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Obsolescence stalks the State’s professional fighting man. This danger waits in the corridors of many vocations, hoping history will relegate new victims to his clutches. Let us examine, for a moment, why he now casts a covetous eye on the military officer.
From this exposition the clever reader should gain at least a cursory understanding of the theoretical and historical foundations of the State. From there he may then discern how this particular condition has influenced our conception of warfare as an activity of the State, by the State, and for State. Once we grasp this we may then see how the changing nature of warfare confounds the State’s modus operandi, hence breaking its monopoly on war. The military officer, conceived and reared within this rubric, now exists as an anachronism “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Formation of the State
The first obvious step must be a brief review and explanation of the State in history and in theory. From here we may apprehend the nature of the State, its operative definition and, thereby, establish its connection to the professional military officer.
In theoretical terms the State perhaps found its first advocate in the philosopher Plato.1 Plato, however, conceived of his ideal ‘State’ as an instrument of justice in an ideal world. His conception is essentially theoretical, regarding matters of practicality as almost below him.2 It is also doubtful whether Plato ever intended his construct for anyone but the Greeks and their system of city-states (polis). Be that as it may, the Platonic definition of the State is not of immediate usefulness or relevance for us. For that and for brevity’s sake, we shall have to jump far forward in time to what may be dubbed ‘medieval’ Europe or the pre-modern era.
For quite some time Europe was unified by a mystical acceptance of the authority of the Catholic Church. Even as late as 1302 Pope Boniface VIII could still say with force that the political powers of Christendom exercised their prerogatives “at the command and sufferance of the priest.”3 In effect, at the philosophical level, men recognized the authority of the Church as supreme. Though contested in practice, this principle determined the nature of political discourse and limited the power of kings, who were obliged to pledge their ultimate fealty to the Pope.
The dissolution of the Frankish empire after the reign of Charlemagne began a process of political bifurcation that was carried to completion by the Reformation some seven hundred years later. This development sundered the universal empire and gave rise to manifold kings, each exercising at least nominal control over some swath of territory.4 These kings lived in nearly constant strife with the Church, jealous as they were of the priestly class’ dominion over so much wealth and land. A series of ever-growing political and moral failures impugned the spiritual authority of the Church and eventually allowed a German monk to openly flout its former unquestioned sanctions. The taboo now shattered, the monarchs of Europe began to aggregate power with greater celerity.5
As the Reformation swept over Europe, Protestant and Catholic rulers alike seized ecclesiastical property. The Protestant did so in defiance of the corrupt Papacy, the Catholic in order to gain resources with which to fight for the ‘true faith,’ or so they said. In the end the Church was stripped of temporal power, its primacy replaced by the divine right of kings. This division and the cognitive dissonance associated with the destruction of the Universal Church manifested itself violently in the Thirty Years War. The desire to restore unity foundered on decades of religious bloodshed. Germany, the scene of most fighting, lost no less than 15 percent of her population by the war’s end.6
In 1648 the powers of Europe signed the Treaty of Westphalia, thus eschewing religious violence for purely political governance and outlook. The new system, born of this peace, was intended to spare future generations the savagery of the Thirty Years War. Its gestation period now over, the modern ‘State’ was born.
The State, in actuality, is an outgrowth of the autocratic despots of the late medieval period. By bringing the intractable nobles to heel and the free towns into line, the monarchs were able to amass spectacular resources and prestige. To administer such a vast array of commodities and personnel, the sovereigns created, over time, vast personal retinues. These household servants, as it were, became what we know as the bureaucracy and, with the elevation of the Republican ideal, divorced themselves from royal servitude.7
The full flower of the State, however, was yet to come. Nearly a century and a half later the State proclaimed its existence and its dominance in the form of the French Revolution. With national will as its fount, the Grande Armee became an instrument of unmatched power, the ultimate expression of the State’s magnificence. By 1806 the Grand Armee of France and her audacious captain Napoleon had annihilated the famed Prussians at Jena-Auerstadt, thereby sounding the death knell of the decaying ancien regime. Within the space of a few short years the French Empire would hold suzerainty over most of Europe; only pugnacious Britain continued in defiance. In response the principalities of the olde world discarded their antiquated systems and adopted the national model.
