Historical Perspectives on Future War

by Robert F. Baumann [Military Review (March-April 1997)]

Thinking deeply about the future of war requires careful reflection on its past. A paradox? Certainly. B.H. Liddell Hart likened the opposing pull of science and history in forecasting the role of future armaments to a "tug of war."^[1] The march of science suggests the next war will employ many new means. In contrast, history suggests that by its very nature, war exhibits many continuities amid change. Broadly speaking, history gives a sense of the trajectory of war's evolution.

Using historical perspectives on the future, this article addresses several fundamental questions. First, how did past futurists frame their arguments in historical terms and what common approaches did they adopt? Second, how have past approaches to speculation on future war influenced the way we think today? And, third, how have historical perspectives entered into the current debate about shifting paradigms in strategy and the revolution in military affairs (RMA)?

Before addressing these questions, a brief review of a few prominent European intellectual trends during the century and a half before World War I reveals emerging assumptions about change and progress that are basic to any analysis of why war has assumed its variety of forms. The modern fascination with cutting-edge technologies and their undeniable impact on war often obscures our view of war's other dimensions. Historians have widely noted the social, political and economic factors in shaping the evolution of conflict. Cultural and intellectual changes have played a powerful role as well.

Past patterns of thinking about the future have influenced the way we speculate about war – so much that we often use them subconsciously. First and foremost examples are our notions of change and progress. As noted by scholar J.B. Bury in The Idea of Progress, until the Middle Ages, Western cultures generally adhered to a static view of history. The ancient Greek philosophers did not perceive progressive development as natural to humanity. While they did grasp the cyclical rise and decline of city-states and empires, they perceived no general direction, and certainly no conspicuous or inexorable improvement, in unfolding human history. Even at the dawning of the Renaissance, when the intellectual preconditions for its appearance were taking form, the idea of progress in earthly affairs was yet to be born.^[2]

However, by the late 18th-century, faith in progress was virtually a fixture in the outlook among all but the most pessimistic of Western thinkers. Period analysts founded this perception on an appreciation of comparatively recent but dramatic change brought about by scientific and technological advances. Progressive discovery in biology, botany, chemistry, physics and astronomy revealed dazzling patterns and regularities in the universe. Some inferred from the unlocking of nature's secrets that comparable tendencies might govern human affairs. A critical component of this revelation was the constancy of change and a fresh sense of the trajectory of historical development. Many looked boldly to a brighter future. For instance, Marquis de Condorcet wrote effusively in 1793 about the limitless perfectibility of humanity even as he was under death sentence and evading revolutionary authorities in France.^[3]

Contemporary thought about warfare reflected the spirit of the time and place. In his Essai general de tactique, written in 1770, Frenchman Jacques Antoine Hippolyte Comte de Guibert purported to make a science of tactics. Based on a historical review of the art of war, he professed to have established a series of enduring tactical principles that would transcend changes in weaponry. Along the way, he concluded that the states of the ancient world often exhibited a better grasp of the relationship between war and state institutions than kingdoms of contemporary Europe, although he held out hope for Frederick the Great's Prussia.^[4]

By the early 19th-century, European interpretations of the historical development of human knowledge, warfare and social organization tended to share one distinctive characteristic: They saw human progress unfolding not in a perfectly linear fashion but in distinct stages. Each stage represented a fundamental transformation that built on the foundation left by its predecessor.^[5] Even the French Revolution's excesses, the Napoleonic Wars' horrors and conservative reaction across Europe did not stifle the optimistic profusion of new writings anticipating a bold new age. War, many believed, was crossing a historic threshold as well.

