Título: THE TRANSFORMATION OF WAR: THE MOST RADICAL REINTERPRETATION OF ARMED CONFLICT SINCE CLAUSEWITZ
Autor: CREVELD, MARTIN VAN
Año: 1991
Género: TÁCTICA Y ESTRATEGIA MILITAR
Formato: EPUB
At a time when unprecedented change in international affairs is forcing governments, citizens, and armed forces everywhere to re-assess the question of whether military solutions to political problems are possible any longer, Martin van Creveld has written an audacious searching examination of the nature of war and of its radical transformation in our own time.
For 200 years, military theory and strategy have been guided by the Clausewitzian assumption that war is rational –a reflection of national interest and an extension of politics by other means. However, Creveld argues, the overwhelming pattern of conflict in the post-1945 world no longer yields fully to rational analysis. In fact, strategic planning based on such calculations is, and will continue to be, unrelated to current realities.
Small-scale military eruptions around the globe have demonstrated new forms of warfare with a different cast of characters –guerilla armies, terrorists, and bandits– pursuing diverse goals by violent means with the most primitive to the most sophisticated weapons. Although these warriors and their tactics testify to the end of conventional war as we've known it, the public and the military in the developed world continue to contemplate organized violence as conflict between the super powers.
At this moment, armed conflicts of the type Creveld describes are occurring throughout the world. From Lebanon to Cambodia, from Sri Lanka and the Philippines to El Salvador, the Persian Gulf, and the strife-torn nations of Eastern Europe, violent confrontations confirm a new model of warfare in which tribal, ethnic, and religious factions do battle without high-tech weapons or state-supported armies and resources. This low-intensity conflict challenges existing distinctions between civilian and solder, individual crime and organized violence, terrorism and war. In the present global atmosphere, practices that for three centuries have been considered uncivilized, such as capturing civilians or even entire communities for ransom, have begun to reappear.
Pursuing bold and provocative paths of inquiry, Creveld posits the inadequacies of our most basic ideas as to who fights wars and why and broaches the inevitability of man's need to “play” at war. In turn brilliant and infuriating, this challenge to our thinking and planning current and future military encounters is one of the most important books on war we are likely to read in our lifetime.
Helps understand the changing face of violence in the modern world.
This book is very enlightening, if that is the word one should use to describe a book about the subject of war, violence, assault, systematic rape, mass killing and everything that goes with it. Others have outlined very well the subject of the book and given a similar rating to mine.
Max Weber said that the state was the only one authorized to the legitimate use of violence. In a rather long-winded and sometimes tedious argumentation, Creveld explains how this is no longer the case, and how the nice tidy little distinction mad by Clausewitz of state, government and people no longer holds: violence is now dispersed and in the hands of many groups whose war-mongering is very different from that of standing armies with the latest military equipment. Modern armies and their weapons are not well suited to this kind of war of “low-intensity conflict”, as he describes it. Before emigrating to the U.S., I saw how this happened in my native Ireland: The Irish Republican Army (IRA) was a very effective force against a sophisticated modern British Army. The IRA said that its strategy, while not always successful, brought its opponents to the negotiating table.
I have also seen it in Mexico (I have a home there) where the drug cartels are now more like a military insurgency than a band of organized bandidos. I witness what happened in recent months (October 17th, 2019). Government soldiers arrested the son of "El Chapo" Guzman (now in a U.S. prison), and after a day-long standoff with the Narcos, his captors were forced to hand him over. That particular day, the Narcos called in firepower from the surrounding mountains which rushed to the scene and took over the city of Culiacan, using guerilla tactics to pin down the local populace (everyone had to stay put), and threatened the army with blowing everyone to bits. As well as their standard AK-47s, they had Barret 82 rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, weaponry to bring down army helicopters (which they did) and a host of other equipment to impose their will. The Mexican army could have won, but with terrible bloodshed, loss of life and perhaps just barely. It is not an exaggeration to say that drug cartels control maybe eight of Mexico's 32 states. Although the Mexican army is a well-equipped and well-trained force, it does not seem to have found an effective way to contain, much less, eliminate the cartels, which day by day become more sophisticated. (Perhaps the government could use more deadly, clandestine means, but they are reluctant to do so because of public reaction, which the Narcos know too well). This is indeed an ongoing low-intensity conflict of the type discussed in the book.
I use this example to validate Creveld's argument, that modern armies and weaponry are simply not enough to confront terrorists, armies of religious fanatics, drug cartels, 'freedom' fighters, and so on. Although written 30 years ago, and although it may exaggerate somewhat the extent of this threat, I feel its conclusions and message have to be taken very seriously. And I am sure they are, by all students of military history and strategy.
–Alastair MacAndrew (March 20th, 2020).
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