The Napoleonic Wars forced the European community to adopt the statist paradigm in toto in order to survive the French onslaught. Concurrently, this dynamic new force broke free of its continental bonds and “closed the ecumene;” that is to say it subjugated the globe.8 The rest of the world reacted to this explosion by aping after the structures of the West, e.g., the State. This endeavor met with varying degrees of practical success, but did establish, at least theoretically, our current normative geopolitical situation.
The Nature of the State
Before we wander into war and its relation to the State, we are compelled to define the modern State and establish what gives it continuing life. This is primarily a philosophical dilemma, but one that must be answered a posteriori from history, albeit a history of philosophy.
The cardinal facet of the modern State is its monopolization of violence. From the time of the Thirty Years War onward political philosophers began to conceptualize armed force as the sole prerogative of the sovereign or, in our broader context, the State. Why did they do this?
The answer lies in what Plato might call the State’s ‘first principle,’ i.e. the fundamental characteristic from which all others find source.9 For most of history rulers derived their authority in some way from a god. In this sense political theory was really nothing more than a subset of theology.10 The Egyptian pharaoh, for example, was god on earth, while the Pope was at least God’s direct representative. Such is not the case with the modern State.
Riven from a concept of deity, the modern liberal State finds its fons et origo in its legitimate use of force. We see this formula in operation in the works of Niccolo Machiavelli. Far from ordaining the State, in the Machiavellian conception, religion is made a servant of the State.11 The ruler or ‘prince’ holds his authority instead based upon his monopolistic application of vulgar force. This reliance on naked power should, in Machiavelli’s mind, even supersede any deference to law.12 To this end, Machiavelli enjoins the wise prince to crush opposition and immediately disarm all persons not directly wedded to his aggrandizement.13
It is true that many theorists endeavored to soften Machiavelli’s harsh tone, but they were, despite the noble effort, unable to escape the ‘first principle’ of force. Jean Bodin, the French political thinker, attempted to establish law as the basis of his abstract state, but also recognized that the true pledge of the State is to enforce law, viz. impose order from chaos. This, of course, requires armed force, or at least the plausible threat of it.14
We can finish our jaunt through political philosophy by briefly discussing the signal effort in the field – Thomas Hobbes and the Leviathan.15 The state of nature, according to Hobbes, is rampant uncertainty, a sort of spasmodic violence. To escape this “war of all against all” man enters into a ‘social contract,’ to use Rousseau’s convention, which entails him offering up a portion of his freedom to an authority so that this authority may, in turn, guarantee tranquility. The portion of that freedom that must be surrendered is the right to violence. This is the essential, nonnegotiable quality of the State. Every other aspect is secondary, even superfluous. In contrast to all earlier polities, it is the sovereign entity, whether senate or tyrant, that holds supreme authority; an authority apotheosized by Reason.16
While many, such as John Locke, strove mightily to restrain the arbitrary power of the State, the formative injunction remained. From this progression we may thereby derive or, to phrase it more accurately, agree with the Weberian definition of the State as expressed by John Hoffman: it is an institution that exercises a monopoly of legitimate force within a defined territory.17 From this curtailed excursus and subsequent definition we may cull two maxims regarding the State: 1) the application of violence is the State’s sole purview; 2) this exclusive practice is legitimated by the security the State is bound to provide its inhabitants.
Clausewitz and State-based Warfare
Given our understanding of the State qua sole arbiter of armed force, we have not far to go to grasp the State’s relationship with war. Within the statist paradigm only the State and its appointed representatives may bear arms and enter into war. Similarly, war must be understood as a conflict between sovereign states and sovereign states alone.
