Customer Reviews

Children at War

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This book talks about the active recruitment of children in many areas of the world today. He covers how they are recruited, abducted or conscripted, trained and finally set off to fight in whatever hot spot is active at the moment.

The one surprising thing about this book is that it treats this as a new problem. War has always been a young persons game. To read the biographies of woldiers of World War II, a surprising number lied about their age to join the army at fifteen or sixteen years of age. In the American Civil War around 100,000 soldiers were fifteen or younger. A surprising, but unknown number were under ten. The pictures of the end of the Third Reich show young boys greeting Hitler. The first American killed in Afghanistan was shot by a 14 year old sniper.

On the other hand, by bringing attention to the fact that our Army will have to face children in the battlefield Dr. Singer may help prepare our forces and our public for the real world.

The face of warfare has changed dramatically in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In the first years of the new millennium, we rarely find state-led armies clashing across the boarders of sovereign nations. Rather, most wars occur within the boarders of an autonomous state. Civil and guerrilla conflicts have replaced the international and colonial wars of the recent past. All too often, the armies fueling these new internal struggles for power are composed of children.

Dr. Singer has created an excellent and through study of the new phenomenon of children at war. Singer looks at the variety of ways that child soldiers are recruited across cultural and political arenas, the perceived benefits of child soldiers to their political patrons, and the long-term repercussions of inundating the world's children in to an existence based upon violence and death.

Singer's work is based upon personal interviews with child soldiers, adults involved in the raging conflicts, as well as international aid agencies, the UN and others closely involved in the "new warfare." Such a work is an invaluable contribution to the emerging cannon on the changing face of warfare. Only with such studies will the world begin to see the problems of children at war, but also begin to create solutions.

As far as I know, Singer is the first to point out that child warriors are making possible a new kind of war, a war without ideology or purpose other than taking something someone else has. Adults fight better with a cause and a purpose--children are more easily drugged, brainwashed, and cut off from other support. They can also be far crueler in battle and harder to rehabilitate. Singer points to responses to lessen the problem, but she is far from optimistic.

This is a welcome follow-up to the author's previous work "Corporate Warriors." While each book highlights an emerging and disturbing trend in modern warfare, the practices described in "Children at War" are particularly horrific. Training children as young as 12 to kill without mercy and to be used as cannon fodder to shield adult soldiers sounds like some crazy vision of a dark future. Singer, however, builds a strong case that this dark future is here. It would be easy to blame this on one or two sadistic tyrants, but Singer shows how a confluence of global factors have led to this situation. What to do with these children when the fighting ends, or when they are rescued from a war zone is a challenge that the global community is just beginning to recognize. While the author does what he can to recommend a solution to this problem, there are no obvious solutions. This may not win an award for "Feel Good Book of the Year," but it should be a contender for "Most Important Book of the Year."

It's a great that another book has been written on this deeply troubling yet narrowly recognized problem in today's world affairs.

The author presents the problem, traces its roots, lists a wealth of examples and statistics, discusses the causes and effects, and proposes solutions while recognizing the difficulties.

I hope policy-makers would read this book and recognize the grave consequences that this salient problem would entail if it is not dealt with quickly and effectively.

Back in the mid-1990s I spent many months reporting on child soldiers in places including Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. I wrote from the immediacy of a journalist's perspective, but was unable to examine the cause-and-effect realities of this disturbing phenomenon. In "Children at War" P. W. Singer has produced a truly important study of the socio-cultural, economic and historic causes behind the militarization of children in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Singer's work is an incredibly valuable contribution to further the study and understanding of armed conflict in the post Cold War-era. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the welfare of children and the state of our world in often-neglected locations such as sub-Saharan Africa. It is also an insightful look at how "warlordism" and the greed driving so-called commodity wars is changing the face of modern armed conflict.

War is so terrible that sociopathic leaders in some parts of the world use child soldiers, ages 12 - 18, to fight their wars. This book tells the terrible story. This is not a new problem. Even in the American Civil War about 100,000 soldiers were age 15 or youngr. Many parts of this book are shocking as it explains the recruitment, training, and discipline of these young children as they are developed into brutal soldiers at the same time that they are robbed of their childhood.

Reading through the other reviews here it struck me that they seemed to share a lack of prior knowledge about the subject. Had anyone read more widely they would have discovered that 'Children at War' is a piece of pseudo-scholarship. This book is based upon a completely misguided assumption - that the involvement of children in warfare is a new phenomenon. In making such an assertion the author reveals either lack of any proper engagement with the literature or simply bad faith. The sad fact is that children have been involved as solidiers in many, if not most, of the wars recorded in history. In spite of Singer's erroneous claims to the contrary, the US Civil War involved large numbers of boy soldiers. Similarly the First World War. Children fought and died with the partisans in Nazi-occupied Europe, and so on. Towards the end of the book, Singer reveals a disturbing political agenda. It seems that his real concern is less with child soldiers and more with the challenges for US troops faced with children in places like Afghanistan and Iraq where killing them is bad for morale and also looks so bad to the folks back home watching CNN.
In terms of sources, Singer relies overwhelmingly on journalistic accounts that are simply intended to offer shock value to their readers and, like his own book, lack any deeper engagement with the history and context within which child recruitment takes place. Aside from one quote, none of the copious quotes from child soldiers seems to have come from Singer's one fieldwork. Indeed, the reader is left wondering if Singer has ever actually visited a setting where child recruitment takes place.
This is a work of truly poor scholarship. It is a mystery how it ever got published and why so many people have been apparently taken in by it. Perhaps it is a case of telling people what they want to hear?
If anyone is looking for a proper discussion of this subject they would do far better to read David Rosen's 'Armies of the Young'.

The Author writes about a chilling new chapter in post-modern warfare. It is a very objective and scholarly work that covers in comprehensive detail the underlying causes, recruitment, implications and response to "Child Soldiers". The author calls this a "new Doctrine" and not only covers the problems, techniques, tactics and procedures; but, also offers lessons learned and suggestions for countering this new dimension of warfare.
As a doctrine developer and trainer to the new Afghan National Army, I found this book extremely valuable. Despite the fact that you may get either emotional or angry at the author for how he conveys his message in select chapters, I strongly recommend that you purchase this book. If you are preparing to deploy to OIF or OEF, Buy this book and struggle through the entire book. In some cases you may feel like skipping chapters or even throwing it away, Dont do either. Read for Understanding

Terry Tucker,Adjunct Prof Military Studies/History
Trainer and Doctrine Developer to the Afghan National Army
Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan

Leadership in war by children (i.e. God's Army/Tailand/led by twelve year old twins) overturns basic concepts in warfare "Over time, children gain combat skills and become shockingly efficient fighters--" (p. 87) Children bind to their groups. They disconnect from their old lives. War is exciting. The process is psychological. Children persist for friends. Fear is a major bond in war Ritual accompanies it. The book is in thorough and scholarly detail. What can be done? Governments could make more effort. They could disarm, demobilize and reintegrate. They could rehabilitate. However, child soldiers are on the rise. Guns are cheap. Lives are cheap for them. The future, unfortunately, means more child warriors not less. Eric J. Lindblom PhD Harvard