The Use Of Force For State Power: History And Future [1st Edition] 3030454096, 9783030454098, 9783030454104

Table of contents :
Preface......Page 7
Acknowledgments......Page 10
Contents......Page 11
Author Biographies......Page 12
List of Figures......Page 13
Chapter 1: Introduction: Tools for Sovereignty—Power and Force......Page 15
A Conceptual Framework of Force......Page 17
Definitions......Page 19
Antecedents and Elaborations......Page 20
The Argument Summarized......Page 24
Chapter 2: Divide and Conquer: The Progress of Force to 1800......Page 31
Ancient Ways......Page 32
Ages Dark......Page 39
The Early Modern Age......Page 44
A Vision of Strategy......Page 47
States and Dissenters......Page 54
Conclusion......Page 60
Chapter 3: “The Civilizing Mission”: European Dominance to 1914......Page 68
Global Reach......Page 71
Systemic Violence......Page 76
The Apogee of Western Power......Page 83
The Industrial Revolution at Sea......Page 85
Conclusion......Page 87
Chapter 4: The World Crisis: 1914–1953......Page 93
The Fatal Cataclysm......Page 94
The Modern System......Page 100
Revolutions, Far and Near......Page 106
A Rule of Law......Page 109
A World Split Asunder......Page 117
The Cold War Begins......Page 125
Conclusion......Page 127
Chapter 5: A Frozen World, 1953–1990......Page 135
The Nuclear Dilemma......Page 136
The West Retreats......Page 146
Asymmetric Conflict......Page 150
Struggling for Hearts and Minds......Page 153
High Tide for Revolution......Page 156
Revolution Fails......Page 164
The Second Cold War and Its Prophets......Page 167
The End of Empire......Page 176
Conclusion......Page 181
Chapter 6: A Liberal Order?......Page 192
Iraq Wars......Page 193
Which Lessons?......Page 196
A New World Order......Page 200
Repercussions......Page 203
The New Terrorism......Page 207
A Global War on Terror......Page 212
Conclusion......Page 216
Chapter 7: Information Wars......Page 224
A Freedom Agenda......Page 225
Insurgencies......Page 227
Virtual Borders......Page 234
The New Surveillance......Page 240
A Return to War......Page 242
The New Caliphate......Page 247
A Clash of Worlds?......Page 251
Conclusion......Page 255
Chapter 8: Conclusion: Force and Trust in the Future......Page 269
Principles of Force for Global Reach......Page 271
A New Domain for Force......Page 273
New Kinds of Cooperation and Conveyance......Page 275
New Types of Comprehension......Page 277
What Does It Mean?......Page 279
Bibliography......Page 287
Index......Page 308

Citation preview

The Use of Force for State Power History and Future m ic h a e l wa r n e r joh n c h i l dr e s s

The Use of Force for State Power

Michael Warner • John Childress

The Use of Force for State Power History and Future

Michael Warner Maryland, USA

John Childress Maryland, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-45409-8    ISBN 978-3-030-45410-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45410-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To our families, who endured this

“We must understand, therefore, that particular citizens have conveyed their whole right of war and peace unto some man or council; and that this right, which we may call the sword of war, belongs to the same man or council, to whom the sword of justice of belongs.” —Thomas Hobbes, “The Citizen,” VI:7

Preface

This book extends a conversation that began in 2015. The authors pondered the ways in which despots had diminished the optimism of the 1990s, when it seemed that liberal states had established an order between nations that would confer peace and prosperity around the world. The authoritarians remaining after the Cold War were apparently unable to modernize their societies absent democratic reforms—they could not compete economically or militarily because they could not mobilize people and innovation. Isolated and left behind by globalization, they seemed destined to adopt, sooner or later, the modern technological and political tools that would ultimately transform their dictatorships and archaic societies. Such an imagined future diverged dramatically from subsequent events. To the surprise of many, the new technologies emerging at the end of the Cold War did not loosen dictatorship’s grip. Illiberal regimes found in technology and ideology a new lease on life—specifically, they found new ways to build power and wield force. As we explored this trend, deeper patterns emerged from the unfolding tapestry of politics and international affairs. We recognized common themes in the ways that force has been applied across history and in our own time. In this book, we seek to sketch these dynamics and share what we have learned about the nature of force in all ages. We understand that we are stepping onto a much-used and oft-­ contested field. Military, diplomatic, and security history are vast subjects, made larger still when one adds to that corpus the shelves full of social ix

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science and theoretical analyses. Why add another work to the pile? Because we believe that history has reached a pass where new developments clarify principles evident in earlier ages. Enhanced perspectives from the distant and recent past have sparked insights on familiar and contemporary events. This is what we offer here. Our work is rooted in history and by necessity it draws liberally from insights in other disciplines. We are struck with the ways in which ancient, modern, and contemporary authors keep returning to certain notions. Concepts in one field, such as military history, echo ideas in other areas like political philosophy and intelligence studies. How is it that a Greek philosopher, Aristotle, discusses tyranny in terms much like an Indian sage, Kautilya, when these two near-contemporaries never heard of one another? And why are military strategists and security services in our day unwittingly operating in cyberspace in ways that would have seemed familiar in Ancient Greece or Kautilya’s India? This book addresses questions like these by studying force, the coercive application of power against resistance. Thomas Hobbes observed that sovereignty as such cannot be divided. All self-contained political orders, even those that we would not yet call states, have some ultimate authority that uses two “swords” to both dispense justice and defend the polity against its internal and external enemies. As Max Weber suggested a century ago, the modern state seeks a monopoly on the legitimate use of armed force. Hobbes would retort that it is ever thus. The swords of justice and war, he explained, are twinned and cannot be separated: “All judgment, therefore, in a city, belongs to him who hath the swords; that is, to him who hath the supreme authority.”1 Our contention is that rulers wield both the sword of war and the sword of justice in very similar ways, applying common principles across time and space. They try to be prepared to use force when necessary, but they typically seek to employ it in ways that seem more efficient and less risky. Those ways, we will try to show, work like the edge of a sword—they divide. They aim to keep foes from working together—by preventing them from concerting their actions, or by eliminating the trust that should bind them. In short, they make enemies afraid to cooperate. Such an argument could strike some readers as mildly reductionist. This history can only trace an outline of events; there are so many more sources that could be incorporated, with far more detail and nuance. We acknowledge the risk of sacrificing the details for the sake of the pattern. As much as possible, we have tried to preserve subtlety, context, and special

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circumstances while also drawing attention to commonalities. Our book asks, in effect, why these commonalities recur across times, cultures, and technological contexts. We did our best to avoid reductionism, and we leave it to our readers to judge our success. We also add this challenge: the critic’s job, it seems, is not only to critique our hypotheses but also to suggest alternative ways to explain the recurring echoes that we highlight, and to do so without dismissing them all as coincidence. Today the force that the liberal West worries most about—at the level of states and groups that can wreak mass destruction—always has technological and ideological characteristics. Baldly stated, anti-liberal regimes and movements fear to live next to liberal ones, whether in physical space or in cyberspace. The borders of their worldviews are the fault lines of conflict in our contemporary world—fault lines that the technologies of our time will not dissolve. Into this unhappy moment, we offer our thoughts. Maryland, USA Maryland, USA

Michael Warner John Childress

Note 1. Hobbes observes that every polity requires “some man or council” to wield both the “sword of justice” and the “sword of war” on behalf of the community. Thomas Hobbes, “The Citizen,” in Bernard Gert, ed., Man and Citizen (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1978), VI:1–8, pp. 174–178.

Acknowledgments

We thank the many people who shared with us their time, sources, ideas, corrections, and critiques. Their comments helped us more than we can ever repay. We thank Amy Chao, Philip Costopoulos, Michael Fischerkeller, Jim Golby, Emily Goldman, Richard Harknett, Hugh Liebert, Lt. Gen Kevin McLaughlin, Joshua Rovner, and the late James V.  Schall, SJ for helping in various ways or at least listening so politely to our attempts to articulate the ideas in this book. We also owe a special note of thanks to Don Jacobs, for making us rethink our initial approach. Dr. Warner adds a note of thanks to his students at American University for their questions about this material. Finally, we thank Anca Pusca and Rachel Moore at Palgrave Macmillan for turning a lump of coal into something that Marilyn Monroe in Bus Stop might have called “not exactly not a diamond.” What is good here comes largely from them. What is flawed stems from our faults alone. Finally, we wish to thank our families for enduring this project. You make everything possible. Both authors work for the U.S. government, but this work reflects their own thinking and does not represent official positions of the U.S. government or any of its components. The book was reviewed by several agencies to ensure it contained no classified information. We thank all who played their quiet but necessary roles in this process.

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Contents

1 Introduction: Tools for Sovereignty—Power and Force  1 2 Divide and Conquer: The Progress of Force to 1800 17 3 “The Civilizing Mission”: European Dominance to 1914 55 4 The World Crisis: 1914–1953 81 5 A Frozen World, 1953–1990123 6 A Liberal Order?181 7 Information Wars213 8 Conclusion: Force and Trust in the Future259 Bibliography277 Index299

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Author Biographies

John Childress  is a U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel who has served as a ground commander in Iraq and Afghanistan. During his nineteen years of service, he has also served as a military fellow in the office of the late Congressman Elijah Cummings and as an assistant professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point where he taught politics and political philosophy. He now serves as a strategist where he deals with questions of policy and legality that are at the heart of the exercise of military power in a democratic republic. Michael Warner  serves as a historian in the U.S. Department of Defense and has written and lectured on intelligence and cyberspace history. He is in his fourth decade of service as a civilian employee of the U.S. government and has also taught at American University, Columbia University, and Johns Hopkins University. His third book, The Rise and Fall of Intelligence: An International Security History, was published in 2014. He sits on the Board of Editors of the peer-reviewed journal Intelligence and National Security.

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.1

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2

Fig. 3.3 Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2

A Japanese view of Portuguese sea power in the early 1600s. Carracks and charts enabled the Portuguese to travel and comprehend the globe strategically. (Unknown artist, “Arrival of the Europeans,” seventeenth century, Screens, 105.1 × 260.7 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mary Griggs Burke Collection) Napoleon I’s victories inspired Carl von Clausewitz to write On War. (Louis Philibert Debucourt, Napoleon I., 1807, Etching, 46.5 × 35 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art) Railroads revolutionized the conveyance of troops. J.J. Higginson, Military Map of the Seat of War, 1861, Map, 33 × 38 cm, New York Public Library Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division Paris Commune handbill (Imprimiere Nationale, Republique Francaise/N. 42, 1871, 40.5 × 52 cm, Musee Carnavalet Paris) Telephones allowed commanders to convey information even on the battlefield in World War I. (Unknown Photographer, Field Telephone Line Construction, Approx. 1914–1918, Photograph, 18 × 24 cm, German Federal Archives) British and Soviet soldiers in Soviet propaganda. Wartime propaganda fostered cooperation among the Allies. (Unknown Artist, Unity of Strength—Inter-allied posters: British and Russian servicemen, shaking hands over dead body of swastikaed dragon, 1939–1946, Poster, U.K. National Archives Kew INF3/327)

35 57

61 67

86

109

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List of Figures

Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2

Fig. 5.3

Fig. 6.1

Fig. 6.2

Fig. 7.1

Fig. 7.2

CASTLE BRAVO thermonuclear detonation, 1954. (Source: U.S. Department of Energy, Castle Bravo, February 28, 1954) The computer goes to war: civil defense workers learn about the U.S. Air Force’s Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) air defense system. (Office of Defense and Civil Mobilization, SAGE Discussion at Maine Civil Defense College, 1951–1961, Photograph, U.S. National Archives Boston) General Secretary Gorbachev (left) and President Reagan (center) at Reykjavik, 1986. (White House Photographic Office, Photograph of President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev meeting at Hofdi House during the Reykjavik Summit, 1986, Photograph, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library) (Color figure online) Iraqi armor destroyed by the coalition during the Persian Gulf War. (SSGT Reeve, Iraqi T-62 main battle tanks destroyed during Operation Desert Storm, 1991, Photograph, U.S. National Archives at College Park) U.S. Air Force B-1B bomber flying from the United Kingdom in support of Operation ALLIED FORCE. (SSGT Mallord U.S. (National Archive, A B-1B Lancer is marshalled to a full stop at RAF Fairford, United Kingdom, 1999, Photograph, U.S. National Archives at College Park) An armed Predator drone flying from Balad Air Base in Iraq. (SSGT Lewis, at Balad Air Base, Iraq, a U.S. Air Force RQ-1 Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle taxis to a runway on a mission in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 2004, Photograph, U.S. National Archive at College Park) U.S. soldiers firing on ISIS positions. (SGT Bigelow, Engaging ISIS, 2017, Photograph, Department of Defense)

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Tools for Sovereignty—Power and Force

This book explores force and what makes it effective when used by sovereign powers for internal security and external defense. We seek to understand how some powers use force with more impact than others—and how the principles by which they do so remain remarkably consistent over time and across cultures. That consistency provides a framework that suggests how rulers have used force to shape societies (and vice versa), and how innovations in force will influence events in our “cyber” age. The seed of our argument, as it were, is a common observation made by near-contemporaries roughly 2300  years ago. Sun Tzu and Aristotle both noted that successful commanders and rulers divide their foes, whether they are enemy armies or internal rivals. These classical theorists of politics and strategy, however, do more than urge kings and commanders to “divide and conquer.” Both Sun Tzu and Aristotle (and many other observers) suggest the way to keep enemies divided is to break their mutual trust.1 We also note similar notions across the ancient world and in modern times, including in works by several founders of modernity, such as Machiavelli (and even Shakespeare). This commonality is echoed today by researchers seeking anthropological, psychological, and sociological explanations for persistent patterns of violence and force. We note in particular the ideas of Douglass North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry Weingast, who observe in their influential Violence and Social Orders (2009) that how societies “solve the ubiquitous

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threat of violence shapes and constrains the forms that human interaction can take, including the form of political and economic systems.” North et al. thus echo Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan in viewing the control of violence as a foundational aspect of all social orders, and they accordingly derive a conceptual framework that seeks to explain the endurance of “natural” (i.e., authoritarian and exclusive elites that Hobbes would recognize) in most times and places. With this allusion to Hobbes’ state of nature, Violence and Social Orders explains that these “natural” structures unwittingly perpetuate ancient impositions that rulers undertook to create social orders in the beginning of history.2 In short, these “natural states” sustain exclusive (and sometimes cooperating) regimes by engendering mutual trust among actors possessing the power and the will to take human life. The actors’ mutual forbearance in this must always be wary, of course, while rivals remain armed; thus natural states face a constant risk of falling back into violence between mutually distrustful rivals. Social peace lasts only while “each elite understands that other elites face similar incentives” not to fight each other.3 These closed regimes or “natural states” represent the vast majority of all societies across history. Violence and Social Orders explains that only in the last three centuries have natural states co-existed with a different form of social organization: the “open access orders” in the liberal West. North and his co-authors thus again follow Hobbes in suggesting that societies that respect rights are more stable, thus more free and more predictable, and thus more prosperous.4 Yet Violence and Social Orders does more than channel Hobbes.5 Its authors are describing events that Hobbes could only dimly envision in the seventeenth century, and it does so with evidence about the remarkable stability of the ways in which people interact across time, places, and cultures. The enduring stability of the salience of violence—and thus force—frames the social landscape that we describe in this book. Explaining social structures as varying answers to the problem of taming violence is a powerful but insufficient insight. North et  al. offer a “conceptual framework” in Violence and Social Orders rather than a formal theory that tests causal hypotheses. That makes sense given their study’s effort to understand the factors common to the origins and evolution of all societies; laboratory experiments, for example, cannot make much sense of ancient history. Yet the efforts presented in Violence and Social Orders (and indeed in Hobbes’ Leviathan, for that matter) necessarily do

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not investigate two considerations that will inform our own conceptual framework for examining force. First, while North, Wallis, and Weingast chart how and why societies control violence in consistent ways, they do not explore how novel technologies allow rulers to use the same principles of force to exert it in new and more effective manners. Indeed, military and political histories are replete with instances showing that the control of coercion and violence evolves with technological change, especially in the cyber revolution. The mechanisms by which rulers control and exert violence are never neutral, as Marshal McLuhan (“the medium is the message”) and two generations of military historians have helpfully explained. Such mechanisms are shaped by their societies, and they in turn shape societies. Second, Violence and Social Orders compares how societies develop and function but says relatively little about how they interact. Peace has always been more the exception than the rule, as North et  al. recognize. The disparities of power that emerged as growth took off in the “open access” societies during the modern age made it possible to create larger empires than ever before. This was quantitatively new, but it was soon followed by a new form of conflict: the ideological struggles of the twentieth century between open access states and other Western (but nonetheless totalitarian) natural states—which were also new. The endurance and severity of that twilight conflict also makes the reader wonder how such ideological states could arise in the first place from ideologies that emerged in reaction to the ideas that had guided the open access orders. Studying the properties of force and how they have worked together across cultures and technological conditions has given us insights into the similar strategies and tactics that rulers use to maintain control and guard their interests at home and abroad. These similarities, moreover, obtain in both the military and the internal security fields. In short, force gets wielded in remarkably similar ways, both in the “natural states” and in the “open access societies” alike—as Aristotle and Sun Tzu suggested above. Its components are three-fold, and they fit together in predictable ways.

A Conceptual Framework of Force Our conceptual framework re-examines the evidence from history, political theory, and social science in a way that suggests insights that in turn can prompt theory building or guide the proposal of

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hypotheses. We believe that force requires concentration, and concentration in turn depends upon three components: cooperation, conveyance, and comprehension. Like the engine, drive train, and steering in a racing car, cooperation, conveyance, and comprehension all work together to allow a ruler or commander to concentrate force at the right time and place. The framework we advance here matters in our day because digitally and globally networked capabilities are rapidly transforming the third of those variables—comprehension—causing a revolution in what governments can know about adversaries at-scale and in real-time. We seek to show that mastering this three-part relationship of cooperation, conveyance, and comprehension since ancient times has given rulers victory abroad and rest from enemies at home. Throughout military and political history, commanders and ministers have typically achieved disruptive and asymmetric advantages over their foes when by skill or chance they have been able to combine relative superiority in some or all of these three factors. Once again, we find ancient insights supported by modern research (as noted below). The factors that strengthen cooperation, of course, can also be attenuated in ways that impair cooperation among adversaries. These findings hint—as Sun Tzu and Aristotle long ago proposed—that rulers and generals disrupt and vanquish their foes by impairing their willingness to collaborate. We are guided in this quest by the synthesizing efforts of two modern scholars, William H. McNeill and Michel Foucault. McNeill’s metahistory The Pursuit of Power (1982) showed the interaction between economic acumen, technological innovation, social organization, and the military art, finding that power over the last thousand years consistently flowed to states that could assemble and sustain these elements. Foucault’s Discipline and Punish gives us a complementary concept— one that he called surveillance—to explain how states use knowledge and coercive might against their own subjects not only to keep them in line but also to remove from the popular consciousness the possibility of struggling to live in some other way. Drawing from these insights into the power of technology and ideology, we gain confidence in our typology of force and its relevance to the fields of strategy, politics, and military history.

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Definitions Force and its varieties comprise the central subjects of this book. Any discussion of force, however, must proceed from an understanding of power. The Oxford Living Dictionary defines power and force this way: Power: The ability or capacity to do something or act in a particular way. Force: Coercion or compulsion, especially with the use or threat of violence.6 Both power and force have intuitive meanings in many disciplines. Indeed, the Oxford Living Dictionary offers nineteen other definitions for power alone, and those include specialized usages in politics, physics, theology, and other fields. This plethora of meanings illustrates the difficulty of providing simple definitions to words with such wide applications. In some sense, power and force are twin foci for most political theorists, social scientists, and historians—not to mention military strategists—and a seemingly limitless literature treats them in similar but varied ways. Harold Lasswell even defined political science as the “shaping and sharing of power.”7 Given the range of connotations for power and force, we use their common English meanings, with some qualifications. First involves the shadings between force and coercion, which were long used as synonyms (and in places still are).8 We recognize a certain distinction between them: coercion includes both the use and the threat of violence to compel its subject to change his actions. Force is the tool of coercion—it is how coercion makes itself felt. This book accordingly focuses on the ways in which rulers exert force rather than on the shades of difference between different concepts of power, coercion, and compellence (i.e., political power and economic power). Second, while we recognize that those differences matter for other purposes, we are attempting a more practical task—to explain “how” those in power use force and how those not in power experience it. The common English meanings above confer the benefit of corresponding to widespread intuitions about power, coercion, violence, and force without countermanding our core concerns. This aids understanding, simplicity, and clarity. Thus power is “the ability or capacity to do something or act in a particular way [emphasis added].”9 This means that power must be understood as potentiality. Since power is potential, force is then a type of action

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that fulfills that potentiality.10 Yet force is something more as well; it is power exerted against resistance, especially but not always with the use or threat of violence. Force allows the ruled to “feel” the ruler, and power allows the ruler to exert force.11 Power and force thus serve different functions—power gives the ability to create force, and force translates power into violence or its threat to coerce. We focus in the chapters ahead on force, discussing its applications by rulers for internal security and for military advantage, for it is our sense that these two applications of force work in the same way.12

Antecedents and Elaborations The framework that we advance finds an antecedent in the writing of the ancient Indian sage Kautilya, who wrote a treatise much like Machiavelli’s The Prince around 200 BC, almost seventeen centuries before the birth of the better-known Italian classicist and diplomat.13 Kautilya’s Arthasastra ranges wider than The Prince while surpassing it in ruthlessness, taking up military matters as well as statecraft and identifying three key elements for military force: “enthusiasm, military might, and the power of counsel—[in that] ascending order of importance.”14 Kautilya’s typology of force for a battlefield commander resembles our notion of force’s internal dynamic, though the parallel is not exact. What he called “military might” we in turn call cooperation, which covers not only raw physical force but the ability to sustain it over time. That capacity has several sub-components—like enthusiasm, or its modern corollary, morale. Kautilya’s “military might” also overlaps with our notion of conveyance, which seeks to capture the importance of moving concentrations of force to the right place and controlling their employment. What Kautilya called “the power of counsel” relates to what we call comprehension, a term which integrates information gained from various tools, like nautical charts, computers, and sensors, with analytical insight, into an accurate appraisal of a situation. Where Kautilya sought to explain what made a prince strong on the battlefield, however, we take a broader view that includes a fuller sweep of the ways in which a ruler exerts force for both internal and external purposes. Our judgment that concentration is the principle of force rests upon the reality that no human enterprise can hold absolute power against internal and external rivals forever. Soldiers age, weapons rust, and no tactic surprises enemies for long. Even superior forces cannot be strong

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everywhere; ideas and emotions do not persuade everyone; and princes and commanders must sleep. Thus any superiority in the use of force is relative and temporary, and success depends upon a formula: the victor wields the right force “at the right place and at the right time” (in the words of Carl von Clausewitz) to prevent his enemies from concentrating lethal force against him. Clausewitz insists the best strategy “is always to be very strong; first in general, and then at the decisive point….there is no higher and simpler law of strategy than that of keeping one’s forces concentrated.”15 The late John Boyd would explain the use of this “maneuver conflict”: he calculated that the successful commander is the one who is able to break up his opponents into “many non-cooperative centers of gravity, as well as disorient, disrupt, or overload those that the adversary depends upon, in order to magnify friction, shatter cohesion, produce paralysis, and bring about his collapse.”16 We apply this formula to political struggle as well as military conflict, and from it we derive the three components of force which fill out the notion at the heart of this book. First, since no single ruler can exert force alone, cooperation is the basic element of creating concentration and wielding force. People must unite to act, though they might do so less than willingly. Without cooperation, force loses mass and ceases to be relevant. Cooperation therefore is a key to force, because without the mutual assistance of multiple individuals, force does not meaningfully exist.17 The inducements to cooperation come in many varieties. Wages and coercion serve as physical incentives; medals and honor draw upon the emotions. Kinship, class, race, creed, or justice provide powerful ideas that enable cooperation. And, of course, some inducements work better than others. Coercion is inefficient; chain gangs can be made to work together, but that requires guards and guns and dogs. Slaves or inmates may have little incentive to work skillfully, and can hardly be trusted with sensitive tasks or rare materials. Emotional and ideational incentives—as complicated as “liberty” or as simple as the promise of gold—are typically more effective at building cooperation. They help mitigate the risk that freely choosing individuals will abandon the ruler in the hour of need. Likewise, the replicability and durability of ideas may foster creativity and innovation that indirectly augments the power of the collective. The factors that strengthen cooperation, of course, can also be attenuated in ways that impair cooperation among adversaries. Rulers have long used force to make people afraid to work together, whether on the battlefield or in darkened rooms where plots are hatched. Cooperation requires

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trust; without it, people will not collaborate in ventures that place their lives at risk. Here some interesting findings relating to information and entropy hint at how it is that groups function or atomize under stress. Social scientists are exploring this in terms of Trust, which sample after sample shows on the increase when people feel confident about the information they are gaining about their situation and any risks it entails for them.18 Related research suggests the reverse as well. Trust evaporates and coordination falters in conditions of “high entropy”—when each new bit of information they encounter seems to make little sense of others because it cannot be easily reconciled with what is already known.19 It follows in turn that rulers and generals can disrupt their opponents’ cooperation by impairing the trust that those opponents have in each other—especially by increasing entropy. Clever sovereigns and commanders thus seek to suborn, confuse, deceive, or mislead their adversary’s subjects, supporters, and allies to drive down the willingness of their foes to collaborate. They do so by flooding their foes with too much information to process, confirming foes’ biases while hiding key elements and clues to their real intentions, and especially by making adversaries afraid of each other. In short, effective rulers and generals do what they can to break down trust among their opponents. The second factor in our notion of force—conveyance—emerges from the requirement to exert force at the right place and time. Conveyance is an old word and used more frequently in the past. We employ it because it describes both physical and non-physical “movement.” For instance, roads and canals convey goods across the countryside, while legal instruments convey ownership between persons. Both physical and non-physical movements are important to the concentration of force because information must be conveyed to soldiers (through couriers or networks) who must themselves be conveyed to the battlefield. The ruler who can convey force more adeptly than the adversary gains the  benefit of position and time. Soldiers march faster in shoes and on good roads. They move even more swiftly when transported on rail cars or in aircraft. New forms of conveyance also accompany the opening of new “domains” of conflict. Indeed, force could hardly apply at all in three domains—the air, the sea, and in space—before the invention of boats, aircraft, and rockets. The newest domain, cyberspace, is a wholly human construction with still fewer ties to terrestrial realities, yet it also has become a venue for conflict, and conveyance pertains there as well, for

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even data packets must move from their source to their recipient (or their target). While the importance of railroads or airplanes for conveying soldiers will surprise no one, the importance of conveying information has been somewhat taken for granted by some strategists. The oldest technology for conveying ideas—writing—long ago revolutionized conveyance in ways that are now lost to history. Subsequent developments, like the printing press, radio, and computers, continued this progress. Communication at a distance in real-time became possible in the Industrial Revolution. In recent decades, the Information Revolution has in turn facilitated the transmittal of data as well as audio and video signals and greatly enhanced storage and analysis. These developments helped not only conveyance but comprehension as well. The third factor in our framework—comprehension—proceeds from the fact that the ruler and commander must exert force at the right time and place against the right adversary. This is roughly what Clausewitz meant in a tactical context when he noted: “If all threads of military activity lead to the engagement, then if we control the engagement, we comprehend them all. Their results are produced by our orders and by the execution of these orders, never directly by other conditions.”20 Aligning all of these factors requires more than data, as might be implied by the term “information.” This of course ties back to the centrality of information and entropy noted above. Likewise, it requires more than the ability to connect dots, as might be implied by “intelligence.” Developing comprehension is also what the ruler or the general does to control entropy among his own people, forces, and allies. Getting it right requires the ability to use an understanding of the whole situation to know one’s own powers as well as the intentions and capabilities of the relevant actors. This is comprehension, or “the knowledge gained from the process of coming to know or understand something.” Comprehension makes concentration relevant; without it, the application of force will likely be wasted or counterproductive.21 It facilitates both concentration and dispersal, at the appropriate time for each. In this context we note Martin Van Creveld’s comment on technology and war. In his book of that title, he concluded that technology is everywhere in war but not determinative of war’s nature. We paraphrase his conclusion on war by adding that the underlying logic of force is “not linear but paradoxical.”22 Grasping and employing that paradoxical nature of force is what comprehension accomplishes.

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The Argument Summarized The horseback survey to follow covers perhaps 3000 years and mentions authors from China to Europe to Latin America. We apply our conceptual framework to shed new light on three world historical disruptions, each of which is treated in two chapters below. These episodes show examples of sovereign powers effectively applying force simultaneously for internal and external uses (though many a king and minister has wielded force well at home but not abroad, and vice versa). The first of these historical disruptions was the ascent of Europe that began in the Renaissance and continued through the Industrial Revolution (Chaps. 2 and 3). Since ancient times no one region or culture held enduring advantages in the military arts so long as weapons relied mainly on muscle power and navigation depended on memory. The first culture to break free of these constraints—that is, the western states of Europe in the sixteenth century—set in motion a global revolution in military affairs that abetted an economic revolution as well. This “Great Divergence” now has a voluminous and contested scholarly literature (which we cite at many points), but many of the key facts have never been in dispute. In short, a handful of nascent states on the western edge of Europe managed to forge huge sea-based empires in a remarkably short time. Portugal, for instance, by 1600 controlled the shipping of the Indian Ocean and forced open trading ports in China and Japan. Spain’s contemporaneous empire in the Western Hemisphere was even richer. We cite contemporary views on these and subsequent empires, including those of Hobbes and Adam Smith, who perceptively explained how these salt-water empires were conceptually and economically sustained. This European dominance in cooperation, conveyance, and comprehension grew seemingly insurmountable in the Industrial Revolution, when steam power, cheap steel, and telegraph lines, followed soon by air transport, radio, and electricity, gave the advanced and “doorstep” open access states in Europe and America the power to rule virtually anywhere on Earth.23 Liberal or not, these regimes nonetheless honed old ways of breaking trust at-scale among their subject populations. We also examine the progress of internal security in the West from the wars of religion through the Industrial Revolution, when European (and soon American) superiority in the arts of force grew even more dominant. We note, moreover, that that dominance created ideological rifts within Europe itself, ensuring that the twentieth century would be the bloodiest

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in history as Western states, despite their mastery of conveyance and comprehension, could no longer sustain cooperation in their own polities, with their neighbors, or with their colonies. The second world historical disruption we track (Chaps. 4 and 5) was the downfall of the Western empires in the twentieth century. In a sense European dominance made Europe’s problems into the world’s. Even before World War I devastated Europe and eliminated any European claim to moral (as well as physical) superiority, the liberalizing states that had arisen since the Enlightenment felt under siege by radical notions of equality and “systemic violence.” In the postwar wreckage these ideologies took power in Russia, Italy, and Germany, creating totalitarian regimes and precipitating an even more ruinous conflict. World War II accelerated the dispersion of Western power by opening the possibility of widespread decolonization. The two world wars distributed modern weapons and tactics across the colonies while globalizing the struggle between rival Western notions of equality—a struggle which seemingly culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Even Europe’s technological superiority could not sustain the empires during the ideological struggles of the Cold War, a trend that reached its completion with the demise of the Soviet Union. The Cold War struggle also saw two key developments for the future of strategy. First, nuclear weapons made direct clashes between the most powerful states mutually suicidal. At the same time, a growing respect for international law largely de-legitimized aggressive war as a means of resolving inter-state disputes. While the police states of the twentieth century could exercise control in their time, they hardly knew whose trust to break, and thus crudely impaired many non-threatening social connections that might have fostered the civil society and economic growth essential to a healthy state. The ensuing ideological exhaustion and economic collapse of Soviet Communism led to the USSR’s downfall and the growth of free societies at the end of the Cold War. Of course, this did not settle the historic argument over how societies should run. The Cold War argument over equality may have ended in 1989, but the ideas and ideals of the liberal West have not convinced many dictators to change their ways. Despite the global ascendancy of liberal or open access states with market economies, not every regime believed that it had to grant liberty if it wanted to remain economically viable. China in particular compromised by allowing circumscribed economic freedom for the sake of rapid growth (though other authoritarians lacked China’s market clout and freedom to experiment).

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This salience of ideology persists into the third disruption (Chaps. 6 and 7), which is the current expansion of conflict into cyberspace. While North et al. suggest that societies have always controlled violence in consistent ways across cultures and times, the intense change in how states exploit cyberspace raises the question of whether that consistency will endure in this new domain, as people and states wield force in, through, and from digital enclaves. We note the increased precision and reach of the means of force, especially with the digital revolutions in surveillance, targeting, and data toward the twentieth century’s end. These means grew ever more sophisticated after the brief pause in ideological conflict after the Cold War, when it seemed to observers like Francis Fukuyama that digital information technology structurally favored the “open access” societies (later described by North et al.), noting how the “enormous prosperity created by technology-driven capitalism, in turn, serves as an incubator for a liberal regime of universal and equal rights.”24 By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Information Revolution had introduced a new and disruptive factor in this geostrategic dynamic. The same digital methods that transformed communications and production also powered a revolution in military affairs, helping combatants make conventional weapons devastatingly more precise in their application and allowing states to target individuals for surveillance or destruction from thousands of miles away. When the use of such tools has been authorized by international bodies like the United Nations, it has wrecked authoritarian regimes—and convinced other authoritarians that they too could be targeted for “humanitarian” interventions. Justified or not in each particular case, such interventions have perturbed the international order, and the anti-liberal regimes have now responded. The need for reflection here can be glimpsed in an interesting disjuncture between several recent authors who see a curious “blurring” in the present and future of conflict, but who disagree over its meaning. In The Future of War: A History, Lawrence Freedman, perhaps our foremost living strategist, recently counseled humility, judging “[t]here is no longer a dominant model for future war, but instead a blurred concept and a range of speculative possibilities [emphasis added].” He concedes digital tools and methods have tactical value. Still, he wonders “how cyberwar should be viewed strategically.” The issue, Freedman suggests, remains “linking the hurt to a political purpose.”25 In contrast, Peter W. Singer and Emerson T.  Booking implicitly disagree in LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media. They argue that online battles have already changed “what ‘war’

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means…further blurring the distinction between actions in the physical and digital realms [emphasis added again].”26 Singer and Brooking seem to imply that Freedman has overlooked something important, for even if cyber means cannot win wars, they can still shape political—that is, strategic—outcomes. In other words, the fates of states and peoples may now be altered without fighting, and thus coercive strategic outcomes need no longer require war. We agree and believe our conceptual framework of force as cooperation, conveyance, and comprehension helps to explain what has been happening in cyberspace. We note in particular that cyber conflict between sovereign powers usually occurs along the “virtual borders” between ideological (Party-based) regimes and those states with “open access orders.” In these all-too-­ common struggles, the former powers insist that their democratic opponents practice a superficial tolerance that cloaks “systemic violence”—that the so-called rule of law in liberal Western states masks a power structure that marginalizes and ultimately oppresses disfavored classes, races, lifestyles, or faiths. The conclusion of our book suggests a potential (and perhaps likely) direction for cyber conflict, both above and below the threshold of armed force. Empowering rulers and commanders with extraordinary comprehension in our time has troubling implications. Here we note the growing body of journalism and government findings illustrating the ways in which cyber means are being used to put at risk the legitimacy of governments, the intellectual property that sustains their economies, and the privacy (and safety) of their citizens in their homes and workplaces. Cyber actors are increasingly able to use big data analytics to tell from friend from foe at an individual level, and regimes are increasingly willing to employ these means for internal control and the intimidation of opponents abroad. Anti-liberal powers today are building powerful military forces that incorporate advances from the current revolution in military affairs, while targeting their citizens using Internet-enabled surveillance, and working to use global digital connectivity and media to discredit liberal ideals and institutions. A new level of comprehension made possible by the technologies of cyberspace can help authoritarian rulers maintain their monopoly on political control and potentially relax social controls that retard economic growth. As a result, the means and methods employed by these new authoritarians now can threaten to touch individual citizens of every country—not merely those who live in warring states—even in their laptops and their neighborhoods. Force may work as it always has, but its increasing reach and precision will affect us all.

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Notes 1. The tyrant, explained Aristotle, sought to guard “against anything that customarily gives rise to two things, high thoughts and trust.” A tyrant therefore sought “to make all as ignorant of one another as possible,” while he sent out his spies “wherever there was some meeting or gathering (for men speak less freely when they fear such persons).” Tyrants especially dreaded men who trusted one another, thus a tyrant would “slander them to one another, and set friends at odds with friends”; cf. Aristotle, Politics, in the Carnes Lord trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984); V, 11, 1313bl. In Sun Tzu’s Art of War we read: All warfare is based on deception. Therefore, when capable, feign incapacity; when active, inactivity. When near, make it appear that you are far away; when far away, that you are near. Offer the enemy a bait to lure him; feign disorder and strike him. When he concentrates, prepare against him; where he is strong, avoid him. Anger his general and confuse him. Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance. Keep him under a strain and wear him down. When he is united, divide him. See Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Samuel B. Griffith trans. (London: Oxford, 1963), Chapter 1, “Estimates”; emphasis added. 2. Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. xii, xvii, 14, 18–20, and 53. 3. Ibid., pp. xii, 14, 18–20, and 53. 4. Ibid, p. xv. 5. Hobbes in 1651 famously described human life in the “state of nature” thus: In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Touchstone, 1993), chapter 13; emphasis added. 6. Both definitions come from the Oxford Living Dictionary, accessed March 24, 2018, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/force 7. Harold Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan, Power and Society (New York: Routledge, 2017), xxviii.

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8. There are significant literatures on coercion and compellence in internal security and international affairs. We take a broader view to understand “how force works” irrespective of the purpose to which the ruler puts it. Readers interested in coercion, compellence, and deterrence can consult Kelly Greenhill and Peter Krause’s anthology Coercion: The Power to Hurt in International Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). We noted the first sentence in this anthology’s Acknowledgments: “This book grew from a shared realization that the foundational scholarship on coercion that we regularly read, taught, and utilized was no longer adequate to explain much of the behavior we observed in the world around us”; see p. vii. 9. Oxford Living Dictionary, s.v. “Power,” accessed March 24, 2018, at https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/power 10. Thomas Schelling discusses a similar distinction between what he calls the power to hurt and brute force; see Arms and Influence, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 3. 11. This is a consideration similar to how Nadia Schadlow discusses the consolidation of combat gains into political power. See her War and the Art of Governance, (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2017), p. 3. 12. In Arms and Influence, Schelling describes a diplomacy of violence in which states use force and threats of force against one another. Our work takes this into account but focuses on the idea of force as a tool in negotiation rather than on the process and logic of negotiation. 13. No one knows the author’s real name; we only know he wrote around 200 BC, appropriating the name of a counselor to the first emperor to rule a swath of India stretching the length of the Indus and Ganges rivers. Kautilya’s tome, the Arthasastra (or “Science of Government”) influenced Indian society and governance for well over two thousand years, even though its manuscript was lost around 1200 and only rediscovered in 1904. See Philip H.J. Davies, “The Original Surveillance State: Kautilya’s Arthasastra and Government by Espionage in Classical India,” in Philip H.J.  Davies and Kristian C.  Gustafson, eds. Intelligence Elsewhere: Spies and Espionage Outside the Anglosphere (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2013), pp. 50–52. 14. Kautilya, The Arthasastra, trans. L.N. Rangarajan (New Delhi: Penguin, 1992), 9.1.16—see p. 628 in this edition. 15. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), Book III, chapter 11, p. 204 in this edition. See also Book I, ch. 2, p. 95, and Book III, ch. 14, p. 213. Emphasis in original. 16. Quoted in Ian T. Brown, A New Conception of War: John Boyd, the US Marines, and Maneuver Warfare (Quantico, VA: Marine Corps University Press, 2018), p.  104; accessed January 23, 2019, at https://www.usmcu.edu/Portals/218/ANewConceptionOfWar.pdf

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?ver=2018-11-08-094859-167. Clausewitz would seem to agree, explaining that the defender has lost the battle when “the attacking force has lost little if any of its cohesion and effectiveness…while the defender has become more or less disorganized.” See On War, Book IV, ch. 7, p. 241. 17. There is a way in which the doctrine or “technology” of military cooperation can also influence the military success of a nation. In this book we focus more broadly on the concept of cooperation within and without the military. For those who want more detail on how doctrine might influence success; see Stephen Biddle, Military Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 18. See, for instance, Simin Hall and William McQuay, “Review of Trust Research,” Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting (2007). 19. Charles S. Carver and Michael E. Scheier in discussing information, cybernetics, and control, note that “information” is intuitive yet fuzzy, and attempt to define it as a concept that “revolves around questions of entropy”; Attention and Self-Regulation: A Control-Theory Approach to Human Behavior (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1981), p. 12. For more on information, entropy, and trust, see Hall and McQuay, “Review of Trust Research,” pp. 22–24; and Jenna Bednar, Yan Chen, Tracy Xiao Liu, and Scott Page, “Behavioral spillovers and cognitive load in multiple games: An experimental study,” Games and Economic Behavior 74 (2012), pp. 12–13. 20. Clausewitz, On War, Book I, ch. 2, p. 95; see also Book I, ch. 3, p. 108. 21. Note the difference between comprehension and related words. Understanding is a near synonym; it is the ability to comprehend, which makes it more than an accumulation of facts. Yet understanding also implies a degree of empathy that would often seem alien to warfare and internal security. In this context, comprehension better suggests the ability to foreknow one’s adversaries’ intentions or plans, rather than simply their location, name, or equipment (the definition of comprehension comes from Merriam Webster online; accessed March 8, 2019, at https://www. merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/comprehension). 22. Martin Van Creveld, Technology and War: From 2000 B.C. to the Present (New York: Free Press, 1991 [1989]), p. 316. 23. For the notion of “doorstep” open-access states, see North et al., Violence and Social Orders, pp. 192 and 205. 24. Francis Fukuyama, Trust: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), pp. 3–4. 25. Lawrence Freedman, The Future of War: A History (New York: PublicAffairs, 2017), pp. xxi, 237. 26. Peter W. Singer and Emerson T. Booking, LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2018), p. 22.

CHAPTER 2

Divide and Conquer: The Progress of Force to 1800

In ancient times the opulent and civilised found it difficult to defend themselves against the poor and barbarous nations. In modern times the poor and barbarous find it difficult to defend themselves against the opulent and civilised. —Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

A central question of history is the rise, distribution, and decline of power. It is typically if not always wielded or redistributed by force. As the previous chapter notes, the framework that we will describe in this book is that effective force depends upon concentration, which requires mastery of cooperation, conveyance, and comprehension. This chapter examines the evidence for that notion from ancient times to the nineteenth century by following three historical periods: ancient, modern, and industrial. Technological and ideological innovations changed the relative importance of cooperation, conveyance, and comprehension throughout these time frames. In each age, however, mastery of force depended upon mastery of at least one of these qualities. That mastery swung decisively to European states after 1500 and remained with them for more than four centuries.

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Ancient Ways At the dawn of history the exercise of force occurred on a human scale. People fought their enemies face to face, or literally a stone’s throw away. They did so a lot; archaeological evidence suggests that perhaps 10% of all deaths involved violence in ancient times.1 Hand-to-hand duels with swords or clubs likely resulted in death or maiming for both combatants unless one of them boasted uncommon strength, speed, and agility. Such athletes of violence are rare by definition. In Greek myths and Old Testament chronicles, for instance, these heroes could change the fortunes of tribes or city-states. The Second Book of Samuel lists King David’s chief warriors; Benaiah, for instance, is said to have “slew an Egyptian, a huge man. The Egyptian carried a spear, but Benaiah came against him with a staff; he wrested the spear from the Egyptian’s hand, and killed him with that spear….David put him in charge of his bodyguard.”2 Such rare heroes could guard or even rule a clan or tribe, but building and sustaining power requires resources. Therefore, primitive raiders took food, tools, slaves, and wombs, though preferably in the form of tribute rather than loot. Plunder, after all, is not easily gained—victims might defend their homes and families with their lives. Thus it often seemed better to all parties to have a threatened city or kingdom pay the invaders to go away than to make them fight. Civilized conquerors’ tastes in plunder grew more sophisticated; they wanted not only strong backs but portable commodities (skilled hands and precious metals) useful for making or buying other goods.3 We have a list of the items and persons that Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, took from the sack of Jerusalem in 597 BC; these included “all the treasures” of the palace and the temple, the king of Judah and his family and functionaries, plus all the trained soldiers “and a thousand artisans and smiths.”4 In addition to the direct costs in battle, using force means diverting men from the fields to the battlefield, diminishing productive capacity, and quite possibly eroding power itself. Mustering an army takes men from their work and deprives their families. The Chinese strategist Sun Tzu calculated this predicament for a ruler around 300 BC, declaring that an army of 100,000 men on campaign cost the ruler “a thousand pieces of gold a day….and the affairs of seven hundred thousand households will be disrupted.”5

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Gaining the cooperation of many men to concentrate force thus meant not only mustering troops but also assembling the supplies to keep them in the field as long as needed. The insight that sustaining a force is as important as deploying it came to observers in lands thousands of miles apart. As the Indian sage Kautilya explained around 200  BC, “[f]rom wealth comes the power of the government,” for “the army is [sometimes] the means of acquiring and protecting the treasury.6 But the treasury is [always] the means of acquiring wealth as well as the army. [On the whole,] the calamity to the treasury is more serious since it affects all others.”7 This dilemma—the need to balance the use of force with the necessity to accumulate the resources necessary to create force—has confronted strategists ever since. With a consciousness of war’s costs and risks to the kingdom came the realization that war must be subject to reason and not left to the fates. While Homer in the Iliad explained success in battle as often turning on the will of the gods, such views gave way in a few places to a deliberate, calculated study. “War is a matter of vital importance to the state; the province of life or death; the road to survival or ruin,” began Sun Tzu’s Art of War. “It is mandatory that it be thoroughly studied.” Xenophon added a line in his Education of Cyrus explaining “those who had not learned to ride had no right to ask the gods to give them victory in [a] cavalry battle.”8 Between the fifth and third centuries before Christ, several societies produced deep insights on strategy. The original classics of applying force—by authors as widely separated as Sun Tzu, Kautilya, Herodotus, and Thucydides—reward readers even today. Sun Tzu’s epigrams wear particularly well in our digital age. He explained, for instance, that the factor that shapes the ability of the sovereign to use force is a superior ability to understand where to exercise limited means to forestall or break up his foes’ ability to concentrate strength. Here is how Sun Tzu explained offensive strategy: Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy. Next best is to disrupt his alliances. The next best is to attack his army. The worst policy is to attack cities. Attack cities only when there is no alternative.…9

The surest path to victory, Sun Tzu thereby suggests, is to convince a foe that he gains nothing by fighting. The second best is to keep his forces

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(and friends) from cooperating together. If one must confront the enemy’s army, then he should be attacked where he is weak. Sun Tzu listed “the strategist’s keys to victory” in battle: All warfare is based on deception. Therefore, when capable, feign incapacity; when active, inactivity. When near, make it appear that you are far away; when far away, that you are near. Offer the enemy a bait to lure him; feign disorder and strike him. When he concentrates, prepare against him; where he is strong, avoid him. Anger his general and confuse him. Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance. Keep him under a strain and wear him down. When he is united, divide him.10

Sun Tzu’s insight suggests that force is a function of men, materiel, and the ideas that allow them to cooperate. Discipline proved to be an idea that served as a critical “technology” to aid cooperation and concentration. The insight into the importance of discipline occurred organically and independently in several cultures; the Greeks and the Romans, for instance, never read Sun Tzu. Yet they grasped that smaller armies well led and handled could defeat masses of less organized enemies. The Greek city-states in particular pioneered new tactics and methods to apply force on the battlefield. Their disciplined foot soldiers learned that if they remained shoulder-to-shoulder in the face of cavalry charges, they thereby saved their lives and those of their comrades. Any man who fled, however, put the entire formation at risk, and had scant hope of outrunning a horse and saving his own life. Convincing hundreds and even thousands of men to recall this truth in the heat of battle required repetitious training, and the men had to trust their leaders and one another. Thucydides put this idea in the mouth of the Spartan king Archidamus in an exhortation to his troops: …remember as you follow where you may be led to regard discipline and vigilance as of the first importance, and to obey with alacrity the orders transmitted to you; for nothing contributes so much to the credit and safety of an army as the union of large bodies by a single discipline.11

Ancient Sparta took the tactics and training of the polis to a high degree of proficiency. Spartans drilled from childhood and mastered the training that added momentum to a campaign as well as a battle. This city-state in rocky southern Greece could beat larger armies of barbarians, numerous

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and brave but “untrained, and greatly inferior in skill,” as Herodotus judged the Persians at the Battle of Plataea in 479 BC.12 Spartan armies also advanced the military art by making cooperation the strength of their formations. When Homer described the Trojans as “[coming] on with clamor and a cry, like birds,” he presented a picture not of tailored concentration but of an inchoate mass moving in a general direction.13 The Spartans, by contrast, could take relatively smaller formations and combine, disassemble, re-combine, and move in unison. This cooperation on the battlefield became possible because the Spartans also made a leap in conveying orders to their soldiers engaged with the enemy. Thus, they could rapidly cooperate to concentrate force against resistance. They developed a system for relaying commands in battle, subdividing the army so that they could transmit orders swiftly throughout their force. The exiled Athenian general Thucydides described this novelty at the Battle of Mantinea (418  BC), in which the Spartans were uncharacteristically surprised but soon rallied and gained the initiative: For when a [Spartan] king is in the field commands proceed from him; he gives the word to the polemarchs, they to lochages, these to the pentacostyes, these again to the enomatarchs, and these last to the enomoties. In short, all orders required pass in the same way and quickly reach the troops; for almost the whole Lacedaemonian army, save for a small part, consists of officers under officers, and the care of what is to be done falls upon many.14

Sparta’s rivals in Athens applied discipline at sea. Athens kept an army and strong city walls, but devoted its wealth to a navy based on citizen oarsmen and soldiers; the Athenians may have been the first people with a notion of sea power. Faced with the Persian invasion in 488  BC, they puzzled over an oracle from Delphi: “Yet Zeus the all-seeing grants to Athene’s prayer / That the wooden wall only should not fall, but help you and your children.”15 The prophecy came true when Athens was saved at the battle of Salamis, in which the wooden triremes of the Athenian and allied navies defeated a larger Persian force. Naval combat at this time was more amphibious than maritime—ships rarely fought out of sight of land, and not infrequently beached to assist local forces or pursue an enemy.16 Still, the Athenian navy was a huge social investment, enlisting many of the polis’ able-bodied men to row the ships and fight hand-to-hand against the soldiers on enemy vessels they had rammed and grappled. Athens even

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possessed the strength to replace a lost fleet. Thrown into frantic activity after their rout at Syracuse (413 BC), for instance, the Athenians hastily regrouped, assembling enough new ships and new crews to win a resounding victory at Cynossema just two years later.17 The strength of Athens at sea thus rested as much on the “social capital” that raised and manned the navy as in the ships and sailors themselves. Here was an economic and social system that could mobilize citizens and wealth for war. Herodotus lauded Greece’s virtuous poverty as opposed to the indolent luxury of Persia, but in reality the Greek states like Athens, though small, were hives of commerce, trade, and innovation in technology, scholarship, and the arts.18 The supreme practitioners of the Greek system of discipline to aid cooperation turned out to be two nations that were not Greek. The Macedonians, namely Philip and his son Alexander, together subdued and utilized the Greeks. In his twelve-year reign, Alexander secured his hold on Greece and then marched his hoplites as far as the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Indus. He incorporated Greek soldiers from the city-states his father had vanquished, combining them in phalanxes that comprised indomitable but maneuverable ranks  of armored infantry massed for mutual protection. Alexander provided his army with cavalry, engineers, and a siege train. Indeed, his army on campaign was essentially a self-sustaining and mobile polis. In his brief career they subdued Egypt and Persia, and he turned back from northern India only when his men, thousands of miles from home, refused to march any farther in 326 BC. Republican Rome watched Alexander warily and ultimately accomplished even more with the ideas that he had perfected. Whether or not Roman generals could have beaten Alexander will never be known, for Alexander had headed east, and not to Italy. Rome’s strength lay in its durable ability to build and sustain armies across Europe. Alexander never lost a battle, conceded the (Roman) historian Livy more than 300 years after his death, but rival commentators who contended that  Alexander could have conquered Rome, countered Livy, failed to grasp that they were “comparing one man’s achievements—and those of a young man too—with the exploits of a nation now in its eighth century of warfare.”19 Rome had a military system that could build and sustain agile and powerful armies led by capable generals. Livy noted (apparently without irony) that Rome had “driven back a thousand armies more dangerous than those of Alexander and Macedon, and this she will still do, provided that

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the love of peace which rules our lives and our concern for domestic concord continue unbroken.”20 The Roman system could even beat Roman troops. Plutarch describes the exploits of the rebel general Sertorius in Spain, who though a Roman to his core turned the methods he had learned against a series of commanders sent out by the Senate to subdue him and the barbarian locals whom he had taught so well: [Sertorius] was also highly honored for his introducing discipline and good order amongst [the Spanish], for he altered their furious savage manner of fighting, and brought them to make use of the Roman armor, taught them to keep their ranks, and observe signals and watchwords; and out of a confused number of thieves and robbers, he constituted a regular, well-­ disciplined army.21

Rome refined all aspects of war but excelled at administration and engineering. As a result, the Romans developed the infrastructure to convey forces quickly to where they needed to be. When the Roman Senate wearied of Carthaginian naval dominance around 260 BC, for instance, the Romans copied a grounded Carthaginian warship and built a powerful navy virtually from scratch.22 Roman legions also made copious use of engineers. A typical legionary handled a spade more than a sword while campaigning; a Roman army on the march fortified its camp every night. Entreated in 55 BC by their only German allies for help against their barbarian oppressors, the local Roman commander, Julius Caesar, resolved to cross the Rhine and chastise the offending tribes. His German friends on the far bank gathered boats for the trip, but Caesar (describing the operation in the third person) had a better idea. Since “a crossing by means of boats seemed to him both too risky and beneath his dignity as a Roman commander,” Caesar had his engineers bridge the Rhine downstream from modern Coblenz. He put his roughly 40,000 troops to the work, and they accomplished the task in ten days, probably laying two bridges over an island for a total span of nearly a quarter mile. A brief, successful campaign in Germany followed, after which Caesar marched the legions back across his bridges and broke them up to prevent marauders from following in his wake as he hurried off to invade Britain that same summer.23 Feats like bridge building required tremendous organization and cooperation to develop skills and, perhaps more importantly, they allowed commanders to convey troops to the right time and place.

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To know where to guide their force, both Greeks and Romans (among many others) needed to comprehend the full situation and identify the best course of action. Likewise, they needed to interrupt their adversary’s comprehension of a situation, and in doing so they often turned to intrigue. The Greco-Roman historian Plutarch praised the Spartan general Lysander for his guile: “For where the lion’s skin will not reach,” Lysander reputedly explained, “you must patch it out with the fox’s.”24 Intelligence— not just scouting, but espionage as well—offered secret sources, means, and remedies to generals and princes alike. Princes, of course, had to contend with threats at home and abroad. For them, intrigue and intelligence brought more than information; such methods helped a ruler deceive the adversary or prevent him from concentrating strength. Even here Sun Tzu’s principle applied: divide and conquer. Spies can see enemies gathering, and can mislead the foe about one’s own strength and plans, or impair his plans by pulling away his friends, whether by fostering suspicion, inducing defections, or enticing new allies. “There is no place where espionage is not used,” declared Sun Tzu.25 Kautilya also had many uses for spies, but first and foremost he wanted them to detect dissent among the prince’s enemies. They hunted conspirators and made them afraid to plot against the prince; the Arthasastra explained that …discontented persons shall not be allowed to come together or join hands with neighboring princes, jungle chiefs, kinsmen who covet the throne and disgruntled princes; sowing dissension is the method to be used [against them].26

Observers in faraway Greece noticed something similar in the behavior of tyrants in the city-states of the Mediterranean world. The problem with tyranny is that it makes the ruler unpopular. Various citizens bore grudges against the typical tyrant, who for his part took extraordinary measures for his own safety. Plutarch tells us that Antigonus II of Macedon slept in a secret attic each night, for instance, while Dionysius the Elder of Syracuse let no visitor bear arms in his presence, and made his barber use a hot ember rather than a razor.27 The tyrant, explained Aristotle, seeks to guard “against anything that customarily gives rise to two things, high thoughts and trust.” Tyrants therefore had to balance the tools necessary to create cooperation (even amongst their own soldiers) with those to disrupt his enemies’ trust in one

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another. Indeed, since a tyrant had so many enemies, he sought “to make all as ignorant of one another as possible,” while he sent out his spies “wherever there was some meeting or gathering (for men speak less freely when they fear such persons).” Tyrants especially dreaded men who trusted one another; thus a tyrant would “slander them to one another, and set friends at odds with friends.”28 The tyrant’s spies, of course, were hated as well as feared. The aforementioned Dionysius had a son (of the same name) who carried on the family business, also oppressing Syracuse until his enemies seized the city by stratagem, thus allowing the citizens to take revenge on the informers. Indeed, these “wicked and hateful wretches,” says Plutarch, became the main quarry of the common people as soon as the latter dared to set upon Dionysius’ followers. The informers were the first to suffer the vengeance of the Syracusans, being promptly “beaten to death by the crowd.”29 By contrast, just and popular rulers like Aratus of Sicyon lived securely in their subjects’ goodwill, said Plutarch, “for where the common people and the principal citizens have their fears not of, but for, their governor, he sees with many eyes and hears with many ears whatsoever is doing.”30

Ages Dark Rome’s proficiency at war and administration begs a question that has perplexed historians since Edward Gibbon in the eighteenth century. How did Rome, for all its power, fall? To put the question in proper context, why did the Greeks, Romans, Persians, Chinese, and Indians, with all their cultural achievements and military prowess in the early centuries AD, prove similarly unable to defend themselves against barbarians or even maintain order in their own realms? All of them exercised great power and cultural sway in their respective regions, with governmental and technological effects reaching beyond their borders. And yet none could maintain political stability. Alexander’s empire fell apart just after his death. The longest-lived empire, Rome, lasted almost a thousand years in its Latin side, and almost a thousand more in its Greek form (Byzantium). Yet even its internal instability is legendary. Gibbon chronicled coup after coup and hinted that Rome fell victim to palace intrigues, disgruntled soldiers, and a collapse of morale as Christianity turned the citizens’ attention from patriotic paganism to a Heavenly home. Such causes in Rome, however, hardly explain what happened in other empires in the middle of the first millennium AD, such as the civil wars

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and disasters that befell Persia and China. Nor can they account for the violent and destructive migrations among the semi-civilized tribes of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. We cannot fully explain this period of history, but we can chart its course and list its effects for the evolution of force. The great beneficiaries of this tumult set out from Arabia on their own march of conquest in the seventh century. Within only twenty years of their Prophet Mohammed’s death in 632, Arab armies and raiding parties threatened local rulers between Sicily and Kabul. The Muslims who invaded Christian and Persian lands struck just as the Persians and the Byzantines had exhausted each other through interminable war. Arab armies pushed the Byzantines into the core of their empire, which Constantinople nonetheless held for another 700 years with a combination of toughness and guile.31 The Muslims rapidly destroyed the empire of the Persians; indeed, with the Byzantines diminished and the Persians vanquished (and soon converted to Islam), Muslim conquests spread rapidly across North Africa and Southwest Asia, stretching from Provence to Sindh in less than a century. The early Muslims’ rapid advance surely owed much to good generalship and cooperation built upon religious fervor, which convinced even converts to fight hard on behalf of their new rulers. Yet we do not know how the Arabs’ military system worked, nor why it proved so effective against so many foes. What we know is that for hundreds of years migratory and marauding peoples, including Huns, Avars, Vikings, and later Mongols and Turks, gained tactical and strategic mobility with horses (and sails) and used it to sweep down on settled lands. Vikings, for instance, roamed from Scandinavia to North Africa and North America.32 Empires from Rome to India to China lost cities and peoples to poorer hosts led by superb generals commanding disciplined and fast-moving cavalry (or long ships), thus proving that the most sophisticated civilizations lacked a decisive technological or organizational advantage. The question remains how the nomads sustained armies against settled and relatively wealthy lands boasting centuries of experience in warfare. Despite some valiant efforts to explain these world-changing facts—such as William H. McNeill’s—we will probably never know the answer, but it surely related in some way to the social contexts of the marauding hosts.33 The Germanic peoples who overran the western Roman Empire—not to mention the Huns who overran them—were roving nations more than armies. The Vikings were infamous as hit-and-run coastal raiders, but they

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also assembled what Alfred the Great’s scribes dubbed the Great Heathen Army to patiently plunder and extract tribute for two decades across what is now England and France.34 In this regard, the Mongols merely continued a thousand-year trend. By Alfred’s time the military art refined by the Romans was gradually changing in Latin Europe.35 All was not lost—a fourth-century tactics manual by Vegetius Renatus, for example, was widely copied and consulted in Medieval Europe.36 But in the vacuum of order after the end of the Western empire in 476, Latin Europe fell back into tribalism for several centuries. Mighty men briefly dominated the battlefield again, at least according to the surviving cultural record that we can read today in the epics of Beowulf, Siegfried, and Roland. The historical Roland was a Frank killed in Charlemagne’s retreat from Spain (778), when the Frankish rear-­ guard was ambushed by local Basques. Medieval minstrels made the ambushers into Spanish Muslims who annihilated Roland’s force. His knights’ last stand, proclaimed these legends, proved a bloody victory for the Saracens, with Roland and his Christians at last overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers: Count Roland has returned to the battle, and with [his sword] Durendal in his fist he strikes blows worthy of a knight. He has hewn in half Faldrun of Pui and twenty-four others from among the pick of the Saracens. No man ever burned so to avenge himself. As stags before the dogs the pagans run before Roland.37

When the Song of Roland was written down three centuries later, warfare was briefly dominated by heavy cavalry armed with lances. At least that is what the knights and their troubadours related. All the Eurasian powers had long fielded cavalry, of course, though primarily as scouts and mounted archers, which is to say, as auxiliaries that only rarely proved decisive against disciplined masses of armored infantry. Two features had enhanced the power of mounted warriors, briefly giving them battlefield superiority: (1) armor for rider and horse; and (2) new saddles that made man and horse one for the purpose of driving home a lance. “For a Frank on horseback is invincible, and would even make a hole in the walls of Babylon,” recorded the Byzantine princess Anna Komnene, who witnessed the Western hosts gathering in Constantinople for the First Crusade. Yet a knight, she added, could be clumsy and helpless if unhorsed, when “anyone who likes can make sport of him.”38 Historians have

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accordingly long debated whether the horse really dominated European battlefields.39 Well-handled cavalry might break and decimate even disciplined infantry—but such success was not assured, as when the Frankish infantry stood firm at Tours (732) and the Saracen cavalry failed. English longbowmen who held their ground could slaughter knights in armor (as they did at Crecy and Agincourt)—or die themselves if they broke ranks, letting themselves be hunted down by mounted knights, as at Patay in 1429.40 Europe’s knights ventured as far as Jerusalem, but it was not they who perfected cavalry as a strategic weapon—that would be the Mongols of Central Asia, who for two centuries beset Chinese, Muslim, Indian, and European armies. Their “hordes” could range about the countryside, snatching up anything portable, and locating the defender’s strong points and the core of his army. Cavalry could then concentrate, hem in the infantry and cut them off. The Mongol system somehow made the hordes more than a match even for the heavy cavalry of their foes. Though we do not know the details of how they did it, legend tells us of the effect that brought adversaries to heel. They conquered much of China, reached northern India and the plains of Hungary, and sacked Baghdad in 1258; Mongol warriors massacred thousands and destroyed the city’s great libraries, allegedly scavenging leather covers from the books to make sandals. Mongol hordes, though they probably had fewer horsemen than their enemies feared, could conquer but they could not rule. Indeed, their conquests were usually but a prelude to their being subsumed themselves. The Mongols ultimately went native, eventually adapting Christianity in the west, Islam in the south, and Buddhism in the east. The pattern prevailed elsewhere in the Age of Cavalry. For reasons beyond the scope of this study, in all of this horse-dominated conflict no regime could create political stability. All conquests—whether by Muslims, Mongols, or Latin Christians intent on retaking the Holy Land from its Muslim rulers—soon broke up into warring fiefdoms run by the conquerors’ lieutenants and heirs. The Mongols were merely the last of a series of marauding peoples who for centuries had beset the civilized lands across the Eurasian continent. Gunpowder weapons slowly changed this state of affairs. By the fifteenth century warfare had again reached a high sophistication all over the Eurasian landmass. No weapon, arm, people, or region could give or achieve more than a brief superiority. Missile weapons had always been

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ubiquitous, but had long been short-ranged and lacking in punch. Around 1450, however, a variety of missile weapons—crossbows, English longbows, and the earliest firearms—were growing truly dangerous, even to knights in armor. They were still comparatively short-ranged and had slow rates of fire. Thus what won on the battlefield was a balance of capabilities—heavy cavalry operating with other contingents using crossbows, muskets, and even small cannons—and supporting common soldiers who fought with swords, pikes, and shields. Their comparative strengths were blended (and their respective vulnerabilities masked) in fixed and mobile contingents by professional soldiers who fought for pay—and not infrequently under foreign rulers. A powerful sovereign in the early gunpowder age did not necessarily employ the best tactics; rather, he raised and sustained competent forces in the field. In other words, power accrued to the sovereign who could assemble and deploy the essentials of the new, combined-arms forces. Professional soldiers worked for the highest bidder, and typically only kings or emperors could afford their services. As observed by William H. McNeill, heavy cannons also gave their most significant advantages to royal customers. Only the strongest rulers could purchase the enormous cannons needed to knock down the castles of once-independent local lords (these guns were sometimes cast right beside their emplacements in the field, as they were almost too bulky to move). Mere dukes or barons, if they lost in the field of battle and sought sanctuary in their castles, could now be battered into submission in mere days. The new “gunpowder empires” thus consolidated royal power over feudalism in Europe. They centralized the reach of the Mughals in India and Muscovites in Russia at roughly the same time that Constantinople finally succumbed to the Turks.41 The Fall of Constantinople in 1453 is justly noted as the end of Rome, but it marked much more as well.42 Both the armies engaged at Constantinople were polyglot in character. Ottoman emperor Mehmet II led Turks, Serbians, and Greeks; Hungarians cast his famous siege guns. Meanwhile the defenders manned the walls with Byzantines, Greeks, Venetians, Genoese, Germans, and even some Turks. These truly multinational forces illustrated the state of warfare at the time. A relative equality amongst combatants in technology, control, and mobility meant that power adhered to rulers who could accumulate and sustain such varied, combined-arms forces. Several empires in several regions understood the military art of the day and fielded capable armies against each other

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(indeed, the French and English, along with Italian and German principalities, and the Serbs, Poles, Ottomans, Persians, Mughals, and Chinese all knew full well how to do this). What changed, then, after 1500?

