The first chapter of this book listed a series of questions which have been addressed along the way, but overall answers must be given now, based on the findings of this book.

From antiquity to the Thirty Years War, and again in the age dominated by the Napoleonic paradigm, most writers on war assumed that it is an inevitable part of the world. Many sought ways to limit it, and a few, writing especially in the Enlightenment and again in the twentieth century, even hoped that it could be abolished altogether through binding legal arrangements and restructurings of societies. The abolitionists and the limiters met in making efforts to reduce the pain and suffering caused by war. Some merely sought ways to offset their own side’s weakness, like some maritime strategists of secondary powers. Several Roman Catholic thinkers like Bonet in the fourteenth century and Hay du Chastelet in the seventeenth, as well as Moltke and the other ‘realists’ and Social Darwinists from the mid nineteenth century onwards, not only dismissed alternative solutions to war but positively welcomed it as part of God’s or Nature’s great design. They tended to favour battles and the offensive. As we might expect, the limiters largely advocated defence, deterrence and indirect approaches to reaching one’s goal. Complicating the picture, however, some limiters advocated seizing the initiative by instigating offensive and decisive battles, or using terror, including the bombing of cities, in the hope of offsetting their own perceived weakness or shortening the war. Both sides were driven by their view of the world and their ideologies. Technology could generally be used to defend arguments on either side.

The Napoleonic paradigm strikes back: Summers’s Clausewitzian critique

At the end of the Cold War, the euphoric hope spread that the collapse of Soviet-led communism might mean the end of ideological strife in the world. Assuming that no new (or old) ideology (or religion) would rise up to challenge liberal democracy as ‘best of all possible’ systems, to paraphrase Voltaire, and assuming that wars originated mainly from ideological disagreement, one could argue that this was, in a Hegelian or Marxist sense, the end of dialectical history (Fukuyama 1989). But the dialectical debate between those who favour the abandonment of the Napoleonic paradigm and those to whom it is the only thing that makes sense in military terms continues.

Not even all Western strategists found this cultural shift in the West easy to accept, as we have seen in the context of the evolution of air power after 1945. In 1982 Edward Luttwak deplored the fact that

His criticism, crucially, highlights the fact that this Western shift of perceptions is unparalleled by thinking in many other countries and cultures. Indeed, Robert Cooper argues that it is not even shared widely within the USA, which is still operating very much as a ‘modern’ state that fiercely defends its right to use force as it sees fit, with or without a mandate from the world’s higher authority, the UN, which has now taken the place of God in the just war theology of old. For Cooper, it is only Europeans that have acquired a ‘post-modern’ mindset leading them to renounce the use of force to settle their own quarrels by force. Even he rightly points out that the peaceful European Union’s central problem is its coexistence on one planet with ‘modern’ states that have not renounced the use of force, and with ‘pre-modern’ entities aspiring to statehood and a state monopoly of the use of force, but in reality torn by rivalling claims to power (Cooper 2000).

Mars mechanised: the Napoleonic paradigm versus technological innovation

We have seen that Americans on both sides of the Civil War rendered homage to the Napoleonic paradigm, which they knew through Jomini’s writings; the Prussians developed their own version of it, ostensibly through their selective reading of Clausewitz but mainly under the increasingly ‘realist’ military leadership of Moltke; the French felt the need to rediscover Napoleonic warfare after their defeat at the hands of the German coalition in 1870/1 which they attributed to the Prussian officers’ studies of Napoleon, again through the medium of Clausewitz. Just as Renaissance men had felt the need to resurrect the wisdom of the ancients and to model their strategies on those of great generals of Antiquity, the emulation of the Napoleonic way of war became the lodestar of strategy from c. 1860 to 1918, as we have seen in the previous chapter.

Nevertheless, there were strong voices who doubted that the Napoleonic paradigm could be applied without significant modifications, pointing to the great technological innovations affecting warfare in this period. Unlike in early modern history, these innovations were both fast in coming and their significance was not denied; however, what the consequences would be was open to debate. In addition to belief in Social Darwinism and biology, and in the right of might, there was the changing factor of technology. The Wars of German Unification and the American Civil War especially had seen revolutionary changes there. Both used railways, the telegraph and industrial mass-production of weapons, ammunition and other equipment, and both harnessed mass armies to a popular cause (Degler 1997: 53–74), which made them ‘industrialised people’s wars’ (Förster and Nagler 1997: 9). Liddell Hart gave a succinct summary of the ‘revolution in warfare’ caused by the new technology from the introduction of the railways and the interwar period (he was writing in 1934):

This revolution of technology had ‘mechanised Mars’ (Liddell Hart 1944: 24f., 69).

This chapter will examine the predominating elements of Strategy in the long nineteenth century and map the evolution of the Napoleonic paradigm into one of Total War along two strands. The first was rooted in the perceived need to make warfare – defensive warfare – more effective by harnessing the entire nation’s strength to the cause of the defence of the country, including all its members, all its productivity, all its wealth. In truth this was more an ideal of the French Revolution than a Napoleonic measure, but the two were often merged into one in the minds of men. This ideal originated even before the Revolution, in the Enlightenment, with Count Guibert. It is what would in the First World War be called ‘total war’ in the sense of ‘total mobilisation of one’s national resources’ by the French politician Léon Daudet, who claimed to have invented the term (Daudet 1918: 8f.).

The second is the quest for a war-deciding battle, which is truly the core of the Napoleonic paradigm. Clausewitz saw the ‘battle of annihilation’ as central to Napoleon’s success (Clausewitz 1832/1976, IV: 11). The sense of the term ‘annihilation’ would evolve over time in a terrible way, under the shadow of Social Darwinism and racism, as we shall see.