Strategy, like morality, is a language of justification.
—Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars
During the 1980s I taught military history to many Army ROTC cadets at Boston University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, while working as a volunteer for several peace organizations in the Boston area. I was not surprised, but was still bemused, by the inability of these two groups to understand one another’s language. I had been vaguely aware that there are two vocabularies for discussing warfare, the moral and the strategic, but I had not realized that they ran on such separate tracks. The peace activists, except perhaps for some extreme pacifists, seemed willing to allow the strategic vocabulary its place, so long as it remained subordinate to their own criteria in high-level decisions. The military professionals, except perhaps for some extreme hawks, seemed willing to allow moral discourse its high place, indeed preferred to keep it high upstairs where it could not intrude into military life except in the form of the occasional chaplain’s lecture on “military ethics,” which would be confined to rules of practical conduct. The two groups did not seek to abolish one another. They ignored one another, especially the intellectuals on both sides.
A common justification for this mutual indifference was that the language of strategy is pragmatic and tough minded, fit for the harsh necessities of war. This assumption could serve both sides: to claim for strategists an autonomous sphere of action (“All’s fair in love and war”) or to limit that sphere (“War is too important to be left to the generals”). But it was clear that the two vocabularies everywhere overlapped—and not clear that the one was more pragmatic than the other. I made some attempts to lecture to peace activists on concepts of strategy and to cadets on the philosophy of war (not “military ethics”). They listened patiently, and I eventually conceived the idea of writing the present book, which is dedicated to the many intelligent and idealistic people I met in both camps.
The schism I have described is reflected in the scholarly literature on warfare. For the past two centuries the just war doctrine has been the preserve of theologians and jurists, and strategy, the property of soldiers. All these groups—not just the soldiers—are professionals concerned primarily with practical issues. So far as the world of “pure” scholarship is concerned, the study of war has been an orphan, but those who approach it from a background in philosophy are usually drawn to the moral vocabulary, and those who come to it from the social sciences and historical scholarship tend toward the language of strategy. There is little crossover between the two traditions, hence no truly comprehensive history of the theory of war has been developed. We have many historical studies of the just war doctrine, all concerned primarily with Christian theology and its continuation in international law. There have been some historical treatments of strategic thought, usually beginning with Carl von Clausewitz, sometimes with a nod to Machiavelli. The classical antecedents of both traditions are generally acknowledged and generally ignored—a procedure that severs their common roots, perhaps to their mutual satisfaction, and sometimes obscures the history of their own doctrine. Machiavelli may be called the greatest philosopher of war, but he has generally been anathema to the moral party and unintelligible to the strategic.1
In this book, I offer a short account of classical theories of war and imperialism as an attempt to bridge this gap. This study is organized around the following three major themes:
· The moral issue: warfare as an instrument of justice, human and divine.
· The international issue: warfare as an instrument of foreign policy or raison d’état.
· The constitutional issue: warfare as an instrument of internal policy.
1. War as an Instrument of Human and Divine Justice. Until recent times, warfare was generally assumed to have a certain place in the cosmic order, assigned to it by divine or natural law, which both justified and restricted it. Under this rubric, we may distinguish two different doctrines, the “just war” and the “holy war.”
The phrase “just war” usually designates a body of Christian teaching that did not reach its fullest development until the sixteenth century, but I use it here for something far older: the all-but-universal human assumption that wars are entirely justified, and requisite, when fought to resist wrong. Such a just war might easily become a just hegemony or empire, as we will see later on.
The holy war, or crusade, is a just war on a cosmic scale, fought not only to redress particular wrongs but to restore order to the world. In practice it is often difficult to distinguish the just war from the holy war. This is so because the just war is often described as a sort of minicrusade undertaken on behalf of the public welfare, and the holy war retains much of the rhetoric of the just war, as it is still a matter of defending rights and resisting wrongs. But once we begin to think of infidels or barbarians as constituting an offense against God or Nature merely by their independent existence, the language of the just war changes its meaning. The doctrine of holy war, like that of just war, reaches its full development in sixteenth-century Christian theology, but both have their classical precedents.
Premodern thought about the ethics of warfare is distinguished by the absence of two important theories that today dominate discourse on this subject. These are defensism and pacifism.
