Kind Of War Research Articles

Bearing Witness to the Unspeakable: 9/11 and America's New Global Imperialism

Two years ago, I told the Congress and the country that the on terror would a lengthy war, a different kind of war, fought on many fronts in many places. Iraq is now the central front. Enemies of freedom are making a desperate stand there, and there they must defeated. This will take time, and require sacrifice. Yet we will do -what is necessary, we will spend what is necessary, to achieve this essential victory in the on terror, to promote freedom, and to make our own nation more secure. -President George W. Bush, September 7, 2003 (USA Today). The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we is not the exception but the rule. - Walter Benjamin (Illuminations 257). Introduction This article takes a critical and interpretive approach toward understanding the resurgence of patriotism in the United States following September 11, 2001. It considers this new wave of patriotism as a collective psychic and social phenomenon fostered within the context of the commercial mass media's perpetual creation and renewal of consciousness as a psychic precondition to the maintenance and expansion of US imperialism abroad. The piece seeks to move toward a theoretical understanding of the mediated experience of 9/11 and the media's role therein vis-avis an underlying subtext of governmental preparation to further America's global hegemony. September may constitute the most forthright example of political leaders hijacking catastrophe1 in modern history, and a situation wherein the continued potential for American and international democracy, the self-determination of all peoples, and the general welfare of the world hang in the balance. Never before in US history has the government, with the aid of intelligence and military technology, wielded such a threat to the civil liberties of its citizenry at home or the welfare and sovereignty of the nations of the world. Because the United States is a democratic republic, the management of the collective public psyche toward the imperial objectives of its ruling elite is a fundamental requirement in US governmental and corporate institutions' control of the world's energy supply. And, as we shall see, to counter the otherwise logical disposition of the American people - most of whom favor decreased military spending and engagement abroad requires the invention and cultivation of certain thought patterns actively perpetuated within the institutional and symbolic system comprised by the conglomerated for-profit news and entertainment media in conformity with the real and practical strategic ambitions of US governmental and corporate policy makers. As Australian journalist John Pilger puts it, the western-dominated media, now capable as never before of penetrating societies everywhere, is a new member of a club as old as Columbus (4). Indeed, nowhere is the media system's effectiveness in this regard more apparent than at home in the world's sole military superpower. Witnessing the Spectacle of 9/11 In one sense, the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were an all-consuming mediated event that brought about something unprecedented in the American collective psyche, piercing the for-profit media's routine cultivation of a prevalent consumer consciousness. In a brief few hours, the US public was brought into direct alignment with its government's cumulative record of geopolitical strategies and courses of action. Historian Gabriel Kolko notes how the clandestine war the United States has been fighting abroad since 1947 had finally reached its shores (13). That which was unspeakable-death and destruction on a colossal scale in a familiar locale and with no readily apparent rationalewas observed, felt, lived, and relived in an all-toofamihar mediated terrain. The televisual whisked us to the scene to be there. Douglas Kellner explains how the international live television broadcasting brought a 'you are there' drama to the September 11 affair (From 9/11 54). …

The meaning of war: A heterodox perspective

(2005). The meaning of war: A heterodox perspective. Journal of Contemporary Asia: Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 423-446.

The Age of Globalization What Kind of Peace, What Kind of War?

The Age of Globalization What Kind of Peace, What Kind of War?

Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror

In the spring of 2004, graphic photographs of Iraqi prisoners being tortured by American soldiers in Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison flashed around the world, provoking outraged debate. Did they depict the rogue behavior of few bad apples? Or did they in fact reveal that the US government had decided to use brutal tactics in the on terror? The images are shocking, but they do not tell the whole story. The abuses at Abu Ghraib were not isolated incidents but the result of a chain of deliberate decisions and failures of command. To understand how Hooded Man and Leashed Man could have happened, Mark Danner turns to the documents that are collected for the first time in this book. These documents include secret government memos, some never before published, that portray a fierce argument within the Bush administration over whether al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners were protected by the Geneva Conventions and how far the US could go in interrogating them. There are also official reports on abuses at Abu Ghraib by the International Committee of the Red Cross, by US Army investigators, and by an independent panel chaired by former defense secretary James R. Schlesinger. In sifting this evidence, Danner traces the path by which harsh methods of interrogation approved for suspected terrorists in Afghanistan and Guantanamo migrated to Iraq as resistance to the US occupation grew and US casualties mounted. Yet as Mark Danner writes, the real scandal here political: it is not about revelation or disclosure but about the failure, once wrongdoing disclosed, of politicians, officials, the press, and, ultimately, citizens to act. For once we know the story the photos and documents tell, we are left with the questions they pose for our democratic society: Does fighting a new kind of war on terror justify torture? Who will we hold responsible for deciding to pursue such a policy, and what will be the moral and political costs to the country?

