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The world has changed, and our view of warfare must change with it. Our approach to the globe is colored by our understanding of the state, in its Clausewitzian form, as the principal actor in world politics.1 This convention is beginning to pass away. History is turning back on itself. The world we know will start to look more like the world before the rise of nationalism and the ascendancy of the state. The prime forces in the world can no longer be observed by looking at a political map. One is better served to peruse a cultural atlas, which more accurately delineates the wills that struggle with each other today.
As the paradigm of international relations shifts to an earlier model, so must our understanding of warfare change to fit the new circumstances. More than ever soldiers must understand the complex nature of the conflicts that surround them. The days of the apolitical duty-driven martinet are certainly over. Today’s soldiers are taught to be unemotional and detached from the forces that rage around them. Their approach to war is supposed to be clinical. This derives from the “modern” notion that war, as practiced by a legitimate state, must be constrained by rational armies who pit themselves against each other in contests that are mitigated by rules and laws. The soldier and state became this way to escape the perceived brutality of warfare before the state, when civilizations, cultures and religions tried to eradicate their opponents. Our rationalization, as evidenced by the Geneva Convention and the Law of Land Warfare2 , was supposed to prevent a reoccurrence of the travails that swept the world before the Treaty of Westphalia. It only produced the 20th Century; one choked with war on a tremendous scale. The future will not necessarily be more violent – we can hardly exceed the organized violence of the world wars – however, it will be violence prosecuted under a system that none of our generation have ever seen, but which is not new to the world. In fact, what we are returning to is much more familiar to mankind than the national wars of the past few hundred years. As Martin Van Crevald aptly noted, “Designed, financed and maintained by one state for the purpose of fighting another, present day armed forces are dinosaurs about to disappear…”3
Due to the diminishing relevance of the national army and the rising tide of cultural struggle, state-based armies, most notably the American, will have to undergo massive changes loosely categorized into two broad stages, after which, these forces will have to become highly elite or prematurely irrelevant. Eventually, to counter the threat to Western culture, any effective “army” will have to be organized across national lines and appeal to broader cultural similarities.
Conflict as shaped by the “Civlizational” paradigm4
More noticeable now than ever, conflict in the world is assuming an extra-national character. As Samuel Huntington demonstrates in his book The Clash of Civilizations, the world is more appropriately viewed as collection of seven distinct civilizations rather than the old convention of state-based geopolitics. These “civilizations” are those nations that share common religion, values, and habits – in essence, culture. The coalescing of the Islamic world, emotionally if not politically, evidences this trend, as does the growing cooperation in East Asia. Increasingly, the major areas of instability are those that sit astride cultural rifts.
Naively, the West – Europe, North America, and Australia – believed that its ideals of liberal democracy and individualism would reshape the world. This has not come to pass. The other cultures of the world have shown that they are all too willing to take from the West what is useful and happily discard the rest. The technological links that seemed to bring the whole world together have only highlighted the differences between people who had previously not known each other. In addition to highlighting the differences, the emergence of the “civilizational” paradigm has led the non-West peoples of the world to reassert the value of their own distinct cultural achievements. Along with lauding their own cultures, they have decidedly rejected the legacy of the West. Conflict has and will continue to reflect this tension.
The West has, to some extent, taken note. Western powers are drawing closer together, however they do not yet fully perceive the nature of the challenge. The threat of international terrorism is clear and does not coincide with one specific state. Currently, the West is ill suited to respond. If we accept that the state has ceased to be the nexus of conflict than we must accept radical change in the structure of our fighting force.
Growing Irrelevance of the State-based military
The Army, as we know it, is based on a model of warfare with the state as the only legitimate purveyor of armed violence. The state’s monopoly over violence is the central feature of the modern international system.5 To escape the horror of struggles like the Thirty Years War, the leaders of Europe sought to impose on their successors a system of organized conflict in which only states could legally prosecute war. The hope was that war would become civilized, even rational. The hope was unfounded and was unable to stop the titanic struggles of the 20th century. Through this hope we also deceived ourselves as to the fundamental irrational underpinnings of war itself.