The Early Modern Age Don Quixote encountered a marvelously new landscape when he sallied forth from La Mancha in the early seventeenth century. The “Knight of the Woeful Countenance” served his creator Miguel de Cervantes both as a figure of fun and as a relic of a passing world—a silly old man who wandered about Spain with his fool, Sancho Panza. Spain was building and modernizing; recall that Don Quixote not only mistook windmills for dragons but also quailed at the din raised by the huge hammers of a water-­ powered fuller’s mill. Yet more dangerous still for him and Sancho were the other travelers they met on their journey. When Don Quixote challenged a wagon load of wandering players in costume for their next performance, they swiftly pulled guns on him. This prompted Sancho for once to intervene: “Are you mad, Sir?” he cried. “There’s no Fence against the Beggar’s Bullets, unless you could fight with a Brazen Bell over you.”43 Cervantes published Don Quixote in 1605, while Spain grew rich on the wealth of the Americas. The story of this age is not only one of great contrast between the powers with gunpowder and modern ideas but between the emerging Western European states that could muster the power to fight far from their homelands as well as in their geographic neighborhoods—and those in the rest of the world that could not. Ocean-­ going ships, and the inventions that allowed for their navigation and dominance, brought about a change in how Western European states understood the broader world and how to concentrate their growing strength. Gunpowder weapons and ocean travel changed the world, putting the resources of North and South America, Africa, and even India, at the disposal of Europe. Their effect can be seen in the divergent fates of the two earliest known European forays to the Western Hemisphere. The Spanish had not been the first Europeans to see distant lands like the Americas, of course. The Stone Age and the Iron Age had briefly met in Newfoundland around 1000  AD, when Vikings encountered local peoples they called “Skraelings” (a pejorative of forgotten meaning). These first European footprints in the New World, however, soon faded. The Vikings had

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reached Greenland a few years earlier, but in small numbers; scarcely a handful could be spared to keep journeying into the unknown west (and the shores of North America). They carried superior weapons—which the native inhabitants coveted—but Norse swords could not keep their owners out of bow shot, and the Vikings abandoned “Vinland” after a decade. Their small settlements in Greenland lived for more than 400 years, but they too failed in the face of climate change and local resistance. Spreading ice trapped them in the early 1400s, and the Norse Greenlanders either starved or succumbed to Inuit raids in perhaps the only instance of a European community falling extinct and leaving a land to its natives.44 Much had changed when Spanish adventurers explored the coast of Mexico a century later. The Spanish had larger ships that could cross the Atlantic and sail together from Cuba to the Yucatan peninsula with hundreds of well-equipped soldiers. These ships also carried horses, which initially terrified native warriors. The local tribes far outnumbered the Spanish adventurers, of course, and wielded deadly flint-edged weapons. Yet their arms proved no match for steel swords, crossbows, and muskets. Hernan Cortes on his subsequent march to what is now Mexico City found the natives debating whether he and his men were gods, recalled one veteran of the conquista. Cortes made alliances with several chiefs who hated their Aztec overlords, thereby giving his soldiers indispensable support when they besieged the heart of the Aztec empire. The Aztecs fought hard but could not stop the house-to-house advance of Cortes and his soldiers into Tenochtitlan, their capital, in 1520.45 Several factors figured in Spain’s rapid conquest of Mexico and much of the New World. Once Cortes decided to stay in Mexico, Spanish ships brought him something almost as important as gunpowder and horses to hasten his victory. They brought him the implements and craftsmen who could generate the power necessary to field an advanced force. Spanish ships delivered sailors and blacksmiths and master carpenters with patterns to build miniature warships for Lake Texcoco, which surrounded Tenochtitlan. Local chiefs allied with Cortes volunteered tribesmen for cutting the timber that Cortes’ shipwrights assembled into small galleys, which soon dominated the lake. Indeed, these vessels kept the Aztecs in their hundreds of canoes from attacking the flanks of the Spanish advance along the causeways leading into the city. Spain had reached the New World in the first place thanks to dramatic improvements in celestial navigation in the late Middle Ages. Ironically, Europeans had devised few of the actual devices that Spanish and

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Portuguese navigators employed so well. The mechanical clock, the compass, and the astrolabe, for instance, all originated elsewhere, but in Europe they began to work together in new ways. Perhaps the answer for the ensuing divergence in relative power relates in some way to the European fascination with measuring time in the late Middle Ages. A mania for observing, sorting, and counting swept Latin Europe even before the Renaissance. The western European world had produced the world’s best mechanical clocks and its only maritime charts by the early 1300s, and a Castilian king, Alfonso X, sponsored the production of astronomical tables for navigators in the mid-thirteenth century. European clockmakers and astronomers in the ensuring decades gained ever more precision in monitoring the motions of the heavenly bodies and developed the mathematics to correspond their regularly shifting positions with fixed patterns in terrestrial space.46 Many hands and minds had fashioned these marvels; the charts, for instance, represented a multicultural collaboration of Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Majorca. Astronomical tables could soon be published as well as copied. Alfonso X’s were printed in 1483, by which time they had been further refined by the Castilian Jew Abraham Zacuto. His astronomical tables were published in Hebrew in 1481 and rapidly translated into Latin and Castilian—becoming in 1497 one of the first books printed with movable type in Portugal. The printing press made that knowledge suddenly accessible to all sorts of people who could find ways to profit from it, most immediately by knowing more exactly where they were on the earth than anyone had previously achieved. What the Europeans had discovered was data, with a curiosity about the world beyond and a zeal for systematizing knowledge. Data ushered in a true revolution in how states comprehended the world around them (and hence their strategic situations). With maps and time, the Europeans could see the world, and its critical landmarks, with eyes that their adversaries did not possess. Tables, maps, charts, and instruments: all of these gave European captains the ability to sail anywhere—and to better comprehend where to bring force to bear when needed. All these techniques helped explorers like Columbus and Vasco de Gama, and would help even more in the decades to come, letting them determine latitude, especially in the regions near the Equator. By the first decade of the 1500s the king of Portugal had something entirely new—a roughly accurate understanding of the Indian Ocean, giving Portuguese captains insight into the key ports and straits to control. A century later an Italian Jesuit in Beijing, Matteo Ricci, showed his hosts North and South

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America—lands entirely unknown to them—on the first true world map ever seen by Chinese eyes. The century in between had seen a spectacular rise in the power of Western Europe.

A Vision of Strategy In the early 1500s, the Ottoman Empire reached from the Balkans as far as Egypt and the frontier of Persia, giving Ottoman traders access to the Red Sea, to the Persian Gulf, and to the Indian Ocean beyond. Yet in a few decades distant Portugal, with a far smaller population and scant resources, seized control of Ottoman trade. It did so because commanders like Afonso d’Albuquerque (1453–1511) drove a revolution in conveyance and comprehension to create a trans-oceanic presence. Their fully rigged ships with stern rudders were true ocean-going vessels, each large enough to journey weeks between landfalls and to carry dozens of passengers and many tons of cargo. Such ships helped to create the modern world, as they were the first to circumnavigate the globe. With these sturdy carracks, Albuquerque and other captains like him could direct flotillas that Turkish, Indian, and soon Chinese rulers and merchants could barely challenge. Yet while superior conveyance provided advantages in ship-to-ship actions, Portuguese carracks and their cannons did not suffice to let Albuquerque and his countrymen overcome local opposition from Ottomans, Arabs, and Indian princes. The critical difference came from the Portuguese ability to pair their conveyance (i.e., ocean-going ships) with comprehension of where to apply force and when. As a result, the Portuguese could concentrate ships, guns, and men at the right place and time to disperse resistance and take command of strategically vital harbors and straits. This revolution in understanding came from navigators who by 1502 gave the Portuguese incomplete but basically accurate nautical charts of the western Indian Ocean.47 The difference between ancient maps and nautical charts is profound, corresponding to the divide between a doodle and a photograph. Charts are like algorithms: they allow a mariner to “enter” local data about the sun and stars and calculate his position.48 Portugal’s charts gave her captains something new: strategic insight into how to control an adversary’s access to the trade and resources of an entire ocean. Afonso d’Albuquerque became the visionary who saw how to combine Portuguese superiority in conveyance and geopolitical comprehension to concentrate force. Portuguese fortunes depended on the sea; they could

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hold harbors but dared not venture far inland, where they would be heavily outnumbered by local forces wielding weapons almost as good as theirs. A Chinese observer noted the Portuguese were like fish: “remove them from the water and they straightway die.”49 The key was knowing which harbors to hold along the Indian Ocean littoral, as Albuquerque explained to his captains in 1511 when they hesitated in taking the port of Malacca (now in modern-day Malaysia). Though Malacca was thousands of miles away from the Ottoman Empire and on the far side of the Indian Ocean, when it was taken the Strait of Malacca (and the lane between the Indian and Pacific Oceans) would belong to Portugal, leaving the Ottomans not “a single port, nor a single situation, so commodious in the whole of these parts, where they can carry on their trade.” Stopping the key trading ports, Albuquerque insisted, was more efficacious than chasing Ottoman ships on the high seas. “I hold it as very certain that if we take this trade of Malaca [sic] away out of [Ottoman] hands,” Albuquerque reportedly insisted, then “Cairo and Meca [sic] are entirely ruined….”50 The key to Portuguese power thus became the ability of Albuquerque and other captains to combine a superior comprehension of geography with the ability to convey force in ocean-going vessels to cause political and economic effects more than 5000 miles away. It would not turn out as easily as he predicted, but Albuquerque’s use of carracks, cannons, and charts nonetheless helped make the Indian Ocean, figuratively speaking, a Portuguese lake by 1586, when that country controlled the strategic entry and exit points to the Indian Ocean, and its trading post on the Chinese coast (Macao) had grown into a city.51 The new technology of navigation and seafaring thus conferred strategic benefits, letting Portugal’s captains comprehend the whole picture and see where to settle and base their ships. With these positions secure, the Portuguese could concentrate force where they needed to ensure Lisbon’s control of a huge expanse of the earth’s surface (Fig. 2.1). The Ottoman Empire soon began feeling the tightening of trade and access. The Turks had a fleet of galleys built for Mediterranean waters and rowed by slaves, but these could not meet Portuguese carracks on even terms on the high seas.52 Ottoman trading partners and interests in the Indian Ocean as far east as Java were soon imperiled by the Portuguese.53 The slow strategic encirclement of Turkey even saw an early example of military aid. At the turn of the seventeenth century, the Shirley brothers and their English companions trained the Safavid Persian cavalry and

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Fig. 2.1  A Japanese view of Portuguese sea power in the early 1600s. Carracks and charts enabled the Portuguese to travel and comprehend the globe strategically. (Unknown artist, “Arrival of the Europeans,” seventeenth century, Screens, 105.1 × 260.7 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mary Griggs Burke Collection)

artillery, giving the Safavids a temporary military advantage over their Ottoman rivals (and thus indirectly slowing Turkish inroads in southern Europe). The Spanish and Portuguese forays to the New World and the East Indies inspired similar ambitions among other nations on the western coast of Europe. English, French, Dutch, and Swedish colonies followed in North America; Western Europeans set up communities or at least trading posts in Africa, India, China, and even Japan. The Spanish reached the Philippines and the Spice Islands from the east in the 1520s, meaning European captains now began staking claims all the way around the globe. This movement enriched its sponsors at least, and had the effect of shifting wealth and then power from the landward states in Eurasia to those on its western edge—what the theorists of Geopolitics in the twentieth century like Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman would call the “Rimland” of the “World Island.” By 1600, Spain had transported vast tonnages of gold and silver home from the Americas and from as far away as Manila.54 Such riches accelerated the maturation of the European economy from one based upon local production and consumption to one based on money as its primary locus of accounting and exchange, with all the efficiencies that entailed for finance, trade, and state revenues.55 It also accelerated the growth of centralized states in Europe, making it easier for

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towns and communities to pay their tithes to the king in money rather than in animals or goods, and that in turn allowed monarchs to broaden the tax base.56 The shift in wealth to Western Europe soon accelerated rippling strategic effects. Europeans who reached East and South Asia found ancient societies that had not kept up with changing technologies. The Chinese, Indians, and Persians, for instance, all boasted long heritages of innovation, and no lack of talent or warrior spirit. The Chinese had invented gunpowder, movable type, the compass, and the stern rudder; both they and the Indians had produced steel since Alexander’s day. Yet by the 1600s every part of the world was at least beginning to lag behind Europe—specifically the Christian nations that touched the Atlantic or the Mediterranean—in military technology and organization. The historical mystery of this “Great Military Divergence” (in Tonio Andrade’s term) remains why lands that had been technologically competitive in the fifteenth century become relatively backward two centuries later.57 China had plenty of guns and had sent a fleet as far as the Red Sea in 1424, but soon afterward abandoned ocean travel and even seaworthy ships.58 According to William H. McNeill, an overbearing Chinese officialdom never ceded enough autonomy to innovators and industry to let China take full advantage of the technological edge it had held around the year 1000. Instead, Chinese technology plateaued, and would not catch up for centuries.59 Tonio Andrade offers a more nuanced explanation of China’s relative decline in military prowess, dating it later but also finding that after the 1600s China “did not need better guns” because the kingdom was mostly at peace for several generations.60 Yet such relative decline happened in too many places outside of Europe to be merely the product of local inertia. India’s Mughal emperors, for instance, enthusiastically fielded artillery and firearms, yet developed no military system comparable to Europe’s to train and sustain innovations and technological expertise.61 Europe had grown, but the East was still much larger in population and landmass, not to mention in resources and trade goods. From this remove we cannot know exactly what constituted the European “exception.” The mystery persists: why on earth should marginal lands on an already marginal continent relatively swiftly become the world’s arbiters?62 Scholars like Bernard Lewis and Niall Ferguson have sought to catalog its aspects, even if not all or even any of those facets could be formal causes of Europe’s accelerating advance.63 It is abundantly clear, however, that the Europeans (and no one else) mastered sea power.

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The Asian empires were not passive or pacific—they had long military traditions and expansive dispositions. Those who went to sea could compete with the Europeans, argues Tonio Andrade, while those who neglected naval matters could not.64 By the 1600s this systematic curiosity and scientific revolution was beginning to be guided by hypotheses that were designed to be verified not only by syllogistic logic but by repeatable observation. The diffusion and availability of data accelerated the acceptance of the scientific method, which spread in the seventeenth century alongside the development of calculus and physics and metallurgy, and the discovery of magnification, of microorganisms, and soon even of new stars. Such discoveries were shared widely in books and pamphlets, thereby broadening the diversity of the minds that could ponder their import. The growth of science after the invention of the printing press indeed generated protocols applicable anywhere by engineers, navigators, and tinkerers. These practical protocols aided the development of power in two ways. First, they facilitated an unprecedented increase of material wealth. Second, they spurred new and sophisticated mechanisms of social cooperation. Now students could coordinate vocabulary and basic concepts in the abstraction of science and then head separately to advance a field through experiments. This diversification of knowledge allowed for the diversification of inquiry and discovery. Europe thus saw the assembling of a community of science and scholarship, based partly in the universities originally established to pass on Christian doctrine (in the common tongue of Latin). The community of science gained state patronage in many lands, with the Royal Society in London (1662), for instance, and the Academie Royale des Sciences in Paris (1666). By 1700 the divide between East and West was stark, and it began at the border between the Christian lands and the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The Turks had besieged Vienna in 1529 and tried again in 1683, but that second, brief, and disastrous foray masked the relative erosion of Turkish strength. The Austrians and their Catholic allies were already dangerous to the Sultan’s ambitions and, by 1698, via the Treaty of Carlowitz, were finally able to force the Ottomans to cede territory. Thereafter the Turks also came under remorseless pressure from a modernizing Russia. The point was not that the Ottomans, Chinese, Indians, and Persians did not improve, it was that Europe improved much faster, and gained the wealth of the New World in the bargain. All that ingenuity gave ample

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opportunity and resources to experiment with improving arms and equipment and methods. For the infantry this meant volley fire, and yet another form of close-order drill. Here is Willem Lodewijk, governor of Friesland, describing such to his cousin, Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange and commander of the Dutch army, in 1594: I have discovered … a method of getting the musketeers and others with guns not only to practice firing but to keep on doing so in a very effective battle order (that is to say, they do not fire at will or from behind a barrier…). Just as soon as the first rank has fired, then by the drill [they have learned] they will march to the back. The second rank either marching forward or standing still, will then fire just like the first. After that the third and following ranks will do the same. When the last rank has fired, the first will have reloaded.65

European armies now looked different and fought in new ways. Once muskets and cannons could be deployed in sufficient numbers, body armor was more cumbersome than useful, and it largely fell out of use in European armies in the 1600s. The same mass formations that concentrated firepower could also be wheeled into squares for mutual protection against cavalry charges, with bayonets on the soldiers’ muskets to perform the function that spears and pikes had served since ancient times. The soldiers with missile weapons and the soldiers with edged weapons—who had been maneuvered in largely separate formations—now merged, giving commanders new flexibility in how they moved their troops. The other innovation on the battlefield was mobile artillery. Big projectiles could only be thrown by siege engines in the past, and such engines were practically stationary devices useful only against large, stationary targets. Now men on the battlefield had to face such dangers as well, as European armies adapted field guns, somewhat more agile with a higher rate of fire, and, at close range, the ability to blast grape shot at opposing troops, like giant shotguns. The basic idea of a well-drilled mass on the battlefield that had endured since the Greek phalanx remained vital, only now such formations could sweep a battlefield out to a hundred yards or more, and when accompanied by field artillery could rake enemy formations with cannon balls at several hundred yards. Cannons had gone to sea soon after their invention. The galleys that initially carried them, however, were relatively small and usually powered by dozens or hundreds of oarsmen—leaving little deck space for guns.

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Missile weapons—first crossbows in quantity and soon cannons—foretold the obsolescence of such galleys. Within three generations even the powerful Ottoman fleet met dangerous competition in the Mediterranean. Coalition members of the Holy League at Lepanto in 1571 credited their victory over a larger Ottoman flotilla to the intercession of the Virgin Mary, but the number and superiority of cannons aboard the Holy League’s vessels also factored in the outcome. The Holy League employed a half-dozen galleasses, big, hybrid ships with sails and oars but built fore and aft to carry more and heavier cannons, which inflicted grievous losses among the Turkish galleys at Lepanto.66 The guns themselves were increasingly cast iron (instead of bronze) after the late 1500s, making them comparatively lighter and much cheaper for the firepower they provided. The navies of nations on the Atlantic dispensed with oars altogether in the seventeenth century, perfecting high-freeboard sailing ships that could carry dozens of cannons. Proficiency in the maritime domain made each nation that built sea power more powerful at the intersection of land and sea by bestowing opportunities to convey force rapidly from one location to another and impose it with increasing skill. Ships gave an attacker the ability to isolate land forces, allowing them to be defeated in detail. Another advantage of ships was that they gave a force the opportunity to withdraw out of range in the face of superior land strength, and also the agility to then descend somewhere else where the opponent’s power was stretched thin. Even a handful of ships could force a landward party to disperse his forces to defend more of his coastline and to invest in fortifying ports and vital landmarks. Sea power also gave those who possessed it an ability to cut maritime sources of supply and assistance that hitherto had increased the landward powers’ strength. The states that prospered in this new age were thus those with the industry, access, and captains to master those intersections of the land and sea domains. By no coincidence, the American naval officer Alfred T. Mahan would one day open his influential volume The Influence of Sea Power Upon History (1890) with a study of the Anglo-­ Dutch naval conflict in the mid-seventeenth century. The Dutch had supplanted Portugal’s control of the Indian Ocean and for a time dominated the seas, until a ruinous series of wars that left England—a nation of perhaps 7 million people around 1700—the pre-eminent naval power. By 1650 the English had learned to maneuver warships in line to sweep enemy ships with broadside after broadside. England’s perfection of this

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tactic and its enduring commitment to ruling the ocean around Britain soon made the Royal Navy the dominant naval power in home waters and beyond. Once it could monopolize trade with India and North America, England ranked among the world’s most powerful states.67

States and Dissenters Frequent wars provided incentive and means for inventors and entrepreneurs in arms and tactics, and prompted innovations in the clandestine arts as well. Constant intrigue now gained a religious dimension, as princes worried about the devotions of their subjects and the threat of conspiracies with foreign and domestic adherents of rival Christian creeds. Secret writing flourished with international intrigue. The printing press had already facilitated interest in poly-alphabetic substitution ciphers; now in the sixteenth century a fashion for codes and ciphers and the secret writing they enabled spread from Italy out across Europe.68 How to deal with such conspiracies? The Italian polymath Niccolo Machiavelli coincidentally had provided princes an answer even before the Reformation. The trick, he explained in an aside that echoed Aristotle’s comment on tyrants, was to break down the ability of dissenters and would-be usurpers to cooperate, replacing trust with mutual fear: For whoever conspires cannot be alone, but he cannot find company except from those he believes to be malcontents; and as soon as you disclose your intent to a malcontent, you give him the matter with which to become content.69

Royal surveillance of conspiracies focused on spotting dissidents to cajole or compel them to inform on their fellows. Such efforts relied on “human intelligence”—both in terms of gathering clues, and in the more-­ active sense of provoking plotters to show their collective hand. Surveillance applied Machiavelli’s observation above, and indeed, a sovereign had incentive to promote distrust among those who might conspire against him, or her. Francis Walsingham did this for Elizabeth I of England, decoding correspondence and spinning webs of spies and informants to catch Catholic plotters against his Anglican queen. Walsingham and his allies especially sought priests, who were ipso facto traitors to the Crown under English law. The penalty for treason was a particularly gruesome death that symbolized the disuniting of the body politic that treason

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represented. Hence England’s long campaign against undercover priests led to many entries in the Catholic martyrology ending with the epitaph “hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn”—the crossroads near London favored for public executions. One Catholic agent held in the Tower of London inscribed in his cell a still-visible testament to his feelings about the business: L.  H. S. 1571 die 10 Aprilis. Wise men ought to se[e] what they do, to examine before they speake; to prove before they take in hand; to beware whose company they use; and, above all things, to whom they truste.— Charles Bailly.70

Walsingham and his English colleagues may have been exceptional for their prowess but not for their craft. Theirs was a more subtle and less formal way of netting people of suspect loyalties; the Spanish Inquisition targeted its own list of suspects, which included Muslims and Jews in the formerly Muslim precincts of Spain. As in England, dissent was officially deemed treason. Thus the mechanisms of the sovereign were enlisted against not only sedition—as they had always been—but now against conscience itself. Yet while Imperial Rome had killed Christians in the Coliseum, the Romans did not worry that these victims represented some foreign power that threatened Caesar. In the strife that accompanied the Reformation, however, that accusation was made thousands of times against people caught in lands where their faith made them minorities. Increasingly the persecutors of religious dissent worked on behalf of states—yet another novelty, and a sign of the shifting power dynamics of Christian Europe. Today the term “state” serves as a casual synonym for country, nation, or even empire, but a state proper denotes (in the context of sixteenth-century Europe) a real innovation in cooperation, even if one that took a couple of centuries to cohere. States emerged from the transformations of thought and technology in the early modern age. Christianity in its Western and Eastern branches had since the Roman Emperor Constantine been comfortable with the notion of “two swords”—Church and Empire—with interminable debates over which held primacy. In the high Middle Ages, the theologian Thomas Aquinas had proposed that each power should reign supreme in its own realm; the Church over ecclesial affairs, and the Empire over secular ones, with neither entitled to usurp the other’s competencies. Of course, even by then the idea of a Christian empire in Europe was illusory. France and England were famously

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independent of the Holy Roman Emperor, and neither emperor nor patriarch in faraway Constantinople had recognized Roman authority over their affairs for centuries. A nagging theological problem thus arose over the role of law and authority, for Christianity as yet had scant practical experience with powerful and sovereign political unities that (unlike Imperial Rome) made no practical or theoretical claims to universal rule. The rise of true states in Western Europe forced this question upon popes and kings—with local bishops wondering which power to obey. Here was a grave challenge to the already crippled notion of Christian unity, with increasingly powerful monarchs in France, England, and Spain appropriating centuries-old papal arguments for the independence of the Church from the emperor and directing them against papal authority over bishops and church holdings in their individual nations. The Protestant Reformation thus came tailor-made for England’s Henry VIII and others to declare themselves head of state and church across their respective realms.71 Catholic scholars found their way to parallel defenses of sovereign independence; Jean Bodin in Paris is credited with formally defining the notion of sovereignty at this time.72 Thomas Hobbes (also writing in Paris) would further develop the concept of sovereignty, as noted earlier, and he saw two powers—civil and ecclesiastical—ruling over the citizenry’s bodies and minds. Monarchs armed with cannons and divine right proved quite powerful in both political and economic terms. The rise of states may indeed have been economic as much as political and technological. States provided huge bases for activity—they could concentrate and sustain power by manning, training, and equipping forces. Sovereigns who ruled nations (instead of collections of lords who in turn ruled their fiefdoms) found they needed steady revenues and ministers who could apply themselves to managing the business of war; that is, supplying the men, materiel, and stuff that armies and navies expended in ever more prodigious quantities. War with guns cost dearly, noted Scottish economic and social philosopher Adam Smith in 1776: The great change introduced into the art of war by the invention of firearms has enhanced still further both the expense of exercising and disciplining any particular number of soldiers in time of peace, and that of employing them in time of war. Both their arms and their ammunition are become more expensive.73

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By the seventeenth century, European wars tended to be fought where state power remained fragmented, that is, where there were only city-­ states and principalities, which is to say in the seams between powerful states like Spain, France, and England. That made western Germany, the Low Countries, and northern Italy the arenas of conflict; the Thirty Years War, for instance, was so ruinous that Europe’s overall population growth briefly stopped. What states now needed to do was to enhance their productive capabilities by promoting industry and capitalism. The late sociologist Charles Tilly observed that war “wove the European network of national states, and preparation for war created the internal structures of the states within it.”74 Divine-right kings wanted their armies (and increasingly navies), to remain at least on a par with their neighbors’ military strength. Kings needed money and found it with the merchants in the cities and towns that had long enjoyed a certain freedom from the strictures of the feudal system (like the City of London since the thirteenth century). Some sovereigns found they could encourage trade and let entrepreneurs themselves profit if their trading rights helped the sovereign’s cause—or equipped and supplied his army.75 Instead of appropriating the merchants’ money for themselves, moreover, states could also delegate monopoly power to corporations, which could then secure and extend their monopolies through profitable applications of force. The Dutch East India Company (chartered in 1602), the British East India Company (1600), and the Hudson’s Bay Company (1670), to name but three famous instances, extended European power across much of the earth. Thus the combined ideas of a national identity and a simultaneous loyalty to a corporation and its trading rights came to guide behavior in creating powerful new entities in support of state power. Another innovation came in finance, with kings now requiring their due in the form of money rather than goods, and increasingly depositing these revenues with state-chartered banks. States also financed themselves through public debt, using those same banks for this purpose; the Bank of Amsterdam, chartered in 1609, underwrote Dutch expansionism, and the Bank of England, chartered eighty-five years later, did much the same.76 Adam Smith could write in 1776: The stability of the Bank of England is equal to that of the British government. All that it has advanced to the public must be lost before its creditors

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can sustain any loss….It acts, not only as an ordinary bank, but as a great engine of state.77

Central banks like England’s provided the ruler a vast “war treasure,” which is why the German philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed banning them as a form of arms control avant la lettre.78 Europe was becoming far more industrious if not yet industrial, and well before the Industrial Revolution, Europe had grown richer than any civilization in history.79 The fading of religious wars in Europe after the Peace of Westphalia (1648) meant states were more stable because of their pledge not to interfere in one another’s internal affairs. Under this dispensation, states became formally co-equal sovereignties, provided they could control their territory and not let it be used for mischief against other states. Such equality gained a regime recognition abroad, and a certain forbearance for its actions at home. European rulers and their ministers might have honored such Westphalian notions with a studied inconsistency, perhaps, but such conventions nonetheless cohered as the norms of European diplomacy. That in turn meant that the religious strife of the Reformation ended at a state’s border, and it presaged an end (or at least a slackening) of the persecution of consciences, for the notion that heresy was treason waned, which in turn diminished the need for extraordinary surveillance. England, for example, executed its last Catholic priest in 1679, while Madrid staged its last public auto-da-fe in 1691 (though the Spanish Inquisition lingered another century). With the ruler and his people now severable in religious terms (as a new ruler could impose a new church), all the nations of Christian Europe implicitly gained an incentive to tolerate other beliefs (even under established state churches), at least for fear of a change in rulers that might render today’s powerful majority into a surrounded minority. Out of this ferment a new science of “society” emerged, reflecting Judeo-Christian principles of an intelligible universe, of subsidiarity, and of solidarity, but imparting insights meant to be applicable in both Catholic and Protestant lands—and thus, implicitly, universally as well. Theorists like Locke and Montesquieu articulated the arguments in secular terms to the English, the French, and many others. Where Aristotle had long before observed and classified the functions and offices of government, Locke showed how the parts of government could interact to build law, and thus stability, which in turn fostered predictability—and prosperity. The technology of the state also improved, including the rule of law and property

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rights.80 Patents and copyrights—that is, intellectual property—were emerging in English law before 1700, and such ideas rapidly spread across the Continent, stimulating productivity and a new, capitalist stage of development. All of this made states more unitary actors, making them still more powerful outside their borders when and where they sought to impose their will abroad. The next great innovation was to encourage industry and capital but deliberately leave them relatively dispersed so they responded to market signals with innovation and efficiency. Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations explained what was already happening and gave it a self-conscious rationale. He showed how markets and prices communicated supply and demand signals, and thus helped consumers and producers understand how to act. Common people were acute judges of their own affairs, he explained, and they would independently seek to better themselves more effectually on their own than if commanded to do so by some higher authority: “But the law ought always to trust people with the care of their own interest, as in their local situations they must generally be able to judge better of it than the legislator can do.”81 Smith might better have titled his economics  classic  The Wealth of States, for his exposition showed how states could exercise a subtle control over cooperation that would enrich and empower them. The state should foster competition, and need no longer sponsor monopolies, Smith insisted: “In general, if any branch of trade, or any division of labour, be advantageous to the public, the freer and more general the competition, it will always be the more so.”82 In this paradox, the nation grows rich by not directing the economy; and general prosperity would mean the state could always borrow in emergencies: “A country abounding with merchants and manufacturers, therefore, necessarily abounds with a set of people who have it at all times in their power to advance, if they choose to do so, a very large sum of money to government.”83 Smith, however, had no intention of promoting an idle government. The state should refrain from interfering with markets, he reasoned, but it should still be alert to their instability, such as in the issuance of paper money, which made finance more efficient but could foist systemic risks on the whole economy.84 The statesman should also be vigorous in defending the lives and property of citizens from strife: Commerce and manufactures can seldom flourish long in any state which does not enjoy a regular administration of justice, in which the people do

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not feel themselves secure in the possession of their property, in which the faith of contracts is not supported by law, and in which the authority of the state is not supposed to be regularly employed in enforcing the payment of debts from all those who are able to pay.85

The combination of capital, law, and science kept the economy productive, while allowing the state to concentrate power on land and sea to meet common purposes and dangers. Of course, complicated economies and rich societies could ill afford to spare men for war; Smith believed that “not more than one-hundredth part of the inhabitants in any country can be employed as soldiers without ruin to the country which pays the expenses of their service.”86 Still, these European societies had such populations and wealth that they could afford such luxuries. Cortes had burned his ships and marched into Mexico with only 400 men in 1519. Two-and-­ a-half centuries later—in the same year that Smith published The Wealth of Nations—George Washington discovered at New York that his British foes could land nearly anywhere around him. The Royal Navy ferried 32,000 of arguably the world’s best troops about the waterways around Manhattan Island in the largest amphibious operations in history to that time. General Washington would eventually turn the tables on the British, but in the appalling season of 1776 he learned a bitter lesson in the ability of a modern navy to add mobility to an army’s mass.

Conclusion Force depends upon concentration, which in turn is a function of cooperation, conveyance, and comprehension. Rulers who can develop ways to enhance cooperation, conveyance, and comprehension can gain an advantage of force over a less innovative adversary. The ages surveyed in this chapter saw at least three disruptive innovations that provided rulers who used them well with significant advantages in force. In ancient times the Greek system of military discipline allowed soldiers to cooperate in ways that brought overwhelming concentrations upon their battlefield opponents. In the early modern era, Western Europeans, following Portugal’s example, harnessed innovations in shipbuilding, artillery, and navigation to gain unprecedented strategic comprehension—and used that insight to gain control over sea lanes and an ability to convey force in nearly every ocean littoral. Finally, as Napoleon came to power in France, European states were fashioning social and legal measures to enhance the productive

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and military power of their societies, in essence fostering new ways to cooperate. Legal protection for private property, for instance, allowed the “Invisible Hand” to coordinate production, while ideas of freedom and nationalism provided new means to mobilize these now much-wealthier societies so that they could wield force in powerfully collective ways. America’s Revolution gave inspiration to France’s a decade later, and that cataclysm produced a people in arms and even larger armies, soon led by a young general, Napoleon, whose campaigns showcased the ferocity and scope of war in the new age. Napoleon probably agreed with Frederick the Great about the ascendency of artillery on the battlefield; the Prussian had improved the mobility of his cannons and wondered if “the kind of war we shall be waging from now on will be a question of artillery duels.”87 Napoleon mastered and massed artillery to powerful effect, concentrating destructive power against resistance at a scale never before seen. In the process, Napoleon succeeded in making France the driving force in European affairs for nearly two decades. Yet perhaps nothing more clearly demonstrated the new world order than Napoleon’s brief Egyptian adventure in 1798. The French fleet landed him with 40,000 men, and with them France swiftly defeated a larger Ottoman army and ruled Egypt until a British expeditionary force expelled the French three years later (after Napoleon had absconded for home). As Bernard Lewis has noted, at this point in history a European force could go where it pleased, and only another European force could dislodge it.88 The Ottoman Empire would live for another century while adopting Western methods and arms as fast as possible and cleverly managing its declining fortunes, but the balance of power in Europe had become the balance of power for the world, in no small part due to unprecedented mastery of navigation, metallurgy, organization, and finance under the control of states. Indeed, the sea-going states of Western Europe gained a superiority of cooperation, conveyance, and comprehension that enable them to apply force nearly anywhere they wished near saltwater. Visitors to the British Museum today can admire a tangible result of Napoleon’s time in Egypt. French soldiers fortifying a position near the town of Rashid (they called it Rosetta) quarried an ancient monument that centuries prior had served as a foundation stone in a Mameluke fortress. This particular block was actually a stele, presenting a proclamation from 196  BC in three languages: in Greek, in a demotic script, and in hieroglyphs. The message could hardly have been more banal; it declared

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that the newest Greek king of Egypt, Ptolemy V, had established his own divine cult and granted its local priests an exemption from taxes. Yet no one alive could read hieroglyphs in 1799, and French scholars with Napoleon’s army immediately saw this “Rosetta Stone” as a key to unlocking the mysteries of Ancient Egypt. The British thought likewise when the stele fell to them as plunder in 1802, so they promptly shipped it off to London. From one of Alexander’s heirs, to a Mameluke fortress, to French Republican soldiers, and finally to museum-goers in Britain, the Rosetta Stone bears mute witness to the progress of force over two millennia.

Notes 1. Max Roser, “Ethnographic and Archaeological Evidence on Violent Deaths,” Our World in Data; accessed September 23, 2018 at https:// ourworldindata.org. See also Esther Lopez-Montalvo, “Violence in Neolithic Iberia: New Readings of Levantine Rock Art,” Antiquity 89:344 (April 2015), pp.  309–327. For context, see Richard H.  Steckel and Jerome C.  Rose, The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 2. 2 Sam 23,20–23, New American Bible version. 3. James C.  Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), pp. 27–30. 4. 2 Kings 24,13–16, New American Bible. 5. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Samuel B. Griffith trans. London: Oxford, 1963, chapter 13. 6. Kautilya, The Arthasastra, trans. L.N. Rangarajan (New Delhi: Penguin, 1992), 2.12.37—p. 254 in this edition. 7. Ibid., 8.1.41–52. 8. Xenophon, Cyropaedia, trans. Walter Miller (Cambridge: Harvard, 1914), Book I, 6:6. 9. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Chapter 3, “Offensive Strategy.” 10. Ibid., Chapter 1, “Estimates.” 11. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. T.E. Wick (New York: Random House Modern Library, 1982) II, 11. 12. Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubrey de Selincourt (London: Penguin, 1982 [1954]), Book IX, 61–64ff. 13. Homer, Iliad, tran. A.T. Murray (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 3—p. 129. 14. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, Book V, 66–68. 15. Herodotus, Histories, Book 7, sec. 141. 16. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, VIII, 105.

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17. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, VIII, 1–2, 104–106. 18. Josiah Ober, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 12. 19. Livy, The History of Rome from its Foundation, trans. Betty Radice (London: Penguin, 1982); Book IX, 18.9–20.10. 20. Ibid. 21. Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, trans. John Dryden, revisions by Arthur Hugh Clough (New York: Random House/Modern Library, 1970), “Sertorius,” p. 687. Traditional military ways persisted in some places long past Roman times; British observers, for instance, saw warriors but not soldiers when they reached India in the early 1600s. See John A. Lynn, “The Heart of the Sepoy: The Adoption and Adaptation of European Military Practice in South Asia, 1740–1805,” in Emily O.  Goldman and Leslie C.  Eliason, eds., The Diffusion of Military Technology and Ideas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 38. 22. Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert, (New York: Penguin, 1979), Book I:20. 23. Julius Caesar, The Conquest of Gaul, trans. S.A.  Handford (London: Penguin, 1982 ed.), Book IV, chap. 2, 17. 24. Plutarch, “Lysander,” Lives, p. 529. 25. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Chap. 13, 14. 26. Kautilya, Arthasastra, 1.13.17–21; on p 158; Book IX, chaps 6–7, also has much on dissension and the methods to use against it. 27. Plutarch, “Dion” and “Aratus,” Lives, pp. 1159, 1235. 28. Aristotle, Politics, in the Carnes Lord trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984); V, 11, 1313bl. 29. Plutarch, “Dion,” Lives, p. 1170. 30. Plutarch, “Aratus,” Lives, p. 1235. See also Xenophon, Cyropaedia, Book VII, 2,7. 31. Kristian C. Gustafson, “Protecting the New Rome: Byzantine Influences on Russian Intelligence,” in Davies and Gustafson, Intelligence Elsewhere, pp. 72–79. 32. Ann Christys, Vikings in the South: Voyages to Iberia and the Mediterranean (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 1–2, 95–96. 33. William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since AD 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 15–23. 34. Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge, eds., Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources (London: Penguin, 1983), see especially p. 74 and fn. 44. 35. See the Introduction to Bernard S.  Bachrach and David S.  Bachrach, Warfare in Medieval Europe c.400–c.1543 (New York: Routledge, 2016).

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36. More than 300 Medieval copies of Vegetius’ Digest on Military Matters survive, so it must have been widespread. See Nicholas Hooper and Matthew Bennett, Cambridge Illustrated Atlas of Warfare: The Middle Ages, 768–1487 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 168. 37. The Song of Roland, trans. W.S.  Merwin (New York: Random House (Modern Library), 1963), CXLI. 38. Anna Komnena, ed. Elizabeth A.S.  Dawes, The Alexiad, Book XIII; accessed May 5, 2018 at https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/Anna Comnena-Alexiad00.asp 39. Hooper and Bennett, The Middle Ages, 768–1487, pp. 154–156. 40. Historians debate how cavalry proved so powerful for roughly a thousand years. In particular, there is scant agreement on how much damage heavy cavalry could do against well-led and well-trained infantry—much as generals and observers at the time debated this point. There seems little doubt that cavalry with discipline and courage could break an infantry formation hunkered down to defend itself. Yet history is replete with instances where disciplined infantry held their ground and prevailed. For a flavor of the debate, see Matthew A. Sears and Carolyn Willekes, “Alexander’s Cavalry Charge at Chaeronea, 338  BCE,” Journal of Military History 80:4 (October 2016), pp. 1031–1035. 41. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power, pp. 89, 95. 42. The defending Byzantine emperor (Constantine XI), who died resisting the besieging Ottomans, was the last of a succession of emperors stretching back to Julius Caesar. 43. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, Ozell’s revision of Peter Motteux’s trans. (New York: Random House/Modern Library, 1950), Part II, Book 3, Chapter 11 p. 513. See also Part I, Book 3, VI, p. 137. 44. The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America, Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Palsonn, trans., (London: Penguin, 1965) pp. 59–61, 64–67. 45. Bernal Diaz, The Conquest of New Spain, trans. J.M.  Cohen (London: Penguin, [1963]), pp. 162, 324, 375. 46. Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest (New York: Penguin, 2011), p. 41. 47. See especially the Cantino Planisphere (1502) in Jay A.  Levenson, Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and World in the 16th & 17th Centuries (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 2007), pp. 64–65. 48. See also George H.  Kimble, “Portuguese Policy and Its Influence on Fifteenth Century Cartography.” Geographical Review 23:4 (1933): pp. 653–659. 49. Spelling in the original, which is quoted by the seventeenth-century historian Faria y Sousa in the entry on “Portugal,” Encyclopedia Britannica, 1911.

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50. The Commentaries of the Great Afonso d’Alboquerque, Second Viceroy of India, translated from the Portuguese edition of 1774 by Walter de Gray Birch, Vol. III (London: T. Richards, n.d.), pp. 115–120. 51. Thomas R. Trautmann, India: Brief History of a Civilization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016 [2011]), pp. 172–175. 52. Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (New York: HarperCollins, 2003 [2002]), pp. 13–14, 23. 53. As early as 1509 the Portuguese were able to fend off galleys in the Indian Ocean; see McNeill, The Pursuit of Power, p. 101. 54. Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), pp. 19–27. 55. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power, p. 109. It must also have spurred inflation: “The continual importations from Peru and Brazil exceed the effectual demand of those countries, and sink the price of those metals there below that in the neighbouring countries.” See Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book IV, chap 1. 56. G.J. Marcus, Naval History of England: The Formative Centuries (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961), p.  130. Such attempts could cause controversy; Charles I’s extra-parliamentary quest for “Ship money”—even from inland counties in peacetime—would prove one of the factors leading eventually to civil war. 57. Tonio Andrade, The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation and the Rise of West in World History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), p. 5. 58. Ferguson, Civilization, 30–32. 59. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power, p. 33. 60. Andrade, The Gunpowder Age, pp. 7, 122. 61. Lynn, “The Heart of the Sepoy,” pp. 36–38. 62. Historical debate rages over this question; see for instance David Wootton, “How the West Invented Itself” [review of Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy], Standpoint, December 2016; accessed October 27, 2018, at http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/ 6713/full 63. See especially Ferguson, Civilization, 57. 64. Tonio Andrade, “Asian States and Overseas Expansion, 1500–1700: An Approach to the Problem of European Exceptionalism,” in Geoff Wade, ed., Asian Expansions (New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 65–68. 65. Cited in Geoffrey Parker, “The Limits to Revolutions in Military Affairs: Maurice of Nassau, the Battle of Nieuwpoort (1600), and the Legacy,” Journal of Military History 71:2 (April 2007). p. 339. The Japanese had a similar idea at the same time; which again begs the question of why tactical

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ingenuity did not translate into strategic power for Japan when it did for Holland. See Tonio Andrade, The Gunpowder Age, p. 356, fn. 76. 66. Roger Crowley, Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World (New York: Random House, 2009 [2008]), p. 265. 67. Trautmann, India, pp. 175–178. 68. David Kahn, The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing (New York: Scribners, 1996 [1967]), pp. 90–98. 69. Machiavelli, The Prince, Harvey Mansfield, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), Chapter XIX. 70. Robert Hutchinson, Elizabeth’s Spymaster: Francis Walsingham and the Secret War that Saved England (New York: St. Martin’s, 2006), pp. 53–55. See also the Preface to Patrick H. Martin, Elizabethan Espionage: Plotters and Spies in the Struggle between Catholicism and the Crown (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016). 71. Heinrich A. Rommen, The State in Catholic Thought: A Treatise in Political Philosophy (St. Louis: Herder, 1945), pp. 534–541, 551–558. 72. William A.  Dunning, “Jean Bodin on Sovereignty,” Political Science Quarterly 11 (March 1896), pp. 91–94; accessed May 14, 2018 at https:// archive.org/details/jstor-2139603. See also Rommen, The State in Catholic Thought, pp. 390–399. 73. Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book V, chap 1. 74. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States: A.D. 980–1992 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1992 [1990]), pp. 76, 87. 75. See, for instance, Jeff Fynn-Paul, ed., Wars, Entrepreneurs, and the State in Europe and the Mediterranean, 1300–1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 3–5; especially its chapter by David Parrott, “The Military Enterprise in the Thirty Years War,” pp. 63–86. 76. Ferguson, Civilization, pp. 38–39; McNeill, The Pursuit of Power, p. 106. 77. Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book II, chap 2, p. 249. 78. Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” in Lewis White Beck, ed. and trans., On History: Immanuel Kant (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), Sec. I:4, p. 88. 79. See also North, et al., Violence and Social Orders, pp. 241–242. 80. North et al. argue that stable land laws gave English elites much greater stake in the political order and the success of the state: “Once elite landowners possessed the same [property] right, such as the right of inheritance and later the right to devise by will, the elite had a united interest to protect those rights.” See Violence and Social Orders, p. 157. 81. Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book IV, chap 5. 82. Ibid., Book II, chap 2, p. 256. 83. Ibid., Book V, chap 3.

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84. Ibid., Book II, chap 2. 85. Ibid., Book V, chap 3. 86. Ibid., Book V, chap 1. 87. Ferguson, Civilization, p. 83. 88. Lewis, What Went Wrong, p. 31. See also Virginia H. Aksan, “The Ottoman Army,” in Frederick C. Schnied, European Armies of the French Revolution, 1789–1802 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), pp. 254–255, 265–266.

CHAPTER 3

“The Civilizing Mission”: European Dominance to 1914

Adam Smith was not unique in seeking to discover the principles behind the functioning of all societies. The nineteenth century would witness a host of thinkers on such quests, which indeed resulted in the creation of modern social science. Two Germans would publish particular insights into the ways that power and force operated on the battlefield and in society itself. Each had Carl written on his birth certificate, and each felt drawn to the relationships of power through politics to the realities of power and force. Carl von Clausewitz sought to synthesize the principles of land warfare for all armies, explaining that war is simply “a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means.”1 But what then is political intercourse? Karl Marx a few years later would search out principles of political economy, and then conclude that struggle over the means of production was the basis of politics—“since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society.” Thus in the current age, suggested Marx, social science showed that class struggle was the basis of war (and of internal security measures).2 The deductions of these two Germans help to explain much of what happened in the century before 1914. The European genius for war in the nineteenth century had seemingly taken human form in the figure of Napoleon Bonaparte. Perhaps no man reflected more deeply on Napoleon than the Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz, who dubbed Napoleon “the God of War himself,” under whom war had “assumed its absolute state.” Clausewitz had spent half his life fighting the French when he wrote his commentary On War (which © The Author(s) 2020 M. Warner, J. Childress, The Use of Force for State Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45410-4_3

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his widow published in 1832). On War continued the process of seeking out universal principles for war by considering what the armies of Revolutionary France had done across Europe. Various thinkers had tried this in the past, when officers could consult handbooks on tactics, and a few authors, like Sun Tzu, reflected on the nature of conflict for generals and rulers. Clausewitz sought an understanding of war’s political, moral, and operational realities for a permanent, professional officer corps in a modern state. “Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult,” he wrote in explaining the problem of “friction” for armies.3 His insights were meant to be applicable to land combat at whatever technological stage it occurred, and independent of the combatants involved. Clausewitz, however, offered objective analysis, not military doctrine (Fig. 3.1). For him theory was “meant to educate the mind of the future commander, or more accurately, to guide him in his self-education, not to accompany him to the battlefield.”4 Not long after Clausewitz’s tome appeared in print, the young German political theorist Karl Marx worked out his own ideas of the paths of history. Drawing from Adam Smith and also Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s notion of dialectics, he concluded that the ways in which people cooperated to produce goods and value determined the distribution of power in societies. Such structures were anything but immutable, concluded Marx. Indeed, they evolved in violent clashes as social groupings sought to gain or maintain power. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” announced Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels on the opening page of their definitive statement of political principles, The Communist Manifesto (1848). The current historical phase of class struggle was one in which the bourgeoisie oppressed the proletariat so systematically that the situation had to result in violent overthrow of the former and ultimately the abolition of private property. That crisis of advanced society, hinted Marx and Engels, could be and would be advanced by revolutionary activism. By the end of the nineteenth century, European advances in conveyance and comprehension had made Europe relatively more powerful than any society in history. Its physical (if not moral) superiority, as Clausewitz and Marx and many others might have explained, rested on its application of scientific principles to technology and social life—in short, to its advanced civilization. Every army in the world in 1800 would have been hopelessly outclassed a century later, while the most advanced states confronted internal opposition guided by passionate and determined

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Fig. 3.1  Napoleon I’s victories inspired Carl von Clausewitz to write On War. (Louis Philibert Debucourt, Napoleon I., 1807, Etching, 46.5  ×  35 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art)

theoreticians of violence, who were themselves hunted by internal surveillance organs of growing sophistication and reach. The result was a schism over the very idea of cooperation. Where the eighteenth century had settled upon the state as the ultimate form of social organization, the

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nineteenth century pondered and argued and fought over theories for moving society beyond states to some universal form of social order. As a result of these developments in technology and ideology, by 1914, Europe’s problems had become the world’s.

Global Reach Clausewitz explained to his readers that warfare had changed its character, though not its nature, in the last generation. A century prior armies and their governments had been largely separate from the nation itself, at least in civilized Europe, and land combat unfolded in a stylized manner almost resembling “naval tactics.” The French Revolution changed all that. The citizenry gained a stake in affairs of state, showing “what an enormous contribution the heart and temper of a nation can make to the sum total of its politics, war potential, and fighting strength.”5 This development forced internal adjustments on every nation in Europe. Such a transformation in politics, according to Clausewitz, inevitably caused changes in warfare. War now drew on the entire strength of the people, and leaders would not forget that linkage. All armies now had to adapt or they would be swept away by those, like Napoleon’s, that had.6 Clausewitz sought insights about the persistent nature of war amidst all this change, and he concluded that war at its highest aims at swift thrusts with the utmost concentration at an enemy’s “center of gravity,” which might be his army, his capitol, or its chief alliances.7 He did not, however, look far beyond Europe for his examples and his conclusions. Here was an irony, for just as Clausewitz explained the factors and uses of military superiority in Europe, his fellow Europeans were launching a new wave of worldwide conquest. In Clausewitz’s day, Europe’s reach had become global even as the rise of “open access” societies and the Industrial Revolution began to transform Europe itself. The power that Napoleon had briefly demonstrated in Egypt now began to be exercised on a broader scale and on a seemingly permanent basis, not just in the Americas but in empires that had long held themselves to be superior civilizations. France once again sent an expeditionary force abroad in 1830, easily dislodging the Dey of Algiers— himself nominally subordinate to the Ottoman sultan—from his coastal cities. This invasion effectively ended the organized piracy from the Barbary Coast that had menaced European commerce and seaside towns from Italy to Iceland (although pacification of the Algerian interior took another couple decades). The British East India Company dominated the

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Subcontinent, employing a professional “sepoy” army blending European weapons and practices with native traditions.8 Christian Europe’s support for national uprisings in the European portions of the Ottoman Empire had a similar effect in fracturing Turkish power. Goaded to action by Ottoman massacres of rebellious Greeks, leaders in France, Russia, and Great Britain intervened, midwifing the birth of an independent Greek state in 1830. Half a world away, the Chinese felt a similar decline in their fortunes. When the Qianlong Emperor in 1793 dismissed a trade mission from Britain’s King George III, he regretfully explained to His Majesty that China possessed “all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders.” Although the Emperor saw “no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce,” he had graciously allowed Europeans to buy Chinese staples: But as the tea, silk and porcelain which the Celestial Empire produces, are absolute necessities to European nations and to yourselves, we have permitted, as a signal mark of favor, that foreign hongs [merchant settlements] should be established at Canton, so that your wants might be supplied and your country thus participate in our beneficence.9

No more British trading ports would be permitted, however, although the Emperor was willing to forgive the importunity of George III’s request, for he could not forget “the lonely remoteness of your island.”10 Barely fifty years later, however, a successor Emperor had little choice in the matter of expanding trade. China’s technological backwardness by then appalled European visitors, such as the Englishman who in 1836 described Chinese cannon mounts as “mere blocks of wood, or solid beds on which the gun is lashed down with rattans”; their “ill-made” firearms were antiquated matchlocks.11 The British East India Company by now was busy turning opium from India into an addiction for many Chinese, and when the government in Beijing tried to ban the opium trade, British firepower prevailed. The East India Company’s ships, including the iron-­ hulled paddle-wheeler Nemesis, destroyed the Emperor’s war junks and steamed up Chinese rivers with British Army troops to end effective resistance. The Treaty of Nanking—signed aboard the Royal Navy’s HMS Cornwallis in 1842—obligated China’s Qing rulers to pay Britain reparations totaling 21 million silver dollars, to open more ports to foreign merchants, and to cede Hong Kong.

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These conquests had all come without the aid of the telegraph, electricity, and hot-blast furnace steel. Hereinafter the list of inventions and their application to military and industrial uses would lengthen at a pace that seemed astounding at the time and looks even more so at a distance. Steam, steel, magnetism, electricity, and chemistry had all been studied in the eighteenth century, by dabblers and amateur scientists. Now inventors almost daily found practical ways to apply these insights to relieve the estate of their fellow man—or to kill him. What added to the European advantage was the combination of mass production, transport that did not depend on wind or muscle power, and near-real-time conveyance of information and commands at ranges beyond visual sight. This represented change in all the critical elements of force: cooperation, conveyance, and comprehension. All these innovations quickly found applications for concentrating force in European militaries. The telegraph went to war in the 1850s, immediately making itself useful for the projection of Western European power and conveying information to facilitate the concentration of troops. Its first wartime use came in the Crimean War. A fragile underwater cable between Varna on the Black Sea and Balaclava in Crimea briefly linked the British and French armies besieging the Russians in Sevastopol to their respective governments in London and Paris. Within three years, even distant British India had 6000 km of telegraph lines, allowing operators in Delhi to flash the first reports of the sepoy mutiny at Meerut on May 11, 1857. The East India Company had ruled India with thinly spread garrisons and administrators who depended on local cooperation and native sepoys to keep order. Telegraphed warnings of the initial disturbances in Delhi swiftly reached other stations, scaring Europeans to seek safety from the spreading rebellion, and giving authorities in Punjab time to disarm their sepoys before they could join the mutiny (a precaution that might have saved British rule in India). Sepoys who joined the rebellion understood the telegraph and wrecked the lines where they could, but they did so randomly and apparently made scant use of telegraphy for their cause.12 By contrast, both sides in the American Civil War routinely employed the telegraph, and both found they had to secure their communications on telegraph wires from prying ears (Fig. 3.2). The Civil War proved to be an early example in which Europe’s military innovations in non-European hands would force a fresh round of modernization on the world’s most advanced armies and navies. The Americans found new ways to make and employ armor and ordnance, with major

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Fig. 3.2  Railroads revolutionized the conveyance of troops. J.J.  Higginson, Military Map of the Seat of War, 1861, Map, 33 × 38 cm, New York Public Library Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division

advances proving their worth within a few weeks of each other in the spring of 1862 along America’s southeastern coast. On March 8, 1862, the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia—a salvaged U.S. Navy steam frigate built up into a mobile blockhouse—effortlessly destroyed two blockading Union warships and forced another aground in Hampton Roads. The next day the Virginia met the Union’s own ironclad, the USS Monitor; these iron monsters pounded each other for hours with little tactical effect—but proving to the world the superiority of ironclad warships. Farther south along the coast and a month later another Union expedition battled a more conventional Confederate obstacle in a perhaps equally consequential fashion. The Confederate seaward defenses of the vital port

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of Savannah began at Fort Pulaski, a modern masonry fortification dominating a narrow channel and surrounded by swamps that seemingly gave attackers no vantage for emplacing heavy siege guns. Union commanders and engineers persisted all the same, however, for they possessed new, lighter, and longer-ranged guns that fired exploding shells. These Parrott rifles, with an assortment of older guns and mortars, opened fire on April 10, 1862, and by the next day had shocked both the fort’s garrison and their own gunners by blasting wide breaches in Fort Pulaski’s sturdy brickwork. Fearing a devastating explosion from a hit on the powder magazine, the Fort’s commander surrendered after a bombardment lasting only thirty hours. The battles at Hampton Roads and Fort Pulaski carried expensive lessons for every modern military establishment. First, they showed that the new rifled artillery could smash exposed masonry from distances up to three times what was practicable before—with the consequence that Europe’s hundreds of fortresses were now far more vulnerable, and had to be rebuilt, literally from the ground up.13 Second, the Virginia’s swift destruction of wooden warships meant that every navy in the world was suddenly obsolete. A race to build ironclads ensued, but with the participants having little notion of the best design to adopt. After all, the Virginia and the Monitor—two very different designs—had fought to a draw. European navies would spend the next several decades experimenting as fast as they could afford with new models of iron (and soon steel) warships. The decisive innovation that could win the next war might not even be technological. The coalition of German forces that defeated France’s armies and captured Emperor Napoleon III himself in a month-long campaign in 1870 benefited from superior logistics, training, and planning, and thus seemingly overnight made the Prussian General Staff the model for modern armies to emulate. The Franco-Prussian War was fought for limited aims, and German leaders had no desire to occupy all of France. The defeat nonetheless proved destabilizing, as it ended the last French monarchy and soon sparked a bloody conflict in Paris itself (not to mention civil divisions that would long roil French politics). Such examples proved cautionary for all European states, which now had to regard the prospect of surprise in a new, strategic light. Modern military intelligence services date their origins from this era; political leaders and ministries suddenly felt an imperative to watch what neighbors and rivals were devising in their workshops, shipyards, and maneuvers, for the delicate balance of power could seemingly be altered in an afternoon if a rival state

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managed to develop and employ some revolutionary new innovation in conveyance or comprehension.

Systemic Violence The turmoil in France after Napoleon III’s ouster illustrated another form of European instability—more political than military—that had been building for a generation. Not a few European leaders and intellectuals in the nineteenth century felt a deep unease about what was happening around the world. Christian Europeans generally had little sympathy for Ottoman sultans or Barbary pirates, who had long menaced the continent’s southern flanks, but Europe’s subjugation of native peoples in the New World and Africa always sat uncomfortably on the Western conscience. The conquistadors who won New Spain in the 1500s had to defend their actions against clerical and lay accusations of cruelty leveled by their own countrymen.14 Michel de Montaigne wondered if the natives subjected by the conquest were not more civilized in their simplicity than sophisticated old Europe: “The laws of nature, however, govern them still, not as yet much vitiated with any mixture of ours.”15 Shakespeare read Montaigne and soon in The Tempest gave a kindred complaint to the enslaved native of Prospero’s island, the unhappy Caliban: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse.”16 After the Enlightenment, such misgivings reached past the ideal of the Noble Savage to include fellow citizens who toiled on behalf of Property. This sentiment gave rise to an anti-slavery movement in Europe and then in the United States. By the 1820s, moreover, European thinkers recognized that they had their own oppressed and dispossessed neighbors; that is, the workers who toiled in the “dark satanic” mills and sweatshops of the dawning Industrial Revolution. The new system created great wealth and shocking inequality that would prompt a new look at economics and society itself. Adam Smith in 1776 had pondered social life and derived theories of how it worked, but his ideas for fostering trade and growth—while enriching some and spurring unprecedented levels of production—did not guarantee that all would share in the bounty. New thinkers like Auguste Comte and Robert Owen, among many others, would now question why the poor seemed to be growing more numerous and more desperate. Whence came this oppressive system? Was it a political problem, or an economic one? Was it a result of a few greedy landowners and industrialists, or of personal vices among the poor themselves, or did it indicate

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some systemic flaw that gave the lie to Adam Smith’s notion of an Invisible Hand enriching society? The instabilities of the new order seemed manifest—particularly the wasteful overproduction and ruinous price cutting that wrecked enterprises and left their employees destitute—compounded by a boom-and-bust business cycle that could plunge a nation into economic straits. The young Karl Marx by 1847 declared the system itself was the problem; the spreading capitalist and liberal order served the class interests of the bourgeoisie while grinding the masses into an oppressed proletariat. Marx saw a metaphor between slavery in the Americas and economic oppression in the industrializing states of Europe: “Modern nations have been able only to disguise slavery in their own countries, but they have imposed it without disguise upon the New World.”17 How to solve this growing crisis? Was the answer constitutional reform and elected parliaments (a radical enough notion in some lands)?; or mutual aid and common property in a communal setting?; or perhaps violent revolution and even the abolition of property altogether? “Property is robbery,” wrote Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first man to call himself an “anarchist.”18 Yet if the answer was in fact revolution, what kind of new society would emerge from it? In the 1840s the notion arose among some social critics that the remedy for society’s ills had to be violent. Marx insisted that revolution was inevitable because the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is a struggle of class against class, a struggle which carried to its highest expression is a total revolution. Indeed, is it at all surprising that a society founded on the opposition of classes should culminate in brutal contradiction, the shock of body against body, as its final denouement?19

When would that revolution come, and what signs would herald its advent? Once again, Marx found an answer in his reading of history and economics. Revolution would erupt when the proletariat, by now the majority, became conscious of its plight, when proletarians would “no longer need to seek science in their minds; they [would] have only to take note of what is happening before their eyes and to become its mouthpiece.”20 Yet revolutions across Europe in 1848 brought neither liberal reform nor the new, classless order foreseen by Marx. That February the French bourgeoisie and proletariat had fought together to overturn King Louis Phillipe, but in June the bourgeoisie turned on their former allies in

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bloody repression. France’s troubles soon gave rise to the same Louis-­ Napoleon Bonaparte (who toppled parliamentary rule four years later and declared himself Emperor Napoleon III). Marx might have been shocked by the June bloodshed, but he was not dismayed. Such setbacks only made the revolutionary cause stronger, he argued: The workers of Paris were overwhelmed by superior strength, but they were not subdued. They have been defeated but their enemies are vanquished. The momentary triumph of brute force has been purchased with the destruction of all the delusions and illusions of the February revolution, the dissolution of the entire moderate republican party and the division of the French nation into two nations, the nation of owners and the nation of workers. The tricolor republic now displays only one color, the color of the defeated, the color of blood. It has become a red republic.21

France had thus been polarized into warring classes, and the proletarians understood the fundamental nature of the conflict. Other nations would follow this pattern, Marx suggested. The systemic oppression of the bourgeoisie’s politics and economics would provoke the liberating violence of revolution. The victory of the counter-revolution in 1848 convinced some radicals, like Louis Auguste Blanqui, that  the revolutionary class had to take up arms. Asked for a toast to be read at a banquet in London marking the third anniversary of France’s 1848 Revolution, Blanqui rhetorically raised the red flag of socialism via armed revolt: Arms and organization, these are the decisive elements of progress, the serious method for putting an end to poverty. Who has iron, has bread. We prostrate ourselves before the bayonets; the disarmed crowd is swept aside. France bristling with workers in arms means the advent of socialism.22

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels lived in London at that time, though they were less sanguine about the near-term prospects of a proletarian revolution. The petty bourgeoisie would take power first, warned Marx and Engels, and their regime would worsen the proletariat’s situation under a pretext of restoring order. The workers thus needed arms, and the Communist League should see they had them: “The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition.” Indeed, those weapons should not be surrendered when the workers were

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called upon by their betters “to behave in an orderly fashion” and prevent any excesses: “Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.”23 Blanqui, Marx, Engels, and other prophets of revolution helped set in motion a Continent-wide wave of radicalism. Its victory might be delayed, and it might be bloody, but those were the necessary birth pangs of the new order that would supplant rule by the bourgeoisie and capitalism. Marx in March 1850 explained how events would unfold: …the proletariat rallies more and more around revolutionary socialism, around communism, for which the bourgeoisie has itself invented the name of Blanqui. This socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally, to the abolition of all the relations of production on which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionizing of all the ideas that result from these social relations.24

Marx’s economic theories did not convince all radicals, but his analysis of the order of events leading to Revolution persuaded many, even those who did not call themselves Communists. He thus helped encourage a train of logic that stretched beyond his own thinking.25 How, the growing numbers of radicals wondered, could the inevitable revolution be hastened? If polarization was, in fact, a necessary step along the way, then polarization should widen as oppressed groups and peoples realized that they were held down by violence that was becoming ever more overt. And what better way to expose repressive violence than with violent acts that would provoke the rulers into overreaction? Before long individuals began acting on such ideas by seeking to spark revolution against despotism. Such ideas spread rapidly in the late 1860s. Fyodor Dostoyevsky in The Devils (1872) depicted the revolutionary Peter Verkhovensky possessed by ideology and demanding of his Russian recruits “which appeals to you more—a snail’s pace in a swamp or full steam ahead across it?” One of his co-conspirators finally confessed that Verkhovensky’s scheme sought the systematic destruction of society and the principles on which it was based, with the object of throwing everybody into a state of hopeless despair and of bringing about a state of general confusion: so that when soci-

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ety…had been brought to a point of collapse, they could suddenly seize power, raising the banner of revolt…26

Sentiments like these would be heightened by the bloody repression of the Paris Commune in 1871, an event that seemed to vindicate Marx’s predictions of greater polarization. The Commune’s end convinced two generations of radicals that the best answer was the assassination of elites (Fig. 3.3). Not a few revolutionaries believed the way to spark revolt was to strike at royalty and political leaders, thereby terrorizing the oppressor class and demonstrating its tyranny, and weakness. It did not take long for the proponents of such actions to call themselves “terrorists.”27 In 1881, Czar Alexander II, ironically enough the liberator of Russia’s serfs, felt his carriage rocked by a bomb as he rode through St. Petersburg. He got out to help the injured, only to have his legs shattered by a second bomb thrown by a member of Narodnaya Volya—the socialist People’s Will. In faraway London, the aging Karl Marx heard the echoes of these bombs and decided they must “ultimately and certainly lead to the establishment of a Russian Commune,” though perhaps “after long and violent struggles.”

Fig. 3.3 Paris Commune handbill (Imprimiere Nationale, Republique Francaise/N. 42, 1871, 40.5 × 52 cm, Musee Carnavalet Paris)

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Marx was no terrorist himself, and he did not necessarily believe a terrorist-­ sparked revolution was inevitable or the only way forward to the progressive future.28 Yet he showed no qualms about such an upheaval if and when it came. Writing to his daughter Jenny in France and missing his young grandchildren, Marx followed the trial of the Narodnaya Volya’s leaders in the papers, telling Jenny just before they hanged that they were “sterling people” of action, not words. Their modus operandi, though specifically Russian, was nonetheless a “historically inevitable method about which there is no more reason to moralise—for or against—than there is about the earthquake in Chios.”29 Marx’s template would be used by many, even those who did not follow his economic analyses. It reduced men and women to social categories, conferred collective guilt on some, decreed the ultimate victory of their opponents (once awakened to their plight), and judged the tactics leading to that victory solely according their tactical utility. Over the generation before 1914, socialists, anarchists, and other radicals would employ such reasoning as they promoted the “propaganda of the deed,” killing seven heads of state in Europe and America and almost murdering eight more, along with any number of ministers, officials, and royalty. The wave of terrorism that gripped Europe and America called forth greater security measures and required a better comprehension of the populace, stimulating advances in intelligence like none before. Here was the most serious subversive threat in Europe since the wars of religion that ended at the Peace of Westphalia. The answering campaign against terror and revolution mixed both new and old means, with most falling under the headings of organization, technology, and tactics. Every major European state created or enhanced a national police force with “special branches” that could centralize information on revolutionaries, run undercover operations, and act as official liaison contacts with counterparts in other countries. England’s was the Special Irish Branch of the London metropolitan police force (soon renamed the Special Branch). France’s was the Sûreté Nationale; Russia’s was the Okhrana. America intermittently used its Secret Service for this work, and in 1908 gave the mission to a new Bureau of Investigation under the Attorney General. These bureaus applied newly invented office equipment created by the rapid evolution in small machinery that came to be applied in businesses and government agencies in the late nineteenth century. Typewriters in particular extended the print revolution to homes and offices, allowing files to be created, indexed, and shared far more easily. Soon offices had

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tabulating machines and calculators, allowing data compilation (and statistical analysis). For the first time it became at least theoretically possible to compile and mine personal information on every citizen of a given state. With new biometric identification methods (i.e., fingerprints), and the sharing of data among states and police departments via the telegraph, it became risky for notorious individuals to pass incognito across national borders. In short, these special police agencies could develop a granular comprehension of the citizenry that they could use to concentrate minimal forces against real and perceived enemies in society’s very midst. The police special branches also employed age-old methods for breaking down cooperation, sowing distrust among conspirators by suborning informers within their ranks. Effective ones like the Czar’s Okhrana penetrated anarchist and socialist cells, turning revolutionaries against one another to eliminate the possibility of radical social change. The Okhrana even had a liaison office to work with the French against agitators in the Russian emigre community in Paris; with and without French collaboration, they employed some of the same active measures abroad that Russian agents used at home.30 The situation for radicals was so serious that by 1908 G.K. Chesterton could set his philosophical satire The Man Who Was Thursday in a revolutionary cell whose every member except one was secretly an officer of England’s Special Branch. States thus proved immensely strong at combating this cross-state threat. In 1902 a Marxist Russian exile living in Zurich—who had just begun styling himself Lenin—surveyed the situation and lamented the shrinking prospects for revolution. His tract What Is to Be Done? diagnosed the problem of police pressure and sought another way forward. Only a movement with a hard core of activists “who make revolutionary activity their profession” could make headway, Lenin insisted. They must employ flawless security measures under iron Party discipline and grasp advanced revolutionary theory: “The only serious organizational principle for the active workers of our movement should be the strictest secrecy, the strictest selection of members, and the training of professional revolutionaries.”31 Though he himself did not cause the wave of terrorism that followed in Russia, Lenin’s advice presaged what historian Anna Geifman has called an “enormous escalation of political violence.” Between 1905 and 1910, according to Geifman, bombings and attacks by a variety of radicals (including Lenin’s Bolsheviks) caused nearly 17,000 casualties.32 Yet even Lenin would prove too optimistic. He had found a formula for creating state-less power, yet strategic success still eluded him and other

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radicals. In the years before World War I, the Okhrana had probably penetrated every significant Russian revolutionary organization. Bolsheviks who captured one of the organization’s archives after the October Revolution marveled at the Okhrana’s success. Its main office in St. Petersburg had dossiers on 30,000–40,000 agents provocateurs active since the turn of the twentieth century, and in the words of one Bolshevik, those files included “excellent historical dissertations on the revolutionary parties.”33 It is likely that no revolutionary movement could ever have prevailed against this surveillance apparatus—barring a cataclysm that could shake Russia to its foundations, creating too many dispossessed citizens for the state to surveil.

