The Future of War
A History
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An award-winning military historian, professor, and political adviser delivers the definitive story of warfare in all its guises and applications, showing what has driven and continues to drive this uniquely human form of political violence.
Questions about the future of war are a regular feature of political debate, strategic analysis, and popular fiction. Where should we look for new dangers? What cunning plans might an aggressor have in mind? What are the best forms of defense? How might peace be preserved or conflict resolved?
From the French rout at Sedan in 1870 to the relentless contemporary insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, Lawrence Freedman, a world-renowned military thinker, reveals how most claims from the military futurists are wrong. But they remain influential nonetheless.
Freedman shows how those who have imagined future war have often had an idealized notion of it as confined, brief, and decisive, and have regularly taken insufficient account of the possibility of long wars-hence the stubborn persistence of the idea of a knockout blow, whether through a dashing land offensive, nuclear first strike, or cyberattack. He also notes the lack of attention paid to civil wars until the West began to intervene in them during the 1990s, and how the boundaries between peace and war, between the military, the civilian, and the criminal are becoming increasingly blurred.
Freedman's account of a century and a half of warfare and the (often misconceived) thinking that precedes war is a challenge to hawks and doves alike, and puts current strategic thinking into a bracing historical perspective.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Freedman (Strategy), professor emeritus of war studies at King's College London, takes aim at how generations of historians, military analysts, politicians, and journalists have tried to anticipate the unknowable: the contours of the next major conflict involving political superpowers or regional actors. In the annals of crystal ball gazing, Freedman points out, most soothsayers have been way off. Prior to WWI, instead of massive armies coming to blows, European nations engaged in colonial exploits in undeveloped lands. Some asserted that growing economic prosperity meant that countries would have little need to fight over resources. But after WWII, an apocalyptic view of future warfare took hold; the development of nuclear weapons merely dialed up this tendency, even as some parties asserted that the bombs would serve as deterrents. More recently, 21st-century prognosticators are predicting cyberwar; robot and drone fighting forces; potential clashes between the U.S., China, or Russia; and conflicts sparked by climate change fueled events such as drought and famine. As chroniclers catalog the myriad ways that the next war could explode, Freedman unsurprisingly concludes that war "has a future." Freedman's work makes for well-informed, if dire, reading, and the book's audience is probably limited to hardcore conflict enthusiasts.
