War: What is it good for? (5 page)

Part of the problem is the sheer amount of thinking and writing about war that has already been done. Despite the professional historians' retreat from the subject, millions of books, essays, poems, plays, and songs have been written about war. According to Keeley, by the mid-1990s there were already more than fifty thousand books on the American Civil War alone. No one can possibly master this flood.

It seems to me, though, that the outpouring of words actually breaks down into just four main ways of thinking about war. The first, and in recent years the most widespread, is what I would call the personal approach. It evokes the individual experience of war—what it feels like to stand in the battle line, suffer or inflict rape and torture, grieve for the fallen, live with wounds, or just put up with the petty privations of life behind the lines. The best of it, whether it comes in the form of journalism, poetry, songs, diaries, novels, films, or just stories told over a drink, is visceral and immediate. It shocks, excites, breaks the heart, and inspires, often all at the same time.

The personal approach tries to tell us what war feels like, and here, as I have already confessed, I have nothing to add to the voices of those who have actually experienced the violence. The personal approach, however, does not tell us everything we need to know about war and in the end only answers part of the question of what war is good for. War is about more than what it feels like to live through it, and the second broad way of thinking about war, what I loosely call military history, addresses this gap.

The boundary between personal accounts and military history can be blurry. At least since 1976, when John Keegan's pathbreaking book
The Face of Battle
appeared, the individual experience of soldiers in past wars has been one of military history's enduring areas of interest. But military historians also tell bigger stories, of entire battles, campaigns, and conflicts. The fog of war is famously thick, and no one person ever sees the whole of what is going on or understands the full implications of events.
To solve this problem, historians draw on official statistics, officers' after-action reports, visits to battlefields, and countless other sources in addition to the personal experiences of fighters and civilians, all to reach for an overview that transcends any individual.

The military-history approach regularly bleeds into a third perspective on war, which we might call technical studies. For thousands of years, professional soldiers, diplomats, and strategists—usually drawing deeply on both their own experiences and their readings in history—have abstracted principles of war from its practice, trying to explain when force should be used to resolve disputes and how it can be applied most effectively. The technical approach is almost the opposite of the personal approach: where the personal approach looks at violence from the bottom up and generally sees no point to it, the technical looks from the top down and often sees a great deal of point to it.

The fourth approach, however, takes us even further from the personal, looking at war as part of the broader pattern of evolution. Biologists have long recognized that violence is one tool among many available to living things in their struggles for resources and reproduction. The obvious implication, many archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and political scientists conclude, is that we can only explain human violence if we identify its evolutionary functions. By comparing patterns of human behavior with patterns found in other species, they hope to identify the logic behind war.

No one has ever mastered all four ways of thinking about war, and perhaps no one ever will. After spending several years now reading books and talking to professionals, I am painfully aware of the gaps in my own background. But that said, I would also like to think that the thirty years I've spent in dusty libraries and on even dustier archaeological excavations has given me at least some basis for bringing the four approaches together to try to explain what war is good for. You will have to judge for yourself whether I am right, but as I see it, we make most sense of war by starting from a global, long-term perspective and then zooming in at key points to scrutinize the details. It seems to me that looking at war is like looking at any other enormous object: if you stand too close, you cannot see the forest for the trees, but if you stand too far away, it fades over the horizon. Most personal accounts and many military histories, I think, stand too close to war to see the big picture, while most evolutionary treatments and many technical studies stand too far away to see the violent details.

This back-and-forth movement shows us just how different long-term
results can be from the short-term actions that cause them. “In the long run,” the economist John Maynard Keynes famously observed, “we are all dead”; and in the short run—the run we actually live in—war just makes us dead quicker. And yet the cumulative effect of the last ten thousand years of fighting has been to make people live longer. As I suggested earlier, in war, paradox goes all the way down.

Keynes spent much of his career trying to finance Britain's part in the world wars, but could still write in 1917 that “I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal.” He understood, perhaps better than most, that many governments
are
criminal. And yet the paradox remains: the cumulative effect of ten thousand years of Leviathans has been to create societies that are more peaceful and prosperous. We might call this the what-about-Hitler (or Stalin, or Mao, or Idi Amin … take your pick) problem. The Nazi regime was an abomination, as interested in murdering its subjects as in protecting them—so how can anyone argue that the overall effect of government has been to make us safer and richer? Hitler, it is tempting to conclude, trumps Hobbes.

But the what-about-Hitler problem has a problem of its own. Hobbes's is not the only argument apparently trumped by Hitler; as I mentioned earlier, it seemed for decades that Hitler also trumped Elias—until it became clear that he didn't. Between 1933 and mid-1945, the Nazi Leviathan devoured its young and drove rates of violent death up to horrendous levels. But if we take just a slightly longer perspective, by the summer of 1945 this monster had of course been defeated by other Leviathans, and the downward trend in rates of violent death resumed.

