Pyat writes about the purpose of war

[pyat]

The traditional assumed purpose of a war is territorial gain. The truth is that war is more commonly a tool of political coercion. Any actual conquest of territory is often temporary, and even undesirable. War is a stick used to convince another country to act in alignment with the views of your own country, and less often useful as a tool of conquest or liberation.

Actually conquering and holding a territory is troublesome and costly. In the modern world, wholesale genocide or cultural assimilation is not even considered (at least openly) by the most militarily advanced states, and as such real conquest may even be impossible in any practical sense.

Even in the earliest days of organized warfare, wars were relatively seldom undertaken to physically expand a kingdom. They were fought to gain promises of tribute, to force an alliance, or simply to cart away as much portable wealth as possible. How many times was Israel invaded in the Old Testament? In almost every case, the conquers marched in, took some slaves and gold, burned things… and marched right back out again, leaving the tribes of Israel to blame their lack of faith in Jehovah for the conquest.

Of courses, the tribes themselves were an exception, given their conquest of the Holy Land, though this was not so much a war an active attempt to displace the resident culture through genocide. Sunday schools usually gloss over this. For example, whenever I heard about the fall of Jericho, it generally ended with the magical collapse of the walls. I was in my 20s before I actually read the description of the invasion of Jericho –

“And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword… And they burnt the city with fire, and all that was therein: only the silver, and the gold, and the vessels of brass and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD.”

Kill them all and take their stuff! Who says the Bible is boring? Uh… anyway, I suspect there’s an entirely different essay in that topic.

My point is that people seem persist in the idea that the purpose of a war is the physical conquest and occupation of another nation. For example, during the Cold War there was a perception that the Soviets were on the brink of invading and conquering Europe. In the U.S., the public were sometimes presented with scenarios in which the Soviets actually invaded (or attempted to invade) the continental United States. While there may have been a real danger of Europe being invaded if relations had deteriorated to that point, a Soviet invasion on mainland America was very a nearly a physical impossibility. The Red Guard was never going to march down main street in Iowa, no matter what they say in Red Dawn.

Comments

[iridium-wolf.livejournal.com]

Well, except for World War II, which for Germany was all about territorial expansion. Lebensarum, or what ever 'living space' is.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Well, there are a lot of other examples, too. The whole history of imperialism, for example. But I think those are just the most visible examples.

[nottheterritory.livejournal.com]

The seeming contradiction is easy to resolve by referring to good ol' Uncle Clausewitz - "war is the continuation of political intercourse by other means" (or variations thereof). Sometimes the capture of territory is a piece of that political intercourse but very often not.

To go into it more detail, I think of the rational purpose of war being the ability to set policy (or at least set certain policies) within a sphere of influence. Sometimes the only way to do that is to actually move your own soldiers into an area, kill the enemy's soldiers and partisans and then establish yourself as the possessor of a monopoly on organized violence and so enforce polic(e)y by literally becoming police. That was essentially how the Nazis wanted to establish their Lebensraum.

Quite often since the mass armies of the post-enligthenment era, the intention was to occupy territory which one could then trade for concessions in the peace treaty that would set the policy in the sphere you were discussing - Japan's intention in the Pacific Theatre of WWII was to capture a whole lot of territory with the idea that they could then bargain away 50-90% in return for being allowed to keep a few plums - since at now time did they really believe they could defeat the US in a protracted war.

Finally territorial conquest can serve a purely tactical concern unrelated to the policy the government was interested in: the Soviet plan through most of the cold war was to insure that they would not experience the devastation of a major war fought on their soil again - so they would try and conquer Western Europe not out of any particular interest in setting policy in Western Europe but rather to push the front as far away from Soviet soil as possible. Of course they also said they would nuke everything in sight at the first provocation, so it was kind of a back up plan at best.

But of course Clauswitz, like any good Enlightenment philosopher, is assuming people act rationally and all too often war lacks even that basic clarity of purpose - lots of wars are fought, or at least continued long past any rational point, essentially based on cultural delusion, self-aggrandizement and just plain mean-ness - World War I, I'm looking in your direction.

And I certainly agree with Pyat that before the Reformation certainly (and possibly not even until Napoleon) war for conquest was a rarity almost to the point of lacking a meaningful existence. Lots of wars were fought intending to prosecute one person or one elite's claim to policy-setting power in a territory (100 years war, for instance) but the idea that one power would literally march people into another power's territory and have those same soldiers sit there and tell the conquered what to do (would truly occupy them) was a fairly peculiar mania. Obvious exceptions like Alexander and the Romans actually go a long way to explaining why that should be so, since in both cases they downloaded as much of the actual governance of territories as they could.