The traditional just war must not be confused with “defensive” war. This is a common misunderstanding. The distinction between aggressive war and defensive war is modern. The traditional just war was supposed to be “vindicative” rather than “defensive.” It was always necessary to have a just cause for war, which meant simply that one had to be able to claim to be the victim of wrongs. These wrongs might include insults as well as injuries, for honor had to be defended as well as land. Often it was felt that there was a moral obligation to redress the wrongs of one’s neighbors as well, which provided a ready excuse to intervene in their affairs. Given a just cause, there was rarely any objection to becoming the aggressor, in the sense of striking the first blow. The failure of philosophers and theologians to ban aggression made it easy for theories of just war to become theories of just hegemony or just imperialism, then for these to become holy crusades.
As for pacifism in the modern sense, it literally did not exist. Premodern thinkers were not all militaristic by any means, but they were almost all “bellicist.”2 They assumed warfare was a normal and natural feature of the world, to be accepted fatalistically like any other great force of nature. It is easy to find in premodern thought expressions of bitter antiwar sentiment that is often mistaken for pacifism. But these Stoic and Christian complaints about warfare are not political programs; they are the equivalent of complaining about the weather. Only toward the end of the eighteenth century did any appreciable number of serious thinkers begin to entertain the hope that war might be abolished. The emergence of pacifism and defensivism in the age of the American and French Revolutions created a great watershed in the intellectual history of warfare.
2. War as an Instrument of Foreign Policy. I mean here the theory known as raison d’état, or Staatsräson, a phrase that entered European languages in the sixteenth century, when the word “state” was acquiring its modern sense.3 The concept designated a set of principles about interstate behavior often associated, then and now, with the name of Machiavelli. Within the purview of raison d’état, the world of interstate relations is assumed to be anarchic, composed of competing political units, each of which is pursuing its own interest. Each is assumed to be justified in such pursuit because the “state” is the only possible moral community. The interests of larger moral communities, such as are assumed in the just war and holy war doctrines, are ignored. Each state is assumed to be capable of identifying its own interests, but since the preservation and strengthening of the state is basic to all other interests, the competition is basically about power for its own sake. War, if consonant with the legitimate interests of the state, is assumed to be a legitimate instrument of state, indeed, its primary instrument in dealing with other states.
This theory has been the dominant philosophy of war since Clausewitz. But it is older than Clausewitz and older than Machiavelli. We do not find the doctrine stated so explicitly before the sixteenth century because only in a Christian society did it become necessary to formulate it in that self-conscious way. But what was called raison d’état in the sixteenth century was simply a systematic statement of an attitude encountered everywhere in the cherished Greek and Latin authors. Greek historiography and oratory are suffused with it. It has never been put more succinctly than in the Melian dialogue of Thucydides. The Romans tended to hide it under a veil of moralisms, but Machiavelli could pick out its hard outline beneath the mellow prose of Livy, and later in the sixteenth century, the name Tacitus became practically shorthand for raison d’état.
The contemporary strategic vocabulary of war is derived from this tradition, and its roots are classical and neoclassical; the contemporary moral vocabulary, however, comes from the just war tradition and has been heavily influenced by Christianity.
3. War as an Instrument of Domestic Policy. There is widespread agreement among anthropologists, as we will see in the following chapter, that primitive warfare, whatever other functions it may have served, had the important function of enforcing social solidarity. Among the Greeks and Romans, this function was quite conscious: They assumed warfare had major effects upon the internal constitution of the state, and much of their thinking about warfare focused on this aspect of it, particularly on an ideal that I will call “civic militarism.” This was the military side of what was known as “republicanism” in early modern Europe. Republicanism essentially meant the belief that the best constitution—meaning the mode of organization within a society—is composed of a body of self-governing citizens whose primary duty is to defend their “republic,” which in the ancient Mediterranean world was always a small city-state. Martial values were cultivated among the citizens not only because they were needed to defend the city but also because they were highly valued in themselves as a main source of citizen virtue and loyalty. This is genuine “militarism,” not just bellicism; it assigns positive social and ethical value to the process of war for its own sake, regarding it as the means and measure of cultural development. I call it “civic” to distinguish it from other types of militaristic culture, such as the primitive militarism to be discussed shortly or the modern nationalistic type, with which we are all too familiar.