The Apogee of Western Power The turn of the new century thus saw the dominant powers of the Western states at peace with one another but at war with internal and external enemies. Europe and America seemed to have both struggles in hand, able to suppress seemingly all foes, if not to eliminate them. Perhaps no event illustrated Western dominance like the battle of Omdurman (1898), in which the Khalifa’s essentially Medieval army in Sudan advanced rank upon rank against a mixed Anglo-Egyptian force that was half its size but armed with Maxim machine guns and rapid-firing cannons. The young Winston Churchill, a cavalry officer with the 21st Lancers (but mostly covering the affair as a war correspondent), fought at Omdurman and published his account soon afterward. He watched with fascinated horror as more than 10,000 white-clad Dervishes topped a ridge and charged down on the Anglo-Egyptian position: They were in a dense mass, 2,800 yards from the 32nd Field Battery and the gunboats. The ranges were known. It was a matter of machinery….For a moment the white flags advanced in regular order, and the whole division crossed the crest and were exposed. Forthwith the gunboats, the 32nd British Field Battery, and other guns from the zeriba opened on them…. The white banners toppled over in all directions. Yet they rose again immediately, as other men pressed forward to die for the Mahdi’s sacred cause and in the defence of the successor of the True Prophet. It was a terrible sight, for as yet they had not hurt us at all, and it seemed an unfair advantage to strike thus cruelly when they could not reply….The Khalifa’s plan of attack appears to have been complex and ingenious. It was, however, based on an extraordinary miscalculation of the power of modern weapons.34

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The result at Omdurman was a one-sided slaughter; more than half of the Mahdi’s 50,000-odd fighters were killed, wounded, or captured, against total Anglo-Egyptian casualties of fewer than 450. Churchill’s testimony might have convinced all generals that troops could no longer assemble on a battlefield in sight of their enemies. In 1453, armies had stood face to face, only a bowshot apart, and a battlefield could still be encompassed with the naked eye. By 1864, however, standing in sight of an enemy was likely to prove fatal. Veteran soldiers in the American Civil War dug in wherever they stopped in or near a battle, scraping the earth and piling stones, branches, and anything else to their front for cover. The siege of Petersburg saw the Union and Confederate armies in trenches, with riflemen picking off soldiers who showed themselves above the ground.35 “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance!” snorted Major General John Sedgwick at Spotsylvania, moments before a Confederate sniper killed him from 1000 yards away. Still, such lessons did not spread quickly or evenly. The Khalifa had certainly misjudged the power of modern weapons at Omdurman, as Churchill noted. Many European commanders would not learn this lesson until 1914. While no power could stand up to Western arms in settled or coastal areas, locals willing to fight as guerrillas could contest a Western presence in the hinterland. Resistance to industrialized imperialism thus shifted to the margins of the civilized world, where the Europeans and Americans fought a series of “small wars” in places like Afghanistan and the Philippine Islands. There, modern firepower could not easily be brought to bear, and few troops could be spared to campaign. Rudyard Kipling added the cost of such conflicts in verse: Strike hard who cares—shoot straight who can / The odds are on the cheaper man. One sword-knot stolen from the camp / Will pay for all the school expenses / Of any Kurrum Valley scamp Who knows no word of moods and tenses / But, being blessed with perfect sight, Picks off our messmates left and right. With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem / The troopships bring us one by one, At vast expense of time and steam / To slay Afridis where they run.36

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But Europe had the men to spare on such expeditions, and the confidence in the rightness and inevitability of its mission to civilize the world. That mission proceeded through the amassing of data on local conditions as well through force of arms—indeed, comprehension of when and where to apply force was crucial to extended empires. French General Joseph Gallieni noted in Indochina that an officer “who has successfully drawn an exact ethnographic map of the territory he commands is close to achieving complete pacification, soon to be followed by the form of organization he judges most appropriate.”37 The imperial method was thus to find local leaders to work with against locals who opposed Western colonialism, thus splintering political control in order to keep military threats small and remote. Revolutionary writer Frantz Fanon would later explain this dynamic in his testament The Wretched of Earth (1961): “Colonialism is not merely content to note the existence of tribes, it reinforces and differentiates them.”38

The Industrial Revolution at Sea Imperialism was made possible, of course, by control of the seas. Kipling’s troopships steamed in safety while the Royal Navy ruled the waves and effectively guaranteed free passage for all peaceful commerce. An American professor named Alfred Thayer Mahan helped explain what was happening. In 1890, he published his history The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783, doing for sea power what Clausewitz had done for land warfare. Mahan theorized that the sea allowed a single naval power, if properly disposed and led, to dominate an ocean. Indeed, this iron law of the maritime domain would yield only one naval hegemon, as Mahan explained in the context of the Anglo-Dutch conflict of two centuries earlier: The sea power of England therefore was not merely in the great navy, with which we too commonly and exclusively associate it; France had had such a navy in 1688, and it shrivelled away like a leaf in the fire…Before [the War of the Spanish Succession] England was one of the sea powers; after it she was the sea power, without any second. This power also she held alone, unshared by friend and unchecked by foe. She alone was rich, and in her control of the sea and her extensive shipping had the sources of wealth so much in her hands that there was no present danger of a rival on the ocean.39

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The Royal Navy thus took on a global role as a force that all other navies measured themselves against. America’s strategy in the nineteenth century, for example, was to maintain a navy equal to that of the Royal Navy minus the fleet of England’s most powerful European rival, for that would be all that Britain could spare for operations in the western Atlantic. Such an American fleet would deter the Royal Navy, which would be the only navy that could possibly trouble America.40 Yet control of the seas was ironically becoming (at least theoretically) imperiled by innovations in European and American workshops. The dominance of the ironclads was absolute, but temporary. Europe saw something new in naval thought in the same year that Mahan published The Influence of Sea Power. France in 1890 launched the Dupuy de Lôme, an armored cruiser designed for commerce raiding. The brainchild of the French Navy’s Jeune Ecole, this fast and powerful ship was intended to manifest the idea that modern states had grown dependent on an international web of commerce for their material well-being. England by 1890 had not been self-sufficient in food for decades. It produced all the coal and iron ore it needed, but for so many of the commodities that it turned into food and materiel, England was increasingly both master and servant of an intricate and global network of communications and finance stretching to its colonies and beyond that had to work in precisely the right time and place. Commerce raiders like the Dupuy de Lôme threatened to interrupt this timing, throwing the entire trading system off-kilter and quickly damaging (and weakening) England’s ability to make war. The Dupuy de Lôme herself proved problematic—her boilers made trouble, and she was soon eclipsed by faster and more powerful rivals. And the Jeune Ecole’s notion of commerce raiding would soon be taken over by still another invention. Every admiral feared the naval balance could change in a day, putting the most powerful states in history on a hair trigger. Yet the way in which naval dominance would be exercised in wartime remained obscure. The American Civil War had shown the military potential of the ironclad warship and something else as well—the naval mine. Even the Union’s newest ironclads, like the USS Tecumseh, could be sunk by these unseen threats, anchored to the sea bottom and exploding when a ship’s hull brushed them. Giving an underwater bomb a reliable, guided propulsion system added a wholly new weapon—the torpedo—to naval arsenals in the 1880s. Fire that torpedo from a submarine—an old idea finally made practical by steel hulls and electric motors—and the threat of invisible death had fully

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gone to sea.41 Both the French and the American navies commissioned true military submarines in 1900, and every modern navy soon followed suit. This dramatic uncertainty in naval affairs represented in microcosm the recognition of the instability of modern life.

Conclusion The prior chapter highlighted innovations in comprehension, conveyance, and cooperation up to the eve of the Industrial Revolution, showing how they led to relative advantages for rulers wielding force. This chapter shows how particular innovations in comprehension and conveyance accelerated with industrialization, while arguments over the nature of society itself altered the trajectory of cooperation across and within states. In 1854, the U.S. Navy had forced Japan to re-open itself to Western trade—from which the Japanese had strictly isolated their nation two centuries earlier. Japan took this harsh lesson to heart and soon embarked on a rapid effort to modernize its economy and military with Western arms, machinery, and practices. The effect of this modernization showed in 1894, when Japanese troops and ships crushed Chinese forces that themselves appeared more up-to-date to Western observers. The point was clear to all who cared to note it: Western methods worked for anyone who would master them, and that modern arms badly employed by corrupt commanders would still lose. The study of history can be likened to a survey of the shifting currents of power. Following that metaphor, history reached a cataract around the turn of the twentieth century. Alexander the Great probably conquered more territory with smaller forces than anyone. Genghis Khan’s empire briefly stretched farther than any state before the Soviet Union. But these victors lacked staying power. Alexander’s Greeks fell to squabbling and mutual war as soon as he died. The Mongols could seize and destroy but they could not build, and everywhere they went they eventually assimilated into the cultures they had conquered. When the sun never set on the Union Jack, however, Western powers dictated their will virtually any place touched by saltwater, and the European conquests indelibly changed every land and people they encountered, bringing the entire world, willing or not, into a Western orbit. This change in human affairs had come about because European rulers and commanders had found new ways to apply the old and universal principles at the heart of this book: concentrate and sustain your strength; divide and conquer your foes.

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These principles depended, in turn, upon the ruler’s mastery of the components for force: cooperation, conveyance, and comprehension. Alexander’s armies demonstrated the effect of building cooperation through discipline. Genghis Khan’s hordes, in turn, used terror created by their ability to convey force. Yet while these principles explain dominant force, these pages also show that their relationship changes as societies develop new technologies which then diffuse to the world more generally. When the West established its dominance, it did with an unprecedented superiority in conveyance and comprehension—and scientific and trading systems that constantly deepened comprehension and improved conveyance. The French had a phrase for Western dominance—the mission civilisatrice—“the civilizing mission.” Steel and steam allowed Europeans to subjugate the globe, and the new industrial way of war dominated every battlefield where the Westerners could field their best weapons. No traditional society and its forces, no matter how ancient their warrior traditions, could stand against rapid-firing artillery and machine guns. Western goods and colonial laws, combined with near-instantaneous communication via telegraph lines that traversed land and sea, ensured that the West could concentrate power more rapidly than any challengers—and ensured that Western colonial officials could spot and disperse plots against their rule. But how would all this power be used? The works of Clausewitz and Marx were not unique in seeking scientific explanations of society, power, and war. Like Adam Smith two generations earlier, they pondered what all cultures have in common in as they ordered their cooperative enterprises; Marx and Clausewitz separately sought to divine universal approaches to one aspect of social life—that of managing violence. Many did not find their thinking persuasive, but the modes of thinking about power and force they represented nonetheless helped shape the thinking of European leaders, generals, and radicals as European states developed ways of applying force on a global scale. Clausewitz was an important exemplar of a set of military thinkers whose works guided generals in applying new technologies along lines that successful commanders had employed since ancient times. Marx helped inspire generations of radicals who—whether they embraced or rejected his economic theories—sought to overturn the order that Clausewitz’s acolytes worked to extend. Radicals long debated the efficacy of terrorism for sparking revolution, but such arguments hardly caused doubts among the devotees of

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assassination and violence as the path to the new order. All sorts of theories tried to make sense of modernization, industrialization, and a new concept, “imperialism.” The Communist Party that Marx and Engels advised had many rivals for adherents among workers, intellectuals, and revolutionaries. Most agreed that the people and the workers had to be made aware of the depth of their plight under the modern order—and of the possibilities for altering their fate. Marx and Engels taught them how to critique social structures, how to spot their vulnerability, and how to widen and exploit such fissures on behalf of revolution. The West had learned faster and better than anyone, making Western arms superior everywhere but, at the same time, creating a schism in the West over the very idea of civilization that would ensure everyone who got those arms would be confused about what to do with them. This system was immensely strong, and could only be broken by a catastrophe. Such a disaster was made more likely by two elements: the sheer technological ferment of destructive methods that could make huge investments suddenly obsolete; and an ideological fissure within Europe itself that included a minor but lethal fringe of self-proclaimed terrorists. This was the world’s situation in the first decade of the twentieth century.

Notes 1. Clausewitz, On War, Book VIII, chap. 6B, p. 605. 2. “It is only in an order of things in which there are no more classes and class antagonisms that social evolutions will cease to be political revolutions. Till then, on the eve of every general reshuffling of society, the last word of social science will always be: ‘Le combat ou la mort; la lutte sanquinaire ou la néant. C’est ainsi que la question est invinciblement posée’.” [“Combat or death: bloody struggle or extinction. It is thus that the question is inexorably put”—from George Sand’s novel Jean Ziska]. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy: Answer to the Philosophy of Poverty by M.  Proudhon (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d. [1847]), pp. 167–168. Emphasis in original. 3. Clausewitz, On War, Book I, ch. 7, p. 119. 4. Ibid., Book II, ch. 2, p. 141, as well as Book II, ch. 5, p. 168, and Book VIII, ch. 1, p.  578. See also Peter Paret, “On War: Then and Now,” Journal of Military History 80:2 (April 2016), p. 482. 5. Ibid., On War, Book III, ch. 17, p. 220. See also Book IV, ch. 2, p. 226. 6. Ibid., On War, Book VIII, ch. 3, p.  592. See also Book VIII, ch. 3, pp. 609–610.

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7. Ibid., Book VIII, ch. 4, pp. 595–596. 8. Lynn, “The Heart of the Sepoy,” pp. 61–62. 9. E.  Backhouse and J.  O. P.  Bland, Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), pp. 326–331. 10. Ibid. Kenneth Pomeranz argues that Europe’s economy and productivity were not markedly ahead of Asian economies in 1800; this implicitly highlights the military advantages that the seafaring European powers maintained over all challengers at that point. See The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 31–32. 11. Andrade, The Gunpowder Age, p.  240. See also Trautmann, India, pp. 179–181. 12. Ken Beauchamp, History of Telegraphy (London: The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2008 [2001]), pp. 107–110. 13. Quincy A. Gillmore, “Official Report of the Siege and Reduction of Fort Pulaski” (New York: D. Van Norstrand, 1862), pp. 48–52. 14. See, for instance, Diaz, The Conquest of New Spain, p. 203. 15. Montaigne, “Of Cannibals,” Essays, Charles Cotton, trans., 1877. 16. The Tempest, Act I, scene 2. 17. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 107. 18. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property?: An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government, 1840; accessed January 4, 2017, at http:// www.gutenberg.org/files/360/360-h/360-h.htm 19. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, pp. 167–168. 20. Ibid., p. 120. 21. Karl Marx, “The June Revolution,” Neue Rheinische Zeitung, June 29, 1848; accessed November 24, 2019, at https://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1848/06/29a.htm 22. Louis Auguste Blanqui, London banquet toast, February 25, 1851; accessed December 29, 2016, at https://www.marxists.org/reference/ archive/blanqui/1851/toast.htm 23. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League,” March 1850, accessed 24 November 2019 at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communistleague/1850-ad1.htm 24. Karl Marx, “Consequences of June 13, 1849,” Neue Rheinische Zeitung Revue, March 10, 1850, reprinted as a booklet by Friedrich Engels, ed., The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850 (1895); accessed 24 November 2019 at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/classstruggles-france/. Emphases in original. 25. For an analysis, see Rustam Singh, “Status of Violence in Marx’s Theory of Revolution,” Economic and Political Weekly 24:4 (January 28, 1989),

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pp. 9–20. For the debate between Marx and Engels and the Blanquistes, who favored direct action and provocation, see the Appendix in Doug Enaa Greene, Communist Insurgent: Blanqui’s Politics of Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017). 26. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Devils translated by David Magarshack (London: Penguin, 1971 [1953]), pp. 410, 661–662. 27. See, for instance, S.  Stepniak [Serge Kravchinsky] and Petr Alekseevich Lavrov, Underground Russia: Revolutionary Profiles and Sketches from Life (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1885), pp. 39–41. 28. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, to the Chairman of the Slavonic Meeting in Celebration of the Anniversary of the Paris Commune, March 21, 1881, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975); accessed 24 November 2019 at https://www. marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/letters/81_03_21.htm. 29. Karl Marx to Jenny Longuet, April 11, 1881, Marx-Engels Correspondence 1881, trans. Donna Torr; [originally published in Marx and Engels Correspondence; International Publishers (1968)]; accessed November 24, 2019, at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/letters/81_04_11.htm 30. Ben B.  Fischer, Okhrana: The Operations of the Russian Imperial Police (Washington: CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1997). 31. Lenin, “What Is to Be Done?” in Lenin’s Collected Works, trans. Joe Fineberg and George Hanna, (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961); accessed January 8, 2017, at https://www.marxists.org/ archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/index.htm 32. Anna Geifman, Death Orders: The Vanguard of Modern Terrorism in Revolutionary Russia (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), pp. 13–15. 33. Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (New York: New York Review of Books Press, 2012 [1951]), pp. 105–106, 113, 115. 34. Winston Spencer Churchill, The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan, Vol. 2 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1899), pp. 114–119. 35. See Winslow Homer’s 1864 painting “Defiance: Inviting a Shot Before Petersburg” for an idea of the new conditions on the battlefield. 36. Rudyard Kipling, “Arithmetic on the Frontier” (1886). 37. Quoted in Paul Rainbow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of Social Environment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996 [1989]), p. 147. 38. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2004), p. 51. 39. Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783 (original published in 1890 and reprinted in many editions—this one is at

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p. 225 in the twelfth edition on Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/13529). 40. Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), p. 64. 41. Richard Dunley, “Technology and Tradition: Mine Warfare and the Royal Navy’s Strategy of Coastal Assault, 1870–1890,” Journal of Military History 80:2 (April 2016), p. 395.

CHAPTER 4

The World Crisis: 1914–1953

Of a battle there is this to be said—that the closer you get to it the less do you see of it. —Irvin S. Cobb, Paths of Glory, 1915

The twentieth century had reached only its fourteenth year when it became the bloodiest epoch in history, and then it grew almost indescribably darker. The darkness spread from both the destructive power of the weapons amassed in Europe and the disruptive effect of the ideal of revolution in Europe and beyond. This chapter cannot provide a comprehensive history of the twentieth century’s first half. Instead, it surveys events in two realms: warfare and social control. It traces intertwined developments in the command of military forces and the ability of states to mobilize power for themselves while fragmenting the power of internal and external adversaries. Western supremacy, as we saw in Chap. 2, depended upon the same timeless principles of force that guided Alexander and the Romans: concentrate force with cooperation, conveyance, and comprehension. The story leading to this chapter is one of Western dominance in force due to superior conveyance and comprehension manifested in unrivaled warships, cannons, and navigation. The arts (and then sciences) that produced those innovations rested on precise measurement of space and time. These advances, among others,

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promoted a mechanical exactness that ultimately spurred the Industrial Revolution, the greatest economic expansion the world had ever seen. Traditional societies could not cope with the resulting Western military supremacy—unless and until the West fractured over rival visions of law and governance in the twentieth century. That weakening would ultimately give the ancient but now-dominated peoples the opening to regain their independence.

The Fatal Cataclysm The armies and navies that clashed in August 1914 were by all previous measures little short of amazing. Great battleships dominated the fighting lines at sea. These armored steel behemoths boasted the finest available guns, turbines, radios, and optics. HMS Audacious, one of the Royal Navy’s newer dreadnoughts, displaced nearly 24,000 tons and stretched two football fields; she could hurl 1400 lb. armor-piercing shells thirteen miles. Germany had its own battleships, of course, and German Zeppelins were almost as long as its battleships but they literally weighed less than air when aloft. The armies of the major powers, especially France, Germany, and Russia, had achieved an unprecedented capacity for efficient military cooperation by training a whole generation of their nations’ manpower through universal military service. The French army, for instance, inducted all fit twenty-one-year-old males each year and cycled them through three years of active service, after which they had reserve obligations until age forty-eight. Their bolt-action rifles and machine guns were as good as any, and their quick-firing 75 mm field guns were the best anywhere. France’s aircraft industry led the world, and the Aéronautique Militaire went to war with more than a hundred scout planes in twenty-one squadrons.1 In short, by training all military-age males and equipping them with such weapons, entire societies could be made to cooperate and concentrate against one another. A Serbian zealot set in motion events that changed the world when he killed the crown prince of the  Austro-Hungarian Empire on June 28, 1914. The crisis that he sparked erupted into World War I a month later, with millions of men marching to battlefields in Belgium, France, and East Prussia. The brief war of movement that August hardened by October into a long stalemate that is justly remembered for its tragic wastage of human life; trench warfare still looks like a bloody and unimaginative campaign of attrition, but looks can deceive. The awful fact was that the

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appalling casualty figures masked startling and ingenious applications of science to allow commanders to control their men and guns. The result was that, on land at least, the defenders held enormous advantages because they could bring overwhelming concentrations of firepower to bear on almost any threat. More important, these quantities of men and material could be controlled and directed in real-time at unprecedented distances. Few knew what to expect when modern European armies with machine guns and quick-firing field guns collided that summer. The men had been thoroughly drilled and they had practiced their maneuvers by squads, regiments, and divisions, but most political leaders did not understand modern firepower. Some, like Kaiser Wilhelm II, thought war a matter of glorious cavalry charges, like the one His Majesty himself led in a war game before the conflict. The Kaiser galloped over to the umpires to ask the result of the charge, and received the tactful verdict: “All dead but one, Your Majesty.”2 German leaders were by no means alone in such illusions. In September 1913 an American correspondent watched a charge across 800 yards of open ground launched by five regiments of French cavalry against a dug-in force just a third their size but supported by field guns. “Crass idiocy” was the verdict on this spectacle pronounced by a fellow observer, a veteran of the Franco-Prussian war.3 The butcher’s bill for 1914 provides the astonishing proof of that old soldier’s comment. When the Allies and the Germans clashed headlong in Belgium and northern France, they suffered over 1,300,000 casualties between them in barely five months of fighting. Reliable figures for the Eastern Front are not available but were surely even higher. The losses in the war at sea proved equally shocking. The Royal Navy knew the dangers of submarines and mines in theory, but in practice did not understand what they would do. Illusions vanished on the morning of September 22, 1914, when a German U-boat sank three old Royal Navy cruisers in one hour. The captain aboard the first to be torpedoed, HMS Aboukir, signaled his two companions that he had apparently struck a mine, and when they stopped to assist, both were also torpedoed and sunk. A month later the Royal Navy lost HMS Audacious to a German-­ laid mine near Ireland—Audacious was Britain’s only modern battleship sunk by enemy action in World War I. Germany’s less than three dozen U-boats sank over 312,000 tons of allied and neutral ships in 1914 alone. Much of this tonnage comprised warships, as Germany had not yet opened its offensive against merchant shipping around the British Isles. That

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would come in early 1915, in which the U-boat fleet would double in size—and allied shipping losses would surpass 1,300,000 tons.4 The stalemate on the Western Front demonstrated the killing power of modern military technology on land. Firepower forced the armies to burrow like moles, as Americans on both sides of the Civil War had done at Petersburg fifty years earlier. By the end of 1914 a network of trenches extended from the English Channel to the Swiss border. The generals in 1915 experimented with ways to combine artillery and infantry in assaults on the enemy’s trenches, with the Germans soon adding poison gas as well, but to little avail. Machine guns and artillery proved even deadlier when skillfully deployed on rugged ground. Turkish defenders, for instance, doggedly held their own against Allied assaults at Gallipoli, trapping Britain’s invasion force at its beachhead for months before the Royal Navy finally evacuated the survivors in January 1916. By that year, generals on both sides decided they had found a way to bleed the other side—by threatening an offensive and then pounding crowded enemy trenches with prolonged artillery barrages. When the heavy guns had done their work, there should be nothing left, at least in theory. It did not work that way at Verdun, where the French defenders held, barely, or at the Somme. At the latter battlefield, the German defenders endured a week-long bombardment by British guns, then emerged from their dugouts to machine-gun British troops charging across no man’s land—the Empire suffered more than 19,000 killed on the first day of that hopeless offensive.5 The military technology of World War I thus made frontal assaults infeasible as a tool of maneuver warfare, for a time. This result had come clear to American journalist Arno Dosch in Belgium in October 1914. He encountered a Belgian machine gunner whose unit, using dogs to tow their guns to the front, had briefly held a road against the German advance. The Belgians would not yield, “and the German bayonet charges only blocked the road with their dead. Again and again the gray line came on, but each time it crumpled before their fire.” Finally the German artillery got the defenders’ range: “They blew us all to pieces,” the Belgian gunner related to Dosch. In three days of combat his company lost forty-six of its seventy men. Dosch tried to reach the Belgians’ front line on his own, but could approach no closer than a half a mile before shellfire turned him back.6 Another American writer, Irvin S. Cobb, got a better look at modern war that same month, but concluded, as we observed above, “that the closer you get to it the less do you see of it.” He viewed no man’s land in

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France from a German observation balloon, watching German soldiers, looking like ants, mass in a trench and then sally forth toward a nearby copse: Some of them got there, I think, some did not. Certain puff-balls of white smoke, and one big smudge of black smoke, which at last signified a bomb of high explosives, broke over them and among them, hiding all from sight for a space of seconds. Dust clouds succeeded the smoke; then the dust lifted slowly. Those ants were not to be seen. They had altogether vanished. It was as though an anteater had come forth invisibly and eaten them up.7

Cobb found the Germans doing much the same to the French in that autumn of 1914: massing the defensive power of their artillery through networks of observers communicating via telephone to fire-control officers who directed the guns. His hosts gave him a tour of their field telephone system, where he found the very “solar plexus of the army.” Into a house in German-occupied Laon all the tingling nerves of the mighty organism ran and in it all the ganglia centered. At two sides of the room the walls were laced with silk-covered wires appliqued as thickly and as closely and as intricately as the threads in old point lace, and over these wires the gray-coated operators could talk— and did talk pretty constantly—with all the trenches and all the batteries and all the supply camps and with the generals of brigades and of divisions and of corps.8

Lest his American readers miss the significance of this sight, Cobb explained: “The day is done of the courier who rode horseback with orders in his belt.” That same courier’s work “is done with much less glamour but with infinitely greater dispatch and certainty by the telephone, and by the aeroplane man, and most of all by the air currents of the wireless equipment”9 (Fig. 4.1). “Wireless” proved to be the crucial adjective here. The telephone gave generals real-time control of their troops even at a distance, as Cobb witnessed. This meant that when they had the right comprehension of the battlefield they could convey commands to concentrate force even over great distances. The wireless telegraph—that is, radio—gave the same advantage to admirals and their ships. By 1914 most warships carried radios, and their respective navies were pondering the opportunities that the new medium offered. Ships at sea had always been isolated tactical units, able to concert their movements only in daylight and good weather.

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Fig. 4.1  Telephones allowed commanders to convey information even on the battlefield  in World War I. (Unknown Photographer, Field Telephone Line Construction, Approx. 1914–1918, Photograph, 18  ×  24  cm, German Federal Archives)

In World War I they could be summoned from dozens or hundreds of miles away, a reality that ensured that single ships now had vanishing odds of evading superior forces—unless they could submerge and hide. Britain’s Royal Navy quickly realized another advantage as well. By intercepting and interpreting the German navy’s radio signals, the Admiralty gained precious hours or even days of forewarning before the Kaiser’s fleet left port seeking battle in the North Sea. Britain owned the world’s most powerful navy, having launched more dreadnought-type battleships (like HMS Audacious) than its rivals. German naval hopes thus hinged for a time on the possibility of luring a portion of the Grand Fleet to battle and then overwhelming it with the full complement of Germany’s own dreadnoughts. But the warning provided by radio intelligence and the control afforded the Admiralty by wireless communications all but ensured such a disaster would not befall the Grand Fleet.10 That in turn

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meant that the Royal Navy by the end of 1914 realized it could husband its battleships, not waiting on alert at its Scapa Flow base and wearing down men and ships in constant North Sea patrols. Instead, as the Navy later explained, it was now possible “for rest and training to be looked upon as matters of essential routine. On the whole, the Grand Fleet was less harassed, and more secure, and stronger than when war broke out.”11 Here was comprehension on a new scale, for now the Admiralty could even understand the enemy’s intentions. Indeed, warning and control soon made British admirals and their First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, believe that they themselves might ambush their ambushers. Until the advent of the wireless telegraph, the high command in London (or any capital) could hardly move ships at sea like pieces on a chessboard and expect the results of their moves in mere hours. Now the Admiralty could, and eventually did.12 In January 1915, a powerful German force sortied for a raid on the English coast, and even before they sailed the Admiralty, alerted by their signals, ordered out an even stronger detachment of the Grand Fleet as night fell. That evening Churchill attended a dinner in London for France’s visiting Minister of War, keeping up appearances while anticipating the collision drawing ever nearer. The British had not told their French allies about this intelligence coup, and thus Churchill could barely contain the secret that preoccupied him: Only one thought could reign—battle at dawn! Battle for the first time in history between mighty super-Dreadnought ships! And there was added a thrilling sense of a Beast of Prey moving stealthily hour by hour towards the trap.13

Battle indeed came as predicted, at the Dogger Banks, and though most of the German raiders slipped the proverbial noose, the effect that reverberated in London and Berlin proved profound. Signals intelligence had proved its operational value to the Royal Navy, even if confusion at the Admiralty and aboard the British flagship diminished the victory. The German high command, stunned by the near-disaster, kept its fleet in port for sixteen more months, not attempting another sortie in force until the Battle of Jutland in May 1916. Such methods of control also served British air defenses once German aircraft and Zeppelins began bombing raids, first over the Western Front and soon over England as well. The countermeasures deployed around London were initially crude; indeed, both the British Army and the Royal

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Navy sought to apply their respective concepts for how to organize the defenses (the Navy borrowed the principles of harbor protection, while the Army brought back from France more relevant tactics derived from divisional anti-aircraft plans). Methods that worked against the Zeppelins in 1916, moreover, had to be rapidly adapted in 1917 once the Germans began attacking England with lower-flying (but much faster) airplanes. Ultimately Britain fashioned a sophisticated network of observers, direction finders, and communicators, all linked to centralized command of the searchlights, anti-aircraft guns, and fighter planes. The whole system, moreover, was cued by communications intelligence derived from the radio transmissions of German airfields and the attacking aircraft themselves—such warnings could provide precious hours for the defenders. By 1918 the integrated air defenses near London—years before the invention of radar—could process and react to sightings across a 10,000 square-mile area (most of southern England) within ninety seconds.14

The Modern System World War I showed how technology and new methods of social mobilization altered the state’s ability to create cooperation, harness conveyance, and enable comprehension so that force could be executed with a new level of proficiency and destructiveness. Thus emerged what Stephen Biddle has called the “modern system,” based on cover, concealment, firepower, and control; it has dominated war ever since.15 What modern communications did not yet do, however, was allow precise control for offensive power in land warfare. Rapid-firing weapons aided by near-real-­ time communications and aerial observation made visibility on the battlefield lethal, at least on the Western Front. The problem was concentrating this firepower at the right place and moment to shield one’s own assault troops from the enemy’s firepower as they advanced. The French started coordinating all their guns and perfected the creeping barrage at Verdun in 1916. This, in theory, allowed the infantry to advance against dug-in defenders, and occasionally the tactic worked in practice.16 Elaborate methods for using aircraft to observe the momentum of the assault and report intelligence to French commanders within minutes had been devised by spring 1917, but France’s attacks failed so utterly that year that they provoked mutinies in French units.17 Indeed, defense dominated the battlefield until the last weeks of the war.

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Offensives in 1918 sought to be choreographed sweeps of infantry and artillery, timed to stun the adversary and keep him hunkered down until the last possible moment, leaving the defenders mere seconds to organize themselves before the assaulting infantry were on them, or even behind their strongpoints. This worked almost as General Erich Ludendorff had planned in Germany’s Operation Michael in March 1918. His troops had been re-trained to disperse and move so as to infiltrate the enemy’s lines, instead of sweeping forward in a solid mass—as infantry had been doing for centuries. The new tactics succeeded, but only up to the point where the assault troops outranged their supporting artillery. Even with vast numbers freed up from the Russian front, Germany lacked the guns and men to sustain Ludendorff’s offensive long enough to force a strategic decision.18 One possible solution was tanks, but Ludendorff had few tanks to help the German advance. These armored monsters had come into service in the British army in 1916, and they did not impress German commanders. Indeed, Ludendorff counted the battle of Cambrai (November 1917) as their only real success against prepared positions, and credited their effect there to unique circumstances, combined with perhaps a little “tank fright” in the German ranks. “Not until our infantry lost its discipline and fighting capacity”—that is, in late 1918, Ludendorff suggested—“did the employment of massed tanks…produce a fatal effect on the course of events.”19 Winston Churchill implicitly disagreed, insisting in his own memoir “there was no reason why a battle like Cambrai could not have been fought a year before”; indeed, three or four Cambrais at once “might have completely overwhelmed [the Germans] on a front of 50 miles.”20 One of the planners of the Cambrai tank attack, J.F.C. Fuller, advocated an even bolder notion in case the war continued into 1919: Our present theory, based on our present weapons, weapons of limited range of action, has been one of attaining our strategical object by brute force….As our present theory is to destroy ’personnel,’ so should our new theory be to destroy ’command,’ not after the enemy’s personnel has been disorganised, but before it has been attacked, so that it may be found in a state of complete disorganisation when attacked.21

With innovative tactics and sufficient numbers of the new, faster tanks coming into service, Fuller argued, the Allies could realize the “possibility of applying naval tactics to land warfare.” For Fuller, tanks represented a

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new kind of conveyance which would not only restore movement to the armies but also “endow the side which can apply them with incalculable power”: Formerly strategy depended on communications, now communications will become universal, and though roads and rails will not disappear, they will become but lines of least resistance to movement in the universal vehicle which the earth’s surface will be turned into by all types of cross-country machines.22

All this innovation required enormous resources, not only of men and materiel but also of the productive capacity needed to supply them. It meant the mobilization of science as well. World War I propelled the state of the art in many fields, including radios, electronics, chemicals, motor transport, and aircraft and ship design. Both sides recognized the importance of the resulting economic campaigns. The contending coalitions, however, operated from very different geopolitical bases. The Central Powers—Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey—had a large and productive economic foundation and held the advantage of interior lines of communication and supply. The Entente—France, Russia, Britain, and later Italy—held the periphery of Europe but could draw (at least in theory) on the rest of the world for resources. The Entente’s strategic advantage in supply thus became Germany’s target. The German navy sought to starve Britain with submarine warfare, and Berlin put this determination to the supreme test in early 1917, allowing sub skippers free rein to sink any ships they found around the British Isles. The U-boats had been a dangerous nuisance before; now they became an existential threat. The new campaign’s first strategic result was to provoke America into declaring war on Germany (though the Germans did not expect the Americans to make much of a difference, and for a time Berlin’s assessment looked correct). Three months after the unrestricted submarine warfare campaign commenced, the U.S. Navy’s William Sims reached London to visit First Sea Lord Sir John Jellicoe, almost on the day that Washington declared war. There Rear  Admiral Sims learned to his dismay that optimistic newspaper reports about German submarines being swept from the seas were purposefully minimizing the gravity of the situation. The U-boats had sunk over a million tons of shipping in the last two months and might sink almost a million more that April:

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It is expressing it mildly to say that I was surprised by this disclosure. I was fairly astounded; for I had never imagined anything so terrible. I expressed my consternation to Admiral Jellicoe. “Yes,” he said, as quietly as though he were discussing the weather and not the future of the British Empire. “It is impossible for us to go on with the war if losses like this continue.”

Sims wondered aloud if the Germans were in fact winning the war. “They will win, unless we can stop these losses—and stop them soon,” Jellicoe replied. 23 The U-boat threat at least had a technical solution: convoys of merchant ships (organized from spring 1917 on), aided by direction finding of the submarines’ wireless transmissions and other sightings, assiduously plotted at the Admiralty. According to Sims, soon the Royal Navy’s intelligence department took charge of Fritz and his crew as they emerged from their base, and kept an unwearied eye upon them until they sailed back home. The great chart in the convoy room of the Admiralty showed, within the reasonable limits of human fallibility, where each submarine was operating at a particular moment, and it also kept minute track of its performances.24

Britain’s economic blockade of Germany, by contrast, proved an insoluble problem for Berlin, and a truly debilitating strategic weapon. Imposed at the war’s outset, the blockade meant that only Germany’s conquests gave it a base to continue a protracted conflict, mused Ludendorff: “The importance in war of coal, iron, and food was known before this war; but how absolutely decisive they would actually become was demonstrated to all the world only as hostilities proceeded.”25 Germany indeed had food, but with the blockade nearly every German eventually faced malnutrition. American journalist Madeleine Doty had visited in mid-1915, with the war still in its first year, and observed “[t]he grain supplies are running low. Not only bread, but fodder for the animals, is lacking. The cattle are being killed and put in cold storage to save the expense of feeding. The few cab horses in Berlin fall in the street from hunger.” Doty returned to Berlin in August 1916 and found the people “pale, thin, and sunken-­ eyed.” “The tragedy of Germany is not quick starvation for a few,” she reported; “it is the under-feeding of a whole race.”26 Neither Doty nor anyone else that summer, of course, could know that the war still had two more years to go—and the blockade was only beginning to be truly effective.

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The only way to keep the combatants in the war was a social mobilization like that of a city under prolonged siege. The major strategic effect thus emerged off the battlefield, deep within society. Indeed, the exertion of force became substantially about building cooperation among a whole nation, not just among its soldiers and sailors. The relative military power of the contending nations depended increasingly on the productivity of their farms and workshops, which in turn depended upon the methods of social control. Whole populations went to war, literally and figuratively, with millions of able-bodied men conscripted and all available manpower—including millions of women as well—pressed into work in factories and fields. In some places this meant new recruits got their first regular meals and medical care in their lives—a powerful boost to the idea of health as a national concern and a social right. In other places it meant the training camps became huge incubators of diseases, like the “Spanish flu” that apparently erupted in America and traveled to Europe and around the world, killing perhaps 60 million people in all. England mustered its seemingly last untapped cohorts of manpower in early 1918. Churchill, now Minister for Munitions, witnessed Prime Minister Lloyd George’s horror as he realized that meeting the army’s pleas for reinforcements would require rounding up …the remaining manhood of the nation. Lads of 18 and 19, elderly men up to 45, the last surviving brother, the only son of his mother (and she a widow), the father, the sole support of the family, the weak, the consumptive, the thrice wounded—all must now prepare themselves for the scythe.27

Enhancing cooperation took different forms in different countries, but all the combatants implemented significant measures to control their economies and keep public opinion from turning against the war effort. Even the United States, that most decentralized of the great powers, controlled wages and prices and criminalized all manner of “seditious” writing and speech. President Woodrow Wilson’s steps to quell dissent against the war, for instance, resulted in a ten-year prison term for Eugene Debs for publicly urging resistance to conscription; Debs had been the Socialist Party’s candidate (and one of Wilson’s opponents) in the 1912 presidential election. Social mobilization thus strained the tenets of democracy in America as well. The Allies’ manpower needs were helped by mobilizing the colonies, bringing Africa and India into the fight. France imported half a million

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men from its empire, including 164,000 from French West Africa and Equatorial Africa who fought on French battlefields.28 The British Empire raised 1.4 million troops in India alone, of whom 620,000 served overseas.29 The battlefield saw rough measures to control the troops’ mental as well as physical states. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) had been described as early as the 1500s, but when armies typically met in battles lasting only a day or so (as opposed to sieges), it affected dozens or at most hundreds of soldiers at once and was not a major problem.30 As soldiers hunkered down in the trenches for months on end, however, their mental as well as physical state became an issue. Huge military medical establishments grew behind the trenches, but PTSD at the scale observed in the Great War was a new thing and horribly treated. After French troops mutinied in the wake of their futile offensives in spring 1917, their new commander-­ in-chief, Philippe Petain, resolved that the French army would henceforth stand on the defensive until the allies got help. “I am waiting for the tanks and the Americans,” Petain quipped.31 The “modern system” for synchronizing firepower had given the allies time, robbing the Germans of a chance to win a swift victory. The allies then won by recruiting the United States, which Germany had made easier by provoking America via the aforementioned submarine campaign (and a silly attempt to incite Mexico into an attack on Texas). The American economy had not been damaged by the fighting and now began shifting its immense strength to aiding the allied war effort. Soon the burden of financing the war moved from Britain to the United States as the allies tapped its vast financial system for loans (which Britain did not finish paying off until 2015). America also sent two million men to France. French staff officer Jean de Pierrefeu recalled the effect of these American reinforcements when still another German offensive briefly threatened to break through in May 1918. “All felt that they were present at the magical operation of the transfusion of blood. Life arrived in floods to reanimate the mangled body of a France bled white.”32 Churchill offered the British view with typical poetic license: “Half-trained, half-organized, with only their courage, their numbers and their magnificent youth…they were to buy their experience at a bitter price.”33 America indeed paid dearly for a seat at the negotiations over the Treaty of Versailles—roughly 120,000 war dead, most killed in the war’s last weeks. That toll was bad enough but seemed a pittance, of course, compared with what America’s European allies had suffered: at least 950,000 military dead from the British Empire, 460,000 from Italy, 1,357,000 from France, and 1,700,000 from Russia.

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Revolutions, Far and Near The frightening casualty rolls and social disruption of World War I shook European civilization and finally made Revolution possible. The collapse of ancient monarchies gave scope for ideological experimentation, and it was by no means certain that Bolshevism in Russia would be the ultimate beneficiary of the chaos. Where the liberal republics and Germany could impose order on their populations, Czarist Russia could not. The Russian army’s staggering casualties—the 1.7 million dead above is perhaps the most conservative estimate—created a crisis that toppled the Romanov dynasty.34 Lenin stepped into the breach in late 1917, and his new regime pulled Russia out of the war a few weeks later. That in turn briefly gave the German high command hope that troops shifted from Russia could beat France and Britain before the American army arrived in strength on the Western Front. The German offensives in the spring of 1918 failed, however, and the Americans swelled the power of the Allied drive the following summer and fall, finally compelling Berlin to sue for peace in November 1918. Russia meanwhile descended into a civil war that cost more than 10 million lives.35 Lenin’s feat was to fashion an uprising into a revolution and a revolution into a state—something never done before on Marxist lines. This posed something of a theoretical problem, as Lenin had called the state a form of organized coercion and wondered aloud (as had Friedrich Engels) if the state would be necessary at all under socialism. After all, the state as such was a “‘special force’ for the suppression of the oppressed class.” But circumstances demanded action; the “‘special coercive force’ for the suppression of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie, of millions of working people by handfuls of the rich, must now be replaced by a ‘special coercive force’ for the suppression of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat.”36 The new Russian order was forged in war, for the Revolution immediately had to fight for its life. “Not a single problem of the class struggle has ever been solved in history except by violence,” Lenin explained in 1918: “When violence is exercised by the working people, by the mass of exploited against the exploiters—then we are for it!”37 Leon Trotsky, one of Lenin’s lieutenants, explained the Revolution’s plight in his tract Terrorism and Communism (1920), leaving posterity a picture of a coup turning into a regime. “The severity of the proletarian dictatorship in Russia,” he explained, stemmed from its desperate

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isolation. The Bolsheviks felt literally surrounded by enemies: “There was one continuous front, on the north and south, in the east and west.” Those foes included the Russian White Guard armies, plus in turn Germans, Austrians, Czechs, Serbs, Poles, Ukrainians, Rumanians, French, British, Americans, Japanese, Finns, Estonians, and Lithuanians—not to mention internal foes. In “a country throttled by a blockage and strangled by hunger, there are conspiracies, risings, terrorist acts, and destruction of roads and bridges.”38 Even American famine relief was suspect in Trotsky’s eyes, for the American dispensers of food aid had got out in the countryside and done what none of Soviet Russia’s European enemies had been able to do—they had “seen us as we really are.”39 The Revolution’s enemies in the bourgeoisie had themselves seized power through earlier revolutions in the various states of Europe and America, explained Trotsky, and once in power they had retained power through repression. The bourgeois liberal order had permitted more space for the political education of the workers than had traditional absolutism, he conceded, but it had also restricted that development through “bourgeois legality,” which corrupted sectors of the proletariat with “opportunist habits and law-abiding prejudices.” In the end, not even democracy in its German socialist flavor had held back the horrors of the late “world imperialist war.” Now the bourgeoisie would not cede its power without a fight. Repression had to be defeated with more repression. “As long as class society, founded on the most deep-rooted antagonisms, continues to exist, repression remains a necessary means of breaking the will of the opposing side.” The Russian Revolution was the first successful proletarian revolution, noted Trotsky, hence its enemies’ desperation to kill it. That is why the Russian proletariat had to protect itself in its peril with “severe measures of State terror.”40 Whereas the (bourgeois) White Terror was an instrument of a dying class, however, the new Red Terror of the Revolution was the instrument of the inevitable rise of the proletariat. “Without the Red Terror, the Russian bourgeoisie, together with the world bourgeoisie, would throttle us long before the coming of the revolution in Europe.”41 The Red Terror inherited the Romanovs’ administrative apparatus and turned the mechanism of oppression formerly employed by leaders of the ancien regime against any forces resisting the new order. The Revolution was ensuring the class purity of its own instruments, particularly the Red Army, by hunting and destroying across Russia those “counter-revolutionary

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conspirators who strive by means of insurrections, murders, and disorganization, to restore the old regime.” This was “acting in accordance with the iron laws of war in which we desire to guarantee our victory.” Those same iron laws naturally decreed that the Soviet government could not tolerate enemy newspapers in its midst while its troops were fighting and dying. The Soviets had “to throttle the class lie of the bourgeoisie and to achieve the class truth of the proletariat.” Thus they destroyed “the Press of the counter-revolution, just as we destroyed its fortified positions, its stores, its communication, and its intelligence system.”42 Trotsky explained the mechanisms by which the Revolution imposed its will, noting their effect was psychological as well as physical. “The problem of revolution, as of war, consists in breaking the will of the foe.” War itself is founded on fear, which is always a powerful weapon of policy, both internationally and internally. War, like revolution, is founded upon intimidation. A victorious war, generally speaking, destroys only an insignificant part of the conquered army, intimidating the remainder and breaking their will. The revolution works in the same way: it kills individuals, and intimidates thousands.43

The Bolsheviks quickly developed and deployed through the Party the means of repression. Leninist ideology and the war emergency channeled all power over resources and economic activity to the state and to the Party that controlled that state. This set the stage for the Bolsheviks to concentrate Russia’s energies, and therefore create the scope for force on a scale not seen before (and soon leading to totalitarianism). A swift series of decrees in late 1917 essentially outlawed the market economy and private finance; after that everyone needed their papers in order to work or travel, and those papers depended on the goodwill of the local Party structure. Social discipline, moreover, needed a new instrument to comprehend who was foe and friend. This would be the “All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Profiteering and Corruption”—the Cheka—an internal Party secret police soon transformed into an instrument of the Soviet state. Thus by the early 1920s the Soviet system had imposed a pervasive apparatus of surveillance and social control.44

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A Rule of Law Those bourgeois European states supporting the counter-revolutionary White Terror—and due to be subject soon to their own revolutions, at least in Trotsky’s estimation—were largely parliamentary systems but only beginning to be liberal, open-access orders; in several cases, they were imperial powers themselves. In short, they were quarrelsome and hardly averse to interfering in other people’s affairs all over the world. They ran their own empires through force and guile. And yet in the 1920s, they actually outlined a more civilized way of dealing with one another, resting on the principle of non-interference in each other’s internal affairs. That ban, in theory, dated from the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which had called for “a Christian and Universal Peace, and a perpetual, true, and sincere Amity” across Europe, in which the kingdoms “shall not act, or permit to be acted, any wrong or injury to any whatsoever.”45 The Europe that emerged from World War I took the Westphalian ideal and tried to create a new international order. The League of Nations, founded in 1920 and based in Geneva, implicitly emulated the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s vision of the equality of lawful states. “This would be a league of nations,” though not a state proper, Kant explained. “[P]eace cannot be established or secured except by a compact of nations” seeking to make an end to all wars, and this league “should gradually spread to all states and thus lead to perpetual peace.”46 That ideal would find its voice again in the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact uniting the signatory nations in a common renunciation of war “as an instrument of their national policy,” and pledging them to use only peaceful means for resolving “all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin.”47 Though frequently mocked for its supposed naivete, the Pact remains in effect for its signatories today. In short, the bourgeois states of Europe were at least hypocritical. They insisted their interventions abroad were to modernize the subject peoples and ultimately bring them into the family of nations. Britain by the 1920s was busy turning its Empire of colonies into a Commonwealth of autonomous Dominions; London negotiated the independence of Ireland in the 1920s and gave India Home Rule in 1935. The League of Nations authorized Britain and France mandates in Palestine and Syria, respectively, not as colonies but as temporary protectorates of the “advanced states” while the new nations of the Middle East got on their feet after centuries of Ottoman rule. The Mandate for Syria and Lebanon, for instance, required

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France to “enact measures to facilitate the progressive development of Syria and the Lebanon as independent states.”48 The Mandate for Palestine was more complicated, in that the League decided that the region should include “a national home for the Jewish people”; that home, however, was to be built so as to promote “the development of self-governing institutions, and also for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion.”49 In short, mandates of power were now to be explicitly provided for the good of the governed. Bolshevik Russia rejected all this piety about perpetual peace and non-­ interference as imperialist window dressing. The new revolutionary government sent diplomats abroad, preserving the traditional forms of diplomacy. Lenin at the same time, however, created the Communist International (or Comintern) to maintain direct ties to local Communist parties and thence to the working class in the various countries. Comintern operative Victor Serge reached Berlin in 1922 to find the Comintern and the Russian embassy performing separate tasks for their masters in Moscow: The Communist International and the Soviet Government were proceeding along two parallel paths, and with two distinct objectives: first, to form disciplined parties over the whole of Europe with a view to events to come; secondly, to achieve toleration from the capitalist world and thence credits for the reconstruction of Russia.50

The Reds developed ways to keep conspiracy alive even under German surveillance, if not yet strong enough for subversion then at least durable enough to enforce Party discipline and conduct espionage. Serge himself worked on the editorial staff of the Comintern Executive’s foreign newspaper in Berlin, which published for the proletariats of Germany, France, England, and beyond. He cloaked his doings in many guises: At my office on the Rote Fahne, I was successively Siegfried and Gottlieb; in town I was Dr. Albert; on my papers Viktor Klein; and, in my journeys to Russia, Alexei Berlovsky, a former Russian prisoner of war in Germany. Victor Serge datelined his articles (which were reprinted as far away as China) from Kiev, a city to which, as it happened, I had never been.51

Serge seldom had business with the Soviet Legation, but knew the leadership of the German Party personally. His job was to foster revolution.

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Russia sent money and arms to hasten and guide the revolution in Germany in late October 1923, but Moscow called off the uprising when its military advisers realized the German police had seized too many of their rifles.52 Revolution in the West would have to wait for a time while the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics built its strength. Lenin soon inspired imitators, some of them mortally opposed to his Marxism and promoting nationalist (but still aggressive) brands of revolution. Trotsky in 1920 had presciently denounced the vengeful “bands of Ludendorff” uprooted in Germany by World War I; he feared they would defend the bourgeoisie and delay revolution.53 Communist rebellions in Germany and Hungary were quickly crushed with the help of these forces. In Italy the disaffected marched to power with Benito Mussolini in 1922. Il Duce disavowed his former socialism in favor of a new doctrine, “fascism,” that in his telling appealed to the human needs for psychological and emotional solidarity as well as for economic liberation. Socialism’s mistaken notion of progress reduced human behavior to economic motives and history to class war, Mussolini insisted, while its materialist conception of happiness viewed men as animals caring “only to be fat and well-fed.” Yet his Fascism fought “the complex system of democratic ideology” as well. Democracy for Mussolini as well as for Trotsky promoted a misguided insistence on majority rule and political equality; it occasionally gave the masses “an illusion of sovereignty,” while true power rested with “other concealed and irresponsible forces.”54 Few Communists understood this Fascist version of revolution, which Marx had not predicted. Serge saw its German version at close hand in Berlin: “The opinion of the [Comintern’s] leadership was this was a piece of reactionary buffoonery that would soon die away and open the path to revolution.” He disagreed, later calling Nazism a “new variety of counterrevolution that had taken the Russian Revolution as its schoolmaster in matters of repression and mass manipulation through propaganda.”55 Serge’s prediction would be borne out with chilling clarity in Adolf Hitler’s assumption of total power in Germany in 1933. Hitler, like Lenin and Mussolini, loathed democratic forms. He had visited the Austrian parliament in Vienna before World War I and recoiled at its mediocrity: “I no longer opposed merely the perverted form which the principle of parliamentary representation had assumed in Austria. No. It had become impossible for me to accept the system in itself.” His admiration for a young and assertive German Empire—in contrast to the decay of his native Austria-Hungary—was similarly alloyed. After all, even the

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Kaiser’s Germany had too much democratic decadence for Hitler; “[t]he fact that the Emperor was prohibited from speaking in the Reichstag made me very angry.”56 Comfortably ensconced in prison in 1924 after his abortive coup in Munich, he had leisure to conclude in his memoir Mein Kampf that “[d]emocracy, as practised in Western Europe today, is the forerunner of Marxism,” the very “breeding-ground in which the bacilli of the Marxist world pest can grow and spread.”57 Hitler ensured no such parliamentary weakness marred his Third Reich, which he started building upon coming to power in 1933. Indeed, within a year, elections, representation, and a relatively free press, which had prevailed in Europe outside of Russia before World War I, had all been curtailed in Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union—as Mussolini has long been held to have put it: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”58 What emerged in Europe in the 1920s was something new: states based on the notion that states themselves were only a way station on history’s march toward more-communal societies based on class, race, or nationality. Liberal, parliamentary forms and bourgeois economic rights distracted the common people from grasping the oppression under which they lived and their true interest in promoting these communal ideals, and thus had to be done away with if the revolution were to succeed. The systemic violence of the oppressors—whether capitalists, democrats, or Jews—had to be met with violence in return. Hitler explained our fallen world in Mein Kampf, calling it pervaded by coercion and declaring that “violence is broken only by violence and terror by terror. Only then can a new regime be created by means of constructive work.”59 Trotsky proclaimed remarkably similar sentiments about breaking the class will of the bourgeoisie, which in places like Republican France was basing its internal policy on “fear, greed, and violence”; there was no other way to break the class will of the capitalists and their henchmen “except the systematic and energetic use of violence.”60 Lenin, Mussolini, and finally Hitler crafted Parties to spread and enforce the ideas and discipline required to hasten the respective new orders that their ideologies forecast. The new anti-liberal, Party states, therefore, rejected parliamentary democracy with its compromises among parties and its chaotic decadence spreading from individualist notions of rights. Such liberal ideals, according to Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini, were hypocritical at best, and more likely tools in the hands of the real power and source of oppression: the capitalists, the international moneylenders, or (inevitably) the Jews. Italian Fascism indeed had the same anti-liberal evolutionary roots as

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Leninism. Mussolini’s socialist (and then Fascist) newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia, from its first issue, and for decades afterward, featured on its masthead Louis Auguste Blanqui’s toast from 1851: “He who has iron, has bread.” Lenin and Hitler felt likewise. They buttressed their power not only through secret police (the Cheka, the Gestapo; and the Organizzazione per le Vigilanza e la Repressione dell’Antifacisimo, or OVRA, in Italy). The new dictators also exerted comprehensive control of the news media and constant militaristic spectacle to stir feelings of persecution and gratitude to the state for its protection from hostile forces. In order to secure their monopoly on ideas, Bolshevism, Nazism, and Fascism imposed Party rule. This allowed them to do something that had been tried before but rarely with such success. These rulers used their comprehension of the society to exert force in ways that could change society’s understanding of itself. This, in theory, enabled them to build a new kind of cooperation amongst their peoples and enable total mobilization. They viewed history through a scientistic lens; that is, as bending toward fulfillment in the portion of humanity favored by natural forces and led by a vanguard elite. Law was meant to serve that scientistic and historic outcome. These societies aspired to control ideas, the most personal of human experiences—through total social surveillance. The party states in Russia and Germany thus added to the traditional Western juridical concept of individual legal responsibility the notion of collective guilt, whether of the bourgeoisie or of the Jews. Where they differed was on their conception of force: Communists saw it as at most a means to an end (as an instrument of repression, or liberation), while Nazis and Fascists reveled in man as a being defined by struggle—as needing to use force and to fight in order to fulfill his essence as man. The world problem in the 1930s thus became who would control the anti-liberal tendency, both inside and outside the new revolutionary states. That in turn meant defending the gains of the revolution against all challengers, foreign and domestic. The fear of encirclement typical of dictators repeated itself with “monotonous similarity” in the capitals of the Party states.61 The Russian Revolution soon turned on itself. The Tenth Party Congress in 1921 declared that Party members could criticize the Party, but could not organize “factions” within it.62 Soon even that limited freedom perished in Russia. A struggle ensued for the Revolution’s soul between Stalin, who dominated the Party’s Central Committee from 1925 on, and a check-mated “Opposition,” which by now included Trotsky and other Old Bolsheviks calling for wider (intra-Party) debate and dissent.

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Victor Serge sided with the Oppositionists but did not share their illusion of creating a clandestine movement in Russia that could eventually soften the line against dissent: I said that illegal methods would fail for two reasons: the unlimited power of the secret police would crush everything, and our own ideological and sentimental loyalty to the Party made us vulnerable both to political maneuverings and, even more, to police provocation.63

In the end, wrote Serge in his memoir, both loyal opposition and conspiracy were “purely academic, since both alternatives were equally impossible.” The Soviet secret police—the heirs of the Revolutionary Cheka—had adapted and perfected the Czarist Okhrana’s methods of infiltrating informants in all walks of life. This enabled the Cheka to sift through society and comprehend who was an enemy of the state. Beseeched by an anguished comrade who felt torn between his angst over Stalin’s victory and his need to retain his Party membership so he could keep his job and feed his family, Serge advised, “Protect your soul.” Alas, a soul can be difficult to protect because “the Party demands that you come to the platform to condemn the error of your former ways, denounce your former comrades, and not just once but ten times, again and again.”64 Here under the banner of revolution was an invasion of conscience and a totalitarian presumption of guilt until innocence is proven (which it must be continually). The anti-liberal states defended themselves from external foes by building formidable militaries and invoking for themselves the principle of non-­ interference that they implicitly refused to respect in their neighbors. The new dictators could and did throw the principle back at the Western democracies. American correspondent William Shirer in April 1939 watched Hitler address his rubber-stamp Reichstag, mocking President Franklin Roosevelt’s demand that he assure Germany’s neighbors that he sought no more territory. Hitler claimed to have asked other states if they actually felt threatened by him, but found that  several, like Syria and Palestine, could not reply because “they are at present not in possession of their freedom, but are occupied and consequently deprived of their rights by the military agents of democratic countries.” Indeed, “the fact has obviously escaped Mr. Roosevelt’s notice that Palestine is at present occupied not by German troops but by the English.”65

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The decades between the World Wars saw successful and unsuccessful revolutions in many lands. Not all took an anti-liberal direction. China’s had begun even before World War I, really commencing in 1912, with the ouster of the Qing dynasty and the adoption of a modernizing (if short-­ lived) constitution nominally based on Western parliamentary ideals. Turkey’s revolution had proved modernizing and secularist, with Ataturk overturning the decayed Ottoman Empire and instituting wide-ranging and disruptive, but largely peaceful reforms, somewhat as Japan had done a half-century earlier. Other revolutions, like Spain’s, followed China’s in devolving into bloody warfare between nationalist and internationalist forces. The Spanish Republic in the 1930s embarked on a radical campaign of social reform, prompting a vicious reaction by General Francisco Franco. The resulting civil war (1936–1939) saw both sides appeal for help from the dictatorships as the democracies held aloof. Here was war within the anti-liberal camp, with Fascists and Nazis backing one side in the civil war, and Communists, socialists, and anarchists supporting its opponents. Another civil war convulsed China, which had drifted toward anarchy after the overthrow of Manchus in 1911. The Bolsheviks for a time aided Sun Yat-Sen and his Kuomintang against various warlords and then switched allegiance to a more reliable Marxist alternative, Mao Zedong, in the late 1920s. China’s civil war would last twenty more years. In the ensuing chaos, the Europeans and Americans maintained their trading privileges and the Japanese periodically intervened to take what they liked.66 World War I had destroyed the aura of European superiority in all the lands dominated over the last century or so. Count Carlo Sforza, once Italy’s Foreign Minister and then the leader of the brief anti-Fascist opposition in parliament, reflected on this disaster for Europe’s standing in the world. He had served his country in China in 1911 and then visited after his retreat to private life. “I saw China twice, before the war and after,” he related in his memoir: Few experiences of my life have had that tang. Before the war, only old [Chinese] philosophers…doubted the value of our over-materialistic civilization. In 1927 and 1928, I could read contempt on even the faces of the coolies who, a novelty in China, had learned to pay a few sapeks for the newspaper from which they expected to learn the failures of the English and of the Russians.67

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The Great War had also trained hundreds of thousands of colonial troops to fight, if not to lead. This would make it easier for them to work together against their colonial masters. The British liberally used Sikhs and Gurkhas on the Western Front, as these were considered the most “martial” of India’s many races.68 The French brought over Moroccans and then blacks from central Africa. The latter proved eye-opening in many ways. A savvy (and lone) black African delegate in the National Assembly boosted recruiting after winning for the colonies political concessions in Paris. Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau was moved by Senegalese soldiers who broke into the Marseillaise for him during an inspection visit; he told them that in fighting for France they would help liberate themselves as well, for the French and the Senegalese would become “sons of the same civilization.” And yet the suspicion lingered that the French had used Africans as cannon fodder. Such doubts had justification, given attitudes like those of French commander-in-chief General Robert Nivelle, who noted before his disastrous offensive in 1917 that the army should “spare not the black blood so that white blood be saved.”69 Nazism would bring yet another world war, and ensure it was the most savage conflict of all. Hitler had made a habit of confounding all who sought to predict his steps. Where he had helped to found an anti-liberal state that could have joined forces with its fellows against the decadent bourgeois West, he insisted instead that the anti-liberal tendency be racially pure, denouncing in the foulest terms the Bolsheviks and their Communism as threats to human evolution. Then after turning Stalin and progressive forces around the world thoroughly against Fascism—a term that progressives now used to describe both Mussolini’s original version and the Nazi variant—Hitler shocked the world by suddenly allying himself with Stalin against the West. Hitler’s emissary and Stalin’s lieutenants held an impromptu celebration in Moscow  to mark their just-concluded non-­ aggression pact on August 23, 1939: “It felt like being among old party comrades,” marveled German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.70 Less than two years later Hitler would invade Russia, stunning even Stalin with his perfidy. The Nazi invasion almost destroyed the USSR; as it happened, it forced Stalin to join the imperialist powers in an improbable but ultimately solid alliance of opposites.

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A World Split Asunder World War I’s advances—in mobility, communication, surveillance, firepower, and targeting—touched on all the elements of force: cooperation, conveyance, and comprehension. In some ways, rapid advances in each field shifted between combatants and spread between the Western powers. By war’s end, these advances, primarily the ability to concentrate entire societies and convey force and orders rapidly, helped ensure not only a sequel but also the deadliest war in history when the next global conflict erupted. World War II concentrated power on the battlefield in ways that had no precedent. Violence could now be administered at great distances and massive scales, and for hitherto unimagined evil. Germany showed the world how to synchronize the components of modern war to make land offensives effective again. Here was a doctrinal innovation that built comprehension and brought it to the field, allowing force to be concentrated to great advantage. Three weeks after World War II began with Hitler’s invasion of Poland, CBS News correspondent William Shirer watched from a distance with Wehrmacht staff officers as German troops, assisted by aircraft, reduced a Polish strongpoint near Danzig: Their infantry, their tanks, their artillery, their signal corps, all seemed to work as a precise machine. There was not the slightest sign of strain or excitement in the German officers at our observation post. Very business-­ like they were, reminding me of the coaches of a championship football team who sit on the sidelines and calmly and confidently watch the machine they’ve created perform as they knew all the time it would.71

The Poles hardly knew what had happened. “They pitted a fairly good army by World War [I] standards against a 1939 mechanized and motorized force which simply drove around them and through them,” noted a surprised Shirer. “The German air force in the meantime destroyed their communications. The Polish High Command, it is true, seems to have had no idea of what it was up against.”72 Hitler’s new Soviet allies saw the future coming their way when the Germans sent Moscow a film of their assault on Danzig; “we watched it in the Kremlin with Stalin. It was very depressing,” recalled Stalin’s lieutenant Nikita Khrushchev.73 With this new way of war, Germany swept all before her for two years. A war of mobility had been glimpsed by visionaries like Churchill and JFC

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Fuller at the end of World War I, but tanks in 1918 lacked range and reliability. They also lacked radios, and thus fought as independent and barely coordinating tactical formations. In contrast, the new German tanks, mobile artillery, and tactical aircraft—all controlled in real-time by radio— made a seemingly unbeatable combination. They could remain dispersed but linked on the battlefield, feeling for weak points in the defense, pounding the seams open with shells and bombs, and then concentrating to exploit the breach, seizing key points in the rear before the defenders could regroup. The defending army then had no choice but to attempt to retake those points by hasty frontal assault, launched against German artillery and airpower.74 In this fashion the panzers routed France and Britain in 1940 with an ease that surprised even Hitler, doing in just six weeks what the German army could not do at all in World War I. The Wehrmacht’s undefeated streak ran all the way to the gates of Moscow, where the Red Army and the Russian winter halted them for a season in December 1941. The Imperial Japanese Navy changed naval warfare as well when Tokyo entered the war on the side of the Rome-Berlin Axis that same month. The British, American, and Japanese navies had all built aircraft carriers in the 1930s to operate with their main battle fleets, but all three navies initially deployed these ships as scouts and air cover for their battleship divisions. In early 1941 the Japanese, although still neutral, could see a Pacific war on the horizon and began exercising with aircraft carriers as their main fleet striking arm.75 The Japanese force sent to bomb Pearl Harbor comprised six fleet carriers, making it arguably the most powerful flotilla in history to that time. With these carriers the Japanese navy for half a year rampaged from Pearl Harbor to Ceylon, enabling Japan’s army to inflict twin routs on America in the Philippine Islands and Britain in Malaya— and forever dispelling illusions of an innate Western military superiority. The Germans joined the Japanese in attempting to deny the control of the seas to the Western Allies. In Hitler’s case, that meant seeking to sever the Atlantic supply lanes to Britain—which had ruled them for over two centuries—and to the Royal Navy’s strategic acolytes in America. German U-boats by now could operate as far afield as the Gulf of Mexico, and though they never threatened Britain’s survival (as they had in World War I), they did serious damage to Allied navies and transport in the war’s early years. The Japanese and Germans had thus found independent answers to the big-gun dominance of British and American dreadnoughts. They could not match Britain and America in building battleships and thus had to find a way to avoid their heavy guns. Germany did so by hiding beneath

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the waves; Japan in practice put its hopes on maritime aircraft, keeping out of range of the battleships while boasting greater striking power. Indeed, a British battleship in 1941 could hit targets at 15  miles with its heavy guns. In contrast, Japan’s aircraft carriers could sweep the seas from 200 miles out. For Japan, carrier-based bombers literally represented an extension of the battleship’s striking power; the force that wrecked Battleship Row at Pearl Harbor dropped converted armor-piercing shells re-­purposed from Japan’s battleship magazines.76 What stopped the Axis advance for good in 1942 were the independent influences of Soviet manpower and Western codebreaking. Here, again, one set of combatants defeated another through a superior comprehension of the adversary and greater cooperation. The Red Army could trade space for time on Russia’s steppes, and controlled seemingly limitless reserves of soldiers to contest the center of Stalingrad with a German army at the end of a long supply line. In that titanic battle alone, the Red Army suffered more than 1.1 million casualties and lost 4000 tanks.77 Britain had no such surplus of men or materiel, but could magnify the power of its arms, thanks to a brilliant and secret exploitation of the device for securing Germany’s tactical radio communications—the famous Enigma enciphering machine. The Germans deployed Enigmas from Africa to the Arctic, on aircraft and U-boats and all over the Reich, and thought so highly of these machines that they imposed them on their Italian allies, making Italian military messages vulnerable to the British as well.78 Thanks to the insights provided by Enigma decrypts, British air and naval forces kept the Axis forces from expanding their conquests far beyond the Continent, and (with heavy losses) kept the Atlantic open for supplies and reinforcements from America when the United States joined the Allies in late 1941. The U.S. Navy used a similar codebreaking coup to stop Japan’s naval offensive at the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway in mid-1942. These indeed were the first fleet actions in which the opposing ships never came in sight of each other—both sides struck their blows using carrier-based bombers. Though briefly outnumbered in capital ships by the Japanese, the Americans at Midway knew the Japanese battle plan, thanks to their decryption of the Imperial Navy’s signals. The U.S. Navy massed all three of its available carriers and sank four of the six Japanese carriers that had struck Pearl Harbor, evening the strategic balance in the Pacific in an afternoon. Thereafter America’s shipbuilding industry—combined with unrestricted submarine warfare to destroy Japanese shipping and trade—could

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outproduce Japan’s and eventually regain control of the seas, as long as American leadership and fighting prowess had the courage to persevere.79 While the Allies managed to stop the Axis powers, however, they could not take the offensive and evict Germany and Japan from their extensive conquests until American production hit full stride. Britain and America enjoyed naval superiority after mid-1942, meaning the Axis states could not concert their efforts and indeed had to defend long, vulnerable supply lines against air and naval attack.80 The Western Allies could meanwhile draw resources from the Commonwealth and the Western Hemisphere and concentrate more or less where they chose, but more important still was that the American economy had enormous untapped potential. Mobilizing for two major wars at once, the Americans managed to produce more of everything that mattered—ships, planes, transports, trucks, and all the accoutrements of modern conflict. The quantities of materiel made in the United States still beggar description. Time magazine offered a quick look back just days before Japan surrendered in 1945: In the five years since the fall of France, U.S. industry and labor had turned out: 299,000 combat planes (96,000 last year); 3,600,000 trucks; 100,000 tanks; 87,620 warships (including landing craft), 5200 merchant vessels; 44 billion rounds of ammunition; 434 million tons of steel; 36 billion yards of cotton textiles for war. Despite this, U.S. home-fronters had remained the best-housed, best-­  clothed, and best-fed people in the world.81

The United States also shared that bounty liberally with its allies through the Lend-Lease program. Britain and the USSR could free up men for combat and concentrate their skilled workers on building the weapons their forces needed most while America provided trucks, transports, and thousands of other products—not the least of which were food and medicine. “Without American production the United Nations could never have won the war,” toasted Stalin when he conferred with Roosevelt and Churchill in Tehran in late 1943. Stalin was almost certainly right. American factories and workshops and farms made it possible to win World War II (Fig. 4.2).

