorist Attacks at the Onset of Vladimir Putin’s Rule (Stuttgart: Ibi-
dem, 2012).
24. Jason Lyall, ‘Are Coethnics More Effective Counterinsurgents? Evidence from the Sec-
ond Chechen War’, American Political Science Review 104 (2010): 1–20.
25. Timothy L. Thomas, ‘Grozny 2000: Urban Combat Lessons Learned’, Military Review
(July–August 2000): 50-59.
26. Mark Galeotti, ‘Putin is Playing by Grozny Rules in Aleppo’, Foreign Policy, 29 Sept.
2016.
27. Jason Lyall, ‘Does Indiscriminate Violence Incite Insurgent Attacks? Evidence from
Chechnya’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 53.3 (2009): 331–362. Lyall was clearly uncom-
fortable with his findings: ‘The article clearly should not be read as endorsing the use of ran-
dom violence against civilians as a policy instrument. Such actions are morally abhorrent and
are rightly regarded as war crimes under both international law and Russia’s own legal sys-
tem’.
28. Emil Aslan Souleimanov and David Siroky, ‘Random or Retributive?: Indiscriminate
Violence in the Chechen Wars’, World Politics, 68:4 (2016), 677–712.
29. Luke N. Condra and Jacob N. Shapiro, ‘Who Takes the Blame? The Strategic Effects of
Collateral Damage’, American Journal of Political Science 56:1 (2012): 167–187.
30. Jason Lyall, Graeme Blair, and Kosuke Imai, ‘Explaining Support for Combatants dur-
ing Wartime: A Survey Experiment in Afghanistan’, American Political Science Review
107.4 (2013).
31. Valentino Final Solutions, 68, and Stathis Kalyvas The Logic of Violence in Civil War,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 388.
32. Seth Jones, Waging Insurgent Warfare: Lessons from the Vietcong to the Islamic State
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2017) 11.
33. Christopher Paul, Colin Clarke, and Beth Grill, Victory Has a Thousand Fathers:

279
Sources of Success in Counterinsurgency (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2010) xxiv.
34. Austin Long, The Soul of Armies: Counterinsurgency Doctrine and Military Culture in
the US and UK (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016) 225.

280
CHAPTER 19
1. Deborah Scroggins, Emma’s War: Love, Betrayal and Death in the Sudan (New York:
Vintage Books, 2004) 427. I found the quote in Kalyvas, ‘Civil Wars’, in Boix and Stokes,
The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics, which led me to read the book.
2. The State Failure Task Force Report: Phase III Findings (McLean, VA: Science Appli-
cations International Corporation, 30 Sept. 30, 2000).
3. Charles Call, ‘The Fallacy of the “Failed States”’, Third World Quarterly 29.8 (2008):
1491–1507.
4. Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, Preventing Deadly Conflict (New
York: Carnegie Corporation, 1997) xviii. Available: http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/
a372860.pdf.
5. Francis Fukuyama, State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).
6. Stephen D. Krasner and Carlos Pascual, ‘Addressing State Failure’, Foreign Affairs 84:4
(2005): 153–163.
7. Wendy Brown, ‘The New U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual as
Political Science and Political Praxis’, Perspectives on Politics 6.2 (2008): 351.
8. Walter C. Ludwig II, ‘Influencing Clients in Counterinsurgency: U.S. Involvement in El
Salvador’s Civil War, 1979–92’, International Security 41.6 (2016): 99.
9. Virginia Page Fortna and Reyko Huang, ‘Democratization after Civil War: A Brush-
Clearing Exercise’, International Studies Quarterly 56 (2012): 801–08.
10. John Clark, ‘The Decline of the African Military Coup’, Journal of Democracy 18.3
(2007): 144–155.
11. Jennifer M. Welsh, ‘Introduction’, Humanitarian Intervention and International Rela-
tions, ed. Jennifer M Welsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 7. For some candid
musings about a new imperialism, undertaken for defensive reasons, see Robert Cooper, The
post-modern state and world order (London: Demos and the Foreign Policy Centre, 2000).
12. Richard Cockett, Sudan: The Failure and Division of an African State (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2016) for more background on the conflict. Emma McCone is also the
model for a fictional character in Philip Caputo, Acts of Faith (New York: Knopf, 2005).
13. BBC News: ‘“I’m going to return to Soiuth Sudan”, says Riek Machar (18 October
2016) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-37689235.
14. ‘Why South Sudan is still at war’, The Economist, 3 Oct. 2016. Available: http://www.
economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2016/10/economist-explains-0 The Economist was
also scathing about a memoir of the person who was at the head of the UN mission, Hilde
Johnson: South Sudan: The Untold Story from Independence to Civil War (London: I.B. Tau-
ris, 2016). (“From hope to horror”, The Economist, 16 July 2016.) Available: http://www.
economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21702158-hope-horror.
15. Monica Duffy Toft, Securing the Peace: The Durable Settlement of Civil Wars (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 2010) 17.
16. Ian Morris, War: What Is It Good For? The Role of Conflict in Civilisation, From Pri-
mates to Robots (London: Profile Books, 2014).
17. Charles Tilly, ‘War Making and State Making as Organized Crime’, Bringing the State
Back In, eds. Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1985) 169–191.
18. Edward Luttwak, ‘Give War a Chance’, Foreign Affairs 78.4 (1999): 36-44
19. Roy Licklider, ‘The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil Wars, 1945–

281
1993’, American Political Science Review 89.3 (1995): 681–690.
20. Monica Duffy Toft, ‘Peace Through Victory: The Durable Settlement of Civil Wars’,
Unpublished Manuscript, Harvard University, 2003.
21. Robert Harrison Wagner, ‘The Causes of Peace’, Stopping the Killing, ed. Licklider
(New York: New York University Press, 1993). For a slightly different mechanism, see Toft,
“Peace Through Victory’. Herbst argued that the fundamental problem confronting African
leaders was (and continues to be) how to extend power over vast, inhospitable territories with
low population densities. See Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative
Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
22. Jeremy M. Weinstein, ‘Autonomous Recovery and International Intervention In Com-
parative Perspective’, Center for Global Development, Working Paper Number 57, April
2005.
23. Sebastian Mallaby, The World’s Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises,
and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations (New York: Penguin, 2004).
24. David T. Burbach and Christopher J. Fettweis, ‘The Coming Stability? The Decline of
Warfare in Africa and Implications for International Security’, Contemporary Security Policy
35.3 (2014): 421–445.
25. See Jonathan M. Powell and Clayton L. Thyne, ‘Global Instances of Coups from 1950
to 2010: A New Dataset’, Journal of Peace Research 48.2 (2011): 249–259.
26. Paul D. Williams, ‘Continuity and Change in War and Conflict in Africa’, PRISM 6: 4
(2017), 33-45; Williams, ‘Continuity and Change in War and Conflict in Africa’; Barbara
Walter, ‘Why Bad Governance Leads to Repeat Civil Wars’, Journal of Conflict Resolution,
59:7 (2015), 1242–72.
27. Scott Gates, Havard Mokleiv Nygard, Havard Strand, and Henrik Urdal, Trends in
Armed Conflict, 1946–2014, (Oslo: Peace Research Institute Oslo, 2016).
28. Max Berak and Laris Karklis, ‘Starving to Death’, Washington Post, 11 April 2017.
29. Christopher Chivvis, Toppling Qaddafi: Libya and the Limits of Liberal Intervention
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
30. Barbara Walter, ‘The New New Civil Wars’, Annual Review of Political Science, 20–
25, (2017) 1–18.

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CHAPTER 20
1. David W. Barno, ‘Military Adaptation in Complex Operations’, PRISM 1:1 (2009): 30.
2. Christopher Elliott, High Command: British Military Leadership in the Iraq and
Afghanistan Wars (London: Hurst & Co., 2015).
3. Charles Krulak, “The Three Block War: Fighting in Urban Areas,” in Vital Speeches of
the Day, 64:5 (15 December 1997), 139–141.
4. Frank G. Hoffman and James N. Mattis. “Future Warfare: The Rise of Hybrid Wars,” in
Naval Institute Proceedings, 132:11 (November 2005).
5. Frank G. Hoffman, Conflict in the 21st Century: The Rise of Hybrid Wars (Arlington,
VA: The Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, 2007). In a similar concept, Thomas Huber
identified ‘compound war’ as a developing form of warfare. In 2002, he described it as the
‘systematic, deliberate combining of regular and irregular forces’. Thomas M. Huber, ‘Com-
pound Warfare: A Conceptual Framework’, Compound Warfare: That Fatal Knot, ed.
Thomas M. Huber (Fort Leavenworth, MS: US Army Command and General Staff College
Press, 2002).
6. Frank G. Hoffman, ‘Hybrid vs. Compound War: The Janus Choice of Modern War:
Defining Today’s Multifaceted Conflict’, Armed Forces Journal (2009): 1–2. Erin Simpson
used the term ‘hybrid warfare’ to describe a type of conflict that would become more preva-
lent. ‘Thinking about Modern Conflict: Hybrid Wars, Strategy, and War Aims’, Paper Pre-
sented at the Annual Meeting of The Midwest Political Science Association, 7 April 2005.
7. Russell W. Glenn, All Glory is Fleeting: Insights from the Second Lebanon War (Santa
Monica, CA: RAND, 2008) 3.
8. Sam Jones, ‘Ukraine: Russia’s new art of war’, Financial Times, 28 Aug. 2014, and Paul
Goble, ‘Putin’s Actions in Ukraine Following Script by Russian General Staff a Year Ago,’
The Interpreter, 20 June 2014, http://www.interpretermag.com/putins-actions-in-ukraine-
following-script-by-russian-general-staff-a-year-ago/. This was a speech of late January 2013
to the annual general meeting of the Russian Academy of Military Science on ‘The Role of
the General Staff in the Organization of the Defense of the Country in Correspondence with
the New Statute about the General Staff Confirmed by the President of the Russian Federa-
tion.’
9. Frank Hoffman discussed Ukraine as an example of hybrid warfare in ‘On Not-So-New
Warfare: Political Warfare vs. Hybrid Threat’, War on the Rocks, 28 July 2014, http://waronth
erocks.com/2014/07/on-not-so-new-warfare-political-warfare-vs-hybrid-threats.
10. I discuss this in ‘Ukraine and the art of limited war’, Survival 56.6 (2014): 7–38.
11. Mark Galeotti, ‘The west is too paranoid about Russia’s information war’, Guardian, 7
July 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/07/russia-propaganda-europe-
america
12. Timothy McCulloh and Richard Johnson, Hybrid Warfare, JSOU Report 13–4
(MacDill AFB, FL.: Joint Special Operations University, 2013).
13. For historical examples see Williamson Murray and Peter R. Mansoor, eds., Hybrid
Warfare: Fighting Complex Opponents from the Ancient World to the Present (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2012).
14. Keynote speech by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg at the opening of the
NATO Transformation Seminar, 25 March 2015. Available: http://www.nato.int/cps/en/
natohq/opinions_118435.htm?selectedLocale=en
15. Frank G. Hoffman, ‘Hybrid Warfare and Challenges’, Joint Forces Quarterly 52
(2009): 34–39.

