John Keegan partially defines his cultural theory of war in A History of Warfare by examining it in a context and comparison analysis with traditional Clausewitzian ideas. Keegan believed the Clausewitzian political prime mover for war as too narrow. Politics may be the fountainhead, but culture is the impetus of the flow – and the flow once released from the fountain spreads across all human action. If strategy is directed by politics, then politics is directed by culture.
Excerpts:
“The wars Clausewitz knew, the wars in which he fought, were the wars of the French Revolution, and the ‘political motive’ for which he always looked as the precipitating and controlling factor in warmaking was, at the outset at least, always present… It must also be recognized that Clausewitz as a historian had nothing to guide him toward the importance of cultural factors in human affairs.
“For Clausewitz, as I have said, was even in his time an isolated spokesman for a warrior culture that the ancestors of the modern state were at pains to extirpate within their own borders.
“War, when it came in a ‘true’ form to that corner of Polynesia called Easter Island, proved to be a termination first of politics, then of culture, ultimately almost of life itself.
“Had Clausewitz’s mind been furnished with just one extra intellectual dimension – and it was already a very sophisticated mind indeed – he might have been able to perceive that war embraces much more than politics: that it is always an expression of culture, often a determinant of cultural forms, in some societies the culture itself.
“Man is a political animal,’ said Aristotle. Clausewitz, a child of Aristotle, went no further than to say that a political animal is a warmaking animal. Neither dared confront the thought that man is a thinking animal in whom the intellect directs the urge to hunt and the ability to kill.
*All excerpts have been taken from A History of Warfare, Vintage Books.
B.H. Liddell Hart’s examination of the German High Command in his book, The German Generals Talk, begins with Hans von Seeckt as the cultural prime mover of German military doctrine following World War One. Disturbed by the political/military fusion Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff exercised over the German Empire during World War One, Seeckt endorsed an unambiguous civil/military separation. The so-called Seeckt-pattern professional developed in Germany throughout the interwar era – and seemed to act as an enabling component for Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship.
Excerpts:
“The General Staff was essentially intended to form a collective substitute for genius, which no army can count on producing at need. Of its very nature it tended to cramp the growth of genius, being a bureaucracy as well as a hierarchy, but in compensation it sought to raise the general standard of competence to a high level.
“A newly-promoted general is always confident that the situation is better than it appeared to his predecessor, and that he can succeed where the latter failed. Such a disposition is a powerful lever in the hands of any ruler.
“When soldiers concentrate on the absolute military aim, and do not learn to think of grand strategy, they are more apt to accept political arguments that, while seeming right in pure strategy, commit policy beyond the point where it can halt. Extreme military ends are difficult to reconcile with moderation of policy.
“Technical science and tactical skill were the keys to the future. ‘A conscript mass, whose training has been brief and superficial, is cannon fodder in the worst sense of the word, if pitted against a small number of practiced technicians on the other side.’
“There was a wise warning, too, in another of his wider reflections – ‘the statement that war is a continuation of policy by other means has become a catch-phrase, and is therefore dangerous. We can say with equal truth – war is the bankruptcy of policy.’
*All excerpts have been taken from The German Generals Talk, Quill.
Rather than a rapid triumph over the Byzantines in North Africa, the Arab conquest in fact advanced at a snail’s pace over the course of many decades. In his biography of Justinian II, Peter Crawford reconstructs – as well as analyzes – the Arab conquest from multiple vantage points to highlight the operational and strategic push/pull of the conflict.
Excerpts:
“More seriously, in Roman Lazica, a revolt broke out under the patricius Sergios, son of Barnoukios, which succeeded in handing the region over to the Arabs. Any seeming reticence from Leontios to meet the Umayyads in battle may have emboldened Abd al-Malik to target one of the empire’s overseas provinces: the Exarchate of Africa and its great bastion, Carthage.
“Such was the success of this Romano-Berber coalition in defeating Uqba and overturning much of his gains that the Liber Pontificalis, likely echoing papal/imperial propaganda, proclaimed that by 685 ‘the entire province of Africa was again totally subjugated to the Roman Empire’.
“The Exarchate of Africa was in dire straits, undermined by years of incessant Arab raids and drained through heavy tribute paid to both Damascus and Constantinople. Its brief successes were also reliant on Arab distraction and military aid from elsewhere. The Roman forces that had staged the raids on Cyrenaica and killed Zuhayr may well have been reinforcements from the central government, which could not be relied upon to always be around particularly once Justinian II had embarked on war with the Arabs, Bulgars and Slavs.