To forecast the path the future would take, those analysts who most influenced 20th-century perspectives attempted to use scientific methodology. Setting the pace were the "positivists" and Auguste Comte. Comte set aside the questions of causality and meaning. Believing that contemporary German idealists and romantics were wasting time in their preoccupation with such problems, he focused his attention on what could be known. Thus, Comte sought to ascertain the laws governing human and social development through empirical observation – the cornerstone of positivist methodology. Comte described history as inexorably unfolding in three intellectual stages: theological, metaphysical and positivist. The latter did not build on its predecessors but, instead, replaced them by virtue of its superior insight. Comte dubbed the application of positive doctrine to human affairs "social physics," the spirit of which incidentally pervades modern social science theory and warfare modeling.^[6] Accordingly, positivists anticipated that knowledge of the laws by which societies functioned would make it possible in the future to engineer a perfect society and even put an end to war. Not only was the future predetermined, humanity itself could self-consciously bring it to reality.

Even John Stuart Mill, the English paragon of classical Western liberalism and champion of free speech and free will, could not entirely escape the idea that certain laws actually governed the flow of history. Mill separated history into so-called organic and critical periods. The former represented periods of stability and the latter, disruption and change. The search for truth was the moving force in history. Overall, he contended that historical laws direct human action, and "the influence exercised over each generation by the generations which preceded it, becomes more and more preponderant over all other influences."^[7] Shaping the same logic toward a different end, German historicists and early philosopher-nationalists, such as Johann Fichte, argued that the present and future were governed by the past.

Fichte saw the unfolding of history in the evolution of the modern nation, viewing the state as the vehicle by which politically self-conscious peoples would secure their destinies. Similarly, German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel saw historical progression as a dialectical process involving creative destruction in which each stage produced the forces that would undermine it and synthesize a new stage. In this context, Hegel wrote, "Freedom is nothing but the recognition and adoption of such universal substantial objects as Right and Law, and the production of a reality that is accordant with them – the state."^[8] This logical foundation served as the point of departure for much of Carl von Clausewitz's interest in the state and its defense.^[9]

Against this common European cultural background, it is hardly surprising that popular philosophical concepts should have found their way into theoretical musings about warfare. Henri Jomini's works on warfare and his belief in the immutable principles that regulate it exhibit positivist influence. Although he was also influenced by empirical scientific precepts, Clausewitz expresses German philosophical concerns with "how we know what we know," the force of human will and a host of other problems. Clausewitz adapted the Hegelian dialectical method to his consideration of war. He recognized implicitly that Napoleon's crushing defeat of the Prussian army in 1806 demolished the military synthesis of Frederickian absolutism.^[10] Though cognizant of change, Clausewitz did not foresee the perfecting of humanity or a prescription for perfect soldiering. His grasp of friction – sand in the gears of the perfect Enlightenment rationalist machine – doubtless made him skeptical of positivist influence on the study of war. Still, he did believe that soldiers could improve their minds through experience and the study of history and theory.

Another perspective that affected interpretations of change and warfare surfaced in 1859 with the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. All the theoretical parts of Darwin's synthesis were well established before he wrote his book. However, no one had woven them together as distinctively as he did. When fully assembled, Darwin's theory of evolution offered a new paradigm for thinking about the world. This paradigm depended on the assumptions that change was constant and normal, the earth was far older than previously supposed and the mechanism of biological evolution was natural selection. The most explosive implication was that humans were the product of evolution.^[11]

Reactions to Darwin varied. To some, namely those who came to be called social Darwinists, "survival of the fittest" became the governing principle of peoples and states. This world view reflected a distinct notion of progress but certainly dispelled the optimism of preceding decades. The idea that struggle was integral to civilization's advance resonated widely and merged with another seminal 19th-century trend – nationalism.

A relatively recent phenomenon, nationalism was rooted in a late 18th-century cultural movement emphasizing the historical rise of distinct nations as expressed through ethnicity, language and heritage. Afforded political impetus by the Napoleonic Wars, nationalism became an incredibly potent social force in late 19th-century Europe, where the imagery of nations as living organisms fused with the concept of Darwinian struggle.^[12] A splendid example is Russia and Europe, published in 1869 by Russian Pan-Slavic theorist Nikolai Danilevski, which forecast a great war with Germany to decide whether Slavs or Germans would be masters of Central and Eastern Europe. With remarkable speed, the new nationalistic strain gained adherents among Europe's armies.

