The Future of War: A History
In 1892, a British journal called Black and White published a fictional account of a future pan-European war. Remarkably, the spark the authors invented to ignite the conflict was an assassination attempt in the Balkans of a man named Prince Ferdinand. In the ensuing war, however, they pitted an Anglo-German alliance against France and Russia.
Such intermingling of predictive success and failure exemplifies the story Sir Lawrence Freedman tells in his latest work of wide-lens historical synthesis: The Future of War: A History. Freedman, an emeritus professor of history at King’s College, London, is one of the most renowned academic writers on military strategy, widely respected by scholars and practitioners alike. His previous book, Strategy: A History, took on a similar task: to make sense for the layman of a subject of unwieldy scope and complexity.
The Future of War is more modest by comparison, at around half the length and reaching back in time only as far as Bismarck instead of the Old Testament. While its brevity demands compromises in depth, the book largely succeeds in offering a thoughtful synthesis of a diverse body of literature in clear and simple prose.
If there is a single key theme in Freedman’s story, it is the persistence of undue optimism about future war, albeit of two distinct sorts.
The first is the elusive promise of “decisive battle,” a quick and devastating blow that settles the political issues of the war in a single stroke. Freedman documents resilient nostalgia for “classical warfare” where generals maneuver in search of a large, climactic clash between regular forces. The book begins with such a set-piece collision of armies, the Battle of Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War. But the decisive battle concept extends into more modern and complex territory as well. Early Cold War strategists contemplated the potential for preemptive nuclear strikes. In a similar vein, the dawn of the information age and development of precision weaponry promised a “revolution in military affairs,” which Freedman characterizes as “an idealized version of classical warfare.” And today’s often-invoked potential for a massive politically motivated cyber attack is another entry in the genre. A related theme is the fear of surprise attack. Pearl Harbor in particular reappears throughout the book, casting a long shadow across American strategic thinking from 1941 to the present day.
Freedman’s view, however, is that history justifies neither the fear nor the promise of such surprise or war-winning single attacks. The Battle of Sedan turned out to be less decisive than it first appeared. More recently, American forces pioneered cutting-edge information-enabled precision strike only to find themselves bogged down for years in Iraqi and Afghan insurgencies. Even Pearl Harbor, after all, was only a tactical success for Japan, and ultimately precipitated its catastrophic defeat.
The second flavor of unwarranted optimism Freedman finds is the promise of an end to war altogether. He describes the earnest efforts of multiple generations of diplomats, scholars, and activists to impress upon the world’s leaders the inherent illogic of warfare. In the wake of the recent Nobel Prize for Peace award to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, it is interesting to be reminded of much earlier Nobel award recipients with similarly ambitious (and improbable) projects. The 1933 winner was Norman Angell, now remembered mostly for his book The Great Illusion, which had the misfortune to advance the notion that major wars were an anachronism only a few years before the outbreak of World War I.
In these sections of the book, Freedman taps into questions extending beyond war and peace, and into the plausibility of a progressive view of history and the perfectibility of mankind. As students of philosophy know, there is evidence on both sides of this debate, and Freedman’s story includes some of each. On the one hand, war has by some measures become less frequent, pervasive, and violent. Democracy has expanded with some—albeit complicated—beneficial impact on the incidence of conflict. On the other hand, expectations of major progress in limiting war have been repeatedly dashed, and seemingly compelling arguments that the next innovation in deadly technologies will make war less attractive (the machine gun, strategic bombing, nuclear weapons, and so on) have been successively disproved.
Freedman’s comments on United Nations peacekeeping operations could serve as a good summary of the larger peacemaking projects throughout history:
Here was the core problem with peacemaking at any level. Peace required a political settlement, but was that to be based on a calculation of the balance of power at the time, or a sense of the rights and wrongs of the conflict, which might address the underlying, and probably still simmering, grievances that had led to the conflict?
The Future of War: A History is divided into three main sections, each quite different from the others. Part I covers the ways in which modern wars between 1870 and 1991 were—and, more often, were not—anticipated. Part II, nominally focused on the post-Cold War era, is really more of an academic literature review on the causes of conflict, from international relations theory to scholarship on civil wars and terrorism. Part III then addresses a set of issues that preoccupy today’s military futurists, such as “hybrid war,” cyber war, robotics, and artificial intelligence. This is a very wide swath of territory to cover, and significant portions of the book are devoted to high-level sketches of the history of international relations and conflict over the past 150 years. While these sections are compact and easily digested, readers with professional interests in the field may find themselves wishing for a more selective but incisive treatment of these topics.
A more novel and compelling feature of the book is its interweaving of future wars as depicted in fiction and film. Often, of course, writers and filmmakers got it wrong. But occasionally, they were quite prescient, and Freedman uncovers a few instances in which fiction actually influenced the course of war preparations, such as H.G. Wells’s early vision of atomic weapons and the interest Ronald Reagan took in the movie War Games and Tom Clancy’s novel Red Storm Rising.
This is not a highly conceptual book. Freedman describes but does not really analyze the conceptual problems that his story surfaces, for the most part seeming content to leave open fundamental questions about the validity of forecasting, the design of military doctrine and plans, the interaction of technology and operations, and the like. He does, however, construct an extended critique of academic analysis of warfare. In general he finds unfolding history to have consistently wrong-footed political scientists. The end of the Cold War in particular confronted international relations theorists with a major problem, and Freedman opines:
One response to this might have been to go easy on the theory, concentrating on observing carefully what was going on in the world, and only offering propositions on causal relationships as and when they seemed appropriate and always with regard for context. Yet the dominant trend in the field was not to abandon theory but to make it even stronger. Only then could it become more predictive.
He also catalogs the challenges analysts have faced in building and employing large analytic databases on interstate conflict, such as the Correlates of War and Militarized Interstate Disputes (hosted by Penn State University). On this point he notes, “Historians, whose observations had been dismissed as being too intuitive or speculative, could retort that the yield from the effort that went into refining the methodologies and interrogating the data turned out to be meagre.”
Freedman titles his main chapter on this subject “A Science of War,” making clear his skepticism that such a science is possible. Many of his points rehearse long-standing complaints from historians about political science. Some of the arguments are more than fair, and Freedman marshals them well. Nevertheless, as the book also makes clear, one need only scratch the surface of any discussion of the future of war to reveal a set of assumptions—perhaps explicit, perhaps inchoate—about the causes of past wars. Indeed, this principle applies to any predictive enterprise. And discerning the causes of past and future wars remains a necessary task, whatever its required mix of artistry and scientific measurement. So despite all the difficulties of data and logical inference in this field, it seems odd to imply, as Freedman does, that remedies are to be found in a less systematic approach to studying the causes of war.
In his introduction, Freedman writes, “We ask questions about the future to inform choices, not to succumb to fatalism.” His analysis steers clear of fatalism, but what is his final message for those burdened with choices about the future of war? Ultimately, he warns against expecting either too much or too little continuity between the present and the future, and concludes that many forecasts of war “will deserve to be taken seriously. They should all, however, be treated sceptically.”
For today’s leaders, then, his story sheds a little more light on the path ahead. But that path, along with the debates about the best ways to peer ahead, remains as wide open as ever.