Political jurists following the Peace of Westphalia codified this idea and, more importantly, kings strengthened it and gave it the force of law. Formerly, war had been the affair of the noble. In this context it had a societal flavor and was decidedly pluralistic in execution: any noble could start a war. This changed as the requirements for more centralized war made the internecine violence of medieval Europe woefully impractical. Spurred by necessity the monarchs of Europe consolidated military power under their royal banners. In states like Prussia this was a gradual effort, the Junkers exchanging their noble imperative for the king’s commission.18 In others the process was far different, but the trend the same.
But let us return to Prussia for a moment. The power and size of Napoleonic war, under the State’s auspices, left Europeans awestruck. The most influential of these baffled onlookers was a disillusioned Prussian officer named Karl von Clausewitz. From his cogent observations grew the germ of an idea: to explain how the god of war meted out his religion and liturgy upon the world.
Vom Kriege is a work rooted solely in the world of the State. Rarely, if ever, does Clausewitz reach back to a time before Westphalia in order to elucidate his principles of organized violence. He takes the State, as Dr. Van Creveld tells us, “almost for granted.”19 All other forms of warfare fade into obscurity or simply inspire opprobrium. The Clausewitzian universe chooses not to account for rebellion or any other form of intra/supra-state conflict. The gap is present because, in theoretical terms, Clausewitz could not account for warfare before the State. These antiquated practices, such as raiding or blood feuds, once normal if not acceptable in a legal sense in the medieval world, are now labeled as criminal activities and stripped of all legitimacy. With some notable exceptions this paradigm held good for several centuries. The physics of war, as Clausewitz tells us, requires the State to act in conjunction with the people and the army. In real terms, the State became a massive engine built to exude military force against an identical opponent. We can verify this statement with the most cursory examination of conventional armies. They are huge, resource consuming monsters, girded with technological marvels designed to smash a mirror image of themselves.
Clausewitz does not account for war outside of the statist model, and it is from this lapidary conceit that the Western world derives its knowledge of war. Our military doctrine, organization, and norms are all based on Clausewitzian premises, even to this day. In this respect, Clausewitz alone is the prophet of our martial religion. The changing nature of the world and war confronts the modern soldier with what amounts to, in his mind, a bellicose heresy.
Directly related to our modern concept of what constitutes legitimate war is the issue of casus belli. As we have already noted war in the past was waged for social, religious, even cultural reasons. Honor was a matter of military concern and, in large measure, was understood as an acceptable issue.
In place of the more mystical aspects of fighting, Clausewitz informed his disciples that war is merely “a continuation of politics by other means.” It is a rational calculation; a logical step taken once normal discourse has broken down. Older sentimentality gives way to our current notion of ‘interests.’ States fight for their interests, whether those are economic, security-related or otherwise.20 We are not the barbarians that tore each other to pieces in the Dark Ages. We are enlightened, civilized…aren’t we?
Changing Nature of the International Order and Conflict
Even as the State and Clausewitzian dogma reached their acme in the global wars of the 20th century, they were laying the groundwork for their dilapidation. This is directly attributable to the following reasons: 1) state on state violence has become impossible with nuclear proliferation; 2) war now occurs as a manifestation of cultural conflict, decidedly separate from the statist rubric.
Nuclear Proliferation
But why has state-based warfare all but disappeared? There are after all, at this juncture, still states. We find this answer in the State itself and its quest to overthrow its competitive duplicates. In the course of monopolizing violence, the State perfected it as well. The afterbirth of total war (the World Wars) was the nuclear bomb, a device capable of ending life on earth, excepting of course the cockroach. Paradoxically indeed, the rational State took irrational war and catapulted it into the realm of downright insanity. Very soon this jealously guarded atomic secret will become ubiquitous, regardless of the major powers’ best efforts to prevent it.
The ineluctable spread of nuclear weapons will, in time, relegate the conventional state-based armies of the world to the sidelines of conflict. With nuclear proliferation comes a multiplicity of atomic power centers, all extending their insulation beyond themselves to their satellites as well. Against the backdrop of nuclear holocaust, all conventional war becomes bad comedy. Were two conventional armies to fight (hypothetically) the loser would immediately have redress in his nuclear arsenal and once loosed on his opponent the exchange would escalate to the eradication of both combatant populations. In effect, this is not war at all, but suicide on the societal level. No two nuclear powers have yet fought, nor will they likely fight in the future.