In the 1870s, Russian General Mikhail Skobelev remarked that only war, the highest manifestation of the life of the state, could stir a self-indulgent citizenry to the service of higher values.^[13] In 1911, in Germany and the Next War, retired German cavalry general and Pan-German publicist Friedrich von Bernhardi embraced the idea of struggle. War was not merely essential, it was the highest expression of civilization.

Not all, however, read Darwin the same way. To Herbert Spencer, evolutionary theory implied that human nature itself was subject to change and therefore offered a renewed hope for the perfection of humanity. Civilization's development through natural selection was itself natural. In contrast to the social Darwinists, Spencer suggested that societies would evolve away from armed struggle toward harmony and cooperation. An industrial age of peace would supplant the age of militant struggle.^[14]

Marxism presented yet another competing interpretation. Though influenced by Comte and Hegel, Karl Marx predicated his views on materialist thought – all events and even intellectual processes have material or physical causes – and scientific social analysis. In 1848, Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto, as well as several other works on the formation of social classes and proletarian revolution. They organized the past and future into stages of development from slave societies, through feudalism and capitalism, to communism. Marx looked ahead to the annihilation of capitalism, the withering of the state and the creation of a classless society. The engine of history was class struggle and periodic revolution against the prevailing order of economic relations in society. A historical determinist, Marx saw humanity's path toward this end as preordained.

After Marx's death, Engels applied the Marxian dialectic to the discussion of war. In 1887, Engels described a cataclysmic future European war that would lay waste to bourgeois societies and create the necessary climate for revolution and working class triumph. Vladimir Lenin borrowed Engels' vision to create a new typology of war. Drawing from Clausewitz and Marx, Lenin penned "The Principles of Socialism and the War, 1914-1915," an essay in which he contended that bourgeois-national wars, which had predominated until 1871, subsequently gave way to imperialist war, a distinctive and inevitable feature of mature capitalism.^[15] In 1917, Lenin forecast in War and Revolution that World War I would devolve into international civil war and revolution.

By the eve of The Great War, many believed change and progress had joined with biological metaphor to define the relationship among European states. This outlook steeled the will of peoples across the Continent to raise gigantic armies and justified virtually any sacrifice in the name of the nation.

Speculation on War and Change

At the turn of the century, well before Lenin came to his revelation about war, Polish banker Jan S. Bloch published a radical non-Marxist critique of contemporary warfare. Employing only information that was available to professional soldiers of his day, Bloch contended that Europe's generals were wrong about what future war would hold. He wrote that "... war, instead of being a hand-to-hand contest in which the combatants measure their physical and moral superiority, will become a kind of stalemate, in which neither army being able to get at the other, both armies will be maintained in opposition to each other, threatening each other, but never being able to deliver a final and decisive attack. It will be simply the natural evolution of the armed peace, on an aggravated scale .... That is the future of war – not fighting, but famine, not the slaying of men, but the bankruptcy of nations and the breakup of the whole social organization."^[16]

Bloch, failing to appreciate nationalism's power, was not entirely correct, although he did discern some of war's dimensions with remarkable clarity. In the end, there was a decision, but only at a stupendous and irrational cost that toppled empires and pulverized a generation.

The point is to note Bloch's revolutionary view of war. Bloch appreciated that the arms evolution had reached a new threshold which would fundamentally alter the conditions of the next great European war. Aside from his skills as an economic analyst and his mastery of professional military literature, Bloch brought a different perspective to his examination. His paradigm was partially a function of his pacifist outlook, but it was equally attributable to his perception that the old way of thinking about warfare could not accommodate new realities.