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Fig. 4.2  British and Soviet soldiers in Soviet propaganda.  Wartime  propaganda  fostered cooperation among the Allies. (Unknown Artist, Unity of Strength—Inter-allied posters: British and Russian servicemen, shaking hands over dead body of swastikaed dragon, 1939–1946, Poster, U.K. National Archives Kew INF3/327)

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With American supplies, Stalin could grind down German resistance once the Allies shifted to the offensive in late 1942, but the Americans and British had to find ways around enemy strongpoints on their fronts. Stalin’s regime compelled Soviet soldiers to advance—at a cost of perhaps 20 million casualties. The Red Army had such numerical superiority in men, tanks, and guns that at key moments its divisions could pound holes in the German lines and exploit the breakthroughs.82 The Western electorates, however, would not tolerate such losses nor support indefinitely a grinding war of attrition like the last great conflict. Britain and America thus did all they could to circumvent attrition with innovations that allowed them to spot the enemy, to attack where their foes were weakest, and to deliver devastating firepower when Axis forces counterattacked. The Western Allies demonstrated this capability and showed that they too had learned the lessons of the blitzkrieg after their successful landing on the Continent in June 1944. Breaking out of their Normandy beachhead that August, General George Patton’s U.S.  Third Army charged around the Wehrmacht and eastward across France toward the Reich’s mostly unguarded border. His right flank (to the south) was essentially in space, with at least 36,000 German troops left in Third Army’s wake and theoretically menacing its lengthening supply line. Patton was gambling, but he knew his odds, thanks to excellent tactical air support and the Allies’ mastery of German tactical communications. In short, the codebreakers in Britain with their Enigma decrypts read in advance the German army’s movement plans, giving the Western Allies a distinct advantage in comprehension. Allied aircraft (especially the fighter-bombers that the Germans called jabos) then circled above to pounce on enemy vehicles trying to use key routes. By early September, the local German commander had had enough and pleaded with his American counterparts to “Keep the Jabo off my men and they will march north” to surrender. Both sides kept the bargain, which resulted in the Americans taking in 20,000 prisoners. The German commander, Erich Elster, pointedly snubbed his U.S. Army counterpart sent to officiate, handing his pistol to the (more junior) U.S. tactical air forces commander at the impromptu surrender ceremony.83 Aerial bombing indeed added new horrors to warfare. Airpower devotees since the 1920s had foretold the annihilation of cities, as bombers could soon deliver much bigger loads of high explosives (and even chemical munitions) hundreds of miles behind the battlefront. The Germans and then the British tried city bombing early in the war, though they

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proved only that even sustained raids would not wipe out civic infrastructures or induce mass panic. Indeed, the main strategic effect of the Luftwaffe’s 1940–1941 campaign against English cities was to turn American opinion in Britain’s favor. The Americans subsequently attacked German industries by day, guided by British intelligence and helped by Royal Air Force (RAF) night raids. This by 1944 had forced Germany’s key factories to disperse across the Reich. Seasoned photo-reconnaissance analyst Constance Babington-Smith of the RAF remembered that Allied intelligence had to search for factories that had been transferred into “the most unimaginable hiding places: to lunatic asylums and chocolate factories, to vast fantastic underground workshops, to firebreaks in pine forests and tunnels on autobahns.” Indeed, she and her colleagues found they had to set aside “one’s usual standards of what was possible or impossible.”84 That very notion of what was possible seemed to be shifting under the world’s feet. By the close of the war, nearly anything that could be seen could be hit with shells, bombs, or missiles. When a commander could comprehend what to hit, force could be applied quickly. New technologies could “see” what new weapons could now reach. Indeed, sonar, radar, and magnetic anomaly detection allowed even enemies cloaked in darkness or underwater to be attacked. Allied patrol planes watching for U-boats flew patterns determined by mathematicians. The new science of Operations Research decided how to paint such aircraft to keep them less visible to German lookouts, and where to add armor to bombers flying raids over Germany. The Western Allies also invented the digital computer, first creating special-purpose devices to crunch through myriad possible solutions to German cipher keys, then by war’s end inventing true, general-purpose machines, first employed to calculate trajectories for naval guns, but soon finding other uses as well. In 1942 American and British scientists and technicians launched the ultimate engineering project—the effort to harness nuclear fission in an explosive device before Hitler’s scientists could build such a bomb for him. By 1944 it was no longer possible for the Germans and Japanese to gain and hold ground against the allies. Artillery and airpower ruled the battlefield against the tank much as the machine gun had ruled it against infantry in World War I.85 In response to allied firepower, Berlin and Tokyo independently fielded guided weapons and used them to inflict maximum casualties against their Western opponents, hoping to make the war so costly that Britain and America would consent to more lenient peace terms

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(such a tactic, of course, was futile against Stalin and was not even tried). The Japanese pursued this goal by fashioning human-guided cruise missiles out of disposable aircraft and pilots. These Kamikazes, of course, could not reach American cities and had to aim for well-defended Allied warships and transports, but they still managed to sink dozens of ships and kill thousands of sailors. The Germans deployed guided glide bombs for similar missions, although never in significant numbers. Hitler’s Germany also developed its “vengeance weapons”: jet-powered V-1 cruise missiles, along with V-2 rockets that flew to the edge of space and plunged back to earth at supersonic speeds, giving no warning before impact. Both weapons were deadly but so inaccurate that they could only hit targets as large as cities. They caused tens of thousands of casualties in England, France, Belgium, and Holland, and might have caused more if British counterintelligence—which by 1944 secretly controlled the German spy nets in England—had not surreptitiously spread misunderstanding by passing deceptive damage reports to the Germans and causing them to shift the aim points of their V-1s and V-2s to less-densely populated areas.86 The ultimate demonstration of firepower, of course, came at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Allied air raids that had required hundreds of aircraft and thousands of bombs had already leveled several German and Japanese cities, but the atomic bomb took destructive power to a hitherto unimagined level. Two American B-29s with one weapon apiece wrecked two Japanese cities that August, and President Harry Truman lost no time in threatening utter destruction unless Japan surrendered unconditionally, declaring on August 6: We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan’s power to make war….[if] they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.87

The atomic bomb hypothetically gave America the ability to destroy every state on earth, but this monopoly would last barely four years. Stalin built his own bomb in 1949 (with help from spies in America and Britain), roughly equalizing the strategic power of the United States and the Soviet Union. Three years later the Americans exploded the first hydrogen bomb, and the Russians achieved their own such thermonuclear test in 1953,

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thus ensuring that a direct conflict between these two “superpowers” could render the planet uninhabitable. For the first time in history, war between the most powerful international actors offered neither side the prospect of strategic advantage—although such a catastrophe remained starkly possible, whether it arose by miscalculation or by accident.

The Cold War Begins That same summer as the atomic bombings, the victorious allies created the United Nations with the hope of preventing another such world war. Where the old League of Nations had operated through consensus and self-help, the UN provided for a Security Council of the world’s strongest states empowered to mediate conflicts and even to enforce its decisions by military means. This regime took effect with the UN Charter’s ratification in late 1945, and it nominally outlawed aggressive war by signatory states, thus carrying forward the ideal behind the aforementioned Kellogg-­ Briand Pact. Article 2 of the UN Charter obligated states to “refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state,” and to seek peaceful resolutions of their differences. The Charter then empowered the UN Security Council to investigate any “dispute, or any situation which might lead to international friction” (Art. 34). Though the United Nations would have an enforcement power that the League of Nations had lacked, the UN Charter still hedged at key points. The Security Council could only intervene upon unanimous consent of its five permanent members. The Charter also permitted states to act in individual or collective self-defense, and gave the United Nations no writ “to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.” [Arts. 2 and 51] These were key provisions for the great powers who sat as the Security Council’s permanent members: the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, and China. That status was crucial for Stalin, who assented to the United Nations partly because, with one of those permanent seats on the Security Council, he held a veto over any use of force by the UN. He also effectively received three votes in the General Assembly (which counted his vassal regions of Ukraine and Byelorussia along with Russia as independent states). China’s permanent seat on the Security Council quickly became a key factor in a dispute that dashed hopes for peace after the extinction of the

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Axis and the creation of the United Nations. Mao Zedong and his Communists finally won their revolutionary struggle in 1949, forcing Chiang Kai Shek’s Nationalists to retreat to Formosa. In so doing, Mao founded only the world’s second organic Marxist-Leninist state (the contemporaneous ones in Eastern Europe were imposed by the Soviet Army). Mao’s victory gave Stalin an ally in the world’s most populous nation. Indeed, Stalin had helped to destroy Nazism and Fascism, and thus at the end of World War II, he finally ranked unrivaled as the leader of any concerted opposition to bourgeois liberalism. Revolution in Russia had helped foster revolution in China, and the West once again seemed on the defensive, just four years after its greatest triumph. A direct challenge to the West soon arose, ironically enough, far away from Europe. The Chinese revolution enabled Mao and Stalin to allow their Korean client, Kim il-Sung, to attempt something similar in his homeland. Kim armed his veterans from the Chinese civil war with Soviet-­ provided tanks and launched a lightning invasion of South Korea on June 25, 1950, quickly capturing Seoul and driving the South to the brink of extinction. A response to North Korea’s invasion by now could only be authorized by the Security Council—if the Soviets permitted it to act. United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 83 on June 27 asked “Members of the United Nations to furnish such assistance to the Republic of Korea as may be necessary to repel the armed attack and to restore international peace and security in the area.” Resolution 83 passed because the Soviets did not use their veto, having decided to boycott the Council in January 1950 after it had refused to unseat the Republic of China and replace the Nationalist delegation with representatives of the new People’s Republic of China. Moscow never boycotted the Council again, which meant that the UNSC was essentially paralyzed in rival blocs from 1950 forward. The Korean War proved a bloody and disheartening test of the UN’s peacekeeping capacity. The three-year conflict caused at least 1.5 million battlefield casualties, with perhaps more than 2 million casualties among Korean civilians on both sides of the demarcation line between the Communist north and the non-Communist south. Initially the Korean War resembled the clashes of World War II, with rapid armored thrust and riposte, and even an amphibious landing by U.S.-led forces at Inchon in September 1950. Only a massive Communist Chinese intervention and still-more Soviet aid saved North Korea from conquest by advancing UN forces that autumn. Even after it took over command of the Communist

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war effort in late 1950, China could only push so hard against the superior firepower of UN forces defending the south. Chinese soldiers at the front were at the end of supply lines constantly under attack from the air. The commander of China’s People’s Volunteer Army there, Peng Dehuai, told the Central Military Commission at a February 1952 conference that government officials complaining of their problems in supplying his army ought to witness the results of their failure first-hand: You should go to the front and see with your own eyes what food and clothing the soldiers have! Not to speak of the casualties! For what are they giving their lives? We have no aircraft. We have only a few guns. Transports are not protected. More and more soldiers are dying of starvation. Can’t you overcome some of your difficulties? 88

At the same time, however, the Chinese had ample manpower and enough weaponry to defend the rugged terrain, and UN forces could not push them much farther north than the 38th Parallel that had divided the two Koreas from the end of World War II to 1950. Conventional war between great powers thus settled back to something resembling the Western Front in World War I—for the time being, at least, it could not yield strategic decision. The Korean War stalemate ended with an armistice in July 1953.

Conclusion The two World Wars witnessed concentrated force on scales that exceeded anything seen before. Both wreaked incredible destruction, in part because innovations in conveyance and comprehension gave rulers unprecedented ways to apply force, and also because states themselves adapted ideological notions of systemic violence that had hitherto persuaded only a radical fringe. In the early twentieth century, the ancient ways of mobilizing power for force and using it to scatter foes gained terrifying new lethality and reach. They gained that new ability to coerce both on the battlefield and off it, in new kinds of states committed to revolutionary ideals. Indeed, statesmen and commoners alike found that the ends for which force is employed can matter a great deal. All this did not happen all at once, of course, and it happened amid great shifts in the three principles of force: cooperation, conveyance, and comprehension. States gained the power to mobilize

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entire societies through ideology, to convey force through the air and with a precision never seen before, and to understand the battlefield (and alter the adversary’s comprehension) to know where to concentrate. No observer could have predicted such a course as late as 1910, when European world supremacy looked invincible and permanent. World War I shook that dominance both materially and morally. It did so not only because Europe, with its high ideals of civilization and the great good that its technological and scientific advances had done to alleviate human suffering, had failed to find peaceful solutions to its internecine disputes. Europe also failed because it paradoxically both gained and lost power to apply force for strategic decision. The most advanced armies perfected the use of the machine gun and field artillery, coordinating them through telephone and telegraph so they could sweep a battlefield of all living things not buried underground or protected by armor. The wireless telegraph finally permitted admirals to control ships at sea and to hunt their foes (both at sea and in the air) by triangulating their radio signals. As one side of the struggle in World War I held military dominance at sea while the other proved all but unbeatable on land, neither side could prevail until the continent was half-ruined. The side that won, moreover, did so by mobilizing the resources and manpower of the New World and most of Asia on its behalf—spreading modern methods of war to many lands that hitherto envied them from a distance. At the same time, modern states proved immensely strong at mobilizing, controlling, and applying the productive energies of their peoples despite huge losses in manpower and opportunity costs. One nation proved the exception to that rule—Czarist Russia, perhaps the most backward country in Europe despite its glittering aristocracy. What supervened in Russia was a Revolutionary ideology imported from Western Europe but rejecting even the nascent liberalism of the Central Powers. The Party that brought about that revolution quickly hardened into a state, without, however, losing its revolutionary zeal and the paranoid tendencies it had developed as survival mechanisms under decades of oppression and underground conspiracy. That party, moreover, inspired other anti-liberal (and anti-Marxist) revolutions in Italy and Germany, which themselves turned into party regimes. Totalitarian states, most prominently represented by the Communist powers, aspired to extend the centralization of physical power into a centralization of power over ideas. This monopoly of thought, whether made for the purpose of alleviating inequality or for the extension of the power of the so-called master race,

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brought the regimes into conflict with the liberalism that had guided the West since the Enlightenment. The anti-liberal regimes could not live in peace at home or abroad, for their ruling parties felt surrounded by enemies inside and out. The rival party regimes briefly allied with one another against the West, and the result was a World War II even more destructive than the original. As an ideological struggle, World War II destroyed three regimes that had openly defied the growing presumption against aggressive war; the Axis states could not gather enough power to overcome the coalition of (liberal and Communist) states arrayed against them. In military terms, all sides learned to control forces at a distance on land, sea, and air, restoring offensive power through new, radio-aided command and control over combined arms, ideally bringing tanks, guns, aircraft, and ships to act in mutually supporting synchronization. Both the Axis and then the Allies could concentrate suddenly in new ways and across unprecedented distances, using intelligence to locate the enemy’s weak points. Still, the new ways of war only worked with the application of vast resources and productive potential. World War II was won with America production, Soviet manpower, and British intelligence (and by training and arming still more allies in China, the Middle East, and Africa). Immediately after the war, however, these factors no longer worked in tandem but increasingly served to check one another. Ironically, still another check arose from a quintessentially liberal, Western project—the seemingly Quixotic progress toward international order and the outlawing of war that had advanced in the 1920s and flowered in the United Nations and its Security Council. Though the coalition that had won World War II soon fragmented, now aggressive war between states was not only illegal under international law but seemingly could no longer yield decision until a hugely destructive but strategically futile struggle bled one side white. This had to be proven in the Korean War before all sides believed it. Neither the Communist world nor the Western forces fighting under the UN banner wanted to resort to atomic bombs to break the military stalemate, and the armistice that ended the shooting phase of that conflict gave neither side a victory (save the people of South Korea, who would still wait decades to enjoy Western-style liberalism and prosperity). By 1953, war between advanced states was no longer politically or strategically useful. Yet this reality brought no end to conflicts and the use of force. The only way one could use force for strategic ends was seemingly through terror and guerrilla war,

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or by deterring them with nuclear weapons. The result would be chronic “asymmetric conflict” and a proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Notes 1. James J. Davilla and Arthur M. Soltan, French Aircraft of the First World War (Stratford, CT: Flying Machines Press, 1997), p. 3. 2. Arthur W. Page, War Manual of the Great Conflict of 1914 (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, Page, & Co., 1914), p. 23. 3. Ibid. 4. C.  Ernest Fayle, Seaborne Trade, Volume 3 (London: John Murray, 1924), p. 465. 5. John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York: Viking, 1976), p. 269. 6. Arno Dosch, “The Last Ditch in Belgium,” originally published by World’s Work in January 1915, and reprinted in Francis J.  Reynolds and Allen L. Churchill, eds., World’s War Events, Volume 1 (New York: PF Collier & Son, 1921), pp. 117, 123. 7. Irvin S. Cobb, Paths of Glory: Impressions of War Written at and Near the Front (New York: George H. Doran, 1915), p. 244. 8. Ibid., p. 263. 9. Ibid., p. 267. 10. Nicholas A.  Lambert, “Strategic Command and Control for Maritime Warfare: Creation of the Royal Navy’s ‘War Room’ System, 1905–1915,” Journal of Military History 69 (April 2005), pp. 404–408. 11. Quoted in Christopher Andrew, Her Majesty’s Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community (New York: Viking, 1986), p. 99. 12. James Goldrick, Before Jutland: The Naval War in Northern European Waters, August 1914–February 1915 (Annapolis: US Naval Institute Press, 2015), p. 300. 13. Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis: 1911–1918 (New York: Free Press, 1959 [1931]), p. 335. 14. John Ferris, “‘Airbandit’: C3I and Strategic Air Defence during the First Battle of Britain, 1915–18,” in Michael Dockrill and David French, eds., Strategy and Intelligence: British Policy During the First World War (London: Hambledon, 1996), p. 24. 15. Stephen Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 28. 16. Alistair Horne, The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 (Penguin, 1981 [1962]), pp. 158–59, 313–17. 17. Terrence J. Finnegan, Shooting the Front: Allied Aerial Reconnaissance and Photographic Interpretation on the Western Front--World War I (Washington: National Defense Intelligence College, 2006), pp. 295–301.

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18. Erich Ludendorff, Ludendorff’s Own Story: August 1914–November 1918, Vol. II, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1919), pp. 201–208. 19. Ibid., pp. 203–204. 20. Churchill, The World Crisis, p. 733. 21. The first “edition” of Fuller’s “Plan 1919,” dated May 24, 1918, appears in J.F.C. Fuller, Memoirs of an Unconventional Soldier (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1936), p. 325; also online [accessed February 11, 2017] at http://www.alternatewars.com/WW1/Fuller_1919.htm 22. Ibid. 23. William S. Sims with Burton J. Hendrick, The Victory at Sea (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1921), p. 9. 24. Ibid., pp. 125–126. 25. Ludendorff, Ludendorff’s Own Story, pp. 135–136. 26. Madeleine Z.  Doty, Short Rations: An American Woman in Germany, 1915–1916 (New York: A.L. Burt, 1917), pp. 33, 124, 132. 27. Churchill, The World Crisis, p. 756. 28. Ferguson, Civilization, p.  184. See also Dick van Galen Last with Ralf Futselaar, Black Shame: African Soldiers in Europe, 1914–1922 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 59, 72. 29. Paul Johnson, Modern Times, p. 41. 30. Diaz, The Conquest of New Spain, pp. 404, 407–408. 31. Arlette Estienne Mondet, Le général J.B.E Estienne  – père des chars: Des chenilles et des ailes (Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 2011 [1969]), p. 159. London had a similar thought at the time, recalled Churchill; see The World Crisis, p. 755. 32. Quoted in Churchill, The World Crisis, pp. 795–796. 33. Ibid., p. 796. 34. Jonathan D. Smele, The “Russian” Civil Wars, 1916–1926: Ten Years that Shook the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 10–17. 35. Smele, The “Russian” Civil Wars, p. 3. 36. Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution (1918), in Stepan Apresyan and Jim Riordan, editors, V.I.  Lenin: Collected Works, Vol. 25 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974 [1964]), p. 402; accessed August 3, 2019, at https://archive.org/stream/LeninCW/Lenin%20CW-Vol.%2025#page/ n407/mode/2up/search/402. See also Robert Service, Spies and Commissars: The Early Years of the Russian Revolution (New York: PublicAffairs, 2012), pp. 62–66. 37. Lenin, “Report on the Activities of the Council of People’s Commissars,” January 24, 1918; Collected Works, Vol. 26, p.  458; accessed May 13, 2018, at https://archive.org/stream/LeninCW/Lenin%20CW-Vol.%20 26#page/n461/mode/2up

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38. Leon Trotsky, The Defense of Terrorism (Terrorism and Communism): A Reply to Karl Kautsky (London: Labour Publishing Co., 1921), p. 48. See also Service, Spies and Commissars, pp. 155–157. 39. Quoted in Service, Spies and Commissars, p. 325. 40. Trotsky, The Defense of Terrorism, pp. 29–30, 52–54. 41. Ibid., p. 61. 42. Ibid., pp. 57–60. 43. Ibid., pp. 51, 55. 44. Johnson, Modern Times, pp. 65–68. 45. Avalon Project, Yale Law School, “Peace Treaty between the Holy Roman Emperor and the King of France and their respective Allies” [the Treaty of Munster, part of the Peace of Westphalia], October 24, 1648, see articles 1–2; accessed March 14, 2017, at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/westphal.asp. 46. Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” in Lewis White Beck, ed. and trans., On History: Immanuel Kant (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957); see the Second Definitive Article for a Perpetual Peace, pp.  98–101. Kant also denounced espionage and subversion; see Sec. I:6, pp. 89–90. 47. Oona A.  Hathaway and Scott J.  Shapiro, The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), pp. 127–130. 48. League of Nations Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon, August 22, 1922; accessed 1 April 2017 at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/ Mandate_for_Syria_and_the_Lebanon 49. League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, August 12, 1922; accessed 1 April 2017 at https://unispal.un.org/DPA/DPR/unispal.nsf/0/2FCA 2C68106F11AB05256BCF007BF3CB 50. Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, pp. 189, 192, 198–201. 51. Ibid., pp. 189, 192, 198–201. 52. Ibid., pp. 189, 192, 198–201. 53. Trotsky, The Defense of Terrorism, p. 63. 54. Benito Mussolini, The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, trans. Jane Soames (London: Hogarth, 1933), pp. 13–15. 55. Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, p. 192. 56. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, translated by James Murphy (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1939), p.  53; accessed March 21, 2017, at http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200601.txt, p. 53. 57. Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 71–72. 58. Arnold J. Zurcher, “State Propaganda in Italy,” in Harwood L. Childs and Marx Fritz Morstein, eds., Propaganda and Dictatorship: A Collection of Papers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1936), p.  48. See also Mussolini, The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, pp. 23–25.

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59. Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 352. 60. Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism, pp. 9, 54–55. For his part, Mussolini eschewed the notion of class conflict but nonetheless wanted the Fascist state to employ “necessarily severe measures” against retrograde elements opposing Fascism’s “spontaneous and inevitable movement of Italy into the twentieth century”; The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, p. 26. 61. The phrase comes from Count Carlo Sforza, commenting on Fascist Italy’s complaint about France’s alliance with Yugoslavia; see his Europe and Europeans: A Study in Historical Psychology and International Politics (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1936), p. 181. 62. “On Party Unity,” March 16, 1921; accessed April 1, 2017, at https://www. marxists.org/history/ussr/government/party-congress/10th/16.htm 63. Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, pp. 283–285. 64. Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, pp. 283–285. 65. William L.  Shirer, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942 [1941]), p. 133. 66. Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), pp. 190–202, 322–339. 67. Sforza, Europe and Europeans, p. 245. 68. Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 218. 69. Last and Futselaar, Black Shame, pp. 41, 59. 70. Quoted in Johnson, Modern Times, p. 360. 71. William L.  Shirer, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942 [1941]), p. 173. 72. Ibid., p. 176. Emphasis in original. 73. Edward Crankshaw and Strobe Talbott, trans. and eds., Khrushchev Remembers (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970) p. 135. 74. Robert Citino, “Beyond Fire and Movement: Command, Control and Information in the German Blitzkrieg,” in Emily O. Goldman, Information and Revolutions in Military Affairs (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 138–145. 75. Gordon W. Prange, with Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon, At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor (New York: McGraw-­ Hill, 1981), pp. 101–102. 76. Ibid., p, 268. 77. Raymond Limbach, “Battle of Stalingrad,” Encyclopedia Britannica online; accessed May 3, 2018, at https://www.britannica.com/event/ Battle-of-Stalingrad 78. Donald P.  Steury, The Intelligence War (New York: MetroBooks, 2000), p. 80.

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79. Joel Ira Holwitt argues that the submarine campaign violated international law and U.S. treaty commitments, but was nonetheless launched as a highly effective strategy against a lawless and predatory maritime empire. See Execute Against Japan: The US Decision to Conduct Unrestricted Submarine Warfare (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2009), pp. 1–4. 80. Phillips Payson O’Brien, How the War was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II (New York: University of Cambridge Press, 2015), p. 5. 81. “Production: The Winner,” Time, August 20, 1945. See also Rick Atkinson, “Projecting American Power in the Second World War,” Journal of Military History (April 2016), p. 351. 82. For a first-hand account, see Hermann Balck, Order in Chaos: The Memoirs of General of Panzer Troops Hermann Balck, David T. Zebecki and Dieter J. Biedekerken, eds. (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2015). 83. Bradford J. Shwedo, XIX Tactical Air Command and ULTRA: Patton’s Force Enhancers in the 1944 Campaign in France (Montgomery, AL: Air University Press, 2001), pp. 90–95. 84. Constance Babington-Smith, Air Spy: The Story of Photo Intelligence in World War II (New York: Harper, 1957), p. 190. 85. Colin S.  Gray, Modern Strategy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 238–239. See, for instance, Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943–1944 (New York: Henry Holt, 2007), p.  426, on the artillery that halted the German counterattack at Anzio in 1944. 86. J.C. Masterman, The Double-Cross System in the War of 1939–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), pp. 178–182. 87. Harry S. Truman, “Statement by the President Announcing the Use of the A-Bomb at Hiroshima,” August 6, 1945; accessed May 13, 2018, at https://www.trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/index.php?pid=100. The Allies in their Potsdam Declaration on July 26, 1945 had warned Tokyo: “We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces, and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.” 88. Cited in Barbara Barnouin and Changgen Yu, Zhou Enlai: A Political Life (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2006), p. 149.

CHAPTER 5

A Frozen World, 1953–1990

“…you cannot resolve a country’s complex problems by force.” —Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs, 1995

By 1945 overwhelming force could be applied at such great distances that the notion of a battlefield itself almost lost relevance. Cities could be devastated by bombs and potentially by missiles as well, while autocratic and even democratic leaders mobilized whole societies for the struggle. Party-­ based regimes in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union exploited ancient republican symbols and compelled their peoples to act as if surrounded by internal and external enemies who needed to be resisted and ultimately destroyed. Such extraordinary changes in the tools of conveyance and cooperation allowed governments to concentrate forces at a scale and with a speed not seen before. These trends combined in history’s bloodiest and most destructive war, which ended only with the unleashing of weapons that threatened to end civilization itself. The Cold War would make these realities global in scope. Atomic weapons had sprung from Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity and the mutability of space and time. His E = mc2 showed that space and time were two sides of the same variable, with energy holding them together—energy that man could now release in terrifying quantities.1 This new power threatened to unleash such destruction that employing it

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seemed strategically pointless. Since rulers seek to rule the living, not the dead, force which destroys even its wielder negates itself unless it creates power in some other form—by convincing people, for instance, to think and feel and live in some new way. British socialist and journalist George Orwell in 1945 glimpsed “a peace that is no peace.”2 The Cold War that he described would not remain forever frozen, however, in a global stalemate. Indeed, the Cold War witnessed something incredibly dramatic. The adjective “incredible” fits here, for what transpired between 1945 and 1991 was literally unprecedented and ranks as perhaps history’s most profound and surprising shift in power. In a span of two generations, the British, French, Dutch, Belgian, Portuguese, and finally the Soviet empires all effectively ended. All but the latter had endured for centuries, yet none of these imperial powers lost their empires to military conquest. How did that happen, and what did it mean?

The Nuclear Dilemma Shortly after dawn on November 1, 1952, American scientists on the Pacific atoll of Eniwetok triggered the world’s first thermonuclear blast. The device they employed was no small  weapon but rather a building-­ sized assembly of pipes and tanks with an atomic bomb at its core. Nevertheless, their contraption unleashed energy equivalent to 10 megatons of TNT and generated a fireball five kilometers wide with a mushroom cloud soaring to the edge of space. Nothing remained of the islet on which the device had sat; instead, the shallow waters of the atoll now filled a crater two kilometers wide. The Soviet Union responded with its own thermonuclear test in August 1953. Though smaller in destructive power, Moscow’s device demonstrated that Soviet scientists had the skill and resources to pace the Americans in the Cold War arms race. Indeed, the Soviets soon weaponized the system, dropping their first hydrogen bomb from a Tu-16 bomber over Kazakhstan in late 1955.3 The Americans had deployed their own hydrogen bombs a year earlier, and thus the Cold War rivals had each attained the capability to annihilate each other. The chairman of the U.S. Congress’ joint committee on atomic energy, Rep. Sterling Cole, revealed the hitherto secret effects of the first American test in February 1954. Speaking to a convention of the National Ready

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Mixed Concrete Association in Chicago, Cole explained that a single bomb matching the power of the Eniwetok blast would devastate that city, leveling an area six miles in diameter and causing damage twenty miles away. He added that the nation’s defenses could count on destroying fewer than one in four Soviet bombers carrying H-bombs toward American cities.4 Cole’s speech resounded across the world. One who heard him clearly was Winston Churchill, almost finished as Britain’s prime minister. As Churchill’s last major speech in Parliament hinted in March 1955, this new destructive power posed an unprecedented dilemma for policymakers and commanders: There is an immense gap between the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb. The atomic bomb, with all its terrors, did not carry us outside the scope of human control or manageable events in thought or action, in peace or war. But [since Rep. Cole publicized the results of hydrogen bomb testing], the entire foundation of human affairs was revolutionized, and mankind placed in a situation both measureless and laden with doom.5

Mankind now possessed the most paradoxical of weapons. They threatened such extraordinary physical destruction that rulers could barely comprehend using them. Weaponry had hitherto translated into effective force when it compelled foes to keep their distance and disperse. Hydrogen bombs now could erase not only cities but entire societies, poisoning the landscape itself and reducing the survivors to prehistoric conditions. President Dwight D.  Eisenhower suggested this in his first Presidential inauguration in January 1953: “Science seems ready to confer upon us, as its final gift, the power to erase human life from this planet.”6 Yale professor Bernard Brodie had predicted the strategic import of the atomic bomb in 1946: “Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars,” he noted. “From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose.”7 Thermonuclear weapons only intensified the dilemma that Brodie foresaw. Eisenhower gradually turned toward this conclusion, to the dismay of some of his Air Force generals, who for a time viewed nuclear bombs as the ultimate means of implementing the World War II concept of using strategic bombing to “kill nations.”8 Thus the point of having thermonuclear arms became (by the 1960s) never to use them. The alternative became unthinkable, although it was

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actually thought for a time. In his first year as President, Eisenhower himself had briefly contemplated pre-emptive nuclear war with the Soviets. Sustaining the American nuclear arsenal on a constant war footing to deter a Soviet surprise attack might well bankrupt the United States or turn it into an armed camp, he privately worried to his advisers in September 1953. The Soviets knew the power of nuclear arms, he reasoned, and their refusal to cooperate in some sort of international control of these weapons suggested Moscow “must be fairly assumed to be contemplating their aggressive use.” Our duty to future generations, thought the President, thus might “require us to initiate war at the most propitious moment,” that is, before the Soviets could deploy their own H-bombs.9 In a theoretical sense, Eisenhower’s logic posited that in the thermonuclear era exerting force depended upon only one variable: conveyance. The power that could convey its weapon first would destroy the other completely. Fortunately for mankind the President soon drew back from this abyss. Soviet doctrine showed a similar bifurcation. Senior leaders in the Kremlin worried about a nuclear war, but for a time the Party line maintained that a nuclear war would only destroy capitalism; socialism could fight and win. “We all understand and consider it to be necessary to conduct, promote and stimulate such measures which are conducive to the reduction of international tension,” noted Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov as late as 1957. “This is the foundation of our work on the strengthening of peace, on the postponement and prevention of a new war” (emphasis added).10 The two sides therefore began the Cold War dreading a nuclear exchange while doing all they could to prepare for such a catastrophe. The Americans and the Soviets spent a decade discovering how powerful they could make their new weapons. Both sides built some very big bombs. The 1954 “CASTLE BRAVO” shot (15 MT) marked the largest U.S. detonation—it was a thousand times more powerful than the bomb that had leveled Hiroshima. The Soviets exploded a prototype bomb (the “Tsar Bomba”) yielding at least 50 MT in 1961. These were huge devices; the former was stationary, and the latter could barely be lifted aloft by the biggest bomber in the Soviet air force. Thereafter the superpowers’ efforts turned toward making thermonuclear weapons small enough to be easily conveyed by lighter aircraft and even to fit in the nose cones of ballistic missiles. The W56 warheads aboard the U.S. Air Force’s Minuteman

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Fig. 5.1 CASTLE BRAVO thermonuclear detonation, 1954. (Source: U.S. Department of Energy, Castle Bravo, February 28, 1954)

missiles in 1962, for instance, each had a yield of 1.2 MT.11 Deployed in the American Midwest, such “inter-continental” missiles could reach targets in the Soviet Union thousands of miles from their launch sites (Fig. 5.1). For all their power, early Cold War arsenals were hardly robust. Indeed, they were highly vulnerable. The U.S. Air Force temporarily lost 70% of its long-range, nuclear-capable bombers to a Texas tornado in 1952; a subsequent RAND Corporation study concluded that the Soviets by 1956 could destroy most U.S. bombers on the ground in a surprise attack.12 The mid-ranged (1500-mile) Jupiter missiles that the United States based in Italy and Turkey to deter a Soviet attack on Western Europe sat out in the open, virtually ready for launch—and were thus naked to a pre-­emptive strike by the Soviets—before they were finally withdrawn in 1963. Hence the push on both sides of the Cold War for redundancy, produced by building more weapons in more varieties. All the major nuclear powers

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deployed at least three deployment schemes for their weapons, fielding them aboard bombers, land-based missiles, and missile-firing submarines (the famous nuclear “Triad”). Fabricating, testing, and even transporting such weapons proved dangerous for their handlers and other people as well. A miscalculation could bring disaster. The aforementioned CASTLE BRAVO shot yielded roughly three times more energy than predicted, and the radioactive fallout that it scattered sickened Pacific islanders who were thought to be safely out of harm’s way. The Soviets’ plutonium production facility at Kyshtym suffered an explosion and radiation leak in 1957, causing some 10,000 people to be evacuated from villages downwind.13 The Americans accidentally dropped unarmed nuclear bombs on various states and allied countries. Indeed, during the 1950s and 1960s, several U.S. Air Force bombers crashed with weapons aboard or accidentally lost their ordnance—including a 4-megaton H-bomb that buried itself in the salt marshes behind the resort town of Tybee Island, Georgia. It has never been found. Relatively crude command and control systems compounded the initial instability in the nuclear arms race. Neither side at first had much warning of an impending attack, so both superpowers kept their forces on alert. Thus the U.S. Air Force planned to launch waves of strategic bombers much faster than it had in World War II, and now they would carry far more powerful weapons.14 But in an attack, moreover, decision makers could not count on their connections to the nuclear firing units. Washington in the mid-1955 decided it was dangerously dependent on high-frequency radio to carry its military communications; Soviet wartime jamming might impair 90% of radio connectivity (civilian and military) with Europe and all of it to East Asia.15 An actual attack also could have ruined radio communications, as the Americans learned in testing nuclear weapons in space. Their STARFISH PRIME exo-atmospheric shot in July 1962—involving a 1.4 MT blast at 250  miles altitude and 800  miles southwest of Hawaii—damaged electronics in Honolulu and crippled seven satellites in low-Earth orbit.16 This was but a foretaste of the electromagnetic pulse effects that could disable command and control in wartime. Electrical engineer Paul Baran learned the extent of the larger communications problem when he arrived at RAND in 1959: Both the US and USSR were building hair trigger nuclear ballistic missile systems. The early missile control systems were not physically robust. Thus, there was a dangerous temptation for either party to misunderstand the

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actions of the other and fire first….long distance communications networks at that time were extremely vulnerable and not able to survive attack. Here a most dangerous situation was created by the lack of a survivable communication system.17

Both superpowers initially sought to build active defensive measures to reduce the damage from a nuclear war. In the Soviet Union these measures took the form of a continent-wide air defense system, bristling with anti-aircraft guns and jet-powered interceptors, soon supplemented by surface-to-air missiles. The United States built a less-ambitious system in cooperation with Canada, which hosted early-warning radars to scan the Arctic for incoming bombers. The system also boasted one of the first computer-assisted command and control interfaces (dubbed SAGE and deployed in 1959). The ability of enemy bombers to evade such tracking remained a primary concern in both Washington and Moscow throughout the Cold War. Both sides knew some bombers would deliver their weapons even after running a gauntlet of defenses that included nuclear-tipped anti-aircraft missiles, but neither side could rest much confidence in its defenses to protect any given site, or in the ability of any particular bomber to reach its target. The superpowers also invested in civil defense measures, though the United States largely abandoned these as futile by the late 1960s. Thus only one generation of American schoolchildren learned to “duck and cover” beneath their desks in drills that seem comical today but were then taken quite seriously. The Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 helped to convince both sides to back away from the abyss. Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, resolved to defend Cuba’s infant revolution from American imperialism and ordered a clandestine deployment of nuclear missiles to Cuba that fall. American intelligence spotted the missiles just before they became operational, prompting an emergency response from President John F. Kennedy. He and his advisers huddled in secret, debating options that included striking the missiles. “Each one of us was being asked to make a recommendation which would affect the future of all mankind, a recommendation which, if wrong and accepted, could mean the destruction of the human race,” recalled the President’s younger brother, Robert.18 President Kennedy ultimately declined to order a pre-emptive attack, perhaps persuaded by his brother’s sense that such a move reeked of perfidy: “I now know how [Japanese premier Hideki] Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbor,” read one of Robert Kennedy’s notes to the President

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during the deliberations.19 The White House instead ordered a “quarantine” of Cuba, with U.S. warships stopping Soviet vessels and U.S. reconnaissance aircraft buzzing the island. Though technically not acts of war, these forceful measures alarmed the Cubans and their Soviet guests, who expected an American invasion and secretly resolved to resist with tactical nuclear weapons. Even Soviet submarines carried nuclear-armed torpedoes; one sub skipper submerged in the Atlantic reportedly had to be talked out of launching his at the U.S. Navy destroyers harassing his boat with practice depth charges.20 The Missile Crisis and the realization that neither active nor passive defenses could prevent a nuclear strike demonstrated two new realities. First, both sides had inadvertently globalized nuclear war by deploying so many tactical nuclear munitions. The Americans did not learn until the 1990s just how many such weapons had been fielded in and around Cuba, but they believed that invading the island could provoke Moscow into attacking America’s NATO allies in West Germany with the Soviet Union’s alarming quantitative superiority in tanks, guns, and men. U.S. forces deployed in Western Europe would then defend themselves and NATO countries with nuclear weapons, and the escalating salvos would ultimately reach the American homeland.21 In short, any direct clash between “conventional” U.S. and Soviet forces could go nuclear, given the number of nuclear bombs, warheads, torpedoes, and shells deployed forward, and the likely counterstrikes using theater or even strategic weapons. Second, neither superpower possessed a sanctuary safe from H-bombs; seemingly everything could be destroyed in a day, and neither side could escape a devastating nuclear counterattack.22 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara would tell Congress two years later that in just “the first hour [of a thermonuclear exchange] one hundred million Americans and one hundred million Russians would be killed.”23 Yet the Cuban Missile Crisis also showed how the danger of thermonuclear war could prompt even distrustful adversaries to defuse a confrontation. Looking back some years later with the perspective of a forced retirement, Khrushchev marveled at how the threat of annihilation had sobered leaders in Washington and Moscow: “The two most powerful nations of the world had been squared against each other, each with its finger on the button. You’d have thought that war was inevitable. But both sides showed that if the desire to avoid war is strong enough, even the most pressing dispute can be solved by compromise.”24 Robert Kennedy claimed to have resisted a proposed attack on Cuba not only

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because it would escalate but also because he sensed world opinion would condemn it; such pre-emption “could not be undertaken by the US if we were to maintain our moral position at home and around the globe. Our struggle against Communism throughout the world was far more than physical survival—it had at its essence our heritage and our ideals, and these we must not destroy.”25 Khrushchev’s and Kennedy’s feelings about facing nuclear war revealed how the potential destructive power of these new weapons exerted a powerful influence upon rulers. Of course there is nothing new about the relationship between physical and emotional power; rulers have long killed selected subjects to persuade or terrify the survivors. The new feature of the Cold War was that the potential use of nuclear weapons exerted palpable emotional force not just upon their targets but also upon those who might use them. In short, the ability of both powers to reliably convey overwhelming force to each other’s homelands meant that war between the most powerful states had become not only futile but also too dangerous as a mechanism for settling disputes. The Missile Crisis ended when Moscow backed down after Kennedy left Khrushchev a way to gain at least something (e.g., a tacit pledge that America would not invade Cuba, and a delayed withdrawal of the obsolete Jupiter missiles from Europe).26 Khrushchev and his comrades, moreover, knew their arsenal of intercontinental missiles was still too small to guarantee a Soviet second strike on America should the Missile Crisis escalate to war—that was one reason for sending Soviet missiles to Cuba in the first place.27 Deterrence now worked in the mind of the adversary, as both superpowers grew convinced that they had nothing to gain from offensive war with each other. The nuclear competition saw the top of the “level of conflict” ladder built so high that it became suicidal for even the most powerful state to employ the full measure of force that it could. Yet both sides felt the need to convince potential enemies that they might indeed use their H-bombs if provoked. Khrushchev insisted (after he had been ousted in 1964) that he had preached the need for strategic stability with a touch of fatal resolve: “I always operated on the principle that I should be clearly against war but never frightened of it.” He added “As long as two opposing systems exist, we will be obliged to keep all possible means of warfare stockpiled. I’m emphasizing this because I want my belief in the importance of vigilance and effective deterrence against imperialist aggression to be clearly understood.”28

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The 1960s subsequently saw both the Americans and the Soviets building out their arsenals. Moscow soon closed the gap in inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), building to rough parity with the United States by 1970. Both sides further diversified their strategic nuclear forces with submarine-launched missiles, rendering it virtually impossible for an attacker to be sure of hitting all the warheads that would be left for retaliation.29 The United States also invested in hardening its military communications, exploring avenues to diversify and digitize the transmission of orders to firing units rather than relying on analog signals. Its new AUTODIN digital communications network in the 1960s, for instance, helped end the U.S. military’s dependence on telephone and HF radio circuits, and would serve for decades before being replaced by packet-­switched links that themselves constituted some of the earliest portions of the Internet.30 The superpowers belatedly supplemented vigilance and robustness with confidence-building measures, beginning with a Washington-Moscow “hotline” for crises, installed in 1963, and a growing interest in calming their competition through arms control agreements. These began with a ban on above-ground nuclear tests (1963), and carried into lengthy discussions about limiting actual weapons. Negotiations bore fruit in 1972 with a U.S.-Soviet deal capping strategic nuclear delivery systems (the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, or SALT), and another bargain on strategic anti-ballistic missiles. These treaties became possible because President Richard Nixon could sell them to the Senate for ratification by developing reliable intelligence systems to monitor compliance. The senators were impressed with the gains in warning and surveillance that the American Intelligence Community achieved by deploying sensors and cameras aboard satellites. These “national technical means of verification”—as SALT’s Article V called them—helped ensure the Soviets could not catch the United States by surprise, either with an all-out attack or with the deployment of a game-changing, new strategic weapon. By this point several other states had joined the nuclear club, with all of them being victors in World War II. Britain detonated an atomic device independently of the Americans in 1952 and tested its first thermonuclear weapon (Operation GRAPPLE) in 1957. The former had been developed under a Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee, and when the Tories returned to power his successor Winston Churchill, despite his misgivings above, launched a crash program to build a British hydrogen bomb.31 Once London had accomplished this, the U.S.  Congress ended nuclear unilateralism and passed legislation allowing the British access to American

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weapons technology. The United States henceforth gave a certain standardization to the West’s arsenal; the American-made B28 bomb (1.5 MT) became in essence the NATO H-bomb.32 China built its own H-bomb in 1967, and France followed in 1968. All but China (at the time) were also permanent members of the UN Security Council. That soon changed when the United Nations gave China’s permanent seat on the Security Council to the People’s Republic of China in 1971, unseating the delegation from the non-communist Republic of China (Taiwan). This step showed that power had decisively shifted to the makers of H-bombs, and had spread globally outside the West as well. Though several nations have since publicly admitted to testing atomic devices (among them India, Pakistan, and North Korea), there is no conclusive evidence as of this writing that the club of nations possessing H-bombs has grown in membership since France joined. The competition between the nuclear-armed superpowers engendered two key trends for the future. First, the United States and the Soviet Union had reached a certain stability in their mutual antagonism by 1970. Yet the logic of “mutually assured destruction” only obtained if both sides felt the other side accepted that logic and cherished no illusions about finding some new, game-changing capability. This belief, moreover, had to prevail on both sides of the ideological chasm between Moscow and Washington. It would erode and even fail if neither side quite trusted that the other would remain deterred. The second trend was that new minds began mattering in the nuclear standoff: those of the general public. Basic concepts of nuclear capabilities and warfighting quickly reached popular culture. By 1964, for instance, the notion of nuclear deterrence could be memorably summarized by Peter Sellers’ eponymous character in Dr. Strangelove: “Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy the fear to attack.” The arms race also prompted a significant peace movement, at least in Europe. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) got its start in England a few weeks after Britain exploded its first H-bomb. CND was a non-communist organization, unlike the Soviet-sponsored World Peace Council, and it gave the world its iconic emblem, now called simply “the Peace Sign.” At the same time, scholars and activists in Europe became interested in “peace research.” While retaining the notion that social injustice equated to systemic violence, they spurned the siren call for personal, physical retaliation in response to such violence, arguing that it just prompted more violence in a vicious cycle.33

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Such sentiments soon began to matter in the liberal West. Just after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Attorney General Robert F.  Kennedy wanted it known that he and his brother the President had resisted advice to launch pre-emptive strikes on the Soviet missiles, as hitting them would constitute a Pearl Harbor in reverse.34 The Kennedys gave exclusive access to the Saturday Evening Post to explain the debates in the White House over responding to the Soviet missile deployment. The fact that it now mattered to an American president what the world thought about his attitude to nuclear war spoke volumes. Despite deploying the most undiscriminating weapons ever created, the leaders of at least one superpower cared what public opinion thought about nuclear war. Both sides feared to resort to general war to settle their very grave differences. This did not end war, however, because armed conflict was shifting to the “Third World,” and there the quiet integrity inherent in peace research would not impress the radicals of the 1960s.

The West Retreats The Cold War competition between mutually exclusive world systems would not be fought out in terms of general war, but it unfolded in no peaceful manner. Conflict erupted in the context of the long European withdrawal from the empires established during the West’s three-century military dominance. World War I had erased any moral claim that the European powers might have had to rule over most of the world. As a result, European rulers lost a key component of the power that they might have used to sustain cooperation from their colonies. What France had called the Western “mission civilisatrice” then made way for a new argument against colonization, namely the theories of Western Imperialism propounded by Lenin and others, not only in the colonized world but in the West itself. World War II drained the energy and resources of European empires needed to halt their colonies’ push for independence. Unrest broke out in Egypt, Algeria, Palestine, and the Dutch East Indies during the war’s final year, though the colonial and mandate powers tamped down the disturbances and restored order for a time. Soon the European withdrawal began in earnest. The question in each territory emerging from colonialism was who would rule and how. Former colonies would now be states—they had no viable path back to pre-colonial political orders. Yet virtually nowhere could the departing Europeans simply hand power back to former regimes. Transitioning rule

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required finding new rulers who both understood the modern implements of force and possessed the ability to create cooperation, harness conveyance, and build comprehension. The colonizers had long since redrawn regional maps, moreover, creating for administrative convenience wholly new groupings of peoples that often bore little relation to historical precedent, geographic features, or ethnic patterns. The most profound event, for it shaped much of what followed, was Mao’s 1949 victory in China’s long civil war. World War II had acted as a de-colonizing struggle in China, with further Japanese advances on the coast chasing out the old European trading concessions, and the Allied powers aiding both the nationalist and communist sides in China’s civil war in order to keep the Chinese fighting Imperial Japan. As a result of World War II, China saw the ouster of both European and Japanese occupiers and a simultaneous influx of Western arms to both sides. The result was a resumed armed struggle commencing in 1946, with the Nationalists receiving modest aid from the United States while the Communists gained sanctuary and captured Japanese weapons donated by the Soviets in Manchuria. Mao’s forces transitioned from guerrilla warfare to “large-­ scale maneuver operations” in the Liao-Shen Campaign in Autumn 1948, beating Chiang’s best troops.35 Nationalist ineptitude and Mao’s promise of land reform then gave his Communists the victory, and Mao with his peasant armies fashioned a new way for Marxist class solidarity to overthrow an established order. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Mao’s road to Revolution from the countryside seemed a worthy alternative to Moscow’s conventionally Leninist emphasis on the centrality of the urban proletariat. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev disagreed on this point, however, later calling the Chinese way a “deviation from true Marxism.”36 But Mao had been defending his own path for decades, even at the cost of famine in the late 1950s, and he saw no reason to bow to Khrushchev, especially after the new Soviet leader denounced Stalin in 1956 and cast veiled aspersions on Mao’s own “cult of personality.” The Communist giants soon grew openly antagonistic, publicly debating “the question of the general line of the international communist movement.”37 Beijing accused Moscow of flirting with various errors, like these: that the contradiction between the two world systems of socialism and capitalism will automatically disappear in the course of “economic competition,” that the other fundamental world contradictions will automatically do

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so with the disappearance of the contradiction between the two systems, and that a “world without wars,” a new world of “all-round co-operation,” will appear.38

More will follow on this topic below. For the present, suffice it to note that the world had changed profoundly since World War II, according to Beijing. “[T]he U.S. imperialists stepped into the shoes of the German, Italian and Japanese fascists, and have been trying to erect a huge world empire such as has never been known before.” Yet in the Third World “anti-imperialist revolutionary struggles of the people in Asia, Africa and Latin America are pounding and undermining the foundations of the rule of imperialism and colonialism, old and new, and are now a mighty force in defense of world peace.”39 The growing Cold War polarization thus meant that post-colonial rulers in the new states would be challenged under the best of circumstances to establish governance. The European powers had spent the preceding centuries monopolizing the skills needed to wield force under modern conditions and disrupting any native efforts to build cooperation, exploit new conveyance, or understand their true adversary. The departing colonizers usually designated their preferred successors, of course, but any such expression of preference risked de-legitimizing those successors in the eyes and rhetoric of rival claimants, themselves typically a varied and even factious set of ethnic, racial, and ideological groupings. New leaders therefore gained the cooperation of the local people with tools from differing sources, some pre-colonial and tribal, others imported directly from the West. New and would-be rulers sought support from the industrialized states, either because they wished to join the liberal or Communist camps, or because they saw advantage in pledging rhetorical allegiance in return for material aid. Yet they also desired a certain ideological independence. Here was the origin of the “Third World,” a moniker dating from the Bandung Conference in Indonesia (1955) to describe those nations outside both the liberal and socialist camps. Indonesian president and conference host Sukarno opened the proceedings at Bandung by professing a new global paradigm: “Nations and states have awoken from a sleep of centuries!” Now the world no longer belonged to the West, for “the people of Asia and Africa,” representing “far more than half the human population,” could “mobilize what I have called the Moral Violence of Nations in favour of peace.”40 Sukarno’s ambition, never fully realized, promised

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to rally the new states against the colonial empires and even superpowers. The prospect of all these newly empowered peoples cooperating together would have presented a significant challenge to Western power. In the event, however, rival Western ideologies divided Third World regimes, preventing sustained cooperation among them. European powers might have fought to retain every colony, but instead they debated within and among themselves whether doing so risked squandering their claims to moral and emotional allegiances that constituted their legitimacy. Most of the peoples and new states of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East thus received their release from colonial or mandate status with relatively little bloodshed. By and large, their temporary European overlords announced a date for independence, set up some means of continued governance, and departed on their own timetable. Britain, for instance, had informally resolved as early as 1942 to grant India independence after the war.41 The Subcontinent thus did not have to cast off British rule in 1947, nor did the Philippines have to throw out the United States in 1946. France similarly granted independence to its protectorates in Lebanon (1943), Morocco (1956), and Tunisia (1957). Violent resistance to colonial rule ending in European defeat was the exception, even for the French, who fought to keep Indochina and regarded Algeria as part of France itself. But exceptions can drive history; the wars that followed in Algeria and Vietnam proved to be catalyzing events for new waves of violence. The new generation of militants of the 1960s would hardly recall that most French (and European) colonies became states in largely peaceful transitions. They remembered instead the ideal of revolution and the catharsis of political and military victory in places like Algeria and Vietnam. Typically the worst fighting erupted after the colonial powers withdrew. Transitions of power from colony to state disturbed intellectual, physical, and moral patterns that had prevailed for decades or even centuries. Sharp internal conflicts flared as rivals jockeyed for power and settled old scores. India after the 1947 Partition set the precedent; communal violence uprooted millions and killed many thousands. The ensuing war between the new states of India and Pakistan led to further clashes on the Subcontinent, with skirmishes continuing to this day. Other regions saw prolonged struggles along similar lines. Sectarian violence convulsed Palestine at the same time, leaving equally unyielding territorial disputes. Indochina saw another post-colonial struggle beginning in the late 1950s,

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though in this second conflict the divide would be ideological rather than sectarian. Conventional wars between uniformed armies erupted occasionally during the Cold War, of course, but after Korea they tended to be short. In nearly all the most-modern military gained a swift victory, as in the Middle East in 1956 and 1967, the Subcontinent in 1971, and around the Falkland Islands in 1982. With few exceptions (like the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu), battles between a Westernized modern military constructed around the lessons of World War II (a set of forces that includes the Israeli military) and an ostensibly conventional force in the Third World went badly for the locals, with victory on the battlefield falling to swift and synchronized Western forces. Even after massive retrenchment following World War II, the Europeans and Americans (and by extension the Israelis and the Soviets) retained the ability to rapidly concentrate force on the battlefield and the communications and intelligence prowess that helped them do so. They improved their advanced weapons, moreover, integrating innovations that were only emerging in World War II, such as jet aircraft, helicopters, and guided missiles. Their technological edge over Third World adversaries increased substantially even as the latter inherited a great deal of surplus weaponry. That overmatch meant that almost anyone seeking to fight against a first-rate Western military, even with comparable weapons and numerically stronger forces, faced swift defeat at the hands of agile armored formations supported by air superiority. Yet this military strength translated into political power in very uneven ways.

Asymmetric Conflict Even Western military victories, however, could prove hollow. Here the West found that subjugating a pre-modern people might be comparatively easy, but transforming that submission into cooperation, or just ruling them against their will, are different matters. For the colonized seeking independence, on the other hand, the question was when and how the collective will to oppose colonial rule turned into cooperation around a single ruler or system. As noted earlier, the European empires learned in the nineteenth century how to divide the local elites against one another along tribal or ethnic lines, and then to suppress with firepower those who actually resisted.

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The same divide-and-conquer mechanism worked in reverse after 1945. The emotional appeal of independence lured recruits and supporters, helping potential rivals to mute their differences and cooperate against foreign rule. Westphalian notions of statehood and the promise that each state gained equal status in international law under the UN Charter motivated the locals in places like Algeria to revive (or create) some ideal of a national identity that would permit them to impose common cause across sectarian or tribal boundaries for the purpose of driving out foreign overlords. Local factions demanding independence from European rule determined to work together to oppose their colonial overlords. When such appeals failed, not a few groups, like the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN), fought against rival insurgents for control of the independence struggle.42 Revolutionary writer Frantz Fanon explained this dynamic in his testament The Wretched of Earth (1961): “Colonialism is not merely content to note the existence of tribes, it reinforces and differentiates them.” Revolutionary violence like that of the FLN, by contrast, explained Fanon, is “totalizing and national”; its elimination of tribal chiefs and traditional authorities is “a prerequisite to the unification of the people.”43 A colonial power that tried to remain on ground that it had conquered often struggled to control the territory and its people. This rule applied whether the Westerners sought to hold their colony or to support a favored post-colonial faction. Indeed, the most interesting Cold War conflicts, from the standpoint of military and security studies, pitted Western forces against Third World insurgencies. The Western states nonetheless retained several advantages. They possessed ample firepower and backed that firepower with experienced intelligence and counter-subversion capabilities. The empires had fielded capable security services, and in their colonies and mandates they had long experience surveilling the locals, with detailed files on past and present troublemakers.44 They also understood the fundamentals of political revolution and insurgency (whether for the offense or the defense), which had hardly changed over the centuries. Indeed, counter-subversion doctrines in the 1960s would have looked familiar to Francis Marion, or Machiavelli. For centuries, intelligence and counter-subversion had sufficed to tranquilize dissent in the colonies while the political will at home still desired to hold the territory. What then was different that allowed the FLN in Algeria to contest the French army until a political solution became

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possible, or that enabled North Vietnam’s army and its Viet Cong allies to wear down the power of the United States? One difference was that insurgents were now armed with machine guns and mortars, mines, and rockets (where previously they had only rifles), even if they could rarely beat a European or American force, even tactically. Not a few of the soldiers using these arms for national liberation, moreover, had trained with and served in the Allied forces in World War II, like General China and his Mau Mau in Kenya.45 For this problem the West fielded proficient infantry who had superior conveyance to the right place on the battlefield: well-trained and well-armed soldiers who were now mobile with trucks and then helicopters as well. No Third World force could match Western mobility. Even when the locals managed to find enough mortars and machine guns, Western infantry still bested them with plentiful radios, ammunition, supplies, engineers, and intelligence. The Western democracies, as they had in the World Wars, usually sought to economize on men by calling down shells and bombs. The colonial powers re-deployed some of the firepower that had won World War II to their empires once the war ended. In virtually every conflict they retained air superiority and faced only sporadic risks from enemy artillery. Insurgents who concentrated enough men to fight against Western infantry risked annihilation from well-directed airstrikes or barrages. If the Europeans in the Third World lacked the numbers and the latest systems that they had held behind to guard Western Europe against the Soviets, they still brought along the expertise, and the communications that had guided that weaponry. France, for example, electrified its fence along Algeria’s border with Tunisia (the “Morice Line”), emplacing sensors and pre-­ ranging its artillery to shell any breach in the wire. Rapid reaction forces then surged to any gap in the line, ensuring that even FLN units in battalion strength could not break through and melt into the hills of the Algerian interior.46 No indigenous formations could stand against such infantry and weight of ordnance. Thus for the colonized, the counter was time. A low but steady casualty rate did not materially affect the physical force that Western democracies could put on the battlefield. What did matter was the political impact of a continual loss of their educated officers and trained men, who often had to be transported great distances just to reach the combat zones. The locals survived by dispersing into small units, at least until casualties eroded the Western powers’ will and compelled them to depart. Insurgents

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then needed to wrest political control from less-capable but still viable post-colonial regimes, and doing so (as always) required them to conspire and to concentrate force at key places and moments. In this they still faced the insurgent’s ancient dilemma: how to compel the ruling regime to hold its troops in their garrisons instead of spreading them out across the countryside to gather taxes, recruits, and intelligence? No insurgency could win if it ceded control of the populace to the regime’s police and officials. The converse also proved true as well: no regime could survive if it left the countryside to the insurgents, allowing them to surround the cities. Post-colonial regimes typically possessed less technical counter-­ subversive capability than their former colonizers, but they could compensate with brutality and surveillance. Here the resistance to colonial rule (or to the new Third World regimes) exploited two European ideas to undermine the brief for continued European rule. If the foreigners were already gone, as in South Vietnam in the mid-1950s (before the United States arrived in force), nationalism also served to indict the Europeans’ successor regimes as the foreigners’ puppets. Such sentiments for independence greatly hampered Western attempts to choose viable post-colonial successors and to gather intelligence on the resistance (especially where a foreign intelligence service lacked fluency in native languages). Here the chief insurgent advantages came from another Western import: Leninist principles of conspiracy. Ruthless cell discipline, especially if stiffened by Marxist ideology or religious fervor, then worked to keep the beleaguered insurgent leaders and structures alive in the face of Western or regime counter-subversion efforts. In short, the insurgents found ways to use self-­ determination to erode the colonial powers’ ability to create cooperation within their home populations, while simultaneously using Western notions of nationalism to build resistance to the foreign masters.

Struggling for Hearts and Minds If the insurgents could not win militarily, then they would have to win politically. That meant they had to keep a force in-being that could cause casualties among the Western forces (or their surrogate regimes), and thus they needed refuge from modern airpower and artillery—and from Western and local counter-intelligence. Usually such refuge came in one of three forms: military, geographical, or political. Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh found theirs with anti-aircraft guns around the isolated French airstrip at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, curtailing a desperate airlift by France’s

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outstretched air force. Those Vietnamese guns occupied well-concealed positions in the hills overlooking the French, where they could barely be spotted from the air, let alone neutralized. Lacking food and ammunition, French troops endured a three-month siege but were ultimately overrun and surrendered in a rare instance of a Western force losing the ability to maneuver over the battlefield.47 More typically, however, insurgent forces found refuge from airstrikes and shelling in places that the Western powers or their local allies dared not strike. The insurgents thus shifted their military bases and sanctuaries to less-governed regions of nearby states, which (like Cambodia or Tunisia) were persuaded by anti-colonial sympathies, or simply intimidated into tolerating insurgent bases just inside their borders. European militaries, and then the Americans as well, learned the hard way to refrain from pursuing insurgents in their sanctuaries. While the world lay divided between Cold War blocs, striking sanctuary states risked drawing their superpower patrons into the conflict. During the Vietnam War, for instance, the North Vietnamese regime did not attack Thailand, which hosted U.S. Air Force bombers, just as the United States avoided striking neighboring China, a source and conduit for the supplies that boosted Hanoi’s war effort. Where the risks of escalation looked slight, the diplomatic or domestic political costs for striking sanctuaries could still be daunting. Bombing the insurgents risked killing non-combatants in potentially public ways. Indeed, hitting insurgent camps in neutral neighboring countries—even those lacking a superpower patron to escalate the conflict—still invited international criticism for widening the war. This is exactly what happened when the French air force flew from Algeria to bomb the FLN in the Tunisian village of Sakiet on a market day in 1958.48 France paid a steep price politically and diplomatically; the criticism over the bombing crippled the government in Paris and opened a political path for Charles de Gaulle’s creation of the Fifth Republic three months later.49 U.S. President Richard Nixon, though he claimed his bombing of neutral Cambodia kept America from resembling a “pitiful, helpless giant,” famously paid his own domestic political price for striking Communist bases there in 1970.50 The strategic effects of local tactics on Western public opinion and elites increased as the Cold War lengthened. States still fought, but they no longer declared war. In joining the United Nations, member states had implicitly abjured wars of choice. As noted above, the UN Charter banned aggressive war, and states generally professed to remain within the letter of that document.51 This trend did not take hold all at once, of course, as

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both large and small actors struggled to understand the new international norm. By aiding North Korea in 1950, the Soviet Union, for instance, had acted against Moscow’s UN obligations. After all, when signing the UN Charter, Stalin had implicitly assented to its decree (in Article 2) that member states “shall refrain from giving assistance to any state against which the United Nations is taking preventive or enforcement action.”52 States that felt compelled to operate on the edge of the UN Charter thus did so in ways that skirted international notice and criticism. Conflicts became either collaborative peacekeeping expeditions (like the U.S.-led coalition that fought under the UN flag in Korea), or anonymous and ideological, fought by covert means with an eye to the opinions that mattered most to the relevant rulers. The result in many conflicts was thus a struggle to shape public perceptions of what was happening in the conflict zones, with both sides seeking to win in ways that preserved their international legitimacy. They sought to control any escalation as well as the narrative, as it were, typically by casting their adversaries as murderous, ideological (or hypocritical) aggressors deservedly outside the community of nations and international law. Austin Carson has noted that both sides knew of this covert assistance and even combat, and yet decided not to publicize it. The resulting “collusion” between rival states to maintain the obscurity of certain aspects of larger conflicts served an important, rational purpose for both sides: it preserved bargaining space by mitigating “hawkish” internal pressures in one side or both that could have escalated the conflicts.53 While both sides in the Cold War depicted their actions as responses to aggression, the rival blocs sought to convince different core audiences. The ultimate penalty was to incur UN censure, so at a minimum they wanted to keep key neutrals indifferent to a particular Third World struggle. Public opinion occasionally made a difference for elected leaders and parliaments, and electorates disliked troop casualties and civilian collateral damage. This made both sides sensitive to news coverage in the liberal states and to international opinion as well. States thus cited the UN Charter as rhetorical and legal support for their policies—at least while any contrasts between rhetoric and practice proved not too jarringly obvious. Internally these ideas also mattered for their ability to aid or impair cooperation and assent to policies that required some degree of sacrifice on the part of the citizens. For example, the center of gravity for the French military in the Algerian civil war turned out to be public attitudes in France, and public attitudes played a similar role

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for the United States in Vietnam a decade later. As U.S. involvement in South Vietnam transitioned from an “advisory” role to active combat in the mid-1960s, American decision makers in Washington—and then ultimately voters as well—demanded of their field commanders that the war cost fewer American lives and do less harm to local civilians. War coverage on the American nightly news broadcasts featured “body counts” of U.S., South Vietnamese, and Communist forces, and correspondents became adept at nosing out any discrepancies between the U.S.  Department of Defense’s press releases and the observed realities. The United States had thus inadvertently taken on a huge political risk; its war effort in Vietnam by 1968 depended on domestic (and world) opinion that the effort was not only competently led but doing more good than harm to its ostensible beneficiaries in South Vietnam.

