"A History of Warfare" could easily be considered Keegan's best if it weren't for the comparable excellence of "The Face of Battle" and "The Mask of Command". Fluidly-written and compelling, Keegan manages to pack an uncanny amount of interest into every sentence. This is as close to being a page-turner that any history can hope for, and yet it also exhibits the erudition, information density and completeness that one demands from a professional historian.
As might be expected, Keegan begins with prehistoric primitive warfare and concludes with nuclear arms. It seems at first blush a task impossibly broad in scope but the author manages to achieve superb pacing and balance. Between these two endpoints Keegan addresses the rationale for warfare as well as technology, tactics and strategy. It is enough to let the chapters speak for the structure, which divides into "War in Human History", "Stone", "Flesh", "Iron", and "Fire". Between each chapter is an "interlude" focusing respectively on limitations on warmaking, fortification, armies, and logistics and supply. While the organization of the history is logical, it should be noted that chapters are more-or-less chronological while the interludes are less so.
The work does have some problems -- the most significant is that Keegan intends it as a polemic against Clausewitz. The author attempts to refute Clausewitz's dictum that "war is a continuation of policy by other means." The entire narrative is localized and situated around this polemic and the unfortunate result is a mild but periodically grating commentary which is both unnecessary and unconvincing.
On the one hand, if, as Keegan asserts, Clausewitz assumed the existence of "states, and state interests" then the reader would not expect his famous dictum to apply to pre-state societies and the polemic would thus be gratuitous. On the other hand, if one believes it is vital to show that war is not a continuation of policy for pre-state societies, then other problems surface.
The principal approach the polemic takes, then, is to show that not all warfare is motivated by policy. But if a war lacks a policy behind it then it must be waged for the sake of sheer bloodlust. In a modern society one can only look at the anomalous serial killer for demented pleasure in death, so it is hard to imagine it reproduced on a collective scale. For this reason it seems simplistic that a society would conduct a war for some carnal "joy of bloodletting". Perhaps then, a non-policy motivation would be vengeance. But is revenge not in some sense a policy, stated or unstated? Can one not argue that a code of vengeance exists to guarantee the expectation of response and so in effect deter aggression? Is it even accurate to assert that prehistoric cultures had no "policy" behind their conflicts? And what of modern societies -- is it correct to conclude that since (e.g.) the Cold War remained "cold" out of "fear" of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), the Cold War was not an extension of policy but merely the result of "fear"?
Moreover, even if Keegan's objection is valid in some pedantic sense -- where does it get us? Every war has different specific motivations, some highly complex, others instinctive and basic. Beyond its appeal to professional historians, is it at all important to lay-audiences to classify each war as policy-motivated or not? Judging by the conclusion, it seems Keegan's goal is to show that mankind is a teeming mass of violent degenerates, which, if not reformed soon, will inevitably ruin the planet with nuclear weapons. Whether such an admonition is novel, helpful or in any way illuminating is another matter.
Clausewitz himself was in the process of revamping his views when he died, his last texts both a synthesis and correction of preceding ones. The reader might turn to Corbett's "Principles of Maritime Strategy" to get an alternative perspective on Clausewitz -- the Prussian's belief in peace through a premature intimation of MAD. And what really is the fascination with Clausewitz when his elevation of regiments to a structural requirement of social order was, in many respects, a legacy of the French Republic -- and was his "regimentalism" much worse than existing alternatives?
On the whole, then, Keegan's history would be phenomenal without lowering itself, as it were, by engaging yesterday's policy wonk in mortal combat. At the same time it bears repeating that the history itself is, indeed, phenomenal.
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Top reviews from other countries
Viktor Horváth
Great overwiev of everything about military in the last 10 millennia
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 15, 2021