America and the Future of War: The Past as Prologue

Praise for America and the Future of War

While America’s leaders display scant understanding of war, Williamson Murray again provides an unflinching book exposing realities we cannot ignore. The breadth and clarity of this richly researched primer packs lens-changing messages on every page, reflecting the author’s extraordinary analytic rigor and historical insight. A must-read if we’re to escape the morass of nonstrategic thinking endangering our future.

—General James Mattis, US Marine Corps (ret.)

This short but wide-ranging book is a like a necessary splash of cold water in the face of the academic and military establishments. There is the drama of a great, take-no-prisoners essay about it. The future of war, the author rightly says, will be like the past: bloody and unpredictable.

—Robert D. Kaplan, senior fellow, Center for a New American Security and author of The Coming Anarchy and The Revenge of Geography

"A superbly written analysis of how the world that we inhabit could go terribly wrong in the decades ahead. For those who think major wars are now impossible because of the ‘democratic peace’ or nuclear deterrence, Murray cautions us to look at history and think again. America and the Future of War should be mandatory reading for all senior political and military leaders, including those in Congress, the executive branch, and all four military services."

—Peter Mansoor, colonel, US Army (ret.) General Raymond E. Mason Jr. Chair of Military History Ohio State University

"Williamson Murray’s aim in America and the Future of War is twofold: he offers a tragic reminder to often therapeutic- minded Americans that war is inherent in the human condition and cannot be legislated or thought away. But he also offers a second practical blueprint of how the United States, through military readiness, deterrence, a balance of power, and muscular alliances, can prevent or at least mitigate hostile aggression. A tour de force of historical insight and political acumen."

—Victor Davis Hanson, Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Classics and Military History, Hoover Institution

AMERICA and the FUTURE of WAR

The Hoover Institution gratefully acknowledges

the following individuals and foundations

for their significant support of the

HERBERT AND JANE DWIGHT WORKING GROUP ON ISLAMISM AND THE INTERNATIONAL ORDER:

Herbert and Jane Dwight

Donald and Joan Beall

Beall Family Foundation

S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation

Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation

Stephen and Susan Brown

Lakeside Foundation

With its eminent scholars and world-renowned library and archives, the Hoover Institution seeks to improve the human condition by advancing ideas that promote economic opportunity and prosperity, while securing and safeguarding peace for America and all mankind. The views expressed in its publications are entirely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the staff, officers, or Board of Overseers of the Hoover Institution.

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Hoover Institution Press Publication No. 674

Hoover Institution at Leland Stanford Junior University,

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Copyright © 2017 by the Board of Trustees of the

Leland Stanford Junior University

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CONTENTS

Preface

1 An End to War?

2 The Nature and Character of War

3 The Nemesis of Human Affairs: The Ever-Changing Landscape

4 Déjà Vu All Over Again

5 The American Problem

6 When the Lights Go Off: The United States and War in the Twenty-First Century

Appendix: Potential Trouble Spots

About the Author

Index

Dedication

To General Jim Mattis and the Soldiers, Marines, Sailors, and Airmen who by their acuity, blood, sweat, and tears will protect this great Republic over the coming century.

PREFACE

IT IS PERHAPS UNUSUAL FOR AN AUTHOR TO SPELL OUT HOW HE OR she came to write a particular book, but in this case America and the Future of War has an interesting provenance. In the summer of 2015 I had attended a conference held by the Joint Staff on its preparatory work for issuing a new edition of an old document. Its title was to be and is The Joint Operating Environment 2035. The conference lasted four days and was an excruciating experience, at least for me. The master briefing came as close as I have ever seen the Joint Staff achieve its longed-for dream of an absolutely contentless briefing.

Having been one of the two authors of an earlier Joint Operating Environment (2008), which managed to annoy a number of foreign ambassadors—the Russian and Pakistani ambassadors in particular—and receive a complaint from a senior figure in the State Department that the document should have been classified because it disturbed foreign governments, I found the exercise appalling. There was nothing in it that gave the slightest hint of how subject to violent change the future will probably be. And it was clear that whatever criticisms and acid comments came from the floor, the Joint Staff intended to issue the document drawn from the briefing just as it was, based on assertions that its members were sure would offend no one.

There matters would have rested, and I would have returned to my home in Fairfax to work on the final edited pages and page proofs of the history of the Civil War that I had recently completed with my co-author Wayne Hsieh, as well as the model boats that have become a passion in my old age. Then fate intervened. Through my friend Frank Hoffman, I received an offer to write what is now titled America and the Future of War from Charles Smith, former ambassador and member of Paul Kennedy’s grand strategy group at Yale. I would not say that I leaped at the opportunity, but I accepted largely because I believed that the product of the Joint Staff was going to be so abysmal and that at least the American military needed to face up to the challenges of the future.

