THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  From a strategic point of view, the example of the West, and especially the United States, must rank among the most successful and skillful coor-dinations of force and statecraft for the achievement of political goals ever recorded. What Gordon Craig and Felix Gilbert said of the Truman administration and the strategic campaigns of the late forties can be said of the U.S. presidents generally with respect to the Cold War: 30

  The effective mobilization of public support for its European commitments and the skillful use of economic resources to gain its objectives, and finally,… the imposition upon its military operations of limitations determined by political considerations—all in all [constitute] an exercise in strategy that would almost certainly have won Clausewitz' approbation.31

  For roughly forty-five years, across nine administrations drawn from both political parties, the Americans were able to summon great resources and—unusually, it is said, for a democracy—great stamina and great restraint. What can be said of the United States–led Alliance during the Cold War can be said of the West generally with respect to the Long War.

  When Clausewitz wrote his most famous and most widely misconstrued sentence, “War is the continuation of politics by other means,”32 he intended to remind his readers that the destruction and human sacrifice that attends war could only be justified to the extent that war was absolutely necessary to accomplish political goals. One might go further and say that it is a corollary to this truth that if the political question that impels states to war is not resolved in that war, then the peace that ensues may be only a pause. Each of the campaigns of which the Long War was composed had strategic consequences for the next, just as the First World War set the stage for the Second, and so on. Now the fundamental constitutional problem of the Long War has been answered. Government by consent, freely given and periodically capable of being withdrawn, is what legitimates the nation-state. Government under law—not government that is above the law—provides the means by which states are legitimated.* So the next question intrudes itself: what are the strategic consequences of the peace?

  What will this new world look like, and how should a state make its way in it? Will such a world be so chaotic without the overarching framework of the Long War that we will look back on the era of the Cold War as a golden age? By means of what new framework ought we to understand events and, ultimately, decide when to use force? These are the questions taken up in Part III, and they are on the minds of thoughtful persons throughout the world. Sometimes it is said that such questions are more difficult now that the armed struggle among great powers is over. If the conventional approach is to assess the threat then because the threat has changed—indeed, to a very large extent vanished—it is said we shall be at a loss until a new threat appears.

  But this observation, which might be rephrased as “If No Copernicus, Then No Newton” (if no problem, then no answer), doesn't go to the issue of deciding per se. It might explain and even justify decisions that seem ad hoc, or patternless, but it neither explains nor justifies the abrupt and repeated reversals of policy in the West since the end of the Long War. While such an explanation might excuse the cynical apathy that governs so many Western foreign ministries, it scarcely excuses the loss of life and loss of confidence in our institutions that has been the result. The flip-flopping of Western decisions regarding Russia or Yugoslavia or Iraq is characteristic not so much of mystery as of changing incentives.

  Then, it is sometimes said, it is a matter of “leadership.” In its first term for example, the Clinton administration did not inspire critics by a slavish devotion to consistency in foreign policy. It is also said that the world is more complex now, that no single paradigm, such as that of containment that guided the West during the Long War and to which I have tried to draw attention, could possibly be useful today.

  I am skeptical about these “explanations.” This is not the first time that an epochal war has ended, and certainly not the first time that profound constitutional questions have been decided by strategic developments, nor that constitutional innovations—like parliamentary democracy—have driven strategic change. In Part II, we will look at the strategic and constitutional consequences of earlier, state-shaping struggles. These make up a history, a way of understanding the development of the State, and of understanding the actual state we are currently in. Finally, in Part III, we examine the State we are becoming, the historic consequence of the Long War.

  May 24, 1980

  I have braved, for want of wild beasts, steel cages,

  carved my term and nickname on bunks and rafters,

  lived by the sea, flashed aces in an oasis,

  dined with the-devil-knows-whom, in tails, on truffles.

  From the height of a glacier I beheld half a world, the earthly

  width. Twice have drowned, thrice let knives rake my nitty-gritty.

  Quit the country that bore and nursed me.

  Those who forgot me would make a city.

  I have waded the steppes that saw yelling Huns in saddles,

  worn the clothes nowadays back in fashion in every quarter,

  planted rye, tarred the roofs of pigsties and stables,

  guzzled everything save dry water.

  I've admitted the sentries' third eye into my wet and foul

  dreams. Munched the bread of exile; it's stale and warty.

  Granted my lungs all sounds except the howl;

  switched to a whisper. Now I am forty.

  What should I say about my life? That it's long and abhors transparence.

  Broken eggs make me grieve; the omelette, though, makes me vomit.

  Yet until brown clay has been rammed down my larynx,

  only gratitude will be gushing from it.

