Gwynne Dyer's War

Go read it. That's the short version of this post.

The long version is, well, longer. It's really an incredible book, that manages "big picture" in a way that few other books I've read have. The only thing I can compare it to is Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, whom Dyer quotes a handful of times. The early chapters deal with the "rules" of war in that Dyer explores the basic ways soldiers are trained, and what they're trained to do - messy killing. One of the more intriguing facts that he cites is that, in World War II, only 15% of soldiers in combat fired their weapons. This was because the machine gun ended the reign of close-knit formations of men, where every man felt the eyes of his comrades on him, so he did his utmost. After World War I, soldiers spread out over open ground, and sergeants and officers lost the ability to closely watch their soldiers. At the same time, this is the second life of mass conscription, where soldiers in battle are not necessarily men who want to be there. So you've made men soldiers, but by World War II they realized they hadn't made them killers. This is when the US Army abandons the old-fashioned bull's eye for target practice, and instead adopts moving, human shaped targets for training. Obviously, the effort is to condition men towards shooting. It worked - by Vietnam, 85% of men were firing their weapons in combat, and many, many more soldiers came home with Post-traumatic stress disorder. Who thinks that's a coincidence?

The middle of the book deals with the ancient and medieval practice of war, which changed surprisingly little for about 4,000 years. The city-states of Sumer had basically discovered the elements of Phalanx warfare 1,500 years before the rise of Classical Greece, and the Roman legion was essentially the same formation with swords instead of lances. The Pike-square of the medieval Swiss would be easily recognizable to any of the rulers of Sumer. Naval warfare was similarly static until the development of naval cannonry. Of course, cannons and muskets very quickly overturn the old rules of war. Dyer does much better justice to this than I can.

The chapters near the end of War are the most thought-provoking. With the rise of new weaponry - conventional as well as nuclear - we can say that the potential gains from war are now close to zero. The best example of this is that, even if World War III had never gone nuclear, it probably would not have lasted more than a month - modern attrition in battle is simply so fierce that you use up weaponry (and warriors) faster than you can replace them. Dyer makes a good case for the obsolescence of war in the modern age. The problem, however, is that we're still human. Even if no major power could "win" a war in any meaningful sense, do we really think that will stop them?