Major War: Given it's so bad, why do we ever go to war?
Some people go to war to secure their Chiliastic vision of the End of History.
Ah, ... We're sleepwalking into world war. Of course.
Yes, yes, yes. Even I have read The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (Christopher Clark, 2012), and one can only guess that sales of The Sleepwalkers have revived these last two weeks. It is a very nice book.
One thing that I got out of The Sleepwalkers is more evidence that everyone has always been mucking around in everyone else's business. Like, why were the French mucking around in the Balkans, and with the Serbs specifically, in the run up to the First World War? And here's a proposition: We are always sleepwalking into crises. Here's another: Observers were so shocked by the carnage of the First World War, because it was the first industrial war fought on an industrial scale; it was just a matter of when the world would sleepwalk into such a thing. Not if.
Again, I pose that as a proposition. It may not be true, but it does encourage us to be a little more careful about we mean by “sleepwalking” into war. Sleepwalking suggests what? That, if better processes were in place, then war could be avoided? We can always go back and connect dots—this happened and this happened and that happened—but do we go through that exercise with the expectation that we will learn about how to avoid war? There is wisdom in the dots, if only we can discern them and trace the right path through them? Does that wisdom amount to fool-proof “Best Practices,” and we will then implement those best practices and secure peace on earth forever after?
Stated differently: Why do we ever go to war? To put it in game theoretic terms: Can we come up with illuminating models in which war sometimes breaks out “on the equilibrium path?” (Homework assignment: Come up with something other than a model in the spirit of Green-Porter [1983] or Kreps-Wilson [1983]. I am sure there is interesting stuff in the literature somewhere.) Or, take litigation: Why do litigants ever press matters to trial and hazard the judgment of a court? Why can’t litigants always come to some sort of settlement in pre-trial negotiation?
The reality, of course, is that cases sometimes do go to trial and wars do break out. Where would Hollywood be without war and courtroom dramas? But, it is a great credit to observers like Dale Copeland, author of The Origins of Major War (2000), to have posed the idea that there may be more to the outbreak of war than just mistakes. He dedicates one of his chapters to the First World War. He develops and documents an interesting narrative. The Germans contemplated inciting a “defensive war” with Russia, because it feared that an industrializing Russia would eventually turn around and threaten Germany. The German documents are damning. They demonstrate that certain well-situated individuals were intent on pressing their Austro-Hungarian cousins into war with Serbia. At the same time, the German leadership would actively whip up war fever in the population; it would “manufacture consent”. The leadership could then exploit the chain of nominal diplomatic commitments and treaties; it could hold out some expectation that Mother Russia would move to support her Slavic brothers in Serbia by mobilizing against Austria-Hungary. That would give the Germans the excuse to mobilize in support of their Austro-Hungarian allies. But the Germans might also expect the French to mobilize to support the Russians. What to do about that?
Roll out the Schlieffen Plan. Long story short: The plan was to reprise the results of the Franco-Prussian War (1870) by again sweeping around Paris from the west and imposing a quick settlement on the French; anticipate that the Brits would stay out of it; turn around before the Russians could do too much damage and vanquish the Russians. Best laid plan.
The plan to quickly take Paris very nearly worked. The Germans bulled their way through Belgium, but they were met by the Brits as they approached the Belgian border with France. The Kaiser Wilhelm had dismissed the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) as a “contemptible little army,” and the Germans had expected it to disperse before things were to get too hot. Was the presence of the BEF not really just a bluff? But, “The Contemptibles,” as they came to call themselves, were not bluffing. They stood their ground and blocked the path to Paris. But not for long. The Brits, accustomed to fighting little colonial wars which were mostly composed of punitive expeditions, found themselves being chewed up in the maw of the greatest war machine any country had ever assembled. The British Tommies dropped their guns and staggered out of the field of fire. Indeed, after the first engagement with Germans outside the Belgian city of Ypres, British Field Marshall Douglas Haig could observe retreating troops “having thrown everything they could, including their rifles and packs, in order to escape, with a look of absolute terror on their faces, such as I have never before seen on any human being’s face.” Such was the observation of an old, seasoned warrior.
Everything was unfolding right on schedule, but on getting reports of the Brits’ panicked flight, the Germans decided to move their schedule up. Instead of sweeping around Paris from the west, why not bear down on it directly and take it? That would save a lot of time and hassle, but it was soon after the Germans changed course that the perspicacious French General Joseph Gallieni managed to discern from the confused stream of dispatches something to the effect of “The enemy shows us his flank.” The French Sixth Army attacked; the first Battle of the Marne stopped the German advance. Opposing armies then dug in. Indeed, they tried to dig trenches around each other’s flank, and they ended up digging trenches all the way from Paris to the Belgian beaches on the North Sea. The quick, mobile war that everyone anticipated degenerated into the trench warfare we all know so well from films and books. The war would not be over by Christmas 1914, and it was not obvious which side would ultimately prevail.