  —Joseph Brodsky, 1980

  (translated by the author)

  PART II

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE MODERN STATE AND ITS CONSTITUTIONAL ORDERS

  THESIS: THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN STRATEGIC AND CONSTITUTIONAL INNOVATION CHANGES THE CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER OF THE STATE.

  Epochal wars produce fundamental challenges to the State. A warring state that is unable to prevail within the then-dominant strategic and constitutional practices will innovate. In such wars, successful innovations—either strategic or constitutional—by a single state are copied by other, competing states. This state mimicry sweeps through the society of states and results in the sudden shift in constitutional orders and strategic paradigms in the aftermath of an epochal war. By this means, a new dominant constitutional order emerges with new bases of legitimacy, and older forms decay and disappear.

  A History Lesson

  Kings

  like golden gleams

  made with a mirror on the wall.

  A non-alcoholic pope,

  knights without arms,

  arms without knights.

  The dead like so many strained noodles,

  a pound of those fallen in battle,

  two ounces of those who were executed,

  several heads

  like so many potatoes

  shaken into a cap—

  Geniuses conceived

  by the mating of dates

  are soaked up by the ceiling into infinity

  to the sound of tinny thunder,

  the rumble of bellies,

  shouts of hurrah,

  empires rise and fall

  at the wave of a pointer,

  the blood is blotted out—

  And only one small boy,

  who was not paying the least attention,

  will ask

  between two victorious wars:

  And did it hurt in those days too?

  — Miroslav Holub

  (translated by George Theiner)

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Strategy and the Constitutional Order

  THE IDEA OF a “military revolution” in Europe was first introduced by Michael Roberts in his now-famous inaugural lecture at the Queen's University of Belfast in January 1955.1
Roberts identified four profound changes in warfare in the period 1560 – 1660. First was a revolution in tactics, as archers and then infantry armed with muskets ended the dominance of feudal knights and massed squares of pikemen. To put this in other words, fire replaced shock as the decisive element on the battlefield. Second, a dramatic increase in the size of armies occurred, with the forces of several states increasing ten times between 1500 and 1700. Third, strategies changed as the possibility of decisive action in the field replaced the static and inconclusive siege tactics of the previous century. Fourth, war became more of a depredation on the civilian society: the vastly greater costs required to field such larger armies, the damage wrought by foraging troops, and the destructiveness of battles made civil life grimly more like that of Brecht's Mother Courage, written of the Thirty Years' War, than of Lepanto, Chesterton's brightly lit account of the famous naval battle of a century before.

  Roberts's thesis quickly achieved the status of orthodoxy—Sir George Clark enthusiastically adopted it unqualifiedly in his War and Society in the Seventeenth Century published three years later2—and thus became a target for various qualifying theses* in the ensuing years. But by far the most important development was the claim that the need for cash and an administrative infrastructure to fund and manage the larger armies and new technologies caused a revolution in government from which, in the seventeenth century, the modern state emerged. Roberts himself had drawn attention to issues of state formation, national identity, centralization, and the development of state bureaucracies, and this aspect of his argument was picked up by others.3 Geoffrey Parker, Roberts's greatest student, observed a strikingly similar pattern that culminated in the establishment of the Ch'in imperial dynasty.4 And he concluded that there occurred in European armies such a massive growth in manpower, accompanied by a profound change in tactics and strategy, and on European societies such a greatly intensified impact of war, that equally profound changes in the structure and philosophy of government came about.5

  To manage the sheer size of seventeenth century armies—Gustavus Adolphus had 175,000 men under arms—states could no longer rely on the traditional ways in which troops were raised. Roberts suggested that governments met this challenge through constitutional centralization, first taking control of the recruiting, equipping, and supplying of troops (which in turn required a more extensive and accountable administrative structure); then establishing permanent standing armies; and finally funding this vast military and administrative expansion through the sophisticated credit and financial systems that are a key characteristic of the modern State. By 1660, it was claimed, the military revolution had had its effect: the modern style of warfare had come into being and with it the modern State, exemplified by the progressive regime of Protestant Sweden.

  This thesis was criticized, however, by Parker.6 He attacked the idea that the military advantage had shifted to constitutionally progressive regimes, and wrote admiringly of the Spanish, who, he claimed, were at the forefront of new weapons technology and the introduction of smaller, more tactically flexible units. Indeed, it was the Spanish army, as early as the 1570s, that had taken on the characteristics of a permanent standing army, with its extensive structures for financing, training, logistics, and command. In subsequent work, Parker focused on a differing explanation for the increase in army size than that proposed by Roberts: rather than reflecting a response to the more ambitious and decisive strategies of the seventeenth century, Parker traced the growth of armies to developments in fortification in the sixteenth century. It was not so much the development of artillery capable of blasting down fortresses as it was the change in the fortresses themselves, enabling them to employ this technology defensively, that set the terms of the sixteenth century battlefield. This change produced the trace italienne, characterized by low formidable walls, broken by complex bastions to enable fire against sapping trenches, and surrounded by obstacle-strewn but visually clear fields that permitted fortress artillery to rake a besieging force with fire. Parker argued that commanders, contemplating these new fortifications, were compelled to increase greatly the numbers of troops in order to man the ever more complex and lengthy siege lines and, if on the defensive, to garrison fortresses for an aggressive defense. For Parker then, the revolution began a century earlier.