283
 16. Lincoln A. Mitchell, The Color Revolutions (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsyl-
vania Press, 2012).
17. Maria Snegovaya, Putin’s Information Warfare in Ukraine: Soviet Origins of Russia’s
Hybrid Warfare, (Washington DC: Institute for the Study of War, 2015).
18. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, eds., Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror,
Crime, and Militancy (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2001) 3–4. Available: www.rand.org/pub
lications/MR/MR1382/.
19. David Kilcullen, ‘Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterin-
surgency’, Military Review 83:3 (2006): 105–107. This began as an e-mail that was widely
distributed around the US Army. See also Emile Simpson, War from the Ground Up: Twenty-
First-Century Combat as Politics (London: Hurst & Co., 2012) 233.
20. G. J. David and T. R. McKeldin III, Ideas as Weapons: Influence and Perception in
Modern Warfare (Washington DC: Potomac Books, 2009).

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CHAPTER 21
1. William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984) 69. Science fiction writer
Gibson is credited with introducing the word ‘cyberspace’, first in a 1982 short story and then
in this novel. Wikipedia draws attention to other uses before Gibson’s, but they were not in a
computer context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberspace.
2. Jean-Loup Samaan, ‘Cyber Command’, RUSI Journal 195.6 (2010): 16–21.
3. The first reference appears to have been: ‘Science: Push-Button War’, Time Magazine,
23 June 1947.
4. Thomas Rid, Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History (New York: W. W. Norton,
2016) 95–6.
5. Scott Brown, ‘WarGames: A Look Back at the Film That Turned Geeks and Phreaks
Into Stars’, Wired Magazine, 21 July 2008. For a highly critical view of the movie, noting the
criminality of the hacking and the total unreality of the plot, see Suid, 446-452.
6. Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2016) 1–2.
7. This term was first used in connections with space exploration, and the possibility of ‘ar-
tifact-organism systems which would extend man’s unconscious, self-regulatory controls’.
See Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline ‘Cyborgs and Space’, Astronautics (Sept. 1960).
Reprinted in New York Times, (26 February 1997), https://partners.nytimes.com/library/cyber/
surf/022697surf-cyborg.html.
8. P. W. Singer, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century,
(New York: Penguin Books, 2009). 66, 416.
9. M. W. Thring, ‘Robots on the March’ in Calder, Unless Peace Comes, 180, 190.
10. Owen Davies, ‘Robotic Warriors Clash in Cyberwars’, Omni 9.4 (1987): p. 76. Cited
by Rid 301.
11. Eric Arnett, ‘Hyperwar’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 48.7 (1992): 14-21. Cited in
Rid 303.
12. Kaplan, Dark Territory 31–2.
13. National Research Council, Computers at Risk: Safe Computing in the Information Age
(Washington DC: National Academies Press, 1991).
14. See Rid 308. The original article was Winn Schwartau, ‘Fighting Terminal Terrorism’,
Computerworld, 28 Jan. 1991. As this was the start of the year, the claim appears to be
stronger than that of RSA Data Security President D. James Bidzos, credited by Scott Beri-
nato in ‘The Future of Security’, Computerworld, 30 Dec. 2003, cited in Jon R. Lindsay,
‘Stuxnet and the Limits of Cyber Warfare’, Security Studies 22.3 (2013): 365-404.
15. Winn Schwartau, Terminal Compromise (Old Hickory, TN: Interpact Press, 1991).
Available: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/79/79.txt.
16. Tofflers, War and Anti-War 195.
17. Bruce Berkowitz, The New Face of War: How War Will Be fought in the 21st Century
(New York: The Free Press, 2003) 138–140.
18. Rid 310.
19. Anna Mulrine, ‘CIA Chief Leon Panetta: The Next Pearl Harbor Could Be a Cyberat-
tack’, Christian Science Monitor, 9 June 2011. Adm. Mike Mullen, quoted in Marcus Weis-
gerber, ‘DoD to Release Public Version of Cyber Strategy’, Defense News, 8 July 2011. Both
cited by Lindsay.
20. Berkowitz 143.
21. Kim Zetter, Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digi-

285
tal Weapon (New York: Crown, 2014).
22. Kaplan 275.
23. Cited in Aaron Franklin Brantly, The Decision to Attack: Military and Intelligence Cy-
ber-Decision-Making (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2016) 39.
24. Thomas Rid and Ben Buchanan, ‘Attributing Cyber Attacks’, Journal of Strategic Stud-
ies 38. (2015): 1–2.
25. Kaplan 283.
26. John Arquilla and David Ronfeld, ‘Cyberwar is Coming!’, Comparative Strategy 12.2
(1993): 141–165.
27. I deal with this in Strategy: A History.
28. John Arquilla, ‘The Computer Mouse that Roared: Cyberwar in the Twenty-First Cen-
tury’, The Brown Journal of World Affairs, 18:1 (2011), 42.
29. Lt. Gen. Richard P. Mills, US Marine Corps, cited by Raphael Satter, ‘US General: We
Hacked the Enemy in Afghanistan’, Associated Press, 24 Aug. 2012, cited in Lindsay.
30. Ben Buchanan, The Cybersecurity Dilemma: Hacking, Trust and Fear Between Nations
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
31. Gadi Evron, ‘Battling Botnets and Online Mobs: Estonia’s Defense Efforts During the
Internet War’, Georgetown Journal of International affairs, 9:1 (1991), 121-6.
32. George Lucas, Ethics and Cyber Warfare: The Quest for Responsible Security in the
Age of Digital Warfare (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

286
CHAPTER 22
1. Isaac Asimov, ‘Runaround’, Foundation (New York: Gnome Press, 1951). ‘Runaround’
was originally published in 1942.
2. Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope (1977). The prequel Rogue One (2016) showed
that the flaw was deliberate, introduced by a designer sympathetic to the rebels, and also that
the Death Star was successfully tested on another planet.
3. Star Wars: Episode VI—Return of the Jedi (1983).
4. Dan Ward, ‘Don’t Come to the Dark Side: Acquisition Lessons from a Galaxy Far, Far
Away’, Defense AT&L: Better Buying Power, 70, (September–October 2011), http://www.
thedanward.com/resources/Build+Droids+Not+Death+Stars.pdf.
5. Paul Shawcross, ‘This Isn’t the Petition Response You’re Looking For’, Wired, (11 Jan-
uary 2013), https://www.wired.com/2013/01/white-house-death-star.
6. Norman R Augustine, Augustine’s Laws, (New York: Viking, 1987), 143.
7. Paul Scharre, Robotics on the Battlefield Part II The Coming Swarm, (Washington DC:
Center for New American Security, 2014), p. 6.
8. Richard Whittle, Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution (New York:
Henry Holt, 2014).
9. Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (New York: Metropolitan Books,
2000).
10. Peter L. Bergen and Daniel Rothenberg, eds., Drone Wars: Transforming Conflict,
Law, and Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Hugh Gusterson, Drone:
Remote Control Warfare (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016); and Sarah Kreps, Drones:
What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
11. Patrick Johnston, ‘Does Decapitation Work? Assessing the Effectiveness of Leadership
Targeting in Counterinsurgency Campaigns’, International Security 36.4 (2012): 47–79.
12. Daniel Byman, ‘Do Targeted Killings Work?’, Foreign Affairs 85 (2006): 95–111, and
Johnson, ‘Does Decapitation Work?’ 47–79. Jenna Jordan in ‘When heads roll: Assessing the
effectiveness of leadership decapitation’, Security Studies 18.4 (2009) suggests that ideologi-
cal groups are more vulnerable to decapitation than religious groups, and are hierarchical
more than decentralised, and also that the tactic can be counterproductive. Stephanie Carvin,
‘The Trouble with Targeted Killing’, Security Studies 21:5, (2012), 29–555.
13. Avery Plaw, Matthew S. Fricker, and Carlos R. Colon, The Drone Debate: A Primer on
the U.S. Use of Unmanned Aircraft Outside Conventional Battlefields (Lanham, MD: Row-
man & Littlefield, 2015). It’s hard to know exactly how many civilians have been killed by
drones, since insurgents inevitably insist that the victims were innocent noncombatants, while
the US government has tended to count most of those killed as combatants. For an idea of
scale, the administration put the numbers killed outside the recognized war zones of
Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria between January 2009 and December 2015 as between 2,372 and
2,581 combatants and between 64 and 116 civilians, while the London-based Bureau of In-
vestigative Journalism estimated that as of August 2016 US drone strikes had killed between
492 and 1,138 civilians in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.
14. See Chris Woods, Sudden Justice: America’s Secret Drone Wars (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2015), and Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept, The Assassination
Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2016).
15. The Trump Administration sought to ease restrictions on drone strikes. Greg Jaffe and
Karen deYoung, ‘Trump administration reviewing ways to make it easier to launch drone

287
strikes’, Washington Post, (13 March 2017).
16. Gordon Johnston of Pentagon’s Joint Forces Command quoted in Singer, Wired for
War: 63.
17. Remarks by Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work at the Center for New American
Security Defense Forum, 14 Dec. 2015. Available: https://www.defense.gov/News/Speeches/
Speech-View/Article/634214/cnas-defense-forum. See also James R. McGrath, ‘Twenty-First
Century Information Warfare and the Third Offset Strategy’, Joint Forces Quarterly 82
(2016): 16–23.
18. Louis A. Del Monte, Nanoweapons: A Growing Threat to Humanity (Lincoln, NE: Po-
tomac Books, 2017).
19. For a sceptical take, see Christopher Coker, Future War (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2015), 100–105.
20. These two paragraphs draw upon Mary L. Cummings, Artificial Intelligence and the
Future of Warfare, Research Paper (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, Jan.
2017).
21. ‘Flight of the Drones: Why the Future of Air Power Belongs to Unmanned Systems’,
The Economist, 8 Oct. 2011. Matthew Rosenberg and John Markoff, ‘At Heart of U.S. Strat-
egy, Weapons That Can Think’, New York Times, 26 October 2016. A Terminator-like ma-
chine was said to be a decade away.
22. Thomas G. Mahnken, Technology and the American Way of War Since 1945 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
23. Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum, The Future of Violence–Robots and Germs,
Hackers and Drones: Confronting the New Age of Threat (New York: Basic Books, 2015).
24. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, Swarming and the Future of Conflict, (Santa Mon-
ica: RAND Corporation, 2005).
25. Scharre.
26. David Kilcullen, Blood Year: Islamic State and the Failures of the War on Terror (Lon-
don: Hurst 2016).
27. Michael O’Hanlon, The Future of Land Warfare (Washington DC: Brookings Institu-
tion, 2015) 163–4.
28. Sharon Weinberger, The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the Penta-
gon Agency That Changed the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017) 496.
29. President Bush, Addresses the 89th Annual National Convention of the American Le-
gion, Reno, Nevada, 28 Aug. 2007.
30. President Barack Obama, ‘Remarks by the President’, Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lake-
hurst, NJ, 15 Dec. 2014. For Obama, the moment of truth had come in Syria in 2013 when,
despite the Assad regime having apparently crossed a ‘red line’ he had set when it used chem-
ical weapons, he decided not to intervene in the conflict. Jeffrey Goldberg, ‘The Obama Doc-
trine’, The Atlantic Monthly, April 2016. Available: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/
archive/2016/04/the-obama-doctrine/471525.
31. Patrick Porter, The Global Village Myth: Distance, War, and the Limits of Power (Lon-
don: Hurst, 2015).
32. The classic analysis of raiding strategies is found in Archer Jones, The Art of War in the
Western World (Urbana and Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001).
33. Efraim Inbar and Eitan Shamir, ‘What after counter-insurgency?’ International Affairs
92.6 (2016): 1427–1441.
34. Bernard I. Finel, ‘An Alternative to COIN’, Armed Forces Journal, (February 2010)
http://armedforcesjournal.com/an-alternative-to-coin.
35. Peter Cole and Brian McQuinn, eds, The Libyan Revolution and Its Aftermath, (Oxford:

