Van Creveld - More on War

War is the most important thing in the world. When the chips are down, it rules over the existence of every single country, government, and individual. That is why, though it may come but once in a hundred years, it must be prepared for every day. When the bodies lie cold and stiff, and the survivors mourn over them, those in charge have failed in their duty.

So many books have been written on war that, had they been put aboard the Titanic, the ship would have sunk without any help from the iceberg. From Thucydides shortly before 400 bc to the present, there have been many excellent military historians. Their contribution to our understanding of war is immense and growing. Yet history and theory are not the same. History focuses on the specific, the transient, and the non-repeatable. It seeks to record what happened, understand why it happened, and, perhaps, where things may be going. Theory, on which more later, tries to discover patterns and uses them to draw generalizations valid for more than one time and one place. It both describes and, at times, prescribes the nature of the subject matter; what its causes and purpose are; into what parts it should be divided; how it relates to all sorts of other things; and how to cope with it and manage it.

In almost every field of human thought and action, good philosophers abound. They have examined their subjects, be they aesthetics or ethics or logic or the existence of God, and dissected them into their component parts. Next they re-assembled them, often in new and surprising ways that helped readers to expand their knowledge and gain understanding. Yet in two and a half millennia there have only been two really important military theoreticians. All the rest, including some who were famous in their own times, have been more or less forgotten.

Names such as Frontinus (c.40103 ad ), Vegetius (first half of the fifth century ad ), the Byzantine Emperor Maurice (539602), Antoine-Henry Jomini (17791869), Basil Liddell Hart (18951970), and many others matter only to a few specialists in the field. This even applies to Niccol Machiavellis Arte de la guerra (1521), which for two centuries gave its title to many other volumes in several languages. Yet Machiavelli is remembered almost exclusively because of his political thought rather than for anything he said about war and armies.

The reasons why these and so many other theorists were forgotten are close at hand. War is a practical businessso much so, some have claimed, as to discourage abstract thought about it. It has much in common with playing an instrument or, at the higher levels, conducting an orchestra. Those who wage it do so to gain victory, not to dish up all sorts of insights. In themselves, not even the best theories can save us from the enemys sharp sword. This fact made most theorists, who were hoping to proffer practical advice to practically minded commanders, focus on how to organize for war, wage war, fight in war, and so on.

As they did so, they often overlooked two facts. First, no two armed conflicts are ever the same. Second, war itself, forming an integral part of human history, is forever changing and will continue to change. The former problem caused many theorists to engage in a futile and/or pedantic quest for principles or maxims. The latter shackled them to their particular times and places. That again took them into the kind of detail that has long become irrelevant. For example, both Alfred Mahan (18401914) and Julian Corbett (18541922), the greatest naval theorists of all time, noted the importance of coal in naval warfare. The latter did so just when the Royal Navy was switching to oil, a very different commodity. Countless others have shared the same fate. Seeking to be up to date, they all but guaranteed that they would soon be out of date.