Introduction to Weapons Systems and Political Stability: A History
by Carroll Quigley
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1. The Human Condition and Security
The earliest moments of my day are divided about equally between the morning newspaper and the cat. At six a.m., as I cautiously open the front door to get the paper from the porch, my mind is concerned with achieving my purpose as unobtrusively as possible. I am not yet prepared to be seen by my neighbors, and, accordingly, I open the door hardly more than a foot. But that is enough for the cat, who has been patiently awaiting my appearance. It slips silently through the opening, moves swiftly to the center of the living room and pauses there to emit a peremptory “meow.” The cry tells, as plainly as words, of its need for food, so I must put my paper down to follow its jaunty waving tail to the kitchen to get its morning meal of cod fillet from the refrigerator.
While the cat daintily mouths its fish in the kitchen, I return to my paper in the living room, but have hardly grasped the world news on the front page before the cat is back, rubbing its arched back against my leg and purring noisily in the early morning quiet. By the time I have turned to page two, the cat, still purring, has jumped lightly to the sofa and is settling down to its daylong nap. Within minutes, it is sprawled in complete relaxation, while my own nervous system, spurred up by the violence and sordid chaos of the news, is tensing to the day’s activities.
The contrast between the simple pattern, based on simple needs, of the cat’s life and the activities of men as reflected in the daily press, makes me, for brief moments, almost despair of man’s future. The cat’s needs are few and simple. They hardly extend beyond a minimal need for physical exercise, which includes a need for food, some expression of the reproductive urge, a need for some degree of physical shelter and comfort in which to rest. We could list these needs under the three headings of food, sex, and shelter.
No such enumeration of man’s needs could be made, even after long study. Man has the basic needs we have listed for the cat, but in quite different degrees and complexity. In addition, man has other, and frequently contradictory, needs. For example, man has the need for novelty and escape from boredom, but, at the same time, he has a much more dominant and more pervasive need for the security of established relationships. Only from such established patterns of relationships, covering at least a portion of his needs, can man successfully strike out on paths of novelty to create new relationships able to satisfy other needs, including the need for novelty. Surely man has social needs for relationships with other humans, relationships which will provide him with emotional expression, with companionship or love. No man can function as a cat operates in its narrower sphere of activities unless he feels that he is needed, is admired, is loved, or, at least, is noticed by other humans.
Even less tangible than these emotional needs of man’s social relationships are needs which man has for some kind of picture of his relationship with the universe as a whole. He has to have explanations of what happens. These need not be correct or true explanations; they need only to be satisfying, at least temporarily, to man’s need for answers to his questions of “how?” and “why?” the universe acts the way it seems to act. This search for “how” and especially for “why” is particularly urgent with reference to his own experiences and future fate. Why does he fail in so many of his efforts? Why are his needs for companionship and love so frequently frustrated? Why does he grow older and less capable? Why does he sicken and die?
As a biological organism functioning in a complex universe which he does not understand, man may be regarded as a bundle of innumerable needs of very different qualities and of a great variety of degrees of urgency. It would be quite impossible to organize these needs into three or even four categories, as we did with the cat, but we could perhaps, in a rough fashion, divide them into a half dozen or more groups or classes of needs. If we do this, we shall find that they include: (1) man’s basic material needs usually listed as food, clothing, and shelter; (2) the whole group of needs associated with sex, reproduction, and bringing up the young; (3) the immense variety of relationships which seek to satisfy man’s need for companionship and emotional relationships with his fellow men; and (4) the need for explanation which will satisfy his questions about “how?” And “why?”
Yet certainly these four do not exhaust the range of man’s needs, for none of these can be enjoyed unless man can find intervals in which he is not struggling to preserve his personal safety. Food, sex, companionship, and explanation must all wait when man’s personal existence is in jeopardy and must be satisfied in those intervals when he has security from such jeopardy. Thus the need for security is the most fundamental and most necessary of human needs, even if it is not the most important.
The last statement is more acceptable to a reader today that it would have been fifty years ago because, in the happier political situation of that now remote period, security was not considered of primary significance and was not regarded as comparable with men’s economic or personal needs. That blindness, for such it was, arose from the peculiar fact that America a generation ago had had political security for so long a time that this most essential of needs had come to be taken for granted and was hardly recognized as a need at all, certainly not as an important one. Today the tide of opinion has changed so drastically that many persons regard security as the most important of all questions. This is hardly less mistaken, for security is never important: it is only necessary.
The inability of most of us to distinguish between what is necessary and what is important is another example of the way in which one’s immediate personal experience, and especially the narrow and limited character of most personal experience, distorts one’s vision of reality. For necessary things are only important when they are lacking, and are quickly forgotten when they are in adequate supply. Certainly the most basic of human needs are those required for man’s continued physical survival and, of those, the most constantly needed is oxygen. Yet we almost never think of this, simply because it is almost never lacking. Yet cut off our supply of oxygen, even for a few seconds, and oxygen becomes the most important thing in the world. The same is true of the other parameters of our physical survival such as space and time. They are always necessary, but they become important only when we do not have them. This is true, for example, of food and water. It is equally true of security, for security is almost as closely related to mere physical survival as oxygen, food, or water.
The less concrete human needs, such as those for explanation and companionship are, on the other hand, less necessary (at least for mere survival) but are always important, whether we have them or lack them. In fact, the scale of human needs as we have hinted a moment ago, forms a hierarchy seven or eight levels high, ranging from the more concrete to the less concrete (and thus more abstract) aspects of reality. We cannot easily force the multi-dimensional complexities of reality and human experience into a single one-dimensional scale, but, if we are willing to excuse the inevitable distortion arising from an effort to do this, we might range human needs from the bottom to the top, on the levels of (1) physical survival; (2) security; (3) economic needs; (4) sex and reproduction; (5) gregarious needs for companionship and love; (6) the need for meaning and purpose; (7) the need for explanation of the functioning of the universe. This hierarchy undoubtedly reflects the fact that man’s nature itself is a hierarchy, corresponding to his hierarchy of needs, although we usually conceal the hierarchical nature of man by polarizing it into some kind of dualistic system, such as mind and body, or, perhaps, by dividing it into the three levels of body, emotions, and intellect.
In general terms, we might say that the hierarchy for human needs, reflecting the hierarchy of human nature, is also a hierarchy ranging from necessary needs to important needs. The same range seems to reflect the evolutionary development of man, from a merely animal origin, through a gregarious ape-like creature, to the more rational and autonomous creature of human history. In his range of needs, reflecting thus both his past evolution and his complex nature, are a bundle of survivals from that evolutionary process. The same range is also a kind of hierarchy from necessary things (associated more closely with his original animal nature) to important things (associated more closely with his more human nature). In this range the need for security, which is the one that concerns us now, is one of the most fundamental and is, thus, closer to the necessity end of the scale. This means that it is a constant need but is important only when we do not have it (or believe we do not have it). That is why the United States, in the 1920s and 1930s, could have such mistaken ideas about the relative significance of security and prosperity. Because we had had the former, with little or no effort or expense to ourselves, from about 1817 to at least 1918, we continued to regard this almost essential feature of human life as of less significance than prosperity and rising standards of living from 1920 until late in the 1930s or even to 1941. Accordingly, we ignored the problem of security and concentrated on the pursuit of wealth and other things we did not have. This was a perfectly legitimate attitude toward life, for ourselves, but it did not entitle us to insist that other countries, so much closer to the dangers of normal human life than we were, must accept our erroneous belief that economics was more fundamental than politics and security.
Many years ago, when I talked of this matter to my students, all in uniform and preparing to go off to fight Hitler, one of them, who already had a doctorate degree in economics, challenged my view that politics is more fundamental than economics. The problem arose from a discussion of the Nazi slogan “Guns or butter?” I asked him, “If you and I were together in a locked room with a sub-machine gun on one side and a million dollars on the other side, and you were given the first choice, which of these objects would you choose?” He answered, “I would take the million dollars.” When I asked, “Why?,” he replied, “Because anyone would sell the gun for a lot less than a million dollars.” “You don’t know me,” I retorted, “because if I got the gun, I’d leave the room with the money as well!”
This rather silly interchange is of some significance because the student’s attitude is about buying the gun with some fraction of the money assumes a structure of law and order under which commercial agreements are peaceful, final, and binding. He is like the man who never thinks of oxygen until it is cut off; he never thinks of security because he has always had it. At the time I thought it was a very naive frame of mind with which to go to war with the Nazis, who chose guns over butter because they knew that the possession of guns would allow them to take butter from their neighbors, like Denmark, who had it.
In recent years there has been a fair amount of unproductive controversy about the real nature of man and what may be his real human needs. In most cases, these discussions have not gotten very far because the participants have generally been talking in groups which are already largely in agreement, and they have not been carrying on any real dialogue across lines of basic disagreement. Accordingly, each group has simply rejected the views most antithetical to its own assumptions, with little effort to resolve areas of acute contradiction. There are, however, some points on which there could hardly be much disagreement. These include two basic facts about human life as we see it being lived everywhere. These are: (1) Each individual is an independent person with a will of his own and capable of making his own decisions; and (2) Most human needs can be satisfied only by cooperation with other persons. The interaction of these two fundamental facts forms the basis for most social problems.
If each individual has his own autonomous will making its own decisions, there will inevitably be numerous clashes of conflicting wills. There would be no need to reconcile these clashes if individuals were able to satisfy their needs as independent individuals. But there are almost no needs, beyond those for space, time, oxygen, and physiological elimination, which can be satisfied by man in isolation. The great mass of human needs, especially those important ones which make men distinctively human, can be satisfied only through cooperative relationships with other humans. As a consequence, it is imperative that men work out patterns of relationships on a cooperative basis which will minimize the conflicts of individual wills and allow their cooperative needs to be satisfied. From these customary cooperative relationships emerge the organizational features of the communities of men which are the fundamental units of social living.
Any community of persons consists of the land on which they are, the people who make it up, the artifacts which they have made to help them in satisfying their needs, and, above all, the patterns of actions, feelings, and thoughts which exist among them in relationships among persons and between persons and artifacts. These patterns may be regarded as the organization of the people and the artifacts on the terrain. The organization, with the artifacts but without the people as physical beings, is often called the “culture” of the community. Thus we might express it in this way:
- 1. Community = people + artifacts + patterns of thoughts, feelings and actions
- 2. Community = people + culture
- 3. Community = people + artifacts + organization.
The significance of these relationships will appear later, but one very important one closely related to the major purpose of this book may be mentioned here.
When two communities are in conflict, each trying to impose its will on the other, this can be achieved if the organization of one can be destroyed so that it is no longer able to resist the will of the other. That means that the purpose of their conflict will be to destroy the organization but leave the people and artifacts remaining, except to the degree that these are destroyed incidentally in the process of disrupting their organization in order to reduce their capacity to resist. In European history, with its industrialized cities, complex division of labor, and dense population, the efforts to disrupt organization have led to weapons systems of mass destruction of people and artifacts, which could, in fact, so disrupt European industrial society, that the will to resist is eventually destroyed. But these same weapons, applied to a different geographical and social context, such as the jungles of southeast Asia, may not disrupt their patterns sufficiently to lower their wills to resist to the point where the people are willing to submit their wills to those of Western communities; rather they may be forced to abandon forms of organization which are susceptible to disruption by Western weapons for quite different and dispersed forms of organization on which Western weapons are relatively ineffective. This is what seems to have happened in Vietnam, where the Viet Cong organizational patterns were so unfamiliar to American experience that we had great difficulty in recognizing their effectiveness or even their existence, except as the resistance of individual people. As a result, we killed these people as individuals without disrupting their Viet Cong organization, which we ignored because it was not similar to what we recognized as an organization of political life in Western eyes, and, for years, we deceived ourselves that we were defeating the Viet Cong organization because we were killing people and increasing our count of dead bodies (the majority of whom certainly formed no part of the Viet Cong organization which was resisting our will).