288
Oxford University Press, 2015).
36. H. R. McMaster, ‘Discussing the Continuities of War and the Future of Warfare: The
Defense Entrepreneurs Forum’, Small Wars Journal (2014). McMaster became President
Trump’s National Security Advisor in February 2017.
37. Developments of this sort loom large in Coker, Future War.
38. P. W. Singer and August Cole, ‘How to Write About World War III: Can Fiction Help
Prevent Another Conflict Between Great Powers?’ The Atlantic Monthly, 30 June 2015. Also
see P. W. Singer and August Cole, Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War (New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 2015).
39. ‘Chronicle of a war foretold: The story of a conflict between America and China makes
a fine example of future-war fiction’, The Economist, 27 June 2015. Available: http://www.
economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21656124-story-conflict-between-america-and-china-
makes-fine-example-future-war.
40. August Cole, ed., War Stories from the Future (Washington DC: The Atlantic Council
Art of Future Warfare Project, 2015). Available: http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/images/pub
lications/War_Stories_from_the_Future.pdf. General Martin. Dempsey, the former Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, praised the work, noting how the stuff of science fiction in the
past, such as directed energy weapons, electromagnetic pulse, and autonomous warfare, were
beginning to materialize. ‘Science fiction allows us to model future possibilities and explore
the practical and tactical possibilities of emerging or future technologies.’

289
CHAPTER 23
1. Fukuyama, The End of History 148.
2. Julia Dunn, ‘Los Angeles Crips and Bloods: Past and Present’, Poverty & Prejudice:
Gangs of All Color, Stanford University Edge. Available: https://web.stanford.edu/class/
e297c/poverty_prejudice/gangcolor/lacrips.htm
3. Newman, ‘Conflict research and the ‘Decline’ in Civil wars’, 263.
4. Wendy MacClinchy, ‘Violence Today’, States of Fragility (Paris: OECD, 2016) 31-67,
and Krause, ‘From Armed Conflict to Political Violence’.
5. Lothar Brock et al., Fragile States: Violence and the Failure of Intervention (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2012).
6. United Nations, ‘The World’s Cities in 2016’. Available: http://www.un.org/en/
development/desa/population/publications/pdf/urbanization/the_worlds_cities_in_2016_data_
booklet.pdf
7. Robert Muggah, ‘Fixing Fragile Cities: Solutions for Urban Violence and Poverty’, For-
eign Affairs (2015): https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/africa/2015-01-15/fixing-fragile-
cities; Robert Muggah, Fragile Cities Rising (Global Observatory, International Peace Insti-
tute, 2013); and João Pontes Nogueira, From Fragile States to Fragile Cities: Redefining
Spaces of Humanitarian Practices, HASOW Discussion Paper 12, Oct. 2014. Available:
https://igarape.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/From-Fragile-States-to-Fragile-Cities.pdf
8. Coker, Future War 189. The quote comes from Mike Davis.
9. Richard J. Norton, ‘Feral Cities’, Naval War College Review 56.4 (2003): 97–106.
10. Jennifer M. Hazen, ‘Understanding gangs as armed groups’, International Review of the
Red Cross (2010): 369–386.
11. David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
12. Chief of Staff of the Army, Strategic Studies Group, Megacities and the United States
Army Preparing for a Complex and Uncertain Future, June 2014. Available: https://www.
army.mil/e2/c/downloads/351235.pdf.
13. Puri, Fighting and Negotiating with Armed Groups.
14. Phil Williams, ‘Transnational Criminal Organizations and International Security’, Sur-
vival 36.1 (1994): 96–113, and Moises Naim, ‘Mafia States: Organised Crime Takes Office’,
Foreign Affairs 91:3 (2012): 100–111.
15. Robert Muggah, ‘A War by Any Other Name’, Small Wars Journal, (2017).
16. Phil Williams, ‘The Terrorism Debate Over Mexican Drug Trafficking Violence’, Ter-
rorism and Political Violence, 24:2, (2012) 259–278. Cockayne concluded, after looking at
the American and Sicilian mafias, that their conflicts were properly understood as war. James
Cockayne, Hidden Power: The Strategic Logic of Organised Crime (London: Hurst, 2016).
17. Michael T. Klare, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008).
18. Pavel Baev, Russian Energy Policy and Military Power: Putin’s Quest for Greatness
(London: Routledge, 2008).
19. Jeff D. Colgan, ‘Fueling the Fire: Pathways from Oil to War’, International Security
38.2 (2013): 147–80.
20. Tim Boersma, ‘The end of the Russian energy weapon (that arguably was never there)’,
Brookings, online, 5 Mar. 2015. Available: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-
chaos/2015/03/05/the-end-of-the-russian-energy-weapon-that-arguably-was-never-there.
21. Roger J. Stern, ‘Oil Scarcity Ideology in US Foreign Policy, 1908–97’, Security Studies

290
25.2 (2016): 214–257.
22. Rosemary A. Kelani, ‘The Petroleum Paradox: Oil, Coercive Vulnerability, and Great
Power Behavior’, Security Studies 25.2 (2016): 181–213, and Llewelyn Hughes and Austin
Long, ‘Is There an Oil Weapon? National Security Implications of Changes in the Structure
of the International Oil Market’, International Security 39.3 (2014/15): 152–189.
23. Emily Meierding, ‘Dismantling the Oil Wars Myth’, Security Studies 25.2 (2016): 258-
288
24. Thomas F Homer-Dixon, ‘Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict: Evidence
from Cases’, International Security 19.1(1994): 5–40. See also his Environment, Scarcity,
and Violence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
25. For a bleak example see Harald Welzer, Climate Wars: What People Will Be Killed for
in the 21st Century, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012).
26. Ban Ki Moon, ‘A Climate Culprit in Darfur’, Washington Post, (16 June 2007) http://
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/15/AR2007061501857.html
27. Bradford Plummer, ‘Global Warring’, New Republic, 20 Nov. 2009.
28. Henk-Jan Brinkman and Cullen S. Hendrix, ‘Food Insecurity and Violent Conflict:
Causes, Consequences, and Addressing the Challenges’, World Food Programme, July 2011.
29. Julie Hirschfeld Davis, Mark Landler, and Coral Davenport, ‘Obama on Climate
Change: The Trends Are “Terrifying”’, New York Times, 8 Sept. 2016. https://www.nytimes.
com/2016/09/08/us/politics/obama-climate-change.html?_r=0.
30. Presidential Memorandum—Climate Change and National Security, (The White
House: Office of the Press Secretary, (21 September 2016) https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-
press-office/2016/09/21/presidential-memorandum-climate-change-and-national-security.
31. Implications for US National Security of Anticipated Climate Change, NIC WP 2016-
01(Washington DC: National Intelligence Council 21, Sept. 2016).
32. A. T. Wolf, ‘Conflict and Cooperation Along International Waterways’ Water Policy,
1:2 (1998), 251; Nils Petter Gleditsch, ‘Armed conflict and the environment: A critique of the
literature’, Journal of Peace Research 35.3 (1998): 363–380.
33. Halvard Buhaug, ‘Climate not to blame for African civil wars’, Proceedings of the Na-
tional Academy of Sciences 107.1 (2010):16477–16482.
34. Wenche Hauge and Tanja Ellingsen, ‘Beyond environmental scarcity: Causal pathways
to conflict’, Journal of Peace Research 35.3 (1998): 299–317; Vally Koubi, Gabriele Spilker,
Tobias Böhmelt and Thomas Bernauer, “Do natural resources matter for interstate and in-
trastate armed conflict?”, Journal of Peace Research 51 (2014): 227; and Mark Notaras,
‘Does Climate Change Cause Conflict?’ Our World, 27 Nov. 2009, online. Available: https://
ourworld.unu.edu/en/does-climate-change-cause-conflict.
35. Peter Gleick, ‘Water, Drought, Climate Change, and Conflict in Syria’, Weather, Cli-
mate, and Society (2014).
36. Williams, ‘Continuity and Change in War’, 37–8; Discussed in Human Security Report
Project. Human Security Report 2012: Sexual Violence, Education, and War, Vancouver:
Human Security Press, 2012, 195–7.

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CHAPTER 24
1. Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War (London: Penguin, 1972) 407.
2. Major General Bob Scales, Scales on War (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press,
2016) 37.
3. Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance
(Washington DC: NDU Press Book, 1996).
4. On the role of scenarios, with some examples, see Michael F. Oppenheimer, Pivotal
countries, alternate futures: using scenarios to manage American strategy (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2016).
5. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Vintage, 1988).
6. See George Friedman and Meredith Lebard, The Coming War with Japan (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1991).
7. James Fallows, ‘Is Japan the Enemy?’ New York Review of Books, 30 May 1991. http://
www.nybooks.com/articles/1991/05/30/is-japan-the-enemy.
8. Michael Crichton, Rising Sun (New York: Knopf, 1992).
9. Tom Clancy, Debt of Honor (New York: Putnam, 1994). The book came largely to be
remembered because—before 9/11—it included a crazed Japanese pilot flying his Boeing 747
into Capitol Hill while Congress was in a special session.
10. George Friedman and Meredith LeBard, The Future of War: Power, Technology and
American World Dominance in the Twenty-first Century, (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin,
19980, 102, 419.
11. George Friedman, The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (New York:
Anchor Books, 2010).
12. Caspar Weinberger and Peter Schweizer, The Next War, foreword by Lady Thatcher
(Washington DC: Regnery, 1998).
13. Jed Babbin and Edward Timperlake, Showdown: Why China Wants War with the
United States (Washington DC: Regnery, 2006). For a more moderate scenario see also Ted
Galen Carpenter, America’s Coming War with China: A Collision Course Over Taiwan (New
York: Palgrave, 2005).
14. Geoffrey Till, Seapower: A Guide for the Twenty-First Century, 3rd Edition, (London:
Routledge, 2013); Peter Haynes, Toward a New Maritime Strategy: American Naval Thinking
in the Post-Cold War Era, (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2015).
15. Sam J. Tangredi, Anti-Access Warfare: Countering A2/AD Strategies, (Annapolis, MD:
Naval Institute Press; 2013).
16. Stephen Biddle and Ivan Oelrich, ‘Future Warfare in the Western Pacific: Chinese An-
tiaccess/ Area Denial, US Air/Sea Battle and Command of the Commons in East Asia’, Inter-
national Security, 41:1 (2016)7–48.
17. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson, ‘Deconstructing A2AD’, The Na-
tional Interest, (October 2016), http://nationalinterest.org/feature/chief-naval-operations-adm-
john-richardson-deconstructing-17918. Paul Kennedy made these points in a preface to a new
edition of his classic The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, (London: Penguin, 2017).
18. Andrew F. Krepinevich, 7 Deadly Scenarios: A Military Futurist Explores War in the
21st Century (New York: Bantam Dell, 2007).
19. David A. Shlapak and Michael Johnson, Reinforcing Deterrence on NATO’s Eastern
Flank: Wargaming the Defense of the Baltics (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2016).
20. General Sir Richard Shirreff, War with Russia (London: Coronet, 2016). Also his arti-
cle on this subject in The Daily Mail, available: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-