Literary Cosmotopia and Nationalism in Ariel

Camilla Fojas, in her paper "Literary Cosmotopia and Nationalism in Ariel," argues that turn-of-the-century cosmopolitan literary texts encoded political interests and that they were concerned with the proper way of being cosmopolitan and national at the same time, of forging literary and diplomatic parity between national and international interests. Unfortunately, this search for balance was beset by rhetorical and ideological prejudices manifest in phobic language about the corrupting forces of cosmopolitan effeminacy on national character. The conflict of cosmopolitanism with nationalism was played out as a kind of war between the sexes, as a gendered battle for dominance. This tension is born out in the critical responses to José Enrique Rodó's Ariel (1900), a text that seeks to reroute the course of national identity through a turn to cosmopolitanism. Although women are excluded from the discursive scene of Ariel, its generic form is transgendered and inclusive, its rhetoric contains the possibility of breaking the masculinist coda of nationalism. Also, the parable of the hospitable king restores cosmopolitanism to its fundamental basis in hospitality where the outcast figures of speculation and imagination, of the strange and queer, might find refuge. The rhetoric of Ariel is insufferable and its classical boys-only model is tiresomely narrow, yet the refusal of North American materialism is admirable and it ventures onto terrain untraversed by many other modernists. In the end, it retains the most useful model of cosmopolitanism, one forgotten in the relentless drive to be modern.

Anthropology and the United States Military: Coming of Age in the Twenty-first Century (review)

Pamela R. Frese & Margaret C. Harrell, editors. Preface by John P. Hawkins. and the United States Military: Coming of Age in the Twenty-first Century. Palgrave-McMillan, 2003. 192 pp. All of us, in this first decade of the 21st century, live in an ever more crowded, complex, and definitely more violent world. Global wars between nation states have been replaced by asymmetric conflict of which anthropologists appear to know so little. At this very moment a new kind of American warrior, fighting a new kind of war, soldiers in far flung corners of the earth; and thus, we might well ask if it isn't somewhat premature to declare that: this volume we celebrate a kind of coming of age, that of the anthropology of the U.S. military. We learn in Jeanne Guillemin's contribution about: Medical Risks and the Volunteer Army; Pamela Frese explores: How anthropological concepts including residence patterns, descent systems, and fictive kin intersect with social class, race, and gender in American military culture; and she provides the conclusion to: this particular, mostly post-modern consideration of: Anthropology and the U.S. Military. Margaret Harrell introduces the various featured topics in her: Subject, Audience and Voice and focuses more specifically on: Gender- and Class-Based Role Expectations for Army Spouses. Joshua Linford-Steinfeld analyzes: Weight Control and Physical Readiness Among Navy Personnel; whereas Clementine Fujimura introduces us to: Integrating Diversity and Understanding the Other at the U.S. Naval Academy. Only Robert Rubenstein and Anna Simmons focus on topics that more directly approach the complexities of relevant current military structures and operations. In their analyses of: Peace keepers and Politics, and Military Advisor as Warrior-King and Other Going Native Temptations, respectively, Rubenstein correctly recognizes, and notes quite perceptively that: Often the people we (the anthropologists) most need to affect with our work are members of communities that we (most often) stigmatize and avoid. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the military... Anna Simmons reminds us (of what we only too frequently overlook and/or ignore completely) that: Although anthropologists and military advisors may seem to make strange bedfellows, they actually have more in common than meets the eye. She recalls for us of just why E. T. Lawrence and Edward Landsdale ucceeded as advisors while at the same time operating effectively as consummate strategists in London and Washington, and why the flawed and yet so gifted John Paul Vann tragically failed in the end to make a difference either in Vietnam or Washington. Traditional forms of deterrence and traditionally structured armed forces are no longer viable, they are no longer effective with foes, and in circumstances, that no longer represent nation states. Now the preferred targets are civilians, attacked not by soldiers but by suicide-seeking martyrs. These individuals seek death while their most potent weapon becomes their own bodies. The former global symmetry of inter-nation state conflict has become the asymmetry of terrorism. This is no longer the Cold War where much about the capabilities and military structures of our opponents were known. In these asymmetric conflicts the usual balance of power, whereby peace results in an equalibrium between rival entities, no longer applies. MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) has been rendered obsolete. Yet, as in the Cold War there is no foreseeable timetable, and Americans, including anthropologists have to accept the unpleasant reality of a conflict that will last for decades. War has transfigured into unconventional contest with a soft humanitarian component. Furthermore, but certainly no less importantly, the gulf between the anthropologist's two traditional roles-that of field researcher and that of analyst has become ever more intricate and challenging. …

