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War, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, “is the father of all things.” Over the centuries, the conflicts between states have indeed brought about all sorts of changes in societies and civilizations: cultural, economic and, not least, political. These changes, in turn, have enabled states to wage war with ever greater ferocity and efficacy. As Charles Tilly, the 20th-century social theorist, put it: “War made the state and the state made war.”
In “The Dark Path,” Williamson Murray traces the story of war making from the 16th century to the present day, registering, as his subtitle has it, “the structure of war and the rise of the West.” Murray, who died last year at the age of 81, was a professor emeritus at Ohio State University and an expert on modern military history. One of his earliest books, “Strategy for Defeat” (1983), took up the role of the Luftwaffe in World War II. He would go on to address a range of topics in more than a dozen books, including “The Air War in the Persian Gulf” (1995) and “Military Adaptation in War” (2011). Among much else, “The Dark Path” can be seen as the culmination of a lifetime of scholarly research and sustained study.
Murray says that, until 1500 or so, the West had no great claim to military superiority. For centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe was beset not by war as we understand the term but by “the meanderings of powerful tribes bent on loot, rapine, slaughter, and land.” It was only in the early modern period that there began a competition among “the ruthless and at times murderous states that made up the Western world.” It was this competition, Murray says, that drove the West forward, requiring constant innovation and adaptation. It was one reason why Asia and Africa—“the rest”—fell behind the West and, incidentally, why “The Dark Path” is so Western-centric.
The “gunpowder revolution,” Murray says, was a momentous event of the early modern period. Though invented in the East, gunpowder had only small-scale effects there. In Europe it spurred, Murray says, the invention of cannons that could bring down a castle wall in mere days. One response was to build fortifications that were low and designed to absorb artillery shots. Meanwhile, ships were being made with enough sturdiness to carry cannons “without suffering structural damage from the recoil.” The steady improvement of sailing vessels from the 15th to the 17th centuries “counts as a significant revolution in military affairs,” Murray writes. It was made possible, in part, by the emergence of state bureaucracies that could mobilize the resources for war—wood and metal, foundries and shipyards, and men.
The mobilizing of resources took a leap forward in the late 18th century, Murray argues, when the French revolutionaries instituted a levée en masse (a version of mass conscription). The state drew broadly from its ideologically enthused population and threw its recruits at the professional armies of the anciens régimes. Murray quotes Lazare Hoche, a general in the revolutionary army, describing French tactics: “no maneuvers, no skill, steel, firepower and patriotism.”
Another sort of revolution—an industrial one—would give Britain a superiority in military production and help to defeat post-Revolutionary France. Murray cites Viscount Castlereagh telling the House of Commons, in 1813, that Britain had shipped a million muskets to the Continent to support the war against Napoleon. One shipment alone, to Prussia in August, contained 2,000 barrels of powder and five million cartridges. All manner of technological feats lay behind such productivity—among them, harnessing the power of coal for manufacturing.
Murray sees the next stage in military evolution as a combination of the French Revolution’s mass mobilization and the Industrial Revolution’s mass production—mass warfare. The first striking instance is the American Civil War, but it can be seen, he says, in the German wars of unification throughout the 1860s and, most vividly, in World War I, when warring states were able to mobilize “vastly increased populations” and raise “unheard of sums of money.” Mass warfare went global with World War II.
The last revolution in Murray’s historical survey is something rather different—a stage of warfare dominated by precision weapons and computers and initially propelled by the necessities of a “war that never was”: the Cold War. Its effects were epochal all the same. To take one example, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), begun in the Cold War, fathered the internet and thus shaped the world we live in today.
Murray argues persuasively that, in the periods he is writing about, victory was decided largely not by tactical brilliance or maneuver but by attrition—the overwhelming effect of superior numbers (supplies, weapons, combatants). The Grand Alliance wore down Louis XIV during the War of the Spanish Succession; allied coalitions crushed Napoleon; the industrial North overpowered the poorer South in the Civil War; the Entente thwarted Imperial Germany during World War I; and the Allies pulverized Germany and Japan during World War II. The Soviet Union was unable to keep up with American defense spending during the Cold War. The losers sometimes demonstrated greater valor and skill but to no lasting effect.
Murray undoubtedly chronicles a story of epic achievement in “The Dark Path” but also one of waste: the waste of treasure, of effort and, above all, of life. The path was indeed dark. But he doesn’t think that war is pointless. His epigraph to a chapter on the Pacific War cites Clausewitz: “Kind-hearted people might come to think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed and might imagine that this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds it is a fallacy… . War is such a dangerous business that the mistakes which come from kindness are the worst.”
It should be said that the case being made by Murray is not new. It originated in the ancient world and has been a staple of modern historiography at least since the Prussian historian Otto Hintze (1861-1940). Murray duly acknowledges his debts, not least to the giants whose work preceded his, such as Geoffrey Parker in “The Military Revolution” (1988). His emphasis on attrition, as he again notes, builds on groundbreaking books by Phillips O’Brien and Adam Tooze.
As for his argument’s presentation, it is sometimes repetitious, and in the book’s first half the classic military narrative sits oddly with the overall theme. At times significant events, such as the Russian Revolution, are dealt with in a rushed way. There are also a few questionable assertions, most notably the idea that Hitler underestimated American industrial power when he declared war on the U.S. in December 1941. It was fear of U.S. strength that caused him to try to pre-empt what he believed to be America’s inevitable entry into the war.
There is a paradox at the heart of “The Dark Path.” Murray is aware of it but never quite resolves it. On the one hand, because war is essentially a matter of attrition, in which the stronger side eventually wins, a war’s outcome should be in some way predictable. On the other hand, as Clausewitz said, there is always “friction” in war: Things do not go as expected. The U.S. failed in Afghanistan, for instance—and Russia failed to win a quick victory in Ukraine—despite enjoying resource superiority. This tension between friction and attrition is the real key to war, which leads us down dark paths whose destination is uncertain.
Mr. Simms is the author of “Hitler: A Global Biography.”
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