War: What is it good for? (16 page)

I will have a lot more to say about how Leviathans break down as this book goes on, but I do want to dwell for a moment on the Indus collapse four thousand years ago. If, instead of sitting at my desk in California in
A.D.
2013, I had written this book in South Asia around 1500
B.C.
, I might well have concluded that war was good for absolutely nothing. All around me, I would have been able to see the lost cities of the Indus civilization decaying into mounds of mud, haunted by spirits and shepherds. Maybe war made us safer and richer for a while, I might have said, but then it stopped.

Yet if I had been writing around 500
B.C.
(still in South Asia), and if I had known about the lost Indus civilization, I might have reached a very different conclusion. By 500
B.C.
, the rising states of the Ganges Valley were as remarkable in their own way as the Indus cities had been fifteen hundred years earlier. The obvious implication of this pattern would have seemed to be that productive war was real but cyclical. Out of chaos,
Leviathan brought order, only to set off a reaction that returned the world to anarchy. That, however, called forth another Leviathan—and on it would go, in an endless oscillation between order and chaos.

But then again, if I had been writing around 250
B.C.
, in Ashoka's heyday, I would surely feel (again, if I had complete knowledge of the past) that I had reached a deeper insight. Yes, I would concede to the me of a quarter of a millennium earlier, productive war is cyclical; but it works in waves, each one cresting higher than the last. Yes, I would go on, the Indus civilization was extraordinary; and yes, the collapse after 1900
B.C.
was terrible. But the Mauryan Empire is more extraordinary still. Productive war works.

Armed with this understanding, if I had been reincarnated one last time another 250 years later, I would not have despaired when I looked upon Ashoka's works. The Mauryan Empire had fallen, like the Indus civilization before it, and its vast territory had been shared out among squabbling princes. But I would remain confident about the future. Leviathan had taken a step back but—just as had happened when the Mauryans filled the shoes of the fallen Indus civilization—would soon take two more steps forward.

What can we learn from this thought experiment? One tempting interpretation is that everything is relative; whether productive war exists at all, or is cyclical, or keeps moving forward depends entirely on the perspective from which we look at it. But that, I think, would be an overhasty conclusion. The real lesson of the last few millennia
B.C.
in South Asia is that the magic worked by productive war, making humanity safer and richer, only operates over the
very
long run. Theorizing about how war works over a timescale of millennia would surely have seemed like a cruel joke to the real people killing and being killed in ancient South Asia; once again, the moral implications of the long-term history of war are unsettling. But the evidence keeps pointing us back toward the same paradoxical hypothesis. War has made humanity safer and richer.

Chariots of Fire

South Asia was not the only place where collapses interrupted productive war. As early as 3100
B.C.
, in fact, something similar might have happened in Sumer. The evidence is obscure, but the control that the city of Uruk had built up now broke down. Uruk itself burned, and for centuries southwest Asia was divided into warring city-states. Around 2200
B.C.
, an even
bigger upheaval came around, shattering both Sargon's Akkadian Empire and Old Kingdom Egypt and even sending ripples of disaster out all across the Mediterranean. There might have been similar (albeit smaller) collapses in China around the same time. The precise causes of these breakdowns are hotly debated, but matters gradually become clearer after 2000
B.C.
At this point, we begin to see that revolutions in military affairs could themselves be the causes of massive destabilization.

The fourth great revolution in military affairs began not in the glittering cities of the Fertile Crescent or Indus Valley but on the arid steppes of what is now Ukraine. Hunters here had managed to domesticate wild horses back around 4000
B.C.
Like the men who had domesticated cattle, sheep, and pigs in the lucky latitudes, these herders originally just wanted a more secure supply of meat. Around 3300
B.C.
, though, they had a bright idea. On the steppes, being able to move quickly from one watering hole to another was often a matter of life and death; by yoking their small horses to wagons, herders vastly increased their mobility and chances of survival.

Further improvements accumulated, and by 2100
B.C.
herders in modern Kazakhstan had bred bigger, leggier horses and trained them to pull lighter carts. These horses were still much smaller than most modern breeds, but the light carts they pulled—chariots—were a hit. Traders and/or migrants (probably a little-known group called the Hurrians) brought them across the Caucasus Mountains into the Fertile Crescent around 1900
B.C.
At first they were used just for transport, but once they had been adapted into fighting platforms—which took a century or two—they revolutionized productive war.

Despite the way they are often portrayed in sword-and-sandals epics, chariots were not tanks crashing through enemy lines. They were difficult to drive and fragile too (by the fourteenth century, they might have weighed less than a hundred pounds), and horses are in any case terrified to charge disciplined infantry who stand firm. What chariots had going for them was not mass but speed (
Figure 2.7
). Light chariots, carrying two or three armored men (a driver, an archer, and sometimes a shield bearer), could turn plodding foot soldiers into arrow fodder. So thick was the air with their fire, the ancient Indian epic the
Mahabharata
claimed, that “the sun disappeared behind arrows shot back and forth.”

Chipped stone arrowheads found in South African caves show that people have been using bows for more than sixty thousand years. So far as we can tell, though, archers got by until nearly 2000
B.C.
with what modern specialists call the self bow, a single stave of wood strung with animal gut.
Since wooden bows rarely survive for archaeologists to excavate, the details are foggy, but at some point—perhaps on the central Asian steppes—bowyers began laminating two or more strips of different woods together to increase the weapon's power. Inventiveness then accelerated, and by 1600
B.C.
a new type, the composite bow, was in use in the Fertile Crescent. Instead of producing a simple stave, craftsmen now started curving the bow tips forward, allowing the archer to produce far more force. Most self bows had an effective range of less than a hundred yards, but composite bows could shoot four times as far, driving arrows hard enough to penetrate everything except metal armor.

