Blog Them Out of the Stone Age

Below is a review I wrote when the book first appeared.  The editor liked it and I got paid for it, but for some reason it wasn’t published.  So I offer it here.

Martin Van Creveld.  The Culture of War.  New York:  Ballantine Books, 2008.  512 pp.  $30.00

This is Martin Van Creveld’s eighteenth book, and like most of its predecessors it combines the insightful with the provocative with the merely exasperating.  Van Creveld is both a gifted military historian and a world class gadfly, and he often gives the impression that he cherishes the latter reputation more than the former.  This impression is more unavoidable than ever in The Culture of War, which, the author informs us, he has written with the desire to put “any number of assorted ‘-ists’ — such as relativists, deconstructionists,  deconstructivists, post-modernists, the more maudlin kind of pacifists, and feminists firmly in their place.”  (xv)   These “bleeding hearts,” he imagines, scorn the notion of a culture of war.  He also wishes to confront the “neo-realists” who collapse warfare into a supposedly rational instrument of policy — and this is in fact the most interesting aspect of the book — but his swipes at the academic left are so frequent and tiresome that they threaten the integrity of the book.

The book, despite its title, is less about the culture of war than about the culture of military institutions, particularly those that serve the nation-state.  His portrait of this culture — the impressive uniforms, the excitement of combat, the use of martial music (especially drums), and the commemorative statues and monuments — is encyclopedic but pedestrian.  Many readers will find his illustrations intuitively obvious or will have encountered similar observations in other books, and his central thesis is pretty much anticipated by  the title of a 2002 book by veteran war correspondent Chris Hedges:  War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (New York:  Anchor Books, 2002).

The culture of war, Van Creveld explains, is indeed the force that gives meaning to the lethal environment that soldiers are expected to master.  In combat, an appeal to rational policy objectives would be laughable.  But appeals to sentimental values — the motherland, the regimental honor, the protection of brothers in arms, and so on — are powerful motivators.  They and other artifacts of the culture of war play a crucial role in “overcoming men’s natural inclination to avoid, or flee from, danger while at the same time preparing them to make the supreme sacrifice when and if required.”  (xiv)  Much of this culture centers upon a cult of the masculine, but it also depends to adherence to rules, including rules that at first blush have little utility in the moral no man’s land that is the “realist’s” vision of war.

Van Creveld violently disagrees with scholars like political scientist John Mueller, who see war as a receding human activity.  But he fears that the peace-mongers may discredit and discard the “culture of war” that sustains effective military institutions, with catastrophic results.  To illustrate his point he performs an extended thought experiment in which he asks “what if… the culture of war fails to develop, or assumes a mechanical character, or is deliberately strangled?” (333)  Shorn of rules and discipline, military organizations would become “wild hordes” — bandits and thugs like the Serbian militias of the 1990s.  Reduced to simple, coglike efficiency, armies would become a “soulless machine” like the 18th century Prussian army of Frederick the Great, which perished when confronted by the passion and élan of Napoleon’s Grande Armée.  The amputation of a martial culture would yield similar results — a fate Van Creveld believes may befall the present-day German Bundeswehr.  Even worse are societies composed of “men without chests” — those who, “not having a culture of war and perhaps looking down on the very idea, refuse to stand up and defend themselves almost regardless of the provocation.”  (375)   Here Van Creveld’s chief case in point is the Jewish Diaspora culture from 70 AD through the 1948 founding of the State of Israel, and he argues that vestiges of this problem still haunt the Israeli Defense Forces when called upon to operate against foes like Hezbollah — conflicts that do not fit easily into the mold of pure self-defense.

Van Creveld is at his most Cassandra-like when dealing with feminism.  On the one hand, he sees feminist ideology as reflexively antiwar and scornful of military culture.  On the other, he sees feminism as responsible for the invasion of women into the armed forces, notwithstanding the fact that most female soldiers do not subscribe to feminist ideology.  Indeed, the chief ideology in play is Van Creveld’s misogyny, which assails the reader in practically every chapter.  Women, in his view, are central to the culture of war to the degree that they celebrate the masculine traits on which that culture depends.  But were they instead to ridicule that culture and shun its adherents, disaster would ensue.  In his view, the same would occur if women comprised more than 10 or 15 percent of armed forces and received the same roles as their male counterparts.

Van Creveld’s treatment of women is the least convincing as well as the least appealing aspect of the book. But his overall point is important:  “While the ostensible function of the culture of war is to make men willing, even eager, to look death in the face, it can do so only if it is understood not as a means to an end but as an end in itself.” (412)