The by-product of this arrangement was the Geneva Convention and, for the U.S. military, the subsequent Law of Land Warfare. Today these documents border on bad comedy. Viewed from our current state of affairs, the Convention’s discussion of “High Contracting Parties” is necessarily impertinent. Terrorists do not respect or listen to any legal arrangement, especially one established and enforced by the West. Nor does any terrorist claim primary allegiance to any state that might be a signatory of that agreement. In a war without armies there are no “combatants” and “non-combatants.” Even the discussion of such a thing is now inappropriate in the legal sense. The very idea of “combatants” as separate from the rest of society is a fairly recent legal construct that is rapidly coming undone. This is not to say that the War Convention will pass away altogether. It will simply change as it has done in the past, reflecting the realities of today rather than the hopes of a bygone era.
The industrial armies of the West were designed, built, and trained to exude sheer force. In those armies are wrapped up all the technological and industrial might of their respective nations. They are trained to overthrow a similar opponent. No such opponent now exists. The U.S., currently, is the only superpower in the world. Similarly, the U.S. Army is easily the most powerful conventional army in the world. To fight the U.S. head on is to lose. Any potential enemy knows this. They know that they cannot compete symmetrically with the U.S., so they won’t. Along with power come constraints. While powerful, the state-based military is woefully unprepared to deal with non-conventional forces. The whole architecture of these forces were shaped to plan, fight and win against a large mechanized adversary. Elaborate staffs, cumbersome support units, and unwieldy vehicles are all now a hindrance to those efforts. The current situation in Iraq dramatically demonstrates this inadequacy. The Army is certainly struggling in Iraq. Its efforts are analogous to a doctor performing eye surgery with a machete. Given clear technological and material superiority it is certain that the terrorist cells of the world will not ride out to meet the U.S. Army in the open. They will hide, wait, and then strike when conditions are entirely favorable to their efforts. Any state capable of matching the U.S. in this conventional showdown also has the money and resources to produce a nuclear weapon and the U.S. has shown that it will not fight a nuclear power. Disenchanted members of the world community are aware of this fact.
The emerging essentials to future war are not technology, wealth or industrial capacity. Instead the key components are commitment, patience, and a steadfastness born of belief in the fight. Short of obliterating the countries that house terrorists the U.S. will be unable to defeat its opponents quickly. Soldiers reared to think that all they need do is fight a climatic battle and then return home are of no use anymore. The principle feature of future war will be length. Because the enemy does not fight under the flag of any nation it is infeasible to elicit his formal surrender. Extra-national terrorist groups will not “surrender” until they are eliminated all together. This will take much time.
The state-based army is further hindered by its slow response time. The impedimenta associated with the modern conventional army defy swiftness of action. Conversely, the terrorist group prides itself on quickness and deception. It is largely impossible for an armored division to sneak up on a terrorist training camp in the wilds of the Iraqi desert. To send a conventional army into action also requires an immense outlay of funds that must usually be authorized, at some point, by some representative body. An effective response to a terrorist act cannot wait on the deliberative process that would surely ensue. By the time a representative democracy6 has reached a decision the response is slow and its direction is too discernible to those who wish to avoid its coming.
The natural counter-argument is that Special Forces or covert operatives working within the traditional state-centered formula can wage this kind of war and are, in fact, doing so already. These agencies are fighting, but not in an optimal manner. Both Special Forces and covert agencies are constrained by the same geo-politics that encumber the traditional state-based military. It is true that they are not hamstrung logistically, yet they are still subject to the protracted politics of a democracy. Additionally, these organizations cannot rapidly follow their extra-national rivals from country to country because many times their presence constitutes an act of war. Furthermore, cooperation between countries is still restricted by the disunity of international organizations. Tactically, Special Operations units are better equipped to deal with terrorists, but politically they are still lacking. Bearing this in mind, these types of elite groups are still closer to the future than the tank battalion of yesteryear.
State-based militaries, whatever their ilk, are at a disadvantage in one other respect – public opinion. Tied closely to the vagaries of democratic politics, public opinion can dismember a military operation. The Western public, to a large extent, demands speedy victory and deplores loss of life. The public also places pressure on elected officials when military operations become unseemly. This is clearly evidenced by Spain’s recent withdrawal from operations in Iraq.
The civilizational wars that are emerging will require a degree of ruthlessness not before deemed acceptable by the Western public. When these operations are carried out by a state, that state will immediately come under criticism by fellow nations and, more importantly, by the members of the body politic. The protracted nature of civilizational warfare will further heighten this discomfiture until such time as the Western democracy must extricate itself from the now untidy situation. The extra-national terrorist group is not subject to this kind of pressure. Its leaders are not elected and no nation can directly effect the course of their operations. They are free to be ruthless, deceptive and…effective.