I will return to the what-about-Hitler question in more detail in
Chapter 5
, but right now I just want to say that the reason Hitler does not trump Hobbes is that picking out extreme cases of vile or virtuous rulers will never prove or disprove a bigger theory about what war is good for. The reality is that no two governments are the same (indeed, given the inglorious history of political U-turns, no one government remains the same for very long), and we can only make sense of Leviathan's impact by looking at government, as well as war, over the longest possible run.

Table 1
, designed by the historian Niall Ferguson, is a handy tool for thinking about this. “The table should be read as a menu rather than a grid,” Ferguson explains; each society makes one or more selections from each column, mixing and matching as it chooses. There are tens of thousands of possible combinations. Hitler's Germany, for instance, was run as a tyranny. Its objectives included security, raw materials, treasure, and above
all land (the notorious
Lebensraum
). The public goods it provided are less obvious but probably included health. Its rule was mainly military, its economic system planned (albeit badly), the main beneficiaries a ruling elite, and its social character decidedly genocidal.

No two societies make quite the same choices. Two thousand years before Hitler, the Roman Republic was governed by an aristocracy, which was interested above all in extracting military manpower. The major public goods it provided were probably trade and law, and it ruled chiefly by delegation to local elites, benefited most of its inhabitants, and shifted over time from a hierarchical to an assimilative character.

For history buffs, slotting different societies into Ferguson's menu can be a lot of fun, but there are weightier points to be made too. Across the five thousand years for which we have written evidence, some governments have acted more like Hobbes's Leviathan and others more like Hitler's Third Reich, but the overall trend, I argue in this book, has been toward Hobbes's end of the spectrum, and this is why rates of violent death have declined so much.

The only way to see this pattern—and the method I will pursue throughout this book—is to step back from the details to look over the long run at what actually happened, rather than at what theorists and self-proclaimed great men said was (or ought to be) happening. On the whole, for reasons I
will come back to in
Chapter 6
, governments pursue what they perceive as their best interests, not blueprints laid out for them by philosophers. Hitler did not need pseudoscientists to convince him to make war on Europe and exterminate what he called
Untermenschen
(“subhumans”); rather, he decided on war and then looked for pseudoscientists to justify it. Europe's chattering classes were scandalized when Hitler and Stalin signed a pact proclaiming friendship between fascism and communism in 1939—“All the isms have become wasms,” some wit in the British Foreign Office quipped—but they should not have been. The truth of the matter is that the isms have
always
been wasms. The hard, paradoxical logic of strategy has always trumped everything else.

Consequently, I spend a lot of time in this book talking about ordinary people—workers, soldiers, managers—and much less about thinkers or ideologues. As we will see, the grand ideas for which men and women laid down their lives or slaughtered the innocent turn out to have been like foam on the surface of waves, driven by much deeper forces. Only when we understand this can we see what war has been good for—and how that will change.

The Plan of Attack

The first five chapters of this book tell the story of war, moving from the violent, impoverished world of prehistoric hunter-gatherer bands to the age of Petrov. It is a messy story, as history always is when we burrow into the details, but it reveals a powerful trend. Under certain circumstances—which I examine in
Chapters 1
and
2
—war can be a productive force, in the sense that it produces Leviathans, which make people safer and richer. Under other circumstances—which I examine in
Chapter 3
—it can turn downright counterproductive, breaking the bigger, richer, and safer societies back down into smaller, poorer, and more violent ones. But under other circumstances still—which I examine in
Chapters 4
and
5
—war can turn more productive than ever, producing not just Leviathans but globocops. These bestride the world like colossuses, transforming life in ways that would have seemed like magic in any earlier age, but they also wield so much destructive power that they could potentially wipe life out altogether.

In
Chapter 6
, I break the narrative to try to make sense of this story by setting it in its broader evolutionary context, before turning in
Chapter 7
to ask what it all tells us about where the world might be heading in the
twenty-first century. The answer, I argue, is both alarming and uplifting—alarming because the next forty years are going to be the most dangerous in history, but uplifting because there is reason to think that rather than just surviving them, we will triumph in them. The long story of war is approaching its extraordinary culminating point, but to understand what is happening, we must begin—as I will now do—by looking back deep into our violent past.

Footnotes

¹
In 2004 the San Francisco-based Association of World Citizens awarded Petrov a redwood plaque thanking him for saving the world and gave him a check for $1,000, and in 2013 he also won Germany's Dresden Prize, which comes with €25,000. Further contributions can be made at
www.brightstarsound.com
.

²
It is the kind of detail that only a professor could care about, but peace
for
our time—not peace
in
our time—is what Neville Chamberlain actually said he was bringing home from Munich in 1938.

