A brutal constant

Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare, by Colin S. Gray (Cassell, 440 pp., $35.02)

THE DEFENSE DEPARTMENT has just issued its third Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), a congressionally mandated document laying out the assumptions that presumably will guide the planners as they develop strategy and allocate scarce defense resources. The QDR and the critiques of it reveal the difficulty Pentagon officials have: They must make hard decisions today based on assumptions about a highly uncertain future.

The record is not a good one: American defense planners have been flummoxed by a strategic surprise on the average of once a decade. The late British field marshal Sir Nigel Bagnall observed that "over the centuries, identifying a nation's future strategic priorities has proved to be a very imprecise art, and as a result peacetime force structures have seldom proved relevant when put to the test of war."

The 2006 QDR reflects the post-9/11 conventional wisdom that interstate conflict, the mode of warfare that dominated the world from the rise of the modern state until the Cold War, is a thing of the past. This is particularly true of total war, a form of interstate conflict that originated with the French Revolution and culminated in the world wars of the 20th century. Future conflict, we are told, will take the form of "inter-civilizational, intercultural warfare," of which radical Islamic terrorism with the global reach of al-Qaeda is Exhibit A.

Not so fast, writes Colin Gray in his new book, Another Bloody Century: Regular interstate war may be out of favor now, but it has a future, no matter what today's defense pundits maintain.

No one is more qualified to address the issue of future war than Gray, who has been the most consistently brilliant and prolific strategic thinker in the English-speaking world for the past three decades. The author of some 18 books and innumerable journal articles, Gray has written on everything from nuclear doctrine to naval policy; but he is at his best when--as here--he addresses the broad canvas of strategy.

Taking his bearings from Clausewitz, Gray gleefully debunks the things we "know" about war that just aren't so. Seven theses make up the essence of his argument in Another Bloody Century.

First, war is a permanent feature of the human condition. The belief that it will disappear because of human progress, globalization, or "the end of history" is no more realistic today than it was in 1914, when the world was nearly as "interdependent" as it is today.

Second, although war may manifest a variable character, it possesses an unchanging nature. Clausewitz is still read because he developed a universal "theory of war," applicable to war in all eras including the current one. Gray argues that war will remain what it has always been, a struggle between two active wills that seek to subjugate each other.

Third, although "irregular" warfare is likely to be the dominant mode of belligerency for some time to come, interstate war--including great-power conflict--has a healthy future. Although the zeitgeist "screams 'irregular' and 'asymmetrical' while leading politicians identify terrorism, the ultimate in irregular warfare, as the defining threat for security of our time," the United States--in its role as the world's "sheriff," providing the public good of security during the early 21st century--cannot afford to settle upon a preferred mode of combat in the hope and expectation that it will be able to oblige any and all enemies to conform to an American style in warfare. Defense planners must avoid the "likelihood fallacy": shifting our strategic focus and investment priorities to those scenarios that are currently "more likely" while forgetting that other scenarios, such as large-scale regular warfare, are less likely precisely because our focus and investment have deterred them.

Fourth, the political context is the principal driver of war's incidence and character. Wars are not fought for their own sake but for political goals. War may be the least bad option available to a government, but it is an option nonetheless. Political calculations about the "value of the object," risk, and costs will always drive the decision to resort to war in the first place, and determine how long and vigorously it will be waged and when it will be terminated.

Fifth, since war is social and cultural as well as political and strategic, it must reflect the characteristics of the communities that wage it. Each community prepares for and wages war after its own fashion. As Sun Tzu observed, victory is more likely when we understand not only ourselves but also our enemy.

Sixth, there have been "military revolutions"--discontinuities in the practice of war--in the past. Warfare does not always change in an evolutionary fashion. Strategic history is non-linear. Trends come in bundles and interact in unpredictable ways, leading to great convulsions and discontinuities. Accordingly, surprise is not only possible or probable, but certain.