The Initial Tension
In response to the changing world system, the state-based militaries, as the sole guarantor of global security, will be forced to take steps to combat the new threat. In general these changes will begin the transformation of armies into elite, non-industrial, fighting forces that are additionally inculcated with an appreciation for their cause.
Firstly, to combat the opponents of the new century will require a warrior who regards himself as elite. The concept of elite is not defined by those included as by those who are excluded. Any army which groups shooters with finance officers, postal clerks, and fuel handlers will never regard itself as elite. The zealous soldier of today (candidate for soldier of tomorrow) will not long stay in an organization that denudes all its participants under the same inauspicious title – “soldier.” The zealous soldier entered the service to be apart from his peers, to elevate himself from the rest. He did not join the Army to become part of a uniformed micro-society. If the zealous soldier is not made to feel elite he will seek better opportunities somewhere else.
The seed of its own destruction has already been sown in many forces. Soldiers are increasingly uninterested in the cause that dictates the course of their service. It is often aptly noted that the U.S. does not have a “volunteer” army, but a “recruited” army. This army, by design, has recruited soldiers by offering them job training, life experience, and marketability outside of the army. In effect, the American Army has not recruited professional soldiers. Owing to this, the Army is forced to pay ever-higher bonuses to keep soldiers in uniform. The warrior spirit is fading at an alarming rate. Service is too often an economic stopgap. Despite the distastefulness of the expression, these tepid soldiers are actually mercenaries, and mercenaries whose pay increasingly does not, in their minds, cover the cost. This mode of soldiering was acceptable during the reign of the state-based army. The state’s vast war machine could be counted on to fight titanic battles and war was relatively short in relation to the clarity of the goal. As this method of violence becomes less prevalent, so will this kind of soldier become less useful. With money as his raison d’ etre, soldiers will find greener pastures as war becomes protracted. Already private security firms are filling in where the state will not or cannot provide security. The second great danger is that a mercenary has no moral commitment to his employer’s cause. The U.S. Army has been forced to recruit by offering incentives that are patently unrelated to an effective army. This kind of army will quickly come unraveled when it faces an inveterate opponent. The Army’s recruiting efforts have been buoyed by the patriotic outburst that followed the terrorist attacks of 11 Sept 2001. Even so, the war in Iraq is steadily undoing that fervor. In the future the U.S. Army will find it nearly impossible to fill its rolls given its current recruitment strategy. To a lesser degree this problem may begin to afflict other Western countries as well.
In no way should armies attempt to retain soldiers who are not willing. Retention of numbers is not important. Industrial warfare is over. War of that sort reached its apogee in 1945 and has quickly sunk to its nadir. With the umbrella of nuclear catastrophe curtailing truly massive conventional conflict in the future, it will be quality that is decisive, not quantity.
Besides its personnel flaws, conventional armies also waste resources unnecessarily. Built on the industrial model, the U.S. Army consumes resources at a rate designed to outfit a large mechanized force locked in mortal combat with a mirror image of itself. This circumstance no longer exists and the U.S. cannot keep up this feeding frenzy for an indefinite period of time. Huge arrays of support units are massed into various camps around Iraq. They exist now to equip mostly themselves and they encumber legions of combat soldiers with taxing guard requirements.
In the near future these formations must disappear. No longer necessary to fight back the Russian horde, the tank will step out of the spotlight. Without this material-consuming monster support units will become streamlined. The vast sea of cargo and fuel trucks necessary to haul the tank’s accoutrements will become unnecessary. The endless bureaucracies that once tracked parts and ammunition for the mechanized army can finally be undone and discarded.
Those that remain should not exist as they once did. All functions that are not exclusive to the fighting man must become the function of contracted agencies. Any role not exclusive to the professional soldier7 will cease to be a soldier’s role. By maintaining these non-professional aspects of military service the army degrades the quality of its members and can never pursue an elite status. If an army is not exclusive it is not elite. If it is not elite, it will not be capable of winning its wars.
