In short, Clausewitzians face two problems when dealing with public
opinion. In the first place, it may be very difficult to get the public ‘on side’,
as the phrase goes. In the 1930s it took a long time for opinion in Britain
and the United States to realize that war was probably necessary – in the
1960s the US was never able to persuade a large enough majority of
Americans that Vietnam justified the effort they put into it. However, once
public opinion is ‘on side’ it is very difficult to restrain it. Whatever the mer-
its of the ‘unconditional surrender’ doctrine of the Allies in the Second
World War, it is clear that any alternative approach – and especially any
suggestion that in future the Soviet Union might prove more of a problem
than post-war Germany – would have been ruled out by public opinion.
Perhaps public opinion would have been right, and was right over Vietnam –
but the point is that is not a very Clausewitzian way of doing business.
There is, however, an even more
fundamental problem with the
Clausewitzian account of war, which is that it may be
culturally specific.
Nineteenth-century European war was a very formal business, with uni-
formed armies occupying clearly delineated territory, a code of conduct
which was usually (although not always) observed, a formal declaration
and a formal end, the peace treaty. The ‘decisive battle’
was a feature of
Napoleonic, Clausewitzian and Victorian accounts of war – Creasy’s
Fifteen
Decisive Battles is a key text here, showing a clear progression from
Marathon to Waterloo (Creasy 1902). States fight in a formal way and
make peace in a formal way. Hanson calls this
The Western Way of War
(1989) and traces it back to the wars of the Classical Greek cities, in which
citizen heavy-infantry would fight one, highly stylized,
battle per campaign-
ing season, with a clear-cut way of determining winners and losers based on
possession of the battlefield. This, he suggests, gives modern Europe its gov-
erning idea of what a war is like. However, he argues that it is highly untyp-
ical of the warfare of most civilizations, which is much more informal, is
not dominated by set-piece battles, and rarely leads to any kind of decisive
moment, much less a peace treaty.
The West is, of course, aware of this kind of warfare, but regards it as the
exception rather than the rule and gives it special labels –
guerrilla war, low-
intensity conflict, police action, dirty war, Kipling’s ‘savage wars of peace’.
The point to make here is that the exception may be becoming the rule.
As we have seen, constitutionally secure liberal democracies do not fight
each other – but then
no one fights each other in the old way any more,
except on very rare occasions such as the Falklands/Malvinas War of 1982
or the Gulf War of 1990–1. Even in these two cases, the parties that were
clearly defeated have refused to behave like nineteenth-century gentlemen
and make treaties which acknowledge this fact. Instead,
they hang on, hoping
something will turn up. Again, the Israelis have repeatedly ‘defeated’ their
enemies in set-piece battles but they have been unable to turn these victories
The Balance of Power and War
109
into political results – indeed every ‘successful’ military action seems to have
weakened their bargaining power by undermining the sympathy previously
shown to the underdog by Europeans, and by many Americans. More char-
acteristic of modern warfare was the imbroglio in former Yugoslavia in the
1990s, where quasi-regular armies vied with armed bands of ‘volunteers’,
and local warlords owed only tenuous loyalty to their nominal superiors,
where alliances shifted on a day-by-day basis and the ‘frontline’ was diffi-
cult
to define, where territory changed hands without set-piece battles, and
where formal armistices and peace treaties were signed and broken, signed
again and broken again. This was the non-Western way of warfare
encroaching on the West in a most painful way. The sensational victories in
war-making but equally spectacular failings in peace-building following
both the 2002 Afghanistan war and the 2003 Iraq war of the US and its
allies also demonstrate the point. In both cases, the overwhelming military
force of the Coalition has not even been enough to control the haphazardly
organized and poorly
armed insurgents in each state, let alone to build and
protect new political systems.
There is at least some evidence that can be read as suggesting that some
Western military thinkers have understood this shift in the nature of warfare
rather better than Western governments or public opinion. The US armed
forces have been developing doctrines for the employment of coercive mea-
sures of a non-conventional kind for some time. The new American soldier
(‘land warrior’) will be expected to display his or her prowess by employing
the latest technologies not in set-piece battles against regular opponents, but
in more informal situations where the political interests of the United States
need to be supported by a show of violence. This capacity for ‘virtual war’
which, given the publicity surrounding it, may be intended to be ‘virtual
deterrence’, has been mapped by postmodern
enthusiasts such as the
Tofflers (1993) and Der Derian (1992).
One of the reasons why the Western way of war is being rejected in the
West itself is, perhaps, traceable to wider changes in late modern society,
and in particular to the apparent ending of the ‘warrior culture’ in the West.
Although Western public opinion has not abandoned the idea that it may
sometimes be necessary to use force in international relations, the demand
nowadays is to minimize casualties amongst one’s own troops, and also
amongst ‘enemy’ civilians. The US reliance on air-power and its refusal to
commit its troops in battle until the ground has been thoroughly prepared
by ‘precision’ bombardment
has been noted by many writers, and is in
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