Many military thinkers on the eve of World War I also recognized the importance of recent changes, but most construed them differently. As early as 1893, Russian Captain E.I. Martynov wrote a study titled "Thoughts about the Technique of Future Wars," in which he attempted to describe how future strategy would guide theater-level war. Another forward-looking Russian was A.A. Neznamov, who served as an instructor at the Nicholas Academy of the General Staff from 1907 to 1912. Neznamov was among the leading proponents of unified military doctrine – a common approach to war for the Russian army.^[17]

Based on his Russo-Japanese War analysis, Neznamov identified four essential features that would characterize the next war and which competent future commanders would have to reckon with:

• The predominant role of fire – more lethal, accurate and voluminous.
• The lower quality of conscript soldiers.
• Mass armies.
• The unprecedented complexity of command and control.^[18]

Bloch shared most of Neznamov's projections. Both also pondered a question that had stirred great debate among generals and military theorists since the Franco-Prussian War: Was there a new relationship between technology and the human/moral factor in war? They both held to the radical view that "man was losing his grip on war." Future firepower would dominate combat and reduce soldiers to cogs in a vast, incomprehensible machine.^[19] Commanders would wrestle to control mass forces beyond the reach of communications.

Unlike many of his predecessors, Neznamov never referred to the power of genius in his writings. Whether or not he believed in genius, he did not expect to find it. What he sought were competent commanders – schooled leaders capable of properly executing any task in harmony with an overall battle scheme. Therefore, the Russian army's central problem was not a lack of genius but a parade-ground mind-set that stifled practical preparation and substituted templated courses of action for scientific analysis and artful judgment.^[20]

According to Neznamov, the education of a proficient general had to be based on self-study. He cited Russian Field Marshal Aleksandr Suvorov's proposition that a good commander first mastered the regulations, then the principles of war and, finally, the history of recent and ancient wars. If the first two instilled a sense of what to do and why, the latter developed his critical faculties and an appreciation of the uniqueness of any situation. A commander had to create solutions, because every problem he would face in future war would necessarily be new, even if it was historically familiar in a general sense. In sum, Bloch rejected war because of its intrinsic futility, whereas Neznamov planned to prepare commanders to cope with future trials.^[21]

The problem confronting Bloch and Neznamov was no different than the one leaders face today. The social and political changes that reshaped military organizations were combined with rapid, incremental technological advances and seemingly normal evolutionary design improvements in existing weapons to produce jarring, disorienting changes on the battlefield. In Marxian terms, quantity became quality.

Paradigm Shifts and RMA

Current literature on policy and international security hails a paradigm shift in US foreign policy and strategy.^[22] The basis for this shift is the Soviet Union's collapse, the disintegration of the Eastern bloc and the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Since 1991, the United States has adjusted to a world without its principal political, ideological and military adversary. The implications are large and numerous.

What exactly do we mean by a paradigm shift, and how do we recognize one? Physicist and historian Thomas Kuhn brought the expression "paradigm shift" into common usage in 1962 with The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He attacked traditional interpretations of scientific development that depicted a steady building process where each breakthrough added to an established knowledge foundation. Kuhn's thesis maintained that science advances alternately between the accumulation of discoveries within a given system of understanding and revolutionary changes which undermine the structure of existing knowledge and necessitate the building of a new conceptual framework. "Paradigms gain their status because they are more successful than their competitors in solving a few problems that the group of practitioners has come to recognize as acute."^[23]

During periods of so-called normal science, new discoveries flow logically from, and in turn support, the prevailing paradigm. However, Kuhn explains that "... the successive transition from one paradigm to another via revolution is the usual developmental pattern of mature science."^[24] Scientific revolutions occur because an existing paradigm cannot accommodate new discoveries or theories. "Normal science ... often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments."^[25] In other words, people are more receptive to new evidence that conforms to previously held views than evidence which contradicts them. Ultimately, normal science approaches a crisis when the results of research can no longer be adapted to fit the established pattern. Ultimately, each paradigm generates the very research that will eventually undermine it.

Therefore, a scientific revolution must drive the old paradigm from center stage to permit the advance of science. A revolution is not a mere reinterpretation of the existing paradigm. Rather, it leads to a fundamentally new comprehension of pre-existing knowledge. Thus, revelation and revolution demand a new paradigm.

