What Do We Learn From War

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

In the latter years of World War I, Winston Churchill met with the novelist and poet Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon was a winner of the Military Cross––he single-handedly routed lx Germans and captured a trench on the Hindenburg Line––and a fierce pacifist. Sassoon's reminiscences of that meeting reveal how odd my championship question would have struck most people before our time. He recalled that during their conversation, Churchill "gave me an emphatic vindication of militarism as an instrument of policy and stimulator of glorious individual achievements."

Later Sassoon left, he wondered, "Had he been entirely serious . . . when he said that 'war is the normal occupation of man'? [I]t had been unmistakable that for him war was the finest activeness on earth." Churchill, remember, had served under fire in India, Sudan, Cuba, and S Africa even before his service in the trenches, and then his comments were not the braggadocio of the armchair hawk unfamiliar with the horrors of state of war.

Many of u.s.a. moderns, of grade, detect Sassoon's beliefs, expressed in his poems and novels, almost the futility and misery of state of war more than bonny than Churchill's idealization of information technology, and consider such enthusiasm untoward, if not sinister. Such attitudes take made war a disreputable topic of study. One time vigorous in the academy, armed services history programs are rarely found at universities and colleges today, even as "peace studies" programs have proliferated. Reasons for this change are not difficult to discover. America's historically unprecedented armed forces power, its enormous wealth, and since 1865 its liberty from boxing on its own soil and from foreign invasion take all insulated Americans from war, and enabled the perception that rather than a foundational and ennobling experience of humanity, war is an unnatural bibelot, a species of barbarism from our benighted past, and hence an unsavory topic of formal study, even as it remains a lucrative (and, to many people, depression-brow) field of study for books, movies, cable goggle box channels, and video games.

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Unidentified Soldiers, Globe State of war I, 1914-1918 (Photograph credit: Land Library of South Commonwealth of australia)

In contrast to the mod disdain for studying state of war, most people before the twentieth century would have found Churchill's comments unexceptional, indeed banal, and they would take considered self-axiomatic the respond to the question raised in this essay's championship. The ancient Greeks were one of the well-nigh civilized, artistic, and cultured peoples in history. But they never questioned the eternal necessity of war. "War is the father of all," Heraclitus said of the original "creative destruction." Plato in the Laws has Cleinias say, "Peace is only a proper noun; in reality every city is in a natural state of war with every other." The arch-realist Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War has an Athenian ambassador tell the Spartans that states fight one another because of the constants of human nature such as fear, accolade, and self-interest, and invoke higher ideals such as "justice" but when they cannot achieve their aims past forcefulness.

All these Greeks agree with Churchill that war is a not-negotiable necessity and a legitimate "instrument of policy," given the realities of man nature and its perennial passions and interests. In a harsh world of limited resources and trigger-happy men, state of war is as critical for the survival of culture equally agronomics, and as such, it would be as great a folly non to study state of war, as it would exist to ignore the craft and skills of farming.

And so too with Churchill's praise of state of war as the "stimulator of glorious individual achievements." From the beginnings of Western literature in Homer's Iliad, and of history in Herodotus' Histories, the glorious deeds of warriors, their bravery and cocky-cede for honor and community, have been celebrated and admired. Who tin can forget the doomed valor of Hector, when despite knowing he is fated to die at the hands of Achilles, says before his concluding accuse, "Only at present my decease is upon me. Permit me at least not dice without a struggle, inglorious, but do some large thing first, that men to come shall know of it"?

And even today, in an age of historical amnesia, the last stand of the vastly outnumbered Thespians and Spartans at Thermopylae is notwithstanding remembered, when, as Herodotus writes, the Greeks, their spears and swords shattered, "defended themselves with knives, if they still had them, and otherwise with their hands and teeth, while the Persians buried them in a hail of missiles."

Those before usa knew that for all its horrors and misery––which our ancestors acknowledged equally much equally its glories––war is when the best that men are capable of is manifested, and great deeds worthy of retentiveness are achieved. And they understood every bit well that the commemoration of these deeds by men "who knew their duty and had the backbone to do it," every bit Pericles said of his young man Athenians, creates models of virtue and honor for subsequent generations to study and emulate. Only in that style can a civilization survive in a world of express resources and ruthless aggressors.

