Margaret Macmillan, War: How Conflict Shaped Us (New York: Random House, 2020), xxii+312 pp., $30.00.

SPEAKING TO a New York Times reporter as his twenty-six-year-old son was brought back in a coffin after only two weeks at the front, the bereaved Azeri father said, “If the nation calls, he has to go … long live the nation.” Muslim Azeris and Christian Armenians have been fighting an off-and-on war over the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh since 1988. Hostility between the two nations dates back centuries. Their ancient hatreds intensified when both Armenia and Azerbaijan became independent in 1918. Both states were absorbed into the Soviet Union, however, and Nagorno-Karabakh became a region of Azerbaijan, despite its overwhelmingly Armenian population. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the two countries, once again independent, went to war, amplifying what had been lower-level hostilities between the two ethnic groups for the previous three years.

A very different kind of conflict took place in July 1969. This one, dubbed the “football war” between El Salvador and Honduras, flared up as a result of a Honduran land reform law that effectively expelled thousands of Salvadoran migrants who were either squatters or immigrant farmers. The proximate cause of the war was violence that had broken out at successive Salvadoran World Cup matches, one of which had been won by each country. On the day that the two teams played the tiebreaker, which El Salvador won, it launched an attack on Honduran targets, including its international airport. Salvadoran troops then moved in and occupied part of Honduras. After four days of fighting, the Organization of American States negotiated a cease-fire on July 18 which took effect on July 20. El Salvador withdrew its troops a few weeks later.

What prompts succeeding generations of both Azeris and Armenians to take up arms against each other? Why is a father proud that his son died for “the Nation” in what has been an endless war? For that matter, how can a Palestinian mother be proud that her son was a suicide bomber, as so many Palestinian mothers have been? And why should a series of hotly contested football matches be the spark that leads nations to go to war? “The causes of wars can seem absurd or inconsequential,” writes Margaret Macmillan in her splendid War: How Conflict Shaped Us, “but behind them usually lie greater quarrels and tensions.”

MACMILLAN PROBES the foregoing questions as she seeks to demonstrate that “war is not an aberration, best forgotten as quickly as possible” and that “we do not take war as seriously as it deserves.” She herself is on the warpath. Her targets include Steven Pinker, who has argued that that there is a clear trend away from violence; academic faculties that have downgraded the importance of war studies; and Western intelligentsia, the overwhelming majority of whom evince so great a distaste for war that they simply avoid discussing it.

Macmillan’s work is as much a sociological essay as it is historical analysis. It is not a history of war per se, nor does it delve deeply into military strategy, operations, tactics, or spending. Rather, it examines how and in what circumstances governments from ancient times to today have chosen to go to war, how those doing the fighting actually feel, the impact of war on civilian populations, and representations of conflict in the arts and the media. Its primary focus is on Western Europe, and its American and Canadian offspring, though Macmillan does refer to conflicts and powers elsewhere in Europe, including Russia.

Macmillan also cites wars in Asia and the Middle East, though more often than not it is in the context of battles fought with Western forces. Macmillan rarely mentions Africa, and only as a colonial offshoot of the colonial European powers. And she virtually omits any reference to Latin America, other than the Falklands War between Britain and Argentina. From the Bolivarian wars of independence in the early 1800s and throughout the nineteenth century, however, South America was the scene of numerous conflicts. Indeed, in attempting to puzzle out why men and nations go to—and glorify—war, in addition to commenting on the El Salvador conflict with Honduras, she might also have investigated Paraguay’s veneration of General Francisco Solano Lopez. Paraguay considers Lopez to be its greatest national hero, and to whom it has dedicated a national holiday and a museum, though he foolishly managed to lose two-thirds of its territory and its outlet to the sea by going to war against the combined forces of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay.

Macmillan laments the fact that, as she puts it, “in the majority of Western universities the study of war is largely ignored, perhaps because we fear that the mere act of researching and thinking about it means approval.” She goes on to note that the lack of interest in war studies translates into a lack of jobs for those who would specialize in that field. Moreover, she adds in a tone dripping with sarcasm, “war or strategic studies are relegated, when they exist, to their own small enclosures where those called military historians can roam away, digging up their unsavory tidbits and constructing their unedifying stories, and not bother anyone else.”