Western armies must also stop thinking about combat in terms of vehicles. Technology is not the decisive factor in war. Our technological prowess has merely engendered an adversary who will not fight in the open. What can a tank company or a fighter squadron do against four or five men building improvised explosives in the basement of a mosque? Tankers cannot think of themselves as tankers; field artillerymen cannot only focus on “steel rain.” They are all now simply soldiers. Soldiers must find tactical solutions apart from their parochial specialty. They must step out of the Cold War era and deal with the ubiquitous, faceless violence that confronts the modern fighting man. Military Occupational Specialties should be consolidated. Make every soldier a smart, agile, multi-skilled master of his art. A similar consolidation will occur for those support duties that remain. Mechanics will step away from their over-specialization just as truck drivers and fuelers should not stay separate jobs. They will exist separate from any piece of technology. Our reliance on gadgets is becoming a serious flaw. Is it not ironic to note that as the smart bomb reaches the apex of its perfection, it has also become perfectly useless?
The need for this change should have been presaged by the rising tide of bureaucratism in the state-based army. An army, as an organization, is constantly suspended between the poles of “professional” and “bureaucratic.” Of late, we have slipped ever closer to the latter of the two. When discussing the seemingly arbitrary actions of those above them, soldiers often use the meaningless pronoun, “they.” More often than not, the soldier cannot personify “they” or decide at which level of command “they” exists. “They” is the evidence of an overly bureaucratic body. “They” comprises everyone and no one at the same time, because “they” is the bureaucracy.
Decisions in a national army, carried out by cumbersome nameless staffs, do not hold any notion of responsibility. As in the state itself, the army suffers from its own bureaucratic inertia. Driven by unaccountable staffs and large disembodied agencies, directives are introduced that are unknown to their “official” proponents or, in some cases, directly contrary to their intent.
As an army inexorably apes after the bureaucratic perfection of the state, it becomes ever more repellent to the “professional” soldier. Wishing to exercise authority freely, the “professional” soldier will become increasingly frustrated by the torpidity he must fight to exact change within the bureaucracy. As the bureaucracy faces adversaries not similarly encumbered, it will retreat upon itself. The obvious answer would be to eliminate “red tape,” but bureaucrats have a special skill at entrenching themselves in times of crisis. Instead of accepting change readily, the bureaucracy will seek to more exactly regulate what falls within the scope of its achievable, and therefore legitimate, aims. Compelled to do more, the bureaucracy will justify why it can only do less. This state of affairs will prove to be anathema to the truly “professional” soldier.
To parry the danger posed by bureaucratization, professionals within armies must force change. Many administrative functions, once designed to manage an abundance of material, will have to be eliminated directly. Staffs built to plan the next Battle of Kursk should be removed completely. Ungainly agencies with nothing to plan or coordinate are necessarily bureaucratic and will look for inventive ways to be distracting. At one point in time many bureaucratic functions came into being because they promoted efficiency and promulgated some sort of effective system. For many of these agencies, staffs, and organizations, the days of their usefulness have long past. The “professional” soldier must decide that whenever the complexity or burdensomeness of a system outweighs its importance, it should be discarded wholesale. If the state-based military is unable to do this, as an organization, than it will more rapidly reach the end of its days.
The Radical Shift
Even an army reborn elite, purged of its awkward size and useless bureaucrats, is still an army based on the state. The state’s monopoly on violence has been broken. For centuries the state’s justification for existence was its role as the guarantor of security. Now new actors, unconstrained by “rational” politics have entered the fray. Their activity defies the notion that there are legitimate national interests worthy of war and that the rest is crime or rebellion. War – their kind of war – predates the state. War will not continue only in our false rubric any more.
The state-based military, even if it was reformed to remove its more serious shortcomings, will still fall short in a civilization conflict. It is not only a question of equipment and organization, but of the quintessential way in which we define ourselves. The state does not recognize emotion, religion, or personal motives as legitimate or “rational” objectives for war. It has divorced itself from these ideas even though they are inescapably a part of human nature. Because of this separation between the state as a corporate body and the myriad forces that drive men to act, the state is necessarily hamstrung. Forces, such as religious zealots, are not similarly handicapped. They may cross international boundaries, strike “civilian” targets, engage in assassinations or kidnappings, and torture their opponents to exact information.
