The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World [DECKLE EDGE] (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Eliot A. Cohen

The British military is smaller than the U.S. Marine Corps; the British defense budget costs less than the Pentagon's research and development budget. But when, a year ago, an outraged British brigadier wrote a slashing (and according to some American officers, deeply unfair) critique of the U.S. Army's conduct of the Iraq War, attacking everything from its jargon to its general officer culture, something remarkable happened. The U.S. Army published the piece in its premier tactical journal, Military Review, and the Army's chief of staff passed the article around to our general officers.

The reason is that, with all of its limits, the British Army -- as ever, underfunded by a treasury more interested in welfare than warfare, underappreciated by a society whose representatives rarely visit wounded soldiers (some parked in geriatric wards) and overstretched by a cabinet and prime minister liberal in commitments and stingy with resources -- remains an extraordinary outfit. It has (in my experience, at least) a higher quotient of sophisticated leaders who have thought hard about the profession of arms and are more intellectually equipped to hold their own with civilian leaders than most militaries -- including, quite possibly, our own. Its soldiers have been engaged in operations at a pace that, until recently, exceeded that of the United States because it is a smaller and more frequently deployed force. Why, it even produces generals who write books -- serious, important books.

One such officer is Gen. Rupert Smith, who spent 40 years in the service, beginning in the sunset days of the British Empire in 1962 and concluding as the deputy supreme allied commander in Europe. He led the British armored division in the 1991 Gulf War, commanded the U.N. peacekeeping force in Bosnia in 1995 and spent many years in Northern Ireland. In each of these posts, he performed superbly -- an important point because the more remote Americans become from military life, the more they forget that not all generals are created equal.

The Utility of Force emerges from his experience and reflections. The nub of the argument lies in the final third of the book, after an extensive analysis of the modern system of war, which he dates to Napoleon and explores competently, though not particularly remarkably. But then, in a series of sharp blows, he describes the new model of war:

"The ends for which we fight are changing from the hard objectives that decide a political outcome to those of establishing conditions in which the outcome may be decided."

"We fight amongst the people, not on the battlefield."

"Our conflicts tend to be timeless, even unending."

"We fight so as to preserve the force rather than risking all to gain the objective."

"On each occasion new uses are found for old weapons and organizations which are the products of industrial war."

"The sides are mostly non-state, comprising some form of multinational grouping against some non-state party or parties."

The rest of the book explains and develops these themes, drawing largely on his own experience in Northern Ireland, the former Yugoslavia and the Middle East. But the larger argument is one of central concern to the United States -- indeed, to all developed nations.

If Smith is right, the U.S. military still has a long way to go in adapting to the world in which it finds itself. On the walls in our war colleges still hang the portraits of Grant and Lee, the paintings of the Leyte Gulf and the massed bomber formations over the skies of Germany in 1944. In our curricula are Chancellorsville and Inchon. But these, Smith believes, are not only the wars of the past -- they are the wars of a different era of conflict, and he has written his book to explore the patterns of new kinds of struggle.

The Israelis got a taste of this last summer, when they found themselves up against the Lebanese militia Hezbollah -- a queer amalgam of light infantry equipped with the latest Chinese and Russian technology, local guerrillas, international terrorists, a social welfare movement and a political party, trained by Syrians and Iranians and backed by volunteers from all kinds of places, including Africa. The war was not over territory or a concrete dispute but over symbols; it took place in a densely populated area in southern Lebanon and northern Israel where the "villages" had the population of a concentrated suburb outside a large American city. This was a different kind of war for the Israelis, and it's the kind of war we can expect too. To some extent, it is already the war we are experiencing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Utility of Force suffers somewhat from the limited perspective of even so widely experienced a soldier as Smith. While war "amongst the people" is now a very large (perhaps the largest) part of the world of military affairs, it's not the whole of it by a long shot. The threat, if not the reality, of old-fashioned, conventional wars still remains, particularly in Asia. A Japanese air force general looking coldly across the Yellow Sea might be forgiven for thinking in more traditional terms about protecting the airspace and ocean approaches of an island nation; so too might American admirals in Honolulu ruminating about the defense of Taiwan, or Indian generals pondering the lessons of the Kargil war of 1999. But these reservations aside, Smith has clearly written one of the most important books on modern warfare in the last decade. We would be better off if the United States had a few more generals like him.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist

