Humane Warfare

Christopher Coker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781134521326
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The decision to fight 'humanitarian wars' - such as Kosovo - and the development of technology to make war more humane, illustrates the trend in the West to try to humanise war, and thereby humanise modernity. This highly controversial and cutting-edge book asks whether the attempt to make war 'virtual' or 'virtuous' can succeed and whether the wes

1 Humanising war

Surfing the Zeitgeist

The unsuspecting reader of David Ogg’s classic account of the history of seventeenth-century Europe would come across an arresting passage. He was writing about what was quite unique to the century: the first serious attempt in an age in which Europe was almost constantly at war to mitigate its worst horrors. Some contemporary writers, like the French politician Sully, had advocated a pan-European union of Christian powers committed to a general peace. Others were more practical in their thinking and, of these, none was more important than Grotius.

Grotius was a Christian rationalist and, if not exactly a pacifist, he was a pacific man. It was a mark of his humanity that he believed it possible to mitigate some of the worst horrors of war by sparing infants, women and the aged. The great jurist wanted to exclude from military service not only agricultural workers (the main economic resource of the time), but also men of letters, indeed anyone who contributed to the life or illumination of the state. He wanted wars to be fought by small bands of professional soldiers. If Grotius had had his way, war would have been waged only by men whose lives the state could easily dispense with. Peaceful occupations would have been interfered with as little as possible. War would hardly have impacted on civilian life. While out campaigning, the welfare of non-combatants would have been uppermost in a commander’s mind.

Grotius was prompted to propose rewriting the rules of war by the evils of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) whose cruelty was captured graphically in Jacques Callot’s The Large Miseries of War, a series of etchings published in 1633. If Callot himself did not witness the worst excesses, the etchings are the work of an informed eye. No one at the time could have harboured any illusions about war. The scenes he depicts – rape, looting, the burning of villages and the destruction of a convent – show the part played in war by criminality and senseless violence. The emphasis placed on this dimension of conflict has led some critics to speculate that Callot equated war with crime. It is more likely both of the man and his times that its message is no less universal but more complex: war, whatever its motivation, nourishes crime, murder and cruelty – the very features Grotius wanted to eliminate.¹

Writing as he did in 1925, only seven years after the end of the First World War, the bloodiest in Europe’s history, Ogg was not much impressed by Grotius’ scheme. While conceding that many of these proposals had been embodied in the Hague conventions, he criticised him for being both impractical and idealistic, for failing to acknowledge the true nature of war. ‘For while he allows war, he purports to rob it of its essential elements – its misery, waste and cruelty.’² He faulted Grotius above all for thinking that war could be made humane.

In arriving at this conclusion Ogg may well have been struck by the similarities between the century about which he was writing and his own. For the religious wars of the seventeenth century had involved the leading European powers of the day in a protracted and murderous engagement which another twentieth-century historian, C.V. Wedgwood, thought the unhappiest period in Europe’s history until the onset of her own. It was ‘a time (like our’s) in which man’s activities outran his power of control.’³ Indeed the damage to Germany in the 1630s was even more catastrophic than the damage it suffered in the twentieth century, for it lost up to a third of its population. For at least a decade after 1650 the city fathers of Nuremberg allowed men to be married to two wives at the same time in an attempt to repopulate the city.

The Thirty Years’ War was as close to a ‘total war’ as wars come, in its impact on Germany and the lives of its people, but it gave way to a period of limited war. The momentous change from total to limited war took place ‘insensibly’ insofar as no one intended the change, or was even aware of it at the time. For the change took place not in individuals who followed their own purposes, and who were not alive to the historical significance of their own acts, but in society, and it involved a transformation of the reason why people went to war. As symbolic of that change in attitude, Wedgwood took the respective battle-cries shouted by the Spanish soldiers at the White Hill in 1620 (the first battle of the Thirty Years’ War) and Nordlingen (the last great Catholic victory fourteen years later). At the first they shouted: ‘Sancta Maria’; at the second, ‘Viva Espana’. Anyone who might have witnessed the two battles would almost certainly not have appreciated their historical significance which lay in the contrast between them, a contrast accessible only to a historian like Wedgwood who saw in it a sign that ‘insensibly and rapidly the Cross gave way to the flag’.⁴

In drawing this contrast, Wedgwood was describing the cycles of limited and total war which distinguished European history in terms of war’s inhumanity. The American strategist Hermann Kahn once drew up a chart of the long cycle of limited and total wars which had distinguished western history since the eleventh century, and his chart repays a visit (see Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Cycles of wars

Source: Hermann Kahn 1989.