“Abd al-Malik sent up to 40,000 of his freed-up forces under Hasan b. al-Nu’man to re-establish the Arab position in Africa. With the biggest Arab army yet deployed to Africa, Hasan was to accomplish much more than that. His military achievements and administrative institutions were to create the first real Arab government in Africa, making him ‘in many ways, the real founder of Muslim North Africa’.
“As well as the battle for Carthage, Hasan also had to capture a series of forts along the north coast, such as Vaga and Hippo Regius. It could well be that there were other Roman held forts to the south of Carthage that Hasan either had to capture first or bypass en route to his showdown with John. This suggests that even with his expedition facing an existential threat in the face of a reinforced Hasan, John failed to bring together all of the forces available to him to defend Carthage.
*All excerpts have been taken from Justinian II: The Roman Emperor Who Lost His Nose and His Throne… and Regained Both!, Pen and Sword.
Colin Gray’s analysis of the so-called strategic dimension of conflict is a multilayered approach – which recognizes at least seventeen dimensions of strategy. According to Gray, the essentials of human culture animate the vital center of the strategic dimension. Further, Gray’s strategic dimension synthesizes with John Keegan’s cultural prime mover of strategy notion for a more refined recognition of how assumptions influence strategic thinking.
Excerpts:
“Politicians and their advisers are experts at crafting policy, just as soldiers have traditionally been viewed as the professionals in ‘the management of violence.’ Who is it, though, that patrols the no-man’s land between politics and military force? That is the realm where strategists should roam.
“Although it may appear unduly pessimistic, even uncharitable, to say it, the evidence of history strongly suggests that we will fail to anticipate the strategic ideas some of our enemies will employ. As a result, we will be embarrassed and, possibly, even defeated occasionally. Such is strategic history.
“Those theorists and officials who persistently confuse the character of war, which is always changing, with the nature of war, which cannot alter, are responsible for creating confusion and raising false expectations.
“Americans must be true to their culture. The conduct of a technological style of warfare is mandated by American circumstances and preferences: It is what Americans do well, and it is usually sensible to go with one’s strengths. The danger is that America’s romance with high technology might distort its understanding of war and strategy.
“In the twentieth century, Germany proved itself to be exceptionally good at fighting. But it repeatedly fell in its inability to translate that combat prowess into an ability to win wars. A world community uneasily dependent upon America’s strategic performance as sheriff has to hope that their guardian state will not reveal any like tendency to win battles but lose wars. That community must also hope that America will remember that the purpose of war is not victory, but the achievement of a condition of peace with security superior to the pre-war context.
*All excerpts have been taken from The Sheriff: America’s Defense of the New World Order, The University Press of Kentucky.
In his essay on the development of peace-groups within international politics, Immanuel Kant advances an institutional approach which features consent and consensus networks among nation-states, as well as republican government as the institutional locus providing the binding glue of lasting peace. The Kantian peace-group is generated bottom-up from republican states – which institutionally extend transnationally via consent and consensus mechanisms.
Excerpts:
“The state of peace among men living in close proximity is not the natural state (status naturalis); instead, the natural state is one of war, which does not just consist in open hostilities, but also in the constant and enduring threat of them.
“Without a contract among nations peace can be neither inaugurated nor guaranteed. A league of a special sort must therefore be established, one that we can call a league of peace (foedus pacificum), which will be distinguished from a treaty of peace (pactum pacis) because the latter seeks merely to stop one war, while the former seeks to end all wars forever.
“Now the republican constitution is the only one wholly compatible with the rights of men, but it is also the most difficult to establish and still harder to maintain, so much so that many contend that a republic must be a nation of angels, for men’s self-seeking inclinations make them incapable of adhering to so sublime a form of government.
“That kings should be philosophers, or philosophers kings is neither to be expected nor to be desired, for the possession of power inevitably corrupts reason’s free judgment.
“Both the love of man and the respect for the rights of man are our duty; the former is only conditional, while the latter is a unconditional, absolutely imperative duty, a duty that one must be completely certain of not having transgressed, if one is to be able to enjoy the sweet sense of having done right.
*All excerpts have been taken from Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, Hackett Publishing Company.
Exiled to St. Helena, and dying of stomach cancer, Napoleon Bonaparte dictated his ideas on the wars of Julius Caesar for posterity. The work is mired in technical details comparing modern and ancient armies, as well as endless reflection on how Napoleonic era artillery would be applied to the ancient Roman battlefield. However, Napoleon’s views on the conduct of the civil war, and its aftermath for Roman society are captivating. Unsurprisingly, Napoleon believed Caesar’s dictatorship was justified, and his assassination was unjustified. He also concludes Caesar’s Parthian campaign would have been successful – had he lived – thereby extending the Roman Empire to the Indus River.