  In contrast to this claim, Jeremy Black argued that the military revolu-tion actually occurred a century later than that proposed by Roberts.7 The development of the ring bayonet, which effectively replaced the use of pikemen by giving the musketeer a pike of his own; a surge in the number of troops engaged in battle; the standardization of equipment, including uniforms; and vastly more comprehensive logistical infrastructures all impressed Black as having a decisiveness that was absent in the transient reforms of earlier periods. Moreover, rather than seeing the creation of the modern state as the outcome of an earlier military revolution, Black concluded that the modern administrative and bureaucratic state that emerged in the early eighteenth century was the driving factor behind strategic change.

  Challenging the thesis of a military-governmental revolution altogether, David Parrott attacked the claim that the expansion in the size of armies was indeed accompanied by a comparable expansion and centralization of the State. In fact, he argued, the great majority of forces that fought in Europe before the end of the seventeenth century were not raised by states at all, but rather were recruited and managed by an extensive system of private entrepreneurs. He concluded that there was no direct correlation between the growth of the forces being maintained and the development of the State. The principal reason for the large numbers of troops in Europe was to allow the military contractors who maintained them to recover their expenses by means of enforced contributions from local populations. The great seventeenth century commander Wallenstein, Parrott noted, told the Holy Roman Emperor in 1626 that he could maintain a self-financing army of 50,000 but not one of 20,000 because the larger force could man garrisons and extract contributions. Parrott proposed that we see the increase in military forces and expenditure as leading not to state-building, but to an unprecedented willingness of the State to offload its responsibilities onto private contractors. When the seventeenth century did witness an increase in the centralization of state authority, Parrott disparaged this as a reaction to the military developments of the preceding period.

  In the chapters that follow, I will trace developments in strategy from roughly the end of the fifteenth century onward and relate these developments to changes in the constitutional structures of the states of Europe. For these purposes, we need not attempt to resolve many of the questions about the “military revolution.” Whether in fact the numbers of troops employed in the sieges of Strasbourg, Breisach, or Turin were greater than those deployed in the preceding century, and whether the forces available for any particular battle in the Thirty Years' War really were as large as those nominally under Swedish command, are matters not directly germane to the present task. It is undeniable that developments in strategy changed the ferocity of and resources required for war from the beginning of the sixteenth century onward, even if we do not know precisely how these demands were met. What we must attempt to answer is Parrott's question: what is the relationship between strategic development and constitutional innovation? And if there is a causal relation, then we must answer Black's question: which way does it run? Does the state change, and with it the strategies it employs? Or do changes in the strategic environment force states to change their organization in order to cope with these developments? And if we can answer those questions, then we can perhaps decide at what point this profound change occurred—the question that divided Roberts and Parker and Black.

  This agenda, however, is not as tractable as it may at first appear. Take Parrott's question. It seems undeniable that there is a relationship between strategic and constitutional change, and the reason for this is not hard to gather. Strategic developments in a geography of proximate societies like Europe can pr
esent a similar, acute problem to states that otherwise may greatly differ. The endowments of states such as Spain and France may have little in common—that is, their material resources, cultural traditions, and political leadership may be absurdly unalike—but the cannon that confronts one will confront both. A new development in military tactics or technology will quickly spread through the available colleges and arsenals of all states. Every state must either mimic or innovate in response to such a development. And yet isn't Parrott right in implying that there is no single relationship between state formation and strategy because history provides far too many counterexamples of retrenchments that follow growth, of successful military innovations that lead nowhere constitutionally, and profound constitutional changes that seem to have no impact on military matters? To take but two examples: Consider the Polish army's practices during the seventeenth century that considerably diverged from those of the European states discussed by Roberts, Parker, and Black, yet were highly successful against the Swedes. Nevertheless, these innovations forced neither military nor constitutional changes on the rest of Europe. One might add also the Hungarian tactics against the Turks in 1686, which were similar in style to those of the Poles. Or consider the downsizing of European forces after Waterloo. Of the great powers, only Prussia elected to follow Napoleon's example and retain a large standing army; the others were far too wary of having so many soldiers garrisoned at home with large numbers of weapons that could be turned against the state.