Given the widespread adoption of Kuhn's terminology, it is appropriate to reconsider the extent of recent changes in the strategic environment in light of his definition. Has the American paradigm undergone a shift or merely a reinterpretation? The latter may be closer to the truth. Consider the continuities. NATO is still with us. The United States still seeks a world hospitable to free market economies and democracy, takes a proprietary interest in Western affairs and maintains highly capable military forces to protect its interests in the post-Cold War world. The lens of US-Soviet rivalry no longer distorts the American view of every regional conflict or Third World insurgency. Today, in terms of national security strategy, we are looking at the old post-World War II paradigm in an unfamiliar way.

The same is true of military strategy. Because US military forces can no longer focus on the former Soviet Union, a huge shift in emphasis is necessary. Still, the variety of missions proposed for US forces in the near term differs little from what we have done historically. US forces have engaged in low-intensity conflict and operations other than war since the founding of the republic and repeatedly in this century. Furthermore, if we look around the globe today, we see nothing unprecedented. Nationalist, religious and ethnic conflicts are hardly distinctive late 20th-century phenomena.

Yet, as the information age matures, some unfamiliar problems are likely to appear. For example, a determined adversary should be able to devise many insidious ways to sabotage, disrupt or contaminate the information highway upon which global and national commerce depend. Competition among multinational economic organizations could easily assume such a form. In addition, the advent of the alleged RMA will certainly influence how we practice war.

Historian Michael Howard recently posed a fundamental question: "Can technology change what has been, until now, the essence of warfare?"^[26] Many have attempted to answer this question. In the past several years, a host of books and articles have heralded the dawning of a new age in warfare. Characterized variously as the Third Wave, the Fourth Generation or simply the latest RMA, the new age in warfare has not escaped the notice of soldiers and scholars. The collective commentary has been impressive in its insight as well as its profusion. Perhaps no generation of military commentators has been so ready to embrace change and administer last rites to conventional wisdom about warfare.

One striking feature of the discussion is the periodization of history. Whereas most 19th-century observers periodized the past in terms of progressive stages of humanity's understanding of the world, social development or civilization, 20th-century writers typically focus on new technologies and the economic base that produces them. New technologies were central to the arguments of Liddell Hart and Julio Douhet. Even Soviet theorists, who relied on the Marxist description of historical stages, described the contemporary period – from World War II forward – predominantly in terms of technological change. Alvin and Heidi Toffler's War and Anti-War suggests that warfare is entering the Third Wave, in which power will be based on information technology. Eventually, they expect, technology and rationality will reduce the level of violence inherent in conflict to that of a hockey game.^[27] Could it be that the Tofflers and others are missing important continuities in the nature of war even as they offer provocative insights into the manner of its future conduct?

To be sure, the manner in which future war will be conducted is most relevant. In 1993, General Gordon R. Sullivan and Colonel James Dubik suggested five trends:

• Increased lethality and dispersion.
• Increased volume and precision of fires.
• Increased integration of technologies.
• Achievement of greater mass and effect.
• Refinements in invisibility and detectability.^[28]

Russian forecasters recently identified a similar set of distinguishing features for future nonlinear war:

• Absence of well-defined spatial limits.
• Combination of offensive and defensive operations.
• Increasing reliance on information systems for coordination.
• Conduct of mass strikes by radio-electronic high-precision, laser and superfrequency weapons, large helicopter groups and radio-electronic suppression.^[29]

Upon close examination, each of these trends exhibits significant continuity with, or is rooted in, the evolution of warfare since the late 19th-century. If we are in the midst of an RMA, historians can make a strong case that it has been unfolding for a long time. Viewing the same progression in another light, one could even argue that accelerating advance along the axes noted by Sullivan and Dubik constitutes one of the fundamental assumptions of the way we view warfare. Perhaps it is just part of our 20th-century paradigm and not a new revolution at all. Warfare has been in a state of rapid change for the past two centuries, and many modern phenomena were born in that progression. The recent trends identified by Sullivan and Dubik and their Russian counterparts differ from those noted by Bloch and Neznamov more in degree than in kind.

