War

Last update: 14 Jan 2003 12:50
First version: 19 February 1998

Guerilla warfare, weapons technologies, command-and-control technologies, mechanized war, weapons proliferation. An ugly subject to which I am tied by my family (a great-grandfather was the last of several generations of Italian army officers) and my profession (which not so long ago invented the apocalypse).

Stanislav Andreski [né Stanislaw Andrzejewski], Military Organization and Society
Stephen D. Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle [Comments]
Barbara Ehrenreich
- "The Warrior Elite" in The Worst Years of Our Lives. [Speculations on why some men (the Freikorps, Oliver North) can't live without war, and how they form self-perpetuating castes. "Only war can make warriors." Suggests that (a) women don't become warriors (in this sense) and (b) technocrats working for the Pentagon and the like have the same character. The first is debatable, since we simply haven't made enough women into soldiers to see if they become warriors (has anyone looked into the Soviet army of the Great Patriotic War?); the second is surely false. I grew up with those people, and they were at their most violent playing golf. It was just a job. --- Some of these ideas are modified in her later book,]
- Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War [which is well-written, startling, and totally convincing
J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle [with an introduction by Hannah Arendt (!)]
William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force and Society Since A.D. 1000
John Mueller, "Policing the Remnants of War", Journal of Peace Research 40 (2003): 507--518 [Reprint via Prof. Mueller]
Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500--1800 [Review by Danny Yee]

Raymond Aron, The Century of Total War
Christopher Bassford, "Clausewitz and His Works" [Online]
Nigel Calder (ed.), Unless Peace Comes: A Scientific Forecast of New Weapons [Surveys the bleeding edge in 1968. The predictions are remarkably and depressingly accurate, with one exception: we've somehow managed to avoid biological warfare.]
Gaius Julius Caesar, Commentaries on the Gallic War; De Bello Gallico
Jung-Kyoo Choi and Samuel Bowles, "The Coevolution of Parochial Altruism and War", Science 318 (2007): 636--640 [A possible evolutionary explanation for why humans would have war]
Manuel DeLanda, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines [Much fascinating material, drowned in post-structuralist goop, and distortions of dynamics which make me gnash my teeth, and doubt his accuracy on other subjects.]
Paul Fussell
- Thank God for the Atom Bomb [Esp. the title essay, and the "Postscript on Japanese Skulls"]
- Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic
J. R. Hale, War and Society in Renaissance Europe
Lawrence Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage [Keeley in fact goes so far as to argue that primitive warfare is real warfare (he tosses in guerillas as well), and that what states engage in is much more ritualized and much less serious, except when civilized armies are forced to learn how to really fight by engaging primitive or guerilla opponents. Review underworks.]
Stanislaw Lem, Peace on Earth
Emilio Lussu, Sardinian Brigade
Jim Paul, Catapult: Harry and I Build a Siege Weapon. [What happens when two San Francisco artists start hefting rocks. Cut with chapters from the history of Western armaments --- Syracuse, Jerusalem, and of course Trinity. Jim and Harry had a lot of fun, and ended up lobbing rocks into the Pacific from the Marin headlands (where the Army used to have gun emplacements), some of which merely landed on a nude beach.]
Noel Perrin, Giving up the Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword [The history is fascinating and exceedingly well-told, but the morals he draws from it are all wrong.]
Thomas Ricks, Making the Corps [Review]
Bruce Sterling, "War Is Virtual Hell"
Jason Vest, "Fourth-Generation Warfare," Atlantic Monthly December 2001 [Online]
Xenophon, The Persian Expedition == The Anabasis ["Thalassa! Thalassa!" Perseus Project translation; Project Gutenberg translation.]

K. Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763--1815
Tonio Andrade, The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History
Cynthia J. Arnson and I. William Zartman, Rethinking the Economics of War: The Intersection of Need, Creed, and Greed
Raymond Aron, On War
John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, Swarming and the Future of Conflict
Deborah Avant, The Market for Force: The Consequences of Privatizing Security
James A. Bennett and Stephen Johnstone, The Geometry of War, 1500--1700
Stephen Biddle, Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare: Implications for Army and Defense Policy
Stephen G. Brooks, Producing Security: Multinational Corporations, Globalization, and the Changing Calculus of Conflict
Christopher Brown and Philip Morgan (eds.), Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age
Gérard Chaliand, A Global History of War: From Assyria to the Twenty-First Century
Carl von Clausewitz, On War [Partial English translation online]
Leonard Cole, The Eleventh Plague: The Politics of Biological and Chemical Warfare
Dora L. Costa and Matthew E. Kahn, Heroes and Cowards: The Social Face of War
D. P. Crook, Darwinism, War and History: The Debate over the Biology of War from The Origin of Species to the First World War
Lyn Crost, Honor By Fire: Japanese Americans at War in Europe and the Pacific
Hans Delbrück, History of the Art of War
D. Denning, Information Warfare [Got a favorable review from Rob Slade, a man not given to such weakness]
Col. George T(aylor) Dension (1839-1925), A History of Cavalry From the Earliest Times, with Lessons for the Future. 2nd edition. MacMillian, London, 1913. [Note the date.]
Robert C. DiPrizio, Armed Humanitarians: U. S. Intervention from Northern Iraq to Kosovo
Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence
Mark R. Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security
Robert B. Edgerton, Warrior Women: The Amazons of Dahomey and the Nature of War
Ellis, The Social History of the Machine Gun
Bernard Fall, Hell in a Very Small Place [Dien Bien Phu]
Peter D. Feaver, Armed Servants
Peter D. Feaver and Christopher Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles: American Civil-Military Relations and the Use of Force
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory
Azar Gat, Fascist and Liberal Visions of War: Fuller, Liddell Hart, Douhet, and Other Modernists
Gibson, Warrior Dreams [Post-Vietnam US para-militaries]
Emily O. Goldman, "Cultural Foundations of Military Diffusion", Review of International Studies 32 (2006): 69--91
Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society
Hugh Gusterson, Drone: Remote Control Warfare
Robert E. Harkavy and Stephanie G. Neuman, Warfare and the Third World
Sheldon Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Secret Biological Warfare, 1932--1945, and the American Cover-Up
Chris Hedges
- War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning
- What Every Person Should Know About War
Gretchen Heefner, Sand, Snow, and Stardust: How US Military Engineers Conquered Extreme Environments
Andrew Ilachinski, Artificial War: Multiagent-Based Simulation of Combat
ISAAC: Irreducible Semi-Autonomous Adaptive Combat ["An artificial-life approach to land warfare", with a cellular automata flavor. Can't be too effective or it'd be classified, right?]
Colin H. Kahl, States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the Developing World
Christopher Kutz, On War and Democracy
Lapp, The Weapons Culture
Robert Layton, Order and Anarchy: Civil Society, Social Disorder and War
Peter A. Lorge, The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb
John A. Lynn II, Women, Armies, and Warfare in Early Modern Europe
Robert J. MacCoun, Elizabeth Kier and Aaron Belkin, "Does Social Cohesion Determine Motivation in Combat? An Old Question with an Old Answer", Armed Forces and Society in press (2005) [PDF preprint]
T. G. Mahnken, Uncovering Ways of War: U.S. Intelligence and Foreign Military Innovation, 1918--1941
John Levi Martin, "The objective and subjective rationalization of war", Theory and Society 34 (2005): 229--275 [Pace Weber and Foucault, "[c]lose attention to the question of rationalization and the history of infantry warfare, however, suggests that far from representing a watershed change from non-rationalized to rationalized war, the early-modern period was more like other rapid expansions of armies based on recruitment of commoners, and had little to do with the distinctive characteristics of the emerging nation-states."]
Philippe Martin, Thierry Mayer and Mathias Thoenig, "Make Trade Not War?" [Analysis of correlations between trade treaties and war-making, finding that bilateral trade agreements make countries less likely to go to war with each other, but countries which are more open to trade globally are more likely to go to war in general. I have not had a chance to read this in detail, but the obvious problem, it seems to me, is that their regression includes the United States of America as just another country, when it is (1) a leader in pushing for trade openness and (2) singularly uninhibited about using its military power, which is greater than that of any other country in the world. A quick scan of their paper doesn't show any attempt to see if one of their observations (e.g., the US) was an outlier and so unduly influencing the results, particularly the last one. Still, definitely serious work and worth reading in detail. PDF preprint; authors' self-presentation.]
Adrienne Mayor, Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World
Walter McDougall, ...The Heavens and the Earth [Military-political history of the space age, starting with Tsilovsky]
Jonathan D. Moreno, Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense
John Mueller, The Remnants of War
Carolyn Nordstrom
- Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century
- Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary World
Robert L. O'Connell, Ride of the Second Horseman: The Birth and Death of War
Robert A. Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War
J. R. Partington, A History of Greek Fire and Gunpowder
David B. Ralston, Importing the European Army: The Introduction of European Military Techniques and Institutions in the Extra-European World, 1600--1914
Roger L. Randsom, "War and Cliometrics: Adventures in Economic History", The Journal of Economic History 66 (2006): 271--282
Edward E. Rice, Wars of the Third Kind: Conflict in Underdeveloped Countries [Online]
William Shawcross, Deliver Us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict
Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: combat trauma and the undoing of character
P. W. Singer
- Children at War
- Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
Abdulkader H. Sinno, Organizations at War in Afghanistan and Beyond [author's book description]
Randolph M. Siverson and Harvey Starr, The Diffusion of War: A Study of Opportunity and Willingness
Philip Smith, Why War? The Cultural Logic of Iraq, the Gulf War, and Suez
Brett D. Steele and Tamera Dorland (eds.), The Heirs of Archimedes: Science and the Art of War Through the Age of Enlightenment
Janice E. Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe
Thucydides [Perseus Project translation; Project Gutenberg text]
Towle, Enforced Disarmament
United States Marine Corps, Warfighting [1989; principally written by Capt. John Schmitt, under the director of Gen. A. M. Gray. Online]
Wright (ed.), Avoiding a Biological Arms Race