Some Reflections on the Future of War

Naval War College Review, Autumn, 2000 by Martin van Creveld

THE RISE OF INTRASTATE WAR

While the proliferation of nuclear weapons appeared to put an end to major war between major states, war as such not only did not disappear but began to be supplemented by a different kind of armed conflict, one that, as these lines are being written early in 2000, has already to a large extent replaced the old.

Perhaps the best way to approach the problem is this. From the middle of the seventeenth century until 1914, the armed forces of "civilized" governments--primarily those of Europe, but later North American and Japanese ones as well--were more than a match for whatever could be put up against them by either societies of their own kind or others in different parts of the globe. Over time this advantage tended to grow; the greatest discrepancy was probably reached toward the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. Thus, the "scramble for Africa" engaged only a few thousand Europeans; at Omdurman in 1896, a handful of Maxim guns enabled the British to wipe out entire columns of dervishes as if by magic.

During the years 1918-39, the difficulties that the various European powers experienced in trying to hold on to the various colonial empires increased appreciably. In some places, such as the Sahara, it took years and tens of thousands of troops to put an end to uprisings; in others the imperialists were compelled to forge alliances with local elites, which were then co-opted into the lower echelons of government. Frequently the Europeans hid behind a variety of treaties that conceded the appearance of power while preserving the reality; that was the case throughout the Middle East and also, to a growing extent, in India. Still, while the direction of change was quite clear, its extent should not be exaggerated. When World War II broke out in 1939, not a single Asian or African country had yet rid itself of its real masters--in other words, troops that were either white or organized and run by whites.

In the event, perhaps the first to find out that the nature of war had begun to change were the Germans. During the last years of the nineteenth century the Germans had participated in the scramble for Africa, gaining territories and holding them by means that were as ferocious as those employed by anybody else. Having lost their empire in the wake of World War I, during World War II they found renewed occasion to show their prowess in counterinsurgency campaigns. Beginning already in 1941, and steadily more so thereafter, the German occupations of Yugoslavia and Russia in particular were so ruthless as to resemble genocide; yet even these methods did not lead to peace and quiet. On the contrary, the greater the atrocities the occupiers committed, the fiercer, by and large, the resistance they encountered. Some countries and some populations were slower off the mark than others, but resistance spread to virtually every nation that was held by the Germans; by the second half of 1944, much of occupied Europe w as ablaze.