Her observations certainly apply to American universities, where far too many left-oriented academics have long made no bones about their hostility toward any aspect of war studies. To a great extent, that opposition is a legacy of the Vietnam War. For many in American academe, the war that overshadowed their student days has never come to an end. Beginning in the 1970s, the ranks of junior professorships far too often were filled with former anti-war protesters, who were deeply affected by the memory of the Kent State shootings, the takeover of university buildings, and the opposition to Defense Department-funded research. Today these men and women, who long ago achieved tenure, have since both risen to senior ranks in leading institutions and successfully promoted the academic careers of the many acolytes that they trained over the past thirty-five years. They dominate the American academic scene, particularly among the elite schools, and have helped to move them increasingly leftward. For these professors, war studies are nothing less than anathema.

One manifestation of this hostility has been the tortured history of the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) at many elite universities. During the Vietnam era, many institutions of higher learning terminated their ROTC programs. For years after the war had ended, the Department of Defense encountered serious difficulties when seeking to reopen these programs. Several Ivy League schools also objected to the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule, which they viewed as discrimination against gays. Some universities would not even permit the military to recruit on their campus. It was only after 9/11 that universities such as Harvard, Brown, Stanford, Columbia, and the University of Chicago began to reconsider re-establishing ROTCs. A 2006 Supreme Court ruling forced them to permit the military to recruit on their campuses. ROTCs finally were reinstated throughout the Ivy League in 2010 when “don’t ask, don’t tell” was repealed. Nevertheless, hostility to the military on the part of a large proportion of the academic community has not abated, and Stanford still does not have its own ROTC program. Macmillan’s lament, nearly a half-century after the war in Vietnam came to an end, is, therefore, more than justified.

MACMILLAN HAS been widely applauded for her path-breaking volumes on both the prelude to the First World War and its aftermath. She draws heavily, perhaps too heavily, on those years as she attempts to demonstrate that human nature does not change all that much even as the nature of war, its organization, and its weaponry continue to evolve. Although she devotes a full chapter to the impact of war on culture, and of culture on war—she terms it “war in our imaginations and our memories”—she cites novels, poetry, and classical literature throughout the book. Homer figures heavily, Shakespeare even more so, as do poets and novelists of the Great War (as the British still call it).

Human nature is by its very definition complex, and, as Macmillan rightly points out, that complexity has resulted in the paradox that “war, surprisingly, has brought peace and prosperity for societies.” Macmillan outlines a second paradox that is less evident, however. She posits that “growing state power and the emergence of bigger states … are often the result of war but that in turn can produce peace.” In fact, as the late twentieth century has demonstrated, war can produce the same peaceful outcome when states break apart. The constituent states of the former Yugoslavia, having fought bitterly when that country disintegrated, are almost all Treaty Partners in NATO. The only exception is Serbia, which provoked the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Moreover, all the former Yugoslav states are either members of the European Union (EU) or, in the case of Serbia, North Macedonia, and Montenegro, are currently negotiating their accession to the EU.

Another paradox, or as Macmillan puts it, an “uncomfortable truth,” is that it “brings both destruction and creation.” Advances in science and medicine have often been the result of wartime needs. Wartime demands likewise have accelerated social reforms. In particular, Macmillan points to the advancement of women in peacetime due to their wartime roles.

Macmillan is on shakier ground when she asserts that “during the Cold war, American political leaders, including Presidents Eisenhower and Johnson, accepted that they must do something for African Americans, not necessarily because they believed in the rightness of the cause,” rather because the Soviets “had a handy weapon for propaganda in American racial discrimination.” That certainly was not the motive in Johnson’s case, although as Robert Caro has clearly demonstrated, Johnson never fully shed his own racist impulses. Moreover, Macmillan overlooks Harry Truman’s critical role in desegregating the military, which was due more to his revulsion at the maltreatment of African Americans returning from World War II battlefields than to any concerns about Stalinist propaganda.

