War Ends and Means.

"Gonna lay down my sword and shield /Down by the riverside / And study war no more.

THIS WINSOME PLEDGE from the Negro spiritual can be an anthem of conversion for the individual soul. When made the motto for a nation it is an intimation of suicide. And it became the motto of the United States during the 1960s, when hawks, moved by hubris, and doves, moved by shame and fear, turned their backs on the wisdom about war so painfully earned through millennia of bloodshed and folly.

First the Kennedy and Johnson men became smitten with the technological fix. Substituting computer logic and civilian accounting methods for timeless lessons of strategy based on human nature, they forced the Pentagon to give up Clausewitz for regression analysis. Then the protest generation rebelled against the dehumanization of war and the academy ("I am a human being-do not bend, fold, spindle, or mutilate"). But in railing against the Vietnam War and the nuclear-arms race, the "destructive generation" threw out the baby with the bath water, labeling as fascist not only the foolish means, but also the ends of American military policy. In time, the student Left became the tenured professorial Left, and the sober study of diplomatic history, security policy, and military science retreated on American campuses. It was as if the classics of strategy constituted an occult body of knowledge to be locked away in library garrets lest tender souls discover them and be tempted of the devil.

To be sure, impressive books on war continue to be written, but by military renegades like Colonel Harry Summers, think-tankers like Edward Luttwak, and British academics like Michael Howard, John Keegan, and D. C. Watt-rarely by American professors. Instead, we observe the proliferation of curricula in "peace studies" programmed by the pacifist Left, resulting in a generation of American students as confused and misinformed about war, peace, and the relation between the two as they are, for instance, about God, man, and the relationship between the two.

Yet young Americans are still fascinated by war-and not just the boys who play "GI Joe" or dream of becoming "Top Gun." They thirst for knowledge of World War II and of Vietnam; they admire the genius of a Bismarck. To the consternation of leftists, feminists, and deconstructionists, a good course in diplomatic history or international security still attracts many times more students than one in French social history or gender studies. In fact, just two days after I was asked to review War Ends and Means I received the following letter from a 17-year-old student in a military academy:

I am of the belief that wars have failed as an extension of national politics. I believe that the differences between countries can be solved by diplomacy. I believe that massive killings of armies and civilians have created a dangerous precedent that may ultimately lead to the destruction of mankind! . . . My dad feels that there will always be wars because of historical differences in language, boundaries, religious beliefs, population explosions, etc. . . . Is dad right by saying there will always be wars or am I right by my conviction that animosities between countries can be negotiated? We both would value your opinion and would be most grateful for your kindest help!

The letter moved me deeply-not because of its idealism or innocence, but because of its humility, filial respect, and deference, How much one yearns to tell an inquiring child the facts of life, and how melancholy it is finally to get the chance!

It is precisely this sort of inquiry that Paul Seabury, a professor of political science at Berkeley, and Angelo Codevilla, a veteran of the Senate Intelligence Committee staff and fellow of the Hoover Institution, determined to satisfy. Their purpose is nothing less than to reintroduce the American student to the forbidden wisdom of war -what causes it ("It is not that they love peace less," wrote St. Augustine, "but that they love their kind of peace more"), how to prevent it ("Happy is the city," proclaimed the doges of Venice, "that in time of peace thinks of war"), and how to win it ("To subdue the enemy without fighting," wrote Sun Tzu, "is the acme of skill").

In the course of their exposition, Seabury and Codevilia expose and rebut ten major myths about war propagated with lethal effect by either the "peace studies" crowd or our civilian technocrats. The first is that wars are somehow the product of impersonal forces-economic competition or arms races, for example. To assert this is to mistake symptom for cause, for ultimately war springs from a flawed human nature that creates situations in which "reasonable people regard 'kill or be killed' as the best option available." Hence the second myth to be buried is the smug chant, "War is bad, peace is good." In fact, war is often to be preferred to conditions conventionally called "peace." Consider that in the twentieth century, in which some 35 million people have died as a result of military operations, over 100 million have been killed by political police, from Turkish Armenia, through Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, and Pol Pot's Cambodia, to the present-day Sudan. A third myth popular among "peace studies" types is that "fighting never solved anything"to which Charles Burton Marshall once replied: "Oh yeah? Ask a Southerner!" Like it or not, every great issue in history has ultimately been settled by war.