Kahn, who used to boast that he had the highest IQ in American history, was the model for Dr Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s film of the same name. He was one of the trio of nuclear thinkers who formulated America’s doctrine of nuclear deterrence in the early years of the Cold War (the others being Bernard Brodie and Thomas Schelling). We should not be discouraged by the fact that his interest in history notwithstanding, he was by training a physicist and was confident in his ability to predict the future. He was one of the first futurologists, and the Hudson Institute which he founded was commissioned by governments and corporations to engage in what is now called ‘future history’.

Neither Kahn’s lack of modesty nor his preoccupation with the future may recommend him to us as an analyst but his chart is interesting, especially in the revised form that I have presented it. The fact that he died in 1983 has required me to add to it a new period of humanitarian wars. In replacing religion with politics, the Europeans were able to return to an era of limited war. In a world that was now ‘unpatrolled by God’ the cruelty of war was much reduced, in scale at least.⁵

Unfortunately, the era which opened with the French Revolution and ended in Napoleon’s defeat saw a return to total war, or something like it. For what was truly revolutionary was not the revolution so much as the revolutionary wars which followed in its wake, for they exported the ideas of the republican government in Paris. As Edmund Burke complained, the revolutionaries were engaged in expounding ‘the catechism of the Rights of Man’. Killing for a collective purpose in the name of man (for an idea) was even more potent than killing in the name of God (for religion).

The result was devastation on an extensive scale. Perhaps as many as three million soldiers lost their lives, and another million civilians; 800,000 soldiers died in one campaign (that of 1812) alone. The memory of the wars is still pervasive in more isolated communities, even if it has been largely forgotten in the cities. One historian was told in the early 1990s by the pastor of a small Thuringian village that his community had lost more dead in the period 1803–14 than it had in any other war in which the Germans had fought since the seventeenth century.⁶

The nineteenth century saw a return to sanity. Fearful of revolutionary sentiment, governments were much more cautious in going to war, and when they did they limited their ambitions. Even the defeat of France in 1871 was followed by forty years of peace. The First World War which brought the curtain down on that halcyon era changed the pattern once again. If that was horrendously destructive the level of savagery in the Second World War exceeded anything known to history. The main explanation for this, namely that more civilians died than soldiers, was true, of course, of the Thirty Years’ War too – described so memorably by Grotius as: ‘a riot of fury in which authorisation was given to every crime’.⁷

The Swiss playwright Max Frisch saw the extent of the inhumanity of war at first hand when he travelled through Frankfurt in 1946:

At the railroad station. Refugees lying on all the steps … their life is unreal, awaiting without expectation, and they no longer cling to life; their life clings to them, ghostlike … It breathes on the sleeping children as they lie in the rubble, their heads between bony arms, curled up like embryos in the womb, as if longing to return there.⁸

The fate of the Soviet Union was even more poignant. It lost up to twenty-seven million people in the war in four years of fighting that can probably claim to be the most barbaric of any conflict in any century. The novelist John Steinbeck saw the destruction for himself when he visited Stalingrad – or what was left of the city – in the summer of 1947, a year after Frisch’s tour of a Germany that also lay in ruins. One day, Steinbeck saw a girl emerge from the rubble in which she lived outside his hotel and feed on what scraps of food she could forage. Clearly she had been traumatised by the battle that had waged a few years before. How many more might there be like her, he wondered, ‘minds that could not tolerate living in the twentieth century’?⁹

The twentieth century was unique, in fact, for producing the ‘death event’ – the mass murder of a million or more men and women.¹⁰ The characteristic of war was no longer the defeat of an army in the field but its total destruction; it was no longer forcing a society to surrender but eliminating the society itself. Mass destruction became the only aim. Whether the ‘death event’ was a battle like Verdun (1916) in which nearly a million soldiers perished on a battlefield no larger than the area occupied by the London parks; or a political act like the Holocaust which claimed the lives of seven million people, death became anonymous. For the victims – whether soldier or Jew – the event itself appeared to be autonomous of human action; it had a logic of its own. When Primo Levi asked a guard in Auschwitz why he was there he was told, ‘Hier is kein Warum – there is no why here.’ Worse still would have been the ultimate holocaust – a nuclear war between the Superpowers which strategists like Kahn expected would produce 100 million victims. It was an event that need not have had a ‘cause’ at all. In Dr Strangelove the enemy is a colonel who goes mad and sends an air wing into Russia. War could now be accidental; it no longer needed a cause.