High Tide for Revolution The early months of 1968 famously saw something of a turning point in the Vietnam conflict and beyond. The European colonies were almost all independent now, and war news in 1967 had been dominated by the Americans in South Vietnam and Israel’s shattering victory over Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian force in the Six-Day War. Yet revolutionary fervor burned undimmed. That January, Hanoi ordered a nationwide offensive across South Vietnam  to coincide with Tet (the Vietnamese lunar new year), in which the North Vietnamese army and its Viet Cong irregulars suddenly infiltrated several cities and sought to hold them against U.S. and South Vietnamese firepower. The result was a military defeat and a public relations victory for Hanoi. The unexpected heavy fighting and casualties in Tet shocked elite opinion in America, discouraging President Lyndon Johnson from seeking re-election and making an American withdrawal only a matter of time. Six weeks later and thousands of miles away, an Israeli incursion into Jordan to root out Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) bases near the village of Karameh encountered opposition from the Jordanian army and Palestinian irregulars, and the withdrawing Israelis left behind several crippled tanks. The Tet Offensive and the fight at Karameh showed that brave but inferior forces could still cause well-publicized losses even to advanced armies. Just as important for all sides in the Vietnam and Palestinian conflict, these setbacks to two of the world’s best armies proved an emotional rallying point to opponents of America and Israel. PLO chief

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Yasser Arafat indeed proclaimed the fight at Karameh—a word that roughly means dignity in Arabic—had restored Arab dignity and prestige.54 This idea proved galvanizing to Arab resistance to Israel and to progressive militants around the world. A lesser force no longer had to beat a Western military to garner respect and international credibility. It could gain propaganda points by merely fighting well, though ultimately losing at the tactical level, against larger and more advanced Western-style forces.55 This development for a time baffled American, Israeli, and some European leaders. When Israel’s Arab neighbors would once again test the Israeli Defense Force in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, their attacks came as a surprise despite warning signs. Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s new Secretary of State, wondered why Israel’s Arab neighbors were concentrating troops on the Israeli border, and shared the consensus that the deployments were only a bluff: “What no one believed—the consumers no more than the producers of intelligence—was that Arabs would act on [the opportunity to attack Israel]. Our definitions of rationality did not take seriously the notion of starting an unwinnable war to restore self-respect.”56 This new “asymmetric” brand of conflict caused a public relations dilemma in the United States. American casualties eroded support for the war effort in Vietnam. That in turn raised incentives for planners in the Pentagon to minimize risks to American service personnel. The U.S. Department of Defense studied a wide range of sensors and semi-­ autonomous weapons—like remote reconnaissance (via unmanned aircraft and satellites), battle-management radars, and laser-guided bombs—to hit the enemy with fewer sorties and less collateral damage. By 1972 the push to build guided munitions had begun to pay off. Improving sensor and communication suites alerted American pilots of enemy interceptors over North Vietnam, and the U.S. Air Force employed new, laser-guided bombs, first using them to destroy a well-defended bridge in North Vietnam whose anti-aircraft defenses had been downing American bombers for years.57 The war also accelerated the Air Force’s development of a flying battle management system, based on an airborne radar with computer-­enhanced sensing that could look down as well as up, electronically “seeing” hostile airspace between the ground and the stratosphere (although the resulting Airborne Warning and Control System [AWACS] aircraft would not be deployed until 1977, after America’s departure from Vietnam). Most such systems were soon made available for purchase by U.S. allies, first in NATO and then beyond. American allies that could not

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afford AWACS planes and other advanced weapons, moreover, still gained some collateral benefit from a stronger NATO. Just as importantly, as we shall see, they profited from the doctrinal developments afforded by a new kind of precision warfare. In the Communist world, by contrast, the opinion that mattered was the popular view of who carried the mantle of Revolution. Determining that verdict, however, proved a complicated proposition as the two great revolutionary regimes—the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China—split over ideology and grew increasingly hostile to one another. Peace between China and the Soviet Union barely survived, with the two sides almost going to war over old border disputes in 1969.58 As the Sino-­ Soviet rift had widened, the contending Soviet and Chinese theories hardened into an ideological rivalry that competed for adherents among Third World revolutionaries. This competition also involved a material side as Moscow and Beijing felt compelled to invest in faraway struggles lest their Communist rivals gain influence.59 They vied aggressively for the allegiance of progressive liberation movements, with the Soviets having more expertise and materiel to offer, and the Chinese loaning the cachet of their peasant revolution. Indeed, this dynamic of ideological rivalry gave Hanoi seemingly limitless resources to prosecute its war to conquer South Vietnam, as Ho Chi Minh played Moscow and Beijing against one another, taking aid from both while becoming a vassal of neither.60 Inspired by Mao or not, few openly Communist-backed insurgencies won in the decolonizing world—most failed from disorganization, slender resources, popular indifference, or the sheer strength of the (sometimes foreign-backed) rulers they sought to supplant. Those insurgencies that won gave heart to the global progressive struggle, but the question of theory always remained even in the successful cases. Why did they win? What was the right way to make revolution? Which strategies worked, and which wasted time, resources, and cadres? Thus the Third World peoples felt pulled not only between liberalism and socialism, but also found their homelands turning into battlegrounds between rival progressive ideals. The liberal democracies in effect won the good fortune of facing a divided Communist bloc, even if some Western leaders proved slow to recognize their luck. The other piece of backhanded luck for the West would be Mao’s Cultural Revolution, another country-wide Stalinist purification campaign that lasted a decade and kept China backward and poor long after. The wave broke suddenly on June 1, 1966. “Sweep Away All Ox Ghosts and

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Snake Demons” blared the People’s Daily that day, and its message found willing followers. Mao’s call for a renewal of revolutionary zeal quickly led to a nation-wide hunt for class enemies, and it paralyzed all authority not stemming directly from Mao himself. The poet Bei Dao, then in high school, joined in the fun and witnessed the horrors as China purged itself of “olds.” That summer his classmates in Beijing Middle No. 4 school herded their teachers and school staff to the playing field for a struggle session at which the teachers had to sing: I am an ox-ghost-snake-demon I am guilty before the people I am guilty I am damned The people’s iron hammer Has smashed me and mashed me up…61

Ideological ferment reached well beyond China as radicals in other lands signaled their Revolutionary virtue. Some grew convinced that the hour had come at last for Revolution in places as diverse as Latin America and the Middle East—despite the odds against them. The spectacle of the Cultural Revolution, as well as the surprises at Tet and Karameh in early 1968, also figured here. These events proved to be emotional rallying points for militants and radical thinkers well outside their immediate regions. “We’ve got that picture of Mao [Zedong] up on the wall because Mao [Zedong] is the baddest motherf∗∗∗∗r on the planet Earth!” proclaimed the Black Panthers’ Eldridge Cleaver to an American communist in 1967.62 In this way the struggle against colonialism metastasized (with the Sino-Soviet rivalry) in a more intense struggle against non-colonial regimes that now had to be depicted as the perpetrators of systemic violence. Most targets for this new wave of revolution had been colonies at some point (see above), and many still had authoritarian regimes. The Latin countries had expelled Spanish colonialism a century earlier but had retained European orientations even if they were hardly liberal regimes. Only one actually voted for socialism. Chile’s Marxist government took power legally in 1970, though the army toppled it three years later and imposed a more traditional (and bloody) Latin authoritarianism.63 In every other Latin country, the only chance for a progressive turn was armed insurrection.

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But should the insurrection come from the countryside, more or less on the Maoist, peasant-based model that seemed to work in Cuba in 1959, or from the cities themselves according to Leninist orthodoxy? The Brazilian revolutionary Carlos Marighella posthumously sought to explain a modified city-first strategy in his Minimanual for the Urban Guerrilla (1969). Marighella perhaps unwittingly offered a blend of Clausewitz’s notion of “surface area” for a “people in arms” with Marxist notions of polarization.64 In his telling, successful insurgents propelled a downward spiral of oppression and violence in which the regime lost its grip and lashed out, breaking down its ability to organize people to cooperate, creating new enemies, and losing international stature as it did. With the urban guerrillas at large, Marighella theorized, the regime had “no alternative except to intensify its repression.” The police could make city life unbearable for the citizenry, but they could not restore order. Thus the army would take over law enforcement, transforming the political climate “into a military situation in which the ‘gorillas’ [Marighella’s term for the regime’s forces] appear more and more to be the ones responsible for violence, while the lives of the people grow worse.” Even for Marighella, however, the revolution eventually had to shift to the countryside. The urban guerrillas “must become even more aggressive and active, resorting without pause to sabotage, terrorism, expropriations, assaults, kidnappings, executions, etc.” These conditions would ultimately “permit the guerrillas to open rural warfare in the middle of an uncontrollable urban rebellion.”65 The conventional military struggle would then be won by the insurgents’ main forces, defeating the regime’s diehards in the field and then at last liberating the cities. Marighella’s concept of revolutionary operations relied on the fact that radicals who took to violence in the midst of a society could create a surveillance dilemma that forced the regime to militarize law enforcement and thus undercut not only its appeal to patriotic allegiance but its very legitimacy. A regime with powerful surveillance and comprehension of the citizenry could respond precisely to violent provocations and target plotters and guerrillas hoping to spark an uprising. Yet poor regimes could hardly mount society-wide surveillance (absent an ideological, totalitarian regime). If the regime could also control the flow of news about the crackdown (as Communist regimes could and did), then it could snuff out a rebellion in private. Marighella’s opponents had no such omniscience, precision, or control over news. They thus wielded blunt instruments against small but growing threats, or so Marighella and his readers hoped.

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The notion of provoking a polarizing struggle that isolated a regime at home and abroad (as explained by Marighella) was not limited to Marxist-­ inspired insurgencies. Indeed, it would assume its own murderous momentum with revolutionaries in the Middle East—most of them not Marxist at all—who had learned from the Algerian War how to turn some Western powers back on themselves. The late French-educated psychiatrist and playwright Frantz Fanon would posthumously inspire many with his extolling of the virtues of violence by the “colonized” revolutionaries: “The work of the colonizer is to make even dreams of liberty impossible for the colonized. The work of the colonized is to imagine every possible method for annihilating the colonizer.”66 The colonizers, Fanon observed, had committed a “three-dimensional” violence against the past, present, and future.67 The colonized thus gained psychological as well as political freedom through cleansing acts of violence against not only the colonizers but against the mentality of dependence and servitude. An exiled Iranian religious leader in Iraq, the Ayatollah Khomeini, offered his own analysis of this dynamic in 1970. He blamed a centuries-­ old and “satanic” offensive by Jews and Western imperialists undermining Islam to gain its resources: “These new groups began their imperialist penetration of the Muslim countries about three hundred years ago, and they regarded it as necessary to work the extirpation of Islam in order to attain their ultimate goals.” The imperialists, chiefly Britain and later the United States, had imposed Western laws and local “agents” (like the Shah of Iran) to keep Muslims apathetic and poor. In the face of this oppression, Khomeini argued, the Quranic obligation of jihad became a duty enjoined on Islamic clerics to show the Muslims their plight, and then a duty of all Muslims to work for a revolution to bring about the rule of Islamic law.68 What emerged from such analyses was a new form of the old tactic of terrorism, which had targeted regime officials and collaborators for decades. Learning from the war in Algeria, the new revolutionaries expanded their target list beyond the symbols and custodians of public order to attack the popular sense that that order kept citizens safe in their daily lives. In short, militants (their preferred term) now targeted civilians where they gathered, such as at airports, train stations, restaurants, and sporting events. Attacks in public places caused horrific and widely publicized casualties, which could goad the regime or its allies to lash out in retaliation, thus harming more civilians through its abuses of firepower and surveillance. Western militaries sometimes obliged as well, as in the

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early days in Northern Ireland’s Troubles, when allegations of torture complicated Britain’s campaign against the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA). An inquiry into harsh interrogations of PIRA suspects by the British Army in 1972 conceded that any such official misconduct defers the day of the return of peace in the community. It strengthens the propaganda campaign and provides ammunition for the enemies of society who are adept and experienced in inventing allegations against the police, even without any justification. We have seen evidence which establishes that this is their declared purpose.”69

Caught in the resulting crossfire, ordinary people felt unsafe in the streets and also endangered by regime responses ostensibly aimed at protecting the populace. This dynamic would unfold most dramatically in the Middle East, especially in Iran. Algeria had already proved the textbook case, the model for what followed. Arab revolutionaries of the FLN—and the reaction they provoked—hollowed out the center of French Algeria’s society and politics. They demoralized and neutralized moderate sentiment among the Arabs, native French, and Mediterranean settlers who had little desire to trade France’s rule for the FLN’s. Some of the loyalist colons fought back, moreover, matching the FLN atrocity for atrocity, and their lost cause would be joined by elements of the French military (and officers who ultimately launched an abortive coup against President Charles de Gaulle). With its mutual violations of civilized norms of wartime conduct, the Algerian struggle prompted weariness and a sense of the chaotic that would dissuade liberal opinion in the West from cooperating with France in the campaign. The targets for this form of struggle soon shifted from France and Algeria to Israel and beyond. The Palestine Liberation Organization had formed in 1965, using Leninist internal discipline for Palestinian ends (only some its factions were avowedly Marxist or Maoist). Many other extremists followed the PLO’s example. Their strategic concept was Fanon’s notion that the colonizing violence rightfully begat cleansing violence for liberation. Rule by any foreign power (whether ethnically, politically, or religiously foreign) is therefore violence—and must be resisted by force. Militarily, however, the idea was always, as Marighella suggested, to build from terrorist attacks toward a conventional armed struggle. Thus the PLO’s brief, failed attempt to run guerrilla warfare into Israel from

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neighboring Jordan (followed by its serial attempts to build conventional forces in Lebanon). For any ruler to navigate these currents took a rare finesse. The ending of the European empires during the Cold War saw global political, military, social, technological, and intellectual dislocations. No region remained outside the larger sweep of change, though societies felt the changes at very different rates and degrees. Third World leaders who sought to operate within the confines of a Westphalian paradigm, as did Egypt’s Anwar al-Sadat in recognizing Israeli statehood and negotiating a peace treaty with Tel Aviv in 1978, ended up assassinated. Sadat was killed three years later by diehards who wished to continue a de facto state of war on the Jewish nation. Western leaders who encouraged Westphalian behavior, like President Jimmy Carter in facilitating that Israeli-Egyptian peace, sometimes had brief tenures to defend traditional norms of international relations. Even President Richard Nixon, perhaps America’s most astute observer of the emerging world order amid the swirling events and baffling trends, soon ran up against his own limitations. Nixon won elections in 1968 and 1972  in part because he promised and delivered an American withdrawal from Vietnam on America’s timetable (albeit one too slow for domestic critics). His opening to Mao’s China aligned all the world’s nuclear-armed states against Moscow. This was cooperation on a strategic scale, allowing the Soviet Union to see that the West and China could potentially bring overwhelming force against it. Mao probably struck this bargain with America, its ideological enemy, because he saw little prospect of deterring his hostile Soviet neighbor without foreign ties. Nixon’s character flaws soon got him impeached, of course, but his strategic insight shaped events then and now. Once Nixon had withdrawn American combat forces from South Vietnam, the regime in Saigon could no longer hold against the powerful, conventional army built up by the Communist North. Hanoi’s forces that attacked the South in the spring of 1975 were no peasant militias; they operated like the Wehrmacht in 1940, only with better tanks and anti-­ aircraft defenses (including hand-carried surface-to-air missiles). The latter proved crucial, as America withheld its powerful air arm, and South Vietnam’s small air force could do little to disperse North Vietnam’s armored columns once it started losing planes to North Vietnamese guns and missiles. The United Nations made hardly a peep, partly because neither North nor South Vietnam held UN membership.70 This debacle essentially showed that the underlying rules of conventional military

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power had not changed with the Cold War, at least when allowed to work unrestrained by world opinion. North Vietnam’s swift conquest also suggested Marighella was right in saying urban guerrilla warfare sets the stage for “the formation of rural guerrilla warfare and supporting the construction of a revolutionary army for national liberation.”71 Conventional conflict was the revolutionaries’ objective, as it could still bring swift and decisive victory against fragile states. As Clausewitz had observed of insurgencies in the previous century, “[t]he destruction of the enemy – an aim that has been postponed but not displaced by another consideration  – now reemerges.”72 The seeming reversion to earlier ways also had its political corollary. Dislocations around the world in the 1970s in many cases did not lead to modernization. Africa saw various strongmen ruling former European colonies more or less as personal fiefdoms, adopting the trappings of statehood and claiming seats in the United Nations, but presiding in some cases over sharp declines in the limited economic, legal, and social gains accomplished under colonial status. The Iranian Revolution in 1979 marked something even less expected: a non-liberal, non-Marxist coup that unlike Algeria’s was explicitly theistic. What the events in Iran created was something shocking: a clergy-run revolutionary regime—that is, a party-led state which followed a religious (specifically Shi’a) rather than a materialist notion of History. Yet even the Iranian Revolution had intellectual ties to the radical, Western critique of the rationalist Western universalism of liberal thought that inspired revolutionaries since the nineteenth century. Its denunciations of America, for instance, owed nearly  as much to the influence of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger as they did to the Koran.73 Iran’s revolution in turn would mid-wife the birth of Islamism as a political movement, for Sunni radicals soon aspired to their own theocracies. Soon came something the West had not seen for hundreds of years: militant Islam that could threaten Western peoples in their very cities and homelands.

Revolution Fails European decolonization had run its course by 1975. That remarkable ebb tide in Western power had come about somewhat voluntarily as an indirect result of the liberal belief that nations should be supreme in their own territories and settle their disputes peacefully, without aggressive war. Liberal governments and publics could no longer justify to their neighbors

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(or themselves) controlling foreign peoples who wished to be governed by laws of their own making. Yet not all of the strongest nations abjured the right to use force against other states, and the exception, for them, turned on the determination of who represented the legitimate voice of the people in crafting laws and exercising sovereign power. For them, sovereignty had to be upheld only if it assisted the swing of history toward the people’s struggle against imperialism; once the people commanded the levers of power their socialist governing structures must be defended against all threats, even if that meant meeting force with force. A socialist society was obligated to employ force even against “various anti-social phenomena [and] the negative activities of an insignificant handful of people,” suggested KGB chief Yuri Andropov in March 1979. He explained his reasoning thus: We simply do not have the right to permit even the smallest miscalculation here, for in the political sphere any kind of ideological sabotage is directly or indirectly intended to create an opposition which is hostile to our system — to create an underground, to encourage a transition to terrorism and other extreme forms of struggle, and, in the final analysis, to create the conditions for the overthrow of socialism.74

This argument over legitimacy and sovereignty would spin out over the next two decades in a technological context that was subtly but significantly changed from the early Cold War. Andropov seemed to be sensing a geopolitical shift that few others recognized at the time. With the demise of Europe’s colonial empires, the last imperial power left to topple was the Soviet Union. The logic that would unravel the Soviet Union took a turn after the North Vietnamese conquest of South Vietnam in 1975, which would serve as prologue for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Moscow seemingly interpreted the UN’s silence over Vietnam in 1975 as tacit consent for progressive forces liberating peoples from the vestiges of imperialism; these would not be condemned as aggressors. Nonetheless, the Soviet Politburo miscalculated in believing that such logic would excuse a full-­ scale invasion of a neighboring country—even a failing state like Afghanistan, which Moscow seemingly viewed as a legal fiction for a collection of warring tribes. After a socialist coup had toppled the short-lived Afghan republic in 1978, the Afghan communist party split into murderous rival factions, each seeking Moscow’s favor. The KGB then convinced

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the Politburo that the winning faction had gone rogue and that American puppets (or radical Iranian Islamists) were somehow nearing a takeover of Afghanistan.75 The Soviet army and the KGB’s ensuing intervention in December 1979 proceeded in classic blitzkrieg fashion, with a combined-arms assault by perhaps 80,000 troops and thousands of armored vehicles, spearheaded by commandos who exterminated the Afghan ruling clique and seized the nerve centers of the regime and military. The operation lasted mere days, and if nothing else showed that the Soviet army had preserved and refined the operational art of using combined arms to stun and paralyze an adversary while breaking his resistance. As a result, purred a KGB-prepared summary, a new socialist regime had been installed pledging to reverse its predecessor’s errors and to “fight for the complete victory of the national-­ democratic, anti-feudal, anti-imperialist revolution and for the protection of the national independence and sovereignty of Afghanistan.”76 Yet the Afghan expedition proved to be a strategic blunder, drawing worldwide condemnation. It launched what might be called the Second Cold War, the return of superpower tensions that had eased somewhat in the detente of the early 1970s. The UN Security Council soon debated the invasion, but the Soviet delegation vetoed a resolution calling for withdrawal of unspecified “foreign troops.” The General Assembly then convened in emergency special session and (one week after the Soviets’ Security Council veto) overwhelmingly endorsed the principle of state sovereignty and deplored the “recent armed intervention.” The Assembly’s resolution calling for the “immediate, unconditional, and total withdrawal of the foreign troops from Afghanistan” passed by the lopsided margin of 104  in favor versus 18 opposed (with 18 abstentions).77 Neighboring Pakistan a few days later convened the foreign ministers of 34 Muslim nations under the Organization of the Islamic Conference to censure the USSR, also demanding an immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops.78 Another Afghan neighbor, Iran, rejected Soviet explanations for the invasion, with Ayatollah Khomeini, who had publicly equated Soviet and Western imperialism in 1970, reportedly telling the Soviet ambassador just after the coup that “there could be no mutual understanding between a Muslim nation and a non-Muslim government.”79 The Soviets then compounded their mistake by mishandling another crisis on another border. They strong-armed Communist-led Poland, where striking workers at a Gdansk shipyard in 1980 had formed a non-­ Communist trade union they called Solidarity. Soviet leaders “feverishly

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sought a solution” between alternative disasters: “the acceptance of chaos in Poland and the ensuing break-up of the entire Socialist camp,” recalled General Secretary-to-be Mikhail Gorbachev in his memoirs. The Kremlin did so because Poland’s Communist leadership, along with “the other ruling parties of the Socialist community,” wrote Gorbachev, viewed Solidarity’s agenda as nothing less than “dispensing with the existing system and deserting the Warsaw Pact for NATO.” The Soviet army, of course, could have intervened to restore order, but the Polish comrades found their own solution in December 1981: the suppression of Solidarity under nationwide martial law. The West immediately sanctioned Poland, and in the ensuing economic crisis Moscow had to make up the loss of Western trade credits with increased Soviet subsidies, which the USSR’s economy could ill afford.80 The Afghan invasion and the suppression of Solidarity wrought a strategic turn in the narrative of Revolution. With Western imperialism at it its lowest ebb in centuries, the Soviets could not credibly claim to be saving Afghan tribesmen and Polish workers from colonialism. The Left in the West and beyond argued over Poland, where a trade union resisted with non-violent means an oppressive one-party brand of socialism. The spectacle of Poland’s Marxist regime officially representing the working class while suppressing a workers’ movement proved too ironic to escape worldwide criticism. The bloody coup and civil war in Afghanistan, moreover, prompted millions of Afghans to flee their homeland for Pakistan and Iran—another fact that made it obvious that Soviet-style socialism had little appeal to the masses. Within weeks of the Soviet invasion, Egypt and China publicly promised aid to rebels fighting the Kremlin-imposed regime in Kabul.81 The United States soon followed with arms and materiel for the mujaheddin.82 Soon the Islamic world learned that Muslims with sufficient weapons could fight the forces of one superpower while Iranian mullahs holding American diplomats hostage in Tehran taunted the other.

The Second Cold War and Its Prophets Support to the enemies of the Soviets, however, had to be mostly sub-rosa. Indeed, NATO could not directly contest Soviet rule in Eastern Europe without risking nuclear war. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had estimated as early as 1961 that the Alliance lacked the strength even to rescue West Berlin should the Soviets blockade it again. The Americans, British,

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French, and West Germans kept up a mere twenty understrength divisions—sufficient only for a “limited defense” of the Federal Republic, in the eyes of the Joint Chiefs. NATO would need fifteen months for mobilization and fifty divisions to retake West Berlin, for accomplishing such a feat would require seizing most of East Germany against Soviet opposition—if the Soviet defenders did not employ nuclear weapons.83 By the late 1970s, the Soviet Army was even more powerful, constituting a modern force incorporating the painful lessons that the Red Army had learned against the Wehrmacht in World War II. Offensive war by the West was clearly futile. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, modern conventional forces represented perhaps the evolutionary endpoint of the weapons and systems devised (if not all fully employed) in World War II. NATO and Warsaw Pact commanders exercised for war using jet aircraft, rockets, and guided missiles, along with improved tanks, guns, and munitions. The superpowers (as well as the British and French) supplemented these forces with tactical and theater nuclear weapons. These forces were far more lethal than their World War II counterparts, as the Boeing Corporation’s Thomas P. Rona explained to the Department of Defense in 1976: The traditional components of weapon performance such as range, accuracy, and lethality have been improved individually and in combination for most of the projected military missions to the point that direct hits and high-­ probability target destruction can be assured at low cost in comparison to the target value.84

In short, guided missiles and even artillery now hit their targets more often than not, when properly handled. This was new, for it meant that force could be reliably conveyed to the intended place. Now commanders in the most advanced militaries required full comprehension of the battle to ensure they hit targets only once. A limited conflict between NATO and the Warsaw Pact could thus be devastating, even if neither side used nuclear weapons. The Soviet build­up of conventional forces in Europe in the 1970s—a force far in excess of a minimum to keep order and deter a conventional attack from NATO— indeed alarmed leaders like West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt.85 What if, they wondered, the Soviets tried to use those tank armies to grab some morsel of NATO territory, daring the West to escalate to a nuclear exchange? Such retaliation could be suicidal for Western Europe.

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At the operational level, moreover, the Western response to the Soviet build-up was constrained by geography and politics. The United States and NATO had relatively scant strategic depth on the European landmass, with key cities and industrial centers in range of Soviet tactical systems. The Soviets, by contrast, had the depths of Russia behind them. Economically the Alliance could have afforded huge conscript armies equal to those fielded by the Soviets, but politically no nation in NATO wanted to live like an armed camp. The peoples of the Soviet Union, of course, had no choice in that regard; their economy remained on a permanent war-footing, with Gorbachev later claiming that military spending absorbed 20% of the gross national product.86 This grim logic pressed on Western leaders worried about Soviet intentions as the Kremlin deployed new weapons like the SS-20 nuclear-armed, road-mobile ballistic missiles that the Soviets began fielding in 1976. NATO foreign and defense ministers thus gathered in Brussels in late 1979 (days before the Afghan invasion) to express their concern about Moscow’s expansion and modernization of all components of its nuclear and conventional arsenals while Western theater nuclear forces had “remained static” and were “increasing in age and vulnerability.” This development caused the assembled ministers acute concern because it occurred “against the background of increasing Soviet inter-continental capabilities and achievement of parity in inter-continental capability with the United States.”87 NATO resolved at Brussels to counter the SS-20s with comparable American-made missiles. The new Pershing II system would thus be based in West Germany and Italy by 1983. This in turn alarmed Soviet leaders, who feared the Pershings could hit the Kremlin five minutes after launch. Moscow had an anti-ballistic system guarding it, but apparently it could not stop the Pershings. After Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party (and de facto head of USSR) in 1985, he asked his experts if the Soviets had any possible defenses against these weapons. They told him that “we did not have any.” This was why Gorbachev in his memoir judged the SS-20 deployment—which prompted NATO to counter with the Pershings—to be “an unforgivable adventure, embarked on by the previous Soviet leadership under pressure from the military-­ industrial complex.”88 For some Americans, the solution to Soviet numerical superiority lay in technological progress that did not have to “go nuclear.” Facing Soviet forces with all that firepower, American strategists and weapons designers

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strove to defeat quantity with quality. What if the NATO defenders could decimate the Soviet forward edge of battle (which both sides expected) while also striking to “offset” all those Soviet reinforcements in the second echelon? That would ensure that even a powerful Soviet offensive in West Germany stalled, forcing the Soviets to resort to nuclear weapons (and invite an apocalyptic NATO retaliation). The Pentagon recognized this logic and realized the requisite improvements in weapons systems sensing, guidance, and control, pushing ahead with its efforts to field precision and stealth weapons, while learning to network them with intelligence and sensors. The result, as Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering William J. Perry told Congress in 1978, could revolutionize warfare: “[I]f we effectively exploit the lead we have in this field, we can greatly enhance our ability to deter war without having to compete tank for tank, missile for missile, with the Soviet Union.” Precision weapons and sensors could make American forces “able to see all high value targets on the battlefield at any time; to be able to make a direct hit on any target we can see; and to be able to destroy any target we can hit.”89 Pentagon consultant Thomas Rona had observed this shift and divined its meaning even before Perry’s testimony. The power of conventional forces with precision weapons (and the possibility of tactical nuclear strikes) demanded and aided dispersed, networked forces. The trend was “toward dispersal of major weapon system components,” he explained.90 For air power, by way of example, “[t]he evolutionary trends clearly point to the dispersion of all air-strike, ground-defense, air-based defense elements.” Target acquisition will be remote and strikes made by “stand-off” missiles; indeed, “in the more distant future, unmanned automatic or remotely piloted aircraft will be used for both target acquisition and weapon delivery.”91 Rona called this enhanced complex of control and precision munitions “information war.” It held enormous implications in his eyes, and it rested upon a commander’s ability to understand where and when to strike. War henceforth depended on the rapid and copious flow of information among commanders, sensors, weapons systems, and supporting functions. Yet this networked circulation of data and instructions was itself vulnerable to potentially crippling countermeasures: Since World War II, advances in technology have brought great increases in the complexity of weapon systems. The need to integrate the many sophisticated subsystems has vastly increased the information flow within the

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weapon system envelope. Overall performance also has come to depend rather critically upon the external information flow between the weapon system proper, the target, the command structure, navigation references, and other ancillaries. Because of their susceptibility to countermeasures, these external links and nodes have become major elements of system vulnerability.92

A force that could ensure the quality of its information flow, minimize its own information vulnerabilities, and fog the enemy’s picture of the battlespace would gain the winning edge. “Disruption and manipulation of the adversary’s information flow by means of countermeasures,” noted Rona, “have rapidly become some of the most potent means to secure military advantage.”93 Indeed, such capabilities might be the crucial investment that force planners could make for the future: Even though a number of important advances are still expected in the state of the art pertaining to propulsion, flight control, structures, warheads, and other subsystems…. conceptual and design improvements related to the information war as defined here may very well overshadow in the 5- to 20-year future perspective the advantages gained from other subsystem technology refinements.94

For all his insight, however, Rona did not foresee how quickly his forecast would come true. To understand this we must take a quick step back in time to the middle of the twentieth century, when British and American mathematicians pondered algorithms, and realized that an algorithm (as a logical sequence of yes/no [or if/then] propositions), could also be expressed as a mathematical equation. As such, its answer could be calculated. That insight by Britain’s Alan Turing struck a chord with his American contemporary, Claude Shannon, who met Turing in New York while the two men worked on different parts of the Anglo-American codebreaking effort during World War II. Shannon and others glimpsed the potential of the new computers being built in Britain and America to support the war effort. These computers, though relatively crude and soon outclassed, nonetheless could handle dozens of instructions per second, making it possible through ever-increasing computing speeds to run fiendishly complex algorithms, or “programs.” Shannon did his most important work during the early Cold War. His exploration of “Information Theory” helped make possible the digital

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revolution that accelerated and re-directed the course of the Cold War. Conveying information, he explained, requires a sender or information source, a transmitter, a signal, a receiver, and a destination or recipient. The sender and recipient, moreover, must both be able to understand the meaning of the message; here the “significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages” that both ends of the communication channel can grasp and act upon (Shannon’s emphasis). Implied in this is the notion that some degree of trust must exist between sender and recipient. In other words, the sender must be not only able but willing to select the correct meaning to send, and the recipient must also be willing to select that meaning from the resulting message.95 This implication of Shannon’s theory of information will be key to what follows (Fig. 5.2).

Fig. 5.2  The computer goes to war: civil defense workers learn about the U.S. Air Force’s Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) air defense system. (Office of Defense and Civil Mobilization, SAGE Discussion at Maine Civil Defense College, 1951–1961, Photograph, U.S. National Archives Boston)

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Thomas Rona had grasped two implications of Claude Shannon’s thesis: that modern war now depended on information for weapons and the systems that targeted them; and that the flow of information was itself a key objective in any military action. Yet Rona did not see the range of its practical applications. Realizing that Shannon’s theory of information implied a certain trust relationship between the sender and receiver of a message, Rona noted that an adversary could be confused by an attacker who manipulated his willingness to accept a full range of messages from his comrades.96 In so doing, the attacker alters the adversary’s comprehension of when and where to concentrate. Breaking trust in the information flow could impair military effectiveness—and (although Rona himself did not realize this) it could impair political effectiveness as well. That aspect of Information War would await the global spread of the Internet to become more apparent and consequential. Both superpowers began to explore notions of Information War in the 1980s. The Soviets called it the “reconnaissance-strike complex.”97 The Americans got there first, however, with systems built around microchips—computers for the battlefield. But first, of course, computers had to be made robust and powerful and small enough to be mobile, and cheap enough to be disposable, so they could serve commanders and even troops in guiding operations and  soon actual munitions  as well. This goal took a stride toward reality in 1971, when Intel Corporation in California’s Santa Clara Valley began selling the world’s first commercial “microprocessor,” the Intel 4004 central processing unit (CPU), a mesh of tiny circuits woven together on a sliver of silicon. Like every great Western military advance, the device relied on precision timing, provided in this case by a quartz crystal oscillating at 740,000 cycles per second. That CPU submitted a new instruction to its host computer every 8  cycles, meaning the computer itself could perform more than 90,000 instructions per second. Intel’s 4004 processor  thus worked at speeds many times faster than the U.S. Army’s room-sized ENIAC, which had helped the mathematicians designing the hydrogen bomb. Nonetheless, Intel’s tiny silicon “chip” cost only $60 per unit (in 1971 prices).98 The cost of microchips dropped steadily as new makers entered the market and competed to improve their performance. Within months of Intel’s breakthrough, various manufacturers began finding ways to put computers not only in hand-held scientific calculators but in all sorts of

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devices for military and civilian use. Inventors followed suit and soon began computerizing seemingly everything possible. The microchip ensured that Americans, Japanese, and Western Europeans as early as 1980 were surrounded with tiny computers at home and at work, in their cars, their telephones, their televisions, and increasingly in their “personal computers,” often linked by telephone lines to other computers in schools, businesses, and other homes. Several short, sharp wars demonstrated that Western forces were rapidly assimilating the new methods and technology. Their ability to see the battlespace and to put munitions precisely on target led to lopsided victories in 1982, first by the British around the Falkland Islands and then by the Israeli air force over Lebanon. In the former conflict, a Royal Navy task force, despite losing several ships to Argentine aircraft firing French-made air-to-surface missiles, ensured that Argentina’s navy stayed in port and its air force launched only isolated strikes. In Lebanon, Israeli unmanned aircraft mimicked an incoming strike, convincing Syrian anti-aircraft missile batteries to acquire the drones with their radars. Israeli aircraft then targeted the radars with beam-riding missiles, blinding Syria’s air defenses and forcing its air force up to defend Syrian forces and their PLO allies. This allowed Israeli pilots in turn to ambush the Syrian aircraft, whose pilots fought in uncoordinated isolation because their radios were jammed. With better sensors, weapons, and training, Israel could comprehend the battlespace while the Syrians could not. The Israelis destroyed a quarter of the Syrian air force in one day while losing no planes or pilots. The U.S. Air Force and Navy subsequently proved their proficiency in the new warfare against Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi in 1986, coordinating U.S. bombers and fighters in a night of destruction for Libyan air defenses (and almost hitting Qaddafi himself). These conflicts demonstrated that the standard for fielding competitive air and naval forces had been raised so high that the handful of nations who mastered the new techniques could operate essentially at will against any obsolete adversary force. President Ronald Reagan in 1983 raised the possibility of utilizing this technological superiority for strategic effect. He publicly called on scientists “to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete” through greatly improved missile defenses, possibly based in space.99 Although the more exotic candidate methods for the resulting Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) proved unfeasible, the prospect of downing at least some missiles in-flight—thus adding uncertainty to an attacker’s task—looked realistic enough to convince proponents and

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frighten critics. Skeptics dubbed it “Star Wars,” and the Soviets insisted they would neutralize it with cheaper countermeasures. Nevertheless, Reagan’s cherished research program proved a sticking point for arms control, with Soviet negotiators demanding the Americans curtail the tests. Gorbachev in Geneva (1985) offered Reagan “a 50-percent cut in strategic arms” for an end to SDI.100 Reagan declined, perhaps sensing Gorbachev would hardly offer such a deal if he believed “Star Wars” was truly a futile waste of American resources (Fig. 5.3). Soviet leaders by this point could barely discern science from fantasy given the bewildering pace of technological change. At a meeting with Warsaw Pact leaders in 1985, Gorbachev noted that “[e]veryone complained about the fact that in the economic sphere—especially in matters of technological progress, advanced technologies, and integration—the Socialist countries were obviously losing ground to the West.”101 The

Fig. 5.3  General Secretary Gorbachev (left) and President Reagan (center) at Reykjavik, 1986. (White House Photographic Office, Photograph of President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev meeting at Hofdi House during the Reykjavik Summit, 1986, Photograph, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library) (Color figure online)

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Communist bloc built its own computers, of course, but as in every other advanced technology sector, Soviet scientists and engineers had fallen behind. Perhaps in consequence, the Kremlin developed a nearly magical regard for the powers of data processing. U.S. intelligence found evidence, for example, that the geriatric leadership in Moscow for a time based its assessment of the strategic balance of power in part on a computer model managed by the KGB. Called VRYAN (for “Surprise Nuclear Missile Attack”), this algorithm weighed 40,000 variables and in the early 1980s kept 200 employees busy feeding it data that might indicate if and when the United States had “obtained decisive, overall superiority on the Soviet Union.” VRYAN thus promised to determine quantitatively when Washington “might be inclined to launch a surprise attack.”102 Politically there was no chance of such an attack, yet debates in the Kremlin had come unmoored from this reality before Mikhail Gorbachev took power in 1985.

The End of Empire Such fears in the Kremlin provided the context for Gorbachev’s fateful turn. He knew better than anyone in the Politburo that the Soviet economy was failing. Indeed, then-General Secretary Yuri Andropov had asked him in the early 1980s to report on the nation’s economy, and what he found appalled him. “The costs of labour, fuel and raw material per unit of production were two to two and a half times higher [in the USSR] than in the developed countries, while in agriculture they were ten times higher.” Despite his charge from Andropov, moreover, not even Gorbachev could see the military budget. Only after becoming General Secretary himself did he learn the truth—that military spending represented two-fifths of the state budget.103 His predecessor Nikita Khrushchev had long ago warned against this: “We must remember that the fewer people we have in the army, the more people we will have available for other, more productive kinds of work.”104 Gorbachev also saw that Moscow’s clients in Eastern Europe had grown addicted to Western loans—debts that had to be repaid in hard currency—while also relying on subsidies from the USSR that the Kremlin could no longer afford.105 The Soviet economy had stalled by the early 1980s, when “a sharp drop in oil prices cost the Soviet Union nearly half of its hard currency earnings”—and reduced the subsidies it could send to Eastern Europe. The USSR, Gorbachev concluded, was in deep trouble that could not be remedied by Andropov’s strategy of “restoring

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order.” “Barracks communism” had built the USSR, but it no longer worked, as he wrote later.106 Fundamental reforms were imperative. Gorbachev prescribed such a cure with his perestroika—the notion that the strategies for social and economic development should remain under central direction but their implementation must be locally and even democratically managed.107 He sincerely believed it would succeed, and his faith emboldened him to endorse unprecedented liberties. For example, Gorbachev fixed upon promoting dialogue between the “democratic circles in Polish and Soviet society.” “It was then,” he wrote in his memoir, “that the go-ahead was given for revitalizing and significantly expanding contacts among sociologists, writers, journalists, scholars, cultural figures, and the creative intelligentsia and the youth of both countries.” The salient point here is that a “go-ahead” had to come from above—in effect, from each nation’s Communist Party—for what in the liberal West was regarded as normal human interaction. This lingering centralism provided the opening for Party opposition to perestroika that ultimately throttled its reforms. Indeed, as Gorbachev lamented, “[a]ll attempts at any kind of serious economic transformation in our country were stifled and choked by political retrogradism.”108 The funds needed for reform were instead, in Gorbachev’s words, “swallowed up by the insatiable Moloch of the military-industrial complex.”109 The Communist bloc had maintained order by wrapping society in networks of informers—an approach that hardly encouraged innovation and risk taking. This system did, it is true, mark a change from the methods of Stalin and Mao. At the height of the purge trials and the Cultural Revolution, these dictators smothered their societies with the fear of sudden arrest and indefinite imprisonment or execution. They had effectually flipped the liberal presumption of innocence, forcing everyone to prove their innocence daily and to proclaim their love for the Revolution (and its current leader). The post-Stalinist regimes of the USSR and Eastern Europe, by contrast, could be brutal but usually worked more subtly, watching everyone in a way that exceeded the inquisitorial reach of every previous tyranny. The security services of the Warsaw Pact, led by the KGB, perfected the capability to blackmail anyone. Here was the apotheosis of Kautilya’s prince and Aristotle’s tyrant, who deployed informers across the city in order to keep citizens from thinking high thoughts and trusting their neighbors. The KGB and its proteges—particularly East Germany’s Stasi—industrialized this ancient surveillance scheme,

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compiling files on nearly everyone and filling their folders with anything their informers supplied.110 Entire societies thus had something to hide. Nearly every citizen could count on having a thick file stuffed with facts, rumors, and lies, and he or she might also be actively cooperating with the secret police themselves by informing on colleagues, neighbors, and relatives. Poland’s secret police, the Słuěba Bezpieczeństwa (SB), for example, watched even non-descript citizens for decades—especially those in the Polish diaspora across Europe. The effects of such surveillance lingered long after Communism’s fall, with its subjects wondering who had informed on them and why.111 The West had glimpsed such a future in the 1960s, when governments and corporations began sorting their citizens’ personal information in computer databases, and virtually every liberal democracy began in the 1970s to limit the collating and sharing of such personal data by legislating (or at least recommending) digital privacy protections.112 Such safeguards remained unknown in the Warsaw Pact, however, where the secret police could always find something compromising and threaten to divulge it if the subject persisted in anti-social behavior (however defined at the time). It must be noted, for it will be important later, that while the Soviet bloc created systems of national surveillance, they did so with blunt methods which contained two fatal flaws. First, by relying on webs of informers, they disrupted the elements of trust that, while they could empower conspiracy, also enabled enterprise. It is no surprise that the disruptive ideas which enabled radical technological development struggled to take root in a society where informers reported to the authorities nearly any non-­ conformity with the officially sanctioned approach. While this first flaw undermined the regime’s ability to generate power that could become force, the second flaw provided a perhaps more fatal vulnerability. This was the state’s inability to turn national information into national comprehension at scale and speed. In short, while the state could track almost everything about its known enemies, it could not reliably find every enemy when and where they challenged the state. Eventually enough people behind the Iron Curtain developed the courage to resist the blackmail—and demand another way to live. But the innovation and risk-taking that Gorbachev had summoned worked to wreck the Party states, not reform them. Eastern Europe saw two trends converge to make socialism untenable. The fall began in Poland, as Gorbachev hinted: “Poland was essentially the first to enter the stage that could be called the general crisis of socialism.”113 What gave Solidarity

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activists courage to resist blackmail and repression was their knowledge of the liberal West, shared increasingly through electronic means. These came to Poland through all sorts of (often illegal) channels, including smuggling. Such means, secretly assisted by the United States, kept hope and resistance alive, as they allowed the underground to coordinate and publicize its actions.114 Activists behind the Iron Curtain took courage from Gorbachev’s reforms in the Soviet Union, which no longer had the means to antagonize Western creditors with renewed repression. In Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968), deviations from socialism had provoked Soviet military interventions to restore the Party’s monopoly on power. Gorbachev had implicitly rejected this course in 1985, telling Warsaw Pact leaders that they would henceforth be taking “full responsibility for the situation in their own countries.” He even suggested in private that the future of the Warsaw Pact was not predetermined: “‘Let’s not force anyone,’ I said. ‘Let each country decide what it should do.’”115 With the Soviets (and their creditors) watching from afar, local Communist Parties dared not order their armies and secret police to fire on mass demonstrations. The Parties in the Warsaw Pact accordingly lost their nerve in 1989, and by the end of that momentous year every Eastern European nation had some form of transitional government moving toward democratic rule. Gorbachev explained this dynamic for the Central Committee of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party at what would turn out to be its last plenum in July 1991. To his “fundamentalist” colleagues who wanted a Stalinist restoration, he insisted the Party would “lose all credibility” unless it reformed itself into a modern, democratic socialist party. Plenum delegates mostly conceded that “such concepts as the market, a civic society, a law-based state, free elections, political pluralism, a multi-party system, human values, integration in the world community, and many other ideas of that kind were here to stay.” A few “fanatics,” however, were not convinced, and launched an abortive coup against Gorbachev the next month.116 The near tragedy ended in three days, however, and the Soviet Union dissolved itself on Christmas Day, 1991. A great historical question remains: how did European communism collapse, wrapped as it was in stifling internal surveillance? The answer rests partly in the USSR’s inability to innovate, which meant it could neither deliver growth nor stop the flood of liberal ideas (like  democracy) while it fell farther behind in military technology. Hence Gorbachev’s

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desperate attempt to preserve central direction with local and even democratic autonomy. As if to prove that ideas (and not just force) drive history, however, a key part of the Communist world reacted very differently to the new “information revolution” sweeping the world in the 1980s. Indeed, one Marxist, Party-dominated state found a way to adapt to global economic imperatives without either ceding Party control or allowing the “chaos” feared by European Party leaders. The Chinese Communist Party accepted a degree of capitalism, or rather a sort of “market socialism” that allowed private property and exchange while boosting exports in a classic mercantilist strategy. Experts were allowed to be experts, without being sent to re-education camps, as they had been during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. China’s new leader, Deng Xiaoping, had already coined a maxim for this epochal shift: “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is white or black, as long as it catches mice.”117 He enforced central direction with a massacre of students and intellectuals calling for democracy at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in June 1989 (three weeks after Gorbachev had visited the capital). Yet Deng delivered a growing and increasingly modern economy; Gorbachev himself conceded in 1995 that “in ten years or so an enormous country of more than a billion people was freed from the most ruinous effects of left-wing experiments.”118 The collapse of orthodox Marxism in the Soviet Union and its abandonment in China shocked revolutionaries and regimes across the Third World. One immediate effect of the Eastern European turn toward democracy was a sharp decline in support to various insurgencies and progressive extremists. In the Muslim world this meant less competition for other militants of a jihadist stripe, both Shi’a and Sunnis. The 1980s had shown that Islamic militants who were willing to die for their beliefs could wear down the will of both superpowers, convincing the United States and France to quit their peacekeeping missions in Lebanon in 1984, and making it so tough for the Soviets to control the Afghan countryside that Moscow pulled its forces from Afghanistan in 1989. Yet interpreting the tide of history proved tricky for those carried by it. The Soviet client regime in Kabul did not collapse immediately after the Soviets left, for example, and the rebels could not capture Afghanistan’s principal cities for five more years. Western indifference to Muslims fighting Muslims, however, did not translate to toleration of overt violations of Westphalian norms, like the Iraqi invasion and annexation of Kuwait in 1990. This invasion indeed

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proved a watershed in the ending of the Cold War ideological competition. Iraqi strongman Saddam Husayn, looking to shore up his strategic position for his next war with Iran, decided he needed Kuwait’s oil wells and its fine harbor on the Persian Gulf, so he took them in a one-day blitzkrieg in August 1990, swiftly overwhelming Kuwaiti defenses. His rubber-­ stamp parliament then annexed Kuwait in spite of the global outcry. The UN Security Council condemned the invasion the day after it occurred, and then in late November endorsed the use of “all necessary means” to compel an Iraqi withdrawal. Moscow and Beijing could have vetoed either resolution, but stood aside and left Iraqi troops to be ousted from Kuwait by an American-led coalition force in early 1991. The United Nations’ decisive action against this aggression stood in sharp contrast to its silence when North Vietnam overran South Vietnam just 15 years earlier. “The divided world of the Cold War had impeded the UN from carrying out the tasks defined in its charter,” explained Gorbachev in 1995, echoing an article he had published in Pravda eight years earlier.119 That ideological division had effectually ended by 1991, and if liberalism and international law had not exactly triumphed, they now had no obvious challengers for legitimacy and global influence.

Conclusion Force depends upon concentration, which rulers build by harnessing cooperation, conveyance, and comprehension. The Cold War saw a subtle and momentous recombination of the factors that determine the effectiveness of force. How did so many empires lose their will and fall more or less voluntarily? All of them yielded, willingly or unwillingly, to the ideal of equality—to the notion that no person, race, or nation is so profoundly gifted as to merit the rule of others without their consent as expressed in law. This idea had been eclipsed in the 1930s but soon revived to sweep the world over the course of the Cold War. How it ultimately prevailed merits a quick reflection, at least to highlight the abounding irony of the power of law in shaping a world order that dwelt in the shadow of nuclear annihilation. World War II had been fought with conventional and atomic weapons, resulting in horrible slaughter. Fear of World War III preserved the “peace that is no peace,” as George Orwell prophesied in 1945, especially when the H-bomb froze the Cold War strategic stalemate.120 The Soviet Union’s enormous military strength indeed kept the European nations from fully

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defending their empires when modern weapons and ideologies spread among the colonies. This inhibition owed much to the need to hold forces in Western Europe to deter Moscow, but it also stemmed from the liberal democracies’ commitments to the UN Charter. Aggressive war to gain or even hold empire was now judged futile, dangerous, and illegal, as long as revolutionaries and liberation movements could claim to be fighting imperialism with asymmetric, “people’s” struggles. Conflict did not end, of course; it just went covert. This in turn gave the Soviets a degree of strategic initiative in the Cold War as long as Communist parties in the Third World carried the banner of revolution. That initiative subtly ended with the final passing of the European empires. By now the revolutionary vanguard was being contested by Moscow and Beijing, giving the NATO nations and their Pacific partners a certain historical breathing space. For two generations, Europe and East Asia (at least the Western-leaning states) could grow in relative peace while civil wars afflicted many of their former colonies. In the late 1970s and across the 1980s, moreover, the liberal democracies tentatively made common cause with Muslim nations against the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan. The Cold War was thus a military stalemate accompanied by fierce conventional skirmishes in the Third World and a global competition of narratives about how people can and should live their lives. European Communism worked for as long as it could isolate itself behind well-­ defended borders. The “liberated” peoples living under Marxist systems could not be allowed to know about the world around them, or to realize that their fellow citizens shared similar hopes for a better future and resentment over their bleak prospects. At the same time, the computer-driven acceleration of Western economic growth widened the gap between the liberal democracies and the Communist lands, while an electronics revolution made this reality ever more glaring to leaders and the peoples even behind the Iron Curtain. The democracies thus deterred the Warsaw Pact’s conventional military superiority while rendering its omnipresent internal surveillance apparatus obsolete. The collapse of Soviet Communism was thus both economic and political, and the twin failures exacerbated each other. By 1991, as noted above, even Gorbachev was telling his Communist Party critics that the USSR had to allow pluralism and democracy. After the USSR’s collapse, the resulting strategic vacuum left the combined military, economic, and ideological power of liberalism looking invincible.

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What culminated at the end of the Cold War was a geostrategic earthquake. Strategy had hitherto, since the 1500s, sought control of vital geographic points and the resources they commanded, which in turn allowed the advanced states to sustain their economies and their armed forces. Geography mattered most because the dominant states delivered their superior force through advances in conveyance, the ferocity of firepower (a kind of cooperation), and their comprehension of where to deliver force. The West had won that competition with superior clocks, maps, guns, transport, and communications. But after 1945 these Western advantages persisted on the battlefield while the West’s ability to hold colonies eroded with the global spread of democratic ideals. In this new age, the prize became not geographic mastery but political legitimacy, as even weapons development began to be shaped by considerations of legitimacy in domestic political and international legal forums. Governments that misread these lessons the least (i.e., the Western liberal states) survived the Cold War.

Notes 1. Where c denotes the speed of light. Calculating velocity, however, depends upon the ability to measure both distance and time. One might argue that “measurement” may in fact be the most fundamental technology of all time, in being a tool developed by every civilization as such. 2. George Orwell, “You and the Atom Bomb,” Tribune, October 19, 1945; accessed May 13, 2018, at http://www.george-orwell.org/You_and_ the_Atomic_Bomb/0.html 3. David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 314–315. 4. “Reveals H-Bomb Damage Area: Rep. Cole Tells How Chicago Would Fare,” Chicago Tribune, February 18, 1954. 5. Winston Churchill, speech in the House of Commons, March 1, 1955; accessed October 30, 2017, at https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/privatelives/yourcountry/collections/churchillexhibition/churchill-the-orator/hydrogen/ 6. Dwight D Eisenhower, First Inaugural Address, January 20, 1953; accessed June 12, 2017, at https://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/all_ about_ike/presidential/1953_inauguration.html 7. Bernard Brodie, The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order (Harcourt, 1946).

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8. Edward Kaplan, To Kill Nations: American Strategy in the Air-Atomic Age and the Rise of Mutually Assured Destruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), pp. 1–2. 9. Eisenhower to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, September 8, 1953, in Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, Vol. 2, Part 1, National Security Affairs; accessed June 13, 2017, at https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus195254v02p1/ d89. Emphasis in original. 10. Yuri Smirnov and Vladislav Zubok, “Nuclear Weapons after Stalin’s Death: Moscow Enters the H-Bomb Age,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin, Fall 1994, pp. 14–16; accessed June 13, 2017, at https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/CWIHP_ Bulletin_4.pdf 11. Stephen I.  Schwartz, Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S.  Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2011), p. 193. 12. RAND Corporation, Vulnerability of US Strategic Air Power to a Surprise Enemy Attack in 1956, Special Memorandum 15, April 1953, p. ii. 13. Arjun Makhijani, Howard Hu, Katherine Yih, Nuclear Wastelands: A Global Guide to Nuclear Weapons Production and Its Health and Environmental Effects (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), pp. 333–336. 14. Kaplan, To Kill Nations, pp. 217–220. 15. Jonathan Reed Winkler, “The Forgotten Menace of Electro-Magnetic Warfare in the Early Cold War,” Diplomatic History (2017), p. 2; accessed November 21, 2017, at https://academic.oup.com/dh/advance-article/doi/10.1093/dh/dhx050/3896229 16. Ralph D.  Lorenz and David Michael Harland, Space Systems Failures: Disasters and Rescues of Satellites, Rocket and Space Probes (New York: Springer, 2005), p. 266. 17. Paul Baran, Oral history interview by Judy O’Neill, 5 March 1990, Menlo Park, California, see p. 10. Transcript is at the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. http://purl.umn. edu/107101 18. Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: WW Norton, 2011 [1969]), p. 35. 19. Ibid., p. 25. 20. Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (New York: Vintage, 2009 [2008]), pp. 302–304, 317. 21. Kennedy, Thirteen Days, pp.  72–75. See also Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s Foreword, p. 8.

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22. Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991 [1983]), pp. 317–326. 23. Kennedy, Thirteen Days; see the Afterword by Richard E. Neustadt and Graham T. Allison, p. 104. 24. Khrushchev Remembers, p. 500. 25. Kennedy, Thirteen Days, p. 30. 26. Khrushchev Remembers, p. 498. See also Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, Kennedy, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1958–1964 (New York: Norton, 1997), p. 286. 27. Khrushchev Remembers, pp. 493–494. Fursenko and Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble”, p. 171. 28. Ibid., p. 518. 29. Raymond L.  Garthoff, “Estimating Soviet Military Intentions and Capabilities,” in Gerald K. Haines and Robert E. Leggett, eds., Watching the Bear: Essays on CIA’s Analysis of the Soviet Union (Washington: Central Intelligence Agency, 2001), p. 153. 30. Donald J. O’Rourke, “Packet switching services for the autodin community,” in American Federation of Information Processing Societies, National Computer Conference 1978 (AFIPS Press, 1978), pp. 735–746; accessed November 22, 2017, at https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/afips/1978/5086/00/50860735.pdf 31. Winston Churchill, speech in the House of Commons, March 1, 1955; accessed October 30, 2017, at https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/privatelives/yourcountry/collections/churchillexhibition/churchill-the-orator/hydrogen/ 32. John Clearwater, Canadian Nuclear Weapons: The Untold Story of Canada’s Cold War Arsenal (Toronto: Dundurn, 1998), pp. 94–96. 33. J.  Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6:3 (1969), pp. 185–186. 34. Stewart Alsop and Charles Bartlett, “In Time of Crisis,” Saturday Evening Post, December 8, 1962, p. 20. 35. Harold M.  Tanner, Where Chiang Kai Shek Lost China: The Liao-Shen Campaign, 1948 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), pp. 4–5. 36. Khrushchev Remembers, p. 462. 37. Letter of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, “A Proposal Concerning the General Line of the International Communist Movement,” June 14, 1963 (this is a reply to “the Letter of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of March 30, 1963”); accessed September 24, 2017, at https://www.marxists.org/ history/international/comintern/sino-soviet-split/cpc/proposal.htm 38. Ibid.

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39. Ibid. 40. Johnson, Modern Times, pp.  477, 489; emphasis in original. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1970 hailed Sukarno as the leader of one of the “great movements in history.” See Khomeini, Islamic Government: Governance of the Jurist (Velayat-e Faqeeh), trans. Hamid Alger (Tehran: Institute for Compilation and Publication of Imam Khomeini’s Works, n.d.). p. 83. 41. Johnson, Modern Times, p. 470. 42. Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1963 (New York: Viking, 1977), pp. 409–411. 43. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p.  51. The Ayatollah Khomeini also noted that Western imperialists sought to fragment the Muslim world, citing as an example the post-World War I break-up of the Ottoman empire into “ten or fifteen petty states” ruled by the West’s “servants.” Khomeini, Islamic Government, p. 24. 44. Christopher E. Goscha, “Intelligence in a Time of Decolonization: The Case of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam at War (1945–50),” Intelligence and National Security 22:1 (February 2007), pp. 122, 127. See also Martin Thomas, Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial After 1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), pp. 296–298. 45. Myles Osborne, The Life and Times of General China’s Mau Mau and the End of Empire in Kenya (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2014), p. 11. 46. Horne, A Savage War of Peace, pp. 246–266. 47. For more, see Charles R.  Shrader, A War of Logistics: Parachutes and Porters in Indochina, 1945–1954 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2015). 48. Horne, A Savage War of Peace, pp. 249–250, 266–267. 49. Ibid., pp. 269, 274. 50. Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990 [1978]), pp. 452–453. 51. Oona Hathaway, Scott Shapiro, “The Internationalists vs. the Realists and Neocons,” Lawfare (blog), September 25, 2017; accessed November 27, 2017, at https://www.lawfareblog.com/internationalists-vs-realistsand-neocons 52. The People’s Republic of China was not yet a member state in the United Nations. 53. Austin Carson, Secret Wars: Covert Conflict in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), pp. 3–6, 268. Lindsey O’Rourke implicitly agrees, adding that a state might not want to publicize an adversary’s covert action that it is in fact exploiting in some way;

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see Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), p. 71. 54. John K. Cooley, Green March Black September: The Story of the Palestinian Arabs (London: Frank Cass, 1973), p. 102. 55. Michael J.  Eisenstadt and Kenneth M.  Pollack, “Armies of Snow and Armies of Sand: The Impact of Soviet Military Doctrine on Arab Militaries,” in Emily O. Goldman and Leslie C.  Eliason, eds., The Diffusion of Military Technology and Ideas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 77–78. 56. Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1982), p. 465. 57. Robert J.  Hanyok, Spartans in Darkness: American SIGINT and the Indochina War, 1945–1975 (Ft. Meade: National Security Agency, 2002), pp. 296–298; accessed November 16, 2016, at http://www.fas.org/irp/ nsa/spartans/index.html 58. Khrushchev Remembers, pp.  471, 474. Raymond L.  Garthoff, Soviet Leaders and Intelligence: Assessing the American Adversary during the Cold War (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2015), pp. 42–44. 59. Fear that Castro might lean toward China, for instance, motivated Moscow to cement ties to the Cuban revolutionary regime in 1960; see Fursenko and Naftali, “‘One Hell of a Gamble’,” p. 50. 60. Garthoff, Soviet Leaders and Intelligence, p. 44. 61. Bei Dao, City Gate, Open Up, trans. Jeffrey Yang (New York: New Directions, 2017), p. 212. 62. Lincoln Cushing and Ann Tompkins, Chinese Posters: Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2007), p. 18. 63. For an overview of the Cold War struggle over Chile, see Christopher Andrew and Kristian Gustafsen, “The Other Hidden Hand: Soviet and Cuban Intelligence in Allende’s Chile,” Intelligence and National Security 33 (April 2018), pp. 416–417. 64. Clausewitz, On War, Book VI, ch. 26, p. 480. 65. Carlos Marighella, Minimanual for the Urban Guerrilla, June 1969; accessed September 5, 2017, at https://www.marxists.org/archive/ marighella-carlos/1969/06/minimanual-urban- guerrilla/ 66. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 50. 67. Frantz Fanon, “Why We Use Violence” (Accra, April 1960), in Alienation and Freedom, Jean Khalifa and Robert Young, eds. (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 68. Khomeini, Islamic Government, pp. 7–17, 24, 31, 72, 75, 83–89. 69. Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, “Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Police Interrogation Procedures in Northern Ireland” [the

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Bennett Report], March 1979; accessed May 5, 2018, at http://cain. ulst.ac.uk/hmso/bennett.htm 70. Moscow had vetoed South Vietnam’s application to join the UN in 1957, and not until twenty years later did the UN admit the (forcibly) united State of Vietnam. See George S.  Prugh, “Application of Geneva Conventions to Prisoners of War,” Law at War: Vietnam, 1964–1973 (Washington: Department of the Army, 1975); accessed August 8, 2017, at http://lawofwar.org/vietnam_pow_policy.htm 71. Marighella, “Objectives of the Guerrillas’ Actions,” Minimanual for the Urban Guerrilla. 72. Clausewitz, On War, Book I, ch. 2, p. 99. 73. Alexander S. Duff, “Heidegger’s Ghosts,” American Interest, February 26, 2016; accessed May 28, 2018, at https://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/02/25/heideggers-ghosts/. Note also Khomeini’s comments in 1970 on the “dazzling effect [of] the material progress of the imperialist countries”; Khomeini, Islamic Government, p. 15. 74. Quoted in Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West (London: Allen Lane, 1999), p. 431. 75. Vasili Mitrokhin, The KGB in Afghanistan, Woodrow Wilson Center; Cold War International History Project, July 7, 2011, pp.  85, 109; accessed October 23, 2017, at https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/the-kgb-afghanistan. See also Garthoff, Soviet Leaders and Intelligence, pp. 59–60. 76. “On the Events in Afghanistan on 27 and 28 December 1979,” a report drafted by the Politburo’s Afghanistan Commission (Andropov, Ustinov, Gromyko, and Ponomarev) for the CPSU Central Committee, No. 2519-A, December 31, 1979; quoted in Vasili Mitrokhin, The KGB in Afghanistan, Woodrow Wilson Center; Cold War International History Project, July 7, 2011, p.  103; accessed October 23, 2017, at https:// www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/the-kgb- afghanistan 77. See United Nations General Assembly, “The situation in Afghanistan and its implications for international peace and security,” A/RES/ES-6/2, January 14, 1980; accessed October 18, 2017, at http://www.un.org/ en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/RES/ES-6/2 78. Central Intelligence Agency, National Foreign Assessment Center, “Worldwide Reaction to the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan,” February 1980, PA80-10051C, p. 3; accessed October 29, 2017, at https://www. cia.gov/librar y/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP81B00401R 000600190013- 5.pdf 79. Mitrokhin, The KGB in Afghanistan, p.  106. Khomeini, Islamic Government, pp. 37, 71.

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80. Gorbachev, Memoirs, pp. 478–479. This fits with what he added in his Memoirs about the possibility of a Tiananmen Square massacre in the USSR: “…I have never consented and will never consent to the use of force to crush similar dissent. Violence does not resolve any problems, it simply drives them deeper.” See p. 506. 81. Central Intelligence Agency, National Foreign Assessment Center, “Worldwide Reaction to the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan,” February 1980, PA80-10051C, p. ii; accessed October 29, 2017, at h t t p s : / / w w w. c i a . g o v / l i b r a r y / r e a d i n g r o o m / d o c s / C I A RDP81B00401R000600190013- 5.pdf 82. Robert Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006 [1996]), pp. 175, 251, 348. 83. Joint Chiefs of Staff, memorandum for the Secretary of Defense, “Berlin Contingency Planning,” JSCM 431–61, June 26, 1961, pp. 22, 32, 35; accessed November 4, 2017, at https://nsarchive.files.wordpress. com/2011/11/1961-06-26a.pdf 84. Thomas P. Rona, Weapons Systems and Information War, Seattle: Boeing Corporation [for the Office of the Secretary of Defense], July 1, 1976, p.  5; accessed February 4, 2018, at www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/.../09F-0070-Weapon-Systems-and-Information-War.pdf 85. McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the Last Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988), pp. 567–568. 86. Gorbachev, Memoirs, p. 215. 87. See the NATO statement approved at the Special Meeting of Foreign and Defence Ministers in Brussels on 12 December 1979; accessed on April 27, 2018, at https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_ texts_27040.htm?selectedLocale=en 88. Gorbachev, Memoirs, pp. 443–444. 89. See William J. Perry’s prepared statement, February 1, 1978, to the Senate Armed Services Committee, reprinted in Department of Defense authorization for appropriations for fiscal year 1979, 95th Congress, Second Session, 1978, pt. 8, pp.  5597–5599; accessed November 7, 2017, at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951d034402778;vie w=1up;seq=118. See also Robert R.  Tomes, US Defence Strategy from Vietnam to Operation Iraqi Freedom: Military Innovation and the New American Way of War, 1973–1990 (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 67. 90. Rona, Weapons Systems and Information War, p. 3. 91. Ibid., pp. 3–4. 92. Ibid., p. vi. 93. Ibid., pp. 1 and 40. 94. Ibid., p. 6.

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95. Claude Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” The Bell System Technical Journal 27 (July 1948), pp. 379–380; accessed May 12, 2018, at http://math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf 96. Rona, Weapons Systems and Information War, pp. 5, 67–68. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” pp. 379–380. 97. Michael J. Sterling, Soviet Reactions to NATO’s Emerging Technologies for Deep Attack, N-2294-AF (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1985), pp.  9–10; accessed November 6, 2017, at https://www.rand. org/content/dam/rand/pubs/notes/2009/N2294.pdf 98. Federico Faggin, “The Making of the First Microprocessor,” IEEE Solid-­ State Circuits Magazine 1:1 (Winter 2009); accessed December 6, 2017, at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4776530/ 99. Ronald Reagan, “Address to the Nation on Defense and National Security,” March 23, 1983; accessed November 27, 2017, at https:// reaganlibrary.archives.gov/archives/speeches/1983/32383d.htm 100. Gorbachev, Memoirs, pp. 407–408. 101. Ibid., p. 467. 102. President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, “The Soviet ‘War Scare’,” February 15, 1990, p.  44; accessed November 11, 2017, at http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb533-The- Able-Archer-WarScare-Declassified-PFIAB-Report-Released/2012-0238-MR.pdf See also Garthoff, Soviet Leaders and Intelligence, pp. 67–69, 77. 103. Gorbachev, Memoirs, pp. 147, 203, 215–217. 104. Khrushchev Remembers, p. 518. 105. Gorbachev, Memoirs, pp. 467, 469, 478. 106. Ibid., pp. 215–217, 468, 603. 107. Ibid., p. 174. 108. Ibid., pp. 480, 494. 109. Ibid., p. 444. 110. Jens Gieseke, “The Stasi and East German Society: Some Remarks on Current Research,” in Uwe Spiekermann, ed., The Stasi at Home and Abroad: Domestic Order and Foreign Intelligence (Washington: German Historical Institute, 2014), pp. 63–70. 111. See Idesbald Goddeeris, “Polish Intelligence in Brussels: The Agent, his Object, and the Subjective Historian,” in Wladyslaw Bulhak and Thomas Wegener Friis, eds., Need to Know: Eastern and Western Perspectives (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2014), pp. 188–189. 112. See, for example, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, “OECD Guidelines on the Protection of Privacy and Transborder Flows of Personal Data,” (1980); accessed May 5, 2018, at http://www.oecd.org/sti/ieconomy/oecdguidelinesontheprotectionofprivacyandtransborderflowso fpersonaldata.htm

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113. Gorbachev, Memoirs, p. 478. 114. Gates, From the Shadows, pp. 358–359, 450–451. 115. Gorbachev, Memoirs, pp. 465–466. 116. Ibid., pp. 601–607. 117. Johnson, Modern Times, pp. 565–567. Deng’s remark is apparently from a speech to a Communist Youth League conference on July 7, 1962. 118. Gorbachev, Memoirs, p. 494. 119. Ibid., p. 442. 120. George Orwell, “You and the Atom Bomb,” Tribune (London), October 19, 1945; accessed November 17, 2018, at http://articles.latimes. com/2013/nov/05/business/la-fi-mh- orwells-atomic-20131104

CHAPTER 6

A Liberal Order?

“Communism’s collapse has called forth old animosities and new dangers.” —President William J. Clinton, Inaugural Address, 1993

The Cold War ended in 1991 with the Soviet Union extinct and the United States perhaps the world’s most powerful country ever, at least in relative terms. At this moment political theorist Francis Fukuyama pondered “the End of History,” foreseeing the ultimate triumph of liberalism and peace, even if he was not quite convinced himself.1 The liberal West seemed to have achieved a two-fold triumph: it possessed superior tools to create force and it possessed the only (apparently) coherent ideology for government. Yet liberal supremacy in international affairs would not last. Peace did not suffuse the world, even as peoples grew more prosperous. Explaining that fact—what did not happen—is the puzzle behind the events and trends that unfolded over the ensuing decade. Two conflicts in Iraq opened and closed the liberal ascendancy in world politics. The first one  confirmed what the earlier decades had wrought. Western militaries, especially America’s, maneuvered in concert over such great distances that there was no doubting their astonishing superiority in the tools of cooperation and conveyance. Yet there was something even more significant in their application of force’s third

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Warner, J. Childress, The Use of Force for State Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45410-4_6

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principle: comprehension. The Gulf War revealed the West’s unprecedented awareness of the battlefield, an understanding paired with superior cooperation and conveyance to extraordinary effect. Theorists had anticipated the importance of information for warfare, and this war dispelled doubts in their foresight. The second Iraqi conflict just twelve years later proved the limitations of Western power on the battlefield and the durability of non-liberal worldviews. The essential elements of force—cooperation, conveyance, and comprehension—still pertained. Yet harnessing them for liberal ends proved highly problematic. Indeed, the tools that had created comprehension for liberal governments and policies began to make themselves available to their opponents as well. How did this happen?