The publication of The Joint Operating Environment 2035 this summer (2016) has fully lived up to my expectations. In it, there is no serious analysis of major threats with the exception perhaps of technology; no discussion of the historical past; a complete disregard for potential black swans; and a general absence of any mention of the potential that a global economic collapse might have for the world’s strategic stability and the capacity and willingness of the United States to support its defense establishment. It was, in every respect, a document of use only to insomniacs.

Thus, my decision to attempt to do what the Joint Staff was clearly unwilling or unable to do has led to this small book. It represents a contentious, argumentative view (mine alone) of the dark years that may well await the United States and its feckless leaders in the coming decades of the twenty-first century. It aims to outrage many and make most of the rest who bother to read it uncomfortable. They should be. As for me, if I have made more enemies, I remember fondly Machiavelli’s comment: More enemies, more honor!

1

AN END TO WAR?

The hero becomes a thing dragged behind a chariot in the dust: . . . The bitterness of such a spectacle is offered us absolutely undiluted. No comforting fiction intervenes; no consoling prospect of immortality; and on the hero’s head no washed-out halo of patriotism descends.

Simone Weil

You suppose that this war has been a criminal blunder and an exceptional horror; you imagine that before long reason will prevail, and all those inferior people who govern the world will be swept aside, and your own party will reform everything and remain always in office. You are mistaken. This war has given you your first glimpse of the ancient, fundamental, normal state of the world, your first taste of reality.

George Santayana

THIS SHORT STUDY EXAMINES WHAT HISTORY SUGGESTS ABOUT THE future possibilities of war as well as the place that thinking about conflict deserves in the articulation and course of American strategy in coming decades. As an historian, the author has no intention of providing predictions about the future; nor does he believe that social science trend analysis offers much that is useful in thinking about the future. The past does provide some glimmerings about what will be. But at best, history can only provide a guide to our interpreting of the unfolding of events and an intellectual framework for adapting to the uncomfortable shocks and traumas that the future will inevitably deliver to our doorstep, much of it in indigestible and unpalatable forms.

We might begin our examination with some thoughts about the potential for major conflicts to erupt over the course of coming decades. It has become popular in some areas of the social sciences to argue that the occurrence of war around the world has been in decline over the past half century and that that trend toward a more peaceful world will probably continue well into the future. Certainly the American academic landscape would suggest that those who populate its universities and colleges believe that to be the case. The number of institutions in the United States where a student can study military and diplomatic history, security studies, and even strategy seriously has declined almost to the point where one can count them on the fingers on two hands. At the same time the number of institutions hosting centers given to the study of conflict resolution has proliferated at a considerable rate.

One might have thought that the increasing violence throughout much of the Middle East, the onward march of Chinese claims on oceanic areas well beyond their shores, Russia’s increasing resort to force in the Caucasus, the Ukraine, the Baltic states, not to mention Syria, among a host of other violent confrontations in other parts of the world might have given the intellectuals in America’s academies pause. But in the gated communities of universities and colleges, where the real world is far from the minds and interests of those responsible for preparing new generations of Americans to deal with an unstable, uncertain, and fractious world, that is certainly not the case. Not surprisingly, the saying falsely attributed to Trotsky that you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you remains far from their thoughts.

The purpose of this short study is to suggest that Mars, the God of War, is not yet dead and to examine the implications of that reality. It is, of course, dangerous for an historian to comment on the possible paths that the fates will unwind over coming decades. But history can and does suggest how to think about the future at least in preparing for its shocks. As the historian MacGregor Knox noted in the early 1990s:

The owl of history is an evening bird. The past as a whole is unknowable; only at the end of the day do some of its outlines dimly emerge. The future cannot be known at all, and the past suggests that change is often radical and unforeseeable rather than incremental and predictable. Yet despite its many ambiguities, historical experience remains the only available guide both to the present and to the range of alternatives inherent in the future.¹

Simply put, if you do not know where you have been (the past), then you do not know where you stand, and any road to the future will do. Thus, a perceptive understanding of the present based on historical knowledge is the first step to thinking about the future. And of importance in understanding the past, even the recent past, is a considered and realistic understanding of the complex context within which historical events have occurred. In particular, as Knox underlines and this work will examine later, radical and unanticipated change is a major factor in the tangled course of human events. There is no indication such radical and unforeseen changes will not continue to confound those who believe that simple linear trends will determine man’s fate in the coming decades.²