The militarism of the classical city-state was always associated with a peculiar type of military equipment and tactic: heavy infantry in a close formation, whether Greek phalanx or Roman legion, relying on direct shock combat. In the ancient Mediterranean, this type of formation and its accompanying ideology were never institutionalized in any social environment but that of a free city. The ideology was responsible for a certain glorification of warfare in Greek and Roman literature and imparted a peculiar spirit of aggressiveness to military ideals and practices. The simple fact that a formation of heavy infantry could be most effectively used in attack bred a tendency to settle wars by a single decisive battle. Among the Greeks, the preference for offensive tactics did not usually imply a preference for offensive strategies; but among the Romans, it normally implied both. This cult of the offensive was one of the most important military legacies of the classical world.4
Today, this may seem one of the more dubious classical legacies. But many have found it difficult to resist this heady combination of civic freedom and military glory. In the republics of Renaissance Italy, the classical vision of an armed and militant citizenry was revived and found its philosopher in Machiavelli. The republican dream soon faded before the realities of the monarchic sixteenth century, but the vision of a disciplined conquering army endured. When Captain John Bingham, who had fought the Spaniards in the Low Countries, translated the Tactica of Aelian in 1616, he thought it useful to explain to his readers in his preface why the ancient ways of war were superior:
The Treatise … containeth the practise of the best Generals of all antiquity concerning the formes of Battailes. And whereas many hold opinion, that it sorteth not with the use of our times, they must give me leave to be of another mind: Indeed our actions in Warre are onely nowadays and sieges oppugnations [sic] of Cities; Battailes wee heare not of, save onely of a few in France, and that of Newport in the Low-Countries. But this manner will not last alwayes, nor is there any Conquest to be made without Battailes. He that is Master of the field, may dispose of his affaires as he listeth; hee may spoyle the Enemies Countrey at his pleasure, he may march where he thinketh best, he may lay siege to what Towne he is disposed, he may raise any siege that the Enemy hath layed against him or his. Neither can any man be Master of the field without Battaile; in ordering whereof, that Generali that is most-skilfull, seldome misseth of winning the day; experience of former times cleares this.5
By “experience of former times,” he means much more than Aelian and the other classical authors on the art of war, for the cult of battle, like much else in the classical military tradition, had been passed down chiefly by the classical historians, primarily through the examples of the great commanders. All educated Europeans knew that Alexander and Caesar had won their reputations by seeking out the enemy, bringing him to battle, and annihilating him.
We are still familiar with the problem of warfare as a component of the international system and with war as a religious and moral question. Machiavelli and St. Augustine can still speak to us directly on those issues. But warfare as a constitutional problem tends to be ignored in modern thought, and the civic militarist version of it has no real equivalent at all in the modern world. It lost its allure some two hundred years ago, when the more enlightened thinkers of Europe and America grew suspicious of the fierce militancy of the ancient citizen ideal and turned to a more peaceable and commercial model of republicanism. Today, when political scientists speculate about the relationship between war and the constitution, they do not ask which constitution will be most successful at waging war but rather which will be most successful at avoiding it; and the effects of militarism on society, if mentioned at all, are generally assumed to be deleterious.
Such, in outline, is the plan of the book. Something more should be said about its geographical limitations. I have restricted myself to the Western world for obvious reasons: the need to reduce the subject to manageable proportions, the thinness of reliable scholarly literature on many nonwestern military traditions, and my lack of the linguistic equipment to study these further. But some attempt must be made to address whether there is a distinct Western tradition of military thought.6
Other ancient civilizations had their literatures of war, but they seem to have been heavily dominated at most times by religious and cosmological theories. The attempt to put warfare in its place within a universal moral order was an important motif in the Western tradition at all times, as I have recognized by making this the first of the three main themes of this book. During the Middle Ages, this theme dominated practically all thinking about warfare in Europe. But the civilization of the Indian subcontinent, before it came under Western influence, seems to have lived in the Middle Ages almost always; and the civilization of the Far East, most of the time. In both traditions, military thought was generally dominated by a learned nonmilitary elite—in India, a priestly caste; in China, a scholar bureaucracy—whose main concerns about warfare were these: to interpret it within a mythic cosmological framework that would not admit the legitimacy of separate warring states, to plant ritual proscriptions around every phase of the art of war, and to keep the military elites of their societies safely under the thumb of Brahman or mandarin.