Dialogue With History: Roles of Irony in Thinking About New Kinds of War

By definition irony is surprising, an undermining of assumptions in comparing alternative scenarios. It should, therefore, contribute to innovative planning, especially when questioning assumptions is important. Using creative thinking about new types of international conflict as examples, this article considers roles of irony in developing innovative plans. The research compares a detailed analysis of Bernard Shaw's prescient insights at the beginning of WWI to current discourses on international conflicts. The Shaw study identifies the overt irony in an early essay about the Great War, using a protocol designed to isolate ironies in comparisons of expected and unexpected situations (scripts and script anomalies). It then examines the integration of the identified ironies with nonironic thinking in Shaw's 1914 proposal for a Western European mutual defense pact. This example shows how irony can be part of a complex and ongoing thought process, playing pivotal roles in the movement from widely held assumptions to innovative plans. The discussion then considers the importance of such ironic thinking in current American discourse.

“Draining the Sea”: Mass Killing and Guerrilla Warfare

Why do some wars result in the intentional killing of large numbers of civilians? In this article we examine the incidence of mass killing in all wars from 1945 to 2000. In the statistical analysis of our data set of 147 wars, we find strong evidence supporting our hypothesis that mass killing is often a calculated military strategy used by regimes attempting to defeat major guerrilla insurgencies. Unlike conventional military forces, guerrilla armies often rely directly on the local civilian population for logistical support. Because guerrilla forces are difficult to defeat directly, governments facing major guerrilla insurgencies have strong incentives to target the guerrillas' civilian base of support. We find that mass killing is significantly more likely during guerrilla wars than during other kinds of wars. In addition, we find that the likelihood of mass killing among guerrilla conflicts is greatly increased when the guerrillas receive high levels of active support from the local population or when the insurgency poses a major military threat to the regime.For their helpful comments on previous versions of this article the authors thank Bear Braumoeller, Alex Downes, Jim Fearon, Hazem Goborah, Stathis Kalyvas, Gary King, Will Lowe, Matthew Krain, Lisa Martin, Manus Midlarsky, Bruce Russett, Nicholas Sambanis, Naunihal Singh, Abdulkader Sinno, Allan Stam, Jeremy Weinstein, and the anonymous reviewers of International Organization. We are also grateful to Wolfgang Moehler for his research assistance.Our coauthor Dylan Balch-Lindsay was killed in an automobile accident on 1 September 2002, cutting short a promising career. He was a gifted young scholar, without whom this article would not have been possible. He is sorely missed by his friends and colleagues. Donations in his name can be sent to the Dylan Balch-Lindsay Memorial Fund for Graduate Education/Foundation of the University of New Mexico, c/o Carol Brown, Department of Political Science, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, 87131-1121.

The War Power and Its Limits

President Bush defined the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks as “acts of war.” His response was to promulgate policies, domestic and foreign, geared to protect against any future attacks against the United States. He urged swift passage of legislation that delegated vast new powers to the executive branch through the USA Patriot Act and two use‐of‐force resolutions, issued an executive order authorizing military tribunals, and announced a new national security strategy of preemption. These policies centralized power in the executive branch, and shifted it from Congress and the courts.

Two horsemen of the Apocalypse

Throughout the war‐ and disease‐ridden history of our world, more have died from pathogens than have perished by the sword. Both kinds of war – one seen and one unseen – threaten our very existence. Yet we seem to have learned nothing from our experience on both fronts. What chance is there that our species will survive into the next millennium, as microbes almost certainly will?

