Book Review - The Future of War: A History by Lawrence Freedman

The saying “all is fair in love and war” has become a cliche, but it’s true that with romance as well as bloodshed, we prepare for the next one mainly by worrying about the mistakes of the last conflict.

Lawrence Freedman’s The Future of War: A History is only about the more martial of the two human endeavors, but there’s a lot to love in it.

Across two hundred and eighty-seven pages of prose, Freedman’s book is part retro-futurism, part dissertation on the difficulties of determining what actually is a war and who died in one, and, finally, part looking forward at the sort of armed conflicts yet to come.

It doesn’t all fit together seamlessly, or read equally engagingly, but Freedman shows his homework regardless of topic, and there’s an additional forty-five pages of notes and twenty-eight pages just devoted to bibliography if warfare of the recent past, present, and future pique your interest.

For non-specialists, the most enjoyable portion is, thankfully, the first bit.

Retro-futurism is immediately enjoyable for the ways people in the past missed the mark. In Part One, Freedman piles up examples of how popular military-fiction authors and professionals in the late 19th and early 20th century imagined the next wars — and how they imagined it wrong.

The Battle of Dorking by George Tomkyns Chesney in 1871 posited a rapid, successful surprise invasion of the British Isles by the German Empire; in 1902, a fore thinking H.G. Wells imagined tanks before their invention but also thought war balloons would dominate the skies and submarines would kill their crews.

Freedman doesn’t give many examples of people who got their predictions right. There’s a short section on the Polish banker Ivan Stanislavovich Bloch, who predicted in 1898 that an upcoming major war would favor defense and have soldiers relying on their spades more than their rifles, but acknowledging his foresight is the exception.

So Freedman picking out past missteps comes across a bit cheap when hindsight doesn’t need spectacles and when Freedman never, even at the end, goes out on a limb to make his own predictions. It’s possible that may have been a conscious choice by the author based on the influence that past off-the-mark predictions have had on decision makers and the wider public.

And that is ultimately the most engrossing aspect of Freedman’s book and one I wish had been the whole subject. As much as some folk might sincerely like current students to be taught nothing but engineering or coding, art hugely impacts life because it shapes the imagination of the people living.

Geopolitics mattered in 1914, but so did a generation of books assuming the British and Germans would be on opposing sides of a future war.

Nuclear technology and policy mattered, but so did Peter George’s 1958 novel Red Alert and Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy adaptation “Dr. Strangelove” in turning public opinion, including elite opinion, against the acceptability of a thermonuclear exchange between Cold War super powers.

Ronald Reagan’s appreciation for Tom Clancy books and the Matthew Broderick film “War Games” had a real influence on U.S. policy in the 1980s.

A Cassandra is someone giving a warning no one heeds, but Freedman, in tone, treats people whose warnings were heeded as if they were inaccurate rather than persuasive as well as prescient.

The major problem, and the hardest part to slog through, is Part Two when Freedman goes into defining what war really is and how one ought to count it.

This is not an unimportant subject; civil wars and sub-national entities inflicting casualties and deaths around the world are clearly not merely semantic issues, but in the context of this book, it’s a diversion, and a laborious one to plow through as a reader when sandwiched by the more interesting and imaginative prognostications.

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Original review on: www.nwprogressive.org