Iraq Wars The 1980s had seen plenty of strife, and several brief wars showcased the new possibilities for technologically adept militaries. As noted, Britain’s defeat of the Argentine military around the Falklands in 1982; Israel’s rout of the Syrian air force over Lebanon the same year; and the swift American strikes on Libya (1986) showed the proficiency of the most advanced forces in the air and at sea. All three of the losers in these contests fielded capable air defenses; Argentina’s combat aircraft were even more modern than Syria’s, and better flown. Yet the difference between a proficient air force and a world-class one had never been starker or more decisive. A form of domain supremacy analogous to Alfred Mahan’s vision of maritime dominance was now possible in the air. Inferior air forces could barely fly at all. The Gulf War in 1991 showed that an analogous chasm between good and not-good-enough now extended to conventional ground combat as well. Saddam Husayn controlled what was arguably the world’s fourth-­ largest army when he overran Kuwait in August 1990. His troops then dug in, fortifying their prize with guided weapons and some of the best tanks and guns available anywhere. Any force seeking to evict the Iraqis from Kuwait would have to plan around threats from anti-aircraft, anti-­ tank, and anti-ship missiles. Nevertheless, President George H.W. Bush assembled an international coalition to retake Kuwait. His planners devised tactics and maneuvers that first suppressed Iraq’s formidable air defenses, and then isolated Iraqi commanders from one another and from central

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control in Baghdad. Coalition aircraft, with U.S. and British pilots playing the lead roles, could then operate with near impunity, striking Saddam’s armor, artillery, and command posts in a five-week campaign to soften Iraqi defenses before coalition armor drove forward in February 1991. The ground push, when it came, proved almost anti-climactic. Iraq’s regular soldiers in Kuwait surrendered at the first opportunity, happy to be out of the way of coalition bombs and shells. Saddam’s elite Republican Guard actually fought, but many of its units were flanked and attacked in darkness, mostly firing blindly in isolated skirmishes against American tanks equipped with night-vision, global positioning systems, and computer-­ aimed guns2 (Fig. 6.1). Casualty figures in the Gulf War highlighted the mismatch between coalition and Iraqi capabilities. Few of the missiles fired by the Iraqis hit their targets; many of those fired by the coalition killed Iraqi equipment or personnel. Iraqi military losses will never be known exactly, but they probably surpassed 100,000 killed, wounded, and captured. U.S. forces, which

Fig. 6.1  Iraqi armor destroyed by the coalition during the Persian Gulf War. (SSGT Reeve, Iraqi T-62 main battle tanks destroyed during Operation Desert Storm, 1991, Photograph, U.S. National Archives at College Park)

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bore the brunt of the ground fighting, suffered fewer than 300 killed from all causes during the conflict. Losses in armored vehicles and artillery favored the coalition by at least 100:1, as Iraq lost thousands of tanks and guns, many destroyed from the air by precision-guided bombs and anti-­ tank missiles launched from two miles overhead. Indeed, the firepower wielded by U.S. forces proved a menace to friendly troops as well, with several instances of U.S. pilots hitting American and British vehicles by mistake. The lopsided victory culminated a trend dating back two decades. U.S. and NATO members of the coalition benefited from unprecedented knowledge of the dispositions and movements of friends and foes, provided by satellites, digital radios, and other innovations such as airborne radars to detect moving vehicles.3 These collectively enabled coalition commanders to concentrate air and ground power when and where required to defeat Saddam’s forces. “No combatant commander has ever had as full and complete a picture of his adversary as did our field commander” in the Persian Gulf War, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell reported to Congress.4 That situational awareness had been designed into American doctrine and training, explained former Undersecretary of Defense William Perry shortly after the war. The coalition’s advantage, noted Perry (who would one day be Secretary of Defense himself), stemmed less from advanced weaponry than from “military support systems” that had been “largely conceived and developed during the 1970s,” and then combined in an “offset strategy” that magnified the combat effectiveness of coalition weapons.5 Other observers saw the Gulf War as less a culmination than a dawn of something quite new. Senior Soviet officers sensed this: retired Major General I. Vorobyev spotted the novelty of so many innovative weapons and tactics employed in the liberation of Kuwait, explaining that “a great deal of what happened was accomplished for the first time.” Soviet commanders, he insisted, should rethink their assumptions about modern conflict, and prepare to abandon “all that is obsolete, outdated, and musty among our combat techniques drawn from the attributes of the two world wars.”6 American military experts like Alan D. Campen echoed Thomas Rona’s analyses (see Chap. 5) in declaring the liberation of Kuwait “the First Information War,” in which the victors had exploited their advantages in “the systems, the people, the procedures and management structures” that enable a force to gain and exploit knowledge. Campen judged that the campaign had “differed fundamentally from any previous

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conflict,” and its outcome “turned as much on superior management of knowledge as it did upon performances of people or weapons.” Indeed, the Iraqi military “may have been the first in history to fall victim to what our defense department now aptly calls the differential in information warfare.”7 Senior leaders in the Pentagon gave a name to the “environment” that would henceforth suffuse the decision making of American commanders, planners, and personnel on all future battlefields. They called it the “Infosphere,” which would not only empower all the Armed Services to communicate and share data but also host “the total combination of information sources, fusion centers, and distribution systems that represent the C4I resources a warfighter needs to pursue his operational objectives.”8 In short, the Americans noted that their preferred mode of warfare depended upon an unprecedented comprehension of the battlefield to overwhelm their adversary.

Which Lessons? These perspectives on the Gulf War reflected the complex reality of the conflict. Two of the war’s effects would have long echoes for the ends and means by which real and aspiring sovereign powers employed force. Ironically, each outcome appeared significant at the time but was also widely misconstrued. The triumphal glow settling over the victorious coalition (particularly in the United States) also served to obscure complications in the coalition’s victory and thus to make lingering problems look simpler than they were. The defeat of Saddam’s Iraq and the collapse of the Soviet Union that same year showed liberalism globally triumphant. The “new world order” (as President George H.W. Bush called it) was one where law guided the nations and force bowed to international suasion. Bush’s successor, Bill Clinton, applauded this new moment in his 1993 inaugural address. He devoted his speech to domestic concerns, but took care to note America’s place in the new world struggling to take shape, a world in which “Communism’s collapse has called forth old animosities and new dangers.” America would work with friends and allies to “shape change,” not only defending her own vital interests but also acting when “the will and conscience of the international community is defied.” Diplomacy and military force remained options, of course, but America’s greatest strength would be “the power of our ideas, which are still new in many lands.”9

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What Clinton left unaddressed was the possibility that significant powers in those lands might try liberal ideals and still reject them. Washington by this point seemed convinced that, regardless of the power of its ideas, the United States could ensure peace through overwhelming military advantage. William Perry had argued in 1991 that America could soon deter even the most powerful adversaries without having to threaten nuclear retaliation: “The United States can now be confident that the defeat of a conventional armored assault in [Europe or Korea] could be achieved by conventional military means, which could enable the United States to limit the role of its nuclear forces [solely] to the deterrence of nuclear attack.”10 Perry did not mention unconventional conflict, which apparently did not figure in his (or anyone else’s) strategic calculus. Nor did he address the prospect of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of plotters who could not be deterred by the certainty of devastating retaliation. The second misunderstood subtlety of the Persian Gulf War was the ad hoc and contingent nature of the coalition’s startling victory. The commanders and weapons and troops worked well, but they functioned at all only because of communications and logistics architectures hastily contrived in-theater by occasionally ingenious service personnel and contractors. “Much of what they did from August through February had not even been dreamed of in July [1990],” commented one observer.11 Gaps and seams and inefficiencies abounded in the American war effort, not to mention the far-flung coalition’s.12 To expect anything else would have been unrealistic, of course, as the coalition had had to shift massive forces from Western Europe and the United States while building almost from scratch the military infrastructure to sustain a campaign against Iraq. In that sense, amazing results had materialized in mere months. Yet the architects of that infrastructure could work undisturbed only because Saddam did not or could not attack them, thus allowing them by default to prepare in a highly permissive “information environment,” observed communications expert Alan Campen. “US forces were endowed with both the time and the talent to construct an information structure that enabled almost flawless execution of [their] war plan. But time and talent are precious and ephemeral commodities.”13 Indeed, the Pentagon took note and opined that future adversaries would not repeat Saddam’s mistake and give U.S. forces months to set up extensive command, control, communications, computers and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) networks in advance of hostilities.14 This

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assessment correctly deduced a key lesson from the Gulf War—that adversaries would seek to frustrate the communications and sensors that had served American and coalition forces—but it still misjudged how adversaries would do so. Sensors and shooters on and over the battlefield required their own complex, networked C2 and data systems. They in turn had to be maintained and supported by thousands of personnel in-theater and still more in America and Europe—communicators, planners, logisticians, analysts, administrators, finance officers,  and security personnel, to name just a few—requiring their own interlinked and globally connected databases.15 This digital architecture made a tempting target for those who wanted to modernize their militaries and understand how they might hamper networked military operations. Indeed, the promise that William Perry had described in his 1991 Foreign Affairs essay—the ideal of total information dominance on the battlefield—was now widely recognized as vulnerable. If it could be targeted by an enemy, then the adversary could not only close the gap between his comprehension and that of the United States. He might also diminish U.S. control of its forces and even sow confusion in the American military. Such vulnerability had been mostly theoretical for a time after Perry’s vision, when the digital environment was still called the “Infosphere.” Implementing that vision of the Infosphere indeed proved problematic in the 1990s; even the Pentagon lacked the money and time to develop customized hardware to tie together its many tailor-made networks across the armed services, staffs, and agencies. The Defense Department instead found it simpler, faster, and cheaper to connect its systems on the now-­ commercial Internet. Writing new software to link the devices over packet-­ switched protocols let the communications systems be virtually hardware agnostic; it did not matter whether a laptop computer was manufactured by IBM, Acer, or eMachines, for example, as long as its operating system could display pages on the new World Wide Web. This meant that the Infosphere soon depended on the “Information superhighway,” or what was beginning to be called “cyberspace.”16 The director of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) explained to a seminar at Harvard in 1996 that he received “about 150 emails every day,” noting “that’s how I run the agency.” That number contrasted with the roughly three messages per day reaching him on DoD’s proprietary AUTODIN network, which still took 15,000 people to run.17

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The U.S. military thus in just a few years came to depend on the Internet for non-sensitive communications and data sharing. In so doing, the Pentagon learned first-hand the aptness of Marshall McLuhan’s teaching that “the medium is the message”; that communication technologies are not neutral—they themselves shape what we can know and do.18 Observers grasped the potential problem with this development: “major disruptions to military operations and readiness could threaten national security if attackers successfully corrupted sensitive information and systems or denied service from vital communications backbones or power systems,” concluded Congressional auditors in 1996.19 In short, linking the Defense Department’s far-flung networks across the Internet brought enhanced comprehension and conveyance but also created significant vulnerabilities. Bad actors could potentially connect into a network from afar, and if they could bluff their way past its crude defenses they could gain access, or disrupt, the information that had become the “lifeblood” of the American military.20 “Dialing into the system, you can get to a lot of the rest of the stuff,” worried DISA’s director in 1996.21 That is just what unnamed cyber actors soon started doing. A mysterious set of intrusions dubbed “Moonlight Maze” bedeviled the defenders of the Defense Department and other U.S. government information systems as early as 1998.22 As the FBI’s Michael Vatis, director of the Bureau’s new National Infrastructure Protection Center, explained to Congress in 1999: In the past few years we have seen a series of intrusions into numerous Department of Defense computer networks as well as networks of other federal agencies, universities, and private sector entities. Intruders have successfully accessed U.S.  Government networks and took large amounts of unclassified but sensitive information….[I]t is important that the Congress and the American public understand the very real threat that we are facing in the cyber realm, not just in the future, but now.23

Even pessimists, however, might have underestimated the speed at which the possibility of digital attacks on information technology and media would materialize. But that is a matter for later.

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A New World Order President Clinton suggested in 1993 that conflict had become an isolated phenomenon of malcontents resisting world order, disrupting nations and peoples but with no real hope of accomplishing anything positive. Conflict might have been a thing of the past, but it did indeed continue in the early 1990s, with communal violence in India, ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, civil wars in Algeria, Somalia, and Afghanistan, and bloody disputes over the borders of the states emerging from the disintegration of Communism in the former Soviet Union  and Yugoslavia. These lingering exceptions to the general peace to which Bill Clinton had alluded at his first inauguration seemed archaic, pointless, and temporary. The world indeed turned toward liberalism—but not wholly. The apparent victory of liberalism carried two overtones. Some saw the triumph of freedom as an idea. Others saw the triumph of an economic system, namely capitalism, inextricably connected with liberalism. Every autocracy faced a dilemma: should it join the new democratic, capitalist order, or resist it, subtly or openly, thus remaining on the margins of global trade and finance and information flows? Failing states like Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, and Afghanistan had little choice and demanded international attention. For a time the open challengers to Western supremacy were limited to Iraq, Iran, Libya, Cuba, and North Korea. Iraq and Iran persisted as one-party regimes; the former a secular, Ba’athist tyranny, the latter a revolutionary theocracy. Only Cuba and North Korea retained Marxist trappings, though even these states became essentially family-run enterprises with armies and secret police organs. But events in the 1990s would add China and Russia to the critics of the liberal world system. China became the bellwether. Leaders in Beijing had abandoned orthodox Marxist economics in the 1980s but did not relax the Communist Party’s monopoly on political power.24 They now faced the enormous tasks of sustaining growth while coping with the migration of hundreds of millions of people from the countryside to the cities. In the global economic boom of the 1990s, however, Chinese leaders no longer had to choose between holding power and embracing liberal political reforms in order to gain access to markets and capital. The Chinese gained capital without liberalization, however, because their ability to mobilize huge pools of labor for low wages enticed Western investment to China’s new Special Economic Zones, where political controls remained but looser economic strictures permitted Western business practices. Beijing thus

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provided workhouses for Western firms to assemble their products while Chinese competitors learned to undersell them. Beijing’s classic mercantilist policies built up a manufacturing powerhouse for exports, running trade surpluses to be plowed into more capital to make more goods. Sustained growth then allowed the Party to insist it had not only ended the “Century of Humiliation” but was finally delivering rising living standards to people who could remember famine in the 1950s.25 With its trade surplus and its potentially gigantic market, China could shrug off slumps like the Asian financial crisis in 1998 and the dot-com bust in 2000. The lesson for other regimes was that a comparatively liberalized economy could deliver growth even absent political liberty. Yet the more China prospered, the more it desired not only trade but also respect—or even deference. Beijing bristled at America’s show of force on behalf of Taiwan after the Chinese clumsily threatened their island neighbor before its 1996 presidential election. President Clinton had ordered the U.S. Navy forward to demonstrate American resolve to defend the island, and Secretary of State Warren Christopher called China’s subsequent missile tests near Taiwan “reckless” and amounting to “intimidation and coercion.” Christopher’s Chinese counterpart verbally shot back at America’s naval deployment, hinting that Washington was risking war: “Should the foreign forces support and connive with the attempt by the Taiwan authorities to create independence or to split the motherland, then it could lead to a chaotic situation in Taiwan,” explained Foreign Minister Qian Qichen in March 1996.26 But force, and the ability to convey it to the right place at the right time, still mattered, and China had no military answer to U.S. Navy carrier battle groups off its shores. Beijing thus  muted its effort to influence Taiwan’s upcoming election. In the long run, however, the result of the Third Taiwan Strait crisis seemed two-fold. First, it cemented the unity of both authoritarian and reformist tendencies in Beijing in support of a vocal Chinese nationalism that replaced class struggle as the Party’s motivating cause.27 And, second, it convinced both Party leaders and the high command of the People’s Liberation Army to accelerate the reforms launched after the Gulf War, increasing military budgets and investing in advanced systems for “fighting modern war under high-tech conditions.”28 Beijing subsequently updated its military with an eye to keeping the U.S. Navy farther from China’s shores, and the PLA began an arms buildup that has not yet abated.

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Other secular, nationalist authoritarians did not have China’s options. Saddam’s Iraq handled internal strife, for a time, by means of surveillance and torture, while a trade embargo imposed by the United Nations in 1990 crippled its economy. Iraq was the state that seemed most dangerous to the world order, especially after Saddam’s son-in-law defected in 1995 and revealed that Baghdad had secretly kept a capability to build weapons of mass destruction. Saddam evicted the UN-authorized monitors of that capability in 1998, which only compounded uncertainty over his intentions.29 Iraq had competition for the title of the most troublesome dictatorship, however, from what remained of Yugoslavia after that Communist federation sundered into ethnic  states. Between 1991 and 1999 the Serb-­ dominated regime in Belgrade fought a series of border wars with its former regions and engaged in “ethnic cleansing” to strengthen its grip on its remaining territories. Belgrade and President Slobodan Milošević drew increasing ire from the NATO nations, whose frustration finally erupted when Serb forces brutally suppressed a growing rebellion by ethnic Albanians in the Yugoslavian province of Kosovo. The ensuing Kosovo War in spring 1999 mustered a coalition campaign for humanitarian goals. With the United States unwilling to commit ground troops, NATO limited its use of force to air and missile strikes against Yugoslavian combat arms, military installations, and Serbian leadership facilities.30 The coalition forces involved had improved significantly over the high standard set in the 1991 Gulf War, thanks in part to the advances in networking for control and data sharing noted above. Strikes on Serb military equipment and personnel were now guided by battlefield radars and remotely piloted (unmanned) aircraft that could pass targets to NATO’s combined air operations center in Italy in just two minutes, although it might take NATO aircraft three hours to put ordnance on aimpoints.31 A NATO spokesman insisted that Operation ALLIED FORCE was “not targeting the Serb people,” nor even “President Milosevic personally.” NATO strikes instead aimed at “the control system that is used to manipulate the military and security forces.” The spokesman explained that particular target selection was necessary to “strike at the very central nerve system of Milosovic’s regime,” which had created the political climate in which Yugoslavia’s brutalities could “not only be accepted but even condoned.”32 The bombing corresponded with a psychological campaign to isolate Milošević  from his henchmen. President Clinton’s adviser Samuel “Sandy” Berger explained this a few weeks after

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the war. Milošević had “failed to split our alliance as he thought he could,” noted Berger, and at the same time coalition leaders and planners “knew he was not immune to pressure from within.” Thus the coalition employed other means—enforcing tough economic sanctions; tightening travel restrictions; freezing financial holdings; making it difficult for Serbia’s privileged class to go abroad, move money around, or plan their exits. In one case, a Milosevic crony, with family in tow and suitcases bulging, found himself denied entry to a nearby country. Such developments raised the level of anxiety and discontent within Belgrade’s power circles….Many around Milosevic came to see the futility—and the risks—of his intransigence.”33

Operation ALLIED FORCE after ten weeks compelled Yugoslavia to relinquish its hold on Kosovo. Subsequently the United Nations examined allegations of widespread civilian casualties and learned that NATO aircraft had flown 10,484 strike sorties and employed 23,614 air munitions, causing approximately 500 civilian deaths. The UN’s report decided that toll was actually rather low, and tacitly conceded that NATO was mostly hitting legitimate military targets: “These figures do not indicate that NATO may have conducted a campaign aimed at causing substantial civilian casualties either directly or incidentally.”34 This was real comprehension of a battlefield coupled with the ability to convey force to exactly the right place. Bill Clinton in his memoir applauded the effective and surgical nature of the strikes, claiming “[t]he success of the air campaign in Kosovo marked a new chapter in military history”35 (Fig. 6.2).

Repercussions The NATO bombing campaign nonetheless proved internationally divisive from its outset. Russian President Boris Yeltsin—perhaps the most liberal leader ever to govern that vast nation—publicly condemned the operation as “nothing more than open aggression” against the sovereign state of Yugoslavia.36 The UN Security Council found itself paralyzed by Russian opposition and Chinese ambivalence in the face of Serbian atrocities, and thus did not explicitly authorize the air campaign. NATO went ahead with the bombing anyway, justifying its intervention not on a fresh Security Council resolution but on creative readings of earlier resolutions. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, came to the Council to denounce NATO’s action, and he offered a new resolution calling for an immediate

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Fig. 6.2  U.S. Air Force B-1B bomber flying from the United Kingdom in support of Operation ALLIED FORCE. (SSGT Mallord U.S. (National Archive, A B-1B Lancer is marshalled to a full stop at RAF Fairford, United Kingdom, 1999, Photograph, U.S. National Archives at College Park)

ceasefire. As the Council’s press release paraphrased his remarks later that day, NATO’s “attempts to justify the military action under the pretext of preventing a humanitarian catastrophe bordered on blackmail, and those who would vote against the [Russian-proposed] text would place themselves in a situation of lawlessness.” Indeed, Lavrov insisted, the Alliance’s military action against Serb-run Yugoslavia constituted “a real threat to international peace and security, and grossly violated the key provisions of the United Nations Charter.”37 Russia’s draft resolution failed in the UN Security Council by a vote of 3–12, and thus the Council gave tacit assent to NATO’s bombing campaign. Secretary-General Kofi Annan reflected this ambiguity, remarking “[i]t is indeed tragic that diplomacy has failed but there are times when the use of force may be legitimate in the pursuit of peace.”38 The Russian draft garnered the votes of only Namibia and, interestingly, China. Beijing endorsed the call for a bombing halt, claiming NATO’s action violated the UN Charter and even international law. In a paraphrase issued by the

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Security Council, China’s representative opposed “the use of or threat of use of force in international affairs, and interference in the internal affairs of other States under whatever pretext.” After the vote, various nations that were not members of the Security Council took the opportunity to condemn the bombing. The Yugoslavian delegate complained that NATO was turning his country into “a killing field and a testing ground” for advanced weapons. Cuba’s representative suggested the lack of support for a ceasefire proved the Council had become Washington’s puppet. As the Council’s press release paraphrased his complaint, “never before had the unipolar order imposed by the United States been so obvious. The Council’s defeat of the draft resolution meant that it was going along with actions of international delinquency of the United States and its allies.” Several lessons about modern conflict emerged from the Kosovo crisis. One was the military and political complexity of a synchronized, strategic air campaign. Strategist Colin S. Gray noted this aspect shortly before the conflict in the Balkans, explaining that even America’s dominating strategic strength was still hostage to “political, social, ethical, and cultural contexts that are not very permissive of the exercise of strategic coercion by the superpower.”39 In this context, commanders at all levels had to act in unison, and the national capitals involved had to have the will and the procedures to approve strikes against a constantly shifting target set.40 The need to cultivate cooperation, not only between armed forces but also between nations and systems under great time pressures, reached a new level of complexity. During the campaign, for instance, it took President Clinton’s personal intervention with French President Jacques Chirac before NATO strikes could hit key installations near Belgrade at the war’s climax.41 China learned a tragic lesson when U.S. aircraft bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade on May 7, 1999, killing three and injuring twenty others. The guided bombs hit their aimpoints, but the U.S. target selection and approval process had failed, mistaking the embassy for a Yugoslav military warehouse. Beijing and the Chinese public felt this had not happened by chance; President Clinton called President Jiang Zemin to apologize and found him skeptical that “a nation as technologically advanced as [the United States] could make such a mistake.” Clinton added in his memoir “I had a hard time believing it too.”42 U.S. diplomatic posts in China then endured angry demonstrations that included the burning of a consul’s residence (but fortunately no violence to American personnel).

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During the siege, the U.S. embassy’s website also came under sustained attack from computer hackers—a novel twist and a foretaste of things to come.43 The United Nations report on NATO’s air campaign assessed the embassy bombing in some detail, ultimately agreeing with U.S. explanations that the strike was a tragic accident; Washington apologized to Beijing and paid $28 million in compensation.44 Kosovo proved an international turning point. The Westphalian ideal that sovereignties should manage their internal affairs without outside interference had always been honored more in the breach, at least outside of Europe. By coincidence, legal scholar Stephan D.  Krasner that same year  published his critical analysis of Westphalian norms, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy.45 The rise of revolutionary, Party-based autocracies in the twentieth century had indeed strained Westphalian inhibitions almost to breaking. Yet the end of the Cold War seemed to have restored, however briefly, universal respect for sovereignty grounded in international law when the Soviets and Eastern Europeans abandoned their ideologically motivated support of progressive extremist groups. After the Gulf War, however, a new norm emerged—that strong nations had the right and indeed the duty to band together under the auspices of international bodies in order to stop widespread atrocities and humanitarian disasters, with force if necessary and even inside the sovereign borders of states unable or unwilling to halt the depredations. The intervention in Kosovo showed that this new norm had gained widespread acceptance in the liberal West. The notion that international law and institutions could be used to justify interventions by military coalitions against autocratic regimes keeping order (however brutally) on their own territory disturbed some prominent UN members, as hinted above. Hence a new paradox of international law and sovereignty succeeded the Cold War dilemma. The Communist revolutionary paradigm had let meddling radical regimes seek the shelter of state sovereignty against retaliation for their support of terror and revolution in their neighbors. Now international law seemed to have become a new way around sovereignty to let liberal states coalesce to support insurrection against autocrats—and then to use the regime’s suppression of the revolt as a pretext for the UN (or NATO) to intervene. This is in effect what happened in the Kosovo crisis, and it would have profound repercussions for international relations.

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The New Terrorism Terror had briefly ebbed at the end of Cold War with the withdrawal of Soviet and Eastern European support for several terrorist groups. Indeed, the remaining 1968-era leftist terrorists not infrequently found themselves apprehended by their erstwhile sponsors, or they retired in some congenial dictatorship (like Abu Nidal in Iraq, Joanne Deborah Chesimard in Cuba, and Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, aka “Carlos the Jackal,” in Sudan).46 Some soldiered on to some sort of political settlement with their opponents, like the peace process in Northern Ireland that led to the Provisional IRA declaring a ceasefire in 1997 and formally ending its armed campaign in 2005. But a new form of terrorism burst into prominence in February 1993, just a month after President Clinton’s inauguration noted the “power of our ideas” to inspire a more peaceful future. Attackers parked a truck bomb under New York’s World Trade Center, killing six in the initial blast and injuring a thousand more in the ensuing smoky chaos. This terrorism caught the world by surprise. Statesmen and scholars struggled to understand how and why the casualty toll from terrorist attacks rose dramatically while the sheer number of attacks declined.47 The strategic extent and tactical lethality of “the new terrorism”—as it was soon labeled—required four ingredients. First, though the new terrorists held diverse ideologies, they were rarely Marxists or leftist revolutionaries. Their beliefs overlapped in one key respect, as Bill Clinton noted in a 1996 speech: they would seemingly all destroy the benefits of the new world order “by killing the innocent to strike fear and burn hatred into the hearts of the rest of us.”48 The new terrorists opposed hypocrisy in the form of governments that proclaimed their love of democracy and freedom while actually serving powerful interests, whether those power-brokers were plutocrats, ethnic cabals, or various unbelievers. Thus the new terrorists tended to inhabit the fringes of society: Christian Patriots (Oklahoma City, 1995), Japanese cultists (Tokyo, 1995), or anti-abortion loners (Atlanta, 1996). Whereas in 1968 terrorism had been primarily secular and political, explained Bruce Hoffman and his colleagues at the RAND Corporation in 1999, the new terrorism was typically religious and millenarian in its motivations.49 Critics of the notion of a “new terrorism” retorted that nearly every aspect highlighted by Hoffman and like-minded observers could be found in various

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forms of the “old” terrorism—but they still conceded that something seemed different after the Cold War.50 Among religious extremists, however, one strand proved  especially attractive and lethal. In the 1990s, Sunni jihadists adopted the tactics and targeting used by Shi’a groups in the previous decade, but unlike the Shi’a organizations they did not act as auxiliaries of Iran’s regional and military policies. Sunni groups had less coordination and more geographic scope in their attacks, accounting for incidents from Chechnya through the Middle East to Europe and America. They claimed justification in the charge that the West, particularly Israel and its ally the United States, inflicted systemic violence around the world and especially against Muslims.51 Here was the classic justification for retaliatory violence articulated since the nineteenth century by Marx, Engels, Blanqui, and other revolutionaries, which had since animated Lenin, Hitler, and a host of revolutionaries who agreed on little else. Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing, proclaimed this logic in its timeless purity at his 1998 trial in Manhattan. He called America the most warlike country of the twentieth century, which had killed thousands of innocents with its bombing raids in World War II and the Vietnam War: And now you have invented new ways to kill innocent people. You have so-­ called economic embargo which kills nobody other than children and elderly people, and which other than Iraq you have been placing the economic embargo on Cuba and other countries for over 35 years.

Ramzi Yousef embraced the prosecutor’s accusation that he was a terrorist and indeed lauded that label’s accuracy: Yes, I am a terrorist and proud of it. And I support terrorism so long as it was against the United States Government and against Israel, because you are more than terrorists; you are the one who invented terrorism and using it every day. You are butchers, liars and hypocrites.52

The new terrorism also required sanctuary. Ironically, some of the new terrorists found refuge in the West, where legal protections for civil liberties kept the authorities officially indifferent toward the content of religious preachings. This agnostic posture in the United States, for instance, briefly made Jersey City, New Jersey, a nexus of global jihad while it hosted

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Omar Abdel-Rahman, the “Blind Sheik” whose calls for killing apostate Muslims and U.S. military personnel inspired the World Trade Center bombers as well as militants in Egypt and beyond.53 But Sunni jihad needed operational sanctuary in particular. The wealthy Saudi-born jihadist Osama bin Laden ran a sort-of terrorist holding company—al Qaeda— from Sudan between 1991 and 1996, but wore out his welcome and moved on to Afghanistan.54 The latter nation had disintegrated into civil war after its Soviet-imposed regime collapsed in 1992. Within five years an Islamist emirate—Mullah Omar’s Taliban—had consolidated power across most of the country. The Taliban, with persuasive subsidies from bin Laden, granted  al Qaeda quasi-sovereign privileges, like the ability to move about Afghanistan, to cross its borders at will, and to import weapons and funds.55 More importantly, al Qaeda could now run camps to vet, indoctrinate, and train more than 10,000 fighters, making capable and committed cadres out of hundreds of them.56 Such isolated facilities in Afghanistan also kept al Qaeda operatives beyond the reach of the infiltration tactics of Western and Arab security services. By 1998, al Qaeda was becoming more than a financier and consultant for Sunni jihadists, and began acting directly against U.S. targets, like American embassies in East Africa. Near-simultaneous truck bomb attacks against the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7, 1998, killed 12 Americans and 201 others, while wounding thousands more, the great majority of them local Kenyans.57 The third ingredient in the effectiveness of the new terrorism was a way to connect operatives and their base. Ideally such channels should convey funds as well as messages, and remain secure from enemy monitoring—a consistent threat to conspiracies throughout the twentieth century. Extremists found their remedy as world communications shifted to digital and then packet-switched systems, particularly the Internet, in the 1990s. Personal computers had hitherto stood alone, while business computers at best linked to other computers via mainframe systems in discrete networks. The Internet changed that by linking the networks, theoretically connecting every online user in the world to every other user. Now conspiracy knew no geographic bounds. Ironically, white supremacists and jihadists advocating a return to a 1400-year old legal code were among the early adopters of the Internet for extremist ends, realizing the potential deriving from this newest and most cosmopolitan of inventions. The Internet was not only fast, cheap, and reliable for conspirators, it also proved relatively secure. Instructions

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for terrorists by cell phones and emails, with funds sent via wired transfers, looked just like millions of ordinary transactions. Even though Western states and corporations could technically monitor most if not all of these discussions, they remained unable to do so at scale. This allowed centralized plotting at a distance; indeed, distance actually kept the plotters safer, noted British researcher Michael Whine: “Geographical dispersion, both physical and in cyberspace, provides extra security; a rigid hierarchical structure is more easily penetrated and neutralised.” Plotters could confer in near-real time with co-conspirators half a world way—and do so in ways that made their “chatter” virtually indistinguishable from the growing volume of Internet exchanges.58 The final ingredient for the new terror was weaponry. Surplus arms and munitions remained in Cold War hotspots, of course, but the new terrorists often wanted something more lethal and spectacular. Their ideological leanings inclined them toward demonstrating the weakness of the ostensible hegemonic powers, and that meant extremists had to cause civilian casualties and even panic to dramatize their contention that the figurative, systemic violence by states inevitably led to real bloodshed for their own citizens. Weapons of mass destruction, whether chemical, biological, or radiological, met that requirement for the new terrorists. Chechen separatists fighting the Russians in 1995, for instance, buried in a Moscow park a bomb laden with enough radioactive cesium-137 to sicken the neighborhood, and then called a local television station with directions to the device. “People these days say we are always bluffing,” their leader Shamil Basayev had just explained to reporters. “They think we can no longer hurt the Russians. So we will give them a little sign of what we have.”59 That same year, the Japanese millenarian cult Aum Shinrikyo (Supreme Truth) released nerve gas on five Tokyo subway trains at once in an attack that killed twelve and injured thousands.60 Chemical and radiological weapons seemed to be mere precursors to the ultimate peril—a nuclear weapon in the hands of a fanatical terrorist cell. These tools provided terrorists with the vital components of force: cooperation built in training camps and magnified through new weapons; modern air travel to convey the attacker who can be directed at distance through the Internet; and that same Internet as a source of plans and targets that allowed the attacker to understand when and where to attack. The human person made the ultimate weapon for the new terrorism. An operative willing to die in his (or her) attack could get much closer to the target. This expanded the possibilities for destruction and news coverage.

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The problem (beside religious strictures against suicide) was training and assembling enough suicide attackers to mount attacks at-scale.61 Ad hoc attempts did not work. For instance, when operatives from the Algerian Groupe Islamique Armé hijacked Air France flight 8969 from Algiers in 1994, they apparently considered ordering the plane to Paris and employing it as a flying bomb over the city. Their hijacking ended suddenly and violently, however, because the hijackers could not fly the aircraft themselves and thus had to refuel at Marseilles and negotiate with the French government, giving an elite police unit its chance to storm the plane and rescue the passengers in a 1970s-style commando raid. Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda learned the lessons above and skillfully fused all four strands of the new terrorism. Bin Laden told ABC News’ John Miller in May 1998 that the interviewer’s American countrymen had to be fought with violence commensurate to that which the United States inflicted on the world: “We believe that the worst thieves in the world today and worst terrorists are the Americans. Nothing could stop you except perhaps retaliation in kind. We do not have to differentiate between military or civilian. As far as we are concerned, they are all targets.”62 From their Afghan sanctuary, bin Laden’s operatives planned and deployed four teams of suicide hijackers, sending them for pilot training in the United States while keeping them in contact and funds with wire transfers, cellphone calls, and emails.63 On September 11, 2001, four hijacker pilots simultaneously boarded airliners at three American airports and, with the help of fifteen companions to quell their fellow passengers, managed to turn three of the aircraft into manned cruise missiles to attack the Pentagon and finally destroy the World Trade Center, killing nearly 3000 people in the process. As usual, moreover, bin Laden issued no public claim of credit for the attack, thus enhancing its mystery and horror. The United States had spotted a growing threat from bin Laden years earlier. President Clinton even fired cruise missiles at one of al Qaeda’s Afghan camps after the embassy bombings in 1998. Lacking timely intelligence on bin Laden’s movements, however, American targeters and officials could not respond quickly enough to sightings, and Clinton’s strike accomplished little. The attacks on September 11, 2001, also showed that old protocols no longer served. Formerly governments responded to hijackings by letting the hijackers land the airliner so that negotiations could follow, leading to either the release of passenger hostages or the storming of the aircraft by commandos.64 The 9/11 hijackers understood that the American government expected them to land their planes—not to

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crash them into public buildings. The U.S. government learned that morning that airliners could not be allowed to be employed as kamikazes, and the F-16s that scrambled over Washington on 9/11 received orders in-flight to destroy any more hijacked airliners. They were too late to execute this ad hoc plan, however, as the passengers on the fourth and final hijacked flight, United 93, had already forced the aircraft to crash in rural Pennsylvania, killing all aboard.65 “This is a new type of war,” reflected an American military aircraft controller that morning.66

A Global War on Terror The attacks on 9/11 briefly united the civilized world in indignation. The following day, the UN Security Council unanimously condemned “the horrifying terrorist attacks” and urged “all States to work together urgently to bring to justice the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors.”67 States had been increasingly divided in the 1990s, which had complicated their coordination in response to terror. The 9/11 attacks restored international unity, for a time, because the death toll proved that it no longer took a powerful state to cause mass casualties and destruction. A tenet of state strategies since World War II thus had to be revised on the fly. Fighting suicidal foreign terrorists with law enforcement and occasional missile strikes in the 1990s had had little effect, concluded the new President George W. Bush in the days after 9/11. Al Qaeda viewed such responses as a sign of American weakness, and bin Laden “could not be deterred by the threat of prosecution.” “To protect the country,” Bush concluded, “we had to wage war against the terrorists.” After all, he later explained, “[t]he lesson of 9/11 was that if we waited for a danger to fully materialize, we would have waited too long.” The Bush administration did not seek a formal declaration of war, but he resolved nonetheless to “fight the war on terror on the offense” in Afghanistan: “This time we would put boots on the ground, and keep them there until the Taliban and al Qaeda were driven out and a free society could emerge.” The United States responded to 9/11 with a campaign that resembled nothing that al Qaeda and the Taliban expected. Afghan fighters and bin Laden’s followers had experience fighting a Western-style military, but it was the Soviet Union’s, late in the Cold War. Bin Laden and the Taliban regime seem to have anticipated air and missile strikes, but no serious commitment of American ground troops. Instead, U.S. forces inserted teams of commandos and intelligence operatives in Afghanistan within

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weeks of 9/11. This comparative handful on the ground began working with various armed factions—the Northern Alliance and others—who had long opposed the Taliban regime, cohering that opposition with deliveries of American aid and persuading some allies of the Taliban to sit out the ensuing conflict.68 The offensive campaign that followed in November 2001 thus represented a hybrid of ancient and futuristic tactics and weapons. This was force made possible by cooperation between two systems, old and new. Taliban commanders learned that assembling enough power to stop their rag-tag Northern Alliance foes made them targets for U.S. airstrikes, yet remaining dispersed to avoid notice from coalition aircraft and drones left them too weak to counter the Alliance’s advances.69When Taliban forces attempted to hold the fixed positions that had hemmed in the Northern Alliance, they exposed their tanks, guns, and bunkers. Bombs and missiles then rained down from aircraft and armed drones orbiting overhead and awaiting targets selected by coalition special forces teams deployed with Northern Alliance fighters. In one battle, the teams used laser sights to designate targets for the bombers, blasting gaps in the Taliban lines to be exploited by the Northern Alliance’s makeshift cavalry.70 Afghanistan’s cities fell in short order to coalition and Northern Alliance forces, with the Taliban abandoning Kabul on November 14. Taliban and al Qaeda leaders then scattered to the mountains along the Pakistan border, hiding in caves and biding their time while a coalition-installed government attempted to extend its authority across Afghanistan. Iraq’s Saddam Husayn watched the war in Afghanistan and seemingly remained unimpressed. He had resisted a U.S.-led coalition in 1991 and survived, crushing internal opposition when the coalition showed no interest in toppling him or occupying Iraqi territory with troops (although the UN-imposed No-Fly Zones limited his reach and let the Kurds win limited autonomy in Iraq’s north). He and his advisers saw the Americans fight in Kuwait and Somalia and concluded the United States was highly reluctant to incur casualties.71 Now Saddam judged from the Afghan campaign that America remained too casualty-averse to commit the troops required to extract bin Laden and the surviving Taliban leaders from their mountain redoubts.72 If they would not capture bin Laden—who had actually attacked the United States, Saddam doubtless reasoned—then they would not topple him. Saddam knew that coalition special forces on their own could not jeopardize his regime, and he thus thought that the British and Americans were bluffing when they hinted at war to disarm

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him in 2002. If he was attacked, he determined that he could disperse his forces well enough (especially in Iraqi cities) to survive yet another round of airstrikes. He also kept himself and his inner circle constantly on the move, betraying no patterns that would allow targeters (or coup plotters) a clear shot, and he built up poorly equipped but fanatical irregular forces to attack the rear of any invaders who might advance into Iraq.73 Saddam’s reliance on Western indecision almost worked. UN sanctions were eroding, and the Security Council divided over whether to authorize force to disarm him.74 In response, the British and Americans argued that they already possessed a warrant from the Security Council’s 1991 demand for Iraqi disarmament and its call for “such further steps as may be required…to secure peace and security in the area.”75 Still the Iraqi dictator, like tyrants since ancient times, feared his own countrymen most. He had long been building a web of security services, sowing society and especially the military with spies—even spies to watch the other spies, according to one Iraqi general.76 Saddam kept his lieutenants on a tight leash and his commanders apart from each other. “It was not allowed to raise your head above anyone around you. That was too dangerous,” recalled Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz to American interrogators afterward.77 In consequence, Iraqi commanders could not cooperate and plan together, lest their interaction allow them to plot against the regime. A commander in Saddam’s elite Special Republican Guard—the only Iraqi military units allowed to enter Baghdad—complained to his interrogators “I had no relation with any other units or fighting forces. No other units were ever allowed near our unit.” Other Iraqi forces were not even permitted to obtain maps of the capital city.78 The coalition assault on Iraq in March 2003 exceeded even the ferocity of the Gulf War. “The United Nations Security Council has not lived up to its responsibilities,” explained President Bush to Americans just before the new conflict; “so we will rise to ours.”79 Saddam learned a second time that modern expeditionary forces backed by air supremacy retained their freedom to move and assemble almost at will, while denying movement options to adversaries who tried to concentrate. The advantages displayed in the liberation of Kuwait in 1991 were honed and accelerated so that the invading coalition accomplished even more with smaller forces in March 2003. Precision-guided munitions, and the sensors and networks to guide them, were more plentiful and robust; they were like “a bullet that pierces the heart without touching the body,” lamented one Iraqi commander.80 The Republican Guard’s al-Nida division, for instance, melted away under

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the airstrikes and the deadly fear they spread. Despite fighting no significant engagements with coalition forces, the division’s combat power bled out in desertions and bombing losses, declining from 13,000 troops and 500 armored vehicles at the start of the campaign to 1000 men and 50 vehicles by the time the division retreated to Baghdad just before the collapse of Saddam’s regime that April. Propaganda leaflets dropped on the troops conveyed the danger, recounted the al-Nida division’s commander, but “[t]he air attacks were the most effective message. The soldiers who had seen the leaflets and then endured the air attacks knew the leaflets were true. They believed the message after that, if they were still alive. Overall they had a terrible effect on us.”81 The military result of the campaign was one of the fastest armored advances in history and a relatively easy capture of a national capital—and destruction of its regime—in just three weeks. Precision munitions and armored columns helped wreck the Iraqi regime, but Saddam’s fear of being deposed or assassinated also played a role in the coalition’s swift victory. His generals were forbidden to coordinate, as noted, which meant they also feared to take initiative. When they did decide to trust their professional training and act on the information and opportunities before them, they were largely unable to cooperate because they did not know where their fellow commanders in nearby units could help them (or needed their help).82 Professor Richard Andres has theorized that the speed, power, and precision of the coalition offensive confronted Saddam and his cadres with a new form of the “dispersion-­ concentration dilemma.” Holding the military in check so that it could not plot against Saddam meant keeping it unable to fight effectively against invading coalition forces, and vice versa.83 Airstrikes against the regime’s leadership, and especially the security services that imposed Saddam’s will on the populace, contributed to the stress on the Iraqi hierarchy.84 The coalition also wrecked Iraqi command and control so the regime and the generals were reduced to using couriers. And the coalition directed faxes and leaflets and phone calls to Iraqi leaders and commanders in the hope of inducing defections or encouraging Saddam’s overstressed security services to see coup plotting everywhere. This measure made the restrictions on military initiative even worse.85 Andres called the result a “top-down” collapse of Iraqi forces. The coalition may also have had some success against the military high command with that most ancient of persuaders—money. A month after the war, General Tommy Franks, commander of allied forces in the conflict, seemed to confirm Pentagon rumors

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that Iraqi military leaders had accepted bribes to hold their troops out of the campaign: “I had letters from Iraqi generals saying, ‘I now work for you’,” Franks told an interviewer for Defense News.86

Conclusion The Iraq War in 2003 marked the seeming apotheosis of the centuries-old dream that calibrating time and space together can facilitate tactical increments of force exactly when and where required to disperse an enemy politically and militarily. This was exquisite comprehension coupled with unparalleled conveyance leading to pinpoint concentrations of force. The problem, as in Kosovo in 1999, and in Afghanistan in 2001, was that the application of physical force had outstripped the capacity to plan for the resulting strategic outcomes. President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair had advocated regime change in Iraq on the reasonable assumption (backed by faulty intelligence) that Saddam possessed hidden chemical weapons and nuclear aspirations. In reality he had retained neither, however, and the discrepancy between pre-war claims about the threat he posed and the actual reality of his vicious but bankrupt tyranny proved a humiliation for America and Britain—“a massive blow to our credibility— my credibility,” lamented Bush.87 The fact that Saddam had possessed no appreciable weapons of mass destruction cracked the brief moment of unity from 9/11, and created a distrust of Bush in Europe that the President could never allay. This critical split in the liberal West broke the cooperation between states that had sustained extraordinary applications of international force in places like Kosovo in the 1990s. The Iraq intelligence failure showed that force could be applied precisely not only to the wrong targets (as in Kosovo) but for dubious goals. Deposing Saddam had rid the world of a tyrant and arguably made Iraq a better place, but Saddam was not the sort of imminent threat that Bush and Blair had depicted. This discrepancy diminished the standing of liberalism and law in international fora—a standing harmed even more the following year when scandal erupted over the treatment of Iraqi prisoners by the American soldiers guarding them. “I felt sick, really sick,” recalled President Bush after the story broke. “America’s reputation took a severe hit.”88 After the end of the Cold War, the geopolitical struggle for legitimacy had become as important as the geostrategic struggle for access and resources. As noted above, the salient feature of our contemporary world

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order is what did not happen after the collapse of Soviet-style Communism left unrivaled a globally dominant, liberal international order. Ideological conflict between states and other actors paused, but it never ended. While the appeal of Marxism faded (except in backwaters like Cuba), virtually every post-Cold War crisis featured at least one actor proclaiming their animus to liberal ideals and wielding power through one-party systems that enforced ideological conformity on their subjects. Conflict endured in part because, as political scientist Robert Jervis has noted in a similar context, “a country that cannot live at live at peace with its own people cannot live at peace with the world.”89 The liberal ascendancy thus brought not Kant’s perpetual peace but renewed global instability—a long struggle for survival on the part of terrorists and dictators against the ostensibly universal appeal of liberal ideals. New battlegrounds had thus been set for the decades to come, and now those fields of conflict would be virtual as well as physical.

Notes 1. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” National Interest (Summer 1989). 2. Michael J.  Eisenstadt and Kenneth M.  Pollack, “Armies of Snow and Armies of Sand: The Impact of Soviet Military Doctrine on Arab Militaries,” in Goldman and Eliason, eds., The Diffusion of Military Technology and Ideas, pp. 82–84. 3. William J.  Perry, “Desert Storm and Deterrence,” Foreign Affairs, September 1991. 4. The officer referenced was General H.  Norman Schwarzkopf of Central Command; see US Department of Defense, The Conduct of the Persian Gulf War: Final Report to Congress (Washington: Department of Defense, 1992), p. 333. 5. Perry, “Desert Storm and Deterrence.” 6. Benjamin S.  Lambeth, Desert Storm and Its Meaning: The View from Moscow (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 1992), p.  68; accessed December 20, 2017, at https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/ pubs/reports/2009/R4164.pdf 7. Alan D.  Campen, ed., The First Information War: The Story of Communications, Computers, and Intelligence Systems in the Persian Gulf War (Fairfax, VA: AFCEA International Press, 1992), pp. vii, ix, 172; punctuation and emphasis in original.

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8. C4I stands for “command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence”; see C4 Architecture & Integration Division, Joint Staff J-6, C4I for the Warrior, June 12, 1992; accessed February 3, 2018, at www. dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a340641.pdf 9. William J.  Clinton, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1993; accessed December 28, 2017, at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index. php?pid=46366 10. Perry, “Desert Storm and Deterrence.” 11. Campen, The First Information War, pp. xi, 180. Emphases in original. 12. See Joseph S. Toma, “Desert Storm Communications,” in Campen, ed., The First Information War, pp.  3; and also Larry K.  Wentz, “Communications Support for the High Technology Battlefield,” in ibid., p. 16. 13. Campen, ed., The First Information War, pp. xi–xii, 180. 14. A Department-wide directive in 1992 defined information warfare as “[t]he competition of opposing information systems to include the exploitation, corruption, or destruction of an adversary’s information systems.” That competition could be fierce, and hence friendly forces should prepare to “operate successfully in degraded information and communications environments.” Donald J.  Atwood, Deputy Secretary of Defense, “Information Warfare,” Department of Defense Directive (DoDD) TS 3600.1, December 21, 1992; accessed December 2, 2018, at http:// www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/FOID/Reading%20Room/ Other/14-F-0492_doc_01_Directive_TS-3600-1.pdf. See also Michael Warner, “Notes on Military Doctrine in Cyberspace in the United States, 1992–2014,” Cyber Defense Review (online only), August 27, 2017; accessed December 20, 2017, at http://cyberdefensereview.army.mil/ The-Journal/Article-Display/Article/1136012/notes-on-military-doctrine-for-cyberspace-operations-in-the-united-states-1992/ 15. Michael T.  Flynn, Matt Pottinger, Paul D.  Batchelor, Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan (Washington: Center for a New American Security, 2010), p. 9; accessed February 3, 2018, at https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/fixing-intel-ablueprint-for-making-intelligence-relevant 16. Albert J.  Edmonds, “C4I Issues,” in Guest Presentations, Spring 1994, Incidental Paper, Program on Information Resources Policy, Center for Information Policy Research, Harvard University, January 1995, pp.  181–192; accessed February 4, 2018, at http://www.pirp.harvard. edu/pubs_pdf/edmonds/edmonds-i95-3.pdf 17. Albert J. Edmonds, “Information Systems Support to DOD and Beyond,” in Guest Presentations, Spring 1996, Incidental Paper, Program on

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Information Resources Policy, Center for Information Policy Research, Harvard University, January 1997, p. 194; accessed October 25, 2018, at http://www.pirp.harvard.edu/pubs_pdf/edmonds/edmonds-i97-1.pdf 18. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994 [1964]), p. 7. 19. General Accounting Office, “Information Security: Computer Attacks at Department of Defense Pose Increasing Risks,” AIMD-96-84, May 22, 1996, p.  4; accessed February 5, 2018, at https://www.gao.gov/products/AIMD-96-84. See also Dan Verton, “IT lessons emerge from Kosovo,” Federal Computer Week, August 31, 1999; accessed on February 4, 2018, at https://fcw.com/articles/1999/08/31/it-lessons-emergefrom-kosovo.aspx 20. Edmonds, “C4I Issues,” p. 156. 21. Edmonds, “Information Systems Support to DOD and Beyond,” p. 194. 22. James Adams, “Virtual Defense,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2001; accessed February 4, 2018, at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2001-05-01/virtual-defense 23. “NIPC Cyber Threat Assessment, October 1999,” Statement for the Record of Michael A. Vatis, Federal Bureau of Investigation, before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Technology and Terrorism, October 6, 1999; accessed March 2, 2018, at https://fas.org/irp/congress/1999_hr/nipc10-6.htm 24. Michael Johnston and Yufan Hao, “China’s Surge of Corruption,” Journal of Democracy 6:4 (October 1995), pp. 81–83. 25. Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–62 (London: Bloomsbury, 2011 [2010]), pp. xiii–xv. See also Bei Dao, City Gate, Open Up. 26. James Risen, “U.S. Warns China on Taiwan, Sends Warships to Area,” Los Angeles Times, March 11, 1996; accessed December 31, 2017, at http:// articles.latimes.com/1996-03-11/news/mn-45722_1_taiwan-strait 27. Edward Friedman, “The Prospects of a Larger War: Chinese nationalism and the Taiwan Strait conflict,” in Suisheng Zhao, ed., Across the Taiwan Strait: Mainland China, Taiwan, and the 1995–1996 Crisis (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 262. 28. You Ji, “Changing leadership consensus: the domestic context of war games,” in Zhao, ed., Across the Taiwan strait, p. 88. 29. Final Report of Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction [the WMD Commission], March 2005, p. 82; accessed May 6, 2018, at https://www.icty.org/en/ press/final-report-prosecutor-committee-established-review-nato-bombingcampaign-against-federal 30. Bill Clinton, My Life (New York: Vintage, 2005), p. 554.

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31. Bruce R.  Nardulli, et  al., Disjointed War: Military Operations in Kosovo, 1999 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND [Arroyo Center], 2002), pp. 90–92. 32. Quoted in United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, “Final Report to the Prosecutor by the Committee Established to Review the NATO Bombing Campaign Against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia,” June 13, 2000; accessed January 2, 2018, at https://www. icty.org/en/press/final-report-prosecutor-committee-establishedreview-nato-bombing-campaign-against-federal. See also Hugh Shelton, with Ronald Levinson and Malcolm McConnell, Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior (New York: St. Martins Griffin, 2011 [2010]), pp. 370–373. 33. Remarks by Samuel R.  Berger, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs at the Council on Foreign Relations, “Winning the Peace in Kosovo,” July 26, 1999; accessed March 2, 2018, at https://www. mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/berkos.htm. See also Shelton, Without Hesitation, p. 381. 34. Quoted in United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, “Final Report to the Prosecutor by the Committee Established to Review the NATO Bombing Campaign Against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia,” June 13, 2000; accessed January 2, 2018, at https://www. icty.org/en/press/final-report-prosecutor-committee-establishedreview-nato-bombing-campaign-against-federal 35. Clinton, My Life, p. 859. 36. Quoted in BBC, “Nato air strikes – the world reacts,” March 25, 1999; accessed January 2, 2018, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/303446.stm 37. United Nations Security Council, “Security Council Rejects Demand for Cessation of Use of Force Against Federal Republic of Yugoslavia,” Press Release SC/6659, March 26, 1999; accessed January 2, 2018, at http:// www.un.org/press/en/1999/19990326.sc6659.html 38. Quoted in BBC, “Nato air strikes – the world reacts,” March 25, 1999; accessed January 2, 2018, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/303446.stm 39. Colin S.  Gray, Modern Strategy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 248. 40. Nardulli, Disjointed War, pp. 27–28. 41. Shelton, Without Hesitation, pp. 384–385. 42. Clinton, My Life, p. 855. 43. Paul Blackburn, “Dealing with a PR Disaster – The U.S. Bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade,” Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training: Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, November 2002; accessed January 3, 2018, at http://adst.org/2013/05/dealing-with-a-pr-disaster-the-u-s-bombing-of-the-chinese-embassy-in-belgrade/

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44. United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, “Final Report to the Prosecutor by the Committee Established to Review the NATO Bombing Campaign Against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia,” June 13, 2000; accessed January 2, 2018, at http://www. icty.org/x/file/Press/ [nato061300.pdf. Beijing for its part also paid Washington for the burning of the consul’s residence at Chengdu and damage to other American diplomatic facilities; Blackburn, “Dealing with a PR Disaster.” 45. Stephan D.  Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 6. 46. Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Most Wanted Terrorists”; accessed January 6, 2018, at https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/wanted_terrorists/ joanne-deborah-chesimard 47. Bruce Hoffman, “Terrorism Trends and Prospects,” in Ian O.  Lesser, et  al., Countering the New Terrorism (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1999), pp. 11–12. 48. Bill Clinton, “Remarks on International Security Issues at George Washington University,” August 5, 1996; accessed January 7, 2018, at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=53161 49. Bruce Hoffman, “Terrorism Trends and Prospects,” p. 17. 50. See, for instance, Alexander Spencer, “Questioning the Concept of ‘New Terrorism’,” Peace, Conflict, and Development 8 (January 2006), pp. 24–25. 51. Mary R. Habeck, “Blessed September: Al-Qaeda’s Grand Strategic Vision on 9/11,” in Lorry M. Fenner, Mark E. Stout, and Jessica L. Goldings, eds., Ten Years Later: Insights on al-Qaeda’s Past & Future Through Captured Records (Washington: Johns Hopkins University Center for Advanced Governmental Studies, 2012), pp. 52–58. See also Flagg Miller, “Re-reading the Origins of al-Qaeda through Osama bin Laden’s Former Audiocassette Collection,” in ibid., pp. 106–109. 52. See “Excerpts from Statements in Court,” New York Times, January 9, 1998; the grammar is Yousef’s as recorded by the court’s transcriber. Accessed January 6, 2018, at http://www.nytimes.com/1998/01/09/ nyregion/excerpts-from-statements-in-court.html; see also the Manila laptop letter at p. 72 of http://news.findlaw.com/cnn/docs/terrorism/ usyousef40403opn.pdf 53. The 9/11 Commission Report, p. 56. 54. Ibid., pp. 57–63. 55. Ibid., pp. 66, 169–172. 56. Ibid., pp. 67, 234. 57. Ibid., pp. 67–70.

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58. Michael Whine, “Cyberspace A New Medium for Communication, Command and Control by Extremists,” International Institute for Counter-­ Terrorism (Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya), May 5, 1999; accessed January 8, 2018, at https://www.ict.org.il/Article/764/ Cyberspace%20A%20New%20Medium%20for%20Communication,%20 Command%20and%20Control%20by%20Extremists#gsc.tab=0 59. Michael Specter, “Chechen Insurgents Take Their Struggle To a Moscow Park,” New York Times, November 24, 1995; accessed January 7, 2018, at http://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/24/world/chechen-insurgentstake-their-struggle-to-a-moscow-park.html. See also International Atomic Energy Agency, “Inadequate Control of World’s Radioactive Sources,” Press Release 2002/09, June 24, 2002; accessed January 7, 2018, at https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/inadequate-controlworlds-radioactive-sources 60. Hoffman, “Terrorism Trend and Prospects,” pp.  18, 20; and in Ian O.  Lesser, “Implications for Strategy,” in Lesser, Countering the New Terrorism, pp. 101–102. 61. David B.  Cook, “The Collapse of Religious Justifications for Globalist Radical Muslims,” in Fenner, Stout, and Goldings, eds., Ten Years Later, pp. 93–96. 62. The 9//11 Commission Report, p. 47. See also bin Laden’s interview with CNN’s Peter Arnett in March 1997; accessed January 7, 2018, at http:// news.findlaw.com/cnn/docs/binladen/binladenintvw-cnn.pdf 63. The 9//11 Commission Report pp. 244–248. 64. Ibid., pp. 83–84. 65. Ibid., pp. 44, 46, 83–84, 153. 66. Ibid., p. 46. 67. UN Security Council Resolution 1368, September 12, 2001; accessed January 14, 2018, at https://undocs.org/S/RES/1368(2001) 68. Henry A.  Crumpton, The Art of Intelligence: Lessons from a Life in the CIA’s Clandestine Service (New York: Penguin, 2012), pp.  195–197, 206–207, 222–223. See also Benjamin S.  Lambeth, Air Power Against Terror: America’s Conduct of Operation Enduring Freedom (Santa Monica, RAND Corporation, 2005), pp. 109–110, 116, 121–122. 69. Richard B. Andres, “Deep Attack Against Iraq,” in Thomas G. Mahnken and Thomas A.  Keaney, eds., War in Iraq: Planning and Execution (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 81. 70. Doug Stanton, Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan (New York: Scribners, 2009), pp. 222–223. Gary C. Schroen, First In: An Insider’s Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan (New York: Ballantine, 2007), pp. 328, 356–360.

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71. Kevin M. Woods, David D. Palkki, and Mark E. Stout, The Saddam Tapes: The Inner Workings of a Tyrant’s Regime (New York: Cambridge, 2011), pp. 50–51, 194–195. 72. Kevin M. Woods, Michael R. Pease, Mark E. Stout, Williamson Murray, and James G. Lacey, Iraqi Perspectives Project: A View of Operation Iraqi Freedom from Saddam’s Senior Leadership (Norfolk, VA: US Joint Forces Command, 2006), p. 16; accessed January 15, 2018, at http://www.iwar. org.uk/news-archive/iraq/lessons-learned/jfcom-ipp.pdf 73. Woods, et al., Iraqi Perspectives Project, pp. 47–49, 127. 74. “Chirac Says France Will Veto UN Resolution on Iraq,” PBS, March 10, 2003; accessed January 20, 2018, at https://web.archive.org/ web/20100902155745/http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/ iraq_03-10-03.html; Woods, et  al., The Saddam Tapes, p.  287. See also Antony Barnett and Martin Bright, “France’s Saddam Deals Revealed,” The Guardian, October 9, 2004; accessed January 20, 2018, at https:// www.theguardian.com/world/2004/oct/10/france.iraq 75. Bush, Decision Points, p. 244. UN Security Council Resolution 687, April 3, 1991, accessed January 20, 2018, at https://undocs.org/S/RES/ 687(1991) 76. Woods, et al., Iraqi Perspectives Project, pp. 27, 62. 77. Tommy Franks with Malcolm McConnell, American Soldier (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), p. 558. 78. Woods, et al., Iraqi Perspectives Project, pp. 27–28. 79. Bush, Decision Points, p. 253. 80. Franks, American Soldier, p. 560. 81. Woods, et al., Iraqi Perspectives Project, pp. 125–126. 82. Ibid., pp. 33, 39, 129. 83. Andres, “Deep Attack Against Iraq,” pp. 70, 82. 84. Franks, American Soldier, p. 482. 85. Woods, et al., Iraqi Perspectives Project, p. 95. 86. “Despite a series of interviews with senior U.S. officials, it remains unclear how many Iraqi generals were approached by U.S. officials, how many of those agreed to sit out the war or walk away, how many accepted payoffs for their cooperation, and how much they were offered and in what form.” Vago Muradian, “Payoffs Aided U.S. War Plan,” Defense News, May 19, 2003; accessed January 15, 2018, at http://infoweb.newsbank.com 87. Bush, Decision Points, p. 262. 88. Ibid., pp. 88–89. 89. Robert Jervis, How Statesmen Think: The Psychology of International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), p. 263.

CHAPTER 7

Information Wars

The idea of degrading the opponent’s information flow and, conversely, to protect or improve our own, has gained reasonably widespread acceptance and has resulted in important applications. —Thomas P. Rona, Weapons Systems and Information War, 1976

The era between the two Iraqi wars highlighted the importance of combining surpassing comprehension of the battlefield with superior tools for conveyance and cooperation. By 2003 the United Nations and the states of the liberal West seemed close to deciding that national sovereignty was subject to liberal international supervision. This notion in the first decades of the twenty-first century met with strong resistance as anti-liberal states and actors defended their virtual and physical borders. Authoritarians mounted this defense in a dynamic technological and ideological environment. The relentless process of digitization continued to transform the ways and means of force for states and non-state actors. Such changes were partly technological, and  partly political. What was analog went digital; what was digital was networked; what was networked went global; what was global became ever more subject to the scrutiny of law; and law itself became the focus of an intensifying dispute over the difference between legitimacy and violence. Change of all kinds now came quickly, though arguably the understanding of force changed the most profoundly over this time. With

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Warner, J. Childress, The Use of Force for State Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45410-4_7

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increasing frequency, force took on a non-corporal sense as states and their adversaries compelled each other through the information space. Of course, ideas and ideology had always exerted a power of their own. As states moved resources, activities, and basic governmental functions into cyberspace, however, it became apparent that the ancient principles of force applied in this new domain as well. Innovations in cooperation, conveyance, and comprehension in cyberspace, and in the information space more generally, now can shape strategic outcomes.

A Freedom Agenda UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in March 2000 issued a report that, perhaps to his surprise, would quietly frame much of dialogue over international relations for years to come. The Secretary-General viewed the progress of diplomacy and wondered if the Westphalian principle of sovereignty might be ripe for revision: Few would disagree that both the defence of humanity and the defence of sovereignty are principles that must be supported….But surely no legal principle—not even sovereignty—can ever shield crimes against humanity. Where such crimes occur and peaceful attempts to halt them have been exhausted, the Security Council has a moral duty to act on behalf of the international community. The fact that we cannot protect people everywhere is no reason for doing nothing when we can. Armed intervention must always remain the option of last resort, but in the face of mass murder it is an option that cannot be relinquished.1

Secretary-General Annan would accept the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the United  Nations in 2001. The doctrine that he articulated above would soon be dubbed the “responsibility to protect.” Here was the culmination of the steps taken two years earlier in Kosovo. Likewise, it proved problematic because it justified (at least theoretically) forceful interventions by the liberal West, and because not all states agreed with it. Dictators and one-party states feared the responsibility to protect. Their resistance to it had to be indirect or muted, however, while the United States remained the world’s pre-eminent military power and worked in concert with allies. President Bush had called out North Korea, Iraq, and Iran in his January 2002 State of the Union address, insisting “[s]tates like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.”2 Saddam’s regime in Iraq had survived barely a year

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after Bush’s speech. Regimes in Iran and North Korea and other places wanted to avoid such a fate. The years to follow thus saw varied efforts to deter or weaken Western power and resolve to impose international standards of rights in particular sovereignties. The Western liberal states launched no immediate large-scale military interventions after the Iraq invasion, but even the possibility of synchronized, regime-changing warfare haunted the dictators. American armies and airpower now camped on the mainland of southwest Asia—on either side of Iran’s theocracy—while American aircraft carriers cruised the Indian Ocean, athwart the sea lanes that carried oil to East Asia. Such strength emboldened democratic reformers in Ukraine (the Orange Revolution), Burma (the Saffron Revolution), Lebanon (the Cedar Revolution), and other lands, who trusted America’s commitment to what President Bush called his “freedom agenda.”3 “The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world,” Bush explained at his second inaugural in 2005. Thus, the United States applauded these “color revolutions” above. Bush stated America would “seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”4 To survive, the dictators had to adapt. The regimes that resisted this tide had little in common and few if any universal or racial pretensions— they were nationalistic or sectarian, and only regional in their ambitions. Only a few leaders (chiefly in Cuba and North Korea) still rhetorically called for Marxist revolution. The others tended to have a religious or nationalist ideology imposed through authoritarian rule by their ruling party. They experimented with links to the global, capitalist system, wondering if China’s model could work for them as well. They also sought various ways to thwart what they saw as subtle Western coercion. Several nations sought to deter Western intervention by accelerating nuclear weapons development. The Iraq War had soon paid one bonus—it convinced Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, long a nuisance to Europe, to abandon his chemical weapons in late 2003.5 Other states drew the opposite lesson about weapons of mass destruction: North Korea and Iran both accelerated their respective nuclear efforts. Even forces with Western Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR), they reasoned, could not withstand attacks by nuclear weapons, which therefore became the weapon of choice for dictators determined to deter any Western intervention. North Korea reached this goal first, detonating a fission device with a yield of less

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than a kiloton in October 2006. Iran sought to build a weapon as well, with the new President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announcing in mid-2005 that Tehran would resume the uranium enrichment effort it had halted in 2003—a sign that Americans and Europeans interpreted as a step toward building a weapon.6 Western diplomats and intelligence strained to understand what was happening in these closed regimes, but disagreed over the findings of intelligence and international monitors.7

Insurgencies Most of the actual fighting in the years after 9/11 took place on the lower end of the violence spectrum. The key for jihad was to weary the coalition forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other war zones. Insurgent leaders sought to bleed coalition forces, inflicting enough casualties to boost public opposition to the wars, especially in the United States and Britain. President Bush believed insurgent leaders had a specific aim: “Their strategy was to present an image of Iraq as hopeless and unwinnable, swinging American public opinion against the war and forcing us to withdraw as we had in Vietnam. To an extent, they succeeded.”8 Al Qaeda affiliate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq, for example, explained to his ostensible patrons that the Americans are “the most cowardly of God’s creatures. They are an easy quarry, praise be to God. We ask God to enable us to kill and capture them to sow panic among those behind them.” Zarqawi also worked to spark a civil war in Iraq, provoking the Shi’a into attacking Sunnis, likening the Shi’a to mad dogs and reasoning they were “the key to change. I mean that targeting and hitting them in [their] religious, political, and military depth will provoke them to show the Sunnis their rabies.”9 Terror attacks would also erode the unity that wavered in the international coalition once pre-war fears of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction proved to be illusory. The United Nations abandoned its direct role in rebuilding Iraq after Zarqawi sent suicide bombers against the lightly guarded UN office in Baghdad.10 The following year another group (probably unaffiliated with al Qaeda and foreign jihadists) bombed commuter trains in Madrid just before Spain’s elections; the ruling conservatives lost, and the new, Socialist government promptly withdrew Spanish forces from the coalition effort in Iraq. In a sense, Zarqawi and those like him attacked Western power by chiseling away at the cooperation necessary to maintain an international coalition and also the cooperation necessary to sustain national support.