292
3601918/Why-war-Russia-year-apocalyptic-vision-British-General-Nato-chief-threatened-
sack-blasting-Tory-defence-cuts.html#ixzz4ADrCHKi7.
21. Douglas Cohn, World War 4 (Washington DC: The Lyons Press, 2016).
22. Cohn 194.
23. Peter Schwartz, Inevitable Surprises: A Survival Guide for the 21st Century (New
York: Free Press, 2003). His view was affected by a very gloomy reading of the impact of the
AIDS pandemic, which was one area where things did not continue as badly as they had
started.
24. Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the
Global Nuclear Weapons Conspiracy, (London: Atlantic Books, 2007).
25. Graham Allison, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, (New
York: Henry Holt, 2004), p. 15. Matthew Bunn, ‘A Mathematical Model of the Risk of Nu-
clear Terrorism’, Annals, AAPSS, 607:1 (September 2006), 103-120, concluded that there was
a 29 percent probability of an act of nuclear terrorism over the coming decade. For a calm as-
sessment of the risks of bioterrorism, appearing just after Allison’s book, see Jeanne
Guillemin, Biological Weapons: From the Invention of State-Sponsored Programs to Contem-
porary Terrorism, (New York Columbia University Press, 2005). On radiological weapons
see Charles Ferguson and Michelle Smith, ‘Assessing Radiological Weapons: Attack Meth-
ods and Estimated Effects’, Defence Against Terrorism Review, 2:2 (2009), 15–34.
26. Michael Levi, On Nuclear Terrorism, (Cambridge, Mass; Harvard University Press,
2007), p.141. There is an interesting debate between Allison and Levi in 2007 ‘How Likely is
a Nuclear Terrorist attack on the United States?’ http://www.cfr.org/weapons-of-mass-
destruction/likely-nuclear-terrorist-attack-united-states/p13097.
27. Joe Cirincione, ‘Nuclear terrorist threat bigger than you think’, CNN, 1 April 2016,
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/04/01/opinions/nuclear-terrorism-threat-cirincione/; Martin
Malin, Matthew Bunn, Nickolas Roth and William H. Tobey. “Will the Nuclear Security
Summit Help Stop Terrorists from Getting the Bomb?” The National Interest, 31 March 2016.
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/will-the-nuclear-security-summit-help-stop-terrorists-
15644?page=show.
28. Graham Allison, Destined for War: America, China, and Thucydides’s Trap, (New
York: Houghton Mifflin, 2017), xvii.
29. Edward N. Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Soviet Union (New York: St. Martin’s,
1983). Amalrik had also anticipated a war with China.
30. Kiyoshi Takenaka, ‘Abe sees World War One echoes in Japan-China tensions’,
Reuters, 23 Jan. 2014. Available: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-china-idUSBRE
A0M08G20140123.
31. ‘India and China, A Himalayan rivalry’, The Economist, 19 August 2010.
32. Edward N. Luttwak, The Rise of China vs The Logic of Strategy (Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press, 2012). For an argument that China is bound to become the world’s
leading power see Gideon Rachman, Easternisation: War and Peace in the Asian Century,
(London: Bodley Head, 2016).
33. The successive documents can be found on the Director of National Intelligence’s web-
page: https://www.dni.gov/index.php/about/organization/national-intelligence-council-global-
trends.
34. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Global Trends 2010, revised edition
(Washington DC: National Intelligence Council, February 1997). Available: https://www.dni.
gov/index.php/about/organization/national-intelligence-council-global-trends/global-trends-
2010. On the influence of ‘black swan’ as unexpected events see Nassim Nicholas Taleb,
Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, (London: Penguin, 2008).

293
 35. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Global Trends 2015: A Dialogue About
the Future with Nongovernment Experts (Washington DC: National Intelligence Council, De-
cember 2000).
36. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Mapping the Global Future: Report of
the National Intelligence Council’s 2020 Project (Washington DC: National Intelligence
Council, December 2004).
37. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed
World, (Washington DC: National Intelligence Council, November 2008).
38. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds
(Washington DC: National Intelligence Council, December 2012).
39. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Global trends: Paradoxes of Progress
(Washington DC: National Intelligence Council, January 2017).

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CHAPTER 25
1. Friedman was recalling his time stuck in an Israeli outpost in Southern Lebanon in the
late 1990s. Matti Friedman, Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin,
2016) 222.
2. John Stoessinger, Why Nations Go to War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). For a
similar thought see Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War (New York: Free Press, 1988) 246.
3. Dominic Tierney and Dominic Johnson, ‘The Rubicon Theory of War How the Path to
Conflict Reaches the Point of No Return’, International Security 36.1 (2011): 7-40.
4. David Betz, Carnage and Connectivity: Landmarks in the Decline of Conventional Mili-
tary Power (London: Hurst, 2015) 5.
5. H. R. McMaster, ‘Discussing the Continuities of War and the Future of Warfare’.
6. Colin S. Gray, Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicholson, 2005).
7. Richard Rosencrance and Steven Miller, ed., The Next Great War? The Roots of World
War 1 and the Risk of U.S.-China Conflict, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). See also
David C. Gompert, Hans Binnendijk, Bonny Lin, Blinders, Blunders, and Wars (Santa Mon-
ica, Calif: RAND Corporation, 2014).
8. James Goodby and George P. Shultz, eds., The War That Must Never Be Fought (Stan-
ford: Hoover Press, 2015).
9. Brad Roberts, The Case for U.S. Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century (Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 2016).
10. President Putin’s September 2014 comment is noted in Tom Parfitt, ‘Ukraine crisis:
Putin’s nuclear threats are a struggle for pride and status’, The Telegraph, 26 Sept. 2014.
Available: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/11064978/Ukraine-
crisis-Putins-nuclear-threats-are-a-struggle-for-pride-and-status.html.
11. Mark Fitzpatrick, The World After: Proliferation, Deterrence and Disarmament if the
Nuclear Taboo is Broken (Paris: IFRI, 2009).
12. Philip Bobbitt, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-first Century, (London:
Allen Lane, 2008).
13. Max Boot, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to
Today (New York: Gotham, 2006), and Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the
Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016).
14. Hal Brands, ‘Paradoxes of the Gray Zone’, Foreign Policy Research Institute (2016);
http://www.fpri.org/article/2016/02/paradoxes-gray-zone/ and Frank G. Hoffman, ‘The Con-
temporary Spectrum of Conflict: Protracted, Gray Zone, Ambiguous, and Hybrid Modes of
War’, Heritage Foundation Index of Military Power (2016): 25–36.
15. David Rothkopf, ‘The Cool War’, Foreign Policy (2013). http://foreignpolicy.com/
2013/02/20/the-cool-war/ Also see Noah Feldman Cool War: The Future of Global Competi-
tion (New York: Random House, 2013).
16. The stream of books on future war is unlikely to dry up. As this book went to press, two
new books appeared. Paul Cornish and Kingsley Donaldson, both with military and think-
tank experience, published 2020: World of War (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2017), dedi-
cated to the memory of Sir John Hackett and taking his The Third World War as their starting
point, and with a similar short-term focus. The authors looked at a number of scenarios: the
challenges posed by Russia, and then by climate change, resource scarcity and health security,
before offering a number of scenarios, covering the most troubled regions, then terrorism and
cyber security before considering an ‘omni-scenario’—the possibility that a number of these

295
challenges might arrive together. The scenarios were intended to be illustrative not predictive,
using the worst cases to help identify areas of strategic risk and possibilities for their manage-
ment. Former Air Force general Robert Latiff’s Future War: Preparing for the New Global
Battlefield, (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2107) compared the pace of technological change and
the complexity of security challenges to the tendency to resort to platitudes and flag-waving.
His book was a demand for more honesty from politicians and engagement from the public.

296
 INDEX

A Q Khan network, 271

A2/AD. See Anti-Access/Area Denial
Abe, Shinzo, 273
ABM. See anti-ballistic missile system
ABM Treaty, 91
accidental war, nuclear war and, 76–77, 231–233
Aeneid (Virgil), ix–x
Aesop’s Fables, ix
Afghanistan, xx, 169, 174, 207, 281
casualties and, 127, 131
cyberwar and, 237
guerrilla warfare and, 190, 192–193
Islamism and, 179–180
US and, 183–184, 192–193, 208
See also Taliban
Africa
casualties and, 149
civil war and, 262
colonialism and, 150–152
democracy and, 152
ethnic conflict and, 158–160
peace and, 218–219
peacekeeping and, 170–173
regional war zones and, 152
resource wars in, 263
See also Central African Republic; Chad; Congo; Darfur; Democratic Republic of the
Congo; Egypt; Eritrea; Ivory Coast; Liberia; Libya; Nigeria; Organization of African
Unity; Somalia; South Sudan; Sudan; Tunisia
African Union, 170
See also Organization of African Unity
An Agenda for Peace (Boutros-Ghali), 147
aid to the civil power, intervention and, 168
Aidid, Mohamed Farah, 179
aircraft, 19, 278
civilians and, 20–21, 55–56, 59–60, 200
knockout blow and, 55–57
naval, 64

297
 Syria and, 206
territory and, 248
US and, 240–241
World War I and, 41, 55
World War II and, 64, 186
See also balloons; drones; Zeppelins
Algeria, 142, 204
alliances, 27, 113, 115, 152, 281
See also North Atlantic Treaty Organization; Warsaw Pact
Allison, Graham, 271–273
Amalrik, Andrei, 104–105
American Civil War, 6, 9, 16, 36–37, 128–129
machine guns and, 14
war, laws of, and, 30
Amin, Idi, 166
ancient hatreds thesis, 155–156
Angell, Norman, 42, 51
Angola, 159
anthropology, 195
Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD), 268–269
anti-ballistic missile system (ABM), 91
Anticipation of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress on Human Life and
Thought (Wells), 18–19, 21
Apocalypse Now (film), 176
Arab Spring, 219, 261
Arab-Israeli War, 185, 259
Arendt, Hannah, 123
Armenians, 125
Armitage, David, 145
arms dealers, 25
The Arms Race: A Programme for World Disarmament (Noel-Baker), 84
Arquilla, John, 227–228, 237, 247
The Art of War (Jomini), 8
artificial intelligence, 244–246
See also driverless cars
artillery, 3, 14
al-Assad, Bashar, 206, 260
Astaire, Fred, 76
atomic bombs, 69–71, 73, 279
attrition, 15–16
Augustine, Norm, 240
Austerlitz, Battle of, 10
Australia, 35
Austria, 7, 10, 70
Austro-Prussian War, 7

