Waging War Without Warriors?: The Changing Culture of Military Conflict (review)

Christopher Coker contributes historical depth and psychological and cultural nuance to expand our perceptions of the asymmetry between Western, particularly American, and Eastern, particularly Islamic, warmaking. A reader in international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Coker brings to his work a broad knowledge of ancient as well as modern history, drawn from a British classical education. He reinforces the conclusion that the nature of the asymmetry is such that while American military power may bring about rapid triumphs in particular episodes of Western-versus-Islamic war, for the long haul the West suffers severe handicaps. His main title refers to a central handicap: the tendency of the United States to attempt to wage war with machines and without warriors. One of the points of departure from which he leads into his arguments is of special interest to this reviewer. He points out, rightly, that in my book The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (1973), I depicted that way of war as presenting variations on historic European methods of warmaking but grounded the American approach in European history. Since 1973, however, he argues the American way of war has diverged further from its European antecedents, to become more nearly different in kind.

First, American technology has advanced so far beyond that of the rest of the world that Europeans cannot employ equivalent military technologies and consequently cannot even understand American warmaking. Coker implies that herein we find one of the main reasons why Europeans so often resent and object to American use of military force. A second change is that in relying increasingly on technology to make war, Americans now seek to convert war into a humane endeavor, not only avoiding casualties among their own armed forces, but attempting to minimize casualties even among enemy combatants, let alone noncombatants. Unwillingness to accept casualties as part of war can be an obviously disadvantageous aspect of the asymmetry between American and Islamic warmaking. The latter observation is hardly unique to Coker, but he goes on to find additional historical sources for it that make the problem more difficult than if it sprang simply from the temptations posed by technology. He traces from the ancient Greeks a Western conception of warfare as instrumental, that is, as a means to an end rather than as a purpose unto itself. From the Greeks onward, with something of a medieval interruption, Western states have gone to war to achieve what they regard as rationally calculated objectives, and they have tried to apply rationally calculated military measures to reach these objectives.

Among the Greeks, nevertheless, there existed also a different conception of war, an existential conception. In this view war was not simply an instrument but was waged for its own sake, because the free Greek male citizen was a warrior in the essence of his being, as an inherent aspect of his identity. Being a warrior set him apart from a slave, a barbarian, or a woman. In ancient Greece the existential conception of war was for the most part already secondary to the instrumentalist approach to war, although not by a wide margin. As the West has evolved, existential warfare has become more and more subordinate to instrumental warfare, until in the United States the idea of man as a warrior has been relegated to a relatively few members of elite military units. If a man is not a warrior, his death in war becomes hard to accept.

In the East, in contrast, the existential view of war has historically predominated. One consequence is that in our own and recent times, from Japanese kamikaze pilots to Muslim suicide bombers, the image of man as warrior remains so strong that death itself can be sought and...