Excerpts:
“Nothing is more opposed to a national spirit, to general ideas of liberty, than the private spirit of family or village. Because of this fragmentation, it also followed that the Gauls had no trained standing army, therefore no knowledge of military science. If Caesar’s glory depended solely on his conquest of Gaul, it would be in doubt… Any nation which lost sight of the importance of a standing army ever-ready for action, and which relied on mass levies of militias, would suffer the same fate as Gaul, although without even the glory of putting up a resistance as strong as theirs, which could be attributed to the barbarism of the time and to the nature of the terrain, covered with forests, marshes and quagmires and without roads: which made it difficult to conquer and easy to defend.
“One can only despise Caesar’s treatment of the Senate of Vannes. This people had not revolted; they had provided hostages and promised to live quietly, but they were in possession of all their rights and liberties. They had indeed given Caesar grounds to make war against them, but not to violate the law of nations in their case and to misuse his victory in so atrocious a way. This conduct was not just; still less was it politic. Such means never achieve their aim; they anger and disgust the nations. The punishment of a few chief people is all that justice and policy permit; it is an important rule to treat prisoners well.
“The conduct of Cato was applauded by his contemporaries and has been admired by history; but who benefited from his death? Caesar. Who was pleased by it? Caesar. And to who was it a tragedy? To Rome and to his party. But, it is argued, he preferred to kill himself rather than bow down before Caesar. But who was forcing him to bow down? Why did he not follow the cavalry, or those members of his party who embarked at the port of Utica and rallied the party in Spain? What influence his name, his advice and his presence must surely have had among the ten legions which in the following year were to vie for the destinies of the world on the battlefield of Munda!… If the book of destiny had been presented to Cato, and he had read there that in just two years’ time, Caesar, pierced by twenty-three dagger wounds, would fall dead in the Senate at the foot of Pompey’s statue, that Cicero would take the floor and angrily denounce Antony in his Philippics, would Cato still have transfixed himself? No, he killed himself out of spleen and despair. His death was the weakness of a great soul, the error of a stoic, a blot on his life.
“Among nations and during revolutions, there is always an aristocracy. If you destroy it in the form of the nobility, it will immediately be recreated among the rich and powerful families of the Third Estate. If you destroy it among these, it will resurface among successful artisans and the people. A prince gains nothing by such a displacement of the aristocracy. On the contrary, he restores order by letting it continue in its natural state, by reconstituting the ancient families on new principles.
“Caesar did not wish to be king because he could not have wished it; he could not have wished it because, after him, for 600 years, none of his successors wished it. It would have been a strange policy to replace the curule chair of the conquerors of the world with the despised and rotten throne of the vanquished.
*All excerpts have been taken from Napoleon’s Commentaries on the Wars of Julius Caesar, Pen and Sword.
Defense strategy in the Roman Empire following the Crisis of the Third Century evolved considerably from the earlier preclusive security apparatus of Hadrian – which emphasized a synthesis of passive and active defense along mostly static lines of effort. Arther Ferrill credits the Emperor Constantine with the transition from the preclusive ideal to a novel defense-in-depth approach, which offered weakened frontier defenses in favor of large mobile field armies. This new model Roman army allowed more centralized control for the Emperor – as well as greater personal security – but with a vastly less controlled border region for the Empire.
Excerpts:
“Such obvious advantages, reflecting organization of war-making capacity far beyond that of Rome’s potential opponents, gave the Roman armies a psychological edge, a superiority in morale, often sufficient in itself to deter hostile military action. In the great days of the second century, with an army of about 300,000, the Romans defended an empire of some 50,000,000 people living in the Mediterranean basin.
“More than anything else Roman grand strategy in the High Roman Empire was based on the tactical superiority of the Roman army against all potential foes. To that extent the famous walls and fortresses can be misleading. The army, not the walls or forts, defended the frontiers.
“Roman grand strategy of the second century was predicated on political stability – preclusive security requires the presence of the legions on the frontiers. Civil war and rebellion, especially when they became endemic, diverted legions from the frontiers to the interior, creating marvelous opportunities for enemies across the border. That is what happened in the third century.
“The big change in Roman grand strategy came with Constantine the Great. As Zosimus claimed in the passage quoted above, Constantine organized a large mobile field army (probably 100,000 or more), stationed centrally, by withdrawing units from the frontiers, leaving them in a weakened condition. Zosimus saw this modification of traditional Roman grand strategy as catastrophic, an interpretation endorsed by Gibbon.
“The worst feature of the defense-in-depth is that inevitably the central mobile army will become an elite force and the frontier defenders merely second rate actors in defense policy. Troops that are not expected to defeat the enemy can hardly be blamed for wanting to avoid him altogether.