Churchill'southward comments, and so, suggest 2 reasons for the study of war, one practical, and the other philosophical. If war is an unavoidable and necessary instrument of statecraft, then we should study the origins, conduct, successes, and failures of wars in order to find, as the Roman historian Livy describes the purpose of history, "what to imitate," and to "mark for avoidance what is shameful in the conception and shameful in the issue." This demand is particularly pressing in a democracy, where the military is subordinated to the civilian government, and the voters have the responsibility to fence and deliberate policies, and to cull leaders whose charge is to serve the security and interests of the citizens both in the brusque and in the long term.

Two historical examples, i ancient, 1 modern, illustrate the importance of armed forces history for teaching the lessons of the past. In 415 B.C., over x years into the war against Sparta, the democratic Assembly of Athens voted to send an expeditionary force 800 miles to assail the rich and powerful city of Syracuse. In Thucydides' telling, this decision was based neither on short-term nor on long-term strategic national interests and security, but on the promise of an expanded empire and the greater revenues that would be available to the citizens through the tribute of subject states.

The charismatic and ambitious Alcibiades was a prime mover of the expedition. He dangled the lure of greater empire, telling the Assembly, "We shall either become masters, equally we very easily may, of the whole of Hellas [Greece], or in whatsoever case ruin the Syracusans, to the no pocket-size advantage of ourselves and our allies." Equally for the Assemblymen, Thucydides writes, "The thought of the common people and the soldiery was to earn wages at the moment [the treasury increased the pay for rowers, and the commanders of the ships promised bonuses as well], and make conquests that would supply a never-ending fund of pay for the future." The expedition sailed, and became one of the most famous armed services disasters in history. The Athenians lost 6000 men and 200 ships, the whole expeditionary force and a relief fleet as well.

This disaster offers many lessons. Starting time, dispassionate knowledge of the enemy and the logistics of state of war are critical for success. Co-ordinate to Thucydides, the Athenians were "ignorant of [Sicily's] size and of the number of its inhabitants, Hellenic and barbaric, and of the fact that they were undertaking a state of war not much junior to that confronting the Peloponnesians." Thus the Athenians woefully underestimated the power and resources of the Syracusans and the dangers of resupply and relief when 800 miles from home, both factors in the ultimate debacle. Next, parochial self-interest, the selfish want for personal wealth and glory rather than the safety and well being of the state equally a whole, are dangerous motives for undertaking a war, every bit they obscure the limits and obstacles a more sober consideration might reveal.

Finally, politicians like an Alcibiades––who according to Thucydides was "exceedingly ambitious of a command by which he hoped to reduce Sicily and Carthage, and personally to gain in wealth and reputation by ways of his success"––will end up sacrificing the land as a whole in club to further their own ambitions. These are all dangers that the citizens should beware when contemplating the employ of force to pursue policy, and when deliberating and evaluating the aims which war will achieve.

The modern lesson comes from the origins of World War Ii. Equally Winston Churchill said in his famous "Sinews of Peace" spoken communication in Fulton, Missouri in 1946, "There never was a war in all history easier to prevent past timely action than the one which has just desolated such slap-up areas of the globe. It could have been prevented in my belief without the firing of a single shot." Churchill was referring to the period before 1935, when Deutschland's serial violations of the Versailles treaty, specially its cloak-and-dagger programs for rebuilding its regular army and armaments industry, were met with indifference or appeasement. But even afterward, timely military action could have stopped Nazi Frg at a fraction of the 50 one thousand thousand dead World State of war 2 cost.

In 1936, Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland, the territory between the French border and the Rhine River, in violation of the Versailles treaty. His 36,000 policemen and green ground forces recruits faced virtually 100 French and Belgian divisions, who did not burn down a shot. Later Hitler would acknowledge that the Germans would have had to "withdraw with our tails between our legs" had the French resisted. Two years after, England and France abandoned their ally Czechoslovakia, and Germany absorbed this strategically disquisitional country. Yet if England and France had fought back with force, an outnumbered Germany would have been defeated, as Poland and the Soviet Union would probable accept followed their marry France'southward lead. A French advance e from the Maginot Line would have opened a second front end and overwhelmed Germany's manpower and materiel. As historian Williamson Murray writes, "Federal republic of germany would have faced overwhelming Allied superiority . . . The results would have been inevitable and would have led to the eventual collapse of the Nazi government at considerably less toll" than the butcher's neb of World War II.