³
Criminologists usually express rates of violent death in terms of deaths per 100,000 people per year. Personally, I always have a little difficulty envisaging what that means in real-life terms, so I will usually couch the numbers as percentages of the population dying violently (calculated by multiplying the death rate by thirty [the number of years in a generation] and dividing by one thousand to reach a percentage) or as the odds that any individual would die violently.

1

THE WASTELAND? WAR AND PEACE IN ANCIENT ROME

The Battle at the Edge of the World

For the first time in memory, the tribes had made peace—Vacomagi with Taexali, Decantae with Lugi, and Caereni with Carnonacae—and every man who could hold a sword was streaming toward the Graupian Mountain. This, the chiefs agreed, was the way the Romans would come. And here, where the highlands dropped down toward the cold North Sea (
Figure 1.1
), the Caledonians would make a stand that would live in song forever.

We will never know what praise the long-haired Celtic bards heaped on the heroes who fought that day; all their epics are long forgotten. Only a single account of what happened now survives, written by Tacitus, one of the greatest of ancient Rome's historians. Tacitus did not follow the army to the Graupian Mountain, but he did marry the general's daughter, and when we put his description of the fighting together with archaeologists' finds and other Roman writings, we get two things—not only a pretty good idea of what happened when the armies clashed nearly two thousand years ago,
¹
but also a stark statement of the problem that this book tries to solve.

“Men of the North!”

Calgacus was shouting at the top of his lungs, trying to be heard over
the chanting of war bands, the braying of copper horns, and the clattering of chariots in the valley below. In front of him were thirty thousand jostling, disorderly men, more than anyone had ever seen in these northern wilds. He raised his arms for quiet but got none.

“Men! Listen to me!” For a moment, the din got even louder as men started chanting Calgacus's name, but then it dipped slightly, in respect for the great warrior, the fiercest of the dozens of Caledonian chieftains.

“Men of the North! This is the dawn of freedom for Britain! We're going to fight, all of us in it together. It's a day for heroes—and even if you're a coward, fighting's going to be the safest thing now!” For a moment, the pale sun broke through the leaden northern sky, and cheering interrupted Calgacus again. He threw back his head and roared defiance.

“Listen to me! We live at the end of the world. We're the last free men on earth. There's no one else behind us—there's nothing there except rocks and waves, and even those are full of Romans. There's no escaping them. They've robbed the world, and now that they've stolen everything on land, they're even looting the sea. If they think you've got money, they attack you out of greed; if they think you've got nothing, they attack you out of
arrogance. They've robbed the whole of the East and the whole of the West, but they're still not satisfied. They're the only people on earth who want to rob rich and poor alike. They call stealing, killing, and rape by the lying name of government! They make a wasteland and call it peace!”

A groundswell of hoarse shouting, stamping feet, and swords clashing on shields swallowed the rest of Calgacus's words. Without anyone giving orders, the war bands started moving forward. Some were in groups of a hundred or more behind a chief, while other men charged forward on their own, dancing with excitement. Calgacus pulled on a chain-mail shirt and ran after his men. The battle was on.

Half a mile away, the Romans were waiting. For six summers, their general Agricola had been looking for a fight, pushing farther and farther north, burning the Britons' homes and crops to goad them into taking a stand. And now, in
A.D.
83, as autumn closed in, he had finally got what he wanted: a battle. His men were outnumbered, far from their forts, and at the limits of their supply lines, but it was a battle all the same. He was delighted.

Agricola had drawn his men up in two lines, running straight as rulers without regard for the dips and folds of the land. Out in front were the auxiliaries, fighting for the money (which was good), the hope of plunder (which was better), and the promise of Roman citizenship after twenty-five years of service. On this campaign, most were Germans, hired along the banks of the Rhine. Some were on horseback, covering the wings, but most were on foot. These were no broadsword-swinging tribesmen: standing almost shoulder to shoulder, they carried javelins and short stabbing swords, sweating under thirty-pound loads of chain mail, iron helmets, and shields (
Figure 1.2
).

In the second line were the even more heavily armed elite citizen legionaries, the best soldiers in the world. Sending away his horse, Agricola took a place with the standard-bearers in front of them.

Just as Agricola had expected, the fight did not take long. The Caledonians surged into the valley, running as close to the Romans as they dared before throwing their spears and scrambling back to safety. Agricola's men were falling here and there, wounded in their unarmored thighs or sometimes killed outright, but the general waited. Only when he judged that enough of the enemy had crowded into the valley to make maneuver difficult did he order the auxiliaries forward.