The importance of organization in satisfying the human need for security is obvious. No individual can be secure alone, simply from the fact that a man must sleep, and a single man asleep in the jungle is not secure. While some men sleep, others must watch. In the days of the cave men, some slept while others kept up the fire which guarded the mouth of the cave. Such an arrangement for sleeping in turns is a basic pattern of organization in group life, by which a number of men cooperate to increase their joint security. But such an organization also requires that each must, to some degree, subordinate his will as an individual to the common advantage of the group. This means that there must be some way in which conflicts of wills within the group may be resolved without disrupting the ability of their common organization to provide security against any threat from outside.
These two things—the settlement of disputes involving clashes of wills within the group and the defense of the group against outside threats—are the essential parts of the provision of security through group life. They form the opposite sides of all political life and provide the most fundamental areas in which power operates in any group or community. Both are concerned with clashes of wills, the one with such clashes between individuals or lesser groups within the community and the other with clashes between the wills of different communities regarded as entities. Thus clashes of wills are the chief problems of political life, and the methods by which these clashes are resolved depend on power, which is the very substance of political action.
All of this is very elementary, but contemporary life is now so complicated and each individual is now so deeply involved in his own special activities that the elementary facts of life are frequently lost, even by those who are assumed to be most expert in that topic. This particular elementary fact may be stated thus: politics is concerned with the resolution of conflicts of wills, both within and between communities, a process which takes place by the exercise of power.
This simple sentence covers some of the most complex of human relationships, and some of the most misunderstood. Any adequate explanation of it would require many volumes of words and, what is even more important, several lifetimes of varied experience. The experience would have to be diverse because the way in which power operates is so different from one community to another that it is often impossible for an individual in one community and familiar with his own community’s processes for the exercise of power to understand, or even to see, the processes which are operating in another community. Much of the most fundamental differences are in the minds and neurological systems of the persons themselves, including their value systems which they acquired as they grew up in their own communities. Such a value system establishes priorities of needs and limits of acceptance which are often quite inexplicable to members of a different community brought up in a different tradition. Since human beings can be brought up to believe almost anything or to put up with almost anything, the possible ways in which the political life of any community can be organized are almost limitless.
In our own tradition, the power which resolves conflicts of wills is generally made up of three elements. These are force, wealth, and ideology. In a sense, we might say that we resolve conflicts of wills by threatening or using physical force to destroy capacity to resist: or we use wealth to buy or bribe consent; or we persuade an opponent to yield by arguments based on beliefs. We are so convinced that these three make up power that we use them even in situations where different communities with quite different traditions of the nature of power are resisting. And as a result, we often mistake what is going on in such a clash of communities with quite different traditions of power. For example, in recent centuries, our Western culture has had numerous clashes with communities of Asiatic or African traditions whose understanding of power is quite different from our own, since it is based on religious and social considerations rather than on military, economic, or ideological, as ours is.
The social element in political power rests on the human need to be a member of a group and on the individual’s readiness to make sacrifices of his own desires in order to remain a member of such a group. It is largely a matter of reciprocity, that individuals mutually restrain their individual wills in order to remain members of a group, which is necessary to satisfy man’s gregarious needs. It is similar to the fact that individuals accept the rules of a game in order to participate in the game itself. This was always the most important aspect of power in Chinese and other societies, especially in Africa, but it has been relatively weak in others, such as our Western society or in Arabic culture of the Near East. The religious element was once very important in our own culture, but has become less so over the past five centuries until today it is of little influence in political power, although it is still very important in forming the framework of power in other areas, most notably in traditional Tibet, and in many cultures of Asia and Africa.
The inability of persons from one culture to see what is happening in another culture, even when it occurs before their eyes, is most frequent in matters of this kind, concerned with power. Early English visitors to Africa found it quite impossible to understand an African war, even when they were present at a “battle.” In such an encounter, two tribes lined up in two opposing lines, each warrior attired in a fantastic display of fur, feathers, and paint. The two armies danced, sang, shouted, exchanged insults, and gradually worked themselves up into a state in which they began to hurl their spears at each other. A few individuals were hit and fell to the ground, at which point one side broke and ran away, to the great disgust of the observing English. The latter, who hardly can get themselves to a fighting pitch until after they have suffered casualties or lost a battle or two, considered the natives to be cowardly when they left the field in flight after a few casualties. What they did not realize was that the event which they saw was not really a battle in the sense of a clash of force at all, but was rather an opportunity for a symbolic determination of how the spiritual forces of the world viewed the dispute and indicated their disfavor by allowing casualties on the side upholding the wrong view. The whole incident was much more like a European medieval judicial trial by ordeal, which also permitted the deity to signify which side of a dispute was wrong, than it was to a modern English battle.
In the most general terms we might say that men live in communities in order to seek to satisfy their needs by cooperation. These needs are so varied, from the wide range of human needs based on man’s long evolutionary heritage, that human communities are bound to be complex. Such a community exists in a matrix of five dimensions, of which three dimensions are in space, the fourth is the dimension of time, and the fifth, which I shall call the dimension of abstraction, covers the range of human needs as developed over the long experience of past evolution. This dimension of abstraction for purposes of discussion will be divided into six or more aspects or levels of human experience and needs. These six are military, political, economic, social, religious, and intellectual. If we want a more concise view of the patterns of any community, we might reduce these six to only three, which I shall call: the patterns of power; the patterns of wealth; and the patterns of outlook. On the other hand, it may sometimes be helpful to examine some part of human activities in more detail by subdividing any one of these levels into sub-levels of narrower aspects to whatever degree of specific detail is most helpful.
In such a matrix, it is evident that the patterns of power may be made up of activities on any level or any combination of sub-levels. Today, in our Western culture we can deal with power adequately in terms of force, wealth, and ideology, but in earlier history or in other societies, it will be necessary to think of power in quite different terms, especially social and religious, which are no longer very significant to our own culture. The great divide, which shunted our culture off in directions so different from those which dominate the cultures of much of Asia and Africa down to the present, occurred about the sixth century B.C., so if we go back into our own historical background before that, we shall have to deal with patterns closer to modern Asia or Africa than our own contemporary culture.
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2. Security and Power
Just as our ideas on the nature of security are falsified by our limited experience as Americans, so our ideas are falsified by the fact that we have experienced security in the form of public authority and the modern state. We do not easily see that the state, especially in its modern sovereign form, is a rather recent innovation in the experience of Western civilization, not over a few centuries old. But men have experienced security and insecurity throughout all human history. In all that long period, security has been associated with power relationships and is today associated with the state only because this is the dominant form which power relationships happen to take in recent times. But even today, power relationships exist quite outside of the sphere of the state, and, as we go farther into the past, such non-state (and ultimately, non-public) power relationships become more dominant in human life. For thousands of years, every person has been a nexus of emotional relationships, and, at the same time, he has been a nexus of economic relationships. In fact, these may be the same relationships which we look at from different points of view and regard them in the one case as emotional and in another case as economic. These same relationships, or other ones, form about each person a nexus of power relationships.
In the remote past, when all relationships through which a person expressed his life’s energies and obtained satisfaction of his human needs were much simpler than today, they were all private, personal, and fairly specific relationships. Now that some of these relationships, from the power point of view, have been rearranged and have become, to a great extent, public, impersonal, and abstract, we must not allow these changes to mislead us about their true nature or about the all-pervasive character of power in human affairs, especially in its ability to satisfy each person’s need for security.
The two problems which we face in this section are: what is the nature of power? And, what is the relationship between power and security? Other questions, such as how power operates or how power structures change in human societies, will require our attention later.
Power is simply the ability to obtain the acquiescence of another person’s will. Sometimes this is worded to read that power is the ability to obtain obedience, but this is a much higher level of power relationship. Such relationships may operate on many levels, but we could divide these into three. On the highest level is the ability to obtain full cooperation. On a somewhat lower level is obedience to specific orders, while, still lower, is simple acquiescence, which is hardly more than tacit permission to act without interference. All of these are power relationships which differ simply in the degree and kind of power needed to obtain them.
The power to which we refer here is itself complex and can be analyzed, in our society, into three aspects: (1) force; (2) wealth; and (3) persuasion. The first of these is the most fundamental (and becoming more so) in our society, and will be discussed at length later. The second is quite obvious, since it involves no more than the purchase or bribery of another’s acquiescence, but the third is usually misunderstood in our day.
The economic factor enters into the power nexus when a person’s will yields to some kind of economic consideration, even if this is merely one of reciprocity. When primitive tribes tacitly hunt in restricted areas which do not overlap, there is a power relationship on the lowest level of economic reciprocity. Such a relationship may exist even among animals. Two bears who approach a laden blueberry bush will eat berries from opposite sides of the bush without interfering with each other, in tacit understanding that, if either tried to dispossess the other, the effort would give rise to turmoil of conflicting force which would make enjoyment of the berries by either impossible. This is a power relationship based on economic reciprocity, and it will break down into conflict unless there is tacit mutual understanding as to where the dividing lines between their respective areas of operation lie. This significant subjective factor will be discussed later.
The ideological factor in power relationships, which I have called persuasion, operates through a process which is frequently misunderstood. It does not consist of an effort to get someone else to adopt our point of view or to believe something they had not previously believed, but rather consists of showing them that their existing beliefs require that they should do what we want. This is a point which has been consistently missed by the propaganda agencies of the United States government and is why such agencies have been so woefully unsuccessful despite expenditures of billions of dollars. Of course it requires arguing from the opponent’s point of view, something Americans can rarely get themselves to do because they will rarely bother to discover what the opponent’s point of view is. The active use of such persuasion is called propaganda and, as practiced, is often futile because of a failure to see that the task has nothing to do directly with changing their ideas, but is concerned with getting them to recognize the compatibility between their ideas and our actions. Propaganda also has another function which will be mentioned later and which helps to explain how the confusion just mentioned arose.
On its highest level the ideological element in power becomes a question of morale. This is of the greatest importance in any power situation. It means that the actor himself is convinced of the correctness and inevitability of his actions to the degree that his conviction serves both to help him to act more successfully and to persuade the opposition that his (the actor’s) actions are in accordance with the way things should be. Strangely enough, this factor of morale, which we might like to reserve for men because of its spiritual or subjective quality, also operates among animals. A small bird will often be observed in summer successfully driving a crow or even a hawk away from its nest, and a dog who would not ordinarily fight at all will attack, often successfully, a much larger beast who intrudes onto his front steps or yard. This element of subjective conviction which we call morale is the most significant aspect of the ideological element in power relationships and shows the intimate relationship between the various elements of power from the way in which it strengthens both force and persuasion.
It also shows something else which contemporary thinkers are very reluctant to accept. That is the operation of natural law. For the fact that animals recognize the prescriptive rights of property, as shown in the fact that a much stronger beast will yield to a much weaker one on the latter’s home area, or that a hawk will allow a flycatcher to chase it from the area of the flycatcher’s nest, shows a recognition of property rights which implies a system of law among beasts. In fact, the singing of a bird (which is not for the edification of man or to attract a mate, but is a proclamation of a residence area to attract other birds of the same habits) is another example of the recognition of rights and thus of law among non-human life.
Of course, in any power situation the most obvious element to people of our culture is force. This refers to the simple fact of physical compulsion, but it is made more complicated by the two facts that man has, throughout history, modified and increased his physical ability to compel, both by the use of tools (weapons) and by organization of numerous men to increase their physical impact. It is also confused, for many people, by the fact that such physical compulsion is usually aimed at a subjective target: the will of another person. This last point, like the role of morale already mentioned, shows again the basic unity of power and power relationships, in spite of the fact that writers like myself may, for convenience of exposition, divide it into elements, like this division into force, wealth, and persuasion.