Babbin, Jed, 267

Baden-Powell, Robert, 17–18
Baker, James A., III, 106

298
Balkan Ghosts (Kaplan), 155
Balkans, 12, 141, 160, 186
See also Bosnia; Croatia; Serbia; Yugoslavia
balloons, 5, 19
Ban Ki-moon, 261
Bangladesh, 165–166
barbarism, 200–208
Barker, Martin, 198–199
Barot, Odysse, 115
The Battle of Dorking (Chesney), 4–7, 11, 88, 94, 96, 252
Beirut, 169, 178, 191
Belgium, 40, 61, 159
Bellona, x
Ben Ali, Zine al-Abidine, 261
Berlin Wall, 86
von Bernhardi, Friedrich, 44
The Better Angels of Our Nature (Pinker), xi–xv, 131
bin Laden, Osama, 179–180, 182–183
von Bismarck, Otto, 3, 37
Black and White (journal), 12
Blair, Tony, 168, 194
Blight, James, 92
blitzkrieg, 62
Bloch, Ivan Stanislavovich, 15–16, 22–23, 25, 35–36, 115
Boer War, 15, 23, 35, 38–39
Boko Haram, 129, 220
le Bon, Gustave, 22, 56
Bosnia, 144, 154–156, 168–169, 202, 217
Boulding, Kenneth, 111–112
Boutros-Ghali, Boutros, 147
Boy Scouts, 17–18
The Boys in Company C (film), 176–177
Brahimi, Lakhdar, 174
Brazil, 257–258
Brezhnev, Leonid, 99
Brians, Paul, 95
Britain. See United Kingdom
Brown, Wendy, 212
Bryan, C. D. B., 177
Bull, Hedley, 84–85, 92
Burdick, Eugene, 77–78
Burundi, 159, 160
Bush, George H. W., 105–106, 119, 136, 179
Bush, George W., 119, 194, 249
Byron (Lord), 9
Bywater, Hector, 63–64

Callwell, Charles, 34
Cambodia, 126, 165, 173

299
Canada, 121–122
Čapek, Karel, 233
capitalism, colonialism and, 35
capitalist peace, 139–141
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 125–126
Carr, Edward Hallett, 52–53, 109
Carter, Jimmy, 100–101
casualties, 124
Afghanistan and, 127, 131
Africa and, 149
American Civil War and, 128–129
China and, 125
civilians and, 126–127, 144
counter-insurgency and, 206–207
COW and, 126–127, 131
disease and, 126–129
foreigners causing, 207
Germany and, 125, 130
Gulf War and, 127, 131–132
information technology and, 188–189
insurgencies and, 129, 131–132
Iraq War and, 131–133, 199
Japan and, 125
Russia and, 125
sources for, 128–133
Soviet Union and, 130–131
Syria and, 133
US and, 127, 188–190
Vietnam War and, 178
war, academic study of, 116–120
World War I and, 127
World War II and, 127, 129–131
cavalry, 15
Central African Republic, 171
Chad, 161
Chamberlain, Neville, 52
Charter 77, 101–102
Chechnya, 191, 205–207
Cheney, Richard, 115
Chesney, George Tomkyns, 4–7, 11, 17, 88, 94, 96, 252
China, xvi, xxi, 118, 125, 279, 281
future war and, 250–252, 266–270
Soviet Union and, 121–122, 272
US and, 122, 266–270, 272–273, 275–276
See also Sino-Japanese War, Second; Tiananmen Square
Chomsky, Noam, 115
Churchill, Winston, 86
Cimino, Michael, 176
cities, 190–192, 254–258

300
 See also megacities
civil war, xiv–xv, xviii, xx–xxi
Africa and, 262
civilians and, 200–201
classical model of, 255
after Cold War, 108, 142–149
colonialism and, 149–152
COW and, 116–119, 146
crime and, 164, 281
democracy and, 141
economic distress and, 160–164
ethnicity and, 154–160
interstate war and, 48, 144–145
intervention and, 165–174, 215–220, 281
legitimate force, monopoly of and, 148–149
Libya and, xv
natural resources and, 161–164
negotiated settlements and, 217
quantitative methods and, 146–147
self-determination and, 156, 158
Syria and, xv–xvi, 133, 219, 262–263
war, academic study of and, 145–149
Yugoslavia, former and, 154–157
See also American Civil War; national liberation, wars of; New Wars; People’s Wars; Sri
Lankan Civil War
civilians, xix, 48–49, 54
aircraft and, 20–21, 55–56, 59–60, 200
American Civil War and, 36–37
Boer War and, 38–39
casualties and, 126–127, 144
civil war and, 200–201
colonialism and, 36, 38–39, 200–201
counter-insurgency and, 200–208
Franco-Prussian War and, 37
Germany and, 40, 59, 67
human rights and, 201–202
information technology, 188–190
intervention and, 202–203
Iraq War and, 199–200
knockout blow and, 56–57
targeted killing and, 243
war, laws of, and, 32–33
World War I and, 40
World War II and, xx, 67
See also collateral damage
civilisation, war and, xiv
civilisational conflict, 153–154
See also ancient hatreds thesis
Clancy, Tom, 96–98, 181, 188, 250, 266

301
Clark, Christopher, 43
Clarke, I. F., 11, 58
The Clash of Civilizations (Huntington), 154, 181
class, 17–18, 22–23
von Clausewitz, Carl, 8, 38
climate change, 260–263
Clinton, Bill, 155, 179
Clinton, Hillary, 227, 267
The Clipper of the Clouds (Verne), 19
Close, Robert, 95
Coal and Steel Community, 140
cobalt bombs, 73–75
Cockayne, James, 258
Cohn, Douglas, 270
Coker, Christopher, 256
Cold War, xi, xx, 73–78, 81–83, 87, 104–106
civil war after, 108, 142–149
conventional forces and, 93–94
democracy and, 134–135, 141
deterrence and, 79–80, 84–86, 92–94
fiction and, 94–98
great-power war after, 108, 110, 143, 274, 279
human rights and, 99–103
MID and, 121
outer space and, 89
realism and, 109–110
technological advancement and, 88–89
US after, 136–137
See also ABM Treaty; flexible response; strategic defense initiative
Cole, August, 250–252
collateral damage, 201
Collier, Paul, 162–163
Colomb, Philip, 12
Colombia, 257–258
colonialism
Africa and, 150–152
capitalism and, 35
civil war and, 149–152
civilians and, 36, 38–39, 200–201
COW and, 116–117
France and, 142
Hague Conventions and, 34
state-building and, 214
technology and, 34
UK and, 34–35
war, laws of, and, 34
World War II and, 142
See also decolonisation
Comaroff, John, xix

302
The Coming War with Japan (Friedman and Lebard), 265–266
The Command of the Air (Douhet), 56
commerce, xii–xiii
See also economic interdependence
communism, democracy and, 134–135
concentration camps, 38–39
See also Gulag
Conference of Experts for the Study of Possible Measures Which Might Be Helpful in Pre-
venting Surprise Attack and for the Preparation of a Report thereon to Governments, 81–
83
Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), 99–100, 137
See also Helsinki Final Act
confidence in victory, 278
Congo, 158–160, 169
See also Democratic Republic of the Congo
Conrad, Joseph, 27
contraband, 161
conventional forces, 93–94, 96–97
Cool War, 283
Coppola, Francis Ford, 176
Correlates of War (COW), 115, 120–122, 138
casualties and, 126–127, 131
civil war and, 116–119, 146
colonialism and, 116–117
extra-systemic wars and, 116–117
interstate war and, 116–119
cosmopolitanism, xii–xiii
counter-insurgency, 190–197
casualties and, 206–207
civilians and, 200–208
failed states and, 211–212
host-nation government and, 208
human rights and, 195
information warfare and, 228–229
politics and, 194–196
Cousins, Norman, 114–115
COW. See Correlates of War
Crane, Conrad, 194
Creasy, Edward, 8–9
van Creveld, Martin, 143
Crichton, Michael, 266
crime, 164, 256–258, 281–284
See also drug trafficking; gangs
Crimean War, 4, 127
Croatia, 154, 156, 168, 202
The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (Le Bon), 22
crowds, reason and, 22
crystal ball effect, 92
CSCE. See Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe

303
Cuba, 159
Cuban Missile Crisis, 77, 86, 90, 92
Cultural Revolution, 122
culture, 108
cyberwar, xxi, 230–231, 283
Afghanistan and, 237
deterrence and, 237
drones and, 246
fiction and, 232–235, 269–270
nuclear war and, 232–233
Pearl Harbor and, 235
Russia and, 227, 236–238
strategic and tactical effects of, 237–238
surprise attack and, 235
terrorism and, 247
US and, 232–237
Czechoslovakia, 52, 99
See also Charter 77

Darfur, 261, 263

DARPA. See Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
Davies, David, 53
Death Star, 239–240
death tolls. See casualties
Debt of Honor (Clancy), 266
decisive battle, xviii–xix, 2–7, 9–10
Napoleonic Wars and, 8
See also knockout blow
declaration of war, Hague Conventions and, 28
decolonisation, 142–143, 149–152
Deerhunter (film), 176
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 248–249
“Delicate Balance of Terror” (Wohlstetter, A.), 87
democracy, 136
Africa and, 152
barbarism and, 203
civil war and, 141
Cold War and, 134–135, 141
communism and, 134–135
CSCE and, 137
Iraq War and, 194
nationalism and, 138, 141
Russia and, 139
state-building and, 213
war, academic study of and, 137–140
democratic peace, 137–141
Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), 160–161, 170–171, 173–174
Denmark, 7
Dennis, Anthony, 181

304
deterrence
Cold War and, 79–80, 84–86, 92–94
conventional forces and, 93–94
cyberwar and, 237
nuclear stalemate and, 84–86, 92
nuclear war and, 79–80, 200
See also crystal ball effect
Deutch, John, 235
diamonds, 159, 161–164
dirty bombs, 271–272
disaggregation, academic study of war and, 118–123
disarmament, 44–46, 49–50, 58, 83–84
disease, 126–129
See also HIV-AIDS
Disease and Non-Battle Injury (DNBI), 127
Dobrynin, Anatoly, 103
doomsday machine, 77–79, 232
Douhet, Giulio, 56
Doyle, Arthur Conan, 40
Doyle, Michael, 137
Dr. Strangelove (film), 77–80, 231–232
DRC. See Democratic Republic of the Congo
driverless cars, 246
drones, 241–253
See also artificial intelligence; driverless cars
drought, 261, 263
drug trafficking, 254, 256–258
Dulles, John Foster, 98
Dumas, Samuel, 125–126
Dunant, Henry, 29
Dunlap, Charles, 201–202
Durant, Ariel, 114–115
Durant, Will, 114–115
Durdin, F. Tillman, 60