In his opening remarks, Smith provocatively states, "war no longer exists." Of course, he does not mean that mass organized violence has ended; rather, he refers to the end of large-scale industrialized warfare characterized by the use of massive tank columns supported by the application of intensive air power. Smith, who spent 40 years in the British army, including service in the first Gulf War, Bosnia, and Northern Ireland, maintains the development of nuclear weapons has essentially made such warfare obsolete. Current and especially future wars fought by Western powers are likely to be low-intensity conflicts, often waged against stateless opponents. Because it is not practical or even possible to win these struggles through the application of purely military force, Smith insists a revolution, or new paradigm, must occur in our conception of these struggles. As a start, we must understand the political context in which our adversaries act. Once identified, political objectives must always drive the military efforts, Smith insists, even at the expense of "sound" military strategy. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (January 16, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307265625
• ISBN-13: 978-0307265623
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #336,162 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

59 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, if a bit short on recommendations, May 28, 2006

By	WiltDurkey (Vancouver, BC Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Utility of Force (Hardcover)

The first half of this book is a first rate history lesson on how the modern war fighting practices of Western military powers came about, with special emphasis on Clausewitz, Napoleon, the US Civil War and the Spanish rebellion against Napoleon (which originated the term "guerilla"). Also reviewed are some of the 20th centuries guerilla wars and how they were lost or won (not many of those) by regular armies.

This groundwork laid, the book examines how this framework of army-vs-army warfare is obsolete and is replaced by foreign "wars amongst the people" where the enemy is an irregular, rather than a standard army and where public opinion, both at home and in the country of operation, becomes paramount.

a) The need to "forget" Western concepts of overwhelming firepower in an army vs. army struggle, because no one is going to be silly enough to engage Western armies on that level for a while yet. For example, IED deaths in Iraq are partially caused by the military not taking into account the lack of truly peaceful areas in an insurgency war: soft skinned military transports become targets everywhere. While standard military doctrine thinks in terms of fronts and combat zones allowing for front line heavy armor and unprotected vehicles everywhere else.

Again and again the point is made that a competent enemy does not play to your strengths, but rather tries to exploit your weaknesses and that assuming otherwise is a good way to lose.

b) The need for clear political objectives to supplement military force - "if you gotta use force or station an army somewhere, please think of what you want to achieve with it, in political terms". And the need for the political and military efforts to complement each other. Many pages are devoted to this subject. For example, the 1950's guerilla in Malaysia was defeated, both by military action against the rebels and by offering civilians an attractive political alternative to rebel aims. Malaysia was often an inspiration for Vietnam military strategies, but no credible political system was proposed to, and accepted by, the South Vietnamese.

Clearly, this applies to the US military's success at planning Saddam's defeat, only for its government to totally fail to consider what it would do, politically, once it had achieved its military objectives.

c) The limits, in military terms, of shared command over multinational troops. As in the other previous points, the author draws heavily upon his experiences as a NATO commander in Bosnia.

d) The key contribution, for me, is the need to respect the law, decency, and employ restraint in counterinsurgency warfare. Both for ethical reasons and because brutality and needless civilian deaths only fuel insurgencies and alienate public opinion.

Being interested in military history I liked this book, especially the first half. The later parts were however clearly more aimed at engaging political decision makers, rather than the casual reader as it raised more questions than answers. This motivates my 4, rather than 5, stars.

60 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Book on (Clausewitzian) Strategic Thought in 20 Years, September 9, 2006

By	seydlitz89 "seydlitz89" (Portugal) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Utility of Force (Hardcover)

Rupert Smith is not only a strategic thinker, but a former strategist and military commander. He has written a trully impressive book on the nature of war in the 21st Century which should be read by military professionals everywhere, and taken to heart and used to influence military operations in the pursuit of political goals, but probably won't. More on that at the end.

