Title: THE UTILITY OF FORCE: The Art of War in the Modern World
Abstract: THE UTILITY OF FORCE: The Art of War in the Modern World, General Rupert Smith, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2007, 430 pages, $45.00. If British General Rupert Smith is right, the United States and its allies are creating the wrong forces, arming them with the wrong weapons, and using them in the wrong way. In The Utility of Force, Smith, who retired from the British Army in 2002, argues that war as we know it-the armed confrontation between two or more nation states-has become extinct. In its place, we now engage in wars among the people, frustrating and seemingly interminable confrontations, conflicts, and combat actions in which weak, poorly armed adversaries exploit publicity, fear, and their stronger opponents' penchant for overwhelming force in order to gain sympathy, legitimacy, and power. The difficulties of current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan overshadow Smith's ideas, but Smith catalogues a host of such asymetric conflicts, from Spain to Chechnya, to expose the not-so-new realities confronting us. Smith's thesis is an old one. Since the end of the cold war, Martin van Creveld, Ralph Peters, and other scholars and defense experts have written extensively on the rise of nonstate actors, and this discourse has influenced the U.S. Army and Marine Corps' new FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency, which specifically addresses the challenges of asymmetric warfare. Blogger John Robb's recently published Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization (Wiley, Hoboken, NJ, 2007) paints a particularly grim picture of crumbling nation-states incapable of responding quickly and effectively to the decentralized and rapidly evolving tactics of various criminal and terrorist networks. Smith's arguments have arrived late to this conversation, but they merit serious attention for several reasons. First, Smith's personal credibility demands respect. Smith has served in the British Ministry of Defense and had extensive command and staff experience in Rhodesia, Iraq (Desert Storm), Bosnia, Kosovo, and Northern Ireland. Just as important, Smith presents his arguments patiently and dispassionately, avoiding the hastily drawn conclusions and breathless fatalism that characterize too much popular military commentary. Smith also resists the urge to reduce his book to an autobiography. He rarely invokes his own experience to make a point. However, when he does, as in his discussion of UN peacekeeping efforts in Bosnia, he convincingly portrays the repeated, systemic failure of UN diplomats and his own British ministers to appreciate the political and military realities that led to the 1995 massacres at Grozny and Srebrenica. More often, Smith effectively grounds his larger arguments within the context of Western military history. He begins his analysis by crediting the birth of industrial warfare to the levee en masse, noting that Napoleon successfully combined political idealism and massive conscription to rapidly overwhelm his rivals on the Continent. From Napoleon, Smith briskly summarizes Clausewitz's concept of the triangular relationship between the state, the military, and the people, and employs this concept as a prism through which he illustrates the technological, strategic, and geopolitical developments of the 19th century that led to the slaughter of the western front. …
Publication Year: 2007
Publication Date: 2007-07-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 72
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