Assuming that power relationships have the basic unity to which I have just referred, what is the relationship between such power and the security which I listed as one of the basic human needs? The link between these two has already been mentioned in my reference to the fact that most power relationships (but not all) have a subjective target: they are aimed at the will of the opposition.
Before we consider this relationship, we must confess that there are power relationships which are purely objective in their aims and seek nothing more than the physical destruction of the opponent. If an intruder suddenly appears in one’s bedroom at night, or if a hostile tribe suddenly invades another tribe’s territory with the aim of taking it over, the immediate aim of the offended party may go no further than the complete physical destruction of the intruder, and this, surely, will have no subjective goal involving submission or surrender. The reason for this is that there already exists a subjective relationship covering the situation. This is the recognition by both parties that the interloper is an intruder entering an area he has no right to enter. In most such situations the defender would prefer to force the intruder to withdraw rather than to have to destroy him with incidental risks to the defender as well. Such withdrawal would be a symbol of the subjective acquiescence or obedience to which I have referred. In the rare cases where the defender’s sole aim is the destruction of the intruder, this abandonment of the more frequent, and more complicated, situation is usually based on fear.
Leaving such unusual cases aside, the normal goal of power relationships or the application of power by one party against another is for the purpose of establishing a subjective change in the mind of the opponent: to subject his will to your power, as a common and rather inaccurate version of the situation sometimes expresses it. The reason for this aim lies in the very significant fact that all power situations have two aspects, an objective aspect and a subjective, psychological, aspect. In practice, we sometimes call the objective relationship “power” and the subjective aspect “law.” But the two are ordinarily inseparable, and security rests in the relationship between the two.
In any ordinary relationship between two persons, or two groups, there is usually the relationship itself as an objective entity and there is also their subjective idea of the relationship. Put in its simplest form, there is security only when both parties have a roughly similar subjective idea of the objective relationship, and such security will be stable only when their relatively similar picture of that situation is fairly close to the real factual relationship.
This probably sounds complicated, but it is really fairly simple. When two boys first come together, they have no idea of their relative power. Eventually, they will disagree about something, and this disagreement will be resolved in some fashion. They may fight each other, or they may simply square off to fight and one will yield, or one may simply intimidate the other by superior courage and moral force. In any case, if there is no outside interference, some kind of resolution will demonstrate to both what is their power relationship, that is, who is stronger. From that moment, their power relationship has the double aspect (1) the fact that one is stronger than the other, and (2) that each knows who is the stronger. From that day on, they may be good friends and live together without conflict, each knowing that, when an acute disagreement arises and the stronger insists, the weaker will yield. Within and around this double relationship, each has freedom to act as he wishes. It is this freedom of action within a framework of power relationships which are clear to all concerned that is security. The opinion which they share of their mutual power relationship is law, as the objective relationship which they recognize is fact. Law, in this sense, is a consensus, on the factual situation as held by the persons concerned with it.
This relatively simple situation has become fearfully complicated in modern times in regard to the relationships between states, but basically the situation is the same. There is an objective power situation, made more significant by the fact that the modern state is an organization of power, and there is a consensus of a subjective kind as to what this objective power relationship is. This consensus is the picture they have of their legal “rights” in relationship to each other. It is subjective, although it may be written down on paper in verbal symbols such as in a treaty. In that case, we have three parallel entities, of which the first (the real situation) and the third (the treaty) are objective, but the vital one, the second, the consensus, is subjective. Peace and stability are secure only so long as all three are similar, by the second and third reflecting, as closely as possible, the first.
From this situation two rules might be established:
- 1. Conflict arises when there is no longer a consensus regarding the real power situation, and the two parties, by acting on different subjective pictures of the objective situation, come into collision.
- 2. The purpose of such a conflict, arising from different pictures of the facts, is to demonstrate to both parties what the real power relationship is in order to reestablish a consensus on it.
The chief cause of conflict is that the real power relationships between two parties is always in process of change, while the consensus, or the treaty based on it, remains unchanged. All objective facts, including power, are constantly dynamic, changing year by year, or even moment by moment to some degree, while the subjective, legal, consensus changes only rarely and usually by abrupt and discontinuous stages, quite different from the continuous changes of power itself. Conflict arises when men act in the objective world, because they act upon the basis of their subjective pictures, or even upon their symbolic verbalizations of those pictures. In the objective world where men act, they are bound to act more or less in accord with their real power, and their pictures of their power relationships are bound to diverge as their power and their actions based upon it diverge. This leads to conflict unless their consensus can be reestablished. But it is very difficult to reestablish a common subjective picture until there has been an objective demonstration of what their real power relationship is in some mutually convincing fashion. This is what conflict does. In fact, conflict is a method of measuring power to achieve such a mutually convincing demonstration and thus to reestablish consensus and stability.
So long as men, or nations, have the same picture of the power relationships among them, their acts will not lead to conflict because any act which might do so will lead to a warning (like the growling of a bear at a blueberry bush) which will recall both parties to look again at their consensus and bring their action into accord with it, but, when the factual power situation changes (as it inevitably does), the realization of the changes will penetrate the minds of the parties to different degrees (and even in different directions) so that their subjective pictures will diverge from the previous consensus, and their resulting actions, based on such different pictures, will lead to collision and conflict. It is, of course, perfectly possible for the subjective pictures in the minds of either or both to change without reference to the objective power relation at all. This is much more likely in the present period when most persons’ ideas of power and of these relationships are increasingly unrealistic, because of the ordinary man’s limited actual experience of power today.
The whole situation is clearly applicable to the two boys I have mentioned. Suppose these boys, whose relative power, say at age eleven, was clear to both, with A stronger than B, were to meet only infrequently over the next four years. During that interval, B, formerly the weaker, might, by exercise and more rapid growth, become the stronger. When these two come together again at age fifteen, with B in fact stronger than A and with A still retaining, as his subjective picture of their relative strength, the now erroneous idea that he is stronger than B, a situation of potential conflict exists. In such a case, B, formerly weaker but now stronger, has no clear picture of their relative strengths, because while he knows he is stronger, he has no way of knowing what increase of strength has been achieved by A. Once they are together, some difference of opinion may give rise to conflict, commencing, perhaps, with a simple effort of one to push the other from a doorway or pull him from a chair. As this test of strength develops and B discovers, perhaps to his surprise, his new ability to stand up to A, the latter, resenting this refusal of A to accept the older picture of their relationship, strikes out, and conflict begins. When it ends, it has demonstrated to both the true facts of their relative power (that is why it ends) and, by making this clear to both, has created a new consensus which becomes the basis of peaceful life together in the future.
Unfortunately this kind of fighting between young boys now occurs much more rarely than it did before (say a century ago) with the result that boys of today grow up to manhood and go off to fight, or to run the State Department, without any conception of the real nature of power and its relationships. This lack is, at the same time, one of the causes of juvenile delinquency and of adults’ mistaken belief that the role of war is the total destruction, or the unconditional surrender, of one’s opponent, instead of being what war really is, a method of measuring relative power so that they can live together in peace.
The role of any conflict, including war, is to measure a power relationship so that a consensus, that is a legal relationship, may be established. War cannot be abolished either by renouncing it or by disarming, unless some other method of measuring power relationships in a fashion convincing to all concerned is set up. And this surely cannot be done by putting more than a hundred factually unequal states into a world assembly where they are legally equal. This kind of nonsense could be accepted only by people who have been personally so remote from real power situations all their pampered, well-protected lives that they do not even recognize the existence of the power structures in which they have lived and which, by protecting them, have prevented them from being exposed to conflict sufficiently to come to know the nature of real power.
To this point we have discussed power relationships in a simplified way, as relationships between two actors, and have introduced only briefly complications which can arise from three other influences (1) the triple basis of power in our culture [i.e., force, wealth, persuasion]; (2) the dual nature (objective and subjective) of power situations; and (3) the changes which time may make to either side of power’s dual nature. Now we must turn to other sources of complication in power relationships: (4) the changes which space may make in power relationships; and (5) the fact that most power relationships are multilateral and not simply dual.
The influence which distance has upon power is perfectly obvious and may be stated as a simple law that distance decreases the effectiveness of the application of power. While no rule exists regarding the rate of such a decrease, it must be understood that the decrease is out of all proportion to the increase in distance and might be judged, in a rough fashion, to operated, like gravity, light, or magnetic attraction, inversely as the square of the distance. Thus, if the distance between two centers of power is doubled, their effective ability to apply their power against one another is reduced to one-quarter.
This example, which is given simply as an illustration and not as a rule or law, is made somewhat unrealistic by the fact that it assumes that the increased distance between two centers of power is of a homogenous nature without discontinuities or intrusive obstacles. But of course all distances in the real world are full of discontinuities and obstacles. A simple wall between two power groups may reduce the effectiveness of the application of their power to near zero. The two boys whom we have mentioned as coming together after an absence (which is the distance in space as well as time) of four years find their previous consensus about their power relationship is now unreal because their remoteness from one another in space over that interval made it impossible for them to observe each other’s changes in power. If, when they come together and begin to clash, some adult steps between them to suspend the conflict, or one of them slips into a house and slams the door, the intrusive adult or door becomes an obstacle to the application of their power and thus prevents the measurement of their power relationship. In fact, the two possibilities I have given are not the same. The door presents a case of the reduction of power by a discontinuity in space, while the interfering adult is an example of the introduction into a dual power relationship of a third power entity (which is factor 5 above rather than factor 4).
Space with all its discontinuities is, of course, one of the chief elements in any power situation and is blatantly obvious in relationships between states. The English Channel, as a discontinuity in the space between Hitler’s power and England’s power in 1940, became one of the chief elements in the whole history of German power in the twentieth century. Anyone who examines this situation carefully can hardly fail to conclude that Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 was a consequence of the existence of the English Channel which made it impossible for him to apply his power to England directly. The decision to attack Russia was based on Hitler’s judgment that, for his power, the distance to London was shorter by way of Moscow than it was by way of the Channel. Napoleon had made the same decision in 1812.
The usual discontinuities in space which reduce the application of power drastically are usually accidents of terrain (such as mountains, deserts, swamps, or forests) or the discontinuity of water. However, simple distance, as found in the Soviet Union or China, or as seen in the two oceans which shield the United States, reduce the ability to apply power rapidly. Nor should we mimimize the role which a simple wall may play in reducing the application of power. Hannibal wandered freely over Italy for fifteen years after the battle of Cannae (216 B.C.) but could not defeat Rome because he found the walls of the city of Rome impenetrable. And the period of European history after 1000 A.D. was dominated, on the power side, by the role of the castle wall, which fragmented power in Europe into numerous small areas and decentralized it so completely that it became almost purely local and private.
We should be equally aware of the fact that the damping role which space and its discontinuities have on power may be reduced by human actions in improving communications and transportation. These elements will be considered in the next section.
The role which distance plays in security rests on the two problems of the amount by which power is reduced by distance and by human judgments in respect to this amount. For example, if, in 1941, the power of the United States in Omaha was 100, and the power of Japan in Tokyo was 60, and the techniques of both for dealing with distance were the same, there was a point, or line, between them where their ability to apply power was equal. Since we have assumed that their rates of decrease of power over distance were the same, the line of equal power would have been much closer to Japan than to the United States. Let us say that it would have been somewhere along the 165th meridian. If their power was equal along that line, Japanese power would have been greater west of it and American power would have been greater east of it. We are speaking here of the facts of power, that is of the ability of each to mobilize more power than the other on its side of the line. If both governments were aware of the situation, there should have been peace and security for both, since Japan would not have insisted on the United Staes doing anything east of the line, and the United States should not have insisted on Japan doing anything west of the line.