I realize, Pyat, that you probably weren't pitching this at people who read Clauswitz, but the question of how and why wars are fought is, I think a really interesting one and reveals much about human history, since it ties deeply to the whole question of why people do what governments tell them to do at all. If I could afford to go back to school for post-grad work, I would never stop writing about this aspect of history.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

I was pretty sure this post would attract your commentary.

At this point I have to ask if you have any Clauswitz I can borrow, because aside from making noises about "elan and not tactics!" I've never actually read Clauswitz.

[nottheterritory.livejournal.com]

Well I'm pretty sure Clausewitz only really wrote one book, he just wrote it for years on end and... truth be told... I've never read the whole thing either. (I do own it though, and you're welcome to borrow it if you like)

The thing is, in fact, most commentaries I've read have said that it's only the core parts of it, the first few chapters, that are still really meaningful. That's the high level stuff. The rest of it is largely only useful if you really need to command an 1823 army sometime soon.

Also, I'm pretty sure Clausewitz wasn't in the 'elan not tactics' school - Clausewitz is, I think, often seen as a reaction to the romanticism of Napoleonic notions of war. He wasn't Machiavelli, but ultimately he was pretty cynical - he believed that total war was the only rational approach to warfare.

[postrodent.livejournal.com]

That's why people keep making videogames set in WW2. It's The Uncomplicated War. I mean, if you ignore inconveniences like the internment of Japanese in North America, and the complicity of the American business class in the rearmament of Germany.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Or all the civilian bombing by the Allies!

[postrodent.livejournal.com]

Yeah, right after I clicked Post I thought, "...and Dresden, let's not forget Dresden". :>

[iridium-wolf.livejournal.com]

Not to mention the firebombing of nearly every urban square mile of Japan.

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

World War II might also be a good justification for Europe being worried about the USSR. After all, as just mentioned, WWII was territorial in nature. Even if that's not the usual purpose, they had just been exposed to one, so could have had it on the brain.

Why the US was/were so worried is anyone's guess.

[paka.livejournal.com]

The OT stuff. There's a lot of evidence suggesting no big cultural change. If there wasn't some weird genocide, then that just fits into a lot of other biblical stuff, where existing traditions were being purposefully recorded as basically Solomonic propaganda. (Eg; "Israel has only one god - and it's the god of the royal house! So stop worshipping El, darnit!")

I don't think there ever was a threat of Soviet invasion. I think Stalin is actually on record as saying that he never thought any sort of military showdown with the west would happen. I actually think Soviet thinking was a lot like ours - poke here, poke there, and gradually American influence will crumble. I think they were a lot more interested in keeping other Warsaw Pact countries in line and were a bit paranoid about protecting themselves from invasion (heck, western nations did invade the USSR in 1919. And there was a lot of noise about attacking them immediately after WWII.) So yeah. Reagan era hoo-ah! paranoid bullshit. Sort of like the way clearly Iraq wanted to directly attack the USA... some things don't change eh?

One of the big exceptions is the Chinese buildup to attacking Taiwan after their civil war, and you can see that they weren't all that attached to the idea. Even then I think that was more intended primarily as a "destroy Nationalist military power" rather than "take and hold Taiwan."

[pyat.livejournal.com]

The OT stuff. There's a lot of evidence suggesting no big cultural change. If there wasn't some weird genocide, then that just fits into a lot of other biblical stuff, where existing traditions were being purposefully recorded as basically Solomonic propaganda. (Eg; "Israel has only one god - and it's the god of the royal house! So stop worshipping El, darnit!")

Well, at the very least they sure enjoyed burning cities to the ground, or telling everyone they had. But, yeah... they weren't as efficient at that sort of thing as we are, so even if they were salting the earth and setting fire to everything, there were bound to be refugees.

Even then I think that was more intended primarily as a "destroy Nationalist military power" rather than "take and hold Taiwan."

And I think right now their policy is definitely one of using the threat of war as a political tool. Though I'm sure some of the more hawkish members of the government would happily invade.

[normanrafferty.livejournal.com]

"War occurs when one side greatly over-estimates its chances of winning or decides to commit suicide. Many wars begin as the former and end as the latter."

-- David Drake, author of Hammer's Slammers, et al.

For a counterpoint, see The Mouse That Roared.

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

War is a Racket.

Or at least the (then) most highly decorated US marine, retired Major General Smedley Butler thought so in this brilliant essay on the rise of the US Military-Industrial complex written close to 75 years ago.

http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm

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