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The grueling Iraq insurgency, followed by another in Afghanistan, tried the patience of civilian leaders which meant that the continuance of the war efforts  depended upon those leaders’ constituencies and majorities. American forces were stretched thin from fighting two wars, and Bush long tried to minimize the footprint of coalition forces in Afghanistan. In 2002, the year after chasing Taliban and al Qaeda leaders to their mountain caves, coalition forces included 5000 troops from 22 countries under NATO command, plus 8000 Americans. This seemed appropriate to Bush, as the coalition “had routed the Taliban with far fewer.” “We worried we would create resentment by looking like occupiers,” he recalled, so Washington pulled out troops from Afghanistan and thus inadvertently “allowed the insurgency to gain momentum.”11 Toward the end of his term, President Bush regretted that “our rapid success with low troop levels [in 2001 had] created false comfort, and our desire to maintain a light military footprint left us short of the resources we needed” as the Afghan insurgency revived.12 The insurgents also sought to ensure that the local population and the coalition troops feared one another, and could not cooperate. The strategy worked in many places; General Stanley McChrystal, commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan in 2009, found that even in quiet sectors American units fearing insurgent ambushes “drove in an aggressive way they believed was essential to protect against car bomb attacks.” But “forcing Afghan drivers off the road and pointing weapons at an Afghan family” only “endangered and insulted the population whose support we needed.”13 The weapon of choice for insurgents in both wars became the “improvised explosive device” (IED), hidden along a road and detonated remotely as coalition vehicles passed. Sunni and Shi’a insurgents in Iraq planted countless numbers of them, often utilizing surplus artillery rounds pilfered from the vast stockpiles amassed for Saddam Husayn’s armies. A thousand IEDs exploded in Baghdad’s teeming Sadr City over the summer of 2004, with another 1200 defused. By late 2006 in Iraq, IEDs caused almost 80% of American troop casualties. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates visited a supply depot for U.S. forces where bombed vehicles were dumped; he wandered through the resulting boneyard—“many acres that contained the wrecked remains of thousands of American tanks, trucks, Humvees, and other vehicles.” Nearly all had been destroyed by enemy action, typically by IEDs, with “each vehicle bearing witness to the suffering and losses of our troops.”14 Sympathizers of the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan launched their own attacks in Western Europe. Improved Western security, however,

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made it progressively more difficult for al Qaeda operatives and would-be adherents to coordinate the operatives, tactics, and weapons required to cause mass casualties. The four catastrophic plane crashes on 9/11 had resulted from the concerted action by nineteen hijackers deployed and controlled from abroad and receiving financial support via al Qaeda’s modest but capable global network. Thereafter, the scale of the attacks and the casualty counts declined for several years. At least eight individuals (only some of them Muslims) took part in the aforementioned Madrid bombings in 2004, detonating ten bombs on four trains nearly simultaneously, with a death toll of 192.15 By contrast, the suicide bombings in London on July 7, 2005, entailed detailed planning and synchronization by only four attackers, with explosions on three Underground trains all occurring within the span of one minute, killing fifty-two victims.16 The martyrdom video by their ringleader, Mohammed Sadique Khan, voiced the classic call to arms against systemic violence, this time, as in 9/11, with Islamic overtones: “Until we feel security you will be our targets and until you stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of my people we will not stop this fight. We are at war and I am a soldier.”17 Just two British jihadists in 2007 parked car bombs in London, and after authorities defused their devices, the pair rammed another car bomb into the terminal at Glasgow’s airport; the attackers themselves were the only fatalities.18 By 2009, it seemed that attacks in the United States could no longer be plotted in advance, though a lone jihadist could still cause devastation, as did U.S. Army Major Nidal Hasan when he turned his service pistol on his fellow soldiers preparing to deploy to Afghanistan, killing thirteen and wounding twenty-nine in firing over a hundred rounds.19 One explanation for the decline in the scale of attacks in the West might have been the growing proficiency of the surveillance of al Qaeda and enhanced liaison across Western law enforcement and intelligence services. Contemporary events outside of America and Western Europe offer circumstantial evidence that Western security measures had improved significantly. Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups never lost their desire to orchestrate attacks. Indeed, the ferocity of incidents elsewhere continued unabated during this time. Dozens of Chechen rebels took a Moscow theater hostage in 2002, and another group of them seized a school in Beslan, Russia, in 2004; the resulting sieges left more than 500 dead. The Kashmiri group Lashkar-e-Taiba planted bombs on seven trains in Mumbai in 2006, killing over 200. More Lashkar-e-Taiba militants attacked Mumbai again in 2008, capturing and fortifying a downtown hotel and

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causing at least another 160 deaths. Suicide car bombings in northern Iraq in 2007 claimed at least 800 lives on a single day. Given this record, the question can be asked whether attacks at such a devastating scale were still possible in the West, at least for the time. Terrorists in the Middle East and South Asia might have had difficulty sending operatives to the West, but they improvised a solution, as hinted above, by inspiring adherents already in Europe and America. As Nidal Hasan showed at Fort Hood, even lone “homegrown” attackers could kill. The key to recruiting them was the Internet.20 Dame Eliza ManninghamBuller, director of Britain’s Security Service (MI-5), told a London audience in 2006 that increasing numbers of Britons were “moving from passive sympathy towards active terrorism through being radicalised or indoctrinated by friends, families, in organised training events here and overseas, by images on television, through chat rooms and websites on the Internet.” Jihadist propaganda efforts grew ever more sophisticated. In Iraq, Manningham-Buller explained, attacks on coalition forces or Iraqi government troops were “regularly videoed and the footage downloaded onto the Internet within 30 minutes. Virtual media teams then edit the result, translate it into English and many other languages, and package it for a worldwide audience.” The chilling results could be seen in Europe, where “young teenagers [are] being groomed to be suicide bombers.”21 The Internet made everyone close to everyone else in ways that governments were still learning to monitor. The pace of attacks in the West thus increased even if their lethality declined. A U.S. Senate report highlighted the Internet’s criticality in facilitating the recruitment of foot soldiers by al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists in the years after 9/11, pointing to an uptick before Major Hasan opened fire on his comrades in late 2009. “[T]he incidence of homegrown terrorism has increased significantly in the past two years as compared to the years since 9/11. From May 2009 to November 2010, there were 22 different homegrown plots, contrasted with 21 such plots from September 2001 to May 2009.”22 This continuance of terror attacks provided crucial context for the coalition military responses in Iraq and Afghanistan. Western leaders who disagreed on the wisdom of invading Iraq or the proper methods of interrogating prisoners nonetheless agreed that neither country could be abandoned to the jihadists and allowed to become again a sanctuary for terror.23 The problem remained sustaining popular and elite support long enough for the war effort to grind down the insurgencies.24 Secretary Gates explained this dynamic to his commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus,

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stating “that Iraq was his battlespace and Washington was mine. We each knew who our enemy was. My enemy was time. There was a Washington ‘clock’ and a Baghdad ‘clock,’ and the two moved at very different speeds.” Gates saw his role as finding a way “to slow down the Washington clock, and how to speed up the Baghdad clock.”25 Minimizing casualties—both of coalition troops and of local civilians— looked like the key for managing both clocks. That, in turn, depended on surveillance and comprehension; where seemingly any adult could turn from a bystander to a combatant and back again in moments, coalition commanders demanded total situational awareness. Drones with video cameras and sensor suites helped to fill this gap, carrying precision-guided missiles themselves or linked to commanders with strike aircraft or artillery at the ready.26 The Americans had deployed over 2000 drones in Iraq and Afghanistan by 2008, including Predators, Reapers, and Global Hawks, supplemented by dozens of conventional aircraft collecting intelligence (Fig.  7.1). Many of these systems transmitted data to, and received

Fig. 7.1  An armed Predator drone flying from Balad Air Base in Iraq. (SSGT Lewis, at Balad Air Base, Iraq, a U.S. Air Force RQ-1 Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle taxis to a runway on a mission in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 2004, Photograph, U.S. National Archive at College Park)

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commands from, installations half a world away in the United States.27 Gates visited a command post for the drones at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, pronouncing it “one of the most astonishing—and lethal—displays of technological progress I have ever seen.” Indeed, the operators at Creech could observe roadside bombs being buried, and what happened next: It was amazing to watch a video in real time of an insurgent planting an IED, or to view a video analysis tracing an insurgent pickup truck from the bomb-making site to the site of an attack. It was even more amazing—and gratifying—to watch the IED bomber and the pickup truck be quickly destroyed as a result of this unprecedented integration of sensors and shooters.28

Surveillance and guided weapons made it dangerous for insurgents to assemble in the open, with the practical effect of driving down the numbers of combatants who could mount any given attack. An academic analysis of the drone campaign against al Qaeda and Taliban forces found it had psychological as well as military effects on insurgent adversaries: The anticipatory mechanism includes damage to targets resulting from their anticipation of being targeted, based on previous successful targeting. Such anticipation may constrain the movement of group leaders and cadres, limit their ability to communicate, and increase in-group mistrust. In turn, leaders and cadres may feel compelled to go into hiding, preventing them from pursuing operations, base expansion, and recruitment, as well as managing allied relationships.29

Collateral damage by drone strikes might have driven aggrieved locals to join the resistance to the coalition in Afghanistan, it is true, but it seemed more likely that the insurgents on balance suffered from the fear of the drones. Indeed, “multiple interviewees from al-Qaida and the Pakistan Taliban denied a surge in recruitment in response to drone strikes; more dominant explanations centered on manpower shortages and desertions starting in 2008.”30 The key to this surveillance-strike campaign was the coalition’s unchallenged supremacy in the air. British strategist Colin Gray observed in 2015 that when “hostile airpower is at liberty to fly where, when, and even how it will, readily visible military effort on the earth’s surface becomes difficult or impracticable.”31 Where American troops might encounter

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companies or even battalions of North Vietnamese regulars in the 1960s, forty years later Iraqi or Afghan insurgents rarely gathered in groups of a dozen or two. They feared American surveillance and airstrikes.32 Their leaders also found themselves constantly hunted. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi died when American bombs hit his safe house in 2006, and there were other ways of menacing prominent terrorists.33 Moscow, for instance, quickly claimed credit for the explosion that same year that killed Chechen Commander Shamil Basayev (who had boasted of the 1996 cesium-137 bomb, and ordered the Moscow theater attack and the Beslan school siege). Although Chechen sources insisted the blast was accidental, the Russian claim probably succeeded in mystifying the event and making other terrorists fear the long reach of Moscow’s secret services.34 Surveillance-assisted firepower could be precise, though still not precise enough. The Bush Administration surged troops to Iraq in 2007, changing the course of the war there when Sunnis turned against the al Qaeda gangs—their former allies in the insurgency—who brutally oppressed them at every opportunity.35 The new administration of President Barack Obama followed Bush’s example and implemented an Iraq-like surge in Afghanistan in 2009, pushing back the insurgency but paradoxically increasing frictions with the Afghan government and the local population. Secretary of Defense Gates, now serving his second president, worked hard on this problem. He would later call the coalition war effort “extremely careful to avoid civilian casualties—uniquely, I think, in the history of warfare.” But collateral deaths and damage were inevitable with the powerful weapons employed, and American forces too often “were clumsy and slow in responding to incidents where we caused civilian casualties.” Gates grew so concerned that he visited Kabul primarily to reassure Afghan leaders on the matter and to insist to his commanders that they employ even effective tactics—like nighttime raids to capture or kill Taliban leaders, and the use of dogs to search houses—with more discrimination.36 The technology required to sustain the distant war effort in two of the most damaged countries on earth would have astounded veterans of World War II and even Vietnam. Much of its effectiveness depended upon its communications—a key source of vulnerability, as noted in the previous chapter. Foreign intruders in Western information networks—even military systems—soon became a serious concern. Other intruders were not content with reconnoitering government networks; they copied and purloined myriads of interesting files. Major General Walter Lord, the U.S. Air

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Force’s chief information officer, publicly accused Chinese hackers, working perhaps at Beijing’s behest, of compromising DoD data: “China has downloaded 10 to 20 terabytes of data from the NIPRNet (DOD’s NonClassified IP Router Network),” he told a conference in August 2006.37 American systems administrators seemed overwhelmed, if not powerless, according to the Sandia Labs expert James Gosler, who lamented the hemorrhage of defense data and noted that [t]he apparent inability to patch US systems in a timely manner provides opponents with ample opportunities for access to our information systems. While we are aware of these operations, we do not yet appear to have the technical ability to close the access holes or to clearly attribute these operations to the perpetrator(s).38

By 2008, a cyber-actor gained at least a temporary foothold into classified U.S. information systems. According to Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn, a “foreign intelligence agency” managed to have its potent malware unwittingly loaded onto sensitive U.S. military intelligence networks “when an infected flash drive was inserted into a US military laptop at a base in the Middle East.” Lynn called this “the most significant breach of US military computers ever,” and noted that the infestation prompted the Department to undertake an urgent and costly containment effort.39

Virtual Borders The Munich Security Conference has met since 1963, gathering each year in the grand old Hotel Bayerischer Hof. Defense Secretary Robert Gates nonetheless found these conclaves of hobnobbing leaders “incredibly tedious”; during his second and last attendance, he found an excuse to duck out of the banquet and joined his aides for beer and wurst in the hotel pub.40 Yet Gates and others would remember the Conference that met in February 2007, when Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed world policymakers and legislators. Russia wanted cooperation, particularly in arms control, Putin insisted, but his speech nonetheless struck an ominous tone.41 No state, however powerful, could build a “unipolar world” in modern times, he insisted. Yet that did not stop some parties from wanting such an international order, and in this quest they had caused “new human tragedies and created new centres of tension.” Putin left little doubt whom he blamed for the “almost uncontained hyper use

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of force—military force—in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts.” After all, it was “first and foremost the United States” that had “overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations.”42 The United States had accomplices in this work, Putin hinted at Munich. International law had become an instrument of the strong, who showed disdain for its principles and independent legal norms. Such overreach was “extremely dangerous” because it had created a situation in which “no one feels safe.” Indeed, “no one can feel that international law is like a stone wall that will protect them.” Hence, the race by “a number of countries to acquire weapons of mass destruction.” Even old threats such as terrorism had returned, and had “taken on a global character.” The strong nations had casually launched “military operations that are difficult to consider legitimate,” when instead force in international affairs should be a last resort that “can only be considered legitimate if the decision is sanctioned by the UN.” Putin insisted “we do not need to substitute NATO or the EU for the UN.”43 The nations of Europe had helped America to erode the rule of law and worked to isolate Russia, complained Putin. They were imposing “new dividing lines and walls…that cut through our continent.” He seemed particularly concerned by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which unnamed parties had sought to transform “into a vulgar instrument designed to promote the foreign policy interests of one or a group of countries.” The OSCE’s processes had been captured by strange ideas, and the once-objective Organization had taken to working its will through “non-governmental organisations” financed and controlled from afar. Worse yet, the OSCE was “interfering in the internal affairs of other countries,” Putin suggested, and was busily “imposing a regime that determines how these states should live and develop.” Now Russia would go its own way, or at least work with “responsible and independent partners” in constructing “a fair and democratic world order that would ensure security and prosperity not only for a select few, but for all.”44 Putin’s speech at the Munich Security Conference previewed the tensions that would emerge over the next decade as Russia rekindled the great power competition that had died down at the end of the Cold War. Moscow now possessed the resources and will to act on the hitherto academic critiques of Western dominance that Putin had echoed in Munich.

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In the years since taking power in the Kremlin from the garrulous Boris Yeltsin, Putin had accelerated Russia’s return to authoritarian ways, strengthening a handful of oligarchs, suppressing independent media outlets, and rigging the political system to keep himself in command. Most dictatorships sooner or later squabble with their neighbors (even if such frictions do not lead always to war). And so did Russia. Massive denial-of-­ service attacks briefly crippled the government of Estonia in 2007 after the Estonians moved a Soviet-era war memorial in a gesture that Moscow deemed disrespectful. The disruption of Estonia—a member of NATO and the EU—drew no blood but nonetheless made Europeans notice: “Frankly it is clear that what happened in Estonia in the cyber-attacks is not acceptable and a very serious disturbance,” complained a senior EU official quoted in The Guardian just after the attacks.45 Russian forces tangled with Georgian troops the following year, this time over the status of two disputed provinces. Moscow sought to teach a lesson to Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, and Russia’s troops advanced to within 40  miles of Georgia’s capital before the Kremlin signed a ceasefire. Afterward, President George W. Bush professed to liking Saakashvili but described him to Putin as “hot-blooded.” “I’m hot-blooded, too,” retorted Putin. “No, Vladimir,” Bush observed: “You’re cold-blooded.”46 President Barack Obama’s administration sought to turn Putin’s energies in more positive directions. Hillary Clinton, the new Secretary of State, promised a “reset” of bilateral relations, dealing constructively with the Russians where mutual interests converged, showing firmness to “limit their negative behavior,” and “engaging consistently with the Russian people themselves.”47 That last element—reaching the peoples of Russia and other dictatorships—would become a feature of American foreign policy during President Obama’s first term, as Secretary Clinton later explained in her memoir. Autocracies increasingly sought to shield their subjects from the Internet, Clinton lamented: Around the world, some countries began erecting electronic barriers to prevent their people from using the internet freely and fully. Censors expunged words, names, and phrases from search engine results….One of the most prominent examples was China, which, as of 2013, was home to nearly 600 million internet users but also some of the most repressive limits on internet freedom. The “Great Firewall” blocked foreign websites and particular pages with content perceived as threatening to the Communist Party.48

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Such pervasive censorship and control amounted to information war that targeted the populace, Clinton suggested. She pushed the State Department to counter such restrictions, for instance by training citizen activists in and around oppressive regimes to employ cyber tools that could “protect their privacy and anonymity online and thwart restrictive government firewalls.” By 2011, she noted, “we had invested more than $45 million in tools to help keep dissidents safe online and trained more than five thousand activists worldwide, who turned around and trained thousands more.” Clinton herself visited one of these workshops that year in Lithuania, figuratively on Russia’s doorstep.49 The Internet, as many in the West had hoped, became a powerful tool for dissent. Iranian repression would be seen by millions in 2009, with the shooting death in Tehran of a young protester, Neda Agha-Soltan, captured on cellphone video, uploaded online, and shared via Twitter and Facebook.50 Iranian authorities crushed widespread protests that year but emerged from the crisis badly shaken. Another long-ruling regime in Tunisia, by contrast, would not survive popular unrest facilitated by social media in 2010. When Tunisian strongman Ben Ali tried to suppress social media sites, the leaderless but surging protests against repression and corruption turned to text messaging on nearly ubiquitous cellphones as their organizing tool.51 Mass protests against the rule of yet another dictator, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, soon followed the Tunisian example. Mubarak left office less than a month after Tunisia’s Ben Ali fled in January 2011. “Thanks to the internet, especially social media, citizens and community organizations had gained much more access to information and a greater ability to speak out than ever before,” reflected Secretary Clinton in her memoir.52 A brief but tumultuous “Arab Spring” followed these upheavals and swept across the Middle East, with protests in Algeria, Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Oman, Sudan, Yemen, and beyond. Dictatorships elsewhere saw they had to respond. They did so clumsily at first, trying to close down Internet service providers or block social media sites. Smarter rulers, like Iran’s, quickly learned to hunt on the web in order to find their adversaries and divine their plans. “The new technologies allow us to identify conspirators and those who are violating the law, without having to control all people individually,” boasted Iran’s top policeman, Esmail Ahmadi-Moghaddam, in early 2010.53 No countries saw more violence, however, than Libya and Syria, both ruled by secular Arab dictators and oppressed for decades by pervasive police states. Both regimes turned their

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militaries on protesters, who rebelled and found arms and courage to defend themselves, pitching both nations into civil war. Libya proved a test of Kofi Annan’s “responsibility to protect” doctrine in March 2011. After the African Union condemned the violence and the Arab League voted to impose a No-Fly Zone over rebel-held territory to deter Qaddafi’s avenging tanks, the UN Security Council passed (with Russia and China abstaining) a resolution finding that the “deteriorating situation” constituted “a threat to international peace and security.” With this justification for intervening in the Libyan crisis, the Council authorized “all necessary measures” short of foreign occupation to protect Libyan civilians.54 The resulting military intervention followed almost immediately in now-classic fashion, although American leaders declined to explicitly cite any “responsibility to protect” in justifying their policy.55 U.S.-led airstrikes and countermeasures suppressed Libyan air defenses and enabled NATO aircraft to pound Qaddafi’s armor and artillery (under Operation UNIFIED PROTECTOR). An unnamed adviser to President Obama described the American role in the Libya campaign to The New Yorker as “leading from behind.”56 Nonetheless, the United States would end up providing much of the wherewithal to wage a precision-­ strike campaign, including the aerial refueling capacity, the surveillance assets, and guided munitions.57 Qaddafi’s regime shrank to nothing over the following summer, with the dictator himself cornered and killed in October 2011. As Secretary Clinton quipped in the presence of a CBS News reporter upon learning of the dictator’s demise, “We came. We saw. He died.”58 Syria would be a much tougher problem. The Syrian conflict that opened in 2011 would be shaped by the Libyan. NATO’s intervention had caused uncharacteristic public disagreements among Russian leaders. Putin, for the time serving as prime minister, alleged Western hypocrisy in attacking Qaddafi’s regime while tolerating other dictators: “When the so-called civilized community, with all its might, pounces on a small country, and ruins infrastructure that has been built over generations—well, I don’t know, is this good or bad?”59 His ostensible boss, President Dimitri Medvedev, shunned such rhetoric and had declined to veto the Security Council resolution authorizing “all necessary means” in Libya. The NATO effort still looked to Moscow like a campaign to depose Qaddafi, however, and the Russians felt they could take no such risks with Syria, Russia’s only ally in the Middle East (with ties dating back to the Cold War). Moscow thus opposed any Security Council action aimed at Syria’s Bashar al-Assad

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unless it ruled out armed intervention.60 Russia and China cast the only dissenting votes in vetoing a Security Council resolution condemning Assad’s suppression of the growing rebellion in early 2012. Moscow’s Foreign Minister complained the resolution was “taking sides in a civil war,” while the Russian ambassador to the UN alleged that Western leaders once again were “calling for regime change, pushing the opposition towards power.”61 UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon called Russia’s and China’s vetoes “a great disappointment to the people of Syria and the Middle East and to all supporters of democracy and human rights,” which had “undermine[d] the role of the United Nations and the international community in this period when the Syrian authorities must hear a unified voice calling for an immediate end to its violence against the Syrian people.”62 Secretary Clinton in her memoirs called the Russian and Chinese veto “despicable.”63 Prime Minister Putin for his part had already expressed his contempt for Clinton and her opinions. Shortly after announcing his ultimately successful candidacy to resume the Presidency of Russia, which would be decided in a Spring 2012 election, Putin showed his anxiety over democratic movements like the Arab Spring. Responding to popular complaints of election corruption in Russia’s late 2011 parliamentary balloting, Putin blamed the protests on Secretary Clinton: “She set the tone for some actors in our country and gave them a signal,” he charged. “They heard the signal and with the support of the U.S. State Department began active work.” Once again, he saw shadowy forces dividing Russians against one another, spending vast sums of “foreign money” to influence the Russian balloting.64 For the time being Putin could only fume. The liberal West seemed triumphant, with its enemies and indeed all dictators at risk. American commandos launched from neighboring Afghanistan killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May 2011, exacting a measure of revenge for the 9/11 attacks, removing the central node of al Qaeda’s still-functioning terror apparatus, and demonstrating that U.S. surveillance and strike capabilities could reach anywhere. With the Middle East suddenly undergoing profound changes, President Barack Obama felt free to fulfill one of his campaign promises and withdraw American combat forces from Iraq. The last of the Americans’ six “Advise and Assist” training brigades would depart Iraq in late 2011, “leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-­ reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people,” proclaimed President Obama to returning troops at Fort Bragg.65

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That moment would ironically prove the crest of a soon-receding democratic wave. Baghdad and its Shi’a government promptly turned a blind eye while the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps—the Praetorian Guard of Tehran’s theocracy—ferried civilian airliners over Iraqi airspace to deliver troops and weapons to Assad’s beleaguered regime in Syria.66 With Iran’s military help and Russian diplomatic cover, Assad managed to hold on against the various squabbling rebel groups, and even began using chemical weapons on the insurgents in 2013.67 Libya meanwhile degenerated into a vicious civil war. Democracy retreated in Egypt. The successor regime to Mubarak’s authoritarianism held an election won by the Muslim Brotherhood, which began imposing a different brand of Egyptian authoritarianism until ousted a year later by a military coup. Washington showed no inclination to take on more military campaigns in the region. Indeed, Secretary Clinton in contemplating the “wicked problem” that was Syria found little willingness to arm insurgent factions or allow U.S. forces themselves to engage. She and President Obama’s advisers felt a military solution was “impossible,” and resolved to avoid “another quagmire, like Iraq.”68

The New Surveillance The diplomatic and military turn against democracy corresponded with a new boldness among autocracies and one-party states in using cyberspace operations to defend themselves from falling to the sorts of popular unrest seen in the Arab Spring. As Secretary Clinton noted above, they worked to guard their digital as well as their physical borders, erecting national firewalls, enhancing the reach and quality of internal propaganda, tightening control of state media, and floating proposals in international forums to replace the allegedly U.S.-dominated “multistakeholder model” of Internet governance. Perhaps just as importantly, they turned their portions of cyberspace into surveillance systems with which they could monitor internal and external challengers. These regimes perhaps shared little beyond an abhorrence and a fear of liberal norms like elections, dissent, and a free press, but they nonetheless acted in similar ways. Ironically, the Internet soon proved just as powerful a support for the centralization of political power as it had been for dissent. The Internet facilitated state surveillance on a hitherto unimagined scale and repression even beyond a state’s physical borders. Seen from the

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perspective of the regimes in question, such steps looked purely defensive and indeed necessary in a world where liberal ideals like international law could now be used, as in the cases of Kosovo and Libya, to trump the traditional, Westphalian defense of state sovereignty. A Chinese military organ, for example, implicitly rejected Secretary Clinton’s optimism about the web’s force for good; as noted by Xinhua in 2015: The Chinese military’s mouthpiece newspaper has warned of the possibility of “Western hostile forces” using the Internet to foment revolution in China. “The Internet has grown into an ideological battlefield, and whoever controls the tool will win the war,” according to an editorial published in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Daily on Wednesday. It stressed the need for cybersecurity measures to ensure “online ideological safety”, euphemisms suggesting efforts to safeguard China’s mainstream ideology. “Western hostile forces along with a small number of Chinese ‘ideological traitors’, have maliciously attacked the Communist Party of China, and smeared our founding leaders and heroes, with the help of the Internet,” according to the paper. “Their fundamental objective is to confuse us with ‘universal values’, disturb us with ‘constitutional democracy’, and eventually overthrow our country through ‘color revolution’,” it added, using a term commonly applied to revolutionary movements that first developed in the former Soviet Union in the early 2000s. “Regime collapse that can occur overnight often starts from long-term ideological erosion,” it warned. The paper said the military should not only safeguard national sovereignty and security on traditional battlefields, but also “protect ideological and political security on the invisible battleground of the Internet.”69

These alarms reported by Xinhua indeed echoed those voiced by senior Chinese military spokesmen since 2010, when China began informing American diplomats that its territorial claims to reefs in the South China Sea were now “core interests,” on a par with Taiwan and Tibet in Beijing’s strategic calculus. The Americans, Chinese Rear Admiral Guan Youfei angrily remarked to a delegation that included Secretary Clinton, were acting like a “hegemon” and seeking to encircle China.70 The key development here was something that hitherto seemed impossible: a merging of Information Age technology with regime ideology and surveillance. Anti-liberal regimes craved external threats to justify central direction, mobilization of the citizenry, and ultimately repression. Such states could not abide open borders with prosperous liberal democracies, so they sought to keep those borders closed, or those neighbors less

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free—these regimes, moreover, could now surveil certain opponents’ very keystrokes. Targeting and suppression of civilian dissent were aided as well by intelligence services utilizing cyber means to attain global reach and unprecedented economies of scale. Even the poorest dictators now could acquire means to monitor dissidents on distant continents.71 Such methods for tracking, enticing, and trapping conspirators, it must be noted, also worked for Western law enforcement. Ancient methods of penetrating conspiracies to erode trust and impair cooperation had always served both tyrants and democrats, and that neutrality endured even as such methods proved highly effective on the Internet. A case in point was the FBI’s takedown of the “hacktivist” group LulzSec by secretly turning one of its leaders, Sabu, known to his parents as Hector Xavier Monsegur. After somehow gaining his cooperation, the Bureau patiently mapped Sabu’s online contacts for months, then pounced with its foreign counterparts, rounding up LulzSec members in several countries at once and largely putting the hacker collective out of business in 2012.72 Such timeless tactics in the realm of cyberspace spread fear even in the “Dark Web,” the Internet’s underground market for hacking tools and purloined data. “It makes for very tense relationships,” explained John Young, co-founder of the digital library Cryptome, which specialized in receiving sensitive documents from anonymous sources who wanted them publicized. Speaking to The Guardian in 2011, he noted “[t]here are dozens and dozens of hackers who have been shopped by people they thought they trusted.”73

A Return to War The Winter Olympics in 2014 opened in Sochi, Russia, showcasing some of the world’s best athletes competing for medals and honors rather than land and treasure. That year the Olympic spirit of sportsmanship did not linger, however, after the Games’ closing ceremony on February 23. Two subsequent events would soon shape global relations for years to come. Russian troops intervened in Ukraine just days later, effectively seizing Crimea. Their intervention shook Western leaders. “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on a completely trumped up pretext,” complained the new U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry, when asked on a news program about Russia’s bullying of Ukraine.74 The nineteenth century looked civilized, however, compared to what happened in the Middle East. Barely a hundred days after the Olympics, fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant

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Fig. 7.2  U.S. soldiers firing on ISIS positions. (SGT Bigelow, Engaging ISIS, 2017, Photograph, Department of Defense)

(ISIL)—whom President Obama in January had called the “jayvee team”—burst out of Syria into western Iraq.75 In weeks they overran perhaps 35,000 square miles, including Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, where they seized the central bank and hundreds of millions of dollars in assets (Fig. 7.2). ISIL then declared itself the Islamic State and proclaimed it would lead a worldwide caliphate to which was owed the allegiance of all faithful Muslims.76 The major developments in 2014 included the accelerated measures that dictators built to protect their physical and virtual borders, keeping the democracies at a distance by building buffer zones around themselves. Russian leaders claimed aloud this new assertiveness was a defensive strategy, made necessary by the liberal West’s promotion of regime change under the guise of humanitarian intervention. Indeed, one of Putin’s advisers, Vladislav Surkov, had been watching for years the progress of the “color revolutions.” An interviewer from Der Spiegel asked Surkov in 2005 how Moscow might defend itself “against the revolutionary virus that could jump over into Russia from Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine.”

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Surkov responded that Russia would see no such uprising, despite the desires of some in his country. He complained of “various foreign non-­ governmental organizations that would like to see the scenario repeated in Russia. We understand this. By now there are even technologies for overthrowing governments and schools where one can learn the trade.”77 Such technologies, Surkov implied, could not be allowed to work their ideological mischief. The possibility of an Arab Spring in Russia also occurred to General Valery Gerasimov, chief of the General Staff. He had already worried in public about the strategic threat from the United States, noting the danger to Russia posed by the proposed deployment of anti-ballistic missile batteries in Eastern Europe.78 The general then visited the Academy of Military Science in February 2013 to call on its experts to help Russian leaders adapt in a rapidly changing world. “[I]t is essential to have a clear understanding of the forms and methods of the use of the application of force,” he observed.79 “In the 21st century,” Gerasimov explained, “we have seen a tendency toward blurring the lines between the states of war and peace. Wars are no longer declared and, having begun, proceed according to an unfamiliar template.”80 This lack of sharp lines between peace and war made contemporary conflicts seemingly non-linear but no less deadly, said Gerasimov: The experience of military conflicts—including those connected with the so-called [color] revolutions in north Africa and the Middle East—confirm that a perfectly thriving state can, in a matter of months and even days, be transformed into an arena of fierce armed conflict, become a victim of foreign intervention, and sink into a web of chaos, humanitarian catastrophe, and civil war.81

Gerasimov suggested to his military audience that crises like the Arab Spring might just be “typical of warfare in the 21st century.” “The information space” created by global networking and mass media had opened “wide asymmetrical possibilities” for attacking a regime: “In North Africa, we witnessed the use of technologies for influencing state structures and the population with the help of information networks.” Indeed, non-­ military means of achieving strategic goals often exceeded “the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness,” for “methods of conflict” such as “political, economic, informational, humanitarian, and other non-military measures” could now be “applied in coordination with the protest

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potential of the population.” Aggressor powers would bide their time, holding their armed forces in reserve until the right moment: “The open use of forces—often under the guise of peacekeeping and crisis regulation—is resorted to only at a certain stage, primarily for the achievement of final success in the conflict.”82 In effect, Gerasimov claimed that Western states could destroy a hostile regime by attacking its ability to muster the cooperation necessary to muster force. What General Gerasimov implicitly viewed as so potentially deadly was the combination by the “world’s leading states” of Information Warfare concepts derived from Thomas Rona with the new media-enabled means of influencing a population behind the target regime’s army. Mobile, combined-arms forces, “acting in a single intelligence-­information space because of the use of the new possibilities of command-­and-­control systems,” now ensured that a victim state had no respite or opportunity to counterattack. “Frontal engagements of large formations” would be few, for the United States and others were learning to launch “[l]ong-distance, contactless actions” to defeat an adversary “throughout the entire depth of his territory.” Even powerful adversaries—by implication Russia, hinted Gerasimov—could see their military advantages nullified by “the use of special operations forces and internal opposition to create a permanently operating front through the entire territory.”83 Russia, according to General Gerasimov, should heed that warning, and learn to conduct “activities in the information space, including the defense of our own objects.” The Russian military, he said, well understood “the essence of traditional military actions carried out by regular armed forces,” but Russian military leaders possessed “only a superficial understanding of asymmetrical forms and means.” Hence his request to the Academy of Military Science to help “create a comprehensive theory of such actions.” Conflicts in Ukraine and Syria would soon demonstrate how quickly the Russians learned these new ways of cooperation and comprehension.84 Russian troops took control of Crimea in February 2014, six days after the pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, fled in what Moscow called a coup. A newly democratic Russia had once pledged (in 1994) to respect Ukraine’s borders when the post-Communist government there had returned Soviet-era nuclear weapons to Moscow’s control. This restraint dissolved in 2013, however, when the new, pro-­Western government in Kiev hailed Yanukovych’s flight as a liberation, calling its revolution the Euromaidan (after the protests that erupted when the Yanukovych regime derailed an imminent association agreement with the

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European Union). Russian leaders insisted they had not violated the 1994 treaty, yet offered no consistent rationale for their position. Nonetheless, masked, Russian-speaking troops with no insignia but guarding Russianmade heavy weapons appeared all over Crimea, seemingly from nowhere. Local residents noted their alien origin and dubbed them “little green men,” a term quickly echoed in the Ukrainian (and world) press.85 The UN Security Council soon debated the Crimea crisis. A draft resolution in March did not mention Russia but nonetheless declared invalid the upcoming, Moscow-endorsed referendum in Crimea, declaring the international community’s “commitment to the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders.” Moscow vetoed the draft resolution, and in a Russian-supported referendum in Crimea the following day, 97% of voters expressed their desire to join Russia. The Kremlin quickly granted their request, declaring its annexation of Crimea on March 18, 2014.86 Unlike the Iraqi annexation of Kuwait in 1990, however, this time the United Nations never contemplated armed intervention to restore the pre-crisis borders of Ukraine. Instead, the democracies turned to the UN General Assembly, which passed a non-binding resolution of its own, calling on “all States, international organizations and specialized agencies not to recognize any alteration of the status of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol.” A hundred nations voted for the resolution, and the eleven voting No were mostly Russia’s friends (i.e., Belarus, Cuba, North Korea, and Syria). What was more telling was the long list of nations that declined to offer a position either way; eighty-two states voted Abstain or Absent on the resolution, including Afghanistan, Bosnia, China, India, Iran, Iraq, and Israel.87 Russia’s Foreign Ministry called the General Assembly’s resolution counterproductive and complained that “shameless pressure, up to the point of political blackmail and economic threats, was brought to bear on a number of (UN) member states” by Western diplomats seeking Yes votes for the measure.88 Moscow’s intervention in Ukraine appeared ad hoc, driven by circumstances. After the Crimean annexation, ethnic Russians in two eastern Ukrainian districts also began agitating to join Russia, forcibly resisting Ukrainian troops and declaring their territory “New Russia” that spring. Eastern Ukrainian separatists received support from more “little green men,” who advised in all manner of military and civil matters. “We’re Russian. We’re all Russian,” quipped one in Donetsk to the BBC in April 2014. “And this land isn’t Ukraine: it’s Novorossiya – and we will defend

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it.”89 NATO, especially its eastern members, took alarm at this effective display of force, calling it “hybrid” warfare, in which “a wide range of overt and covert military, paramilitary, and civilian measures are employed in a highly integrated design.”90 Hybrid or “gray zone” warfare in Ukraine, explained a team of researchers at West Point in 2017, was conflict “deliberately maintained at a level insufficient to warrant substantial outside intervention.”91 Ukraine launched a counter-offensive in July 2014, only to see it stall as the rebels gained support from units of the Russian military with armor, artillery, and anti-aircraft missiles. The latter nullified the combat effectiveness of Ukraine’s small air force. The missiles also promptly caused an international embarrassment for Moscow when a battery of SA-11s downed Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 that July, destroying the cruising jetliner at 33,000 feet and killing all 298 people aboard. Moscow denied responsibility and blamed Ukrainian forces, in keeping with its official disavowal of any direct role in the conflict. Russia’s misdirection from the beginning outraged European governments. Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) told its Parliamentary oversight committee in late 2017, for example, that Russia had mounted a massive disinformation effort to support its actions in Ukraine: An early example of this was a hugely intensive, multi-channel propaganda effort to persuade the world that Russia bore no responsibility for the shooting down of [Malaysian Airlines flight] MH-17 (an outright falsehood: we know beyond any reasonable doubt that the Russian military supplied and subsequently recovered the missile launcher).92

As in Syria, diplomatic efforts to end the conflict in Ukraine proved futile.93 Low-level hostilities between the Ukrainian military and Russian-backed separatists continue to this day.

The New Caliphate As the Ukrainian conflict erupted in 2014, another crisis emerged almost simultaneously from the ongoing Syrian civil war. Insurgencies and even terrorists seek in their various ways to attain statehood—to overturn an existing regime, or to fashion a new one from the territory of some other power. Al Qaeda came closest to attaining global influence while not ruling its own territory, but that was while its Taliban allies ran most of

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Afghanistan. The chaotic conflict in Syria by 2014 had created a political and military vacuum in Syria’s eastern reaches, while the Shi’a-dominated government of neighboring Iraq alienated the Sunnis of its western districts just over the Syrian border. America’s withdrawal from Iraq at the end of 2011 had ended the sustained presence of sophisticated intelligence, reconnaissance, and strike forces in the area, and now insurgents and vehicles could once again gather on a battlefield.94 Into the vacuum stepped ISIL, an offshoot of al Qaeda, which in 2013 turned its energies from fighting Assad.95 Despite its retrograde social views, ISIL saw statehood as its shortest path toward its ultimate goal of a caliphate across the Muslim world. ISIL stormed over Iraq’s border in early 2014, its reputation for savagery preceding it and panicking Iraqi defenders (the group tortured and executed those soldiers it caught).96 Its fighters seized thousands of square miles of Syrian and Iraqi territory in just weeks. By summer, ISIL had erected “a primitive but rigid administrative system,” maintaining “some basic services in a highly repressive environment” and imposing its version of Islamic law on more than 8 million people, Sunnis and Shiites alike, with Christians, Yazidis, Kurds, and other beleaguered minorities.97 ISIL sought to make its offensive a global one over the next year, accepting allegiance from like-minded groups in Asia and Africa and calling for attacks in the West. Thousands of adherents from around the world journeyed to ISIL-controlled areas to fight on its behalf.98 Once again, jihad took to the Internet, building cooperation with information age tools, and Western leaders and security services feared even more what their citizens might see there.99 ISIL’s “caliphate” by early 2015, for example, offered websites and slick online magazines, in addition to posting the names, photos, and addresses of dozens of U.S. military personnel, and calling on supporters to attack them in America.100 ISIL did not manage to reach any of the individuals named in the online postings, but its various exhortations still prompted attacks in Garland, Texas, and San Bernardino, California. In the latter, a husband-and-wife team shot up an office holiday party before dying in a suburban firefight with police in which the two sides exchanged more than 500 shots.101 Global jihad also returned to Europe in 2015. While attack sizes had declined for a decade, al Qaeda and Islamic State affiliates now found new ways to kill dozens at a time. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula claimed credit for the assault on the Paris office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo (2015) and for a wave of incidents that followed in France. ISIL’s

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campaign reached a peak with coordinated attacks by sympathizers in Paris that left 130 dead on November 13, 2015. Four months later the same ISIL-affiliated cell mounted three nearly simultaneous suicide bombings in Brussels that killed thirty-two.102 With the breaking of that terror cell, however, attacks became cruder, typically involving individuals inspired by the Islamic State online propaganda. For a time they hijacked (or rented) trucks and plowed them into crowds, as at a Christmas market in Berlin (2016) and outside Parliament in London the following year. Similar vehicular attacks by ISIL-inspired loners also took place at Columbus, Ohio (2016), in Barcelona and Stockholm (August 2017), and on a bike path in Manhattan (late 2017). Still, even a lone attacker could do great harm if trained by ISIL affiliates in Libya to handle explosives, as was the Manchester Arena suicide bomber, who killed twenty-two and wounded hundreds in 2017.103 ISIL’s barbarity both attracted adherents and also succeeded in uniting a diverse coalition of states to oppose it in the Middle East.104 The United States in late 2014 assembled a Coalition of fifty-nine countries and the European Union to work against ISIL; its charter endorsed “a common, multifaceted, and long-term strategy to degrade and defeat ISIL” by military, diplomatic, and economic means. The Coalition’s communique also noted that some participants insisted on the need for “effective ground forces to ultimately defeat ISIL,” and “increased support to these moderate opposition forces which are fighting on multiple fronts against ISIL/Daesh, Al Nusrah Front, and the Syrian regime.” Iraq and some of its neighbors co-signed the communique; Syria, Iran, and Russia did not.105 The U.S. military soon organized a Combined Joint Task Force in Kuwait to coordinate combat operations against ISIL. The military intervention that followed in Iraq and Syria was patterned on the model of NATO operations in Libya and Afghanistan, with advanced coalition forces mounting airstrikes and supporting commandos working with local forces who did most of the fighting against their countrymen (and sometimes even their neighbors).106 The U.S.-led campaign began reaching into Syria in May 2015 with a Special Forces raid that killed senior ISIL leader Abu Sayyaf.107 Washington also hinted that August that it would defend friendly Syrian forces with airstrikes, even against Assad’s troops.108 Russia and Iran then worried that Assad’s regime could collapse under the simultaneous (though uncoordinated) pressure from ISIL and the Coalition-backed “moderate opposition forces.” Assad controlled less than a fifth of Syria’s territory by the summer of 2015.109 The Russians and

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Iranians made common cause in fighting Sunni extremists. The international effort to suppress ISIL thus gave Moscow a diplomatic opening to introduce Russian forces directly into the Syrian conflict. All services of Russia’s military joined in the campaign that fall, mounting well-­publicized strikes with all sorts of advanced conventional arms at their disposal. Russian strategic bombers and warships firing cruise missiles saw their combat debuts. General Gerasimov and his lieutenants gained practical experience employing the new technologies for comprehension of the battlefield and conveying force, synchronizing long-range strike operations, ostensibly mounted against ISIL but often hitting the Coalition-­ backed Syrian opposition instead.110 Moscow implicitly patterned its intervention on the independent U.S.-led Coalition effort, and in both campaigns the advanced militaries provided their respective local allies the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, logistics, and command and control essential for sustained modern campaigns.111 With Russia’s newest and most powerful weapons now frequenting Syria’s crowded airspace, moreover, Coalition leaders lost any realistic chance they might have had to impose on Assad a military solution to the Syrian civil war. The intervention by Russia and Iran allowed Assad to slowly reclaim Syrian cities from his opponents as the Coalition meanwhile drove ISIL from Iraq and reduced its holdings in Syria. Assad’s forces re-took Aleppo in late 2016, while the Iraqi army with Coalition support uprooted ISIL from Mosul in July 2017 and declared Iraqi territory ISIL-free the following December. By then the Syrian town of Raqqah, the ostensible capital of ISIL’s caliphate, had already fallen to Coalition forces. ISIL had “lost nearly all of the territory they once held,” explained a Combined Joint Task Force spokesman at the end of 2017, though he cautioned that ISIL was not quite finished: “We know this enemy is as adaptive and savvy as it is cruel and evil.”112 Its persistence on the ground in Syria, and ability to inspire suicide bombings as far away as Pakistan (with 149 killed in July 2018), added a note of caution to any declaration of victory. The last territorial hold of ISIL fell in March 2019. Moscow and Washington apparently agreed at this point that a military decision in the Middle East was not impossible. Despite the complicated deconfliction challenges for Russian, Syrian, and Coalition forces in Syria, the Coalition had mounted a ferocious air campaign. The U.S. Air Force component of that campaign reported that in 2017 the combined air effort had included

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a Coalition airpower team of 21,000 Airmen and 300+ aircraft from 21 nations. The synchronized airpower this team provided in 2017 to both [Iraqi] and Syrian Democratic Forces included more than 200,000 hours of manned and unmanned ISR, nearly 40,000 weapons employed, and 788 million pounds of fuel dispensed in support of approximately 20,000 sorties.113

At the same time, U.S.-led forces had sustained ISR and strike missions in Afghanistan. Targeting enemies on the battlefield could be almost personal. As noted, guided weapons and precise monitoring facilitated Special Forces raids against individual ISIL leaders—such intense firepower inevitably caused casualties among non-combatants on and off the battlefields. Washington in 2016 provided its count of those killed by American drone strikes during the Obama administration. Between 2009 and 2015, explained the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the U.S. government had launched 473 drone strikes (not counting those taking place in the war zones in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan), which had killed roughly 2500 combatants but also between 64 and 116 non-­ combatants.114 The latter tally immediately came under criticism by independent groups—a reaction anticipated in the ODNI report, which had warned of “the deliberate spread of misinformation by some actors, including terrorist organizations, in  local media reports on which some non-governmental estimates rely.”115 The dispute itself proved an indicator of the stakes for conflict in the global arena. A primary job of targeting, at least for democratic coalitions, had become one of discerning and protecting the non-targets.

A Clash of Worlds? General Gerasimov had predicted in 2013 that future conflicts would be waged in what he called the “information space.” Within a few years of his speech, every shooting war also had a digital dimension. Almost every gun or missile today (in 2020) is employed with the aid of some digital device, even if only the cellphone that detonates the roadside bomb, or the video that spurs the aspiring jihadist. Networked digital information gets the weapons and ammunition to the right place at the right time—whether such armaments reach the battlefield on tanks, fighter jets, ships, or in men’s arms—and digital technology helps to maintain and control them.

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At the same time, several regimes are now attacking opponents in cyberspace as well. The clashes over borders between the West and the various anti-liberal regimes have become virtual as well as physical. Such attacks had already begun when General Gerasimov made his prediction. Iranian hackers between late 2011 and mid-2013 disrupted American financial companies, according to the indictments of seven Iranians won by the U.S. Justice Department in March 2016: Using botnets and other malicious computer code, the individuals— employed by two Iran-based computer companies sponsored and directed by the Iranian government—engaged in a systematic campaign of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against nearly 50 institutions in the U.S. financial sector.

Their campaigns disabled bank websites, frustrated customers, and “collectively required tens of millions of dollars to mitigate.”116 North Korea entered the cyber fray the following year, attacking Sony Pictures Entertainment for releasing an otherwise forgettable satire about an assassination attempt on North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un. Secretary of State Kerry publicly condemned North Korea’s “cyber-attack targeting Sony Pictures Entertainment and the unacceptable threats against movie theatres and moviegoers.” Kerry called the attacks “a brazen attempt by an isolated regime to suppress free speech and stifle the creative expression of artists beyond the borders of its own country.”117 China moved with greater discretion. In March 2015, someone attacked the website of GreatFire for hosting material that would help computer users avoid official censorship. Independent researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab found that this new weapon rested on China’s so-called Great Firewall; Citizen Lab called this capability “the Great Cannon” and noted its sinister novelty: The operational deployment of the Great Cannon represents a significant escalation in state-level information control: the normalization of widespread use of an attack tool to enforce censorship by weaponizing users. Specifically, the Cannon manipulates the traffic of “bystander” systems outside China, silently programming their browsers to create a massive DDoS attack.118

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Beijing also worked in cyberspace to tame and channel discontent at home. Western researchers analyzing a trove of emails leaked from a local Internet Propaganda Office in 2014 found that the regime tasked hundreds of thousands of government employees to “cheerlead” for government positions by posting on social media. Their well-coordinated but subtle role was neither to support nor to censor criticism of the regime, rather it was “to distract and redirect public attention from discussions or events with collective action potential.”119 At least one regime went well beyond censorship and cyberattacks on opponents to manipulate information with cyber tools. According to the indictment of thirteen Russians handed up by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation in February 2018, for instance, Moscow soon after the Ukrainian intervention had mounted a covert campaign to get Americans arguing with one another. A Russian organization called the Internet Research Agency “as early as 2014…began operations to interfere with the U.S. political system, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” noted the indictment.120 The Russians attacked the presidential candidates that they (along with most American experts) considered strongest while ignoring their apparently weaker challengers. Russian agents engaged in operations primarily intended to communicate derogatory information about Hillary Clinton, to denigrate other candidates such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and to support Bernie Sanders and then-candidate Donald Trump….On or about February 10, 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators internally circulated an outline of themes for future content to be posted to [Internet Research Agency]-controlled social media accounts. Specialists were instructed to post content that focused on ­“politics in the USA” and to “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump—we support them).”121

The efforts of these hackers received supporting fires, as it were, from embarrassing leaks of emails exfiltrated by Russian intelligence from the headquarters of the Democratic Party and released to the news media in increments to distract Clinton’s campaign.122 A month before the 2016 election, the Secretary of Homeland Secretary with the Director of National Intelligence jointly explained to the world that the “Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations.” The disclosures resembled “the methods and motivations of Russian-directed

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efforts”; indeed, “the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there.” Secretary Jeh Johnson and Director James Clapper assessed in light of “the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-­ most officials could have authorized these activities.”123 After the election, a team of experts convened by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington concluded that Russia had “invested in a systematic, multi-year campaign to not merely affect the results of an individual election, but sow chaos and undermine trust in the liberal democratic order itself.”124 As the world saw in America’s 2016 election, such targeting of individuals and societies via the “information space” could have strategic effects by eroding the cooperation necessary to sustain a democratic society. Cyber campaigns backed by massive arsenals looked formidable indeed by late 2017. British leaders began discussing in public the apparently growing threat of Russian cyber and electoral disruption potentially backed by powerful conventional and even nuclear forces. Prime Minister Theresa May warned in November 2017 that Moscow had “mounted a sustained campaign of cyber-espionage and disruption.”125 Its tactics, she claimed, “included meddling in elections and hacking the Danish Ministry of Defence and the [German] Bundestag among many others.” A few days later, Ciaran Martin, chief of Britain’s new National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), accused Russia of attacking Britain’s media, telecommunications, and energy sectors, and of “seeking to undermine the international system.”126 These sentiments found another proponent in General Sir Nick Carter, Britain’s Chief of the General Staff—the head of Britain’s army—who added his own warning in January 2018. Russia did not necessarily want “to go to war in the traditional definition of the term,” he noted, but Britain “may not have a choice about conflict with Russia.” The General explained that Moscow “could initiate hostilities sooner than we expect— and a lot earlier than we would in similar circumstances,” employing “nefarious” below-the-use-of-armed-force techniques “to erode the capability of NATO and threaten the very structure that provides our own defence and security.” General Carter called such tactics “[t]he divide and rule which the international order is designed to prevent.” He looked to history as he explained that Britain could have no choice about engaging in its next conflict. “The parallels with 1914 are stark,” he noted.127

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For its part, Moscow seemed unimpressed. It certainly was not deterred from sending two military intelligence agents to Salisbury, England, six weeks later on a mission to kill a Russian, Sergei Skripal, who had worked for British intelligence.128 The would-be assassins employed Novichok, a chemical weapon produced in Russia, according to Prime Minister May.129 Her government blamed Putin for the attack; then-Foreign Minister Boris Johnson publicly explained: “Our quarrel is with Putin’s Kremlin, and with his decision—and we think it overwhelmingly likely that it was his decision—to direct the use of a nerve agent on the streets of the UK, on the streets of Europe, for the first time since World War II.”130 If Johnson was correct, then it would seem Moscow wanted to send a message to any and all who would dare to work against Mother Russia: you are never safe. American strategists acknowledged the return of great-power competition by 2018. Then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis released his National Defense Strategy that January, and observers noted its bleak tone and its argument that “inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security.”131 The new American strategy saw states remaining the primary locus of power in the modern world, but perhaps did not see how much even states were now driven by technological and ideological influences beyond their control.

Conclusion …war was now understood as a process, more exactly, part of a process, its acute phase, but maybe not the most important. (Natan Dubovitsky, “Without Sky”)132

The previous chapters showed how the ancient ways of mobilizing power for force and using it to scatter foes gained frightening new reach and lethality, both on the battlefield and for internal security. These new means became subject, for the sake of efficiency, to logical programs for sorting digitized data. Yet that very efficiency opened new avenues for force and extraordinary opportunities for surveillance. Modern states gained the ability to concentrate force seemingly at will by marshaling cyber tools to build extraordinary comprehension of the battlefield and using cyberspace to direct and convey force to seemingly any place at any time. Cyberspace allowed rival states remote and virtually instantaneous access to three of their opponents’ sources of national power; specifically, their intellectual property (i.e., their knowledge for producing value); the

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privacy of their citizens (and those citizens’ ability to control information about themselves); and their legitimacy (i.e., the esteem in which their governments are viewed by their citizens, allies, and creditors). Each of the sources of national power thus became arenas where force could be applied, with the ancient factors of cooperation, conveyance, and comprehension suddenly relevant in new and surprising ways. This is the third great historical disruption in strategic affairs. The possibilities for wielding force via cyberspace cut in multiple ways. Cyberspace enabled adversaries to attack each other remotely and, perhaps more importantly, allowed them to employ rumor and libel to undermine the cooperation necessary to maintain not just power but society itself. The struggle for legitimacy was made acute in the new century by the dilemmas of justifying force and surveillance to domestic publics and before the world. Rulers who cannot do so explicitly, however, have learned to force their liberal opponents to prove they were not abusing their own powers and their peoples. In effect, anti-liberal regimes changed the question from one of right to one of trust, at the level of the leader, the commander, and the individual. Can you trust those with whom you would do business? Can you trust that your computer is guarding your data, or presenting you the truth? Can you trust that international law will protect your sovereignty—or protect you from your government? The answers to such questions have strategic significance in our inter-­connected age. Two weeks after Russia seized Crimea in 2014, one of Vladimir Putin’s advisers published a miniature offering of surrealist science fiction. The apparent author, former Deputy Prime Minister Vladislav Surkov, submitted his story to the public under the pen name Natan Dubovitsky. His tale “Without Sky” takes its title from the simple world that its crippled and abandoned “two-dimensional” subjects now inhabit. While the rest of humanity lives in a world with depth (and sky), the story’s unnamed protagonist, a survivor from the ravaged countryside that witnessed the climactic battle of World War V, is now physically (or psychologically) incapable of seeing life as the devious and hard-hearted city dwellers see it. “Without Sky” ends on the eve of his companions’ rebellion against the city and its ways: We founded the Society and prepared a revolt of the simple, two-­dimensional against the complex and sly, against those who do not answer “yes” or “no,” who do not say “white” or “black,” who know some third word, many, many third words, empty, deceptive, confusing the way, obscuring the truth.

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In these shadows and spider webs, in these false complexities, hide and multiply all the villainies of the world. They are the House of Satan. That’s where they make bombs and money, saying: “Here’s money for the good of the honest; here are bombs for the defense of love.” We will come tomorrow. We will conquer or perish. There is no third way.133

Here again appeared the modern answer to modernity: violence to thwart the systemic violence of modern life. Its siren call has reached so many over the last century and a half. From French socialists to Russian and Chinese revolutionaries, to Italian and German fascists, Brazilian and American urban guerrillas, and jihadists both Sunni and Shi’a, the call now echoes again in Russia and beyond. The next and final chapter examines some emerging trends and attempts to divine possibilities for the future.

Notes 1. United Nations, Report of the Secretary-General, “We the peoples: the role of the United Nations in the twenty-first century,” March 27, 2000, p.  35; accessed January 21, 2018, at http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/ groups/public/documents/un/unpan000923.pdf 2. George W. Bush, State of the Union address, January 29, 2002; accessed January 21, 2018; https://web.archive.org/web/20111011053416/ http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/detail/4540 3. Bush, Decision Points, p. 437. 4. Second Inaugural Address of George W. Bush; January 20, 2005; accessed January 22, 2018, at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/21st_century/ gbush2.asp 5. Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, Report to the President of the United States [the WMD Commission Report] (Washington: Government Printing Office, 2005), pp.  251–252; accessed February 4, 2018, at https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-WMD/content-detail.html 6. Bush, Decision Points, p. 416. 7. Bush was angered by his own intelligence analysts, for instance, when a 2007 estimate offered the “eye-popping” conclusion that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program (though not its enrichment of uranium); Decision Points, pp. 418–419. 8. Ibid., p. 260. 9. Coalition Provisional Authority English translation of a Musab al Zarqawi letter to al Qaeda, obtained by United States Government in Iraq,

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February 2004; accessed February 4, 2018, at https://2001-2009.state. gov/p/nea/rls/31694.htm. See also Stanley McChrystal, My Share of the Task: A Memoir (New York: Penguin, 2013), p. 236. 10. McChrystal, My Share of the Task, pp. 107–108, 120–122. 11. Bush, Decision Points, p. 268. 12. Ibid., pp. 207, 268. 13. McChrystal, My Share of the Task, p. 306. 14. Robert M. Gates, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (New York: Knopf, 2014), pp. 119–124. Gates demanded action and got the Pentagon to hasten production of mine-resistant troop carriers. 15. Paul Hamilos and Mark Tran, “21 guilty, seven cleared over Madrid train bombings,” The Guardian, October 31, 2007; accessed January 26, 2018, at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/oct/31/spain. marktran. See also Seth G. Jones, Hunting in the Shadows: The Pursuit of Al Qa’ida Since 9/11 (New York: Norton, 2012), pp. 164–177. 16. Jones, Hunting in the Shadows, pp. 203–209. 17. “London bomber: Text in full,” BBC News online, September 1, 2005; accessed January 22, 2018, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_ news/4206800.stm 18. “Behind the London-Glasgow plot,” BBC News online, December 16, 2008; accessed January 22, 2018, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_ news/7772925.stm 19. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (Special Report by Sens. Lieberman and Collins), “A Ticking Time Bomb: Counterterrorism Lessons from the US Government’s Failure to Prevent the Fort Hood Attack,” February 3, 2011, pp.  7–8; accessed January 31, 2018, at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/documents/fthoodsenatereport.html?hpid=topnews 20. Jones, Hunting in the Shadows, pp. 149–150, 341–344. 21. Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, “The international terrorist threat to the UK, Speech at Queen Mary’s College, London, November 9, 2006; accessed January 28, 2018, at https://www.mi5.gov.uk/news/ the-international-terrorist-threat-to-the-uk 22. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, “A Ticking Time Bomb”. 23. Gates, Duty, pp. 335–344. 24. Bush, Decision Points, p. 260. 25. Gates, Duty, p. 49. 26. McChrystal, My Share of the Task, pp. 137–139, 156–157. 27. Gates, Duty, pp. 131–132. 28. Ibid., pp. 128, 131.

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29. Asfandyer Mir, “What Explains Counterterrorism Effectiveness?,” International Security 43:2 (Fall 2018), pp. 54, 73, 81; accessed January 22, 2019, at https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/ isec_a_00331 30. Ibid. 31. Colin S.  Gray, “Airpower Theory,” in John Andrews Olsen, Airpower Reborn: The Strategic Concepts of John Warden and John Boyd (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2015), p. 165. 32. McChrystal, My Share of the Task, p. 311. 33. Ibid., pp. 144–145, 222–231. 34. CNN, “Mastermind of Russian school siege killed,” July 10, 2006; accessed January 28, 2018, at http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/ europe/07/10/russia.basayev/index.html 35. For more see Kimberly Kagan, The Surge: A Military History (New York: Encounter, 2009), especially Chapter 3. 36. Gates, Duty, pp.  218–219. See also McChrystal, My Share of the Task, pp. 311–312. 37. Dawn S.  Onley, “Red Storm Rising,” Government Computer News, August 17, 2006; accessed February 4, 2018, at https://gcn.com/articles/2006/08/17/red-storm-rising.aspx 38. James Gosler, “Counterintelligence: Too Narrowly Practiced,” in Jennifer E. Sims and Burton Gerber, eds., Vaults, Mirrors, and Masks: Rediscovering US Counterintelligence (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2008), p. 182. For perspective on the potential strategic impact of such theft, see Franz-Stefan Gady, “Andrea and Mauro Gilli on Why China Can’t Steal its Way to Military-Technological Superiority,” The Diplomat, March 6, 2019; accessed at www.thediplomat.com on December 26, 2019. 39. William S. Lynn, “Defending America in Cyberspace,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2010, p. 97. 40. Gates, Duty, pp. 154, 326. 41. Speech of Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Munich Security Conference, February 10, 2007; accessed February 10, 2018, at http:// www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/12/ AR2007021200555.html 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Ian Traynor, “Russia accused of unleashing cyberwar to disable Estonia,” May 16, 2007; accessed February 11, 2018, at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/may/17/topstories3.russia 46. Bush, Decision Points, p. 435.

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47. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hard Choices (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), pp. 228, 231. 48. Clinton, Hard Choices, p. 548. 49. Ibid., pp. 545, 549. 50. Nazila Fathi, “In a Death Seen Around the World, a Symbol of Iranian Protests,” New York Times, June 22, 2009; accessed February 14, 2018, at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/world/middleeast/ 23neda.html 51. Philip N. Howard and Muzammil M. Hussain, “Egypt and Tunisia: The Role of Digital Media,” in Larry Diamond and Marc F.  Plattner, eds., Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), pp. 111–113. 52. Clinton, Hard Choices, p. 49. 53. “Iran’s police vow no tolerance towards protesters,” Reuters, February 6, 2010; accessed February 17, 2018, at https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSDAH634347 54. UN Security Council Resolution 1973, March 17, 2011; accessed February 17, 2018, at https://www.un.org/sc/suborg/en/s/ res/1973-%282011%29 55. David E.  Sanger, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power (New York: Crown, 2012), pp. 346–351. 56. Ryan Lizza, “Leading from Behind,” The New  Yorker, April 26, 2011; accessed February 16, 2011, at https://www.newyorker.com/news/ news-desk/leading-from-behind 57. Gates, Duty, p. 522. 58. CBS News, October 21, 2011; accessed October 26, 2018, at https:// www.cbsnews.com/news/clinton-on-qaddafi-we-came-we-saw-he-died/ 59. Ellen Barry, “Putin Criticizes West for Libya Incursion,” New York Times, April 26, 2011; accessed February 17, 2018, at http://www.nytimes. com/2011/04/27/world/europe/27putin.html 60. Steve Gutterman, “Russia says will veto ‘unacceptable’ Syria resolution,” Reuters, January 31, 2012; accessed February 17, 2018, at https://www. reuters.com/article/us-syria/russia-says-will-veto-unacceptable-syriaresolution-idUSTRE80S08620120201 61. Neil MacFarquhar and Anthony Shadidfeb, “Russia and China Block U.N.  Action on Crisis in Syria,” New York Times, February 4, 2012; accessed February 17, 2018, at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/ world/middleeast/syria-homs-death-toll-said-to-rise.html.  Russia and China did endorse UNSCR 2042 the following month; the new resolution called for a ceasefire and authorized observers to monitor it, but added no text supportive of an international humanitarian intervention.

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“Veto on Syria sparks Arab and Western fury,” Al Jazeera, February 5, 2012; accessed February 17, 2018, at http://www.aljazeera.com/news/ middleeast/2012/02/201224162422121856.html 62. “Veto on Syria sparks Arab and Western fury,” Al Jazeera, February 5, 2012; accessed February 17, 2018, at http://www.aljazeera.com/news/ middleeast/2012/02/201224162422121856.html 63. Clinton, Hard Choices, p. 452. 64. David M. Herszenhorn and Ellen Barry, “Putin Contends Clinton Incited Unrest Over Vote,” New York Times, December 8, 2011; accessed February 11, 2018, at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/09/world/ europe/putin-accuses-clinton-of-instigating-russian-protests.html. See also Michael McFaul, From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2018), p. 243. 65. “Remarks by the President and First Lady on the End of the War in Iraq,” December 14, 2011; accessed March 3, 2018, at https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2011/12/14/remarks-presidentand-first-lady-end-war-iraq 66. Michael R. Gordon, “Iran Supplying Syrian Military via Iraqi Airspace,” New York Times, September 4, 2012; accessed February 17, 2018, at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/05/world/middleeast/iran-supplying-syrian-military-via-iraq-airspace.html 67. Clinton, Hard Choices, p. 465. 68. Clinton, Hard Choices, pp. 460–463. 69. This story was covered by several Western outlets. See “Internet the key front in China’s battle with Western hostile forces: military paper,” Reuters, May 20, 2015; accessed May 23, 2015, at https://ca.news.yahoo.com/ internet-key-front-chinas-battle-western-hostile-forces-120506329.html. See also Sean Gallagher, “Chinese Army newspaper calls for military role in Internet culture war: Claims West and “ideological traitors” use Internet to weaken Party’s authority,” Ars Technica, May 21, 2015; accessed May 23, 2015, at http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/chinese-armynewspaper-calls-for-military-role-in-internet-culture-war/ 70. Clinton, Hard Choices, p.  76. Jim Pomfret, “In Chinese admiral’s outburst, a lingering distrust of U.S.,” Washington Post, June 8, 2010; accessed February 18, 2018, at http://www.washingtonpost. com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/07/AR2010060704762. html?sid=ST2010060705111 71. See, for instance, Citizen Lab, Munk Centre for Global Affairs, University of Toronto, “Hacking Team and the Targeting of Ethiopian Journalists,” February 12, 2014; accessed March 3, 2018, at https://citizenlab. org/2014/02/hacking-team-targeting-ethiopian-journalists/

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72. See Mark Mazzetti, “F.B.I. Informant Is Tied to Cyberattacks Abroad,” New York Times, April 23, 2014; accessed March 3, 2018, at https:// www.nytimes.com/2014/04/24/world/fbi-informant-is-tied-to-cyberattacks-abroad.html See also James Ball, “LulzSec court papers reveal extensive FBI co-operation with hackers,” The Guardian, March 6, 2012; accessed March 3, 2018, at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/mar/06/lulzsec-court-papers-sabu-anonymous 73. Ed Pilkington, “One in four US hackers ‘is an FBI informer’,” The Guardian, June 6, 2011; accessed February 18, 2018, at https://www. theguardian.com/technology/2011/jun/06/us-hackers-fbi-informer.  See also Saul O’Keeffe, “Hacking Underworld Riddled with Secret FBI Informants,” ITPro-Portal, July 24, 2015; accessed February 18, 2018, at https://www.itproportal.com/2015/07/24/hacking-underworldriddled-secret-fbi-informants/ 74. CBS News, Face the Nation Transcripts, March 2, 2014; accessed February 18, 2018, at https://www.cbsnews.com/news/face-the-nation-transcriptsmarch-2-2014-kerry-hagel/ 75. At American colleges, the junior varsity (J.V.) team is the secondary, training squad for less-seasoned athletes. See David Remnick, “Going the Distance,” New Yorker, January 27, 2014; accessed February 19, 2018, at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/01/27/going-thedistance-david-remnick 76. United Nations, “Rule of Terror: Living under ISIS in Syria,” Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, November 14, 2014, p. 3; accessed February 24, 2018, at https://web.archive.org/web/20150204115327/http://www.ohchr. org/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/CoISyria/HRC_CRP_ ISIS_14Nov2014.pdf 77. “Interview with Kremlin Boss Vladislav Surkov: ‘The West Doesn’t Have to Love Us’,” Spiegel, June 20, 2005; accessed February 19, 2018, at http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/spiegel-interview-withkremlin-boss-vladislav-surkov-the-west-doesn-t-have-to-loveus-a-361236.html 78. McFaul, From Cold War to Hot Peace, p. 328. 79. Gerasimov’s speech was translated by Robert Coalson and reprinted in his “Top Russian General Lays Bare Putin’s Plan for Ukraine,” Huffington Post, September 2, 2014; accessed February 19, 2018, at https:// www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-coalson/valery-gerasimov-putinukraine_b_5748480.html 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid.

