Customer Reviews

A History of Warfare

5 star:		(40)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

The book deserves a place among Keegan's other classics, "The Face of Battle" and "The Mask of Command". He has proved once again that he is the preeminent military historian in the world today, perhaps of all time. Because of the book's daunting scope--covering warfare from prehistoric times to the nuclear age--it is not overly specific. However, Keegan weaves the story of war with the story of human civilization very nicely, and proves that for most of our history, war has been our primary occupation. He denounce's Clauswitz' theory that war is merely the continuation of politics by showing it is something much more basic. War, according to Keegan is cultural. Wars may be fought for political reasons he says, but the driving force behind them is a nation's/people's culture.

If you do not believe in this theory or are just a big fan of Clauswitz, this book is still a fascinating read because it connects the whole history of war in one relatively slim volume. This is a rare accomplishment, and it provides and excellent base of study for any time period of history.

As for presentation, the book is divided into four main parts with interludes between them, discussing the major advances in military technology. Titled Stone, Flesh, Iron, and Fire, he mainly discusses the advance of weapons from bronze, to iron, to gunpowder, the rise and fall of the horse, and the institution of national armies as major turning points. The book can drag at some points, but on the whole is a quick read, though you may want to read some parts twice just because there is a lot of information here. In short this is a must own for any history buff!

Like the best of Keegan's books, A History of Warfare starts with an overarching theme (Clausewitz's assertion that war is politics by another means) and then proceeds to frame his description of warfare from pre-history to present day. Those that see this book merely as a defutation of Clausewitz ignore the meat of the book, which is a smooth and lucid description of (past and current) methods and philosophy of warmaking.

Most interesting is probably the notion that the western (originally Greco-Roman) ideal of decisive battle is an abberation. In fact, natural (primitive) war involves many safeguards and rituals to prevent high casualties. That is not to say that conquest is not possible in primitive war - Aztecs, Monguls, and Turks all managed to set themselves up as permanent rulers in conquered lands. However, casualties are light and there is no shame in retreat in this type of warfare. Keegan then proceeds over ground well-travelled by military historians - how the evolution of European power has led to Western military hegemony since the 17th century. For my money, Hanson's Carnage and Culture (from which Keegan quotes) is a more interesting and provocative read, but Keegan is convincing and fresh in his slant on the same topic.

The only negative aspect of the book, for me, is the theme - that of debunking Clausewitzian theory. It seems to me that, in fact, Keegan has proven (not disproven, as he claims) that Clausewitz's basic assertion, "War is politics by other means" is true. It feels like Keegan is bending the definitions of war and politics to serve his philosophy, and that a Clausewitz apologist could fudge definitions of war and politics to re-prove Clausewitz's assertions. For example, is not the Aztec method of warfare - emphasising the capture of prisoners to be later used in ritual sacrifice - entirely consistent with advancing their theological political system, which requires pacifying their gods with such sacrifices? Granted, Keegan does use many more examples and details to show that warfare is only Clausewitzian if the people prosecuting the war (i.e. WWI) believe it. Natural warfare is not, and warfare in the age of nuclear weapons cannot be if human civilisation is to survive.

This is probably a polarizing work of military history. Either you will love or hate it. I applaud the author for his unique "chronology" of warfare, but his emphasis on themes and interrupting interludes (mini-chapters between main sections) breaks up all continuity. The themes also of necessity overlap each other, but he fails to draw the connections, the threads of continuity if you like.

What really devalues the work is this: the author engages in a philosophical/anthropological/social scientific debate with Clausewitz's sentence that war is the continuation of politics (he leaves out the rest of the statement, "by other means"). In fact, the author goes so far afield in his argument for "culture of war" as opposed to "nature of war" the reader is left wondering what all the fuss is about. Are not culture and politics two sides of the same coin? If not, then they certainly are members of the same currency. No one has proven that stateless societies lack "polity" though some have tried. Whenever two are gathered, someone gains "something" over the other. That is political.