The composite bow might also have been invented on the steppes, and it might even have entered the lucky latitudes along with the chariot. But whatever the details, the chariot-plus-composite-bow package transformed the battlefield. Initially, charioteers probably had a secondary role, firing arrows at enemy infantry to disrupt their formations before spearmen
delivered the final blow, but chariots proved so effective that rulers gradually stopped deploying large masses of infantry at all. Battles came to be decided almost entirely by “the chariot fighters [who] circle each other on their chariots, loosing arrows as nimbly as clouds let go their water streams” (the
Mahabharata
again).

Battlefields had been gruesome enough before the seventeenth century
B.C.
, with thousands of infantrymen pushing and shoving, stabbing bronze spears above enemy shields into throats and faces or below them into thighs and groins. Big battles left hundreds dead and even more hundreds dying slowly—“some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left,” as Shakespeare would one day put it. “I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle.” By 1600
B.C.
, though, a whole new level of horror had been added. Horses were bigger targets than men and usually unarmored. The fastest ways to stop a chariot were either to shoot its horses or for men with nerves of bronze to stand firm as the vehicle thundered past and then leap out to hamstring or disembowel the horses from behind. (Skirmishers carried nasty, sickle-shaped knives specifically for this purpose.) For the next three and a half thousand years, right into the twentieth century
A.D.
, Eurasian battlefields would be choked as much with mute, bleeding horseflesh as with shrieking, bleeding humans.
⁹

Chariots took several centuries longer to spread from the Kazakh steppes to China but got there around 1200
B.C.
and got to India (still recovering from the Indus collapse) by 600
B.C.
In each part of Eurasia's lucky latitudes, chariots arrived as they had in the Fertile Crescent, brought by immigrants and traders from central Asia (from the Mediterranean to the China Sea, the design of chariots was virtually identical, indicating their shared origin). In each place, chariots answered the same military need for mobility and firepower, and in each place they had similarly chaotic consequences.

It is perhaps part of human nature that organizations that work well with one way of doing things sometimes seem reluctant to embrace a new way, and this certainly seems to be what happened with chariots. In the Fertile Crescent the early adapters were not great kingdoms like Egypt
and Babylon; they were smaller, marginal groups such as the Kassites, Hittites, and Hyksos, who—starting around 1700
B.C.
—defeated, looted, and sometimes even overthrew the rulers of richer states. Similarly, in China, the Shang dynasty was brought down in 1046
B.C.
by more chariot-friendly Zhou tribes. However, it was only when the biggest, wealthiest states finally embraced chariots (around 1600
B.C.
in the Fertile Crescent, 1000
B.C.
in China, and 400
B.C.
in India) that their real golden age began. This was because only rich states could afford to use chariots properly.

Chariots were expensive. According to the Bible, Israel's King Solomon paid 600 silver shekels for each chariot and a further 150 for each horse, at a time when slaves were valued at just 30 shekels. A fourteenth-century text from the Hittite Empire gives us some idea of what cost so much, with a day-by-day account of a seven-month training program required for chariot horses.

Chariots also worked best in bulk, with hundreds of vehicles swarming around open flanks and filling the sky with arrows. The more chariots the enemy has, the more you need yourself, and chariot forces grew exponentially. Around 1625
B.C.
, the Hittites attacked Aleppo with just a hundred chariots, but at the Battle of Kadesh in 1274
B.C.
they mustered thirty-five hundred, along with ten times as many infantry. (Their Egyptian enemies fielded similar numbers.)

Raising, training, and feeding such hosts called for a quantum leap in the scale and skill of bureaucracies and commissariats, and controlling so many vehicles on crowded, dusty battlefields demanded even more from officers. The great military challenge in the third-millennium Fertile Crescent had been how to discipline infantry to fight face-to-face; in the second millennium it was how to get chariots going in the right direction at the right time. The answers: more hierarchy, more officers, more spending.

Stationary bandits in the chariot age hardened their hearts, taxed their subjects more heavily, and raised bigger armies to keep up with their neighbors. Those who failed, seeing their chariots smashed on the battlefield and their infantry hunted down and slaughtered, could only put hope in the strength of their walls. The scale and sophistication of walls and towers therefore leaped ahead too, which, the Red Queen Effect being what it is, only encouraged the building of better rams and digging of deeper tunnels. (Homer's
Iliad,
written down in Greece around 750
B.C.
, may preserve distorted memories of a ten-year siege at Troy around 1200
B.C.
)

Leviathans had to become bigger and scarier in the age of chariots, their administration tighter, and their armies and civil services more
professional. And yet, in the now-familiar paradox, the consequence might have been less violence. As one state swallowed up another, the number of states available to fight each other steadily shrank, and when wars did break out, there were surprisingly few big battles. So far as we can tell, the kings of the thirteenth-century-
B.C.
Fertile Crescent felt much the same way about their armies as rulers would do in eighteenth-century-
A.D.
Europe: these proud professionals cost so much, and battles destroyed them so quickly, that no one in his right mind would send them into a head-on clash unless he had to. The biggest chariot battles that we know much about—at Megiddo in 1368
B.C.
and Kadesh in 1274—both involved at least one and perhaps both sides being taken by surprise.