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132. Natan Dubovitsky, [Vladislav Surkov], “Without Sky,” Russky Pioneer 46 (March 12, 2014); accessed February 19, 2018, at http://www.bewilderingstories.com/issue582/without_sky.html. See also Peter Pomerantsev, “Non-Linear War,” London Review of Books, March 28, 2014; accessed February 19, 2018, at https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/03/28/ peter-pomerantsev/non-linear-war/ 133. Dubovitsky, “Without Sky.”

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion: Force and Trust in the Future

You know where I go and where I lie down. You know everything I do. Lord, even before I say a word, you already know it. You are all around me—in front and in back—and have put your hand on me. Your knowledge is amazing to me; it is more than I can understand. —Psalm 139 (New Century Version)

Our all-too-human tendency in regarding many philosophers and intellectuals is to remember them for one trademark saying or idea that their work bequeathed. Such a thinker is Francis Fukuyama, famous now for his 1989 comment that world events had reached “the End of History.”1 His essay of that title argued that Marx’s notion of History as a perpetual struggle over the means of production had been definitively refuted by Marxism’s liberal opponents. Fukuyama’s insight remains famous because it seemed vindicated within months of its publication. By the end of 1989, millions of people in Eastern Europe had more or less peacefully thrown off Communism in the name of universal human rights and democratic norms. The future looked bright, and even technology seemed on the side of peace and freedom. Fukuyama himself explained this happy trend six years later, noting how the “enormous prosperity created by technology-driven capitalism, in turn, serves as an incubator for a liberal regime of universal and equal

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rights.”2 No less an authority than President Bill Clinton publicly predicted at the beginning of the twenty-first century that “liberty will spread by cell phone and cable modem.”3 Such predictions have so far disappointed their prophets. The idea that a globalized economy and the Internet would pull ever more peoples toward democratic norms (and would calm international disputes) has not yet prevailed. Rather than confirm the demise of non-liberal regimes, the new century so far has seen them invigorated. China’s economy has been semi-liberalized and grown dramatically—to cite only the most conspicuous example—but China is neither democratic today nor does it seem likely to be so in the near future. Two trends have led to this reality. First is the surprising, if not wholly unexpected, durability of anti-liberal ideas. Second is the capacity of cyber tools to revolutionize a regime’s comprehension of its population. While the Internet still provides dissidents a tool to challenge rulers (as predicted), combining the surveillance possibilities of the Internet with modern computing power seems to be offering governments like China’s a powerful tool to sustain control. “Authoritarianism has gone global,” argued Christopher Walker, Marc Plattner, and Larry Diamond in 2016. Authoritarian regimes, like those in China and Russia, now use the improved surveillance architectures of a cyber society to preserve political power while simultaneously “seeking to reshape international values and norms in order to limit the global ambit of democracy.”4 In this book we have argued that force depends upon concentration, which rulers create by using the tools available for cooperation, conveyance, and comprehension. We sought to show how rulers rose and fell with their ability to harness the dynamics of these underlying factors of force. In particular, Chap. 2 illustrated how comprehension improved dramatically with the new insights into time and geography in the early modern era—and how those insights combined with advances in cooperation and conveyance to give the emerging states of Europe world-dominating (if temporary) advantages in force. Yet the changes in comprehension that are now underway are historically significant even by this standard. There is no historical analog of a ruler knowing the population as the Psalmist tells us God knows His people. While we will explore some implications of this revolution in comprehension in the following pages, the full dimensions of their impact will take generations to play out. Rulers who grasp

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and skillfully apply the disruptive possibilities for comprehension with the evolving tools of cooperation and conveyance will use force effectively, and will prevail over rivals who do not.

Principles of Force for Global Reach History should remind us to recognize both the steadying principles that exist below the surface as well as the change above. The same applies to understanding force and its trajectory into the future. The introduction to this book laid out three concepts that guide the application of force; a few capstone observations are warranted here. First, on cooperation. Since no ruler possesses unlimited resources to generate force, concentration is a necessary conservation of political and physical energy. The key to success is coordination across like-minded (or directed) individuals, groups, and even states. Victory, or at least survival, should follow the commander’s or the ruler’s ability to concentrate force at the right place to disperse the concentrated power and action of adversaries. Conveyance and comprehension also prove crucial in the application of force. Rulers need them to work together because the concentration of force must occur at the right time as well in the right place. Even when a ruler possesses the ability to move force to the place of her choosing, that force cannot produce its full effect without comprehension of the adversary. Likewise, perfect comprehension about enemy concentration avails little if the ruler cannot control and convey force. In a sense, conveyance and comprehension are predicates and accelerants of force. The prior chapters described these tools through ancient and modern history. In the twentieth century, these technologies combined in a vertiginous process. Three innovations that had been developing prior to 1900 enabled this concentration of power and efficacy of force: precision timing, universal law, and real-time communication. Time may be an unremarkable feature of daily life, but its measurement in vanishingly tiny intervals enabled seemingly unrelated technologies and concepts that collectively accelerated the military might wielded by the West for three centuries. For example, Portugal’s charts of the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century become possible because European clockmakers had learned to measure time minute by minute.5 Precise navigation then allowed Portuguese commanders to understand the ways in and out of the Indian Ocean, which gave them a vision of strategy and the ability to concentrate warships and men where needed to ensure Portugal’s mastery of a huge expanse of the earth’s surface.

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The West improved its technologies for measuring time into the twentieth century. Quartz clocks made computers possible and allowed them to communicate in the worldwide networks that are now  transforming economics and society. Tools like the Global Positioning System (GPS) created navigation aids to allow ships, vehicles, smart bombs, and even unmanned vehicles to find any point on earth.6 Perhaps just as importantly, the notion that time and space are intimately and precisely linked also implied that objects existing in a given time and space can be converted into their elements in a process that yields energy according to the formula E=mc2, enabling the construction of our most powerful weapon, the hydrogen bomb. A second decisive innovation, universal law, also shaped the ways and uses of force. Three legal principles deserve special mention here. First was the notion voiced by John Locke and others that people have inalienable rights (the violation of which justifies revolution against the sovereign).7 Second was the emerging consensus (later attributed to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648) that states are the primary actors in international affairs, and that they should reign supreme in their internal affairs. Finally, Kant’s idea of a ban on aggressive war was instantiated in the KelloggBriand Pact (1928) and strengthened in the United Nations Charter. Force since 1945 has pivoted around the debates attending these three principles and has done so in ways that have shaped strategy, tactics, and even weapons development. These innovations in law have spread worldwide. Yet coincident with their global diffusion, the notion of law itself has become entangled in a Western argument over whether it springs from Natural Right or whether instead it is a mere instrument of Power. If the latter conception is correct, then law is a tool of oppression and systemic violence—as is the liberal ideal of law itself, as Proudhon, Marx, Blanqui, and their heirs have argued. It follows then that what the peoples need is not more liberal law but liberating Progress.8 Yet such has been the influence of Locke and Kant that such calls for revolution still have to be justified under the rubrics of right. In short, even revolutionaries have felt obliged to explain their actions not as grasping at power but as acting in self-defense. Hence the need for radicals since Blanqui and Marx to justify calls for revolution as necessary or even inevitable responses to the physical and/or systemic violence of the established order.9 The third decisive innovation, real-time communication, contains three elements: preservation, dissemination, and speed. The written language

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long ago provided chiefs and satraps the ability to both preserve and share thoughts across time and empires. This event might well have facilitated all other technologies, including that of time and law. In warfare and politics it aided cooperation, conveyance, and comprehension. The changes wrought by the printing press, for instance, need no elaboration here. Yet even the printing press had a distinct limit on its significance for the exercise of power: it was not interactive in real-time. A general might learn strategy from a book and his drillmasters might teach “the manual of arms,” but the printing press did not allow for real-time communication on the battlefield.10 Real-time communication at distances beyond line-of-sight accelerated the diffusion and impact of technologies and ideologies. The telegraph allowed a general to talk to the high command almost immediately at great distances. Undersea cables soon linked capitals with diplomats and commanders on other continents. The telephone let forward observers direct artillery fire on the battlefield. Wireless communications—telegraphy and eventually voice—then essentially liberated communication from distance and delay, for military and internal security purposes. By the 1960s, only accessibility (i.e., bandwidth) limited communication. As long as people had compatible devices, they could talk.

A New Domain for Force The novelist William Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” in 1984 to describe the emergent world of networked computers, data, and users that had grown from a congeries of American academic and military interests.11 Computers once filled entire rooms and could communicate with one another only rather slowly and crudely.12 Hardware improvements and global networking followed, allowing a cyberspace outside the realm of scholarly, financial, and military applications. Enthusiasm for this new realm, at first confined to futurists and science fiction writers, swayed the popular imagination in the 1980s and 1990s. An “Internet” soon linked computers in homes, offices, workshops, and even vehicles as cyberspace interleaved with everyday life. Mail become electronic, shopping moved online, and people increasingly looked at screens to find and interact with others. Within a generation, personal and institutional wealth moved onto the Internet, as did social life; virtual networks created new forms of community and new means for activism and surveillance.13

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Unsurprisingly, governments quickly started using cyberspace to exert force. As a non-physical, but still real, new world, cyberspace offers new scope for rulers and their opponents to project force. The place-like nature of cyberspace has led modern militaries to declare it a “domain” of operation, putting cyberspace on par with the land, sea, air, and space as a forum for conflict.14 For example, in 2016 the U.S. government accused the Iranian government of using cyber tools to alter water flows at a small dam near New  York City, and more recently the United States alleged that Russian hackers had penetrated the networks of American and European power plants—coming close to gaining control of the flow of electricity and impairing the safety of nuclear generating stations.15 Such incidents might individually seem trivial, but what they presage is momentous. Cyberspace has evolved beyond the Internet in important ways, spawning an Internet of Things and big data analytics. The Internet of Things defies tidy definition but basically encompasses millions of networked, digital devices—the Things talking to other Things—that are beginning to pervade everyday life. They are the sensors and nodes in our homes, automobiles, and workplaces that we take for granted, for they perform the routine tasks of measuring and controlling our physical environment. The Internet of Things has only begun to reach the average household, and so it exists largely in anticipation. But that future is coming fast. By now there may be 200 billion digitally connected and networked machines, or 26 networked devices for every person alive.16 They will be linked by 5G networks to vast processing power. Big data analytics represent the second evolutionary path beyond the Internet as we have known it. The amounts of data produced and conveyed by our devices every year already eclipse our ability to comprehend them, and these quantities will grow dramatically as more and more machines talk to each other.17 Big data analytics are the tools that make sense of the astronomical quantities of data generated by the Internet and by the Internet of Things.18 Such tools enable scientists and marketers to extract predictive patterns from otherwise incomprehensible phenomena. Big data analytics already allow companies like Google, Facebook, and Netflix to provide personalized recommendations for customers at the cost of the algorithm. These algorithms may soon allow governments to create comprehension from the vast quantity of surveillance data generated by so many devices.

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New Kinds of Cooperation and Conveyance For many people, cyberspace takes shape through the ways that they connect with others. They enter cyberspace through applications like Telegram, Facebook, Snap, or YouTube. New platforms rise and fall over time, and that very list above will soon look outdated (not long ago it might have included Yahoo!, AOL, and MySpace). Such communities can develop shared beliefs and experiences for their participants, making them potential sources of either loyalty or dissent in a particular state. The online communities curated by the Russian and Chinese governments provide examples of how these Internet subcultures can foster new expressions of patriotic fervor and behavior. These and other regimes have completed what Evgeny Morozov has called the “information trinity of authoritarianism” for social control: censorship, propaganda, and surveillance.19 Likewise, more nefarious online communities can foster terrorism and crime. Not only does cyberspace create new communities and new connections, but it can also make the globe into a neighborhood. Social applications make strangers familiar in ways that lack strict parallels in the physical world. Three decades ago, an Ohio teenager would have had almost no way of knowing about Vietnamese pop music. She would have been even less likely to find someone in Washington state with similar interests, let alone reach out to the Vietnamese artists personally. Today all that can happen through cyberspace, and it will happen increasingly frequently as billions of users come online from the “Global South.”20 Thus the strategic predicament for every state: no country has “depth” anymore. Where all are online, all are neighbors. These powerful new means for interaction and discovery let people around the world cooperate to oppose, or favor, the regime. Cyberspace alters and indeed shrinks the quanta of cooperation required to exert force. As we saw in the rise of “lone wolf” terrorism, the Internet can help extremists to incite personal if not yet precise applications of force from halfway around the world. This is not a new kind of cooperating; books and broadcasts have long inspired people to act on ideas that originated far away in distance and time. The difference lies in the scale and immediacy of contact afforded to the instigator. The authors and the readers of books previously had little if any personal contact; now they can interact in real time, and the message can be tailored to each reader.21

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The weaponization of the Internet of Things will also lead to new types of cooperation between industry and the state. The friendliness of this cooperation may vary by location and political form, but two trends will likely stand out. Companies that operate largely domestically are likely to have to cooperate with host governments to write code and design devices that resist the encroachments of foreign powers. They may also face pressure to allow their devices to monitor internal adversaries of the regime; these pressures will probably be most pronounced in authoritarian regimes. Multinational companies, in contrast, are likely to feel global market demand to resist cooperation with any government, or at least to cooperate with only large consortia of governments. Apple, for example, has proclaimed its desire to provide the consumer with security features that cannot be broken by any state—while facing criticism for its perceived bow to Chinese demands for data localization.22 Cooperation-free force is not yet possible, and will probably never exist in the purest sense of the term.23 The Iranian and Russian cyber intrusions cited above, for example, must have required some investments of personnel and resources. Yet developments in the world of big data analytics and autonomous action are allowing fewer people, working quickly, to apply force in increasingly significant ways. Autonomy is the field where applications could soon leave the laboratory. It is possible to build systems that, once fielded, require very little cooperation to sustain and execute mission, in effect  giving rulers a capacity to exert force with little, or no, human agency at the point of need. This development may become even more pronounced if rulers acquire artificially intelligent systems that learn without human assistance.24 While the possibility of full autonomy through artificial intelligence remains distant (and might never happen, despite prophecies to the contrary), its realization would create a new paradigm by allowing adversaries, for the first time, to concentrate force without the need for human cooperation.25 Cyberspace also accelerates changes in the technologies of communication and takes them close to their ultimate expressions. Wireless communications enabled Prime Minister Winston Churchill to run Britain’s war effort in Europe and a war in Asia, for example, but he still faced limitations in bandwidth and reach that prevented him from controlling individual battles from London. The global connectivity of cyberspace has come to close to making such control possible today. These developments in communication (and thus conveyance) matter on the battlefield and in the arsenals because they could facilitate not only

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real-time control of forces but also enable that control to be made resilient and redundant in ways not possible before. Recall that the design choices at the heart of Internet protocols stemmed originally from a desire to create a communications system that could withstand a nuclear strike from the Soviet Union. While there may be difficulty at any moment with one or two channels, states and commanders now possess multiple means to re-establish virtually instant communication. Deployed forces can transmit and receive data via satellites, cables, and radios. This plethora of channels allows the simultaneous employment of aircraft and ships on opposite sides of the globe. At the tactical level, soldiers at the end of global communications and supply lines can now integrate their fire with deeper support from the land, air, and sea.

New Types of Comprehension Technologies of force in the twenty-first century have so far accelerated the trends of the twentieth. Superpowers in the 1960s could bring destructive force to any place in minutes, with the potential consequences measured in millions of souls, square miles of devastation, and radioactive half-lives. Long-range nuclear delivery systems and precision strike technology provided such reach in the Cold War, but only by threatening to cause such extreme loss of life as to invite massive retaliation. The technologies of our new century can create effects at nearly the speed of light against targeted persons, individual silicon chips, and single lines of programming code. The weaponization of algorithm-driven devices in an Internet of Things will extend the reach of states into their adversaries’ very homes. The question is whether states will have the requisite comprehension to exploit the advances in cooperation and conveyance suggested above. Here the world is on the cusp of a revolution at least as sweeping as that which fostered European global supremacy in the early modern age. We saw above how the Internet, the Internet of Things, and big data analytics have implications for the employment of force. Combining them together will provide new kinds of tools that will change the application of force in the years ahead. The impact of each of these future weapons cannot be known yet, but their collective trajectory seems clear. The growth of cyberspace might have its most important impact by creating a new comprehension of internal security, i.e., for surveillance. As networked computing devices, particularly operating in an Internet of

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Things, pervade every dimension of daily life, rulers are gaining a sensing platform without precedent or equal. The East German Stasi achieved a sweeping degree of social control by pitting neighbors against neighbors, weaving a web of informers around each citizen, who might be an informer herself. Yet even the Stasi illustrated the human limitations that provided the fundamental constraint on surveillance and security systems. No matter how intelligently people reviewed the Stasi’s files, they still needed rest, and their organizations faced limits on their ability to recruit and manage analysts.26 The Stasi and its peers behind the Iron Curtain failed not because they lacked information but because they could not increase their analytic power to the scale necessary to identify all threats to the regime.27 Its level of surveillance cannot compare to a world in which appliances, clothing, and cars all report to state databases. The Stasi, moreover, was hated and feared. By contrast, even though it could soon be possible to track, measure, and record almost every action of an entire population, we seem likely to consent to at least a substantial part of that monitoring because of the value that we place on the devices that give us real-time network access. Consumers like these tools (as even their critics concede), despite suspecting that they can allow security services to spot threats by mining billions of otherwise innocuous records.28 The revolution in comprehension will affect war as well as internal security. We are starting to understand what can happen when a state devotes resources to harvesting the personal data from a rival state’s leaders, commanders, aides, and their families. The American national security adviser Robert O’Brien seemed to be thinking along these lines in a speech at the Halifax International Security Forum in November 2019, warning his audience that allowing a Chinese 5G network to dominate the Canadian market was potentially dangerous: “[T]hey’re going to know every health record, every banking record, every social media post—they’re going to know everything about every single Canadian.”29 In an age when individuals’ social, financial, and professional standings abide in their digital data, adulterating such information could harm those affected, distracting their cooperative efforts and ruining the bonds of affection and trust that allow them and their loved ones to live their daily lives. The mere prospect that the adversary could have corrupted those data might undermine faith in the system, thus impacting it whether or not such corruption occurs. A similar peril accompanies the threat posed by cyber-meddling in elections.

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A state might alter vote tallies and throw an election, but it is more likely, and perhaps more dangerous, for an adversary state to simply taint public trust in the election system itself.

What Does It Mean? Yet even the prospect of pervasive surveillance is not the most important change wrought through cyberspace. The rise of big data analytics provides the key to creating comprehension at scale. Algorithms can comb universal data to spot patterns that help predict and see with precision—in short, they come closer to conferring omniscience. This is made possible by the degree of global networking and the computing power that has become available, and the prospect that artificial intelligence might exploit that inexhaustible data pool. Glimpsing this possibility may have prompted Russian President Vladimir Putin to tell Russian schoolchildren about artificial intelligence (AI)  as the school year began in 2017: “Whoever becomes the leader in this space will become the ruler of the world.”30 U.S.  Secretary of Defense Mark Esper would seem to agree, telling an audience in late 2019 that Advances in AI have the potential to change the character of warfare for generations to come. Whichever nation harnesses AI first will have a decisive advantage on the battlefield for many, many years. We have to get there first….But let me be clear, the question is not where AI will be used by militaries around the world; it will be. The real question is whether we let authoritarian governments dominate AI, and by extension the battlefield…31

Applying big data analytics to the all-encompassing data of cyberspace potentially allows a regime, even a democratic one, to develop a system that anticipates adversary concentrations in time to disperse plotters with tailored force at the right time. Here is where the new technology seems likely to impose a historic turn in the application of force. Such an all-­ seeing regime has been contemplated by political philosophers since Plato, who envisioned one in The Republic, where the Guardians of the polis would be like the dog in their ability to know friend from foe: When a dog sees someone it doesn’t know, it gets angry before anything bad happens to it. But when it knows someone, it welcomes him, even if it has never received anything good from him. Haven’t you ever wondered about

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that…it judges everything to be either a friend or an enemy, on no other basis than that it knows the one and doesn’t know the other.32

Concentration has hitherto meant the gathering and application of force to break the adversary’s capacity to concentrate, and it has typically worked through eroding or minimizing the ability of foes to trust one another. As we observed above, the authoritarian states of the twentieth century failed not primarily due to a lack of surveillance but from an inability to process information into knowledge about adversaries at a national scale. As a result, these states resorted to internal force, fostering the fear of informants, slander, and arbitrary arrest, and imposed social controls like bans on speech and assembly. They also curated misinformation for their populations, misleading millions with propaganda that began in the nursery and surrounded all aspects of life. Such regimes did their best to prove Aristotle’s observation that a tyrant seeks above all to guard “against anything that customarily gives rise to two things, high thoughts and trust.”33 Authoritarian regimes of the twenty-first century seem to have recognized that these comparatively blunt methods are no longer necessary for sustaining political control. Rebecca MacKinnon noted in 2012 that authoritarians have used the Internet to add more subtle and targeted techniques of social control that already “contribute to the erosion of democracy and slippage back toward authoritarianism.”34 As Ronald Deibert notes, the effect of such a surveillance environment may be less like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and more like Jeremy Bentham’s model prison, the Panopticon, perpetually giving each citizen “the feeling of being watched.”35 The new tools and techniques will enable rulers to create comprehension at both a scale and with a speed that could reinvigorate the authoritarian mode of rule that had seemed doomed by the combined powers of liberalism and capitalism.36 That could be why observers are already beginning to view access to the largest possible data pools as the new geostrategic prize for rival states.37 Now that authoritarian governments can create a system which gives them a more reliable comprehension of who favors the regime and who does not, they can loosen some of the strictures on society that had limited their economic growth in the past while maintaining—contra Fukuyama— their grip on political power. Before the twenty-first century ends, rulers will be able to identify potential conspirators and apply force before they concentrate arms or even thoughts that threaten the regime. This suggests

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that instruments like bans on protests or restrictions on speech may no longer be necessary for social control. This, in turn, means that autocratic states—which increasingly are run by one-party regimes dedicated to fighting some form of “systemic violence”—can allow their populations those freedoms essential for material success without compromising their rulers’ monopoly on power. In previous ages, only gods went everywhere. Airplanes, tanks, and ships put an end to this monopoly—states could go anywhere in the twentieth century, and only another state could stop them. In the twenty-first century, the Internet, Internet of Things, and big data analytics now allow rulers to appropriate another characteristic reserved to gods in ages past: the ability to know everything. Soon we may say about our rulers as the Psalmist said about his God: “You are all around me and have put your hand upon me.”38 Hardly anyone would want to oppose rule by a perfect, all-knowing ruler, the incarnation of Plato’s Philosopher King for our time. Political thinkers and average citizens have long believed there could be no such perfect ruler, but when a sovereign with Thomas Hobbes’ twin swords of justice and war who is all-knowing but tyrannical can arise, people may conclude that such a ruler cannot be resisted. If war is founded on intimidation, as Leon Trotsky insisted in 1920, then this development presages intimidation of a kind and scope hitherto unimaginable.39 The implications of this trend are historic. Battlefield advances in firepower, movement, and reconnaissance could be negated by adversaries who target the personal lives of the enemy commanders and soldiers (as well as their families) who are charged with operating the new weapons. Furthermore, when a prince could not see “inside” a cabal until he placed an informant in its ranks, he could monitor his subject’s behavior but not their consciences. But when all can be surveilled and recorded, however, everyone must speak in order to prove that silence is not dissent. Conscience thus becomes socially malleable; all will feel the pressure. In such a world, people may seemingly live lives that are free but, upon closer inspection, they will possess nothing more than an Orwellian simulacrum of “freedom.” Conscience can only operate properly in proximity to truth; hypocrisy, after all, is the homage that even vice pays to virtue. A liar knows he’s lying, because he knows what his listener does not wish to hear—or perhaps has no right to know. Conscience has never been secure, but it will be endangered root and branch in a world that could look much like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

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The question that historians of the twenty-first century will ponder some day is whether cyberspace strengthened the rule of liberty and law or whether it merely served the will of the strong. Both mutually exclusive outcomes are possible because the new technologies of force reinvigorate the liberal crisis that has become the world’s great dilemma. In this new century, we must decide whether or not we will trust that laws are fairly made, that judges are just, that election results are accurate, and that all-­ seeing machines monitor us for the common good. Or, by contrast, we must perpetually fear that law and representation and freedom are simply cunning instruments of oppression. We could not escape the struggle between liberalism and its opponents in the last century, and the new tools of force in this century promise no escape in the twenty-first as well. Such a future, however, is not foreordained. The mechanics of force— cooperation, conveyance, and comprehension—persist through history, but they are always employed by that most unpredictable of worldly realities: the human heart. People can and do change their sentiments and their minds about the conditions and rulers they serve. Winston Churchill reflected after World War II that virtuous but timid measures “are no match for armed and resolute wickedness.”40 Yet his example, as we saw above, nevertheless demonstrates that the ideal of freedom can mobilize decisive effects in its own defense. Sovereign force might always apply through the Twin Swords, as Hobbes suggests, but even Leviathans are never absolute in their control of human dignity.

Notes 1. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” National Interest (Summer 1989). 2. Francis Fukuyama, Trust: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), pp. 3–4. 3. “Full Text of Clinton’s Speech on China Trade Bill,” New York Times, March 9, 2000; accessed November 11, 2018, at http://movies2.nytimes. com/library/world/asia/030900clinton-china-text.html 4. Christopher Walker, Marc F.  Plattner, and Larry Diamond, “Authoritarianism Goes Global,” The American Interest, March 28, 2016; accessed October 7, 2018, at https://www.the-american-interest. com/2016/03/28/authoritarianism-goes-global/ 5. For more, see George H. Kimble, “Portuguese Policy and Its Influence on Fifteenth Century Cartography,” Geographical Review 23:4 (1933), pp. 653–659.

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6. The technological impact of precision location systems seems both hard to overstate and readily observable to the casual observer. What may be less obvious is the geopolitical importance of these systems. In the first two decades of the twenty-first century there are four systems vying for influence, the American-backed GPS, the Russian GLONASS, the European Galileo, and the Chinese Beidou. The fact that these systems have differing reach, accuracy, and adoption should not obscure the observation that their satellite constellations have sufficient importance to justify vast investments from four national entities. 7. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (New York: Cambridge, 1988), pp. 350–353, 380. 8. Nietzsche and Foucault may be the most common examples cited in classrooms today to expose those who see power arrayed against power. The debate, however, goes back to Plato’s Republic, the foundational work of Western political philosophy, wherein Socrates seeks to demonstrate the rule of reason over naked power. Thrasymachus’ famous blush betokened how Socrates won the debate by showing the limitations of a logic resting solely on power, see Plato, Republic, trans G.M.A.  Grude, revised by C.D.C. Reeves (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1992), Book I, 350d. 9. Two offshoots of the revolutionary impulse—Nazism and Fascism—did by contrast justify force for its own sake, although their founders indeed decried what they saw as the systemic violence of the governments they supplanted. World War II showed that these states that had glorified force for its own sake lacked not only the firepower but the moral authority to win allies in their struggles against the liberal and Communist worlds. 10. Generals could always send couriers with handwritten notes around the battlefield. Such messages, however, were not instantaneous communication, and the very need for their existence testifies to the inability of books, manuals and, for that matter, oral commands, to provide sufficient guidance on the battlefield. 11. William Gibson, Neuromancer (Ace, 1984). 12. Guy Raz, “‘Lo’ and Behold: A Communications Revolution,” NPR, October 29, 2009; accessed October 27, 2018, at https://www.npr.org/ templates/story/story.php?storyId=114280698 13. Susan Landau, Surveillance or Security?: The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), pp. 240–241. 14. Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Military Strategy, 2004, p.  18; accessed October 7, 2018, at https://archive.defense.gov/news/Mar2005/ d20050318nms.pdf 15. Mark Thompson, “Iranian Cyber Attack on New York Dam Shows Future of War,” Time, March 24, 2016; accessed March 24, 2018, at http://time. com/4270728/iran-cyber-attack-dam-fbi/. See also Nicole Perlroth and

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David Sanger, “Cyberattacks Put Russian Fingers on the Switch at Power Plants, U.S. Says,” New York Times, March 15, 2018; accessed March 24, 2018, at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/15/us/politics/russiacyberattacks.html 16. Intel, “A Guide to the Internet of Things,” accessed October 27, 2018, at https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/internet-of-things/infographics/guide-to-iot.html 17. David Reinsel, John Gantz, John Rydning, Data Age 2025: The Evolution of Data to Life-Critical—Don’t Focus on Big Data; Focus on the Data That’s Big (Seagate, IDC White Paper, April 2017), pp. 5–7; accessed November 25, 2018, at https://www.seagate.com/www-content/our-story/trends/ files/Seagate-WP-DataAge2025-March-2017.pdf 18. As noted above, big data analytics are software tools that analyze very large datasets in order to derive understanding from patterns that would otherwise escape human discernment. For an industry-based explanation of big data analytics, see: “Big data analytics: What It Is and Why It Matters,” SAS (formerly Statistical Analysis System); accessed October 27, 2018, at https://www.sas.com/en_us/insights/analytics/big-data-analytics.html. Readers interested on the impact of artificial intelligence on the practice of strategy should consult Kenneth Payne’s Strategy, Evolution, and War: From Apes to Artificial Intelligence (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2018) for an exploration of the issues using some of the same concepts but focusing on their impact on strategy as a psychological phenomenon. See also Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017). For an industry-based explanation of big data analytics, see: “Big data analytics: What It Is and Why It Matters.” Big data analytics: What It Is and Why It Matters | SAS; accessed March 24, 2018, at https://www.sas.com/en_us/insights/analytics/big-data-analytics.html 19. Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), pp. 82, 311. 20. Ronald J. Deibert, Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2013), pp. 100–102. See also Leslie Jamison, “The Digital Ruins of a Forgotten Future,” The Atlantic, December 2017; accessed March 25, 2018, at https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ archive/2017/12/second-life-leslie-jamison/544149/ 21. James R.  Beniger explores a similar concept in The Control Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), p.  7. David Patrikarakos suggests that new communication has created a new kind of battlefield; see War in 140 Characters (New York: Hachette: 2017). 22. Eric Lichtblau and Katie Benner, “Apple Fights Order to Unlock San Bernardino Gunman’s Phone,” The New York Times, February 17, 2016;

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accessed October 27, 2018, at https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/18/ technology/apple-timothy-cook-fbi-san-bernardino.html 23. Even if force can be effectively executed by a single individual, exerting force will almost always necessitate the cooperation of multiple people in the design and maintenance of technological systems. 24. For a preview of such ideas, see Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, “Reagan National Defense Forum Keynote,” speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, November 15, 2014; accessed March 24, 2018, at h t t p s : / / w w w. d e f e n s e . g o v / N e w s / S p e e c h e s / S p e e c h - V i e w / Article/606635/ 25. See, for instance, Kevin Drum, “Tech World: Welcome to the Digital Revolution,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2018; accessed November 25, 2018, at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2018-06-14/ tech-world 26. Daniel Headrick talks about a similar concept of efficiency with data; see When Information Came of Age (New York: Oxford, 2000). 27. Surveillance empowered by big data analytics also holds implications for state-on-state power too. States are relatively few in number, and they have long dedicated relatively significant resources with which to process surveillance against one another. Given the relatively small number of states to monitor, changes in processing power have had strategic but not civilizational import. This is in comparison to vast quantities of individuals that comprise the body-politic, any number of whom might hide secret threats to the ruler. 28. Ronald J. Deibert, Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2013), pp. 66–68. 29. Michael McDonald, “Trump adviser issues dire warning to Canada,” National Observer, November 29, 2019; accessed December 3, 2019, at https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/11/24/news/trump-adviserissues-dire-warning-canada 30. Tom Simonite, “For Superpowers, Artificial Intelligence Fuels New Global Arms Race,” Wired, September 8, 2017; accessed April 29, 2018, at https://www.wired.com/story/for-superpowers-artificial-intelligencefuels-new-global-arms-race/ 31. “Remarks by Secretary Esper at National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence Public Conference,” November 5, 2019; accessed December 1, 2019, at https://www.defense.gov/Newsroom/Transcripts/Transcript/ Article/2011960/remarks-by-secretar y-esper-at-national-securitycommission-on-artificial-intell/ 32. Plato, Republic, trans G.M.A.  Grude revised by C.D.C.  Reeves (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1992), 375e–376b.

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33. Aristotle, Politics, trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984); V, 11, 1313bl. 34. Rebecca MacKinnon, “China’s ‘Networked Authoritarianism’,” in Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner, eds., Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), pp. 89–90. See also “China Invents the Digital Totalitarian State,” Economist, December 17, 2016; accessed October 8, 2018, at https://www.economist.com/briefing/2016/12/17/china-invents-thedigital-totalitarian-state 35. Ronald J. Deibert, Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2013), p. 75; emphasis in original. 36. See, for example, Zack Whittaker, “Security lapse exposed a Chinese smart city surveillance system,” TechCrunch, May 3, 2019; accessed June 30, 2019, at https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/03/china-smart-city-exposed/ 37. Eric Rosenbach and Katherine Mansted, The Geopolitics of Information, Belfer Center, Harvard University, May 28, 2019; accessed June 30, 2019, at https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/geopolitics-information 38. Ps. 139: 5–6, New Century Version. 39. Leon Trotsky, The Defense of Terrorism (Terrorism and Communism): A Reply to Karl Kautsky (London: Labour Publishing Co., 1921), pp. 51, 55. 40. Winston S.  Churchill, The Gathering Storm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), p. 190.

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Index1

A Abdel-Rahman, Omar, 198 Abu Nidal, 196 Academie Royale des Sciences, 37 Afghanistan, 235 coalition operations in, 216, 217, 219, 221, 238 coups (1978), 153 Soviet invasion and war, 153, 155 Taliban rule in, 202 U.S.-led invasion (2001), 201 Ahmadi-Moghaddam, Esmail, 226 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 216 Air defenses computer use in, 111, 129, 145, 160 integrated, 88 World War I, 111 Air France, 200 Air power Cold War, 127, 142 Information War and, 240 Naval, 107, 108, 162 reconnaissance, 145

surveillance, 145, 221, 240 World War I, 111 World War II, 125, 128, 138 Aircraft, 87, 88, 162, 202, 220, 221, 240 bombers, 110, 111, 126–128, 142, 193 Cold War, 127, 142 fighters, 110 helicopters, 138, 140 observation, 88 transport, 90 unmanned systems, 145, 158, 162, 191 World War I, 111 World War II, 125, 128, 138 Aircraft carriers, see Warships Alexander II, Czar, 67 Alexander the Great, 74 Alfonso X, King, 32 Alfred the Great, 27 Algorithms, 33, 159, 164, 264, 267, 269

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Warner, J. Childress, The Use of Force for State Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45410-4

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300 

INDEX

Ali, Ben, 226 ALLIED FORCE, Operation (1999), 191–193 Al Qaeda 9/11 attack, 200–202, 219, 228 Afghanistan and, 198, 200, 201 Anarchism, 103 Andrade, Tonio, 36, 37 Andres, Richard, 204 Andropov, Yuri, 153, 164, 176n76 Anglo-Dutch Naval conflict, 39 Alfred Mahan on, 39 Anglo-Egyptian Sudan Expedition, 70 Annan, Kofi, 193, 214, 227 Anschluss, 104 Antigonus II, 24 Aquinas, Thomas, 41 Arab Spring, 226, 228, 229, 233 Arafat, Yasser, 145 Aratus, 25 Archidamus, 20 Argentina, 162, 182 Aristotle, x, 1, 3, 4, 14n1, 24, 40, 44, 165, 270 on tyranny, x, 165 Armor, 23, 27–29, 38, 60, 111, 116, 183, 227, 236 Armored fighting vehicles Iraq War, 204 World War I, 116 World War II, 114 Arms control, 44, 132, 163, 223 ARPANET, 184 Artillery, 59 Chinese, 59 field guns, 38, 47, 70, 82 Naval, 38, 82, 107 origins, 29 parrott rifles, 62 self-propelled, 106 Assad, Bashar al, 227–229, 238, 239 Astronomy, 32 Athens, 21, 22

Atomic bomb, 112, 117, 124, 125 Attlee, Clement, 132 Aum Shinrikyo, 199 Austria, 90, 99 AUTODIN, 132, 187 Aztecs, 31 B Babington-Smith, Constance, 111 Baghdad sack of (1258), 28 taken by coalition forces (2003), 204 Bailly, Charles, 41 Ban Ki-Moon, 228 Bandung Conference, 136 Bank of England, 43 Baran, Paul, 128 Barbary pirates Algiers and, 58 Europe, and, 58, 63 Basayev, Shamil, 199, 222 Battles Agincourt, 28 Algiers, 200 Anzio, 122n85 Cambrai, 89 Chaeronea, 50n40 Coral Sea, 107 Crecy, 28 Cynossema, 22 Dien Bien Phu, 138, 141 Dogger Bank, 87 Gallipoli, 84 Jutland, 87 Karameh, 145 Lepanto, 39 Mantinea, 21 Midway, 107 Normandy, 110 Omdurman, 70, 71 Patay, 28 Pearl Harbor, 106, 107

 INDEX 

Plataea, 21 Salamis, 21 Somme, 84 Stalingrad, 107 Syracuse, 22 Tours, 28 Verdun, 84, 88 Battleships, see Warships Bei Dao, 147 Benaiah, 18 Bentham, Jeremy, 270 Beowulf, 27 Berger, Samuel, 191, 192 Beslan massacre, 218, 222 Biddle, Stephen, 88 Big data analytics, 13, 264, 266, 267, 269, 271, 274n18, 275n27 Bin Laden, Osama, 198, 200–202, 228 Blair, Tony, 205 Blanqui, Louis Auguste, 65, 66, 101, 197, 262 Blitzkrieg, 110, 154, 169 Bodin, Jean, 42 Boeing Corporation, 156 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 55 Booking, Emerson T., 12 Bosnia, 235 Boyd, John, 7 Brazil, 51n55 Britain, Roman invasion of, 23 Brodie, Bernard, 125 Bulgaria, 90 Burma, 215 Bush, George H. W., 182, 185, 201, 203, 205, 214–217, 222, 225 C Carthage, 23 Cavalry, Medieval, 27–29 firepower eclipses, 29 strategic import of, 26, 28

301

China, 59, 191, 235 backwardness, 59 cyberspace and, 195, 223, 225, 230, 241 disputes over revolutionary doctrine, 135 economic reforms and model, 189, 215 Kosovo conflict and, 194 military traditions in, 28 opium War, 59 People’s Republic of China, 146 tensions with the USSR, 146 United States, tensions with, 114, 194, 223, 230 Chinese civil war, 114 Christianity, 25, 42 Reformation, 41 Civil war American, 60, 71 English, 51n56 Russian, 97 Spanish, 103 Clausewitz, Carl von, 16n16 defeat and disorganization on, 16n16 Clinton, William J., 185, 189–192, 194, 196, 200 Columbus, Christopher, 32 Communist parties, 98 disputes over revolutionary doctrine, 103 Computers and computing, 159 weapons and, 161 Concentration, 4, 6–9, 14n1 relative nature of, 4, 9 Conscription, universal, 82, 92 Conveyance air mobility, 8, 140 communications; telegraph, 60, 75; wireless, 86, 263, 266; writing, 9, 187, 263 cyberspace, 244

302 

INDEX

Conveyance (cont.) logistical support, 8 sea mobility, 8, 39 transportation and mobility, 8 Cooperation attacks on, 245 conspiracy and, 231 development, 37, 58, 171 economic, 82 economy of force, 7 forced, 7 ideational foundations; liberalism, 170; Marxist, 65; nationalism, 47; religion, 10 ideology and, 58, 116 internet and, 231, 237, 265, 266 state power and, 43 terrorist, 199 trust and, 7, 8, 40, 231 Cortes, Hernan, 31, 46 Counter-intelligence, 141 Covert action, 236, 242 Crimea, 235 Crimean War (1854), 60 Crusades, 27 Cuba Cuban Missile Crisis, 129, 134 revolution, 129 Cyberspace cyber conflict, 13 force in, 12 D Daesh, see Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant d’Albuquerque, Afonso, 33, 34 Data big data analytics, 13, 264, 266, 267, 269, 274n18, 275n27 mechanization of, 69, 158 networked, 158, 187, 263 strategic prize as, 270

Debs, Eugene, 92 Decolonization, 11, 152 Deibert, Ronald, 270 Deng Xiaoping, 168, 179n117 Denial of service attacks, 241 Devils, The (novel), 66 Diamond, Larry, 260 Dien Bien Phu, 138, 141 Dionysius the Elder, 24 Dionysius the Younger, 25 Dispersal, 9, 158 “Dispersion-concentration dilemma,” 204 Dosch, Arno, 84 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 66 Doty, Madeleine, 91 Drones, see Aircraft “Dubovitsky, Natan,” 244, 245 Dutch, 124 Dutch East Indies, 134 E East India Company, British, 43, 58, 59 East India Company, Dutch, 43 Egypt ancient, 48 French conquest of (1799), 47 Einstein, Albert G, 123 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 125, 126 Election interference, United States (2016), 242, 243 Elizabeth I, Queen, 40 Empires Austro-Hungarian, 82 Aztec, 31 Belgian, 124 British, 84, 91, 93 Dutch, 35, 134 French, 30, 134 Mongol, 26 Portuguese, 34, 124

 INDEX 

Ptolemaic, 25, 48 Roman, 41, 42 Encryption, 40, 107 Engels, Frederich, 56, 65, 66, 76, 94, 197 England ancient, 203 development of Naval power in, 39, 40 Enigma (cipher machine), 107, 110 exploited by Allies in World War II, 107, 110 Eniwetok (atoll), 124, 125 Enlightenment ideals, 63 Entropy, 8, 9, 16n19 Esper, Mark, 269 Espionage ancient, 24 informers, 25, 102 European Conquest of the New World, 31 F Falkland Conflict (1982), 138, 162, 182 Fanon, Frantz, 72, 139, 149, 150 FBI, see United States, Federal Bureau of Investigation Ferguson, Niall, 36 Finance central banking, 43 Kant on, 44 military power and, 19 military sustainment and, 93 Smith on, 43 state power and, 43 Firearms early, 29, 31 influence on tactics, 38, 71, 83, 84 Firepower, 38, 39, 59, 71, 83, 84, 88, 93, 105, 110–112, 115, 138–140, 144, 149, 157, 171, 184, 222, 240, 271, 273n9 First World War, see World War I

303

Force conceptual framework, 3–4 definitions, 5–6, 101 Fort Pulaski, 62 Foucault, Michel, 4, 273n8 France Aéronautique Militaire, 82 Algeria and, 137, 140, 150 “civilizing mission,” 75 colonies, 92, 137 League of Nations Mandates, 97, 102, 134 Revolution, 1789, 47 Revolution, 1848, 65 Second Empire, 65 Vietnam in, 137 World War I, 82 World War II, 156 Franco, Francisco, 103 Franco-Prussian War, 62, 83 Franks, Tommy, 204, 205 Frederick II, the Great, 47 Freedman, Lawrence, 12, 13 French, 124 Fukuyama, Francis, 12, 181, 259, 270 Fuller, John Frederick Charles, 89, 106, 119n21 G Gallieni, Joseph, 72 Geifman, Anna, 69 George, Lloyd, 92 George III, King, 59 Gerasimov, Valery, 233, 234, 239–241 Germany Cold War and, 156–158, 165 East Germany, 156 Federal Republic of, 156 Third Reich; Thirty Years War in, 43 West Germany, 157, 158 World War I, 83, 99, 100, 106, 111 World War II, 105 Gestapo, 101

304 

INDEX

Gibbon, Edward, 25 Gibson, William, 263 Globalization, ix, 189, 206, 260 Global War on Terror, 201–205 counter terror strategies in, 201 See also Terrorism and Counterterrorism Goldman, Emily, 121n74, 175n55 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 155, 157, 163–170 Grand Fleet, see Royal Navy Gray, Colin, 194, 221 Great Britain, see United Kingdom “Great Divergence,” 10 See also Military dominance, Western Groupe Islamique Armé, 200 Guerrilla war, see Insurgency Guided weapons, 203 control of, 145, 156, 184, 191, 194, 221 Information War and, 158 intelligence and, 158, 194, 240 laser-guided bombs, 145 strategy and (“offset strategy”), 184 targeting of, 240 “Gunpowder empires,” 29 H Haiti, 189 Halifax International Security Forum, 268 Hasan, Nidal, 218, 219 Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm, 56 Heidegger, Martin, 152 Henry VIII, King, 42 Herodotus, 19, 21, 22 Hitler, Adolf, 99–102, 104–106, 111, 112, 197 parliamentary forms, rejection of, 100 racial ideology, 100, 104 World War II, 105, 197

Ho Chi Minh, 141, 146 Hobbes, Thomas, x, xin1, 2, 10, 14n5, 42, 271, 272 Hoffman, Bruce, 196 Holland, 52n65, 112 Homer, see Iliad, The Hudson Bay Company, 43 Huns, 26 Hydrogen bombs, 124, 125, 161 accidents with, 113 American, 112, 124 British (Operation Grapple), 132 I IBM Corporation, 187 Ideology and ideological conflict, 12, 206 Iliad, The, 19, 21 Imperialism colonialism and, 136 (see also Empires) Fanon on, 139, 149 Khomeini on, 149, 174n43 Lenin on, 134 Marx on, 76 India, 137, 235 ancient, x, 6, 33 colonial troops from, 104 Home Rule in, 97 martial races, 104 Mughal conquest, 36 mutiny (1857), 60 nuclear weapon capability, 133 Partition (1947), 137 sepoys, 60 Indonesia, 136 Industrial Revolution social conflict, 64 weapons development in, 60 Influence of Sea power Upon History, The, 39, 72 Information Revolution computers and, 161

 INDEX 

data and, 9 digitization, 132, 159–160, 187 networking and, 132, 158, 186, 187 Information Theory, 159 Information War, 158, 159, 161, 184, 207n14, 213–246 “Infosphere,” 185, 187 Insurgency colonialism and, 139, 141, 142, 146 tactics in, 139–142, 148 terrorism and, 217, 236 Intel Corporation, 161 Intelligence covert action, 69, 143, 170, 174n53, 201, 236 internal security and, 55, 96, 112, 167, 170, 229, 266, 268 photo interpretation, 88, 111 professionalizaton of, 69 surveillance and, 40, 239 Intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance, 227, 240 airborne, 145, 184 Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS), 145 battlefield, 138, 237, 271 terrorism and, 220, 221 Internet, 132, 161, 187, 188, 198, 199, 219, 225, 226, 229–231, 237, 242, 260, 263–265, 267, 270, 271 Internet of Things, 264, 266–268, 271 Iran, 214, 235 cyber tactics, 241 Internet surveillance in, 226 nuclear program of, 216, 246n7 revolution, 152 Syrian civil war and, 229, 238 unrest in, 226 Iraq, 214, 235 insurgency, 216, 217 Kuwait invasion, 168, 182, 183, 235 Persian Gulf War and, 183

305

Repression of military dissent, 191, 203 security services, 203, 204 weapons of mass destruction, 216 Iraq War (2003), 205, 215 armored fighting vehicles in, 204 command and control in, 203 ISIL, see Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant Islam radical interpretations of, 149, 152, 168, 197, 237 Shi’a, 152, 168, 197, 216, 217, 229, 246 Sunni, 152, 168, 197, 198, 216, 217, 222, 237, 239, 246 Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), 231–232, 237–240 Israel, 235 air force, 162 Israeli Defense Force, 145 Jordan and, 144, 151 Palestinians and, 144, 150 Six-Day War and, 144 terrorism against, 150, 197 Yom Kippur War, 145 Italy Cold War and, 127, 157 early modern, 30, 40 fascism, 100 World War II, 107 J Japan contact with Europeans, 35, 135 modernization of, 74, 103 Navy, 74 Opening of (1854), 74 World War II, 135 Jellicoe, John, 90, 91 Jerusalem, 18, 28 Jervis, Robert, 206

306 

INDEX

Jiang Zemin, 194 Johnson, Lyndon B., 144 Judah, Kingdom of, 18 K Kamikazes, 112, 201 Kant, Immanuel, 44, 97, 120n46, 206, 262 central banking, on, 44 peace, on, 206 Kautilya conspiracy on, 24 theory of military effectiveness, x Kellogg-Briand Pact, 97, 113, 262 Kennedy, John F., 129 Kennedy, Robert F., 131, 134 Kenya, 140, 198 KGB, 153 Khan, Mohammed, 218 Khrushchev, Nikita, 105, 129, 131, 135, 164 Kim il-Sung, 114 Kipling, Rudyard, 71, 72 Kissinger, Henry, 145 Knights, 27–29 See also Cavalry, Medieval Komnene, Anna, 27 Korea, Democratic Peoples Republic of (North Korea), 114, 133, 143, 189, 214, 215, 235, 241 Korea, Republic of(South Korea), 114 Korean War, 138, 143 Inchon landing, 114 mobile phase, 114 origin, 114 stalemate, 117 Kosovo Conflict Chinese embassy bombing incident, 194 precision weapons in, 191, 194 Kurds and Kurdistan, 202, 237 Kuwait, Invasion of (1990), 168

L Lasswell, Harold, 5 Law international, 11, 117, 122n79, 139, 143, 169, 195, 224, 230, 245; rule of, 13, 44, 97–104, 224 League of Nations, 97, 113 Lebanon, 97, 98, 137, 151, 162, 168, 182, 215 Legitimacy law and, 148, 169, 213 propaganda and, 270 struggles over, 205, 245 violence and, 137, 148 Lend Lease, 108 Lenin, Vladimir, 69, 94, 98–101, 134, 197 “professional revolutionaries” and, 69 Lewis, Bernard, 36, 47, 220 Liao-Shen Campaign, see Chinese Civil War Liberal democracy capitalism and, 12, 189, 270 early modern origins of, 44 international order and, 117, 206 Marx on, 64 property rights and, 56, 64 spread of, 171 Little Green Men, see Crimea Livy, 22 Locke, John, 44, 262 Lodewijk, William, 38 Ludendorff, Erich, 89, 91 LulzSec, 231 Lynn, William, 223 Lysander, 24 M Macao, 34 Macedon, 22, 24

 INDEX 

Machiavelli, Nicolo, 1, 6, 40, 139 Machine guns, 70, 75, 82–84, 111, 116, 140 Mackinder, Halford, 35 MacKinnon, Rebecca, 270 Mahan, Alfred T., 39, 72, 73, 182 Malacca, Strait of, 34 Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, 236 Maneuver conflict, 7 Manninghan-Buller, Eliza, 219 Mao Zedong, 103, 114 Marighella, Carlos, 148–150, 152 Marion, Francis, 139 Marx, Karl, 55, 56, 64–68, 75, 76, 99, 259, 262 class struggle, on, 55, 56 liberalism, on, 64, 259 politics, on, 55, 65 terrorism, view of, 75 Mau Mau, 140 Maurice of Nassau,Maurice, Prince of Orange, 38 May, Theresa, 243, 244 McChrystal, Stanley, 217 McLuhan, Marshal, 3, 188 McNeill, William H., 4, 26, 29, 36 Mechanization cryptology, 107 office equipment, 68 transport in war, 106 Medieval Age Fall of Rome and, 25 military art in, 27 military technology in, 27 warfare in, 27 Medvedev, Dmitri, 227 Mehmet II, Sultan, 29 Mexico, 31, 46, 93 Spanish conquest, 31 Michael, Operation, 89 Military dominance, Western challenges to post-1945, 139

307

Industrial Revolution and, 60, 76 origin in the 1500s, 33 Military professionalization early modern, 46 Industrial Revolution, 56 Mercenaries, 29 Miller, John, 200 Milošević, Slobodan, 191, 192 Mines, Naval, 73, 83 Minimanual for the Urban Guerilla, 148 Missiles anti-aircraft, 129, 236 guided, 138, 156, 220 ICBMs, 132 jupiter, 127, 131 Minuteman, 126 Pershing II, 157 SS-20, 157 “Modern System” of warfare, 93 Mohammed (Prophet), 26 Molotov, Vyacheslav, 126 Mongols, 26–28, 74 Monsegur, Hector, 231 Montaigne, Michel de, 63 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis, 44 Moonlight Maze (intrusion set), 188 Morozov, Evgeny, 265, 274n19 Mubarak, Hosni, 226, 229 Munich Security Conference, 223, 224 Muslim Conquest, 26 Mussolini, Benito, 99–101, 104 Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), 133 N Napoleon III, Emperor (Louis Napoleon), 62, 63, 65 Narodnaya Volya (“Peoples Will”), 67, 68 Nationalism, 47, 141, 190

308 

INDEX

National Liberation Front Algeria, 139, 140, 142, 150 “Natural states,” 2, 3 Nature, state of, 2, 14n5 Naval combat, 21 ancient, 21 early modern, 39 Ironclads and, 61 (see also Sea power) World War I, 83, 86, 90 World War II, 106, 107, 111, 112 Navigation celestial, 31 data and, 10 strategic advantage and, 46 Nazism, 99, 101, 104, 114 Nazi Party, 101 Nebuchadnezzar, 18 Network, 8, 43, 73, 84, 85, 88, 129, 132, 158, 186–188, 198, 203, 218, 222, 223, 233, 262–264, 268 New Terrorism, 196–201 Nicholas II, Czar, 116 Nivelle, Robert, 104 Nixon, Richard, 132, 142, 145, 151 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 133, 145, 146, 155–158, 170, 184, 191–195, 217, 224, 225, 227, 236, 238, 243 North, Douglass, 1–3, 12 Northern Alliance (Afghanistan), 202 Nuclear Age, 117, 125, 169 Nuclear stalemate, 124, 169, 170 Nuclear weapons deterrence value, 118 strategic effects, 162 testing, 128 use in war, 11 (see also Weapons of mass destruction)

O O’Brien, Robert, 268 “Offset strategy,” 184 Okhrana, 102 Omar, Mullah, 198 Online radicalization, 198, 219, 237, 238, 265 “Open access societies,” 3, 12, 58 See also Liberal democracy Operations Research, 111 Orwell, George, 124, 169, 270 Ottoman Empire constantinople, 29 military decline of, 59 Russia and, 37, 59 Turkey and, 34 Owen, Robert, 63 P Pakistan, 133, 137, 154, 155, 221, 228, 239 Palestine, 98, 102, 134, 137 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), 144, 150, 162 Patton, George, 110 Peacekeeping operations, 114, 143, 168, 202, 234 Peace research, 133, 134 Peng Dehuai, 115 Peoples Will, see Narodnaya Volya Perestroika, 165 Perry, William J., 158, 184, 186, 187 Persia ancient, 203 English influence, 34, 149 Muslim conquest of, 26 Safavins, 34, 35 Persian Gulf War armored fighting vehicles in, 182–184, 186 coalition operations, 169, 182, 184

 INDEX 

communications and control systems in, 186 guided munitions in, 184 Petain, Philippe, 93 Philip, King of Macedon, 22 Philippine Islands, 71, 106 Philippines, The, 35, 137 Pierrefeu, Jean de, 93 Plato, 269, 271, 273n8 Plattner, Marc, 260 Plutarch, 23–25 Poland German invasion of (1939), 105 repression in, 167 solidarity trade union, 154, 155 Polarization, 65, 136 Marighella on, 149 Marx’s formulation, 67 terrorism and, 66, 148, 149, 197, 216 Powell, Colin, 184 Power definitions of, 5 force and, ix, x, 1–13, 42, 55, 75, 104, 107, 115, 116, 158, 166, 185, 233, 244 Precision weapons, see Guided weapons Printing, 9, 32, 37, 40, 56, 68, 263 movable type, 32 Privacy, 271 legal protections for, 47 surveillance and, 166, 226, 245 Property, 63 capitalism and, 168 intellectual, 13, 45, 244 legal protections, 47, 197 patents and copyrights, 45 social order and, 44, 45, 64 systemic violence and, 96 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 64, 262 Provisional Irish Republican Army, 150

309

Prussia Franco-Prussian War, 62, 83 General Staff, 62 See also Germany Public perception, 143 Putin, Vladimir, 223–225, 228, 232, 244, 245, 269 Q Qaddafi, Muammar, 162, 215, 227 R Radio, 9, 10, 82, 85, 86, 88, 90, 106, 107, 116, 128, 132, 140, 162, 184, 267 deployed in World War I, 140 Railroads and rail transit, 61 Ramirez Sanchez, Ilich (“Carlos the Jackal”), 196 RAND Corporation, 127, 196 Reagan, Ronald, 162, 163 Red Terror, 95 Reformation, Protestant, 42 Renaissance, 10, 32 Republican Guard (Iraq), 203 Republic of Korea, 114, 117 Responsibility to Protect doctrine, 214, 227 Revolution in military affairs, 10 Early modern, 36 Information Revolution and, 12 (see also Military dominance, Western) modern system, 93 “Modern System” of warfare, 88 Revolutions American, 10 Chinese, 246 “color,” 215, 230, 232, 233 Russian, 70, 94, 95, 98, 99, 101, 246

310 

INDEX

Ribbentrop, Joachim, 104 Ricci, 32 Rimland, 35 Roland, 27 Rome Byzantium and, 25 Division into Eastern and Western Empires, 41 fall of, 29 military system, 22 Naval power, 23 republic, 22 Rona, Thomas, 156, 158, 159, 161, 184, 234 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 102, 108 Rosetta Stone, 48 Royal Navy, 40, 46, 59, 72, 73, 82–84, 86–88, 91, 106, 162 Royal Society of London, 37 Rule of law, 44, 97–104, 224 Russia air Force, 236 Army, 94 Balkans, in, 37 Bolsheviks, 70, 94, 96, 98 Chechnya and Chechen conflict, 199, 222 civil war, 94 crimean War, 60 cyber tactics, 243, 266 czarist, 94, 116 Muscovy, 29 Okhrana, 68, 69 Post-Cold War, 189, 199 Red Terror, 95 terrorism in, 69 Ukraine and, 113, 231, 232, 234–236 White Terror, 95 See also Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Rwanda, 189

S Sadat, Anwar al, 151 Saddam Husayn, 169, 182, 202, 217 Sanctuary, military, 142 Saracens, 27, 28 Satellites arms control and, 132 intelligence and warning, 132 reconnaissance, 145 surveillance by, 132 Sayyaf, Abu, 238 Schelling, Thomas, 15n10, 15n12 Schmidt, Helmut, 156 Science chemistry, 60 institutionalizaion, 37 metallurgy, 37 physics, 37 Scientific method, 37 Sea power Albuquerque and, 34 Mahan’s views on, 39, 72 strategy, 72, 73 Second World War, See World War II Sedgwick, John, 71 Self-determination, 141 Sellers, Peter, 133 Sepoy mutiny (1857), 60 Serbia Kosovo conflict, 191 World War I, 82 Serge, Victor, 98, 99, 102, 244 Sertorius, 23 Sforza, Carlo, 103, 121n61 Shakespeare, William, 1, 63 Shannon, Claude, 159 Ships, 46 Aboukir, HMS, 83 Audacious, HMS, 82, 83, 86 Cornwallis, HMS, 59 Dupuy de Lôme, 73

 INDEX 

Monitor, USS, 61 Nemesis, HMS, 59 Virginia, CSS, 61 See also Warships Shirer, William, 102, 105 Shirley brothers (Anthony, Robert, and Thomas), 34 Siegfried, 27, 98 Sims, William, 90, 91 Singer, Peter W., 12, 13 Six Day War, 144 Skripal, Sergei, 244 Słuěba Bezpieczeństwa (SB), 166 Smith, Adam, 10, 42, 43, 45, 46, 55, 56, 63, 64, 75 Solidarity trade union, see Poland Somalia, 189, 202 Sony Pictures Entertainment, 241 Sovereignty, 195 Bodin on, 42 divine right and, 42 Hobbes on, 42 states and, 154, 192, 195, 214, 224, 230 Spain ancient, 18, 23 civil war, 103 conquest of New World, 31 early modern, 30, 35 Economic effect of New World silver on, 35, 51n55 inquisition in, 41, 44 Loss of American colonies, 147 Sparta, 20, 21 control of troops in battle, 21 Special Branch, 68, 69 Special Irish Branch, 68 Spice Islands, 35 Spies, see Espionage Spykman, Nicholas, 35 Star Wars, see Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)

311

STARFISH PRIME, nuclear test, 128 Stasi, 165, 268 States early modern, 41, 260 sovereignty and, 154, 195 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), 132 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), 162, 163 Strategy Clausewitz on, 7 navigation and, 46 nuclear weapons and, 11, 118 post-9/11 revisions, 201 sea power and, 86, 91, 107, 108, 128, 215 Sun Tzu and, 18–20 Sudan, 70, 196, 198, 226 Sukarno, 136, 174n40 Sun Tzu espionage, on, 24 strategy, on, 18–20 sustainment on, 18 Sun Yat-Sen, 103 Sûreté Nationale, 68 Surkov, Vladislav, 232, 233, 245 Surveillance cyber-enabled, 199, 230, 231, 241, 242, 267 double agents in, 40, 69, 102, 112, 221 espionage and, 98 informers in, 165, 166 intelligence services and, 218, 229, 231 intelligence systems and, 40, 69, 96, 269 Kautilya on, 24 social control and, 96, 265 Syria, 97, 98, 102, 162, 182, 226–229, 232, 234–240 Systemic, see Systemic violence

312 

INDEX

Systemic violence, 65, 133, 147 colonialism as, 149, 150 party rule and, 190 See also Violence T Taliban, 198, 201, 202, 217, 221, 222, 236 Tanks, see Armored fighting vehicles Tanzania, 198 Tariq Aziz, 203 Telegraph, 10, 60, 69, 75, 85, 87, 116, 263 Telephone, 85, 86, 116, 132, 162, 263 Terrorism and counterterrorism Global War on Terror, 202, 205, 216, 219 Origins (19th Century), 67 Tet Offensive, 144 Thermonuclear device, see Hydrogen Bombs “Third World,” 134, 136–141, 143, 146, 151, 168–170 Thirty Years War, 43 Thucydides, 19–21 Time computing and, 159 data and, 32, 161, 183 precise measurement of, as factor in force, 81 Torpedoes, 73 Treason, 40, 41, 44 religious differences and, 40 Treaties Carlowitz, 37 Nanking, 59 Peace of Westphalia, 44 Versailles, 93 Trotsky, Leon, 94–97, 99–101, 271 Truman, Harry S., 112

Trust entropy and, 8 fracturing, as a goal of force, 8, 270 Tsar Bomba, 126 Tunisia, 137, 140, 142, 226 Turing, Alan, 159 Turkey, 34, 90, 103, 127 See also Ottoman Empire Turks, 26, 29, 34, 37 Tyranny ancient examples, 24 Aristotle on, x, 14n1, 24, 40, 270 U U-boats, see Warships Ukraine conflict in (2014 on), 231, 234, 236 UNIFIED PROTECTOR, Operation, 227 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 153, 154, 164, 165 air force, 126 Army, 95, 106, 107, 110, 114, 154, 156 Cheka, 96, 101, 102 Cold War, 11, 124, 169, 170, 181, 196 disputes over revolutionary doctrine, 135 Eastern Europe and, 114, 155, 164, 165 economic reforms, 165, 167 KGB, 154 nuclear weapons, 11, 156, 158 origins of, 94 Persian Gulf War and, 169, 184 Politburo, 153, 154, 164, 176n76 repression, 167 revolutionary mantle, 146 Sino-Soviet tensions, 146

 INDEX 

Third World, and, 140, 146, 168 World War II, 156 United Kingdom Air Force (Royal Air Force), 111 American Revolution and, 46 Army, 59, 87, 89, 94, 150, 243 Commonwealth, creation of, 97 decolonization, 137 Falklands conflict, 162, 182 French Revolution and, 48 intelligence services; Secret Intelligence Service (MI-6), 236; Security Service (MI-5), 219 Ireland and, 83, 97 Ministry of Defence, 243 Navy (Royal Navy); dominance of, 106; Grand Fleet, 86, 87; origins, 40 troubles (Northern Ireland), 150 War on Terror, 205, 216, 218, 219 World War I, 106 World War II, 117 United Nations (UN), 191 Charter, 113, 139, 142, 143, 170, 193, 262 General Assembly, 113, 154, 235 United Nations Security Council (UNSC), 113, 114, 117, 133, 154, 169, 192–194, 201, 203, 214, 227, 228, 235 resolutions, 114, 227 United States (US) Air Force, 126–128, 142, 145, 160, 162, 220, 222–223, 239 American Revolution, 47, 95 Army, 94, 110, 161, 215 Cold War, 124 Defense, Department of, 144, 145, 156, 188 Defense Information Systems Agency, 187

313

economic power, 93, 108 intelligence, 164 Joint Chiefs of Staff, 184 Navy, 61, 74, 90, 107, 190 Persian Gulf War and, 183, 184, 186 State, Department of, 226, 228 superpower status, 129, 168 tensions with, 190 Vietnam, and, 144, 145, 151 war on terror, 201 World War II, 117, 132, 136, 138, 201 United States, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 188, 231 Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, 220 See also Aircraft USSR, see Union of Soviet Socialist Republics V Vasca de Gama, 32 Vatis, Michael, 188, 208n23 Vegetius Renatus, 27, 50n36 Vienna, 37 siege of, 37 Viet Cong, 140, 144 Viet Minh, 141 Vietnam, 169 Democratic Republic of (North Vietnam), 140, 142, 144–146, 151, 153, 169 Republic of (South Vietnam), 141, 144, 146, 151, 153, 169 State of Vietnam, 176n70 Vietnam War, 137, 144, 145 airpower, 142 Tet offensive, 144 Vikings, 26, 30, 31 “Great Heathen Army,” 27 Vinland, 31

314 

INDEX

Violence athletes of, 18 double agents in, 198 force and, 1, 2, 5, 6, 15n12 non-violence and, 133 party rule and, 100 social order and, 1 systemic, 11, 13, 63–70, 100, 115, 147, 197, 199, 218, 246, 262, 271, 273n9 “Virtual borders,” 13, 223–229, 232 Vorobyev, Ilya, 184 VRYAN, 164 W Walker, Christopher, 260, 272n4 Wallis, John, 1, 3 Walsingham, Francis, 40, 41 War on Terror 9/11 attacks, 201 Afghanistan, 198, 201, 202, 228 debates over surveillance, 75 effects of, 142 internet in, 198 Warsaw Pact, 155, 156, 163, 165–167, 170 Warships, 23, 31, 39, 61, 62, 73, 81–83, 85–87, 106–108, 112, 239, 261 aircraft carriers, 106, 107, 215 battleships, 82, 83, 86, 87, 106, 107 carracks, 33, 34 galleasses, 39 ironclads, 61, 73 submarines; American, 74; U-boats, 84, 91 See also Individual ship names under Ships Washington, George, 46, 90, 128, 129, 133, 144, 164, 186, 190,

194, 195, 201, 217, 220, 229, 238–240, 243, 265 Weapons of mass destruction biological, 199 chemical, 199, 205, 215, 229, 244 nuclear, 11, 118, 128, 131, 156, 162, 199, 215, 234 terrorism and, 199 World War II, 156, 169 Weber, Max, x Weingast, Barry, 1, 3 Westphalia, Peace of, 68, 97, 195, 214 creation of, 44 international affairs and, 262 sovereignty and, 139, 151, 168 Whine, Michael, 199 Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 83 Wilson, Woodrow, 92, 176n76 “World Island,” 35 ideology and, 13 World Peace Council, 133 World Trade Center, 196–198, 200 bombing (1993), 196, 197 World War I, 11, 82–84, 90, 100, 103, 105, 115, 116, 134 aerial observation in, 88 armistice, 115 blockade of Germany, 91 central powers, 90 codebreaking in, 86–88, 91 colonial troops in, 104 communication in, 88, 105 Eastern Front, 83 economic aspects, 90 Entente Cordiale, 90 “modern system” in, 88–93 science in, 83 social mobilization in, 88 strategy, 115, 116 telephone in, 85 trench warfare, 82

 INDEX 

United States in, 90, 92–94 Western Front, 88, 115 See also Individual countries World War I origins, 97 World War II, 11, 105, 108, 114, 115, 117, 125, 128, 132, 134–136, 138, 140, 156, 158, 159, 169, 197, 201, 222, 244, 272, 273n9 allied Powers, 135 atomic weapons development, 169 Axis Powers, 108 bombing campaigns, 110, 112 codebreaking in, 159 Eastern Front, 106, 107, 110 economic aspects, 108 ideology and, 104 intelligence in, 107, 111, 112 origins, 117 polish campaign, 105 science in, 111 Second Front, 110 strategy, 11

315

sustainment and supplies, 108 “vengeance weapons,” 112 See also Individual countries World Wide Web, 187 X Xenophon, 19 Y Yanukovych, Victor, 234 Yeltsin, Boris, 192, 225 Yom Kippur War, 145 Young, John, 231 Yousef, Ramzi Ahmed, 197 Yugoslavia, 121n61, 189, 191–193 Kosovo Conflict, 192 Z Zacuto, Abraham, 32 Zarqawi, abu-Musab al, 216, 222 Zeppelins, see Aircraft