Besides the failure to fully define terms such as culture, politics, warfare, he also misrepresents arguments and ignores the fact that Clausewitz's _On War_ was never completed by the author. All must recognize that he was in the process of revising and rewriting when he died. So, to avoid falling into the same trap the author did, I will leave the gallant Prussian and move on to my other objections.

There are some errors of interpretation (understandable) and fact (less so). The atomic bomb was NOT designed to end wars without commitment of manpower on the battlefield as the author contends. The A-bomb was another weapon, which potentiality we only discovered after its use. Not until a decade later did nuclear weaponry come to take its place first among equals in military establishments, at least in the U.S.

I believe that there will never be a world without conflict, hence never a world without war. The author has been on this theme at least from _The Face of Battle_. So I wish he'd give it up.

One last foray into politics: modern day peacemaking and peacekeeping IS political, not humanitarian. President Clinton did not commit U.S. forces to combat in Somalia, Kosovo, and other numerous noncombat situation for humanitarian reasons (though the liberal media would like you to think so). It was politics, domestic politics perhaps, but politics none the less.

Finally, there is a subtle realism about page 250 that the author is running out of space, but that chronologically he is still not past the fall of Rome. The themeatic pace heats up and the reader is shuffled through 1500 years of warfare with an unsatisfying feeling of free fall. In these last pages we learn, incorrectly, that the Vietnames notion of "protracted warfare" only started in 1948 after Mao's victory; that the Chinese Civil War was from 1948-1950 (irreconcilable with the previous statement); that U.S. Marines were responsible for the victories at Iwo Jima (understandable given the Mt Suribachi propaganda) and Okinawa (less so. Army and Navy forces all contributed their share to the victory); and giving Guderian credit as the father of German panzer forces rather than a father. Given these factual errors, the author fails to attach further significance to warfare in the gunpowder age that includes guerilla, terrorist, ethnic hatred/revenge, armored, and air. Only the specter of the nuclear bomb continues to shadow us.

So the book ends leaving the reader wondering what it was all about. If you want an anthropoligical or social scientific survey of why primitive man took up weapons and continues to do so today, this is your book. If you want a History of Warfare, keep looking.

Having finished my fourth reading of this outstanding book, I am again in awe of Keegan, who not only tackles a daunting subject --- nothing less than the entire history of armed conflict, from the dim mists of prehistory to the recent strife in the Balkans --- but manages to put it all into an impressively brief, insightful and readable narrative. Keegan does not debunk Clausewitz; rather, he shows him to have been a product of his age, his class and his nation, and his writings to have been suited to the post-Napoleonic era, but potentially disastrous in the Nuclear Age. (If international success is the same as military success today, than how can Saddam Hussein still be the leader of Iraq?) By approaching warfare as social and cultural anthropology (rather than from the far more narrow --- not to say blindered --- perspective of military theory alone), Keegan is able to show how each society's expression of warfare is both unique and has ramifications and consequences for all other societies, especially including our own. Buy and read this book. You'll be glad you did.

Most of the negative commentary you will see by customers revolves around Keegan's blasting of Clausewitz.

Because there are a lot of Clausewitz fans who don't take kindly to the criticism.

What is really the case, however, is that Keegan is merely [mis]reading Clausewitz in much the same manner that ultra-rationalist military commanders of all stripes have [mis]read Clausewitz for far too many decades. The only thing Keegan does differently, after [mis]interpreting Clausewitz in much the same manner, is to then shows how fallacious the logic is.

It is true that Clausewitz included many qualifying phrases, and Keegan somewhat conveniently overlooks them. But the fact that Keegan overlooks them is a mere reflection on how so many military commanders also overlooked them, and I can hardly blame Keegan for the same mistaken intrepretations *MORE THAN* I blame all those military thinkers who were too quick to cut to the chase scene on Clausewitz's meaning.

And all of that is but a small portion of the book.

If you overlook that part, the book is absolutely fantastic, a completely riveting read. Keegan uses the rest of the book to illustrate historic examples that refute the ultra-rationalist approach, and then builds an alternate approach to undertsanding the nature and sources of warfare.