This was, indeed, the situation between these two countries from about the end of 1922 until about 1940, because the Washington Conference of 1922 had fixed the relationship between the two in terms of capital ships, aircraft carriers, and naval bases so that the power of each fleet in its home waters was superior to the other. This situation was modified in the late 1930s by changes in naval technology, especially the development of fleet tankers, refueling at sea, and the range of both vessels and aircraft, but it was still true in 1941 that each was superior to the other in its own area. The American demand that the Japanese break off their attack on China, the American protectorate over the Philippines, the Japanese decision to take over Malaya and the Dutch Indies, and the Japanese sneak attack on Hawaii, were probably all in violation of the existing power relationship between these two countries in 1941, with the situation made much more uncertain by the fact that British, French, and Dutch contributions to the stability of the Far East had been neutralized by the Nazi conquest of Europe in 1940. From the change and uncertainty came the conflict of 1941-1945 in which the power of Japan and the United States was measured to determine which would prevail and to make possible the reestablishment of a new subjective consensus and a new stable political relationship based upon that.
The last major influence which complicates power relationships arises from the fact that such power relationships rarely exist in isolation between two powers but are usually multilateral. The complication rests on the fact that in such relationships among three or more powers, one of them may change the existing power situation by shifting its power from one side to the other. Of course such shifts rarely occur suddenly because the application of power in international affairs is rarely based on mere whim; and, insofar as it is based on more long-term motivations, changes can be observed and anticipated. Moreover, a system involving only three states is itself unusual, and any shift by one power in a three-power balance will usually call forth counter-balancing changes by fourth or other powers tending to restore the balance.
Such multilateral systems explain the continued existence of smaller states whose existence could never be explained in any dual system in which they would seem to be included entirely in the power area of an adjacent great power. The independence of the Low Countries cannot be explained in terms of any dual relationship, as, for example, between Belgium and Germany, since Belgium alone would not have the power to justify its continued existence within the German power sphere. But, of course, Belgium never had to defend its existence in any dual struggle with any one of its three great neighbors. It could always count on the support of at least one of them, and probably two, against any threat to its independence from the third. That means that any threat to the independence of Belgium would bring into existence a power coalition sufficient to preserve its freedom. And that is why the Netherlands, which had become part of the Spanish Habsburg territory by inheritance early in the sixteenth century, obtained its independence late in the same century and has preserved it since, against attacks from Spain, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Hitler.
These same considerations apply to the independence of Switzerland, balanced between German, French, Austrian, and Italian power, but with the added consideration that Swiss terrain serves to reduce the effective power of any potential attacker, so that Swiss power itself may play a significant role in maintaining Swiss independence, without constant challenges. The Scandinavian countries are in a situation like that of Switzerland, with Britain, Germany, Russia, France and others balancing to create an interstice in a power nexus where they may survive. The obstacles of terrain, plus great power influence, also serve to balance the Scandinavian countries among each other within the other, larger, power system.
Of course if the three or more balancing great powers which preserve the independence of lesser states by their interactions were to reach an agreement on the division of these lesser states, the latter would pass out of existence, probably without conflict. We can see clear examples of this in the history of Poland, where tripartite agreements of 1772, 1792, and 1795 among Prussia, Russia, and Austria ended the independence of Poland. Poland was restored in 1918 because of the unlikely arrival of a situation in which Germany and Russia, fighting each other with power much greater than Poland’s, over Polish territory, were both defeated, and more remote states (France, Britain, the United States, Belgium, and others), whose powers contributed to this defeat of both Poland’s neighbors, used their temporary superiority in Eastern Europe to recreate Poland, without any consideration for the future real power situation in that area. As a result, the new state continued for only twenty years in a precarious and unstable balance in which continued support from the Western powers which had recreated Poland was so remote and thus weak that Poland continued to survive only from the temporary weakness of Germany and the Soviet Union and their enmity, which applied their power in opposite directions, thus creating a power interstice in which Poland could continue to exist only so long as these two did not reach any agreement to destroy it. Once they reached such an agreement, as they did in August 1939, Poland was doomed, since the events of 1938 had shown that French and British power in Eastern Europe was also neutralized to a point where they were unable to preserve Poland in the face of any Soviet-German agreement to destroy it. And Poland could be restored, as a satellite rather than an independent state, only when the Soviet-German agreement in Eastern Europe broke down into open conflict again.
In any actual power situation, all the factors I have mentioned play roles in producing the events of history. We can see an excellent example of this in the history of Turkish power in Eastern Europe. That history can be divided into four periods over a total duration of six or seven centuries. The first and third of these periods, covering roughly about 1325-1600 and 1770-1922, were periods of war and political instability, because in both, Turkish power was different in law from what it was in fact. In the second and fourth periods, covering about 1600-1770 and since 1922, there was relative stability because Turkish power was about as extensive as the area recognized as Turkish territory in the international consensus and legal documents. In the first period of instability, Turkish power was greater and wider than was recognized by legal provisions, and the Turks were struggling to obtain such wider recognition. This explains the constant wars in which the Turks sought to demonstrate that their version of their power was correct. As soon as the Turks were able to show (and obtain recognition that they had shown) that their power was greater than any other, not only in the lower Balkans, but also in the upper Balkans and even in Hungary, although they were not able to hold Austria or capture Vienna, it was possible to reach a rough agreement to this effect, and the second period, one of relative peace and stability, began. But Turkish power began to decay even more rapidly than it had risen, and, from 1770 onward the Turks had legal claims to areas where, in fact, they no longer could exercise their will. As a result, once again there was a disparity between their real power and their legal rights, although now in the opposite direction, with their legal position wider than their actual power. From this came the third period of their history, one of great instability and war, as the powers concerned tried to discover what was the real power situation in the south-eastern Europe. This became almost the most acute problem in European international affairs, known as “the Eastern Question.” It was the chief cause of Europe’s wars, including such events as the Greek Revolution of the 1820s, the Crimean War of 1854-1856, the Russo-Turkish war of 1877, the Tripoli War of 1911, the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, and the First World War of 1914. It also gave rise to innumerable diplomatic crises, such as that of 1840 over Egypt, the Congress of Berlin of 1878, the Bulgarian crisis of 1885, the Bosnian crisis of 1908, and many episodes involving the question of which powers would replace the nominal suzerainty of the Sultan in North Africa.
The fourth period of Turkish history, since 1922, has been on in which Turkey has been a force of peace and stability in its area, because, once again, its area of legal power has coincided with its area of real power. This would not have been true if the Treaty of Sevres, imposed on the Sultan at then end of World War I, had been permitted to stand, because that treaty reduced the area of Turkish legal power to more restricted limits than the real Turkish ability to rule. If it had not been replaced by the more lenient Treaty of Lausanne in 1922, Turkish instability would have continued. Fortunately, the Turkish nationalists challenged the Treaty of Sevres and were able to prove that their power was wider than the area conceded to them by that earlier document.
A similar analysis could be made of the international position of the Habsburg Empire in the nineteenth century. In fact, the whole history of European international relations in that century could be written around three sharp divergences between power and law. These would center on the Ottoman and Habsburg empires and on the rise of Prussia to become the German Empire. In the first two the area of legal power was wider than the area of factual power, while in the third the opposite was true.
In all such crises of political instability, we can see the operations of the factors I have enumerated. These are (1) the dichotomy between the objective facts and subjective ideas of power situations; (2) the nature of objective power as a synthesis of force, wealth, and ideology in our cultural tradition and (3) the complication of these operations as a consequence of changes resulting from time, from distance, and from a multiplicity of power centers.
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3. The Elements of Power
As we have said, war is a method of measuring power, and it is continued until the adversaries agree as to what their power relationship is in a particular situation. War is the application of force against the organizational patterns of the opponent to reduce his ability to resist, until agreement can be reached. Since the real goal of military operations is agreement, all such operations are aimed, in the final analysis, at the opponent’s mind, or rather at his will, and not at his material resources or even at his life. This has long been recognized by military men, although it is a truth which has not spread very widely among the civilian population. Even among military men, the recent growth of elaborate mechanical instruments for applying power, and especially the growing influence of the advocates of air power in military thinking, has made war more impersonal and thus concealed the real aim of military operations, but to military theorists it has long been a maxim that “the goal of strategy is … to break the will of the enemy by military means.” The airplane crew or missile operators who concentrate on enemy installations as targets easily lose sight of the real target, the enemy’s will, behind those installations, but thousands of years of human history show the truth of the older maxim about the goal of strategy.
Parallel with our recent confusions about strategy have been equally unfortunate confusions about the relationship between wealth and force. The relationship between these two is essentially the relationship between potential and actual. Wealth is not power, although, given time enough, it may be possible to turn it into power. Economic power can determine the relationships between states only by operating within a framework of military power and, if necessary, by being transformed into military power itself. That is, potential power has to become actual power in order to determine the factual relationship between power units such as states. Thus this relationship is not determined by manpower, but by trained men; it is not established by steel output, but by weapons; it is not settled by energy production, but by explosives; not by scientists, but by technicians.
When economics was called “political economy” up to about 1840, it was recognized that the rules of economic life had to operate within a framework of a power structure. This was indicated at the time by the emphasis on the need for “domestic tranquility” and for international security as essentials of economic life. But when these political conditions became established and came to be taken for granted, political economy changed its name to “economics,” and everyone, in areas where these things were established, became confused about the true relationships. Only now, when disorder in our cities and threats from external foes are once again making life precarious, as it was before the 1830s, do we once again recognize national security and domestic tranquility as essential factors in economic life.
In the past century we have tended to assume that the richest states would be the most powerful ones, but it would be nearer the truth to say that the most secure and most powerful states will become the rich ones. We assumed, as late as 1941, that a rich state would win a war. This has never been true. Wealth as potential power becomes effective in power relationships, such as war, only to the degree that it becomes actual power, that is, military force. Merely as economic power it helps to win a war only potentially and actually hampers progress toward victory. We could almost say that wealth makes one less able to fight and more likely to be attacked. Throughout history poor nations have beaten rich ones again and again. Poor Assyria beat rich Babylonia; poor Rome beat rich Carthage; poor Macedonia beat rich Greece, after poor Sparta had beaten rich Athens; poor Prussia beat richer Austria and then beat richer France several times. Rich states throughout history have been able to defend their positions only if they saw the relationship between wealth and power and kept prepared or, if they were able when attacked to drag out the war so that they had the time to turn their wealth into actual military power. That is what happened in the two World Wars. In each case the victims of German aggression were able to win in the long run only because there was a long run. If the Germans had been able to overcome the English Channel, their victims would not have had time to build up their military power.
Thus we see that wealth in itself is not of great importance in international affairs. It must be turned into military power to be effective, but then it ceases to be wealth. Wealth turned into guns no longer is wealth. But guns can protect wealth.
Another aspect of this error is to be found in the belief that the factual relationship between states is something which can be bought. All through the period after 1919 this illusion played a major role in foreign policies. During World War II we believed that the support and cooperation of neutrals like Turkey, Spain, or even Vichy France could be bought. We have sent such states goods, bought their goods at high prices, and given them loans. All of this meant only so much as our actual power at the time could make it mean. These acts could win nations over to cooperate with us only to the degree that it is clear that we have the real power to enforce our desires. The subsidy which Great Britain gave to Romania in 1939 did not prevent that country from cooperating with Germany, for the simple reason that Germany had the power in that area to enforce Romanian cooperation and Britain did not.
Another example of this same error can be seen in the efforts of the League of Nations or the satisfied powers to compel obedience to their desires by economic sanctions without military sanctions, as against Italy in 1935. Many persons, even today, are eager to use economic warfare, but shrink from using military methods, without seeing that the former will be effective only to the degree that they are backed up by military power. Since 1945 the United States has given billions of dollars in such economic bribes to scores of states throughout the world without increasing our power or obtaining our desires or even winning good will, if that was what we wanted, to any significant degree. In fact, the old, and cynical, adage, “If you want to lose a friend, give him money” seems to operate in international relations as well as in personal ones.
