The Transformation of War by Martin van Creveld

Abstract

630 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Lindley’s research, though generally sound, would have profited from some attention to telegraph trade journals, a likely source of unreported cases. His writing reveals, at times, poor judgment in moving between background and foreground; digressions and re­ dundancies also muddy his main points. Most frustrating, though, is Lindley’s conception of his book: why this title and a preface on “telegraph historiography” when half the work never mentions the telegraph? This book comprises two discrete studies, only tenuously connected. It would have worked better as two law review articles. Richard B. Kielbowicz Dr. Kielbowicz is an associate professor of communications at the University of Washington and author of News in the Mail: The Press, Post Office, and Public Information, 1700—1860s. He is currently studying the impact of the telegraph on the press. The Transformation of War. By Martin van Creveld. New York: Free Press, 1991. Pp. x + 254; bibliography, index. $22.95. In The Transformation of War, Martin van Creveld argues with the ghost of Karl von Clausewitz, the Prussian general and philosopher whose 1831 treatise On War still underpins much current military thinking. At heart the book is a diatribe against the Clausewitzian thesis that war is (or ought to be) an extension of politics. According to van Creveld, modern war began in 1648 when three interrelated developments matured, producing what he oddly terms “trinitarian warfare,” presumably because it involves three elements: the origin of the state (by which he means exclusively the modern Western nation­ state) and its assumption of sole legitimate responsibility for making war; the establishment of the regular army as the only rightful war-making instrument; and the total exclusion of the people from any say in war-making decisions. By defining politics solely in terms of power relations and policy formation within nation-states, van Cre­ veld can argue that von Clausewitz’s instrumental analysis of warfare as the extension of politics was based on a historically unique situation and has lost whatever validity it may once have had. Since World War II, low-intensity conflict—which van Creveld normally refers to as LIC and in which entities other than states (as he defines them) make war for reasons other than politics (as he defines it), conven­ tional armies are ineffective or irrelevant, and the voice of the people may in fact be heard—has become the only kind of war that works and will doubtless spread to the developed world. Unfortunately, the success of van Creveld’s argument largely de­ pends on setting up a Clausewitzian straw man. In particular, it requires using the terms state, politics, and strategy in highly idiosyn­ cratic ways. I have already alluded to his extremely restrictive usage of “state” to mean only the modern Western nation-state and “politics” TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 631 only power relations in such states—he explicitly excludes principal­ ities, republics, city-states, empires, or any other kind of polity and explicitly denies the existence of state, politics, or even government before 1648. “Strategy” in van Creveld’s lexicon becomes a late-18thcentury invention concerned with the creation and use of force in trinitarian warfare. What he terms “trinitarian warfare” as a unique product of the so-called Clausewitzian universe makes no sense without these special definitions. The strained argument may actually obscure the underlying validity of his thesis: If war has indeed been transformed in the latter half of the 20th century, a tendentious quarrel with von Clausewitz will hardly clarify the nature of the change. This latest in a series of generally well-received commentaries on military practice and organization that have flowed from the prolific van Creveld in the past several years shares both the strengths and shortcomings of such predecessors as Command in War (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), Technology and War (New York, 1989), and The Training of Officers (New York, 1990). Like them, The Transformation of War is strewn with interesting and provocative ideas, few systematically expounded. Van Creveld’s writing may best be characterized as lively but slapdash: colorful, cliche-ridden, and careless in detail. These shortcomings are compounded by what seems to be poor editing, reflected in...