Eagleburger, Lawrence, 155

East Germany, 82, 86, 103
East Timor, 173
economic distress, civil war and, 160–164
economic interdependence, 7, 25, 42–43, 139, 163–164
Egypt, 75, 219, 261, 279
Einstein, Albert, 71
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 81
El Salvador, 121
11 September 2001, xx, 119, 148, 180, 182–183
Eliot, T. S., 74–75
Emancipation Proclamation, 30–31
energy crisis, 250–252, 260–263
See also resource wars

305
energy resources, Russia and, 259–260
Entente Cordiale, 13
environmental security, 260–263
Eritrea, 204, 215
ethnic cleansing, Yugoslavia, former and, 154–155
ethnic conflict, 153–160
ethnicity, 108, 154–160
EU. See European Union
Europe Without Defence? (Close), 95
European Union (EU), 140, 270
extra-systemic wars, COW and, 116–117

failed states, 147–148, 210–212, 274

See also fragile states
Fail-Safe (Burdick and Wheeler), 77–78, 231–232
Falklands War, 116
fallout, nuclear war and, 72–74
Fallows, James, 265–266
Fashoda Incident, 13
Fazal, Tanisha, 127
fiction, xvii, 4–7, 11–13, 16–21, 58–59, 266–267
Cold War and, 94–98
cyberwar and, 232–235, 269–270
nuclear war and, 74–76, 94–98, 232–233
Vietnam War and, 176–178
war, academic study of and, 87–88
Field Manual on counter-insurgency (FM-3-24) (document), 194–196, 203, 212
The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World: from Marathon to Waterloo (Creasy), 8–9
film
Iraq War and, 198–199
Vietnam War and, 176–177, 198–199
“Final Solution to the Jewish Problem” (document), 62–63
First Matabele War, 14
first strike. See surprise attack
flexible response, 94
Fonda, Jane, 177
food insecurity, 260–262
Football War, 121
foreigners, casualties caused by, 207
former Yugoslavia. See Yugoslavia
Fourteen Points, 45
Fox, William, 128
fragile states, 144, 148, 255
France, 2–3, 40–41, 60–62, 142, 172
See also Crimean War; Entente Cordiale; Fashoda Incident; Franco-Prussian War; Paris
Commune; Sedan, Battle of; Vichy regime
Franco-Prussian War, 2–3, 7, 14, 37
Freud, Sigmund, 113
Friedman, George, 265–266

306
Frisch, Otto, 71
Fukuyama, Francis, 134–135, 153–154, 211, 254
The Future of War (Friedman and LeBard), 266
The Future of War in its Technical, Economic and Political Relations (Bloch), 15, 115
future war, 277–278, 279, 284–286
China and, 250–252, 266–270
disaggregation and, 123
Japan and, 265–267
future war (continued)
literature on, xvi–xxi
motivation and, 22
self-determination and, 48
technology and, 14, 264–265, 279
UK and, 5–6, 13
US and, 264–275, 280–281
Wells and, xvii, 18–21, 55, 58, 61, 68–70
World War I and, 54–55
World War II and, 54–55
See also specific topics

Gaddafi, Muammar, 219, 250

Gaddis, John, xi
Galeotti, Mark, 206, 225
Galula, David, 195
Gandhi, Rajiv, 204
gangs, xviii, xxi, 254, 256–258
The Gas War of 1940 (Southwold), 58
Geneva Conventions, 29, 31
genocide, 39, 62–63, 67, 125–127
See also Holocaust; Rwandan genocide
George, Peter, 77–80
Gerasimov, Valery, 224
Germany, 2–3, 279
casualties and, 125, 130
civilians and, 40, 59, 67
genocide and, 39
nationalism and, 51–52
Treaty of Versailles and, 51
war, classical model of, and, 7–8
World War I and, 40–41, 43–46, 138
World War II and, 60–64, 66–67, 118
See also Berlin Wall; blitzkrieg; East Germany; Franco-Prussian War; Herero Revolt;
Nazis; Operation Barbarossa; realpolitik; Sedan, Battle of; West Germany
Germany and the Next War (von Bernhardt), 44
Gettysburg, Battle of, 9–10
Ghost Fleet (Cole and Singer, P.), 250–252
Gibler, Douglas, 140
Gladstone, William, 4, 6–7, 44
Global Trends (report), 273–275

307
von der Goltz, Colmar, 38
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 97–98, 102–106, 130, 281
Gow, James, 156, 157, 202
Gray, Colin, 279
The Great Illusion (Angell), 42, 51
The Great Pacific War (Bywater), 63–64
The Great War in England in 1897 (Le Queux), 12–13
great-power war, xviii, xxi, 7
after Cold War, 108, 110, 143, 274, 279
realism and, 109–110
war, laws of, and, 34
Greece, 142, 169
ancient, 272–273
Greek mythology, ix
Green Berets (film), 176, 198
Greenhill, Kelly, 129
Grey, Edward, 46
grey zone conflicts, 283
Guatemala, 204
Guéhenno, Jean-Marie, 173–174
Guernica, bombing of, 59
guerrilla warfare, 190, 192–193, 203–204
See also irregular forces
Guetzkow, Harold, 112
Gulag, 130–131
Gulf War, 119, 127, 131–132, 167, 187, 201

Habyarimana, Juvénal, 159–160

Hacker, J. David, 128–129, 188
Hackett, John, 94–98
Hague Conventions, 25–28, 30, 34
Haiti, 127
Haldane, Aylmer, 200–201
Hamburger Hill (film), 177
Hamilton, Cicely, 58
Hammarskjöld, Dag, 169
Hart, Basil Liddell, 54, 56, 186
Hart-Rudman Commission, 182
Havel, Václav, 101–102
Hearne, R. P., 55
Helman, Gerald, 147–148
Helsinki Final Act, 99, 101
Herero Revolt, 39
Hersey, John, 72
Hezbollah, 178, 223–224, 249
Hideki Tojo, 66
Hirohito (Emperor), 65
Hiroshima, bombing of, 71–72, 78, 235
Hirshleifer, Jack, 161

308
historians, war, academic study of and, 113, 118
Hitler, Adolf, 51–52, 61, 66–67, 118
HIV-AIDS, 171
Hobbes, Thomas, 145–146
Hobson, John, 35, 44
Hoffman, Frank, 223
Holland, 61
Holman, Brett, 56–57
Holocaust, 126, 279
Holsti, Kalevi, 143
Homer-Dixon, Thomas, 260
Honduras, 121, 257
host-nation government, counter-insurgency and, 208
human rights, 99–103, 137, 195, 201–202
Human Security Project, xii
Hungary, 98, 103
The Hunt for Red October (Clancy), 96–97
Huntington, Samuel, 135, 153–154, 181, 183, 272
Hurd, Douglas, 167
Hurt Locker (film), 198
Hussein, Saddam, 167, 183, 250
hybrid war, 222–229
See also information warfare; Three Block War
hydrogen bombs, 73–74

ICBMs. See intercontinental ballistic missiles

IEDs. See Improvised Explosive Devices
Ignatieff, Michael, 242
Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), 243
In Place of Folly (Cousins), 114
India, 149, 165–166, 261, 273, 281
Indochina, 142
Inevitable Surprises (Schwartz), 270–271
infantry, RMA and, 187–188
information technology, 185–190, 246–247
See also revolution in military affairs
information warfare, 226–229, 283
See also cyberwar
instability, xv, xviii
See also civil war
insurgencies, 129, 131–132, 193–194, 256–258
See also counter-insurgency; irregular forces
The Intelligent Man’s Way to Prevent War (Woolf), 51
intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), 87–88, 90, 246
“The International Anarchy” (Angell), 51
international arbitration, 24, 26
International Committee of the Red Cross, 29, 144, 214
international law, 45–46, 201, 203
International Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO), 117, 126–127

309
Internet, 229, 236, 246–247
The Interpretation of Radium (Soddy), 69
interstate war, xi–xv, 155
civil war and, 48, 144–145
COW and, 116–119
Iraq and, 119
See also great-power war; Militarized Interstates Disputes
intervention, 282
aid to the civil power and, 168
civil war and, 165–174, 215–220, 281
civilians and, 202–203
humanitarian, 214–216
media and, 166–167, 202
peacekeeping and, 169–174
refugees and, 166–167
state sovereignty and, 165–168
US and, 166–167, 176–179
Yugoslavia, former and, 202–203
Yugoslavia and, 167–168
See also responsibility to protect; state-building
interwar peace projects, 49–53
See also Kellogg-Briand Pact; League of Nations; Locarno Treaties
The Invasion of 1910 (Le Queux), 13, 17
Iran, 138–139, 181, 269, 281
See also Stuxnet
Iran-Iraq War, 116, 120
Iraq, xx, 182, 259, 269, 279
interstate war and, 119
Kurds and, 166–167, 169
peacekeeping and, 174
UK and, 200–201
Iraq Body Count, 132
Iraq War, 183–184, 192, 196–197, 250, 280–281
casualties and, 131–133, 199
civilians and, 199–200
democracy and, 194
film and, 198–199
insurgencies and, 193–194
popular support and, 198–199
soldiers and, 199
Sunnis and, 196
UK and, 222
See also Gulf War; Iran-Iraq War; Islamic State of Iraq and Syria
irregular forces, 16–17, 33, 37–38, 143–145, 223
See also guerrilla warfare; insurgencies
Is War Now Impossible? (Bloch), 15
ISIL, 269
ISIS. See Islamic State of Iraq and Syria
Islam, Islamism and, 183

310
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), 119, 248
Islamism, 179–181, 183, 220
Islamist movements, 126, 172, 219, 242, 247, 248, 284
Isoroku Yamamoto, 66
Israel, 149, 236, 242, 249–250, 279
See also Arab-Israeli War; Second Lebanon War
Italy, 59
Ivory Coast, 172

Jackson, Robert, 151

Japan, 273, 281
casualties and, 125
future war and, 265–267
total war and, 67
World War II and, 63–67, 118
See also Hiroshima, bombing of; Nagasaki, bombing of; Pacific War; Russo-Japanese War;
Sino-Japanese War, Second
Jews, Nazis and, xx, 62–63, 126–127
Jihadism. See Islamism
Jomini, Antoine-Henri, 8
Jones, Seth, 207
Jordan, 257
Joseph, Franz, 8

Kabila, Laurent-Desire, 160–161

Kagame, Paul, 160
Kagan, Donald, 114–115
Kahn, Herman, 78–79, 87–88
Kaldor, Mary, 143–144
Kalyvas, Stathis, 195
Kant, Immanuel, 137
Kaplan, Robert, 155, 158
Karem, Abraham, 241
Keegan, John, xi
Keen, David, 164
Kellogg-Briand Pact, 49–50
Kennedy, John F., 86
Kennedy, Paul, 265–266
Khrushchev, Nikita, 82, 86
Kilcullen, David, 228
Kissane, Bill, 145
Kissinger, Henry, 100
Kitchener, Herbert, 38
knockout blow, 55–57, 76, 78–79, 251–252, 276–278
See also blitzkrieg
Korean War, 90, 126–127
Kosovo, 168, 173, 203
Kouchner, Bernard, 173
Kramer, Stanley, 76