Macmillan offers multifarious examples of how “the need to make war has gone hand in hand with the development of the state.” Examples of war’s impact upon the nature of the state and its activities include the growth of bureaucracies to obtain and manage supplies and to organize and maintain support facilities. Similarly, the needs of war led to the emergence of the census, to identify numbers of potentially available troops. Macmillan attributes the notion, like the word itself, to ancient Rome, though the Book of Numbers likewise counts the males “between twenty and sixty years of age” who constituted the Hebrews’ fighting forces.

“There is some evidence,” writes Macmillan, that war also “brings social as well as economic leveling. Men and sometimes women are conscripted and thrown together with people unlike any they have ever met before.” Macmillan does not present that evidence, however. As is frequently her wont throughout the book, Macmillan instead cites several examples from World War I, in this case, to buttress her argument that mass conscription for war is a great societal leveler. Mass conscription no longer is the norm in several Western societies, however, including the United States, France, Britain, and the author’s native Canada—and it is unlikely ever to be reinstated. On the other hand, national service, even if not in the military itself, would generate the same social outcomes as conscription once did. With Western societies, especially the United States, becoming increasingly polarized, the case for conscription into national service has never been stronger.

“Greed for what others have, whether it is food for survival, women for servitude or procreation, precious minerals, trade or land, has always motivated war.” Nevertheless, even if war is hard-wired into the human psyche, and although human nature may not have changed since the mythical days of Hector and Achilles, and the very real ones of Napoleon and Wellington and of Foch and Baron von Richthofen, the context in which wars are fought is quite different. Similarly, the means with which they are fought are considerably more varied, depending on who is doing the fighting and how the fighting is being done. There are limits to the value of constantly referring to the battles and literature of ancient Greece and Rome, and, indeed to the period between 1870 and 1920.

MACMILLAN ASSERTS, “war has normally been seen as a sphere for men.” She does note that there have been women warriors throughout the ages, and not just the Amazons of Greek mythology. Still, until the recent past—and with few exceptions, such as the Israeli Defense Forces—women did not serve in military combat units. In the past, women certainly were an “excuse” for war, as she puts it (and sometimes for trying to sit it out, as Achilles sulked in his tent over Briseis). They still are in certain societies: witness the appalling and cruel behavior of ISIS fighters towards Iraq’s Yazidi women. Nevertheless, among major military powers, the absence of females in the military, due either to fear that they might be raped or due to their perceived lack of strength, is diminishing if not entirely gone.

Women fighters do continue to run the risk of rape, particularly if they are captured as prisoners of war. Despite that very real fear, however, women have graduated from combat support and service support roles to pilot fighter aircraft, serve on submarines and surface ships, operate in land force formations, and control drones. Most importantly, they have risen to very senior rank in Western militaries, including as American four-star generals and admirals serving as combatant and staff commanders.

Macmillan briefly recognizes this change but does not discuss it sufficiently. The availability of women for the military increases the talent pool of potential volunteers, while the expansion of high-technology jobs within the military reduces the requirement for all military entrants to be powerful physical specimens. As military operations continue to expand into the cybersphere and space, and as artificial intelligence and machine learning will occupy an increasingly important place in the command and control of military tactics and operations, the potential role of women on the battlefield will continue to expand. World War II’s Rosie may continue to be a riveter in a future conflict, supporting the military’s home front, but she will also be a targeter, a shooter, and an operational and field commander.

If the prospect of carrying off women like so many Sabines no longer is a major motivator for men to go to war, religion and ideology, or perhaps more accurately, religious ideology, still move men—and women—to risk their lives in war in order to save their and other people’s souls. Macmillan offers a quote from Martin Luther that could be the watchword of any Taliban or isis fighter: “The hand that wields the sword and kills with it is not man’s hand but God’s.” For far too long, postwar policymakers in the West, no doubt heavily influenced by the increasingly secularized societies in which they have lived, have paid little to no attention to the role of religion, especially when blended with nationalism, as a motivator for the use of force. Thus, senior American officials could authorize the supply of Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and other equipment to the Afghan Mujahedin without recognizing that in so doing they were arming an enemy that for subsequent decades would view itself at war with its erstwhile supporters.

