THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (59 page)
Read THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES Online
Authors: Philip Bobbitt
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As noted above, computer-assisted design and manufacturing, training simulators, and virtual-reality environments will doubtless shape the military planning process of the twenty-first century.
Simulation
might, however, play an even more ambitious role in the hands of a market-state arbiter, such as the United States, or an ad hoc group of such states. With global monitoring, it ought to be possible in principle to simulate battles and then assess costs and damages afterwards. No lives need be lost in such conflicts. The role of individual heroism, of unit esprit, and sheer good luck will be less perhaps in future wars where combat is mainly fought by machines against machines—or against defenseless persons once their machines fail. In a transparent environment without tactical surprise, it may well be possible to arbitrate disputes not so much on the basis of international law as on a simulated competition run by computers. Recalcitrant losers would face coercive measures as penalties. The American legal practice of plea bargaining is an analogous example of such simulation in a different context. Based on the likely assessment of what would happen if the defendant went to trial, the prosecution and the
defense barter within a range of likely outcomes, each preferring to avoid the risks and costs of trial if possible.
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Mercenary forces
were once the dominant armed instrument of the State because they were an economical alternative to more expensive standing armies. In the future, the use of local proxy armies can offer a similar efficiency. Backed by the information and intelligence collection, the air power and the strategic direction of United States – led coalitions, such forces could provide the indispensable element of ground control without risking American lives to the same degree as U.S. ground forces. The risks attendant to the use of proxies—as Rome discovered—is that they are unreliable allies; the weapons and information they are provided must be carefully calibrated and the technological support given must be carefully weighed.
The present volume began with this question: why is it so difficult for contemporary leaders to determine when to use force in international affairs? Now, I believe, we are in a position to answer this question. If the American state—and many other states also—is in the midst of a transition from one form of constitutional order to another, then states are also in the midst of a change in their strategic relationships vis-à-vis one another that is related to this change in constitutional order. The difficulty lies in the fact that we have yet to appreciate the nature and implications of this transformation. We are quickly becoming a market-state. Yet we still cling to a strategic mentality that was formed within the constitutional order of the nation-state and its Long War for survival. It's not so much a matter of finding a new strategic paradigm as it is of acquiring the habits of thinking that are compatible with the character of the new constitutional order; then the paradigm will follow.
The United States's world role as protector of free states and our domestic constitutional institutions of liberty and equality are linked together by our history. Any set of rules that forbids the use of American force in virtually all the contexts in which the United States is likely to find itself moved by moral considerations in the current era will forfeit its claim on our moral sense. Then when those situations arise that do threaten our vital interests and call for a supreme national effort, we shall regret having ignored the cardinal historical lesson of American war making: that it is never done wholly on a moral or an expedient basis, but always and only when both are present. For two hundred years, U.S. foreign policy has been to offer assistance, where our assistance was sought and where it
would be efficacious, to peoples who wanted free institutions and peaceful lives, and to oppose aggressors who threatened the constitutional way of life that is our greatest legacy to mankind. In service of the former objective we fought the warrior tribes of the Plains, the Mexican dictator Santa Anna, the German empire, the Spanish empire, and the Asian totalitarians Kim Il Sung, Mao Zedong, and Ho Chi Minh, and sent forces to many places around the world where the collapse of the legal order brought great suffering. To defend our constitutional form of life, we fought both Britain and France in the nineteenth century, and defeated fascism and communism in the twentieth. We have seldom sought territorial cessions by conquest and have largely grown our continental state by the wishes of the pioneer inhabitants of the territories we protected or purchased. This history must be qualified by the wrongs we have committed, including those against Native Americans and the preservation of slavery and the slave trade for half a century after it had been outlawed in Europe. Yet it is our history that gives us a consistent sense of our achievements
and
of our wrongdoings.
It is important for the United States and its leaders to remember that Thucydides concluded that the “truest reason” for the Peloponnesian War was Sparta's fear of the growing strength of Athens. Not simply increasing American power, but persuading others of our modesty, our benign intent, our deference to the preferences of other societies will be an indispensable element in maintaining peace. American references to “the sole, remaining superpower” are scarcely helpful but the label “hyperpower” comes from abroad.
For history is not made within the State alone. Indeed I have argued that the State depends upon conflict with other states—the object of strategy— in order to establish itself as the legitimate guardian of a legal order. What of the
society
of states? How does its constitutional order come about, and what legitimates that order? This is the subject of Book II.
All wars are so many attempts to bring about new relations among the states and to form new bodies by the break-up of the old states to the point where they cannot again maintain themselves alongside each other and must therefore suffer revolutions until finally, partly through the best possible arrangement of the civic constitution internally, and partly through common agreement and legislation externally, there is created a state that, like a civic commonwealth, can maintain itself automatically.