These forces, indiscernible from the surrounding “non-combatants,” cannot be bombed to death or crushed under the tread of a tank. Even if the reformed elite army of the near future were to find one of their lairs in a daring commando raid, the enemy will surely escape across some international boundary or into a mosque protected by our hypersensitivity to political missteps. These clandestine soldiers will strike cities at home or embassies abroad. They will attack what cannot be protected and yet, the state-based military will have to grant them inviolate sanctuaries, allowing them to always gain the upper hand. The state-based military is powerless, abject and weak, before this onslaught. It can neither respond effectively nor seek to gain the initiative. The enemy will bomb a plane and we will make stirring vows of revenge. He will assassinate an official and we will appeal to international law. He will furtively skate from one country to the next and we will decry him for not “following the rules.”
What can the state or its contracted killers do against this nebulous enemy? Increasingly little! The enemy has inaugurated a nearly forgotten war. It is a war of peoples, not of countries. The lines of this conflict will be drawn based on ancient allegiances and by cultural affinity. At some point, this tension will produce similar counter-organizations. Its ultimate allegiance or responsibility of these groups will not be to any country but to the idea of the West as a civilization separate from its detractors. The members of this group, hearkening back to earlier wars, will come from the West, not America or Britain or France or Germany. For a millennium Europe knew nothing of countries or politics as we know them now. Truly they fought amongst themselves, but there was the over-arching idea that they were all part of one kingdom, then loosely defined as Christendom. This connectivity has been sustained through time by common culture, values, societal norms, and religion. These counter-groups will recognize and appeal to this kinship. Allied to no one single state, these fighters will appear, perhaps disturbingly, analogous to their terrorist adversaries. Their leadership, organization, and discipline will be more akin to the crusading orders of the Middle Ages than the armored division of World War II. Their appearance will be the result of war trying to balance itself again. They will become the “army” of the new age. In the end they may take on many of the trappings of the terrorist themselves; different mainly in that their cause is, at least nominally, ours.
International terrorism poses a dire threat to the continued viability of the state itself and that is why this entire discussion is so important. The state exists, primarily, to provide its citizens with security. Its whole claim to legitimacy and sovereignty rests on the assumption that only the state, with its vast retinue of military and financial might, can guarantee stability for the individual. The fundamental covenant of the “social contract” is that the individual gives his loyalty to the state and, in return, the state furnishes peace of mind. As we have seen, the state is failing to keep up its end of the bargain. In time, as individuals look elsewhere for their security, the state will lose claim to their exclusive allegiance. The logical conclusion is fairly obvious. International terrorism, if continued unabated, may precipitate the end of the post-Westphalian world system.
1 M. Van Crevald, The Transformation of War (The Free Press, 1991), p. 36.
2 FM 27-10 Section I. General. 2. Purposes of the Law of War: The conduct of armed hostilities on land is regulated by the law of land warfare which is both written and unwritten. It is inspired by the desire to diminish the evils of war by: a. Protecting both combatants and noncombatants from unnecessary suffering; b. Safeguarding certain fundamental human rights of persons who fall into the hands of the enemy, particularly prisoners of war, the wounded and sick, and civilians; and c. Facilitating the restoration of peace.
3 M. Van Crevald, The Art of War: War and Military Thought (Cassell, Wellington House, 2000), p. 214.
4 S. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and Remaking the World Order (Touchstone, 1996), p. 21.
5 M. Van Crevald, The Rise and Decline of the State (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 155.
6 It is important to remember that every country in the West subscribes to this system of government.
7 The Professional soldier is defined by his exclusive military expertise. It is only in this regard that the soldier is separated from his civilian counterpart. A finance clerk in the Army is in no way different from a finance specialist working for a corporation. The infantryman, however, has no mirror in the civilian world.
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question/comment by Valerie :: NR0 :: Show
RE: question/comment by willwaddell :: NR7 :: Show
props, army changes, and possible state-run army needs by Brandon :: NR9 :: Show
Email-Driven Army by markmcb :: NR8 :: Show
War has laws? by Anonymous :: NR0 :: Show
This is ridiculous by Anonymous :: NR0 :: Show
Look—the face of war surely is changing, but the tendency of this author to assume (or at least imply) the inevitability of war and its causes is deeply flawed.
The imagined inevitability of violent conflict and competition between "civilizations" is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sometimes a people must defend itself, but it’s all too easy to go too far and graduate from self-defense to "preemptive" conquest and intimidation. The desire to pacify the world by force only makes it a more hostile place.