Once Hitler'southward ambitions became obvious fifty-fifty to the appeasers after the debacle of Munich, the French and British appear that they would protect Poland'due south territorial integrity should Germany invade. Simply this was the wrong place and time to depict that item red line. The occupation of Czechoslovakia had strengthened Germany and put the Wehrmacht on the southern border of Poland, beyond the state-of-the-art fortifications the Czechs had built in their mountainous western region. And Frg now possessed the military hardware of the Czechs and the Skoda works, one of the largest arms manufacturers in Europe. In fact, the Panzer 35(t) and 38(t) tanks used in the invasion of Poland were really Czech tanks produced by Skoda. Given Germany'due south advantages, there only was not much England and France could practise militarily to help the Poles, which explains the 8 months of "phony war" marked by the Allies' inaction afterwards Hitler invaded Poland.

The lesson we should learn from this pitiful history is that preemptive war is a necessity when facing a determined aggressor, and that the time and place of a potential conflict, and the capacity to wage state of war until its successful conclusion, must be advisedly considered and prepared for when making treaty commitments and pledging the nation's claret and treasure. This means that often a nation cannot merely wait to react to assailment, but must conceptualize where the accident will fall.

To use the simile of the great quaternary-century Greek orator Demosthenes, when he chastised the Athenians for serially failing to react to Philip of Macedon's assailment, a nation must not deal with an aggressor the way a barbarian boxes: "The barbarian," Demosthenes said, "when struck, always clutches the identify; striking him on the other side and there go his hands. He neither knows nor cares how to parry a blow or how to watch his adversary." Given that Hitler had thirteen years before laid out his plan of conquest in Mein Kampf, the Allies should have anticipated the sequence of aggression that would culminate in the attack on Poland, and resisted the Germans in 1936 in the Rhineland, or in 1938 in Austria or Czechoslovakia.

The larger lesson, however, of this "depression dishonest decade," equally Due west.H. Auden called the thirties, is that success in war depends on morale, not fabric superiority. Long before 1938, England and France had lost their nervus, and but did not have the volition to fight. Instead they had bought into the illusions of internationalism and collective security, pacifism and disarmament, which had merely fed the alligator of Nazism, to paraphrase Churchill, in the vain hope that they would be eaten last. And this brings us to the philosophical lessons the report of war teaches. Contrary to our mod therapeutic utopianism, the history of war shows us the unchanging, tragic reality of man nature and its irrational passions and interests that will spark land aggression and violence.

The modern world, in contrast, rejects the notion that human nature comprises subversive passions and selfish interests that will kickoff wars only force tin terminate. On the contrary, to the modern optimist, humans are universally rational and peace loving, if but the external, warping constraints on these qualities––ignorance, poverty, parochial indigenous and nationalist loyalties, the oppression of priestly and aristocratic elites––tin can be removed. Then people will progress to the realization that their truthful interests like peace, freedom, and prosperity volition be achieved not by force just by international trade, economic development, democracy, and non-lethal transnational institutions that can adjudicate conflict and eliminate the scourge of war.

This influential belief was famously expressed by Immanuel Kant in his 1795 essay "Perpetual Peace." In it Kant imagined a "federation of free states" that would create a "pacific alliance . . . dissimilar from a treaty of peace . . . inasmuch as it would forever terminate all wars, whereas the latter just finishes one." In his decision, Kant expressed the optimism that would become an commodity of faith in subsequent centuries: "If it is a duty, if the hope tin even exist conceived, of realizing, though by an endless progress, the reign of public right––perpetual peace, which will succeed to the interruption of hostilities, hitherto named treaties of peace, is not then a chimera, but a trouble, of which time, probably abridged by the uniformity of the progress of the human being mind, promises us the solution."