Nonreligious theories of war can appear in such cultures, but they do not become continuing traditions, or if they do, they are thoroughly subordinated to the ruling ideology. Ancient India produced the treatise called Arthashastra, attributed to Kautilya, a minister of the Mauryan empire in the third century B.C. who has often been compared to Machiavelli for his coldblooded acceptance of raison d’état. But the Brahmans reasserted their control and eventually succeeded in subjecting the Hindu warrior caste to what would appear to be the most fantastically elaborate and strategically crippling code of ritual warfare to which any military tradition has ever submitted.
In China, however, military thought achieved a much more significant breakthrough. During the Age of the Warring States (403-221 B.C.), there developed a remarkable tradition of military literature that left us the Seven Military Classics, the basic texts used in imperial examinations for military office in China into the twentieth century. One of these works, the Art of War attributed to Sun Tzu, has been well known in the West since the eighteenth century and has enjoyed a popularity denied to any of the ancient Western treatises on the art of war. The precocity of the ancient Chinese military literature is undeniable, but it is sometimes exaggerated because we tend to compare it to the classical Greek and Latin treatises on the art of war, such as those by Aelian and Frontinus, which resemble the Chinese works in literary form. This comparison is misleading. The Greek and Latin treatises on the art of war are indeed a disappointing body of literature when compared to their ancient Chinese equivalents, indeed, when compared to almost anything. The major contributions of the Greeks and Romans to military literature are not to be found in these jejune tracts; they are to be found in historiography. If we are to compare the military thought of the ancient Mediterranean and ancient East Asia, we should include their historical literatures in the comparison, for China, alone among ancient societies, developed independently something like the Greek tradition of narrative history about war and high politics. A comparative study of classical Far Eastern and classical Far Western historiography is one of the great cross-cultural subjects awaiting a competent scholar—a role to which I cannot aspire, owing to the limitations mentioned above.
Chinese military thought was precocious and remarkable, but it did not last. After the establishment of the Han dynasty, the martial tradition was increasingly subordinated to the ideology of the Confucianist elite, whose major traditions were antimilitary. The realpolitik of the Age of Warring States had no place in later Confucianist political philosophy, which was centered on the ideal of a peaceful universal empire reflecting the order of heaven: The military bureaucracy always had its place but was increasingly subordinated to the civil bureaucracy: The heroes of imperial China include no equivalents of Alexander or Caesar: The Seven Military Classics were kept alive only because they were assigned a strictly compartmentalized place in Chinese culture, as required reading for military officers, and were generally forbidden to everyone else.
Finally, even in the great age of Chinese military thought, there seems to have been no equivalent to what I have termed civic militarism, and there was little trace of the decisive-battle ideology that went with it. In fact, the Seven Military Classics have always impressed Western readers because they do not exhibit the preoccupation with the offensive that has been a continuing feature of Western thinking about warfare. Rather, they emphasize the importance of gaining victory with as little fighting as possible:
Attaining one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the pinnacle of excellence. Subjugating the enemy’s army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence. Thus the highest realization of warfare is to attack the enemy’s plans; next is to attack their alliances; next to attack their army; and the lowest is to attack their fortified cities … Thus one who excels at employing the military subjugates other people’s armies without engaging in battle, captures other people’s fortified cities without attacking them, and destroys other people’s states without prolonged fighting. (Sun Tzu 3 [trans. Sawyer, 161])
This is far removed from the thought world of Captain Bingham, not that he represents the acme of European military thinking or that his passion for decisive battle is the only counsel to be found in it.
There is something distinctive about the Western tradition of warfare. No other civilization developed a continuing tradition of military thought independent of religious and social control, no other gave rise to such dynamic patterns of warfare. Belief in the just war is worldwide, but outside the West we find little trace of raison d’état and no civic militarism. These were legacies of the Greeks and Romans, and until around 1800, European thought on matters of war and peace was dominated by the classical authors. The classical tradition did not lose its grip on Western military thought until the early nineteenth century, when the influence of the classical historians was finally replaced by the new “scientific” history of Georg Barthold Niebuhr and that of the classical treatises on the art of war, by the new “scientific” military thought of Antoine Henri Baron de Jomini and Clausewitz. In the final chapter of this book, I will attempt to summarize the continuing influence of this tradition. But first, we must look at its primitive roots.