Sometimes we must defend ourselves, to be sure, but we cannot fail to recognize the historical context that has led to world wars, a cold war, and terrorism—and that is a history of conquest and colonialism by western powers. Social changes in the west—a distaste for war and hegemony—has led to many reforms, including a shift from colonization by force to economic domination, but it’s still essentially the same thing, and people recognize this. They still find their way of life under threat, and many of them are prepared to respond violently.
It doesn’t make violence okay—but the violence of terrorism the west fears is only the natural result of the west’s own greed, and it must be understood in those terms. Shockingly, many people in the west are still confused about this—and still don’t understand why many people in other parts of the world may not want to live the way we do, but may feel cornered into doing so. They’re not alone—many westerners themselves feel they are pressured into a stupid, competitive, and greed driven way of life that threatens their wellbeing, and even the survival of the species.
So, to talk about the changing face of war, to speak of war as if it’s simply human nature, or to discuss how professional soldiers must unshackle themselves from the ugly complications of public mistrust or overmanagement—well, it’s ridiculous.
The "distaste" of the western public for war is simply a recognition of all these factors—that there’s profit in war, that wars are rarely just (even if they are "legal"), and the west has been pissing on the rest of the world for quite some time. This distaste fueled the shift away from colonialism toward economic globalization, but we’re not done—people want something more ecologically and cross-culturally viable. Thinking people in all civilizations and cultures hate war and all other forms of violence and oppression, and always have. They understand that war is the most pathetic of all ways to solve a problem, and that any person who would wish to excel at it or undertake it as a profession for profit and glory must be terrubkt immature or insane.
Real people (though frequently not those in power) recognize that a truly smart, agile, multi-skilled soldier is first and foremost a peacekeeper. His or her duty is not to a nation, a government, or personal gain, but to peace and prosperity for all—including and especially his enemies. A true warrior seeks understanding, not "victory."
A true warrior makes peace within himself and always uses the least possible level of force. If he must settle a difference at gunpoint, then he knows he has lost, because violence only escalates matters and delays further conflict.
Ultimately, war is about power, and power is about controlling a situation. Everybody requires a certain amount of power/freedom in their lives, but the kind of power some crave—freedom at the expense of another’s—is untenable for an intelligent species in a finite ecosystem.
The social contract is not supposed to be a dubious exchange of personal loyalty for state-sponsored security, between man and government… Such a view implies a kind of "Hobbesian" state of nature which is deeply and hopelessly cynical; not to mentione inherently flawed.
Human beings are basically good and basically honest—only when they are desperate or in pain do they become avaricious and hostile.
The social contract is supposed to be a basic sense of trust, good-will, and respect between people; a recognition of commonality between people, irrespective of cultural differences.
If we had such a social contract, I daresay there’d be no reason at all for war, or even for states or laws, or state-sanctoned economic policies, because individuals could band together quickly, responsively and responsibly for the common good—they would recognize that their own wellbeing is inextricably linked to the wellbeing of others, and working forward from that, they’d strive to cooperate instead of pitting themselves against each other in petty struggles (military, economic, or social) for land, resources, or prestige.
The way that such a society might deal with conflict would always be firm, but flexible—and hardly ever violent. It would always be ready to work with people—thus avoiding atrocities like terrorism by never allowing anyone to become so alienated and cornered that they feel terrorism or war is their best or only option to improve their circumstances. Unfortunately, as we have centuries of war, malice, greed, and mistrust to overcome, people are born and bred believing that their only way to improve their lot is through competition and conflict.
So, to summarize—I agree with the author in that the face of war must change and become more mobile, responsive, and adaptable if it is to continue to be effective… but I would go futher and say that a true responiveness and adaptability lead to a basic refutation of war itself—they lead to creative harmony, and we should aim for THAT, instead of being content to settle for better ways of slaughtering each other. Let’s improve our view of each other and set our sights a little higher.
New Thread, Same Conversation by willwaddell :: NR7 :: Show
So we want evidence that man is selfish and that war cannot be reduced? Well, let’s examine any period in history, any century, any generation. Hmm, where to begin…?