Throughout the nineteenth century international institutions were created to realize this dream and lessen, if non eliminate, the savagery and suffering of war. The First Geneva Convention in 1864 and the Second in 1906 sought to institute laws for the humane handling of the sick and wounded in war. The kickoff Hague Convention in 1899 established an international Court of Arbitration and codified restrictions on aerial battery, poison gas, and exploding bullets. The preamble to the first Hague Convention explicitly acknowledged its Kantian aims: "the maintenance of the general peace" and the "friendly settlement of international disputes" that both reflected the "solidarity which unites the members of the society of civilized nations" and their shared desire for "extending the empire of law, and of strengthening the appreciation of international justice." One wonders how such optimism made sense of the Franco-Prussian War iii decades earlier, when two of the world's well-nigh "civilized nations" suffered most a million casualties, including 170,000 dead.

Fifty-fifty afterwards the industrialized carnage of World War I showed international solidarity and universal progress to be a fantasy, the Versailles treaty established the League of Nations, the transnational establishment intended to realize Kant's dream of a "federation of complimentary states" that would go along the peace and promote global progress. But within a few years the League had been exposed as ineffective, since the same sovereign nations that had fought each other so brutally in the state of war continued to pursue their zero-sum interests, frequently with strength. No more effective has been the United nations, a "cockpit in the Tower of Babel," as Churchill feared it might become, that also has failed at its foundational goal of maintaining peace, condign instead an instrument of the fellow member-states' nationalist interests, one that frequently supplements and abets, rather than controls or limits country violence.

Familiarity with the history of war should disabuse people of these Kantian illusions. Studying the causes and nature of armed conflict reveals that technological progress, better education and nutrition, global merchandise, and increased prosperity has not eliminated or reduced wars, but oftentimes made them more fell and destructive. War machine history teaches us that state of war is not a baloney of a peace-loving human nature that non even so has sufficiently progressed beyond such brutal barbarism, but rather is a reflection of a flawed homo nature, and the necessary instrument for states to protect their security and pursue their interests, whether these are rational and good, or irrational and evil. The written report of state of war, in brusque, can remind us of the tragic wisdom evident on every page of history: that humans are fallen creatures prone to subversive violence that only righteous violence can cheque.

The lessons nosotros can larn from studying war, of class, are more numerous than the few discussed here. Our judgment of any war, whether of its origins or its deport, must be based on the record of history rather than the utopian fantasies of a world that will never exist. From the standard of history, in any conflict we should always expect mistakes, unforeseen consequences, civilian casualties, deaths from friendly fire, barbarism, and cruelty. All of these contingencies tin be found in every war, including the so-called "good state of war," Globe State of war II, from the Market Garden disaster in September 1944 that cost the Allies sixteen,000 casualties, to the harvesting of gold teeth from the Japanese dead in the South Pacific. These evils are the costs of using violence to defend our security and interests, and should be expected, though never condoned, the moment the conclusion to go to war has been fabricated.

We also should expect––particularly in constitutional states where citizens are responsible for the decision to go to war––impatience, second-guessing, and frustration with these unfortunately perennial evils of armed disharmonize. And we should not be surprised when the citizens want to punish the politicians and leaders who started and managed the war. Later news of the disaster in Sicily reached Athens, Thucydides writes, the people "were angry with the orators who had joined in promoting the expedition, only as if they had non themselves voted it." We recently experienced the same phenomenon during the Iraq war in 2004, when many of the same Senators who had voted to invade Iraq yr before, a determination based on the same intelligence the Bush administration had studied, responded to growing criticism of the war by turning against information technology and attacking the president.

Leon Trotsky allegedly said, "You may not believe in war, but state of war believes in y'all." Though likely a mistranslation, the sentiment is all the same valuable. War and its horrors will always be with us, forth with its unavoidable suffering and cruelty, "such as take occurred and always will occur equally long every bit the nature of mankind remains the aforementioned," as Thucydides writes. And as long as we cherish our way of life, with its freedom and human rights, its prosperity and its opportunity, nosotros volition at times have to make the awful conclusion to send our citizens to fight, kill, and die to defend those appurtenances from those who want to destroy them. The more than we know about war, the better equipped we will be to make that option and see our efforts succeed.

This essay is based on a speech delivered at Hillsdale College.