Had the Germans not made a seemingly sensible adaptation to their plan, would they have been able to take Paris and impose a quick settlement to the war on the western front? Who knows, but we can imagine that the results on the Marne induced more than a little anxiety in the German High Command. The western front was now an intractable problem, and the British could be expected to regroup and rejoin the fight. Things were not looking good after such an auspicious start in the west.
Things started less auspiciously in the east. The Russians had already invaded Germany (East Prussia). Quick thinking and adaptation in the west may have resulted in stalemate, but quick thinking and adaptation in the east decisively neutralized the immediate Russian threat. The Germans would roll the Russians back and impose grievous losses on them. The ironic result was that Germany ultimately managed to knock Russia out of the war while having to sustain a greater fight in the west against the French and the British.
Copeland’s account in The Origins of Major War has much the flavor of the “Thucydides Trap”. In the thirteen conflicts he reviewed, “conflict was initiated by a state fearing decline.” Surely there is something to that, but it would be nice to inquire with the German High Command, even if the plan had worked, “How were you expecting to manage relationships with the French and the Russians going forward?” Was the idea that the future was far enough out that you could discount it heavily—that is, you could worry about “crossing that bridge when you get there?”
The business of industrialized killing really comes out vividly in Tony Ashworth’s very engaging tome Trench Warfare, 1914-1918: The Live and Let Live System (1980). Indeed, one could, perhaps, be forgiven for losing track of a more important theme in the book. Ashworth works up ideas that have some of the flavor of Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil.” Specifically, Ashworth spends some time exploring the “bureaucratization of violence.” One aspect to this is that one should not be too surprised that, if the authorities institute rules and best practices for killing people, you get a lot more killing people. A frightening aspect to that is the role of hierarchy: commands go down the chain; managers further down the hierarchy might exercise more discretion than senior managers might prefer, but certain processes might be more amenable to tight, bureaucratic control and thus less susceptible to manipulation by people on the ground. Indeed, is the business of war kind of like assembly line production? Is it the kind of stuff amenable to the new and emerging “Scientific Management” (the “Taylor System”) with which Lenin had become so enamored?
Perhaps war-making is more like codifiable, assembly line work—at the tactical level where the bullets start flying. Not so much, perhaps, at the strategic level where the leadership needs to decide where and when, very, very generally, the war machine should direct its ordinance. But, even at the tactical level foot soldiers might find opportunities to break rules and exercise more discretion than senior leadership might prefer. Ashworth’s book, for example, is about how the people at the tactical level, the foot soldiers and their immediate leadership, could often collude up and down the line with their counterparts in opposing armies to subvert the murderous tactical and strategic plans of their respective High Commands. Basically, once the war on the western front had settled in to the stalemate of trench warfare, the people in the trenches on both sides of the line had time to develop understandings and relationships. They started to make a point of engaging in ritualized warfare rather than actual warfare. Shells could be expected to fall harmlessly into no-man’s-land. Machine gunners would make jokes of “loosing off” to melodies of popular tunes, and they would do it at the same time each day so that everyone could know to duck and wait out the performance. High Commands on both sides of the line expended much energy trying to figure out how to police such shirking.
I myself write about that in The Economics of Adaptation and Long-term Relationships (2019), and I cite many colorful episodes from Ashworth and other sources. But this question of managing long-term relationships brings us back to the German leadership in 1914. Did their plan, as mapped out by Copeland in The Origins of Major War, basically contemplate an indefinite stream of “defensive wars”? Does prevailing in one defensive war merely set up the prospect of having to fight another defensive war in the future? What future did they contemplate?
One possibility is that High Commands sometimes perceive the future in Chiliastic terms: After we win this war, everything will be great. Basically, there is no future; we achieve the End of History; the trajectory of History delivers us to an absorbing state; let’s secure our place in the End of History before someone else secures it for us.
It’s not obvious that that is how the German leadership was thinking in 1914, but it may represent how the new Iranian leadership was thinking in 1979. The Iranians had just deposed the Shah in their Islamic Revolution, and then the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called to “export the revolution” to the world—and especially to its immediate neighbor, Iraq. The Ayatollah urged the majority Shiite population in Iraq to rise up against the minority Sunni government of Saddam Hussein. Saddam was a smart guy; he didn't sit around waiting for revolution to happen. He took the initiative, invaded Iran, and got his Shiites to fight their Shiites. Both sides suffered grievously, but Saddam's clique survived. The Iranians stumbled into that needless affair, and dragged millions down with them.
The preamble of the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran indicated that, going forward, it would develop its military capacity “not only for safeguarding the borders, but also for accomplishing an ideological mission, that is, the Jihad for the sake of God, as well as for struggling to open the way for the sovereignty of the Word of God throughout the world.” That reflects a certain concept of the End of History, and that vision remains in play, especially since the Americans ventured in and failed to implement their own Chiliastic vision of the End of History. The Americans did what the Iranians could not: depose the nominally-Sunni regime of Saddam Hussein, but the Americans’ vision of setting up Iraq as a liberal democratic state, a kind of “City on a Hill,” merely diminished Iraq and enabled Iran to absorb it within its own sphere of influence.