Past essays in this series, as well as links to many other Internet information resources related to books, are available via the Internet Book Information Center Gopher server (temporary Gopher address: 141.211.183.23). E-mail comments welcome to Frederick.Zimmerman@ciesin.org. %A Keegan, John %T A History of Warfare %I Alfred A. Knopf %C New York %D November 1993 %G ISBN 0-394-58801-0 %P 429 pp. %O hardcover, U.S. $27.50 John Keegan's A HISTORY OF WARFARE is a challenging book for anyone who loves military history; for it offers both a passionate justification for the value and larger meaning of the discipline, and a hopeful plea for its eventual obsolescence. These paradoxical feelings are intrinsic in reading military history. The primary virtue I found in this book was that Keegan brought those contradictions closer to the surface than most authors do. I began reading military history when I was very young. By high school, I had delighted in working my way through such wonderful books as Samuel Eliot's fifteen-volume THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES NAVY IN WORLD WAR TWO and David Chandler's THE CAMPAIGNS OF NAPOLEON. My reading in military history remained very active until I entered a small Quaker liberal arts school in eastern Pennsylvania and found that not very many people there--and no young women--were interested in hearing me enthuse about military history. At that point, my interest began to diminish somewhat. I continued to study military history in the academic setting, though, until I wrote my undergraduate Honors thesis and found, halfway through what was originally a rather Strangelovian thesis topic, that I believed that any future use of nuclear weapons against civilian populations would be immoral and wrong; that mutually assured destruction was a chimerical goal; and that a world of minimum deterrence posed the least threat to human survival from a strictly actuarial point of view. I still love military history, and I think I always will, but in a much less encompassing way than when I was an lonely teenage strategy intellectual. Nevertheless, it still pains me when I encounter the widespread misconception, among those who do not read military history, that it is a somewhat ghoulish form of vicarious aggression that has almost no redeeming social value. There is undoubtedly some truth to that, and more for some people than those others. But, speaking only for myself, I learned some very different things from reading military history. I learned that brutal violence and organized, purposive cruelty is a fundamental aspect of the human condition. More importantly, though, I learned that it is reasonable to expect only a certain modest amount of rationality and mutual agreement from human beings. That taught me, better than a thousand political correctness seminars could have, the ineradicability and the intrinsic value of cultural diversity--something that millions of people throughout human history have regarded as "worth dying for". It is with those lessons that Keegan begins, and what he says about military history will ring true to anyone who has read much of it. "Warfare is almost as old as man himself, and reaches into the most secret places of the human heart, places where self dissolves rational purpose, where pride reigns, where emotion is paramount, where instinct is king," he writes. "'Man is a political animal', said Aristotle. Clausewitz, a child of Aristotle, went no further than to say that a political animal is a warmaking animal. Neither dared confront the thought that man is a thinking animal in whom the intellect directs the urge to hunt and the ability to kill." From that jumping off point, Keegan takes us on a wide-ranging and unfortunately somewhat scattered tour of dozens of military cultures from the stone age on. This is both a strength of the book--for Keegan's erudition is immense and his powers of description remarkable--and its greatest weakness. It is interesting to compare A HISTORY OF WARFARE to Keegan's first book, THE FACE OF BATTLE, which is the best single volume of military history written in the second half of the Twentieth Century. Both books make the same argument, in different forms: that the intensity of modern warfare has become beyond human toleration. As Keegan writes here, "Politics must continue; war cannot." But in the earlier book, Keegan made his argument by a magnificent accumulation of detail describing four well known and well understood battles of the modern era. Here, the argument is less convincing, because it is less focused. This book points in some promising new directions, though, when Keegan explores the cultural dimensions of war. He points out how we are "culturally bound" by our modern Western industrialized perceptions that war must be a Clausewitzian "true war", full mobilization struggle with no quarter. Nuclear weapons, as "the logical culmination of the technological trend of the Western way of warfare," reduce that dominant military culture to an absurdity. We are left, however, in a world with 30,000 nuclear weapons in the hands of ten to twenty self-interested states of low to moderate rationality, plus 200 more even less rational states armed with high intensity conventional weapons and every intention of using them all the way up to, if not beyond, the rather high threshold of destructive military activity which the nuclear states will accept from the nonnuclear ones. (Viz. Bosnia). Keegan's work, too, has reached its logical culmination. He identifies the problem, and makes some optimistic sounds about the Bush administration's New World Order, but he does not have any answers beyond suggesting that there may be much virtue in relearning how supposedly "primitive" cultures have adapted the human urge to aggression. "There is a wisdom in the principles of intellectual restraint and even of symbolic ritual that needs to be rediscovered," he concludes. "There is an even greater wisdom in the denial that politics and war belong within the same continuum." Implementing this insight will be the task of later generations of military historians and politicians--assuming, of course, that they exist.