On the Subject of War
GEWEN, BARRY
Writers & Writing ON THE SUBJECT OF WAR BY BARRY GEWEN JLerhaps it is due to the feeling that international affairs have entered a more dangerous phase, or to the antinuclear movement, or to the...
...Their supremacy faded by the 15th century, however, a historical dead-end, and McNeill turns next to the Italian city-states...
...A paradox of arms control—and Martin displays a pretty eye for paradox throughout his book—is that the search for greater safety may require higher, not lower, military budgets...
...Otherwise, why spend so much money...
...Writers & Writing ON THE SUBJECT OF WAR BY BARRY GEWEN JLerhaps it is due to the feeling that international affairs have entered a more dangerous phase, or to the antinuclear movement, or to the Reagan Administration's increases in defense spending...
...Whatever the cause, a spate of books about war has been pouring forth from publishers' presses this fall...
...His stance is that of a self-confessed middle-of-the-roader who is willing to settle for unsatisfactory half-solutions because the proposed alternatives are too unrealistic...
...William H. McNeill's The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force and Society Since A.D...
...Lack of a centralized authority and the push of the market led to a European arms race or, more appropriately, an arms crawl that turned into a sprint in the early 19th century and then into a gallop...
...The problem with The Two-Edged Sword lies in its very realism...
...At the same time, as he himself observes, "it is not sufficient, indeed it is not very effective, to respond with glossier brochures depicting the strength of Soviet forces...
...One might argue that the options are not so stark as he believes, that his tendency to emphasize impersonal forces and technological change at the expense of human will and ideas has compelled him to construct out of history an infernal machine operating on its own imperatives...
...Many millions around the world are asking that very question, and offering their ban-the-bomb solutions to the arms race...
...Maybe it is merely coincidence...
...Canan brings to his book his experiences as Business Week's Pentagon correspondent...
...His contention that market forces in both Medieval China and Renaissance Italy led to the rise of the modern military, offered with little examination of how those forces differed in such dissimilar locales, makes him look suspiciously like a man with a thesis to sell...
...McNeill is nothing if not sweeping...
...Martin convincingly skewers any notions of disarmament (and Americans must be grateful that he is making himself heard in England, where unilateralism has become a significant political force...
...Three new volumes are fairly representative of the selection and, together, provide a good overview of the topic (as well as suggest that something is wrong in our strategic thinking...
...Laurence Martin's The Two-Edged Sword: Armed Force in the Modern World (Norton, 108 pp., $13.95) addresses some of the most difficult and divisive questions on military conflict that now face us...
...Finally, the unprecedented mobilizations of World War I, inaugurating modern managed economies, ushered in "a new epoch in world affairs, an epoch in which we, in the 1980s, still find ourselves floundering...
...They will enable us, sooner or later, to take the human completely out of the loop...
...Yet, as Martin stresses, under present international conditions we have no choice other than to persevere in the short run while hoping for a change in the long run...
...Once settled in Europe, he is able to weave a continuous narrative down to the present...
...Most futuristic of all are killer satellites and the laser- and particle-beam rays that move at the speed of light...
...When the pace of change accelerated dramatically about a century ago, such now-familiar problems as the global traffic in arms and technology transfers to national enemies began to emerge...
...Wecan only pray that Carter was wrong, and that Reagan is right, that muscling up massively in preparation for war is indeed the way to win arms-control agreements satisfactory to both sides...
...Inevitably, we will strive to develop these weapons...
...Necessary though it is to explain that aspect of the problem, it is equally essential to rebut false remedies, and in some detail, and this not merely for effect but because we are, after all, ultimately seeking solutions to the problems of war and peace that transcend the immediate exigencies of theCold War...
...Canan declares:" At some point it will have to stop, through treaty or thermonuclear war...
...Nonetheless, he has written a book abounding in useful and curious information, sometimes both at once: The knowledge that the Second Lateran Council of 1139 banned the crossbow for being too dangerous might give modern disarmament enthusiasts pause...
...Canan explains how advances in electronics and computerization are revolutionizing missilery—and possibly war itself...
...In The Two-Edged Sword, originally presented as six 30-minute lectures on the BBC, he looks at arms control, nuclear proliferation, the deficiencies of nato, and the Third World, among other tough issues...