Somewhere between 3500 B.C. and 3000 B.C. man invented writing. To discuss anything before that, in the age of vampire-kings, would be a vain effort so we’ll start there. During this pre-dynastic period in Egypt the southern and northern kingdoms fought with one side eventually gaining dominance. Whether that side was southern or northern is open to speculation but one faction eventually triumphed.
If we jump across the globe to China we see much the same type of thing occurring. The early Shang dynasty is overrun by the Zhou who impose a semi-feudal architecture to Chinese politics. The resulting Spring and Autumn Period was one of battles, with larger polities destroying or annexing smaller competitors. This rosy time was, in turn, replaced by the exceedingly pleasant Warring States Period. The touchstone theme of this age was larger battles among larger states. This time ended with the rise of the state of Qin.
But perhaps you would rather start in ancient Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization. Here Sumerian city-states were pressured by Semitic peoples who eventually came to rule the city of Kish. A household servant of one of these kings overthrew the established dynasty and set himself to conquest. This Sargon erected an empire centered on Akkad and pushed the limits of his domain perhaps all the way to the center of Asia Minor. Sargon’s progeny, particularly his grandson, proved less capable than their fathers and found themselves trampled by nomadic Gutians from the east. Eventually the Sumerians regained their lost power and exterminated the rogue Gutians. All seemed well for a while until Amorites from the west invaded, sacking and burning ancient Sumer. Chroniclers at the time recorded lamentations detailing bodies rotting in the sun and smoke covering the aspect of their cities.
Surely, however, India, the land of Buddha and Gandhi, was better off. War and competition never reared their ugly heads…did they? Even the apparently peaceful time of the Harappa, about which we know desperately little, was destroyed by the arrival of Aryans, probably originating somewhere in the steppes of Inner Asia. They brought with them the caste system, the fairly rigid hierarchical structure that pervades India even to this day. And this early situation was probably your best bet as to a pre-historic utopian society, although our limited knowledge about this civilization makes those claims all questionable. But even here we see that everything "went to hell" once someone (i.e. the Aryans) decided to up the ante.
We can jump forward in history and see much of the same. The Greeks found the the Persians to be disagreeable masters. From those wars we remember such battles as Marathon, Thermopylae, and the great naval battle at Salamis. With Persia on the ropes the Greeks took aim at each other. I imagine most everyone has heard of the lengthy Peloponnesian War. Besides the fighting, Athens even got to experience a plague brought on by the privations of war. Doesn’t that sound like great good-natured fun?
Alexander and the Macedonians finished off Greek squabbling and carried the banner of Greek conquest into Asia for a change. He was so successful that basically the entire known world yielded to his army. As he sat in Bablyon in 323 B.C., he might have imagined that he had brought peace to the world. There seemed no one left to conquer. Ah, but Alexander died and his rival successors quickly initiated the Wars of the Diadochi. These wars were full of murder, intrigue and revolts — all in all really good times.
Now, let’s jump forward an examine another time period. Any swath would do, so I have chosen the 15th to 19th century or thereabouts. I assure you that the intervening time was also full of war and strife and general competition. But let us ever so briefly survey this niche in history.
During the first half of the 15th century we observe the closing of the Hundred Years War and the beginning of Ming rule in China, after successfully usurping Mongol overlordship. In that same period the Turks captured Constantinople, thus killing the last emperor, plundering the church of St. Sophia and turning it into a mosque. Slightly later on, 50 years or so, the Turks were knocking on the doors of Vienna and the Russians had just thrown off the yoke of Tartar domination.
In Europe the Reformation was followed by the Hugenot Wars in France and the Thirty Years War across most of Germany. Germany lost 15 percent of her population in that one.
The Onin War gripped Japan for ten years starting in 1467. By 1590 Hideyoshi had subdued all of Japan, leaving Korea the natural next step in his path of conquest. The geographically unfortunate Koreans were only saved by the timely arrival of Chinese armies. Ieyasau Tokugawa, the forced successor of Hideyoshi, transformed the island nation into a police state that lasted unchallenged until Commodore Perry’s guns opened up Japan in 1853.
China once again fell to a foreign power in 1644 as the Manchu banner armies entered Peking. Nurhachi’s heirs didn\‘t take long to capture south China. Tibet fell to new Ch’ing Dynasty in short order as well.
Europe rounded out the 18th and 19th centuries with a flurry of activity. We have the War of Spanish Succession, the 7-year War, the French Revolution, followed up nicely by the Napoleonic Wars.