Religion can be an excuse for crimes that might, in any event, be committed by their perpetrators. Yet there is no denying that it also does continue to spur to violence and war many who see themselves as true believers. Religion moved young Iranians to clear minefields with their bodies. It divided Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland for three hundred years until the signing of the 1998 American-negotiated Easter Sunday Agreement. Outbreaks of violence between Catholics and Protestants still take place wherever the Scottish Football League’s Celtic and Rangers play each other. Religion was a major factor in the most recent Balkan Wars between Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats and between Serbs and Muslims in Bosnia. It underlays the latest brutal civil strife in Yemen: the war between Zaidi Muslim Houthis located in the country’s north and the Sunnis of the south, reflecting tensions that go back a millennium. It fuels the ongoing, equally long, and certainly more brutal civil war in Syria, which pits Sunni rebels against the Alawi-dominated government. And, as already noted, it is a critical factor in the current and previous wars between Armenia and Azerbaijan, as well as in Turkey’s military assistance to the Azeris, thereby evoking the haunting specter of the early twentieth-century Armenian genocide.

Religion has led to the atrocities of Nigeria’s Boko Haram rebels, including the reported beheadings of Christians. It has propelled the emergence of isis and motivated young men from around the world to join its ranks. Macmillan mentions neither Yemen nor Nigeria; she tends to focus on the religious wars of Europe’s past. Yet what motivated past wars spurs current ones and no doubt future ones as well; the internet virtually guarantees that there will continue to be religious wars in the future.

Ethnic hatreds need not be religiously motivated or even have a religious component, however. That the Iraqi Kurds were Sunni like Saddam Hussein and his henchmen did not prevent the Iraqi dictator from launching airborne chemical strikes on Kurdish men, women, and children. Nor did it stop him from invading overwhelmingly Sunni Kuwait in 1990 or firing missiles at Wahhabi Sunni Saudi Arabia during that Gulf War. Neither was religion a factor in the 1994 Rwandan genocide that resulted in the death of as many as a million Tutsis. Rather, as in the Biblical story of Cain and Abel, the majority Hutus, most of whom were farmers, resented the elite minority Tutsis, who derived their wealth and status from their ownership of livestock. Macmillan’s European focus, ironically, like that of Pinker with whom she tends to disagree, overlooks that most horrific attempt to exterminate an entire people since World War II. The Rwandan genocide was the bloodiest massacre since the Cambodian killings perpetrated by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, which were driven purely by ideology, and which Macmillan likewise fails to mention. 

Yet another cause of war, and often an excuse for it, is a sense that, as Macmillan points out, the nation or the ruler’s “honor” has somehow been impugned, whether as a result of an immediate or long-standing affront. She offers an example of the former in Britain’s decision to go to war because the Spanish had cut off Captain Robert Jenkins’ ear. Actually, she notes, the war was about control of trade in the Caribbean. She might have added that the cry to “Remember the Maine” was as much about the American desire to rid the Caribbean of its Spanish presence as about the supposed sinking of the battleship. An example of a more recent vintage was Argentina’s mid-1982 occupation of the Falkland Islands. The year 1983 would have marked 150 years since the British first occupied the islands; as Lawrence Freeman and Virginia Gamba-Stonehouse observed in their masterful account of that war, “The symbolic importance of this anniversary meant that there would be pressure within Argentina demanding strong action by the government of the day in Buenos Aires.” 

Often even more than wars between states, civil wars can be especially brutal. Even when one side nominally has prevailed, the losing side’s bitterness can linger for decades, or even longer. As Macmillan rightly points out, “We feel a particular horror at civil wars both because they rip apart the bonds that hold societies together and because they are so often marked by unrestrained violence toward the other side.” The lingering resentment of the American South, which has played out in presidential elections since 1964 and was a factor both in Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and his fight for re-election in 2020, is a notable case in point. 

It is true, as Macmillan notes, that “The American Civil War probably had more casualties than all other American wars combined.” Yet her focus on Western warfare overlooks the Taiping Rebellion, which actually was a civil war between rival claimants to power. That war, which overlapped with the American Civil War, lasted nearly four times as long and resulted in as many as seventy million dead, more than twenty times the total of American casualties on both sides. Macmillan also notes that it was the Romans who first came up with the notion of “civil war,” though the Book of Judges recounts the near extermination of the tribe of Benjamin by the other Hebrew tribes centuries before Marius and Sulla contested the leadership of Rome.