Confusions such as these, and even worse confusion which mistook verbal legalisms, such as CENTO, SEATO, and even NATO, for power, could have arisen only in a period of remarkably untypical human experience. The nineteenth century from about 1830 to about 1940 was such a period. The failure to see the relationship between economics and power, like the confusions between law and power, could arise when people had security for so long that they came to accept security as part of the natural order like oxygen. The confusion is seen in laissez-faire in domestic life as well. In the feudal period or in the long mercantilistic period which followed, conditions of insecurity were close enough for all to see what the real nature of power was. But in the century before 1939, security, at least for the English-speaking peoples, became accepted, and the separation of political from economic life became possible because security was present. But at that time, as always, prosperity was based on resources and security, and both of these depended on power to get and to hold. In Western Europe, where laissez-faire was established for this reason, these truths could be ignored because the Western nations, especially the English-speakers, were expanding over such a wide area of far weaker peoples and there were, at first, so few of these expanding states, that they could continue to expand in relative peace with little inference with each other and with only minor conflicts. In fact, their conflicts with their African and Asiatic victims were hardly regarded as wars at all. But this expansion was firmly based on military superiority. The wars which did arise, such as the Opium War on China, the destruction of the American Indian (even when the weapon of destruction was whiskey or measles virus), the Sepoy Rebellion, the Zulu or Ashanti Wars, and such, were firmly based on the fundamental foundation of military superiority. In many cases this military superiority was so great that it did not have to be applied in battle. The native rulers yielded and allowed their own communities to be destroyed by the non-military weapons of Europe, such as its disease, commercial practices, and legal rules. From this arose the curious result that the English-speaking peoples were able to persuade themselves that they had not needed their military power at all. They spoke of “peaceful economic penetration of colonial areas” even when natives were dying by millions, as in China, from the innovations they had brought in. By “peaceful” they came to mean, not that weapons had not been used because European military power was so overwhelming, but that weapons had nothing to do with it. The perfect example of this is the opening of Japan to Western commerce by Perry over a century ago. Only to Americans did this appear as peaceful economic action; the Japanese knew then as we know now, that it was a conflict of power even if that did not become overt.
That pleasant situation in which economics conquered the world for the West did not last long, but long enough to mislead the West into the belief that economics could prevail in world politics independent of military power. By 1890 that period was passing: politics and economics began to come together again, in what the West called “imperialism.” This happened partly because some of the non-Europeans like the Japanese began to use political methods against European exploiters and their fellow exploited alike, but chiefly because the available colonial areas of the world became fewer, just as the numbers of the European exploiting states became more numerous, with Germany, Italy, and the United States being added to Britain, France, the Netherlands, and other earlier colonists. As a result, economics came increasingly to rely on armed force in the international scene, especially when the late arrivals, like Germany, openly took to armed force in order to compensate for the head start enjoyed by Britain and France. These latter, by that time quite befuddled about how they actually had taken over so much of the world, tried to compete with the new imperialists by economics alone. They even insisted that economic methods of expansion were the only morally acceptable methods, and that Germany and Italy were immoral for attempting to use the weapons which the earlier imperialists had either not had to use or had forgotten that they had used. It was hard for the Germans to believe that the British, who had won Hong Kong in 1842 by using the crudest of forceable methods, were not being hypocrites in 1911, when they were horrified at Germany sending a gunboat to Agadir to protect German commercial interests in Morocco. An event such as Agadir convinced many Germans that all British were hypocrites as it convinced many English that all Germans were aggressors.
In the same way in which misconceptions about the relationship of politics and economics came into international politics, similar misconceptions came into domestic life about the idea of laissez-faire. These underestimated the need for tranquility at home and the need for political power, including force, as a framework for business in the same way that a political basis for economic action was needed in the international field. These domestic errors included two beliefs: (1) the belief that there are eternal economic laws to which political activity must be subordinated; and (2) the belief that economic methods and especially economic inequality could function without regard to the power situation in the community. As one consequence of this, when Germany about 1937 was violating our economic “laws,” we felt that the Nazi regime would soon go bankrupt. I can recall Salvemini in 1936 tracing a graph of the Italian gold reserves as a steadily falling line from about the early 1930s until the date in 1935 when these figures ceased to be published and then, by extrapolation into the future, finding the date when Italy would have no more gold and the Mussolini regime would fall from power. As if any nation with power and resources needs an economic convention like gold to operate, even in a world which accepts such conventions.
In this confusion of misconceptions and errors arising from the nineteenth century, Americans led the world because Americans had been shielded from the realities of human life for generations. In the nineteenth century we were not only shielded from other powers by distance, but that distance consisted of the world’s two greatest oceans, with only backward states lacking navies on the farther shore of the Pacific and with the British fleet patrolling the waters of the Atlantic. And, to complete the picture of a paradisiacal unreality, the good conduct of the British fleet was guaranteed by the fact that we held Canada as a hostage for such good behavior because of the long, undefended Canadian border. Thus we had security without any real effort or expense of our own and without even recognizing that it depended upon the power of other states. Even today, the past role of the British fleet and of the Canadian hostage in our nineteenth century security is largely unrecognized and will even be denied as a historical fact when I mention it. But in that pleasant fool’s paradise, Americans developed their dangerously unrealistic ideas of the nature of human life and politics. Since security is necessary rather than important, it was, like air, taken for granted by Americans who put other things, especially economics, higher on their lists of priorities. Thus Americans were naive in their relations to power, a quality which is carried over into their personal lives by their overprotected childhoods.
The events of 1941 gave a rude jolt to American naiveté, but the effects of such jolts are such as to demonstrate the importance of power rather than to teach its nature. We now do recognize its importance but are still widely uninformed about its nature and modes of operation, a condition of ignorance which seems to be as deep among our recent Secretaries of State as among more humble citizens. For the achievement of a higher degree of wisdom on this subject there are few topics more enlightening than the history of weapons systems and tactics, with special reference to the influence that these have had on political life and the stability of political arrangements. Experience may be the best teacher, but its tuition is expensive, and, when life is too short, as it always is, to learn from the experience of one’s own life, we can learn best from the experience of earlier generations. All such experiences whether our own or those of our predecessors, yield their full lessons only after analysis, meditation, and discussion.
One thing we learn from experience with power is that force is effective in subjecting the will of one person or group to that of another person or group only in a specific situation. There can be no general subordination of wills, because, as situations change, the wills of both parties may change. A man who will continue to pay a share of his crops to a political superior may refuse to permit the rape of his daughter by that superior.
In any specific situation the ability of one party to impose its will on another is a function of five factors making up the element of force. These are (1) weapons; (2) the organization of the use of such weapons; (3) morale; (4) communications; and (5) transportation or logistics. The last two indicate the importance of distance, already mentioned, since no one can be made to obey or yield to force, unless orders can be conveyed to him, his subsequent behavior can be observed, and force can be applied through the distance involved to modify his behavior. This seems more obvious to us than it has been in history, because our recent experience has been with such efficient communications and transportation that we tend to forget that for much of human history it was almost impossible to know what was happening even a few miles away, and it was even more difficult to influence such happenings when they were known. As recently as two generations ago, events and even acute crises in Africa were usually settled one way or another before the home governments in Europe knew they had occurred.
I shall frequently use the terms “power sphere” or “power area” to refer to the territory over which a power system can operate or prevail as a consequence of the five factors mentioned. It is obvious that power spheres are limited by the existence of other power spheres, as well as by the limitations arising from the five factors. It is equally evident that technological improvements in the five factors, especially, perhaps, improvements in communications and transportation, will serve to widen areas of power and that in any given geographic confine, such as Europe, such improvements will, by making it possible to compel assent over wider areas, make the areas larger and reduce the number of power units in such a geographic confine. Since the ability to command assent has increased in some periods and decreased in other periods, the number and sizes of political units in any fixed confine such as Europe have changed. Such changes have generally not been explained by historians, but they should be, as will be done in this book. Periods in which the ability to obtain assent over wider and wider areas is increasing are periods in which offensive power is dominant. On the other hand, periods in which defensive power is dominant are periods in which there is a tendency for power units to grow smaller and more numerous. In time, if such defensive power continues to prevail for a long time, power will be so reduced that the state will gradually disappear, and eventually public authority will vanish, and all authority will be private authority. This may seem impossible to us, but it has happened several times in European history, notably at both ends of the duration of classical civilization, about 1000 B.C. and again, two thousand years later, about A.D. 1000.
It must be recognized that fluctuations of power areas are influenced by other factors in addition to those I have mentioned, but these additional factors are relatively less significant and are often of a contingent character, in the sense that their influence is dependent, to a large degree, on the five basic factors. Of these contingent factors the most important is the ideological one. It must be clear that any structure of power over a power area must have some basis in ideology on which to make an appeal to the allegiance of at least some of the inhabitants of that area. The basis for such an appeal will usually have to be modified as the power area expands or contracts, and this change will frequently have to be a change in social extension as well as in a real extension, in the sense that it may have to appeal to different social groups or to new levels of social classes even in the original area.
In this connection it is revealing that the ideological appeal for allegiance in the last two thousand years of Europe’s history (and, indeed, in most of mankind’s earlier history) made almost no effort to reach or to attract the peasants ,who were, throughout history down to the nineteenth century, not only the most numerous class in society but were also, of course, the economic support of the power structure. This failure to make ideological appeal to the most numerous and most necessary group in the community was a consequence of the facts of power which are being discussed in this book. Whatever the number of the tillers of the soil or the indispensable nature of their contribution to the community, their power has always been insignificant, except in the few, relatively brief periods when they have been of military importance to the community. Except for the period before about 4000 B.C., and for a few centuries in Roman history and an even briefer period in some areas of Greek history, the peasantry has played almost no role in military life and, accordingly, almost no role in political life of the communities which have made history. This military and political incapacity of the tillers of the soil, so glaringly evident under feudalism or during the Thirty Years’ War, was a function of the distribution of weapons and of military organization, and is a remarkable example of the weakness of economic necessity in contrast with the role of force in any society. As we shall see, the rise in political significance of peasants and farmers in the nineteenth century, a rise which never took them to a dominant position, was a consequence of changes of weapons, a fact almost unmentioned by historians of the modern period. A similar neglect of peasants has existed in most of history, but on a gigantic scale, in Asia and in Africa, and, above all, in China, as we shall see.
Of the five factors we have mentioned as determining fluctuations in the size of power areas, the first two (weapons and organization) have operated together and have been more significant than the last two (communications and transportation), which have also operated together. In the influence of the first pair, which taken together could be referred to as a weapons system, the most important consequences have arisen from the relative balance between defensive and offensive power.
We might define the superiority of a defensive weapons system in terms of the ability it gives to those who have it to say “No” to orders and to sustain that “No.” This statement indicates the greater importance of the first pair of factors over the last pair, because it shows ability to refuse obedience even when an order can be communicated and its consequence observed. Thus the ability of a messenger to arrive with an order will have little meaning if the defensive power of the recipient of the message is much greater than the offensive power of the sender.