...4 aurence Martin, formerly professor of war studies at King's College, London, now vice-chancellor of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, is not prepared to tell us how to change direction, but he is ready to bring a great deal of common sense and clear thinking to bear on immediate problems...
...Yet the costs, like the weaponry, are astronomical, and as the technology gets more complex, the guns-or-butter choices for any U.S...
...And so it went...
...The introduction of stirrups in 1301 improved the efficiency of archers...
...One Pentagon insider told Canan: "With the enormous growth in the capacities of microprocessors, the PGM's computers, toward the end of this decade, will come very close to comparability with the human brain...
...With an eye on the British disarmament movement, he writes: "To endorse impracticable schemes and to bend Western policy toward them is likely, I believe, to undermine the system of security, imperfect but at least working, that we have already...
...President grow more difficult . The momentum described by McNeill continues to accelerate...
...resulted from the development of heavy armored cavalry...
...A distinct sense of doom rises to the surface of the later chapters...
...Exactly where more-of-the-same is taking us can be glimpsed in James Canan's War in Space...
...The Chinese created sophisticated weapons, including gunpowder, and learned to administer and equip a one-million man army...
...An introductory chapter outlines the practice of war in antiquity, emphasizing the limits that nature and human need put in the way of aggressive behavior...
...On the subject of arms control, for example, Martin reminds his readers that agreements to limit weapons must not be equated with efforts at disarmament, although this is a common confusion...
...The Russians are already exploring the military uses of space, and we are obliged to follow...
...McNeill sees mankind as faced with the alternatives of either some sort of world government or total annihilation...
...The Pursuit of Power, like its subject, starts slowly and builds...
...As one might expect of the author of The Rise of the West, he writes history in the grand manner, swallowing large subjects in huge gulps...
...Not far behind are precision-guided nuclear missiles that could be sent across continents...
...He is reasoned, moderate, never ideological, and any open-minded person, hawk or dove, will find his arguments worthy of serious consideration...
...Precision-guided missiles (PGMs) could, according to some experts, send the tank and manned aircraft the way of the crossbow...
...Military-industrial complexes arose to direct the pattern of technological innovation—instead of new inventions simply being adapted to purposes of combat, as was done before...
...Guns, first recorded in Europe in 1326, eventually revolutionized battle, although it took them a century just to catch up with catapults...
...For the people who have the answers are wrong, and the people who are right don't have the answers...
...Unfortunately, ifMartin's modest policy of more-of-the-same remains the best we can do for the present, it offers us not a hint of how to find those ultimate solutions that he, along with everyone else, desires...
...James Canan's War in Space (Harper & Row, 186 pp., $13.95) describes the probable Flash Gordon-like future of battle...
...In general, his own suggestions fall on what would be termed the "hawkish" side of the arms debate, with calls for beefing up nato's conventional forces and developing a more flexible nuclear defense to replace the current all-or-nothing policy of "mutual assured destruction...
...According to McNeill, China's "rapid evolution toward market-regulated behavior in the centuries on either side of the year 1000tipped a critical balance in world history...
...The Pursuit of Power traces a grim momentum, with the industrialization of war speeding up military preparedness to a level beyond rational control, pushing the world to the edge of catastrophe...
...A 16th-century Dutch military genius, Maurice of Nassau, drawing his inspiration from the Romans, introduced regular drill, systematic encampment, more rational troop divisions, and the first officer-training school...
...His generalizations can be breathtaking—as when he declares that "feudalism" (as opposed to feudalism...
...1000(Chicago, 405 pp., $20.00) summarizes the way mankind has gone about inflicting damage upon itself in the past...
...We will be able to simply tell a missile that the target is somewhere out there, launch it at random, and let it go to work...
...Arms control originally evolved as an acknowledgement that armed force was hereto stay, and that the best way to live in the nuclear shadow was by trying to forestall any tragic or disastrous accidents...
...The result is a work that, while overly anecdotal and journalistic, is a good primer on the weapons that exist at the cutting edge of military technology...
...Somestatements raise more questions than they answer...
...Still, any reader surveying the military developments of the last few centuries with McNeill is likely to close The Pursuit of Power feeling uneasy about the path we are on...
...We are truly caught between a rock and a hard place...
Vol. 65 • November 1982 • No. 20