Seabury and Codevilla are equally irreverent when it comes to the myths of the modern technocrat. It is fashionable, for instance, for political scientists to quantify national power by reference to population, GNP, technological sophistication, and so forth. But size and potential did not save Rome (or the U.S. cause in Vietnam), and to focus attention on them is to distract the student from the determining roles played by national discipline, leadership, strategy-and will. So distracted, the student is likely to believe a corollary myth: that military power is a commodity a nation can buy. Rather, military service is more like familial love-an act of devotion unto deathand, as Machiavelli wrote, a nation that cannot evoke such love, and must rely on mercenaries, is doomed.

A sixth myth of our day is that nuclear weapons have changed forever the principles of strategy and tactics. Not so, say the authors: The precepts of Sun Tzu and Clausewitz concerning strategic deception, the indirect approach, economy of force, striking the enemy's center of mass, and breaking his will are as valid today as ever. For war is a human relationship, not a game of computer solitaire, and strategy is an art of adaptation, not a science of application. Nor (Myth #7) has modern weaponry made war more destructive. For the damage done in war is a function of intentions, not tools. (Genghis Khan had no atomic bombs.) And this means that the link between ends and means is inescapably moralthat to relegate all parties in war to the same moral plane (Myth #8) is a conceit. Yet students are taught that there is no moral distinction between the U.S. and the USSR simply because both sides employ nuclear weapons, spies, and so forth.

A ninth myth identified by Seabury and Codevilla is that war is the solvent of society and civic virtues, and thus to be avoided at all costs. Rather, say the authors, war is more accurately viewed as a society's supreme test"the ultimate election" in which the people vote for the survival or destruction of their own polity according to their willingness to sacrifice. Tenth, and finally, the authors deny that the world since 1945 is "outgrowing" war. The fact is that "today's world is filled with more people animated by greater hatred and possessed of more means to make war than ever before."

Perhaps all these myths are derivative of the monster myth, born of the Enlightenment's denial of original sin, to the effect that war is an aberration, rather than the norm, in human affairs. But the burden of this book is that even the belief that peace should be the normal condition of man is limited today to shrinking portions of the Western world. For only when Christianity pronounced all men to be brothers under a heavenly Father did war become something that had to be justified and its conduct something that had to be constrained. Moreover, the purpose of peace, according to St. Augustine, was not to enable the pursuit of wealth and hedonism, but to foster virtue. But modern thinkers from Rousseau and Marx to Freud and Dr. Spock denied the Christian explanation of war, seeing its roots in eradicable contingencies like monarchy, aristocracy, class or race oppression, or collective neurosis, while war itself in the age of nationalism and industrialism became increasingly beastly. The result of these misapprehensions and horrors is that many late-twentiethcentury Americans display a profound aversion to the use of force for any purpose and cling desperately to peace without an understanding of what peace is for.

The bulk of War is a primer on strategy and tactics, the material and political conditions of conflict, the impact of weapons technology and intelligence assessment, and the moral principles of just war as codified by the medieval Church in the jus ad bellum and jus in bello. The historical illustrations are sometimes of dubious accuracy or relevance, and each chapter seems to push a political agenda (such as SD[ deployment) or grind an axe (as in thc attacks on NATO strategy or the mismanagement of American force in Vietnam, Iran, and Panama). But the common-sensical passages far outweigh the dubious or tendentious ones.

Above all, the sections on political warfare and intelligence demonstrate the continuum embracing war and peace. If war is won by breaking the enemy's will to fight, then subversion, intimidation, and demoralization through grey and black propaganda, agents of influence, and outright espionage are weapons potentially as deadly as tanks and missiles.

But perhaps the greatest danger to American security today is not the missiles and spies of Moscow, or the bombs of terrorists, or the export industries of Japan, but the myths about war and peace being drummed into the heads of millions of American students. And so I shall urge my young letter-writer to read this book, in hopes that he will learn that conflict is rooted in human nature, that diplomacy is not the opposite of war, that conflict is preferable to death and slavery for yourself and those who depend on you, and that the best way of avoiding war is to persuade a potential bully that you are willing and able to bloody his nose.

That is not a popular catechism, especially in the Age of Gorby. But the struggle is not one between war and peace it never has been. The struggle is always between your peace and mine.