Weapons systems not only influence the size of power areas; they also influence the quality of life within that area. The most significant factor here is concerned with whether a weapons system is “amateur” in character or is “specialist.” By “amateur” I mean weapons which are cheap to obtain and easy to use, while by “specialist” weapons I mean those which are expensive to obtain and difficult to use. Both of these criteria can be defined more narrowly. A weapons system is “cheap” if it can be obtained by the savings of an ordinary man in the community over no more than a year. A weapons system is “easy to use” if such an ordinary man can become adept in its use in a training period measured in weeks or months. By these criteria the period about 1880 was the golden age of amateur weapons, for at that time the best weapons available in the world were probably the Winchester rifle and the Colt revolver. Both could be bought by the ordinary man for not much more than a hundred dollars, and, in the United States at least, most men could obtain a hundred dollars in the course of a year. Moreover, any man could learn how to use these two weapons in a period of days or weeks. Thus about 1880 the ordinary citizen of the United States could obtain the best weapons available at that time, and no government could obtain any better weapons. In such a situation, in which most or many men can get the best weapons, men are relatively equal in power and no minority can easily force a majority to yield to its rule. Thus there is a tendency, in such a period, for the appearance of political equality and majority rule (or at least for rule by the large group which can obtain weapons). Such amateur weapons have been dominant only rarely in history, most notably in Athens in the fifth century B.C. and in Rome shortly after that time. At those two periods also, there was a tendency toward political democracy.
On the other hand, on many occasions in the past, the best available weapons have been so expensive that only a few persons in the society have been able to obtain them, and usually, at such times, the weapons available have been difficult to use so that long periods of training were necessary to use them effectively. About A.D. 1100 in Europe, there were two “supreme” weapons, the medieval knight and the medieval castle. Both of these, especially the castle, were so expensive that not one man in a hundred could afford them, and they could be used effectively only with years of training. The same thing was true about 1200 B.C., when horse-drawn chariots and stone castles, as at Homeric Troy, were the dominant weapons. And now a similar situation has been developing over the last few decades, so that today the most effective weapons, such as jet planes, armored vehicles, mobile artillery, and even nuclear weapons, are so expensive that only governments rather than individuals can afford them, and some of them cannot be afforded by many governments. The training periods required for the effective use of such weapons is measured in years rather than months, although in the United States, as a survival from 1880 we still try to man an army equipped with such weapons by drafting men for two years. This is just another example of the failure of the twentieth century to recognize the passing of the nineteenth century and of our persistence in retaining patterns which grew up in the previous period into the present where they are largely not applicable.
In any such period of specialist weapons, which can be obtained and used by a small minority of the population, there is a tendency for the government which can command such forces to become increasingly authoritarian.
As we shall see in the next and subsequent sections, these two relationships concerned with offensive-defensive and with amateur-specialist weapons have a great deal to do with the nature of political power and its changes in history. In fact, much of history is the record of the consequences of changes in patterns of men’s living resulting from changes in the relationships of weapons systems.
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4. A General Pattern of Weapons History
If we look at the great panorama of military history and power relations in the past, our first impression is one of chaotic confusion and complexity in which even the greatest events seem to be the result of personal and accidental influences. For want of a nail, the horse, the battle, and the kingdom were lost. That was Tolstoy’s conclusion in regard to Napoleon’s defeat in Russia, but, since a similar fate also occurred to other invaders of Russia, like the Teutonic Knights in 1242, the Swedes in 1709, or Hitler in 1941, it seems likely that there may be something more than simple accident in determining what happens.
A longer examination of these confused events, a study in which we constantly shift our attention from the individual detail to the overall picture and back again to the individual episode, will gradually reveal to us that there is, to some degree, an underlying pattern or patterns to the flow of events. Such an examination seems to indicate a number of major oscillations or cycles in this flow of history, or at least in Western history.
The first such pattern is concerned with the obvious fact that there have been, in the history of weapons, shifts of emphasis between shock weapons and missile weapons. Shock weapons are those in which the combatants hurl themselves onto each other in physical collision. They include fists, hand weapons (such as daggers, clubs, or swords), spears, bayonets, and so forth. Fighting cave men, Sumerian spearmen, Greek hoplites, Macedonian phalanxes, Roman legions, medieval knights, and the bayonet charges of the period from about 1800 through World War I, are examples of the use of shock weapons. On the other hand, javelins, slings, bows and arrows, catapults, crossbows, firearms, grenades, and our contemporary bombs and rockets are examples of missile weapons. With these the combatants hold back from each other, at least temporarily, and hurl their weapons at their opponents.
The relationship between shock weapons and missile weapons has often been misunderstood by historians of military affairs, especially by academic military historians, who often write as if peoples of the past had a free choice as to whether they would use a shock weapon or a missile, and often made that choice on an exclusive basis, that is, they adopted one to the exclusion of the other. Thus we may read in history books that the European Middle Ages were “dominated” by the shock weapons of the medieval knight or that the Scythians or other grassland cavalry used only missile weapons. This gives a quite misleading impression of what was going on, since missiles and shock are not alternatives but are complementary, at least to the point that they perform different functions and play different roles in the use of applied forces in human relations. Missiles are generally weapons of destruction, while shock weapons are generally weapons of duress. The former can kill men, but the latter can force men to obey. This is why a distinction is made in police science between “deadly weapons” and “police weapons.” The distinction rests upon the fact that “police” (that is “shock”) weapons can be used to varying degrees of violence, as a policeman’s baton can be used for a slight tap or for a knockout blow or a bayonet can be used against a prisoner for a persuasive dig or a deadly thrust. Because of this wide range of violence which is possible with shock weapons, such weapons can be used against individuals to force them to obey and order, such as to get into a vehicle.
Missile weapons are quite different because they lack any intermediate degrees between being fired and not fired; they cannot be half used or half fired, except by the user tossing them away. The reason for this is that the user of a missile weapon loses control of it the moment he has fired it or hurled it at his opponent, and, at that same moment he has become disarmed (unless his missile weapon has some kind of repeating mechanism). Thus the user of such a missile has little choice except to try to kill, since, once he has released his weapon, he is disarmed in the presence of a live opponent (unless, of course, he has some other weapon, such as a shock weapon). Obviously, a non-repeating missile weapon like a hand grenade, or even a repeating missile weapon like an automatic rifle cannot be used to make a prisoner do what one wants, such as to get into a vehicle; these can, of course, be used to kill the prisoner, or to threaten to kill him, but this does not make him get into the vehicle if he flatly refuses to do so. Thus obedience obtained from individuals by duress requires shock weapons, which can be controlled at all stages and degrees of use. For this reason, any defense system dominated by missile weapons must also have shock weapons, although it is not so necessary for a defense system dominated by shock weapons to have a complementary missile component (however any exclusively shock defense system will often find situations in which the users cannot do things which they desperately would like to do).
There is another important aspect of this distinction between these two kinds of weapons. Missile weapons, being deadly, are often more effective against formations of fighters, while shock weapons are more effective against individuals. Since battles begin as conflicts between formations, but continue as applied force against individuals, battles, as we know them, usually use missile weapons in the first stage and follow this up with shock weapons in the second stage, the first seeking to shatter or disrupt the enemy formations, the second seeking to force the enemy as individuals or small groups to do what the victors wish, such as to surrender for ransom, slavery, or exchange. Such application of shock weapons in the later stage of a battle usually involves a pursuit of fleeing enemy forces, not only to force individual obedience, but also to prevent the enemy from reforming his formations. Thus a typical model of a battle in our tradition can be viewed as consisting of three stages: missile attack, shock assault, and pursuit (with an emphasis on shock weapons). Thus I have usually called this sequence, an M-S-P battle. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this sequence used artillery barrage (increasingly supplemented by musket or rifle fire), then bayonet assault, and finally ended with cavalry pursuit. This sequence of artillery, bayonet, and calvary, my students called “an A-B-C battle.”
Although this sequence of weapons and aims has often appeared in battles throughout history, the point at which the combatants shift from one stage to another has not usually been determined by exclusively tactical considerations, but has been influenced by personal tastes, mistaken ideas, and traditions, often to the detriment of the combatant’s military advantage, so that decisive victories (and defeats) have often resulted from making the shift from one stage to another too early or too late. The Indo-European tradition of individual combat and emphasis on shock weaponry has given Europe a persistent tendency to shift as soon as possible from stage I to stage II in a battle to such a degree that the missile opening of a battle became almost insignificant. This has been true of European fighting since the Indo-Europeans arrived there about 2000 B.C. and replaced the preceding missile tradition based on archery (the so-called “Bell Beaker” tradition) by the shock tradition which we see in the Homeric and classical battles. Among the latter, the Greeks and Romans were so eager to get to grips with the enemy with their spears and swords that the opening missile stage of the battle was often reduced to little more than each infantryman hurling a javelin or two as he advanced on the enemy with his shock weapon. But the fact remains that this oping missile stage was present, however briefly, in all battles of the classical period and was usually much more significant than the accounts either of contemporary observers or of modern historians might indicate. Thus the role of “light” infantry, such as peltasts among the Greeks after about 400 B.C. or of elites in the Roman forces until about 100 B.C. (when they were replaced by foreign auxiliaries) was always more significant than most writings on the subject might lead us to believe.
The failure to pick the correct moment in a battle to shift from the missile stage to the shock stage can also occur in making the shift from the shock stage to the pursuit stage. Antiochus the Great lost two important battles in 217 and 190 B.C., the first against Ptolemaic Egypt and the second, the decisive battle of Magnesia, against the Romans, by going in pursuit of the fleeing left wing of the enemy, leaving the main enemy formation still intact.
As we shall see, the European devotion to shock weapons after 2000 B.C. was matched by a growing Asiatic devotion to missile weapons after that same date. While Asiatic archers always had shock weapons to follow up their original missile attack on an enemy formation, they were usually reluctant to make the shift from missiles to their daggers, swords or spears, and sometimes lost the victory from such delay. One of the weaknesses of any missile attack is that the assailants may run out of ammunition before the enemy formation is broken or the defenders may have such defensive armor that they cannot be broken with the attacker’ supply of missiles. Since this was generally true in the Asiatic missile tradition from before 2000 B.C. until after the advent of firearms, the Asiatic missile tradition consistently tried to trick their opponents into breaking their own formation by the famous Asiatic grasslands tactic of the feigned retreat, by which calvary archers would suddenly break off their tempestuous missile assault and make a rapid retreat, hoping to draw the enemy into a premature pursuit and thus to get them to break their formation, so that the fleeing archers could whirl about and resume their attack against a now scattered enemy.
As we shall see later, these two traditions after about 2000 B.C. were not just a matter of taste and training but had sound ecological reasons rooted in the fact that shock tactics were better adapted to the peasant economies of forested Europe, while missile tactics were better adapted to the nomadic, and commercialized economies of Asia’s grasslands, but both practices were carried to extremes from the force of traditions and training.
The historical sequence of emphasis on missile and shock weaponry is distorted by this long-term persistence of shock weapons in Europe and missile weapons in grasslands Asia over the period of more than 3500 years from about 2000 B.C. to after A.D. 1500. Another distortion, if we may call it that, has rested on the fact that civilized urban societies, with their higher standards of living, have been able to afford more complex defense arrangements and often have a variety of weapons systems, including missiles, shock, infantry, artillery, fortified castles and towns, cavalry, and naval forces. If we keep these two exceptional influences at the back of our minds, we can see a rough historical sequence or cycle in the alternation of missile and shock tactics.
We cannot speak of battles or war in the Stone Age, because the use of violence in that period was not associated with any formations or specialized functions. Even when one group attacked another group, the conflict was simply disorganized individual combat. Weapons were all shock, except for throwing of stones. Although spears were thrown in hunting, and the atlatl or spear-thrower was known in the late Paleolithic period in Europe, it is unlikely that spears were thrown in conflict, since a missed aim would leave the thrower unarmed, unless he was carrying more than one spear. The atlatl, which greatly increased the effectiveness of the thrown spear in hunting by almost doubling its range, would not generally be used in fighting, since increased range would be of little advantage and would be more than over-balanced by increased uncertainty of aim. The sling was also known in Europe in the Upper Paleolithic period, and is more likely to have been used in fighting than the atlatl or even the thrown spear, since a slinger would have a sufficient number of stones for missiles. On the whole, however, any fighting in the Paleolithic would probably have been with the spear or thrown rocks. And it seems very likely that fights in that period were rare and between individuals rather than groups or tribes.