WHEN MACMILLAN turns to what she terms the “ways and means” of warfighting, she asserts that “how societies fight wars and the weapons they use affect and are affected by their values, their beliefs and ideas, and their institutions, their culture in the broadest sense.” She adduces considerable historical backing for her observations about the impact of culture on those who would wage war. She points to warrior-societies ranging from ancient Sparta to Prussia. And she posits that cultures that venerate war look down upon cultures that do not: The Romans considered Carthaginians to be effeminate and the British took the same dim view of Bengalis while admiring Gurkhas and others whose war-fighting abilities they put down to the cooler climates of their homelands. She adds, “How groups of humans contemplate and plan for wars is also affected by their … geography.” America was blessed by the protection that great oceans afforded it; it could rely on relatively small land forces. Britain, surrounded by water, could do the same, assigning its highest military priority to the Royal Navy. Germany and Russia, with no such protection, accorded pride of place to their armies. Up to a point her observations apply today: most states on the Asian mainland, for example, including China (despite her growing maritime capability), assign budgetary priority to their armies; an island nation like Japan does so for its navy.

It is certainly true that, as Macmillan asserts, “culture, technology and war are … interdependent” in the sense that “war pushes ahead the development of technology but it also adapts what is already there.” This was the case in ancient times and is true today. For example, the U.S. Defense Department has sought in a variety of ways to exploit Silicon Valley’s technological breakthroughs—though the commercial hi-tech sector is notably reluctant to work with government. 

It is equally the case that Americans’ enterprising spirit has spurred the country’s advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, hypersonics, 5G, and other emerging technologies. The gung-ho attitude that pervades Israeli entrepreneurial society likewise has resulted not only in the Jewish state’s emergence as a “start-up nation,’ but has also transformed its military into a regional powerhouse. Yet China, with a very different culture and political system, has actually outpaced the United States in several of these technologies, and not only because it has copied or stolen them. Similarly, Russia’s advances, especially in hypersonics, are very much indigenous, though its society is once again under the thumb of a harsh authoritarian regime.

Moreover, the tools of modern war, whatever their origins, are fundamentally different from those Macmillan cites in her chapter on “modern” war. Just as she rightly contrasts the nature of warfare in ancient times from that of World War I, and that of the Great War from that of World War II, so too will future wars differ from those of even the recent past. It is unfortunate that Macmillan reserves for her brief final chapter her very cogent observations about the revolutionary nature of what is truly modern warfare.

Macmillan’s discussion of the nature of “modern” war, like that of “modern” weapons, likewise tends to focus more on World War I and the wars that preceded it than on the impact of future conflicts on both combatants and the societies that support them. It is true that beginning with Napoleonic France, through World Wars I and II, and most recently America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, “modern war [has] last[ed] longer [and] cost more.” Since the end of the Vietnam War, however, conflict has not, as Macmillan asserts, “demand[ed] more of society.” When the United States went to war in Afghanistan, President George W. Bush instructed the American people, “they have got to go about their business.” He did not change his position when the United States invaded Iraq two years later. Americans were not asked to buy war bonds to finance the two wars that have cost them hundreds of billions of dollars, and, if veterans’ benefits are included, will cost billions more over the next decades.

Moreover, wars are once again the preserve of a professional class as volunteer militaries replace those that depend on conscription. Macmillan’s observation that “it has almost always been the young men who volunteer or are taken first for war” is now only partially accurate. Young men volunteer, but they are heavily recruited. And not just men. Women volunteer and they too are recruited. And both young men and women in the military, at least in the American military, have families with small children. Indeed, one of the major causes of pressure on the American defense budget is the proliferation of benefits both to entice young men and women, including those with families, to join the military and then to re-enlist.

Modern war, at least for American forces, is changing in another respect. Macmillan rightly notes that “a strong sense of comradeship and a willingness to follow orders, which make men fight and endure together, can lead to systematic organized cruelty and evil.” After all, Adolf Eichmann’s defense when he was tried for mass murder was that he was “only following orders.” The Eichmann defense is no longer operative, at least in the American military. Instead, it is charged to ignore illegal orders, such as torture. Moreover, in the wake of the Lafayette Square incident and his subsequent defeat in the 2020 presidential election, military leaders agonized over the question of how to respond to an order from President Trump that they might deem to be illegal, such as an unprovoked nuclear strike. 