311
Krepinevich, Andrew, 269
Krulak, Charles C., 223
Kubrick, Stanley, 77–80
Kurds, 166–167, 169
Kuwait, 166–167, 259, 279

Lansing, Robert, 47
Lasker, Larry, 232–234
lawfare, 201–202
Lawrence, T. E., 195
League of Nations, 46, 49–51, 53
Lebanon, 257
See also Beirut; Hezbollah; Second Lebanon War
Lebard, Meredith, 265–266
Lebensraum, 61
legitimate force, monopoly of, 148–149
Lenin, Vladimir, 35
Leopold II (King), 159
The Lessons of History (Durant, A., and Durant, W.), 114–115
Lettres sur la Philosophie del’Histoire (Barot), 115
Levi, Michael, 272
Levy, Jack, 137
Lewis, Bernard, 181
liberalism, nationalism and, 46–47
See also war, liberal vision of
Liberia, 172
Libya, xv, 174, 219, 250
Lieber, Francis, 30–31, 33
limited war, 30
Lincoln, Abraham, 37
Livermore, Thomas, 128
Locarno Treaties, 49
Long Peace, xi
Low, David, 61
Ludendorff, Erich, 57
Luttwak, Edward, 217, 273
Lyall, Jason, 206–207

MacArthur, Douglas, 90
machine guns, 12, 14
MacMillan, Margaret, 43
MAD. See mutually assured destruction
de Madariaga y Rojo, Salvador, 49–50, 84, 174
Malaysia, 169, 197
Mali, 172, 262
al-Maliki, Nouri, 269
The Man Who Ended War (Godfrey), 20
Manhattan Project, 71
Mao Zedong, 122, 195, 203

312
Master of the World (Verne), 20
Mattis, James, 223
McConnell, Mike, 234
McCune, Emma, 214–215
McFate, Montgomery, 195
McMaster, H. R., 250, 279
McNamara, Robert, 89
media, 166–167, 202, 229
megacities, 255–258
Mein Kampf (Hitler), 52
Meitner, Lise, 71
Mexico, 33, 257, 258
MID. See Militarized Interstates Disputes
militarism, 15, 18, 25
Militarized Interstates Disputes (MID), 119–121
military necessity, laws of war and, 30–31, 33
military preparedness, US and, 270
Milošević, Slobodan, 155–157, 156, 168
Minorities at Risk (report), 117
Mitchell, Billy, 56
modern states, state failure and, 210–211
Molander, Roger, 235
von Moltke, Helmuth, 3, 7, 8, 37, 39
Moore, Gordon, 185
morale, 14–15
Pearl Harbor and, 66
total war and, 56–57
See also motivation
Morgenthau, Hans, 109
Morris, Ian, 216
Morsi, Mohamed, 218–219
Mosul, 219
motivation, future war and, 22
Mousseau, Michael, 140
Mubarak, Hosni, 218, 261
Mueller, John, xi
Muggah, Robert, 256, 258
Munro, Hector (Saki), 23
Museveni, Yoweri, 218
mutually assured destruction (MAD), 89–90, 232

Nagasaki, bombing of, 71–72

Namibia, 161
nanotechnology, 244
Napoleon, 5, 8, 33
Napoleon III, 2
Napoleonic Wars, 4, 8
See also Austerlitz, Battle of
narratives, information warfare and, 228–229

313
national liberation, wars of, 146
national minorities, self-determination and, 47
National Security Agency (NSA), 234
nationalism, 51, 275
democracy and, 138, 141
Germany and, 51–52
liberalism and, 46–47
Yugoslavia, former and, 155–157
nationhood, statehood and, 151
NATO. See North Atlantic Treaty Organization
natural resources, 161–164, 195
See also diamonds; energy resources; oil; resource wars
naval battle, Pacific War and, 63–66
See also submarines
navy, China, 268
navy, US, 63–66, 268
See also Anti-Access/Area Denial
Nazis, xx, 51–52, 62–63, 67, 126–127
See also “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem”; Holocaust
negotiated settlements, civil war and, 217
netwars, 227–228
New Wars, 143
Newman, Edward, 255
Nicholas II (Tsar), 25
Nigeria, 129, 150, 172, 219
Nixon, Richard, 99, 106
Noel-Baker, Philip, 83–85
North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), 232
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 95–96, 140–141
hybrid war and, 226
nuclear war and, 93–94, 97
Warsaw Pact and, 186–187
West Germany and, 82
Yugoslavia and, 168, 202–203
North Korea, 257, 279
state failure and, 210
US and, 120, 182, 236–237, 267–269, 281
Norton, Richard, 256
Norton, Roy, 20
NSA. See National Security Agency
nuclear stalemate, deterrence and, 84–86, 92
nuclear war, xi, xviii, 69–92, 280–281
accidental war and, 76–77, 231–233
conventional forces and, 93–94, 96–97
cyberwar and, 232–233
defence against, 88–89
deterrence and, 79–80, 200
disarmament and, 83–84
fallout and, 72–74

314
 fiction and, 74–76, 94–98, 232–233
knockout blow and, 76, 78–79
NATO and, 93–94, 97
Pearl Harbor and, 82, 90
reason and, 75–76
surprise attack and, 82–83, 86–87, 90
terrorism and, 181, 271–272
total war and, 72
war, abolition of, and, 70
world government and, 83
World War II and, xx
See also atomic bombs; cobalt bombs; Cuban Missile Crisis; dirty bombs; doomsday ma-
chine; hydrogen bombs; intercontinental ballistic missiles; mutual assured destruction

OAU. See Organization of African Unity

Obama, Barack, xvi, 119, 249, 261–262, 269
Obama Administration, drones and, 242–244
O’Hanlon, Michael, 190
oil, 161–163, 259–260
On the Beach (film), 76
On the Beach (Shute), 74
On the Origins of War (Kagan), 114–115
On Thermonuclear War (Kahn), 78–79, 87–88
Oneal, John, 139
Operation Barbarossa, 62, 66, 82, 279
Organization of African Unity (OAU), 150–151
See also African Union
Orwell, George, 68, 105
outer space, Cold War and, 89
Oxfam, 214

Pacific War, 63–66

See also Pearl Harbor
Pakistan, 149, 165–166, 243, 261, 269, 273, 281
See also A Q Khan network
Palestine, 149, 180–181
Panetta, Leon, 235
Paris, Roland, 172–173
Paris Commune, 3, 17
Parkes, Walter, 232, 234
peace, Africa and, 218–219
See also capitalist peace; democratic peace; territorial peace; war, abolishment of
peace movements, 24–26, 111–112
See also Quakers
Peace of Westphalia, 28
peacekeeping
Africa and, 170–173
France and, 172
intervention and, 169–174

315
 Iraq and, 174
UK and, 171–172
UN and, 169–174, 179
Yugoslavia and, 169
See also United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus
Pearl Harbor, 63–66, 78, 118, 279
cyberwar and, 235
11 September 2001 and, 182
nuclear war and, 82, 90
Peierls, Rudolf, 71
People’s Wars, 143
Peters, Ralph, 191
Petraeus, David, 194, 196–197
Philippines, 38
See also Philippines War, Second
Philippines War, Second, 38
Picasso, Pablo, 60
Pinker, Steven, xi–xv, 131
Platoon (film), 177
poisoned gas, 56–59
Pol Pot, 126, 166
Poland, 52, 60
political science, 195
politics, counter-insurgency and, 194–196
popular support, 16–18, 197–199, 208
Portugal, 142, 159
Posen, Barry, 191
poverty, xv
PRIO. See International Peace Research Institute in Oslo
prisoners of war, 31
private sector, information technology and, 246–247
Prussia. See Austro-Prussian War; Franco-Prussian War; Germany
push button war, 231
Putin, Vladimir, xvi, 205, 259, 269, 281

al-Qaeda, 119, 179–180, 182–183, 196, 241, 271

Quakers, 24
quantitative methods
civil war and, 146–147
war, academic study of and, 111–120, 137–140
Le Queux, William, 12–13, 17

R2P. See responsibility to protect

raiding, 249–250
railroads, 3
Rajapaksa, Mahinda, 205
RAND Corporation, 78, 86–87, 112, 134, 208
rational society, Wells and, 21–22
Ratner, Steven, 147–148

316
Reagan, Ronald, 97, 105, 233, 281
realism, 109–110, 113
realpolitik, 44, 46, 68
reason, xii–xiii
crowds and, 22
nuclear war and, 75–76
Red Alert (Bryant), 77–80
Red Storm Rising (Clancy), 96–97, 250
refugees, 126, 144, 284
cities and, 257
intervention and, 166–167
regional war zones, Africa and, 152
religion, 154
resource wars
Africa and, 263
responsibility to protect (R2P), 170, 174
revolution in military affairs (RMA), 187–193, 269, 274
The Revolution in Warfare (Hart), 186
Rhodes, Richard, 71
Rhodesia. See First Matabele War
Richardson, Lewis Fry, 111
The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (Kennedy, P.), 265–266
Rising Sun (Crichton), 266
RMA. See revolution in military affairs
Roberts (Lord), 13, 17
robots, 233–234, 243, 248
See also artificial intelligence
Rome, ancient, ix–x
Ronfeldt, David, 227–228, 237, 247
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 71, 118
Royal Navy, 5–6, 60
Rumsfeld, Donald, 184, 192
Russett, Bruce, 139
Russia, xxi, 270, 281
casualties and, 125
Chechnya and, 191, 205–207
cyberwar and, 227, 236–238
democracy and, 139
energy resources and, 259–260
Hague Conventions and, 25–27
information warfare and, 226–227
Syria and, 206, 275–276
Ukraine and, 224–225, 269, 275–276, 281
See also Soviet Union
Russo-Japanese War, 23, 26–27, 63
Rutherford, Ernest, 69–71
Rwanda, 159–161
Rwandan genocide, 126–127, 160, 179

317
Salisbury (Lord), 150
SAMs. See surface-to-air missiles
Scales, Bob, 191, 264–265
scepticism
of future predictions on war, 286
of nuclear power, 69–70
of peace, 26
of state power, xiii
of strategic attack paradigm, 237–238
Scharre, Paul, 248
Schelling, Thomas, 80, 86
Schwartau, Winn, 234–235
Schwartz, Peter, 270–271
science, 11, 18–19
See also technology; war, academic study of
Scowcroft, Brent, 106
Scroggins, Deborah, 209, 214–215
Sea-power in the Pacific: a study of the American-Japanese naval problem (Bywater), 63
Second Boer War. See Boer War
Second Lebanon War, 223–224, 249–250
Sedan, Battle of, 2–3, 7, 9
self-determination, 46, 168
ethnic conflict and, 156, 158
future war and, 48
national minorities and, 47
state-building and, 213–214
Serbia, 154–157, 168, 203
Sese Seko, Mobutu, 159
Sewell, Sarah, 195
Al-Shabaab, 220, 262
Shakespeare, William, 10
The Shape of Things to Come (Wells), 58, 61
Sheridan, Philip, 37
Sherman, William T., 36–37, 39
Shias, 166–167, 196
See also Hezbollah
Shirreff, Richard, 269–270
Shultz, George, 178
Shute, Nevil, 58, 74
Sierra Leone, 170–172
Singer, J. David, 115–116
Singer, Peter, 250–252
Sino-Japanese War, First, 63
Sino-Japanese War, Second, 60, 64–65
Siroky, David, 207
el Sisi, Abdel Fattah, 219
slaves, 30, 36
SLBMs. See submarine-launched ballistic missiles
Small, Melvin, 115

