A history of getting war wrong

Book review of 'The Future of War: A History'

The Future of War: A History

Lawrence Freedman

Penguin Random House, UK

375 pages; £25

Lawrence Freedman, one of Britain’s most outstanding contemporary strategists and historians, has consistently delivered excellence. In 1981, he published The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, which has served since then as the primary text for students of nuclear strategy. He was in former UK prime minister, Tony Blair’s, inner circle of strategic advisors and was chosen to write the history of the Falklands campaign. In 2009, he was on the four-person committee, headed by Sir John Chilcot, which enquired into Britain’s much-criticised decision to invade Iraq alongside the US, and which delivered a damning verdict: That Mr Blair obliged President George W Bush by exaggerating the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, and that the British military and intelligence agencies were ineffective. Like all great strategists and writers, Mr Freedman has the clarity of thinking that allows him to take a skein of complex, intertwined thoughts and, almost miraculously, extract from them some simple, understandable threads. His elegant prose, laced with humour, is a joy to read.

In his latest book, which is surely destined for the bookshelf of every serious strategist and military thinker, Mr Freedman adopts an intriguing methodology, which the book’s elegant title hints at. In treating a range of campaigns starting from the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, the author back-tracks in time to sample what strategists, generals, the media and even futurologist authors, predicted before the campaign. He even includes the writing of futurologist authors — H G Wells’ War of the Worlds is extensively mined. Mr Freedman then compares what had been anticipated with how the campaigns actually played out. The conclusion that emerges from most case studies is that, in the lead-up to battle, planners usually deluded themselves into believing they could deal the enemy a knockout blow in a decisive battle. Mr Freedman terms this the legacy of Waterloo, where, in a single day of battle, Napoleon’s comeback attempt was scuttled forever. 

However, in campaign after campaign, Mr Freedman demonstrates how unreasonable was this optimism. In contrast to the quick and decisive battle that had been predicted, militaries found themselves bogged down in messy stalemates that dragged on endlessly, extracting an unanticipated price in blood, money and prestige. The obvious example of this was the First World War, where Germany was going to deal the allies a knockout blow through the Schlieffen Plan in the summer of 1914; just as Britain and France were going to “get the boys home for Christmas”, only to find themselves in a grinding battle of attrition that went on for four years, wiping away an entire generation of European youth.

Even where battle was decided quickly – such as the “classical, textbook military victory” of Kaiser Wilhelm of Prussia over the French army in 1870 at Sedan – the Prussian victory that came in a day was undermined by the refusal of the French people to accept their monarch’s surrender and, instead, mount a country-wide insurrection that bloodied the Prussians for another year. This was echoed famously in Iraq, where the easy Coalition military victory devolved into a bloody, years-long insurgency that had never been anticipated by the American and British planners of that campaign.

Fascinatingly, even the futurologists who correctly foreshadowed the advent of weaponry like tanks (H G Wells) and submarines (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) were undermined by officials and planners. As early as 1912, Conan Doyle described what was to come in the First World War, in describing underwater submersibles that went about sinking passenger liners. But contemporary British admirals who pooh-poohed this notion did so not because they believed submarines were technically impossible. Instead, they argued that sinking unarmed passenger vessels was to plumb a level of depravity that no civilised country would do.

Through the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, planners in America and Europe (the book’s predominant focus) structured and equipped their armies for “climactic battles” against rival powers for high political stakes. They got it wrong too, since most European powers found themselves fighting colonial wars through this entire period. In a fascinating nugget, Mr Freedman reveals that from 1837 to 1901, Britain alone fought over 400 battles in some 60 colonial campaigns, for which authors and historians invented a term: “Small wars”. These were considered to be of little interest, but bred a culture of cruelty that the author believes engendered the mindset that accepted the endless slaughter of the First World War. 

The quest for decisive battle is still alive, points out Mr Freedman. The “revolution in military affairs” that fused digital and communications technologies to create the “shock and awe” operational strategy that was first seen in the 1991 Gulf War has now been taken to another level. The fusing of artificial intelligence with unmanned systems allow planners to dream of bloodless war, in which autonomous machines do the fighting — at least until they are “killed” by cyber weaponry. But Mr Freedman remains unconvinced this would make campaigns quicker or more acceptable. While nuclear deterrence would continue to push warfare into weak states, campaigns like the ones against the Islamic State on battlegrounds like Mosul and Raqqa serve as reminders of just how bloody warfare continues to be.