If militaries and their weapons have undergone marked change in the past several decades, the outsized role of the media in influencing public opinion in support of, or opposition to, war has not changed very much since the mid-1800s. To paraphrase Macmillan, “war is good for sales.” Moreover, just as the media has long been, and still can be, a forceful voice in support for a war, it can also render a conflict increasingly unpopular. Walter Cronkite’s televised opposition to the Vietnam War helped turn the country against it. And, as Macmillan rightly contends, once popular opinion turns against a war, it becomes increasingly difficult for a government to sustain it. America’s Vietnam, the USSR’s and America’s respective wars in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, and Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon all support her point.

Macmillan is also on the mark in arguing that “governments and their military have learned to play the game of manipulating public opinion too.” She incorrectly asserts, however, that “although the US military allowed reporters extraordinary access in Vietnam, it drew the conclusion that it must never make that mistake again. In both wars with Iraq the media were tightly controlled and managed.” To the contrary, despite its difficulties with the media in Vietnam, the military decided to risk giving reporters free rein in both Iraq wars, and has since concluded that it made the correct decision. While some older reporters (and they were almost all men) who had covered the Vietnam War were distrustful of the military’s operations in Iraq, younger ones were far less so. Moreover, members of the press who were “embedded” with particular units in Iraq were free to join other units, and some certainly did so, even joining up with the special operations forces.

Wars may until recently have been a male preserve, yet non-combatant women, like the media, have long affected national attitudes to conflict. As Macmillan points out, “women have opposed war, sometimes on the grounds that they create life and do not take it away, but they have also been its cheerleaders.” Indeed, from the Biblical Sisera’s mother (“Are they not finding, are they not dividing the spoil? A damsel, two damsels to every man”) whom Macmillan does not mention, to those she does—like the mothers of Spartan troops, the Prussian women who raised funds for battleships, and the British women who handed out white feathers to men who had not donned the uniform to fight in the trenches of World War I—“women have urged men to fight and shamed them for refusing.”

“WAR IS a mystery,” writes Macmillan, “and it is a troubling and unsettling mystery. It should be abhorrent, but it is so often alluring and its values seductive.” How true: hanging on the wall alongside the main staircase from the Pentagon’s River Entrance to the secretary of defense’s office is a painting of a family kneeling in church. The husband is wearing a military uniform, and the caption reads “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us.” The words that precede this passage from Isaiah 6:8 state “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying…” The message is clear: we fight for God and country (or where monarchs still rule, “God, king/queen, and country).

Macmillan goes on to demonstrate how difficult it has been to grasp the “complex essence” of war, though throughout the millennia men and women have tried to do so through the arts, memoirs, and letters, and more recently the cinema and television as well. She points out that in the past it was the educated, invariably those who commanded troops and who came from the upper classes, whose letters, memoirs, and literature were the primary source of wartime recollection. That is no longer the case today. Emails and social media have enabled men and women of every military rank and social background to portray the circumstances in which they operate, and often to do so in real-time. 

Similarly, Macmillan’s observation that most efforts to recreate battles for those who do not fight them come mainly from land fighting, because “we the bystanders find it harder to put ourselves in the shoes of aviators and sailors” has not been the case for some time. A United States Marine officer once told me that Herman Wouk’s War and Remembrance was the best book on war, whether fiction or non-fiction, that he ever had read. (Wouk had served in the Pacific theatre during World War II.) The marine spoke with some authority. He had been the recipient of two Navy Crosses in Vietnam (only one other man had achieved this distinction) and later rose to the rank of lieutenant general. The Hunt for Red October, based on the best-selling book that was published by the prestigious United States Naval Institute, portrayed the all-too-tense military environment that characterized the Cold War. And Top Gun, based on the very real experiences at the Navy’s eponymous training center, offered an exceedingly realistic portrayal of training for air combat. Snoopy and the Red Baron it was not.