Once we have accepted this, we can see how conventional conflict, waged by the State, becomes limited to backwater theatres, unknown and unimportant, hence not worth a declaration of war. As this trend progresses State militaries will watch in impotent horror as their former preserve passes into the hands of supra-national terrorists, corporate mercenaries, and ethnic militias, viz. those capable of fighting underneath the all-pervasive nuclear umbrella.21
Civilizational War
Rather than make the world safe for conventional battle, as some had hoped, nuclear proliferation has opened the door to almost forgotten forms of war, pejoratively labeled by the West as ‘low-intensity’ conflicts. These wars are a result of the State’s imperfect transference to much of the non-Western world and the attending popular disenchantment. Rejecting the statist paradigm, many factions have taken to pursuing violence, so long denied them by the Westphalian system.
It is now empirically evident that the majority of conflict in the ‘post-modern’ era defies explanation under the statist system. This tension holds true for the international system of sovereign states as well. The cosmopolites have been unable, as one might imagine, to reconcile their belief in the centrality of sovereign states with the fact that numerous forces now abrogate that standard.22
One theory of international relations does account for this shift. Samuel Huntington has posited that the world, as it exists now, can best be understood as a system of nine distinct “civilizations” as opposed to the classical notion of variegated sovereign states.23 These civilizations are essentially delineated along cultural lines, e.g. Western, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu etc. In this way human communities are defined more broadly, however, we must also realize that implies a more fractious view of the future. The fall of communism will not usher in a new age of cooperation and common vision. Old cultures, long enthralled by Western dominance, are reasserting themselves and looking to challenge the status quo.
We may also surmise with Huntington that to understand conflict in our age and in the future, we must learn to recognize cultural rifts and identify culture as the locus of war. The State is no longer the major player. It hasn’t been for some time. War, in our time as in times long past, occurs where these “civilizations” buffet up against one another.24 We need look no further than the Pakistan/India conflict or the battles raging in the Sudan. Everywhere culture predominates. In fact, since the close of World War II cultural war has defined the field. State-based war has been the aberration.
The West has been reluctant to accept this readily perceivable fact. We built the international system, wrote its laws, and gave it substance in the form of the United Nations. Our interest appears vested in the maintenance of this order, but it is now beyond our ability to persevere in this fiction. Cultural forces will not contend with state-based armies in the way we have told them they must fight and nuclear forces have, perforce, opted out of the question. When faced with battalion after battalion of tanks, or super-sonic jets invisible to radar, the cultural opponent dissolves away, blends into the population. The fuel-hungry armored brigade storms and tramps around creating much havoc at exorbitant fees in an ultimately fruitless endeavor – something analogous to performing eye surgery with a pickaxe.
Organizations such as international terrorist groups have also benefited from the territoriality constraints under which states suffer. A terrorist may move freely from one country to next, hardly detected by an intelligence apparatus that was not designed to look for him. Conversely, the State must negotiate with its sovereign brethren, goading them to assistance or risk a war only tangentially related to the real problem. Even the State’s spy networks are limited by cultural factors. Surely those Americans capable of infiltrating al-Qaeda are few and far between.
These shadowy networks constitute an ever-present threat beyond the capable reach of the State’s security apparatus. This breakdown of the State’s monopoly of violence has produced manifold and disconcerting ramifications. Among these is the procurement of security services by outside actors, most notably corporations. They have stepped into the vacuum left by the government’s incapability to secure life and property. With security as a traded commodity, some corporations simply augment the State (e.g. MPRI in the U.S), others, however, have supplanted entirely the State’s military infrastructure. In Saudi Arabia the government is protected and sustained by the contracted efforts of an Italian firm called Vinnell, which serves as a sort of “praetorian guard to the regime.”25
An acute problem now faces the State. Its ‘first principle’ is under attack from multiple directions and, thus far, no recourse has presented itself. The Army qua cornerstone of the State’s ‘first principle’ confronts this problem as well. If the changing nature of the world threatens the State with dissolution, then the Army will certainly be the first to feel the vexation, as other players usurp its function.