Irony and war

Clearly the face of war has changed significantly. Let me quote a contemporary voice, a retired USAF officer commenting on the battle sequences of what is commonly held to be the most realistic Hollywood war movie, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan:

As a career Air Force aviator I have no experience with the kind of intense ground combat depicted in this film. When it comes to the titanic clash of mighty land armies where thousands of young men are thrown into each other’s line of fire, I have to rely on the reviews of the experts who say it’s pretty realistic.¹¹

Looking back on the Normandy campaign, which is the subject of Spielberg’s film, the conditions which the allied soldiers (the great majority conscripts at that) were expected to endure are unimaginable today. Although we stand only half a century from it, we have great difficulty envisaging both the conflict and its cost. One British soldier on the road to Caen saw a landscape that reminded him of the war he had read about when young: ‘a country fought over and destroyed like the Somme and Passchendale battlefields of the Great War … pocked with shell holes … scarred with slit trenches … sullied by the stench of unburied dead.’ With a casualty rate of 2354 soldiers per day, the Normandy campaign was one of the bloodiest the British Army has ever fought.¹²

In today’s military profession, our airforce pilot adds, there is no place for ‘the bloody boots on the ground realists’ who insist that victory cannot be bought without wading through the blood of one’s comrades – a reference to those still left in the western military establishments who are appalled that the pain and dislocation of mortal combat is being reduced to a ‘stand-off’ conflict in which aircraft and missiles deliver their weapons of death over hundreds of miles. We have entered a new era of limited war which will be more humane not only for the soldiers who fight it but our enemies as well. We are told that the incivility of war which Ogg took to be its principal feature can be significantly reduced. As a thoroughly modern man Ogg would be sceptical of our attempts to do precisely that – to revalue it by making it humane. He would probably find unconvincing our attempts to divest it of its cruelty; to eliminate its waste – both material and human; to reduce its misery to soldiers and non-combatants alike. He would no doubt criticise us for being as ‘disingenuous’ as Grotius but he would be wrong to doubt our intentions. For the western powers have engaged in a real, if possibly unrealistic, attempt to transform not only the character of war, but also its nature.

We have not, of course, gone out of the business of war. Instead, we have been forced to re-market it, to fight it in a different fashion. We now fight humanitarian wars, and we try to fight them more humanely. This is why we find war ironic. We are struck by how different it is from fifty years ago. Irony has many definitions but one is the difference between what we are told something is and what we find its true nature to be. The principal difference today is war’s real or purported ‘humanity’.

• What struck many observers as ironic about the Gulf War was the low number of casualties incurred by the allied forces. The Americans expected to lose up to 10,000 men. They lost 270 (some of them in accidents). So low was the eventual death-toll that questions began to be asked which had never been asked in war before. Was it not safer to serve in a war zone than be billeted back home? In Life magazine’s fourth and final special issue on the war two sociologists calculated that as of 6 March 1991 the death-toll on the US side represented only 40 per cent of those who might have died had they stayed in the United States – the casualties of traffic accidents, muggings, domestic incidents or other distinctly unheroic forms of death.¹³

• Another ironic note was sounded by a Pentagon official who insisted that ‘the battlefield is no place for a soldier’.¹⁴ On the penultimate day of the war a group of Iraqi soldiers tried to surrender to a remote controlled machine called ‘Pioneer’, the first occasion in the history of warfare in which human beings tried to capitulate to an inanimate enemy. Tomorrow, soldiers may be removed from the battlefield altogether – we call it ‘disengaged conflict’.

• The Gulf War was ‘unmanned’ in another respect. It was the first major conflict in which women were more integrated into a combat support role than ever before. Although they represented only 6 per cent of the Coalition’s forces, the novelty of their deployment in a combat zone received a disproportionate amount of media attention because it was taken to be indicative of the new spirit of the times. Indeed the recruitment of women marks the most radical social break with tradition in the past 3000 years – for it involves the recruitment of 50 per cent of humanity that by tradition has been excluded from military service. Women, we are also told, are more ‘humane’ than men or at least more compassionate. In the aftermath of the war a former consultant to the US Secretary of the Army suggested that the problem of gender integration might be solved in future if the military agreed to eliminate such ‘masculinist’ attitudes as ‘dominance, assertiveness, independence, self-sufficiency and the willingness to take risks’ – in a word, all the traditional sold...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Humanising war
• 2. War and the renunciation of cruelty
• 3. The redundancy of courage
• 4. War without hatred
• 5. The humane warrior
• 6. Zoning the planet
• 7. Humane war and the moral imagination
• 8. Conclusion
• Notes
• Index