If you haven’t gotten it yet, let me explain that I could keep going on like this for quite a long time. I could cover every space of time with accounts of the travails men have faced, the wars they have fought. We can say with confidence that every generation from the beginning of recorded history has faced war in some form or fashion. Does this mean that there were never periods of peace? Certainly not. It does mean, however, that war waits in the wings always ready to pounce on the unsuspecting or the unprepared. Our survey of history also reveals that war is no less prevalent today than it was 3000 years ago, only the technology and the methods have changed. I don’t think I need to go through the list of 20th century wars. The Russo-Japanese War, World War I, the Russian Revolution, the Irish Civil War, the Northern Expedition, World War II, the Korean War, and the Six Day War should provide a sufficient, if far from exhaustive list. Actually during the space of 1900-2000 I can count 91 wars and I think I am probably missing some.
What should be obvious at this point is that man from ages past till now has embarked upon war for myriad reasons. It is foolish to think we can escape this kind of phenomenom so evidently rooted in our existence. This also means that we should always prepare for war, lest we end up like so many extinct peoples. You may like to think that "tyrants" with some mystical demagoguery have always and anon tricked men into fighting against their better wishes, but this is not the case. Men, for whatever reason, crave war. If he didn’t he would have figured out the tyrant’s game long ago. If a tyrant provides anything, it is organization or direction. Men have the bloodthirstiness all their own.
This state of affairs cannot be expunged by marching out anthropological anomalies like the Aborigines or the !Kung. The extremely primitive !Kung lived in a region so inhospitable that they spent literally all their time simply trying to survive. Their communities hardly numbered more than 30 allowing for almost no specialization in economics. Basically, they had no time for war and with such small numbers no real opportunity to fight. Whereas you would assert that in this case "people kept each other in check," I would argue that near-starvation and constant labor kept people too tired to fight or really compete. If you would reduce the world to starvation and somehow prevent any technological advances, then yes, we too could live as peacefully as the !Kung. Wouldn’t that be marvelous.
Related to your ideas about competition and peace is your conception of capitalism and our shift from feudalism to democracy. You notice this change, yet completely misapprehend why the new systems worked better. Both capitalism and our government of representative democracy assume as a basal state the innate corruption of mankind. That is the genius of both. Capitalism observes that man is essentially greedy and wont to prevail over his fellow man. Through competition capitalism plays to man’s natural predilection, pitting greed against greed thus holding the economic system in balance. Democracy is much the same. We have three separate branches of government each designed to check the power of the other two. We only need this system of checks and balances because the framers recognized man’s natural will to power. Our system deftly plays man against man, limiting any one man’s aggrandizement. Other systems, like communism, which must assume the best of men all fail or lead to a totalitarian order. The beauty of both capitalism and democracy is that they are decidedly not utopian. These ideas work by understanding the rules of a broken world and using them to good effect. This is why Winston Churchill said that "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried."
It is likewise fallacious to throw out history based on certain attitudes that have existed throughout that history. You’re saying, in short, that because the past is not a perfect predictor of the future we should cast aside the whole endeavor. Surely the once held geocentric view of the universe does not invalidate all further scientific inquiry. You would have us be incapable of knowing anything, all evidence be damned.
Now, does this mean that all good is futile? Of course not. Man may and should do good, but should not arrogantly surmise that his good may redeem a fallen world. I find it interesting that you mentioned the appeal of Jesus as in some way impugning the worldview I have explained here. Jesus did not preach a utopia of this life. The Jews, in contrast, had long clamored for a messiah, a deliver, who, in their minds, would free them from the Romans, restore the kingdom of David, and reassert their glory in this world. Jesus told "those who are persecuted" that they are "blessed…for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." Never does he promise peace in this life. In fact he told his disciples that "You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen…" (Matthew 24:6). In essence the Christian finds peace because his hope is not in this world, but in the world to come and, moreover, he recognizes that the problem with his present condition is sin. It is, for us, as Augustine said, "non posse non peccare" (not able not to sin). Our appeal to goodness must come from outside us, not from within. Our sense of "oughtness" that drives us to desire something better is a faint recollection of what once was, before man failed. That time will be restored, but not by our doing.
The whole point of this discussion seems almost lost now, but I can summarize as follows: "to secure peace is to prepare for war." It really comes down to that.