Transformation and Homeland Security: Dual Challenges for the US Army

Army exists to win the nation's wars. That is and always should be its principal mission. Army's transformation White Paper, Concepts of the Objective Force, states, The Army must remain optimized for major theater war,1 with the presumption that this theater of war is overseas. But the Army has other priorities as well. preamble to the Constitution tells us that among our founding principles, our government exists to insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. This statement of existential purpose implies a domestic emphasis--that we must be prepared to fight significantly different kinds of wars from what we think of today. Even after 11 September 2001, the modern concept of war for most American soldiers is something that is fought elsewhere for national security reasons, does not directly affect domestic safety, and does not affect the lives of the average citizens (other tha n our national preoccupation with 24-hour news stations). Yet homeland security is now a major focus of the nation, the Administration, and Congress, and the Army will play a major role in it. This new security situation, dominated not just by the need to project exceptionally lethal force overseas, but also to assist in homeland security, will force change on the military. While once a significant mission of the Army, protecting US citizens from attacks at home has not been a major concern for generations, and the Army has not organized or actively planned for this mission in recent memory. Yet the events of 11 September 2001 have caused us to recognize that many of the asymmetric attacks we prepare to confront in distant combat zones also can be perpetrated against our citizens at home. Homeland security is once again a front-burner issue for the nation. From a formal policy perspective, the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) arguably made homeland defense the Department of Defense's primary mission, and the QDR report states that preparing for homeland security may require changes in force structure and organization. (2) For over a century and a half, from the formation of the nation until World War II, defending the nation-proper from foreign or domestic attack was arguably the primary mission of the Army. (3) Strategists, primarily outside the Pentagon, are once again focusing on the military's role in homeland security, with such issues as the control, composition, and missions of the National Guard receiving significant attention. (4) Juxtaposed to this, almost the entire focus within DOD before 9/l1 was on changing the structure, doctrine, equipment, and supporting institutional functions of the military--what the Army used to call DTLOMS and the joint community now calls DOTMLPF (Doctrine, Organization, Training, Materiel, Leadership, Personnel, and Facilities)--through a process called transformation, with the purpose of being better able to fight future wars in faraway places. (5) Since 9/11 this has not changed substantially. For the Army, the ability to project transformed power to distant theaters of war is the major focus. Additionally, the Objective Force concepts for fighting future wars envision nonlinear battlefields, significantly faster operational tempo (optempo) and speed on the battlefield, nearly omniscient commanders and forces with a god's eye view of the battlefield based on almost perfect intelligence, and more sophisticated technology, including the expanded use of robotics. These two strategic focuses create institutional forces--transformation and homeland security--which will drive change in the Army. To date, indications are that they are being considered separately, without regard for their interactions or the realization that, together, they define the military capabilities needed in the new security environment. In this article, I briefly examine each and discuss how they affect expectations and capabilities, using the DOTMLPF model as a template. …

A different kind of war? September 11 and the United States' Afghan War

The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and the US response have been widely described as heralding a new kind of war. For over a decade previous to 11 September, however, a body of literature had developed arguing that during the 1990s a new kind of warfare had begun to emerge for the West. This article examines whether 11 September and its immediate aftermath – the US campaign in Afghanistan – confirmed these trends, or whether it really did constitute a different kind of war. It does so through a four-part framework: that during the 1990s wars were localised; that the enemy was not a state but a regime or individual leader; that civilian deaths should be minimised; and that wars were fought on behalf of the West by professionals, but that the risks to these forces should also be minimised.

La puissance militaire en question

The Effectiveness of Military Power, by Martin VAN CREVELD Twelve years after the publication of The Transformation of War — French edition, Le Futur de la guerre — it is time to re-examine its basic arguments. Two outstanding facts emerge. First, the fact that we are in the midst of a historical shift from interstate conventional conflict towards what différent people call low intensity war, non-trinitarian war, or asymmetric war, has been amply borne out and has, indeed, become the subject of a vast literature. Second, people have not yet corne around to re-examine the other main premise of the book, namely the need to re-examine Clausewitz and to come up with a new theory of war more suitable to the times in which we live. Still, sound practice can only be based on sound theory. At the beginning of the third millenium, we are still trying to wage war on the basis of theories first formulated two hundred years ago under completely different circum-stances, for a completely different kind of war. It is high time that this problem be remedied. Or, else, those who put their heads in the sand will end up by being kicked in the ass.