The Beginning of Frustration
As we have discussed, the notion that people should fight for ‘interests’ is firmly entrenched in our collective psyche. Be that as it may, this approach misses the point. It was a clever pablum foisted on the world by quixotic men who did, we must admit, have good intentions. At base, however, ‘interest’ is a rational calculation in a wholly irrational milieu. War is the province of violent uncertainty, and death, you might say, is a perennial feature. To say that men happily plod off to die for ‘interests’ is ludicrous, for, as Martin Van Creveld tells us, “dead men have no interests.”26 ‘Interest’ understood as some posthumous expectation of material reward for even the closest of relatives is to broaden the definition well past any usefulness.27 Our current attempt at understanding glosses over the truth of the human experience and substantially handicaps us in our dealings with those who are not similarly prejudiced.
War, in reality, often exists for no end but its own. No matter how that affronts our modern sensibilities the truth remains that man likes to fight. It makes him feel more than himself. The soldier transcends his vulgar corporeal condition, much as the Norse warrior alighted on Valkryie wing to take his place in Valhalla. This position is not just ancient melodrama or some flight of poetic fancy. Man desires war. He desires it until he learns by experience to think otherwise and this lesson is one that must be revisited with each generation. The great Prussian chief of staff, Helmuth von Moltke the Elder once said, “eternal peace is a dream, and not even a pleasant one. War is a part of God’s world order. War develops man’s noblest virtues, which otherwise would slumber and die out.”28
It would be convenient to ignore this sentiment, label it the outmoded words of a militaristic Teuton, but that would be irresponsible and serve only to reinforce our failing system. Soldiers have always known, at some level, that war is more than politics. They have ever seen it in mystical terms, but the system in which they operate denies that understanding. The State has sought to impose unnaturally a rationalist system over a fundamentally irrational endeavor.
While we must come to understand this, we must also realize that the enemies of the Western world do not languish under any such misconception. The suicide bomber obviously accepts the mystical aspect of war. He makes no pretense to rationality and we are subsequently confounded by it. The French experience in Algeria provides a powerful example of this dilemma.
Seeking to maintain its overripe imperial pretensions, France fought for many years to keep her African possessions. On the one hand there was the clear cause of the Algerian separatists, cemented in both religion and ethnicity. On the other was the vacillating policy of a confused French government. The French Army stood haplessly in the middle, desirous of a cause but unable to garner one from her political leadership. Like all military men, the French soldier craved command and clear directive. It was his expectation of his superior officers and of his government.29 The problem arises when one tries to pit rationality against ideology. In this sense, political discourse is anathema to the conduct of war. General Lionel-Max Chassin rightly stated that to fight “an insidious and powerful ideology” one needs a “superior one capable of winning the hearts of men.”30 France did not possess such a belief and saw its army ruin itself in Algeria. The vexation grew to such an extent that eventually the French Army removed its civilian government and installed a new one more to its liking, albeit one that suffered from the same ideological malaise.
Nietzsche observed that “a good war halloweth every cause,” but what is the soldier to do when the enemy will not allow the war to be “good?” An intangible opponent coupled with nebulous mission statements is a sure recipe for professional frustration and, over time, organizational disintegration. This robs war of its therapeutic value. To speak psychoanalytically, we become incapable of combating the Internal Terrifier through his external surrogate, i.e. our actual physical opponent. We flail uselessly, the spiraling uncertainty of the conflict reinforcing our psychotic anxieties rather than alleviating them. In the end the soldier cannot separate “nightmare and reality.”31 He wanders in obscurity, speculating as to why he started fighting in the first place.
