The Future of War (review)

This thought-provoking collection emanates from a conference held to commemorate Jan Block, The Future of War (Boston, 1903; orig. pub. 1898), at the end of the nineteenth century and to think about the same subject again at the end of the twentieth. Block approached his subject as a builder of railways capable of carrying the troops of Russia to the Polish frontier. His nonspecialist vantage point lent an unusually revealing, interdisciplinary character to his study. Access to the industrial and military testing grounds and leadership of Russia enabled Block to appreciate more clearly than anyone previously that war among industrialized states would be, as Andrezj Werner puts it, "far more disastrous than any fought in the past," that it would demand "huge resources" and involve "colossal human casualties," leading to the "collapse of economies and international trade" and to social disintegration (86). That prospect led Bloch to conclude that war would prove impossible in the twentieth century. Though tragically his conclusion proved too optimistic, his fundamentally gloomy analysis turned out to be all too true.

Bloch's study prompted the contributors in this volume to try to look with similar freshness, from their varied standpoints, at the future of war on the eve of the twenty-first century. Their responses are heavily influenced by the pertinent events of the past decade, mainly the end of the Cold War, the revolution in military affairs that came with the advances in electronic communications and smart weaponry on display in the Gulf War, and the confrontations, then and since, between newly developing or emerging states and the coalitions of the most advanced economies, led by the United States. Far from arriving at a consensus, the commentators differ, sometimes emphatically, in their analyses and forecasts. The sharpest disagreement is between Edward Luttwak, who insists that "not intervening, not helping is usually the best thing you can do for humanity," and a chorus of liberal internationalists (185). A few, such as Christoph Bertram, director of the German Wissenschaft & Politik foundation, Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister, and (more cautiously) Klaus-Peter Klaiber, nato's Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs, hold up the European Union as a model, "the most important instrument for peace in our part of the world in our time" (114). John Keegan maintains that war could be stopped more expeditiously "by a simple economic decision of the governments of the rich states" not to sell armaments to the poor (180).

Another group within the contributors, among whom there is more agreement, ponder the future by examining the current revolution in military affairs. To one degree or another, everyone recognizes the limitations of the cyber warfare that enables rich and powerful countries, preeminently the United States, to inflict terrible damage on their opponents without endangering their own personnel. Unimpressed by this technical achievement, Martin van Creveld contends that the wars of the future will be waged "by people wielding Kalashnikovs, anti-tank rockets, machine guns, maybe even literally knives, sticks and stones" (192). Lawrence Freedman explores the enfeebling implications, for rich states, of fighting under the aegis of a coalition, whether formed by the un or nato, and of reliance on remote forms of electronically guided aerial attack that pose no risk for their own people.