Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (review)

"Brilliant" is an adjective that should be used sparingly by reviewers, so that when a truly brilliant book like this one comes along it can be properly designated. Using the concept of organizational culture as her analytical framework, Isabel Hull lays out a coherent explanation for the fact that the Prussian-German army of 1870–1918, in most respects the world's best, functioned so disastrously at the task of formulating strategy in support of rational state policy. Hull argues that this was mainly due to the development in the army of a hegemonic military culture through interactions among operational doctrine, a history of apparently spectacular success, and practices at all levels.

Like all organizational cultures, that of the German army was partly a subject of conscious understanding and partly a pattern of operational assumptions and practices that were seldom exposed to examination, even when they were demonstrably inappropriate. Among its features were a focus on operations rather than strategy, an overriding emphasis on total destruction of enemy forces as the only meaning of "victory," a faith in encirclement and pursuit as the way to achieve such a victory, and a conception of "military necessity" that gave unlimited priority to victory defined in military terms. When army actions did not produce results on which the validity of military culture was predicated, the overwhelming tendency was to do more of the same things rather than to question their applicability to the case at hand. When frustrated, and when external political checks were ineffective, the army consistently escalated the violence it employed to self-defeating levels.

Hull sees German army policies in the First World War as a manifestation of this culture, in contrast to interpretations that emphasize economic factors, ideology, or imperialism. She explains the apparent nihilism of army strategy in the last years of the war not as a result of growing ideological extremism, but as a spiraling of violence inherent in a military culture faced with failure that was evident even in the first months of the war. Much of the brilliance of the book arises from its focus at the start not on the World War, but on the German suppression of the Herero revolt in South West Africa in 1904–5. Hull demonstrates that all the deficiencies of German military culture were blatantly obvious in that war, culminating in the wholly pointless near-extermination of the Herero people. She shows both that colonial wars should not be considered a type apart from the European wars and the depth at which the dangerous elements of military culture were rooted in the German army.

One of the few weaknesses of the book arises from one of its strengths: Hull's use of the theory of organizational culture to inform her interpretation. While the theory is obviously appropriate for armies, it encourages a tendency to downplay cultural dynamics that transcend organizational boundaries. Hull argues that very broad "ideologies" (such as Social Darwinism) served mainly as vocabularies for explaining decisions that arose specifically from military culture. But the various ideological formulations of nationalism and imperialism in Germany arose in large part from political practices and other factors in the public sphere not unlike those that created military culture in the army—and military personnel participated actively in their creation. Analysis of military culture provides important new insights into the disasters of the First World War, but it needs to be connected to an analysis of politics and ideology, not set up as a competing enterprise largely sufficient unto itself.