Problems inherent in linking futuristic technological change and doctrinal concepts are much the same today as they were a century ago. Consider the US Army's 1950s' response to the nuclear age. Having retained a conventional focus after World War II, the Army suddenly revealed the Pentomic Division in 1956. Consisting of five battle groups, the new division stressed air mobility and dispersion to function better in a nuclear environment. The bold experiment failed because "the technology lagged behind the doctrine, and the strategic concepts raced ahead of tactical realities."^[30]

This time, the Army is valiantly attempting to prepare for change ahead of time. The future holds many eye-opening innovations, especially in technology. Recent dialogue has described future electronic combat as achieving spectrum supremacy which "will prove as critical as conventional battlefield preparation and air supremacy operations of past wars."^[31] The near term also holds the prospects of cyberwar, robotic war and even neocortical warfare.^[32] Again, the underlying concepts are not altogether new. Most are consonant with J.F.C. Fuller's 1919 prescription for attacking the nervous system of the enemy.^[33] The imperative to gain spectrum supremacy might lead to escalatory scenarios reminiscent of the 1914 mobilization theory or Cold War nuclear logic.

Visions of new capabilities offer a glimpse of the future but leave even more unknown. In the Fall 1994 issue of Parameters, David Jablonsky asserted that the quantum leap in technology may actually increase the "fog of war," given compressed decision cycles and the increasing integration of the levels of war.^[34] Will we have more information than we can absorb? Will enemies find new ways to deceive us?

Because we cannot perfectly model future human behavior and interaction, past wisdom may be more helpful than critics suspect.^[35] Recent attacks on Clausewitz stress his neglect of insurgencies and ethnic strife within his state-oriented, trinitarian framework; his inability to anticipate the flood of future technologies; and his failure to consider the role of culture in determining modes of conflict.^[36] Although these criticisms have some merit, they are based on a misconception of the Clausewitzian trinity, the constituent parts of which are violence, chance and reason.^[37] The army, the government and the people are merely the rough real-world correlates of the trinity. The actual trinity is not bound to any particular historical context. It is as relevant to Operations Uphold Democracy and Desert Storm as to Prussia. Perhaps the trinity is a nonlinear concept.^[38]

Were Clausewitz alive to comment, he might note that the idea of the state as Fichte knew it probably applies as well to the Palestinian Liberation Organization or Chechnya (which aspired to statehood) as to the United States. Furthermore, the passions and rationales that move states to roll the dice of war differ little from those which arouse tribes or insurgents. Finally, would a man who likened war to commerce really be unappreciative of the spectrum of conflict? Whatever features conflict assumes – urban operations, conventional air strikes, guerrilla fighting, psychological operations, random terror and even peacekeeping – all are discussable in Clausewitzian terms.

Like Sun Tzu, Clausewitz intuitively understood that the history of conflict revealed a dynamic tension among competing forces. Clausewitz, whose On War frequently bewilders American readers, drew heavily upon Hegelian dialectical reasoning, which sought synthetic truths through the resolution of opposing ideas or forces. It is this state of mutual opposition, regarded as perfectly natural by German philosophers, that characterizes the three parts of the trinity. Rather than ambiguity, Clausewitz saw in it flexibility and applicability to a many-sided reality.

Clausewitz did not describe in detail how future wars would be fought, but he was a futurist in his own right. In constructing a theory for thinking about war, he assumed that war's essential trinity would remain constant far beyond his lifetime.

As observed recently by Lieutenant Colonel Poncho Diaz-Pons, a historian formerly with the US Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, "If you want to think outside the box, you want to know how the box was made." His point – and the point of this article – is that the writings of past thinkers have left us a legacy of intellectual constructs which we regularly apply to the study of change and future war. Thus, to paraphrase Liddell Hart, the "tug of war" between science and history remains a dynamic element in contemporary thinking on future war. The concepts of paradigm and revolution, rooted in past conceptualizations of history and progress, reflect this tension.