318
small wars, 34–35
smartphones, 229
Smith, Rupert, 143
Smuts, Jan Christiaan, 55
Sneakers (film), 234
Snow, C. P., 82–83
Snyder, Jack, 141
socialism, 17–18, 21
Soddy, Frederick, 69–70
soldiers
Iraq War and, 199
wounded, 29–30, 33
Somalia, 179, 191
See also Al-Shabaab
Souleimanov, Emil Aslan, 207
South Africa, 159
South Korea, 257, 279
South Sudan, 171, 215–216
Southwold, Stephen, 58
Soviet Union, xx, 169
atomic bombs and, 73
casualties and, 130–131
China and, 121–122, 273
end of, 98, 103–106, 108, 134–135
military strength of, 103–104
Soviet Union (continued)
World War II and, 61–63, 191
See also Cold War
Sovietology, 105
Spain, 33, 59–60
Spanish-American War, 9
spies, UK and, 13
Sri Lankan Civil War, 204–205
stalemate, 22–23, 40–41
See also nuclear stalemate
Stalin, Josef, 61, 66, 130
Star Wars (film series), 239–240
state failure. See failed states; modern states, state failure and
state sovereignty, 27–28, 135–137, 165–168
state-building, 211–220
statehood, 148–149, 151, 210, 218
states, war strengthening, 216–217
The Statistics of Deadly Quarrels (Richardson), 111
Stead, William, 15
Steer, George, 59–60
Stevenson, Adlai, 74
Stoessinger, John, 278
strategic defense initiative, 97
Streseman, Gustav, 49

319
A Study of War (Wright, Q.), 110–111
Stuxnet, 236
submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), 88, 90
submarines, 6, 19–20, 41, 96–97
Sudan, 215
See also Darfur; South Sudan
The Sum of All Fears (Clancy), 181
Sunnis, Iraq War and, 196
superpowers, 85
surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), 88
Suri, Jeremi, 82
surprise attack, 251–252, 278–279
cyberwar and, 235
nuclear war and, 82–83, 86–87, 90
See also Operation Barbarossa; Pearl Harbor
von Suttner, Bertha, 26
swarming, 228, 247–248
Syria, 236, 257
casualties and, 133
civil war and, xv–xvi, 133, 219, 262–263
Obama and, 249
Russia and, 206, 275–276
See also Islamic State of Iraq and Syria
Szilard, Leo, 71, 73–74

Taiwan, 267
Taliban, 119, 202, 207
tangible support, popular support and, 208
tanks, 19, 41, 61, 278
Tanzania, xv, 166, 182
targeted killing, drones and, 242–243
Tasmania, 35
Taylor, Charles, 172
technological advancement, Cold War and, 88–89
technology, xviii, xxi
colonialism and, 34
future war and, 14, 264–265, 278
over-reliance on, 251–253
Vietnam War and, 184–185
See also aircraft; artillery; cavalry; drones; information technology; machine guns; nan-
otechnology; robots; science; submarine-launched ballistic missiles; submarines; tanks;
telegraph; torpedoes
telegraph, 12
Tenet, George J., 182
Terminal Compromise (Schwartau), 234–235
territorial peace, 140
territory
aircraft and, 248
wars over, 148–149

320
terrorism, 180, 182–183, 249–250, 274, 284
cities and, 257
cyberwar and, 247
nuclear war and, 181, 271–272
targeted killing and, 242
See also barbarism; 11 September 2001; al-Qaeda; Al-Shabaab
Thatcher, Margaret, 97
Theodore Savage (Hamilton), 58
The Third World War: A Future History (Hackett), 94–95
Thirty Years War, 28
Three Block War, 223
Thucydides, 113, 272–273
Tiananmen Square, 104
Tilly, Charles, 217
Timberlake, Edward, 267
Toffler, Alvin, 185–186, 235
Toffler, Heidi, 185–186, 235
Toft, Monica, 148, 216–217
Tolstoy, Leo, 26
torpedoes, 5–6
total war, 54–55, 58–59, 61–66
Japan and, 67
morale and, 56–57
Nazis and, 67
nuclear war and, 72
Sino-Japanese War, Second and, 60
totalitarianism, 67, 102–103
Treaty of Versailles, 46, 51
trench warfare, 14–15, 19, 41
Truman, Harry S., 118
Trump, Donald, xvi, 276
Tunisia, 261
Turkey, 125, 139, 169
The Twenty Year’s Crisis (Carr), 52–53

UCDP. See Uppsala Conflict Data Program

Uganda, 160–161, 166, 218
UK. See United Kingdom
Ukraine, xvi, 224–225, 269, 275–276, 281
UN. See United Nations
UN Charter, 135–136, 149, 165
UNFICYP. See United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus
UNICEF. See United Nations Children’s Fund
United Kingdom (UK), xix, 169, 197, 269
colonialism and, 34–35
decolonisation and, 149
future war and, 5–6, 13
Iraq and, 200–201
Iraq War and, 222

321
 peacekeeping and, 171–172
spies and, 13
World War II and, 61
See also Crimean War; Entente Cordiale; Fashoda Incident; First Matabele War; Royal
Navy
United Nations (UN), 83, 142–143, 149–150, 169–174, 179, 214, 274
See also UN Charter
United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 144
United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP), 169
United States (US), xix
Afghanistan and, 183–184, 192–193, 208
aircraft and, 240–241
Angola and, 159
casualties and, 127, 188–190
China and, 122, 266–270, 272–273, 275–276
after Cold War, 136–137
cyberwar and, 232–237
drones and, 241–244
future war and, 264–275, 280–281
human rights and, 100–101
information technology and, 185–190
intervention and, 166–167, 176–179
military preparedness and, 270–271
North Korea and, 120, 182, 236–237, 267–269, 281
oil and, 260
war, classical model of and, 222
World War II and, 63–67, 118
See also Cold War; 11 September 2001; National Security Agency; navy, US; North Amer-
ican Aerospace Defense Command; Pacific War; Philippines War, Second; strategic de-
fense initiative; US National Intelligence Council; Vietnam War
Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), 117, 132
US. See United States
US National Intelligence Council, 273–276

Valentino, Benjamin, 204

The Vanishing Fleets (Norton, Roy), 20
Vasquez, John, 112–113
Verne, Jules, 19–20
Versailles Peace Conference. See Treaty of Versailles
Vichy regime, 67
Vieira de Mello, Sergio, 174
Vietnam War, xiv, 127, 147, 169, 175–178, 184–185, 191, 194, 195, 198–199, 201
violence
cities and, 254–258
decline of, xii–xiii
Virgil, ix–x

Waltz, Kenneth, 92, 109

Walzer, Michael, 166

322
war. See specific topics
war, abolition of, xi–xv, 25–27, 44–45, 284
disarmament and, 84
nuclear war and, 70
Wells and, 24, 43–44
war, academic study of, 109–123
casualties, 116–120
civil war and, 145–149
democracy and, 137–140
disaggregation and, 118–123
fiction and, 87–88
historians and, 113, 118
peace movements and, 111–112
quantitative methods and, 111–120, 137–140
scientific approach to, 110–123
See also Correlates of War; realism
war, classical model of, 8–10, 11–12, 276–277
information technology and, 187–189
Sedan, Battle of, and, 3, 7
US and, 222
World War I and, 41
World War II and, 60–61, 67
See also civil war, classical model of; decisive battle
war, duality of, x
war, laws of, 26, 29
American Civil War and, 30
civilians and, 32–33
colonialism and, 34
great-power war and, 34
irregular forces and, 33
military necessity and, 30–31, 33
state sovereignty and, 27–28
See also Geneva Conventions; Hague Conventions
war, liberal vision of, 44–45
War and Anti-War (Toffler, A. and Toffler, H.), 235
The War in the Air (Wells), 20–21, 35
The War of 1938 (Wright, S. F.), 58
War of the Worlds (Wells), 35
Ward, Dan, 240
WarGames (film), 232–233
Warsaw Pact, xx, 81, 93, 95–96, 99, 140–141
dissolution of, 102–104
Hungary and, 98, 103
NATO and, 186–187
Wayne, John, 176
Weber, Max, 148, 210, 218
See also legitimate force, monopoly of
Weinberger, Caspar, 178, 266–267
Weinberger, Sharon, 248–249

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Weinstein, Jeremy M., 218
Wells, H. G., 35
atomic bombs and, 69–70
future war and, xvii, 18–21, 55, 58, 61, 68–70
rational society and, 21–22
war, abolishment of and, 24, 43–44
world government and, 18, 21–22, 68, 70
World War I and, 19
Welsh, Jennifer, 214
West Germany, 82, 102, 141
What Happened to the Corbetts (Shute), 58, 74
Wheeler, Harvey, 77–78
White, Andrew, 26
Wiener, Norbert, 231
Wilhelm (King), 2
Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? (Amalrik), 104–105
Williams, Phil, 258
Wilson, Peter, 235–236
Wilson, Woodrow, 44–46
See also Fourteen Points
Wohlstetter, Albert, 81, 86–87, 90
Wohlstetter, Roberta, 90
women, xii
Woolf, Leonard, 51–52
World Bank, 162–163, 214
world government, 18, 21–22, 44–45, 68, 70, 83
The World Set Free (Wells), 69–70
World War I, 118, 142, 154
aircraft and, 41, 55
casualties and, 127
civilians and, 40
economic interdependence and, 43
France and, 40–41
future war and, 54–55
Germany and, 40–41, 43–46, 138
machine guns and, 14
stalemate and, 40–41
war, classical model of, and, 41
Wells and, 19
World War II, xiii, 52–53, 118–119
aircraft and, 64, 186
casualties and, 127, 129–131
civilians and, xx, 67
colonialism and, 142
France and, 60–62
future war and, 54–55
genocide and, 62–63, 67
Germany and, 60–64, 66–67, 118
Japan and, 63–67, 118

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 nuclear war and, xx
Poland and, 60
Soviet Union and, 61–63, 191
tanks and, 61
UK and, 61
US and, 63–67, 118
war, classical model of, and, 60–61, 67
See also Pacific War
Wright, Quincy, 110–111
Wright, S. Fowler, 58
Wright Brothers, 20

Yakovlev, Alexander, 130–131

Yugoslavia, 142, 179
ethnic cleansing and, 154–155
ethnic conflict and, 154–157
intervention and, 167–168, 202–203
nationalism and, 155–157
NATO and, 168, 202–203
peacekeeping and, 169

Zaire. See Congo

Zeppelins, 55–56
Zimbabwe, 160–161
Zimmerman, Warren, 156

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