Missile weapons began to take over with the invention of the bow and arrow in the Mesolithic period, probably in south Asia and before 20,000 B.C., at a time when Europe was still in the glacial Paleolithic. The blow-gun with poisoned darts was invented in the same cultural context, that is, a tropical or semi-tropical thickly forested river bank where peoples lived a rather sedentary life on fish, shellfish, root crops, and small animals, with considerable use of wicker-work for fish traps, baskets, and shelters and of cords for fish lines, nets, snares, but the use of poison for fighting was not feasible since it acted too slowly.
The use of the bow spread widely, reaching much of the Old World, including the oceanic islands which could be reached by boats, also a Mesolithic invention, and coming into the New World with the ancestors of the American Indians. In its progress, the bow spread to the peoples who were still in the earlier hunting stage as well as to the later stage of Neolithic gardening cultures. By 4000 B.C. the simple self-bow, made of a homogenous shaft of wood, was known over most of the earth, although some peoples who knew it did not make much use of it, while others, who used it for hunting, did not use it for fighting. As we shall see, numerous improvements could be made in the bow and were developed over the period down to about the time of Christ, most of these in central Asia, as a consequence of interactions between peoples of the Asiatic grasslands and those of the forests which fringed these grasslands on the north. On the western end of these grasslands in what we regard as part of Europe, north of the Black Sea, the Indo-European peoples developed and became numerous in the period of Atlantic climate, which was rather warm and wet, from before 6000 B.C. to after 3000 B.C. When the climate became drier after 3000 B.C., these Indo-European people moved westward into Europe (as well as southward and southeast, into regions of more civilized cultures), enserfing the agricultural peoples and the Beaker peoples whom they found there, and replacing the bow as the prevalent weapon of central and eastern Europe by the battle-axe, the dagger, and the spear, all shock weapons (after 2000 B.C.).
This period of shock weapon predominance in Europe gradually covered most of Europe, ignoring the bow, although it was known, and missing some of the chief improvements in the design of the composite bow, regarding the bow as a weapon for backward and inferior people, such as their own peasants. The period of shock weapons in Europe lasted from after 2000 B.C. To after A.D. 1400, when increased use of the bow, the crossbow, and firearms inaugurated a long period of missile weapons dominance in which we are still today. In fact, this fourth period in the cycles of this aspect of weapons history reached its peak only in the twentieth century with the eclipse of the bayonet in the generation 1914-1941. The process took about a thousand years from the last peak of the previous shock weapon period, as seen in the medieval knight about A.D. 1000, with the decisive crossover in the slow shift from pikes to muskets in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. It is of considerable significance that this period of shock weapons dominance from about 1900 B.C. to after A.D. 1500 was also a period in which the horse was a very significant part of military life, and that the horse and the last significant shock weapon (bayonet) left the scene almost simultaneously after 1914. The decline of shock weaponry required centuries because of the persistent tradition of the heroic Indo-European warrior class, which was as devoted to shock and individualistic tactics as it was to horses. Much of European military history over the period of about six centuries after A.D. 1350 revolved about the efforts to judge, usually unsuccessfully, the degree of the shift from impact weapons to missiles and, at the same time, to judge the shift of fighters from horsemen to infantry. The persistence of the European shock tradition despite the steady increase in missile firepower culminated in 1916 in the dismal spectacle of more than two and a half million casualties in the battles of Verdun and the Somme without any military decision to show for them.
The Asiatic grasslands were just as persistent in clinging to their missile tradition as Europe was to its shock tradition. As a result, the two areas responded quite differently to technological innovations and did so for reasons which were cultural and ecological rather than tactical, as we shall see. When the wagon and chariot spread after 2400 B.C., Europe combined the chariot and spear in what we regard as “Homeric warfare,” while Egypt, western Asia, and Shang China combined the chariot with archery. The chief difference was that a spearman had to dismount from his chariot to fight, while the bowman could fight from his vehicle; both needed a driver to handle the vehicle, in spite of the literary and pictorial misrepresentations which pretend that he hero was alone in his glory. The two traditions, embedded in social training and individual neurological patterns, persisted through ages of weapons changes, often imposing grave restraints on the effective use of new weapons. Such restraints can be seen in the shift from chariots to cavalry in the first millennium B.C., when Asia shifted to mounted bowmen while Europe shifted to mounted spearmen. All the subsequent improvements in horse-riding, including the improved bit, the firm saddle, body armor, stirrups, and horseshoes, are only significant details on these two distinct traditions.
The area of contact between these two traditions has been in the Near East and across the steppe frontier of Eastern Europe. The victories of Rameses III’s bowmen over the Peoples of the Sea about 1190 B.C., the victory of Greek spears over Persian bowmen at Marathon in 490 B.C., the victory of Parthian horse archers over Roman legions at Carrhae in 53 B.C., the victory of European shock over Seljuk mounted bowmen at Dorylaeum in the First Crusade (1097), the victories of Mongol archers over Polish and Hungarian knights at Liegnity and Muhi in 1241, and the victory of Russian archers over the Teutonic Knights on Lake Peipus in 1242; these are familiar examples of the collisions of these two traditions. Even the victory of David over Goliath should be included in such a list.
The persistence of the Western shock tradition in the face of tactical drawbacks and long after better methods were known can be seen in naval history. As we shall see, naval history began in the Mediterranean with oared galleys which fought by ramming about 900 B.C. This shock tactic of ramming or boarding hampered the exercise of seapower in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic for more than 2500 years. The shift from such shock tactics to missiles was not so much a consequence of the arrival of guns in the sixteenth century as it was that the locale of decisive naval battles shifted from the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic in the west and to the Indian Ocean in the east, areas where vessels could no longer be propelled by rowing and therefore areas where the use of ramming was no longer feasible. We could date the shift over at the date between the battle of Lepanto of 1571, in which the Habsburg defeated the Turks in the Mediterranean, and the British victory over the Spanish Armada in the English Channel in 1588. The former was a victory by ramming, while the latter was a victory for guns and seamanship. Yet the shock tradition continued to be strong in many navies. As late as the era of Nelson (killed at Trafalgar in 1805), when the British navy was fully devoted to battle by gunfire, the new American navy was cluttered with grappling irons, boarding pikes, and boarding nets, and rowed galleys were still being used in the Mediterranean. Thus the shock tradition was so strong in naval tactics that the complete shift of naval power from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic had made rowed naval vessels obsolete. The interesting point is that there was an earlier missile and sailing tradition in the Mediterranean before ramming was adopted, for the victory of Rameses III over the Peoples of the Sea in 1190 was a victory for marine bowmen. If the Ptolemies, who took over Egypt in 323 B.C., had continued the naval tradition of Rameses, instead of importing the Western tradition of ramming, the history of the Mediterranean might have been quite different; with small maneuverable vessels filled with eastern archers, instead of her unwieldy galleys, Cleopatra might have defeated Augustus at Actium!
The Western, especially American, shock tradition, which is still evident in many ways, such as the great emphasis on “contact” sports like football, also influences history which has emphasized battles and shock tactics to a degree which has seriously distorted the whole of military history. We have been given ancient military history in terms of Greek hoplites and Roman legions and medieval history in terms of knights charging across grassy fields. As a result the history of missile weapons, of siege tactics, of logistics, and of the vital role of weapons in controlling flows of incomes from land and trade have been neglected, leaving our view of the past not only incomplete but mistaken.
To sum up this first cycle in military history: we can see, in the West at least, four phases giving two completed cycles: a prehistoric phase of shock dominance lasting hundreds of thousands of years; a second phase of rising emphasis on missiles in the archaic period from the Mesolithic to the early Bronze Age (in Europe until about 2000 B.C.); a third phase of shock dominance in the West from the spread of the Bronze Age warrior peoples to the spread of the crossbow, the longbow, and firearms (that would be from about 1900 B.C. to after A.D. 1300-1600); and finally a fourth phase of growing emphasis on missile weapons from the longbow to the Vietnam War of 1965-1972, which had no place for shock weapons at all.
A second pattern in military history is that between offensive dominance and defensive dominance already mentioned. The prevalence of either domaine is not entirely a matter of weapons, since organization and morale may be equally important. In this second pattern also we seem to have a sequence of eight phases giving four full cycles. This oscillation seems to show that defensive power was very strong in the prehistoric period before 4000 B.C., reached a second phase of great defensive dominance just after the Iron Age invasions in Europe (say, about 1000 B.C.), reached a third similar dominance in Europe about A.D. 1000, and finally reached a lesser and brief episode of defensive dominance in Europe about 1916. These four phases of defensive dominance were balanced by five periods of offensive superiority. There may have been a first such period associated with the spread of the bow and arrow and the appearance of the state as a religious organization in the fourth millennium B.C. A second offensive phase is associated with the spread of bronze weapons and the rise of the great Bronze Age empires of the middle of the second millennium B.C., say about 1700-1300. The third offensive phase is associated with iron weapons, the rise of cavalry, and the growth of the Iron Age empires of the last five centuries before Christ. The fourth phase was a wavering advance of offensive power associated with the spread of firearms and great improvements of military logistics until the late nineteenth century. A fifth such phase may be seen in the great increase in offensive power which seems to have culminated about 1950.
Each of these periods of growing offensive power is associated with a growth in size and intensity of political organization, as follows: (1) the growth of the earliest states, replacing kinship groupings, based on the archaic religions, after 4000 B.C.; (2) the growth of Bronze Age empires about 1700-1200, including Babylon, the New Kingdom and Empire in Egypt, the Hittite Empire, Harappa in India, and the Shang Empire of China; (3) the growth of the classical empires (the Assyro-Persian, the Macedonian-Roman, Maurya in India, and Han in China), all in the millennium after 700 B.C.; (4) the growth of the European dynastic and national states culminating about 1870; and (5) the growth of “continental blocs” about the middle of the twentieth century.
Any effort such as this to arrange historical changes on a wide geographic basis runs into certain difficulties such as problems of geographical lag. Moreover, in dealings with the recent period, there is a many-pronged problem associated with any observer’s tendency to overemphasize the foreground of the most recent period, making a tendency to mistake minor oscillations for long-term trends. This is intensified by the well-recognized difficulties of studying contemporary history, and the problem, to which I have made such frequent reference, for the post-nineteenth century to be unrealistic about its political arrangements.
This last problem appears as a persistent and perverse proclivity to ignore, or even to counteract, the influence of force in political organization. For example, the political arrangements of the peace treaties of 1919-1923, which disrupted the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov Empires by creating a number of new states on “nationality” lines, represented the defensive stalemate of 1916 rather than the growing power of the offensive in 1917-1950 and was one of the reasons for the surprisingly easy liquidation of so many of these states in the 1938-1942 period when this offensive superiority asserted itself. The appearance of scores of new states, or rather pseudo-states, since 1945 reflects a similar misconception of the real nature of political organization. Many states admitted to the United Nations since 1945 are so remote from the realities of the world power structure that they do not represent any power structure at all. In the seventeenth century, when the modern states system came into existence and the basis was laid for the modern system of international law, it became understood that the state was a structure of power on a territorial basis and that the existence of such a structure could be recognized by its ability to defend its frontiers against external aggressors and to maintain law and order for its peoples within those frontiers. This system of international law, often associated with the name Grotius (1583-1645), was not based on whim or theories but on observation of the activities of the power structures in the new European states system. The unrealistic experience of the nineteenth century, which largely destroyed European, and especially English-speakers’, ability to observe political facts because of a growing obsession with myths and verbalisms, led to the actions of the twentieth century in which men made such unrealistic political decisions that untold millions were hurled into death and misery for the sake of untested theories remote from facts. Today, states which have not the slightest ability to defend their frontiers or to exercise simple police powers over their own citizens are recognized as states for no other reason than that they are admitted to the United Nations.
