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From Socialist Review, No. 172, February 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
A History of Warfare
John Keegan
Hutchinson £20
‘War is hell.’ So wrote General Sherman towards the end of his life and he should have known. Sherman was one of the founders of modern ‘total’ warfare – war where the destruction of the enemies’ fighting soldiers is no longer sufficient as a goal but where, in a modern industrialised society, victory rests on destroying the enemy’s economy and the morale of its civilian population. Sherman’s march to the sea and the destruction of the Confederate state’s railroads, the cotton plantations on which its society was based and the burning of cities like Atlanta, effectively ended the American Civil War.
John Keegan’s A History of Warfare starts with the Prussian theoretician von Clausewitz’s maxim that ‘war is the continuation of policy by other means’. He goes on to paint a broad historical sweep from Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt up to the Second World War and Vietnam.
Keegan is no left-winger, having been a senior lecturer at Sandhurst and going on to become defence editor of the Daily Telegraph, getting an OBE in the Gulf War honours list. Yet he is also no Colonel Blimp. As in his other books he does not shirk from detailing what war entails at the cutting edge. The very breadth of his study is stimulating and it makes for an easy read.
But it is also a book through which runs a debate Keegan has not resolved. Its writing coincided with the ending of the Cold War and the widespread acceptance that the great wars between continental powers are a thing of the past. Keegan accepts that and goes on to look for a role for the modern soldier.
His answer lies in a peacekeeping role round the globe’s troublespots. The brutality of the American intervention in Somalia, the inability of the West to prevent the eruption of wars which stretch from Italy to China and the futility of the West’s Gulf War all blow a wide hole in such hopes.
In an argument with Clausewitz, Keegan argues that war cannot be identified with modern states or with power politics. Rather its origins lie in human nature. ‘Man’, for Keegan, ‘is a thinking animal in whom the intellect directs the urge to hunt and the ability to kill’.
This is the most annoying part of the book. Humans have been on the globe for some 1 million years while their antecedents were around for two million years. The view that warfare emerged alongside the creation of agricultural societies is one now accepted by not just Marxists but most mainstream anthropologists. Yet Keegan’s argument that the origins of war lie somewhere in our inner selves rests on an examination of societies which were already developed, like those of Ancient Mesopotamia, or tribes already in contact with more developed societies. At the earliest his examples start some 6,000 years ago.
In carrying forward this critique of Clausewitz, Keegan goes on to argue:
‘Politics played no part in the conduct of the First World War worth mentioning. The First World War was, on the contrary, an extraordinary, a monstrous cultural aberration, the outcome of an unwitting decision by Europeans in the century of Clausewitz ... to turn Europe into a warrior society.’
This can only be maintained by an argument that contrasts the century running up to the First World War with the rest of human history where, he argues, war had nothing to do with politics but emerged from particular military cultures.
But the First World War can only be understood through the emergence of the great Western powers and their division of an emerging world economy. The war itself ended with the explosion of the class differences on which these states rested with revolution in Russia and Germany.
Throughout his book, however, John Keegan goes out of his way to show how warfare developed in relation to the development of humanity’s productive capacity. This is the meat of the book and makes its reading worthwhile.
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