Some of the Caledonians turned and ran right away. Others stood,
trying to find room to swing their two-handed broadswords in huge arcs that smashed through armor, flesh, and bone, chopping men in two. But the auxiliaries steadily came on, rank upon rank in heavy metal armor, pushing in too near for the scattered highlanders to use their unwieldy weapons. Intimately close, Romans smashed iron-rimmed shields into noses and teeth, drove their short swords through ribs and throats, and trampled their victims in the wet grass. Eruptions of blood clotted thickly on their chain mail and visors, but they kept moving, leaving those in the rear to finish off the dazed and injured.

No plan survives contact with the enemy, the saying goes, and as the Roman auxiliaries pushed uphill, the orderly ranks that had so far made them unstoppable began breaking up. Exhausted, soaked now in sweat as much as blood, they slowed and then stopped. In twos and threes, Caledonian swordsmen turned and stood their ground among boulders and trees. For minutes that felt as long as hours, they shouted abuse at the Romans and threw stones and any remaining spears; then, as their line grew firmer, the bravest edged closer to the invaders. More and more fighters came running back down the slopes, emboldened, and spilled around the Romans' flanks. The auxiliaries' advance ground to a halt. As they felt the tide turning, Caledonian cavalry on mud-spattered ponies came pushing behind the Germans, spearing them in their legs and hemming them in so tightly that they could not fight back.

Across the valley, Agricola still had not moved, but now he gave a signal, and a trumpet blew a new command. His auxiliary cavalry jingled and clattered forward. Neatly, as if on a parade ground, their deep column unfolded into a wide line. The trumpet blew again, and the men lowered their spears. A third time it blew, and the riders kicked their horses into a gallop. Gripping the horses' bellies with their knees (this was five centuries before the coming of stirrups), they leaned into the wind, blood pounding and the thunder of hooves filling their world as they shrieked out their rage.

Here and there knots of Caledonians turned to fight as Roman riders fell on them from behind. There was frantic stabbing, spear against spear, as the Romans rushed past. In a few places, horses crashed straight into each other, spilling riders and steeds to the ground in screaming tumbles of broken legs and backs. But for the most part, the northerners fled, unreasoning panic blacking out every thought but escape. And as the men around them melted away, the fury drained out of those few who had kept their ground. Throwing down their weapons, they ran too.

An army becomes a mob in moments. There were still enough Caledonians to smother the Romans, but with all order gone, hope departed too. Through gorse and stream, across the slopes of the Graupian Mountain, Roman riders speared everything that moved and trampled anything that did not. When trees provided cover, Caledonians would cluster in their shadow, hoping to wait out the Roman storm, but the Roman riders, methodical in the midst of chaos, dismounted, flushed the enemy back into the open, and then resumed the chase.

The Romans kept killing till night fell. By their best guess, they butchered about 10,000 Caledonians. Calgacus was probably among them, since his name never crops up in our sources again. Agricola, by contrast, had not a scratch on him. Just 360 Roman auxiliaries had died, and not even one legionary.

In the darkness, the historian Tacitus tells us, “the Britons scattered, men and women wailing together, carrying off their wounded or calling to survivors. Some fled their homes, and in a frenzy, even set fire to them. Others chose hiding places, only to abandon them straightaway. At one moment they started forming plans, only to stop and break up their conference. Sometimes the sight of their loved ones broke their hearts; more often it goaded them to fury. We found clear signs that some of them had even laid hands on their wives and children in pity—of a kind.”

By the time the sun came up, Tacitus continues, “an awful silence had settled everywhere. The hills were deserted, houses were smoking in the distance, and our scouts met no one.” Calgacus had been right: Rome had made a wasteland and called it peace.

Pax Romana

Winter was coming. With his enemies broken and his army stretched thin, Agricola left the Caledonians to their suffering and led his troops back toward their bases.

The farther south they marched, deeper into territory Rome had held for decades, the less it looked like a wasteland. There were no burned-out ruins, no starving refugees; rather, the Romans saw well-tended fields, bustling towns, and merchants eager to sell to them. Prosperous farmers were drinking Italian wine from fine imported cups, and Britain's formerly wild warlords had exchanged their hillforts for luxurious villas. They sported togas over their tattoos and sent their sons to learn Latin.

Here was a paradox that might have troubled Calgacus, had he been
alive to see it. To most people on the Roman side of the frontier, though, the explanation for why the Roman Empire was
not
a wasteland was obvious. The orator Marcus Tullius Cicero put it best a century and a half earlier, in a letter to his brother Quintus, who was then governing the wealthy Greek province of Asia (roughly the western quarter of modern Turkey). This was an excellent posting, but Quintus had temper problems, and the provincials under him had been complaining.

After a few pages of stern elder-sibling advice, Marcus's tone changed. The fault, he concluded, was not all on Quintus's side. The Greeks needed to face facts. “Let Asia think on this,” he pointed out. “Were she not under our government, there's no calamity of foreign war and civil strife that she'd escape. And since there's no way to provide government without taxes, Asia should be happy to purchase perpetual peace at the price of a few of her products.”