Smith's book has to do with war paradigms. I disagree with the use of the term, since following Thomas Kuhn it is questionable whether the term can be applied to the social sciences at all, and would prefer to use the term "ideal types" to describe Smith's concepts. Smith is however aware of the pitfalls but insists that we have essentially entered into a new form of war that although linked with the past (as Smith points out, Clausewitz identified the beginnings of this paradigm in the early 19th Century), is diffent from what we knew as "war" before. One will look in vain for buzzwords such as "4th Generation Warfare" or "Network Centric Warfare", since these dubious concepts only confuse the issue rather than clarify.

This new paradigm he describes as "war amongst the people" is related to "guerrilla warfare" and "revolutionary war" but is different from both due to the distinction of ossillating between "conflict" and "confrontation". Also due to the destructive nature of modern weapons, almost all combat in this paradigm takes place at the tactical level. Smith reserves intelligence and policy operations for the operational level.

A regular military force operating in "war amongst the people" must first of all achieve stability and then impose and maintain the rule of law within the political community they are operating. To ruthlessly utilize maximum military force and thus destroy the structures one is attempting to save, kill the people one is attempting win over, is self-defeating and most likely to increase the support of one's opponent.

Smith compares and constrasts "war amongst the people" with the conventional (and in Smith's mind outmoded) paradigm of "industrial war", which also dates from the early 19th Century. An interesting survey of the tactical innovation of industrial warfare runs from Napoleon through to World War II. Smith is not only a theorist of note, but knows his military history as well. "Industrial war", unfortunately serves as the paradigm in which we conceive of war, the weapons of industrial war - tanks, jet fighters, aircraft carriers - are the icons of war, even though the actual wars we wage are completely different than the wars these weapons systems were designed to fight. We fight "wars amongst the people" with the weapons, doctrine, military organization and thinking associated with the old paradigm of "industrial war", and spend a good bit of time defeating our own political purpose in the process.

So, why is this book liable to have little influence? Given the sad state of strategic thought in the US or even UK today, with most military officers and strategic thinkers unable to see outside the boundaries of "industrial war", not to mention their cultural and value assumptions, and the numerous false paths and confusion as to what is going on, we are at a similar situation to that of Ludwig Beck in 1938. He complained bitterly how his officers had lost all concept of the strategic link between military aim (seeing only in terms of military capability) and political purpose, or even attempting to recognize the limits and utility of military force.

Of all the best selling books on the subject, General Smith's is the lone voice of reason currently in strategic thought.

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Summary of Today's Conundrum, March 1, 2007

By	J. Avellanet (Williamsburg, VA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

There are 3 things you need to know about this book:

1. There are parts where it's repetitive and he could've used an editor.

2. If you agree with his main premise - that we will no longer (and haven't been for decades) fight nation-state to nation-state (ala WWII) and that it's all going to be battles for what he calls "will of the people" (aka "hearts and minds") - then you can probably skip this book completely unless you want all the detailed why's and how's we got to this point from Napoleon to 2006.

3. The last third of the book is devoted to his approach to start resolving these issues:
- stop building industrial-complex level machines and technology; focus money on information-gathering, intelligence gathering and analysis and building force flexibility
- the military should be used to achieve military goals only; and then the rest of the "hearts and minds" battle turned over to agencies that train for that (in the US, that'd be AID, State dept, Commerce, etc.)
- the only time that the small level non-state enemies we face (insurgents, terrorists, warlords, etc.) are really vulnerable is when they shift from hiding to training and then from training into operations - at those phase points, and thus, information is crucial to determining when so we can strike
- there are no "pat" answers; because every non-state enemy is going to be different, there are no real "if X, then we bring Y+1" types of formulas to figure out what to do
- you need to have the political end-game goal figured out BEFORE you bring in the military (in the case of Iraq today, he argues that we should have figured out what we wanted after the "regime change" to determine how best to use the military and then when to turn it over to someone else because "force" is no longer needed to win hearts & minds).

That said, if you're a fan of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, this book belongs on your shelf.

J. Avellanet, Co-Founder of Cerulean Associates LLC