Notes
1. W. E. Kaegi, Jr., “The Crisis in Military Historiography,” Armed Forces and Society 7 (1980), 299-316, mentions among the topics neglected by military historians “the place of military strategy in intellectual history,” and “the influence and perhaps tyranny of Graeco-Roman precedents and precepts on European and American ideas and practices in the art of war and military strategy.” He offers a list of military authors who were so tyrannized, from Machiavelli to Guibert. One notices the list includes no one after 1800 except Ardant du Picq. Kaegi remarks, “Historians have seldom given much critical scrutiny to military strategy, let alone to how it is formed or how it might relate to other forms of human thought, in particular to historical assumptions.” He thinks that the historical study of strategy practically ended in 1967 with the last edition of Basil Liddell Hart’s Strategy, after which the subject fell to the metahistorical approaches of the nuclear strategists. Since this article appeared much has been done to fill in the gap between Machiavelli and Clausewitz by the revised edition of Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton, 1986), and Azar Gat’s Origins of Military Thought: From the Enlightenment to Clausewitz (New York, 1989).
2. A term coined by Michael Howard, used by Martin Ceadel in Thinking About Peace and War (Oxford, 1987).
3. It did not, however, find a generally accepted equivalent in English, as witnessed by the English translation of the title of Friedrich Meinecke’s Der Idee der Staatsräson in der neueren Geschichte—Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’Etat and Its Place in Modern History, trans. Douglas Scott (New Haven, 1957).
4. One of the many contributions of Hans Delbrück to the history of warfare (Geschichte der Kriegskunst im Rahmen der politischen Geschichte [Berlin, 1900—], trans. W. J. Renfroe, Jr., as History of the Art of War, 4 vols. [Westport, Conn., 1975-1985]) was to propose that there have been two basic forms of warfare, the strategies of annihilation and of exhaustion. Victor Hanson in The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (New York, 1989) argues that the first of these is peculiarly Western and can be traced back to the ancient Greeks. This idea is now reaching a wide audience through John Keegan’s A History of Warfare (New York, 1993), whose master thesis is the contrast between nonwestern traditions of limited warfare and a Western tradition, derived ultimately from the Greeks, of “the face to face battle to the death.” I agree, though I think the version of this tradition that most influenced later Western culture is Roman rather than Greek.
5. The Tactiks of Aelian, trans. John Bingham (London, 1616), dedication. This debate often became a quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, with the ancients on the side of the offensive. Compare Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1988), 6, 16.
6. The most useful attempt at a general theory on the relationship between war and religion known to me is J. A. Aho’s Religious Mythology and the Art of War: Comparative Religious Symbolisms of Military Violence (Westport, Conn., 1981): Aho supports the view that there is a significant difference between Western and non-Western traditions, the latter being more dominated by ritual codes of behavior and less prone to “Machiavellianism.” The Chinese classics have now been translated with full commentary in another volume in this series, The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China, ed. R. D. Sawyer (Boulder, 1993). I have also profited from an unpublished doctoral dissertation, C. C. Rand’s “The Role of Military Thought in Early Chinese Intellectual History,” Harvard University, Department of East Asian Languages, 1977.
Developments in the Islamic world have been too little studied to permit generalization. In medieval times, Muslim culture was strongly influenced by Greek philosophy, had a lively tradition of historical writing that produced the unique historical theories of Ibn Khaldun, and might have had a tradition of military-political literature that escaped the controls of religious law; but if there was such a tradition, it was lost. In early modern times, Muslim religious law did not recognize the legitimacy of wars between Muslims and considered the only righteous warfare to be the holy war between the House of Islam and the House of War, or the infidel world. See the studies collected in Cross, Crescent, and Sword: The Justification and limitation of War in Western and Islamic Tradition (Westport, Conn., 1990), and Just War and Jihad: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives on War and Peace in Western and Islamic Traditions (Westport, Conn., 1991), both ed. J. T. Johnson and John Kelsay.