Martin van Creveld - The Changing Face of War: Combat from the Marne to Iraq

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

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

To understand the present, study the past. Where did twentieth-century warfare come from? How did it develop from its nineteenth-century predecessor? How did it reach the point at which, at one time, the forces that waged it were capable of overrunning entire continents? When did those forces peak, why did they start to decline, and how did they reach the present impasse? Is there a way out, or are regular, state-owned armed forces forever doomed to go on losing to what are often small groups of bedraggled, ill-organized terrorists? The present volume, consisting of a short history of war over the last century or so, is an attempt to answer these questions.

In tackling this subject, perhaps the most difficult problem is deciding what to include and what to leave out. Obviously any attempt to tell the story of twentieth-century warfare without reference to the political, economic, technological, and social background is as impossible, say, as describing a chameleon without taking into account the environment in which it lives. Obviously, too, any volume that tries to do all this will grow to monumental dimensions. I tried to compromise, providing enough background material to make the wars, campaigns, and battles about which I write comprehensible, but without denying military operations the center stage to which they, if the above-listed questions are to be answered, are entitled.

Another difficulty in writing about the subject at hand was that the number of available sources is practically unlimited; which, given that the library of my alma mater in Jerusalem is buying fewer and fewer books, was actually one very good reason for preferring that subject to many others. I hope I can convince people that, in addition to doing my homework and providing a brief synthesis, I do have some original things to say. Yet I did not think it necessary to read every volume produced by others or document every word I wrote. Had I tried to do so, then of course the task would never have been finished either in my lifetime or, much worse, that of my readers.

Prelude, 1900-14

A round 1900, the idea that the only possible threat to a Great Power could come from another Great Power was taken very much for granted. Indeed, nowhere in the voluminous strategic literature of the period is any other possibility so much as hinted at. Depending on whether or not one included Italy, the number of Great Powers was either seven or eight. Of them, no fewer than six (or seven) were populated almost entirely by Christian people of Caucasian stockan extraordinary fact, considering that such people formed a small percentage of the worlds population. Even more extraordinary, of the seven (or eight) Great Powers in question, four (or five) were located in just one, rather small, continent by the name of Europe. Another, Russia, had its main basis firmly rooted in that continent even though it also stretched all the way across Asia to the Pacific. Only two of the powers, the United States and Japan, were geographically separated from the old continent. However, even those two owed their strength either to the fact that their population was of Caucasian stock or to their successful adaptation of European ideas, methods, and techniques.