*All excerpts have been taken from Fall of the Roman Empire: The Military Explanation, Thames and Hudson Inc.
Michael A. Palmer chronicles the rise of twentieth century Islamism – i.e. the militant politicized form of Islam – in his book the The Last Crusade, and finds its origins in the myriad failures of Arab nationalism. According to Palmer, local nationalism was inspired by European geopolitics in the region, and Islamism by the waning of such nationalism following episodes of Arab weakness vis-à-vis the West – particularly concerning Israel.
Excerpts:
“The Americans gained their first penetration into the Middle East oil market in 1928, although at the cost of abandoning its Open Door principle. On July 31, 1928, British, Dutch, French, and American oil companies signed the famous ‘Red Line Agreement,’ establishing a cartel controlling oil exploration and production in the region.
“From 1920 to 1939 oil production had increased dramatically, by 900 percent, largely because of American involvement. Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain had joined Persia as major producers. In 1920 the United States produced about 95 percent of the world’s oil; by 1939 that number had fallen to about 86 percent.
“Nixon shaped a policy that would avoid committing American forces, most especially ground troops. His Nixon Doctrine turned responsibility for regional defense to local states. In Indochina this policy became known as ‘Vietnamization’; in the Persian Gulf it took the form of the ‘Twin Pillars,’ or a reliance on Iran and Saudi Arabia.
“After 1975 no one viewed Lebanon as a template for sectarian coexistence. The Lebanese experiences also marked the shift in the nature of terrorists acts – from those employed by a ‘national liberation front’ organization, such as the PLO, to those employed by Islamic fundamentalists.
“Arafat had supported Hussein and the invasion of Kuwait, and with the Iraqis’ collapse the Palestinians were persona non grata in many of the gulf states, especially Kuwait. The first Intifada, which had begun in 1987, came to an abrupt end in 1991.
*All excerpts have been taken from The Last Crusade: Americanism and the Islamic Reformation, Potomac Books, Inc.
The American military has long been bewitched operationally and strategically by Antoine-Henri Jomini’s formulaic approach to warfare. The universality of the Jominian consciousness is so well established other strategic schools usually operate beside it – or as a passing veneer above its perpetual architecture. Likewise, Jomini’s geopolitical and diplomatic wisdom is usually less pronounced – but does offer some strategic bull’s-eyes.
Excerpts:
“War is always to be conducted according to the great principles of the art; but great discretion must be exercised in the nature of the operations to be undertaken, which should depend upon the circumstances of the case.
“In an offensive movement, scrupulous care must be exercised not to arouse the jealousy of any other state which might come to the aid of the enemy. It is a part of the duty of a statesman to foresee this chance, and to obviate it by making proper explanations and giving proper guarantees to other states.
“…if the principles of strategy are always the same, it is different with the political part of war, which is modified by the tone of communities, by localities, and by the characters of men at the head of states and armies.
“All history teaches that no enemy is so insignificant as to be despised and neglected by any power, however formidable.
“The love of conquest, however, was not the only motive with Napoleon: his personal position, and his context with England, urged him to enterprises the aim of which was to make him supreme.
*All excerpts have been taken from The Art of War, BiblioBazaar.
George Kennan’s book Russia and the West chronicles early Soviet international politics under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin as well as Joseph Stalin. Russian diplomacy vis-à-vis the West is the emphasis, and Kennan offers keen analysis concerning Soviet intentionality. In his final chapter “Keeping a World Intact” Kennan endeavors to harmonize points of friction with geopolitical realism to construct a workable American/Soviet diplomatic model for the Cold War.
Excerpts:
“Stalin was a dangerous man to the end; and almost to the end, he remained unchallenged in his authority. But the men around him served him, throughout those final years, in a sullen, guarded silence, expecting nothing and waiting only for the hand of Time to take him.
“By this opposition to the very institutions of the West, the Russian Communists offered to the will of the Western peoples a species of defiance for which they have had no patent other than their own unlimited intellectual arrogance.
“Russian governments have always been difficult governments to do business with. This is nothing new in kind – if anything is new about it – it is only a matter of degree.
“People who have only enemies don’t know what complications are; for that, you have to have friends; and these, the Soviet government, thank God, now has.
“The first to go, in my opinion, should be self-idealization and the search for absolutes in world affairs: for absolute security, absolute amity, absolute harmony. We are a strong nation, wielding great power. We cannot help wielding this power. It comes to us by virtue of our sheer size and strength, whether we wish it or not.
*All excerpts have been taken from Russia and the West: Under Lenin and Stalin, Mentor Book.
Strategic Studies Book Club 