But if you find yourself really annoyed by Keegan's attack on Clausewitz, because you think the attack is richly undeserved, then you won't be able to get out of the starting gate. You'll detest the misintrepretation, and perhaps that will be enough to ruin the rest of the book for you.

Which is really too bad because, at its core, Keegan's book is an utterly fantastic tour through a history of warfare.

I would go on, but read some of the other comments for a more substantive review of the book's contents. My purpose was merely to clarify the source from which most of the negative reviews came.

Have you read Carl von Clausewitzs' "On War" and if so do you think it is THE classical text on warfare? If yes, you may want to skip the first 60 pages of Keegan's book which repudiates Clausewitzs' theory that 'war is the continuation of policy by other means.' 'A History of Warfare' has a unique approach - sweeping the subject up into 4 'themes' -stone, flesh, iron and fire- each covering a specific period or method of warfare. In between are 'interludes' on specific subjects - I found the one on fortification to be very interesting. Although encyclopedic in terms of scope and period covered, it is not a dry book. It is actually very easy to read and serves as a good introduction to military history. The book dives deeply into the cultural, and social factors behind war. Only where Keegan ventures into Philosophy in the first interlude 'war in human history' does he slip a little.

Few books in the market provide a better general overview of the history of warfare since the dawn of war-making. In this ambitious piece of work, Keegan ranges effortlessly across epochs and continents to tell the story of more than four millennia of world history. If all this sounds a little daunting, the book is written in an accessible style that constantly engages the reader and ensures that you'd probably not need to go over a paragraph twice.

One of the great strengths of the book is its thematic layout. What might have been a long and humdrum narrative is enlivened by intelligent chapter divisions that deal with the different `ages' in warfare according to specific themes. This breaks the account into more manageable portions. The overall structure and coherence of the narrative is always preserved.

Keegan offers something more for the informed reader through the inroads he makes into military philosophy. Notably, he highlights the limitations of Clausewitz's `war is merely a continuation of politics' by demonstrating the intimate connections between war-making and culture.

This book is a must-read for any military history enthusiast, or anyone else interested in a first taste of this genre.

A refreshing insight! It is a frequent criticism of history books that they focus too much on the history of war; but like it or not, our world has largely been shaped by war. As an avid reader of global history, it was enlightening to find a book that does so much to explain the forces behind the conflicts we so often read about. For example, I have often read about the countless steppe peoples who time after time ravaged everyone from China to India to Europe; but normally it is simply recorded that such-and-such happened without there being any given reasons. The explanation that the Mongols became so powerful simply because their tribes were consolidated under one determined and ruthless leader ignores the fact that they were conquering similarly united and powerful peoples. What gave these steppe people the edge, therefore?

In 'A History of Warfare' Keegan postulates less on what happened, and more on why and how it happened. To continue my example, I now have an appreciation of what it was that gave these steppe peoples an advantage over many millennia, from their skills as herders and hunters, to their hardened attitude and approach towards battle. Keegan's work is not meant to be a step-by-step account of any war in particular. (The two world wars of the 20th century receive only sporadic coverage, and never with the same attention to the chain of events as can be expected in other histories.) Rather, it offers an explanation as to how our attitudes and technology were shaped towards such a climax in the first place. Thus, Keegan's history focuses thoroughly on his chosen thesis with a refreshing perspective that must ultimately complement any arm-chair historian's book collection. Such details and explanations are outside the scope of most history books, and so I was thrilled when 'A History of Warfare' gave me the deeper considerations that I was looking for. The book was also clear and very well-written, and it made for a highly compulsive read that I would recommend to anyone.

I like this book because it is comprehensive and wide-ranging in coverage, especially on warfare in the West. I don't always agree with Keegan, however. On one point, for example, Hitler, I disagree. Keegan thinks Hitler is unique in history, for three reasons: he used wars for political means, he believed in the warrior class superiority, and he was obsessed with technology. This combination was unprecedented in any individual in history, Keegan argues, and it made Hitler so dangerous.