Those who have been prognosticating about the disappearance of war from the human condition have largely spent their time in rummaging through the past with little attention to the fact that trends are incapable of identifying the violent changes that so often wreck the comfortable illusion of progress. Nor are trends necessarily indicative of the context within which politics and strategic decision making take place. The most valuable lesson of a rich immersion in the past is that the only trend on which one might trust in thinking about the future is recognition of the infinite capacity of human action and reaction to trigger violent change. The most recent advocate of the war is disappearing theory is the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker with his book, one that has gained considerable appeal.³ In fact, what the good doctor has assembled is a collection of badly interpreted history, some discussion of literature that indicates that he was a recipient of what used to pass for an Ivy League education, and a discussion of irrelevant trends, because he lacks the historical knowledge to understand the context within which those trends have taken place. As one critic has noted, he seldom takes a long and careful look at the larger global and historical context in which decisions about war and peace are made. What we have instead is the rather nebulous and diffuse impact of changing sensibilities.⁴

Admittedly the period from 1945 to the present has displayed a distinct lack of a great power conflict on the battlefield. There was no World War III, although there were massive preparations for such a contingency. Nevertheless, the Cold War interlude reflected the context within which the struggle between the United States and its allies on one side and the Soviet Union and its allies on the other took place. The most obvious was the fact that the most costly war in human history in terms of casualties and destruction had just ended, a conflict which had seen somewhere in excess of 50 million human beings killed and every major city in Europe wrecked with the exception of Stockholm, Madrid, Geneva, Paris, and Prague. What kept the Cold War from then destroying what little remained of Western and North American civilization was the fact that Soviet and American leaders quite correctly concluded that they, too, would likely die should the contest turn hot with the planned use of nuclear weapons and that there would be precious little of their countries remaining in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust.

Nevertheless, the absence of great power wars hardly suggested that peace had settled around the globe in the aftermath of the Second World War. Instead of a massive conflagration, innumerable smaller wars occurred to blot the landscapes of Asia and Africa. The processes of decolonization provided a series of bitter wars: for the British, the Malayan and Kenyan insurgencies; for the French, war in Indochina, which the Americans followed a decade later in South Vietnam. The list continues on and on: the three wars between India and Pakistan; the Korean War; the Algerian revolution; the four Arab-Israeli wars; the collapse of the Congo into interminable conflict after the withdrawal of the Belgians; and even the short, bitter war between Britain and Argentina over the Falklands. The collapse of the Portuguese Empire in the early 1970s resulted in the nasty civil wars in Angola and Mozambique, in which Soviet and American proxies delightedly participated. None of these vicious conflicts were on the level of the great world wars, but they certainly underlined that peace was hardly at hand, even with the restraining hands on nuclear triggers, at least in those areas where the great powers believed their most important interests were in play.

The miracle of the peaceful Soviet collapse then supposedly resulted in what some pundits termed America’s unipolar moment. Accompanying that decade’s intellectual themes was Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, a more sophisticated work than its title suggested, but one that reflected the American belief that history was irrelevant. Given the fact of America’s overwhelming military preponderance in the post–Cold War period, one that Saddam Hussein was kind enough to test with his invasion of Kuwait, there were few, except for Arab religious fanatics, who were willing to test the reality of overwhelming American power. But where the Americans were unwilling to involve themselves, such as in the Balkans, Somalia, and Rwanda, ancient hatreds reappeared with murderous results. What now appears to be occurring, at least in terms of President Obama’s strategic policies, is that America’s preponderance of military power and its willingness to use that power are beginning to unravel, a situation which some with little, or no, understanding of the role of the American military in maintaining stability or peace will undoubtedly find attractive.

THOUGHTS ON THE ARRIVAL OF PEACE IN THE PAST

Ironically, given their disinterest in any deep study in history, contemporary commentators are not alone in mistaking the temporary absence of conflict as heralding the arrival of a new age where wars are fewer. Over the past centuries, numerous politicians and pundits have proclaimed that the incidents of human conflict were on the decline, arguments that echo today’s pronouncements. In 1792, a decade after the conclusion of peace between Britain and France, the great British statesman, William Pitt the Younger, declaimed in the House of Commons: unquestionably there never was a time in the history of this country when, from the situation in Europe, we might more reasonably expect fifteen years of peace, than we may at the present moment.⁵ He could not have been more wrong about the future.

Within a matter of months Britain and the other major European powers had declared war on Revolutionary France and embarked on a series of wars against the French and their allies that would last for almost a quarter century. As Carl von Clausewitz noted, the next 23 years of warfare resulted in