This manner of frustration is becoming evident in the U.S. military. In addition to the pervasive rumors of officer disenchantment, we would do well to note the troubling recruiting figures of the past year. The Army, for example, started FY05 with 28 percent less recruits on hand than the previous year.32 In like manner, the Marines, often extolled as being able to turn recruits away, missed their enlistment goal in January 2005 for the first time in almost a decade.33 Though far from conclusive, it would seem that the war in Iraq is taking its toll.
In Response to Frustration
The State’s fighting man is markedly out of step with contemporary war. His conventional arm is hamstrung by the specter of nuclear obliteration, while even his ‘special forces’ cannot overcome the limitations of political ambivalence. Ideas must be combated with ideas. To fight post-modern war requires us to accept the basic fact that the mechanisms of industrial warfare are outmoded. Tanks, airplanes, and aircraft carriers are all now simply heraldic trappings of a bygone era. What matters now is unyielding, blind commitment to a cause. The cultural forces working at those civilizational fault lines demand this response.
War, like so many other natural phenomena, seeks at all times to return to equilibrium. An advancement achieved by one side will, as a matter of course, be imitated by the other. This is true of all aspects of war. Technology breeds technology. Superior organization engenders similar but countervailing organization. In like fashion, fanaticism creates and stokes further fanaticism.
When the British Army intervened in Northern Ireland it purported to be a detached participant, wanting to stop violence between Protestant and Catholic while taking neither side. This fantasy did not last long. The intransigence of the Provisional IRA undermined any British claim to objectivity. Due to this the Ulster Defense Regiment, originally formed with a sizable Catholic contingent, became by 1973 an exclusively Protestant unit zealously committed to the orange cause.34
The war in Iraq is, to be sure, different, but some inductions must still be offered. The most prominent of these is that the enemy in this war is not a State, but an ethereal force tied together only by its Sunni-Islamic devotion. The ‘center of gravity’, to violate my own proscription and use a Clausewitzian concept, is not an army or a capital, but an ideology. Unless the U.S. recognizes this fact all of its efforts will only strike at the periphery, leaving the heart unmolested. The resulting dissonance will build in the U.S. military until such time as that military begins to fanaticize itself.
It is axiomatic that if the State withholds or denies a powerful ideology while confronting the same, the soldier will seek one out, invent it if necessary.35 The cool duty-bound professional fighting man, so long esteemed in the Western tradition, will be replaced by a fanatic capable of dealing with his fanatical opponent. This is, in all likelihood, unavoidable and, in some respects, necessary if the U.S. wishes to continue the fight against international terrorism. Only a fanatic will patrol the deserts for years on end, vigilantly waiting for his equally fiery adversary. The rational State-centric soldier will decide that it is not worth his effort and go home. Duty as motive force has perceptible limits.
Some may argue that the Special Operations soldier, e.g. Green Beret or Navy Seal, possesses all the necessary skills to combat the new threat. He is adaptable, they say, and capable of meeting the terrorist on equal footing. He goes where he wills, more or less. State boundaries still pose quite a challenge. Above all else he does what he must to survive, eschewing all doctrine as he sees fit. True as that may be, this analysis misses one very important point: special operations soldiers are not fanatics. Despite the elevated training and independent mission role, the special operations soldier is subject to the same ideological handicaps. This impediment is all too evident in our current special operations community. Though their service is invaluable they are increasingly difficult to retain. The Pentagon, in an unprecedented move, has begun offering $150,000 bonuses in the hopes that it can keep these rare professionals in the uniform.36 The unmistakable reality, however, is that even if the ploy succeeds the State will simply find itself the reluctant employer of a mercenary company. It is indeed difficult to fight ideologues with economic opportunists.