The correlation I have made between offensive superiority and the growth of size of political units, with its contrary correlation of defensive power with the stabilization or contraction of the size of power areas, is distorted by a number of lesser influences.
There are four of these lesser influences. The first is simple lag in time, so that changes of size may be a generation or a century later than the establishment of the dominant weapons system. The length of such a lag has been reduced in the course of history. Some of this is due to our perspective, which makes closer time intervals look longer than more remote time intervals which were actually longer. But the change also rests on the speeding up of communications and transportation throughout history, so that, with the exception of some aberrant periods, news and the recognition of conditions have spread more rapidly in recent periods.
The second distorting influence arises from the role played by logistics in weapons systems. For example, in the period 1815-1865, increase in fire power through the rapid introduction of paper cartridges, percussion-cap ignition, breech-loading, rifling, and the use of brass cartridges greatly increased the obsolescence of shock weapons such as bayonets and cavalry sabers and also increased the strength of the defense over the offense. These two influences would have stabilized the size of power areas as they were about 1850 with much of Europe remaining in small kingdoms and principalities, such as Bavaria, Hanover, Modena, the Two Sicilies, and such. This increasing power of the defensive was recognized even by a poet in the Crimean War (“Some one had blundered”). It was also evident in the American Civil War from the failure of Pickett’s charge, through the mounting casualties of Grant’s advance on Richmond and his failure to capture the city from the stalemate before Petersburg. This las engagement, with its withering defensive fire-power, its use of trenches and countermining, and its use of balloons for artillery-spotting, was a foretaste of 1915 (by which time the defense had been further strengthened by barbed wire and machine guns). This steady growth of defensive weapons power was countered in the opposite direction by the application to military affairs of the advancing techniques of improved communications and transportation, notably by the post, telegraph, and the railroad, to give the shattering offensive triumphs of the German victories of 1866 and 1870. A repetition of these successes was avoided only by a narrow margin in 1914 at the Marne, leading to the defensive stalemate of the next three and a half years. This was based on the increase in defensive fire-power in the interval 1870-1916.
A third distorting influence in our simple correlation of the offensive-defensive balance with the size of power areas rises from the fact that the advances of technology in historical time, however intermittent, have required scarce resources, highly trained personnel, and great accumulations of capital that fewer and fewer political units could provide. It is clear that almost any group could provide itself with stone weapons; fewer groups could provide themselves with iron weapons and even fewer with steel ones; only a few could make jet airplanes, while very few could make nuclear weapons. This growing concentration in the production of weapons, combined with improved transportation and communications which more advanced states could obtain made it possible for such advanced political units to extend their rule over wider and wider areas which were unable to obtain these advantages. This resulted in the increased size of political units from small bands and later tribes to the continental blocs of today through the fluctuations of defensive and offensive weapons systems. As we shall see later, it is conceivable that this long secular trend may now be reversing itself, as it did on some occasions in the past.
The fourth distorting influence in this correlation of weapons and power areas is concerned with the oscillations between amateur and specialist weapons already mentioned. One aspect of this relationship, sufficiently distinct to deserve mention as an independent cycle, is the shift in military history between walking to war and riding to war.
The third cycle could be expressed as the old distinction between infantry and calvary, but it is a difference much wider than that since fighting men have traveled in other ways than on the backs of animals, and the cycle must be seen in terms of all conveyances, rather than in terms of any single one of them. Before men rode horses to war, they rode in chariots, and, after they gave up horses completely, the traveled in trucks, tanks, and planes. Interspersed between these modes of riding to war, there were periods of walking to war, so that the whole sequence presents three complete cycles, thus:
- 1. infantry, before 2500 B.C.
- 2. chariots and cavalry (in some areas), 2500-600 B.C.
- 3. infantry (in Europe), 600 B.C.-A.D. 500
- 4. return to cavalry dominance, 500-1450
- 5. infantry as “the Queen of battles,” 1450-1917
- 6. mechanized conveyances, 1917-[present]
This table is somewhat less reliable than our other cycles because this particular oscillation is more subject to geographic variation, chiefly from the fact that areas with sufficient supply of fodder for animals retained animal conveyances longer, while areas with inadequate fodder, such as the Mediterranean, found it difficult to make much use of horses. Similarly, in the post-equine period, areas which were industrialized could use mechanical conveyances while non-industrialized areas were largely excluded, or much hampered, in the use of such vehicles. In general the above chronology is that for areas of greater political significance in the West, as the Mediterranean basin was in the classical period and as Western Europe has been since about 1100. The shift of European political power from south of the mountains to north of the Alps in the Dark Ages arose because Christian civilization at that time was threatened by mounted invaders from the Eurasian grasslands, and the northwest, with rainfall in all four seasons of the year, had more adequate supplies of fodder and could defend itself against mounted invaders by mounted defenders.
This pattern of change between riding and walking is of considerable importance, not because one method is intrinsically superior to the other, but because when men fought on foot, a larger part of the community was involved in the fighting and was expected to fight. As a result, period of infantry dominance have been periods in which political power has bene more widely dispersed within the community and democracy has had a better chance to prevail. On the other hand, periods in which men have fought from mounts have generally been periods in which only a minority have been expected to fight and this minority could hold political control over the majority and compel this majority to work to support such an expensive military system.
In general, in applying this last cycle, we must remember that most of history has been in transitional phases rather than at the peak of any cycle, and, on the whole, infantry has lasted longer in areas which were economically poorer, while cavalry lasted longer in areas which were richer. This is almost to say that infantry was retained in areas of mountain and forest, while cavalry flourished better in the grasslands and valleys, a simple reflection of the fact that better agricultural areas were generally richer in most of history. However, areas which have been rich for any reasons, even outside agriculture, have often been able to afford cavalry. Thus for almost 500 years before the fall of Troy (say, 1700 to 1200 B.C.), Greece was rich from trade crossing it from the Aegean Sea to central Europe and could afford chariots and warriors, but when this commerce ended, in the Iron Age invasions of the twelfth century, the poor agricultural resources of Greece could not afford castles, chariots, or even much cavalry, so that Greece turned to infantry for defense, while further east, in Mesopotamia and Persia, mounted fighters remained important long after they had become insignificant in Greece.
The fourth cycle in military history is that between amateur and specialist weapons as already defined. This cycle has passed through three complete oscillations, with a possible fourth in the prehistoric era. The early Stone Age was a period in which an ordinary man could obtain weapons about as good as his neighbor merely by making them. Accordingly, men were roughly equal in power, the differences in this respect being not much greater than their natural physical endowments. The advent of metals and later the beginnings of cavalry made these elements of warfare so expensive that only a minority could engage in war, reaching a peak with bronze weapons, stone castles, and chariots in Mycenaean Greece and late Bronze Age Western Asia about 1400 B.C. Iron was potentially cheaper and more democratic than bronze because it is one of the most common elements, but the processes of manufacture were skilled and expensive until after 600 B.C., so that weapons and politics remained concerns of an authoritarian minority of men after the destruction of Mycenaean society about 1200 B.C. and the slow beginnings of a new society after 1000 B.C. based on iron. But by 600 the cost of iron slowly fell and standards of living among the Greeks also rose, so that a substantial part of the men in most Greek areas could afford the weapons of the Greek hoplite fighter. This led to the domination of the new classical Mediterranean society by its citizen-soldiers from about 600 to about 400 B.C. in the Greek world, somewhat later (about 300 to 50 B.C.) in the western Mediterranean. As areas of political power became larger after 400 in the east and after 200 in the west, equipment became more expensive, tactics more complex, supplies more important, and campaigns extended for years, so that citizen-soldiers, who could not be away from their livelihoods for such long periods were gradually replaced by mercenary professional soldiers. This growing cost of wars and fighting eventually bankrupt classical civilization, and the state found it impossible to defend the whole area. After A.D. 400, the state retracted its forces to the east, leaving the west to invaders who were increasingly devoted to shock mounted combat; this was so expensive in an impoverished society that more than a hundred peasants were needed to support each mounted fighter, a condition which continued in northwest Europe for much of the period until about 1400. Accordingly, society was divided into two chief classes, the small minority who were expected to fight and the larger majority who were expected to support the fighters.
The introduction of gunpowder after 1350 did not change this situation because guns, for over four hundred years, were expensive to obtain and difficult to use, although this new weapon did help to shift tactical superiority from cavalry to infantry and made the private castle obsolete by 1580. Only with the arrival of a cheap and convenient hand gun in the nineteenth century and the economic revolution to mass production did men (and women) become equal in power, a change which was reflected in politics by the arrival of new slogans: “one man, one vote,” “majority rule,” “the voice of the people is the voice of God,” and even “votes for women.” The threat to authority from amateur weapons began to appear in the period of 1775-1815, at first in America in such events as Braddock’s defeat, Concord and Saratoga, and the victories of French citizens over professional forces at Valmy and under Napoleon in 1799-1813. Equality of men and majority rule became established in England, Western Europe, and America in the period 1830-1870. This did not appear in southern Europe or the east because the economic changes spread so slowly and standards of living rose so gradually that the peoples of those areas could not afford guns before the introduction of the more expensive, specialist weapons, beginning with machine guns and rapid firing artillery. These newer weapons and their successors, such as tanks and airplanes, began once again to increase the power of the minority and led to a shift away from democracy in political life. The process is parallel to the changes in weapons and politics in classical antiquity in the period 450 to 50 B.C. Like all historical parallels, this one is not exact because the recent shift was not only from amateur to specialist, but was also a change from foot soldiers to those who moved in conveyances, while in antiquity infantry remained supreme for many centuries. As a consequence, the shift which took place in antiquity in two steps over several centuries took place recently in little more than a single generation.
If we combine the four cycles we have mentioned, we can make a chronology of the history of weapons and political forms in the West from the archaic period to the present. This table, of nine stages, has weaknesses. It is more concerned with weapons than it is with the organizations in which those tools were used or with the outlooks and morale which determined how effectively they were used. Moreover, the table concentrates on the northwest quadrant (from the Himalayas to the Atlantic) or even more narrowly. This geographical limitation is in no way justified by the greater importance or more frequent innovations of the West, at least in the earlier period. It is rather justified by the fact that it covers the areas which readers of the book will be more familiar. As we shall see, other areas not covered by this chronology were at least as important as this one, at least up to A.D. 1500. The most significant omission from this outline is that of the great empires of the mobile missile warriors of central Asia, which will be considered in detail in their proper place. This table may serve as an outline for the West until more adequate detail can be arranged around it as this book progresses.
Figure: Relationship of Weapons and Politics
|
Periods |
Weapons |
Politics |
|
Stone Age |
Amateur (to 3000 B.C.) |
Democratic (to 2500 B.C.) |
|
Bronze Age Early Iron Age |
Specialist (3000-600 B.C.) |
Authoritarian (2500-500 B.C.) (Archaic empires) |
|
Early classical period |
Amateur (600 B.C.-400 B.C.) |
Democratic (500-350 B.C.) |
|
Late classical Medieval Early Modern |
Specialist (infantry) Specialist (cavalry) Specialist (infantry) (400 B.C.-A.D. 1780) |
Authoritarian (350 B.C.-A.D. 1830) (Classical empires; feudal; dynastic states) |
|
Later modern |
Amateur (infantry) (1780-1917) |
Democratic (1830-1934) (National states) |
|
Contemporary |
Specialist (mechanized) (1917-[present]) |
Authoritarian (1934-[present]; Continents; blocs) |
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Transcription Notes
This transcription is an excerpt of the Introduction from the full PDF ebook of the 1983 first edition of Weapons Systems and Political Stability: A History (published posthumously) which can be downloaded from the official Carroll Quigley Website. Every effort has been taken to avoid any errors or omissions in this electronic transcription. If you wish to bring any errors or omissions to the attention of the editors, please write to quigley.editors@mattellison.org.
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