The truth is, Hitler merely echoed Frederick the Great and Bismarck in the first two mentioned attributes. As for his obsession with technology, it was precisely Hitler's poor imagination and ignorance about science which prevented Germany, the world's leader in theoretical physics at that time, from developing the atomic bomb. He placed little faith in atomic physics, because in his limited mind this is associated with "Jewish physics." His interest in technical innovations in weaponry was neutralized by his impatience, his demand for instant results. Americans took four years to make the bomb, and even that would have been too long for Hitler. (Of course, given Germany's far more limited resources, they would have taken much longer even if maximum effort had been made - which wasn't, thanks to Hitler.) I'm not impressed by this so-called unique combination in Hitler. In his ruthlessness to civilians he merely resembles ancient tyrants; in his lack of restraints, he recalls Napoleon. Hitler was an orator, but so were many others, including FDR and Churchill. He had charisma, but that's hardly unique - Mussolini also had charisma.

Hitler was only so dangerous and so destructive because he led a highly organized and highly industrial state, not because there was anything special about Hitler. Had Russia started World War II, Keegan would probably have said the same thing about Stalin. Germany's destructive potential, not Hitler's, made the difference. I believe the great man theory of history, popularized by Carlyle, is at least half true. So Hitler's personality counted for a lot. But so do the personalities of many other war lords. As I scan the pages of history from prehistoric times in both the East and the West, I fail to see Hitler as extraordinary. He was a mediocrity with a few very eccentric traits, that's all.

I need hardly add that this so-called unique combination - warrior ethics, technology obsession, war and politics as two sides of the same coin - was the very secret to the Mongols' success. Genghis Khan and his successors lived and died by conquests, so the distinction between war and politics was not something they could have understood. As for the warrior class superiority, the entire Mongol society was one warrior class who treated sedentary subjects like the Chinese with contempt. And the Mongols certainly were quick to adopt new technologies: they used Chinese engineers when besieging Middle Eastern fortresses, and they picked up what they learned fighting in Arabia and applied it to their conquest of China. So there is really nothing new about Hitler. Rather than being the first conqueror who combined these three characteristics, Hitler was actually the last. That he was no doubt the most destructive of them is due to modern science and technology, not to the man himself. Hitler could have been far more dangerous than he was had he not been so stupid.

This is not the only point on which I find myself in disagreement with Keegan, but it so galls me that I feel I must put him right.

A lot has been made of John Keegan's head-on attack on Clausewitz in this book, but in the end, whether or not you agree with Keegan's arguments (I don't entirely), A History of Warfare is one of the best and most comprehensive books on war that has ever been written.

Keegan begins his book with the bold assertion that Clausewitz is wrong in arguing that "war is the continuation of policy by other means." His argument is that Clausewitz, living the highly politicized era of the Napoleonic Wars, could only understand one kind of warfare, that of his own era, which was built entirely around the idea that warfare could and should achieve political ends. Keegan uses his argument against Clausewitz as the jumping-off point into his history.

In the first large section, "Stone," Keegan first looks at primitive societies and points out distinguishing features of primitive warfare--especially ritualized combat and the "tentative" nature of engagements. In "Flesh," Keegan discusses the domestication of the horse, the creation of the chariot, and the rise of nomadic horse peoples, many of whom, like the Mongols and Huns, had crack cavalry. "Iron" discusses the transition from bronze to iron weaponry and the development of military societies from the classical Greeks, through the Romans, to the Middle Ages. And finally, "Fire" continues the history with the introduction of gunpowder weapons and the evolution from medieval to modern combat.

Between each of these sections is an "interlude," in which Keegan describes special problems he doesn't directly address in the longer chapters. Among them are the concepts of standing armies, fortifications, and logistics.

"Iron" was probably my favorite section overall, dealing as it did with Greco-Roman and Medieval combat, which are my specialties. For me, this represented the real meat of the history, since much of the material on primitive warfare in "Stone" is based on anthropology and guesswork. And as I said, even though the entire history is built around an argument against Clausewitz's notion of warfare as "the continuation of policy," Keegan only really argues his main points at the beginning and end, and whether or not you accept his contention, the rest of the history is outstanding.

Highly recommended.