Conclusions and Ramifications
Is the change to fanaticism something that an institution like the U.S. Army, steeped in statist bureaucracy, can ever accomplish? Can it even broach the question? Realistically, the answers must be no. This adaptation would require a commensurate shift in the whole outlook of the State. This is something that the liberal State cannot achieve. The requisite shift would contemn the statist logic, rendering its operative principle null and void. If any hope does remain it will rest with the young officer. The old martinet, enamored with his rank and comfortable in his intellectual sinecures, will find himself only capable of muted anger and impotent dismay. Perhaps the young, not yet institutionally enthralled, may make a play for future relevance, but this will require a great deal of foresight and perseverance; more, probably, than even the young can muster. Junior officers are beginning to feel the discomfiture of the new world, though few can give it a definite name at present. The probable outcome of this is that these officers will choose to abandon the force rather than attempt reform. When faced with a seemingly insurmountable bureaucratic megalith, flight appears safer than fight. In a pragmatic sense, any restorative effort would be ultimately misplaced. To their perceptive credit we must admit that the organization is by all accounts inherently incapable of meeting the new threat.
The end run of all this requires the military officer to transcend his current station, abandon his obsolete ontological precepts. He must become so radically different as to bear almost no resemblance to his former self. The effect will be to produce a soldier washed in the cultural world, capable of meeting his ‘post-modern’ enemy on equal footing. There also remains the real possibility that not only must our soldier change radically, he must be prepared to fight this war at home as well as abroad. It remains to be seen whether our current system can survive such a test fundamentally unaltered. I suspect not.
In summation, the source of the State’s validity has always and ever been the monopolization of violence. The inevitable ubiquity of nuclear weapons coupled with the rising tide of ethnic and religious violence will rob the State of its sole export – security. For a time conventional statist armies will be retained as vestiges of former glory, however, a day will come when their irrelevance and costliness will pass the limits of toleration. The State-based army and her manager, the officer, have made their play upon the stage, accomplished much, but can make no further claims to vitality.
1 Plato, Protagoras, 318E.
2 Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955), 81.
3 Martin Van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 61.
4 Ibid., 61.
5 Ibid.,67.
6 Robert A. Doughty and others, Warfare in the Western World, vol. 1, Military Operations From 1600 to 1871 (Toronto: D. C. Heath and Company, 1996), 27.
7 Van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State, 128-143.
8 William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 573.
9 Cassirer, 83.
10 Van Creveld, Rise and Decline, 171.
11 Cassirer, 173.
12 Ibid.,186.
13 Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. Stanley Appelbaum, trans. N.H. Thomson (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1992), 56-57.
14 Van Creveld, Rise and Decline, 176.
15 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, (New York: Penguin Classics, 1985).
16 Van Creveld, Rise and Decline, 179.
17 John Hoffman, Beyond the State, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 3.
18 Karl Demeter, The German Officer Corps in Society and State, 1650-1945, trans. Angus Malcolm (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965), 4.
19 Martin Van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York: The Free Press, 1991), 37.
20 Ibid., 124.
21 Van Creveld, Transformation, 2-10.
22 Robert H. Jackson, “International Community beyond the Cold War,” in Beyond Westphalia: State Sovereignty and International Intervention, ed. Gene M. Lyons and Michael Mastanduno (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 61.
23 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations: Remaking the World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 26-27.
24 Ibid., 207.
25 P.W. Singer, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 13.
26 Van Creveld, Transformation, 158.
27 Ibid., 158.
28 Helmuth von Moltke, Moltke on the Art of War, ed. Daniel J. Hughes, trans. Daniel J. Hughes and Harry Bell (Novato: Presidio Press, 1993), 22.
29 George Armstrong Kelley, Lost Soldiers: The French Army and Empire in Crisis, 1947-1962 (Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1965), 8.
30 Ibid., 24.
31 Franco Fornari, The Psychoanalysis of War, trans. Alenka Pfeifer (London: Indiana University Press, 1974), xviii-xix.
32 The Virginia-Pilot (Norfolk), 2 October 2004.
33 New York Times (New York), 3 February 2005.
34 Charles Allen, The Savage Wars of Peace: 1945-1989 (London: Michael Joseph Ltd., 1990), 233.
35 Demeter, The German Officer, 195.
36 USA Today, 20 Feb 2005.
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I finally see it by Brandon :: NR9 :: Show
I’ve seen you (Will) and Mark mention things in this direction many times, but this article finally cleared it all up for me (after wading through them big words). Nicely done.
I wonder, though, what kind of government do you see replacing the State ?