Sobre a Terra e Sobre o Mar

The present article tries to consider the present circumstances of the phenomenon of war starting from an opposition between Carl Schmitt and Michael Walzer. Starting from the essential link between jus ad bellum and jus in bello, the author tries to analyse the kind of war that arises from the crisis of jus ad bellum: a war reduced to self defence, based on enemy’s criminalization and justified as a police action with humanitarian rhetoric. Based on that analysis, he argues that the inevitable consequence of taking away the jus belli from sovereign power is the increasing of war’s intensity and violence itself.

Changing the Rules

Despite the long tradition and complex theory underlying the just war tradition, contemporary just war reasoning narrowly focuses simply on the established criteria for war. Yet these criteria were codified by the fifteenth century and favor the kinds of wars that could be fought at that time. Historic changes—in politics, economics, technology, and religion, among other spheres—not only have changed the nature of warfare, but have limited the applicability of the original just war criteria. Contemporary just warriors ought to turn to the deeper Christian values and virtues that underlie traditional just war theory and use them to develop new just war criteria that function better in the twenty-first century.

A Cultural History of the War without End

In October 2001, when President George W. Bush outlined his administration's responses to the September 11 attacks New York and Washington, he also announced that the United States was about to begin and different war, war against terrorism that would need to be fought on all fronts. Bush argued that unlike World War II, which brought clear-cut victory, or the Vietnam War, which ended in quagmire, or even the high-tech Gulf War, the new war would be a different kind of war that requires different type of approach and different type of mentality. Speaking to reporter few days later, Vice President Richard Cheney put it more bluntly, is different than the Gulf War was, in the sense that it may never end. At least, not in our lifetime.' The sense of historic rupture with previous models of understanding the world was widespread in the weeks following the attacks. Not only were the levels of destruction and the extraordinary human casualties unheard-of for Americans in peacetime, but the live television coverage had left the nation stunned. Eventually, perhaps, television's endless repetition of the second plane slicing through the south tower of the World Trade Center would become numbing, but other, more personal, images retained profound emotional resonance: firefighters covered in soot, rushing to save those they could and, later, searching through the rubble. Then came the friends and family who began to arrive the scene-and the screen-in the hours after the attacks. They carried large photocopied photos of their loved ones and spoke to reporters, tearfully telling of their last contact or determinedly showing the pictures that they hoped would inspire rescuers. Within days, September 11 had taken the folkloric status of the assassination of John F. Kennedy; at nearly every gathering, people would tell their stories: where they were and what they were doing when they heard-or, rather, saw-the news. It was not surprising, then, that the Bush administration would stress what many people in the United States already felt, that the nation was facing an unprecedented crisis and that nothing in our past had prepared us for such an attack. One corollary

Blame it on the Romans: Pax Americana and the Rule of Law

You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life-but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud. --T. R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War In the third century before Christ, Roman legions gained control of the region around Rome. Over the next two centuries they conquered the Italian peninsula, defeated the Carthaginians and Greeks for regional domination, and extended their hegemony throughout the Mediterranean. In the end they created the Romana. The Romans were efficient conquerors and superb administrators. More important, their legions set the conditions for centuries of peace and prosperity. Roman roads sped commerce as well as armies. Arts, literature, and education flourished from England to Mesopotamia, and from Germany to North Africa. They built magnificent cities and elevated the quality of life throughout their empire, for Romans and non-Romans alike. They had no peer competitor. And they left us records of their achievements. Rome's legacy of a unified, stable world at peace within secure borders proved far more enduring than its empire. The idea, if not the reality, of a Holy Roman Empire lasted well into the modem era. In the 19th century the British Empire established political and military control over a large portion of the planet and amassed both wealth and power. It is no coincidence that this period is remembered as the Britannia. Since the end of World War II in 1945, America and the West generally have enjoyed peace and prosperity. Despite the Cold War, occasional regional wars, and a variety of local conflicts and revolutions, this era is often referred to as the in view of the protection and stability provided by American military and economic power. That power rebuilt Europe and caused the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Pax Americana Today, America stands unchallenged as a global power, projecting its economic and military strength throughout the world. American values and ideals form the basis for international discourse. There are those who do not share these values, and others who openly and violently struggle against them. Nonetheless, the Pax Americana is a reality. The question is, where do we go from here? Finding themselves inheritors of the mantle of empire, Americans evince little enthusiasm for the burdens it entails. Despite American reticence, international efforts at peacekeeping and peacemaking led by the United States enjoyed considerable success in the last decade, along with notable failures and a great deal of frustration. The world remains a dangerous place, even more so since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. (2) Universal peace remains a goal beyond the reach of human nature, but the pursuit reflects favorably on man's nobler ideals. The subject of this article is the use of military power, particularly American power, to establish and enforce global peace. The focus is on legal considerations of peace enforcement, (3) particularly complicated questions of international law. (4) Critical to this analysis is how the United States and the international community apply evolving concepts of international humanitarian law. Recent experiences with operations other than war, including peace enforcement, will serve to illustrate the challenges confronting international peacekeepers. Lawyers representing the United Nations, nongovernmental organizations, and military forces are frequently found on the front lines of modern contingency operations. No operation takes place without extensive legal review, Ironically, the legal community, both military and civilian, is often regarded as an obstacle on the road of progress by military colleagues and by the general public. …

