WASHINGTON, Sept. 25 (UPI) -- All of Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld's books are worth reading, but a few are "big books," books so important that anyone interested in war must read them.
To date, his big books include "The Transformation of War," "The Rise and Decline of the State" and "Fighting Power." Van Creveld's latest book has just come out, and it is a very big book indeed. Titled "The Culture of War," it targets, hits and obliterates 19th century Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz's assertion that war is merely the continuation of politics by other means.
Like the late U.S. Air Force Col. John Boyd, who was America's greatest military strategist, van Creveld has engaged in a running feud with Clausewitz. I happen to think Clausewitz still offers much of value, as do many things Prussian. But as Boyd often said, we have learned a few things since Clausewitz's day.
"The Culture of War" offers one of the most important lessons. War exists not to serve the interests of states, it argues, or anything else. Rather, it is a fundamental part of human nature and culture. No human culture is imaginable that excludes war. At the same time, war and those who fight it develop their own cultures, cultures that shape how war is carried on far more powerfully than do rational calculations of military effectiveness.
It is impossible to summarize a book this rich in a column. Rather than try, let me give two examples from it, both from German military history. The first illustrates the danger of military culture divorcing itself from actual war, the second the consequences of trying to separate military institutions from the culture of war.
After the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, the Prussian army routinized itself to the point where complex and largely useless drills came to be everything. Creveld writes:
"Many were especially devised for the king's benefit; the most spectacular, if not the most useful, movement of all was turning a battalion on its own axis, like a top."
However, the extent to which the culture of war had taken over from war itself is nicely illustrated by two contemporary stories.
One had 18th century Prussian Gen. Friedrich Christoph von Saldern earnestly debating the pros and cons of increasing the regulation marching speed of 75 paces a minute to 76.
According to the other, when von Saldern went to heaven and explained his system of maneuvers to the 17th century Swedish king and victorious general Gustavus Adolphus, the Swedish ruler answered that he was not aware that in the years since his death the Earth had been made flat.
Briefly, a thousand details -- "pedantries," as Field Marshal Gebhard von Bluecher was to call them later -- that had originally served a useful purpose now became detached from reality, so to speak. They continued to float about solely as parts of a highly developed culture, one that no longer made sense in any terms except its own.
The result was a Prussian army so brittle that, when faced in 1806 with the powerful French army of the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, it shattered.
--
(Part 2: The collapse of the German Bundeswehr)
--
(William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation.)