—Kant,
Idea for a Universal
History with Cosmopolitan Intent
(1784)
Conclusion to Book 1
T
HE
L
ONG
W
AR
was an
epochal war
. Such wars are distinguished from other types not simply by their duration—which often spans lengthy periods of armistice—but mainly by their constitutional significance. Indeed such wars keep going precisely because they concern the fundamental legitimacy of the State. When revisionist historians suggest that the World War II Allies could have ended that war earlier by modifying the surrender terms offered the Japanese so as to guarantee the constitutional position of the emperor, these historians are reflecting their tacit understanding of the war itself. They think it was like other wars, mainly about the accretion of power or wealth. When we see World War II as but a part of a much longer constitutional conflict, however, such observations appear to miss the point.
Let me reiterate that the reasons epochal wars are begun are no different from those of any wars: they arise from clashing claims to power, from competing ideologies and religions, insistent ambition, the gamble for greater wealth, sympathy for kinsmen or hostility to foreigners, and so on. The reason epochal wars achieve, in retrospect, an historic importance is because however they may arise, they challenge and ultimately change the basic structure of the State, which is, after all, a war-making institution.
In studying past wars that came to be recategorized as mere engagements in longer, epochal conflicts, one repeatedly finds that basic issues persisted and were not resolved by the peaces that followed the cessation of overt belligerency. Because the very nature of the State is at stake in epochal wars, the consequence of such wars is the transformation of the State itself to cope with the strategic innovations that determine the out-come of the conflict. Thus, the transformations of the State into the various constitutional archetypes described in Part II are each associated with epochal wars.
The metamorphosis of the realms of princes into Renaissance princely states coincided with the Wars of the Italian Peninsula, begun by the French invasion of Italy in 1494. The modern state originates in the transition from the rule of princes to that of princely states that began there.
Of these new
princely states
, Machiavelli argued that their security and liberty were the prince's first concern and that all else depended on this.
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The great princely states of Habsburg Spain, Valois France, and Tudor England were superseded by
kingly states
forged in the Thirty Years' War. On behalf of the kingly states, Bodin insisted that only a single sovereign embodying the ultimate authority of the State could prevent the religious rebellions that had repeatedly erupted during this epoch.
2
Territorial
states in turn proved triumphant in the defeat of the greatest of the kingly states, in the wars of Louis XIV. Locke, whom we anachronistically associate with American democracy, in fact accepted a sovereign who singularly made all the laws, so long as this reflected a covenant between the governed and the governing. These regimes were in turn superseded by the great
state-nations
, of which Hume
3
is no less the prophet than Robespierre.
*
Burke famously said in 1774 that Parliament was not a congress of ambassadors from its various electoral constituencies, but “a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole.”
4
The Napoleonic Wars accompanied the introduction of this constitutional archetype into the history of Europe, and their settlement at the Congress of Vienna enshrined this order for four generations. By contrast, the
nation-state
is associated with the Long War, a struggle that was fought over the moral and political orientation of that constitutional form in the twentieth century. Wilson and Lenin, Hitler and Roosevelt
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all claimed that their systems would best benefit the material well-being of the people, a claim we have heard so much that it is hard for us to imagine a constitutional form that does not take its legitimacy on such a basis. Yet this was not always the case.
Legitimacy is what unites the problems of strategy and law at the heart of epochal war just as history supplies the answers to those problems. The axiom of legitimacy has changed as new constitutional archetypes have replaced their predecessors; it is invariably the consequence of epochal wars that new constitutional archetypes appear as the competing states
involved in the conflict develop into more successful forms for managing the strategic innovations that win the war.
Civil wars and revolutions are characteristic of transitional periods between constitutional forms as the old constitutional archetypes struggle against the birth of the new,
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whereas epochal wars are transformative. The Dutch Revolt of 1567, the English Civil War, the Fronde, the American Revolution, and the American Civil War all began periods that encompassed epochal conflicts and a shift in the constitutional order. Epochal wars often include, and indeed are often begun by, revolutions and civil wars. These revolutions determine the possibilities; epochal wars make the choices; history provides the rationale.
The link between the strategic and the constitutional is seldom drawn in contemporary affairs. There are notable exceptions to this: Michael Howard,
7
Geoffrey Parker,
8
Aaron Friedberg,
9
and Jeremy Black come to mind as military historians and analysts who have written with great sensitivity about the relationship between history and force; Anthony Giddens,
10
Peter Mancias,
11
and David Beetham
12
are political sociologists who are keenly interested in the relationship between legitimacy and violence, about which each has written with real insight. The problem seems to be that the two groups so seldom talk to each other. The contemporary debate over a future national security paradigm for the United States provides a good example of such missed opportunities. Although this debate is at the very center of current policy planning, and is being carried on by persons of great ability, it has as yet yielded little practical benefit to decision makers.