Naturalism vs. positivism: Debates over coercive protection of human rights in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo

This essay analyzes the largely political causes behind the incipient norm for enforcing human rights protection, what is often called ‘collective humanitarian intervention’, that has emerged in the peacemaking and peacekeeping missions in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. It does not take a legal approach to determining what is or should be this new international law. Rather, three political science paradigms are used to explain why Western states have adopted a natural law approach to humanitarian intervention, rather than defer to a consensus understanding of the text of the UN Charter's rules on the use of force. This new trend away from positivism is crucial because humanitarian intervention is likely to be the more frequent kind of war that most NATO states are likely to fight. NATO leaders did not undertake, indeed they probably tried to avoid, debates over the UN Charter and international jurisprudence. Yet, international law is based on how states behave. The natural law proclivities of NATO leaders, to the extent that they represent state policy, were unambiguously expressed when British Prime Minister Tony Blair called for defense of the ‘values of civilization and justice’.1

Symbols, Strategies, and Choices for International Relations Scholarship After September 11

Pundits and officials have been remarkably united in their assertions that the “war on terrorism” is fundamentally a new kind of war. This is troubling, because it suggests that the world has stepped into terra incognita. No one—to draw a recent comparison—has suggested that this past winter's standoff between India and Pakistan is fundamentally new, even though both nations are now nuclear powers. Indeed, in spite of the high stakes in Kashmir, the conflict feels familiar, partly because the two countries have long been mutually suspicious and often hostile, and because they are two states; we know how to think and to talk about them. And, one hopes, policymakers know how to reduce these tensions. In contrast, the war on terrorism has an almost surreal quality because of the utter novelty of the idea of a superpower fighting against a transnational, clandestine network or against the even more nebulous phenomenon of terrorism itself. Like the U.S. government, international relations scholars were caught largely unaware and were initially unprepared to offer much guidance on how the new crisis might develop.

Conflict, technology, and the impact of industrialization: The Great War 1914–18

In major respects, World War I appeared markedly unlike even quite recent wars. What, by and large, caused the difference was not quality of command or changing morale. It was industrial mobilisation and technological advancement. The emergence of new weapons, and of new methods of producing them in volume and at speed, played a crucial role in changing the nature of war. Certainly, the peculiar qualities of the Great War of 1914–18 were not determined solely by technology. Quite other factors, such as the profundity of the issues at stake ('This war is life and death'), and the relative equality in resources and determination between the principal rivals, also profoundly influenced the nature of the conflict. Yet in delineating the dominant aspects of that struggle, the contribution made by industrialization and technology and a culture of inventiveness must loom large. Admittedly, in some respects, the transformation of weaponry under the impact of industrialisation did not necessarily produce a new kind of war. The battleship of 1914 was hugely unlike the battleship of 1805, yet the Great War at sea was not strikingly different from the naval war against Napoleon. War in the air was an entirely new phenomenon, yet the aircraft had not reached a state of development where it could fundamentally alter the face of battle. But in the case of the land war, new weapons and new volumes of weaponry did indeed make a vast difference to the nature and consequence of military operations. In large measure they generated the features by which this struggle is best remembered: stalemate, immobility, great battles of attrition, and ‘futility’.