Movies about land fighting have also become more realistic; not all of them are Chuck Norris or Rambo thrillers. Steven Spielberg’s World War II film Saving Private Ryan and Michael Cimino’s Vietnam classic The Deer Hunter both evoked the realities of war. So too did Blackhawk Down, about the attack on American forces in Somalia. I viewed the film with a senior Pentagon official who had been involved in the policy decision that led to that disaster; he broke down in tears as he watched the action unfold and had to leave the theater before the film ended.

Macmillan’s primary target audience is, as she puts it, “those of us who are on the sidelines.” Yet it offers much to the specialist as well, particularly military analysts and policymakers who do not have, but should have, a greater understanding of the sociology that underpins policy decisions to go to war, and the behavior of those who are doing the fighting.

Later in her book, Macmillan returns to her theme of “war in our imaginations and our memories.” As she has throughout the volume, Macmillan once again draws heavily on the classics, Shakespeare, and the poets, artists, and writers, notably Erich Maria Remarque, who fought, depicted, wrote about, or remembered World War I. She contrasts the artistic output resulting from the First World War with that of the Second: “It is hard to think of a comparable outpouring from the Second World War,” she writes. There may be fewer great novels about World War II, but Herman Wouk’s classic The Caine Mutiny together with his War and Remembrance and The Winds of War, as well as The Diary of Anne Frank, certainly should meet Macmillan’s standard. World War II also inspired a host of films, though not all necessarily in its immediate aftermath nor all, in the spirit of Remarque’s novel, depicting the horrors of war. World War II films continue to appear, many to popular acclaim. They have ranged from thrillers produced in the 1960s like The Great Escape and The Guns of Navarone to depictions of the Holocaust, notably Shoah and Spielberg’s Schindler’s List as well as Saving Private Ryan and, more recently, Dunkirk. 

The public may love war movies, but the reality of war has had devastating effects on non-combatants, who, as Macmillan demonstrates, are far too often termed “collateral damage.” The brutal disregard for human life that marked the wars of the distant past, or even the two world wars, has not diminished in any way. It would have been helpful, however, if she had spent more time writing about the atrocities in Rwanda, Bosnia, Syria, Libya, and Yemen. She only mentions Syria, as well as Iraq, in the context of discussing the highly controversial doctrine that emerged in the 1990s called Responsibility to Protect or R2P (she calls it Right to Protect) and that refers to the need to intervene against governments brutalizing their own people.

Macmillan shows that ever since medieval times there have been, and continue to be, strenuous efforts to control both arms and the manner in which they are employed. The Washington Naval Treaties, the Kellogg-Briand Pact that sought to abolish war entirely, the various agreements between the United States and the Soviet Union (and later Russia) to limit nuclear arms, conventions to ban chemical and biological weapons, as well as the deployment of United Nations or NATO peacekeeping forces all reflect the desire to draw at least some boundaries around war and limit its recurrence.

When it comes to punishing war criminals, however, Macmillan has little good to say about the United States. 

When the most powerful country in the world holds prisoners illegally in sites around the world or does not accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court [ICC]—which was set up to punish unjust wars, among other crimes against humanity—others will be tempted to follow its example.

Leave aside the fact that those who violate international norms, such as Syria’s Bashar al-Assad in ordering the use of chemical weapons against his civilian population, or Saddam doing the same against Iraqi Kurds, are unlikely to pay much attention to the ICC. Can Macmillan seriously allege that the United States committed crimes against humanity, a term first used in the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals? If America’s enemies had their way, President George W. Bush and Secretary Donald Rumsfeld could be tried as war criminals for attacking Saddam’s Iraq. Not everyone would agree to such trials, and there is good reason why the United States refuses to join what it views as a highly politicized institution.

Throughout the ages, civilians have resented foreign occupation. Perhaps because so many civilians have suffered at the hands of occupying forces, many have taken up arms to resist as best they could, in whatever way they could, As Macmillan points out, “Resistance in the Second World War was picking up a gun or blowing up railways, but it was also listening to the nightly news bulletins on the BBC… even though that was punishable by death.” She might have added another form of resistance: those who knew they were doomed, like the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, but nevertheless preferred to go down fighting against overwhelmingly greater and more powerful Nazi forces.

MACMILLAN CONCLUDES her volume with an all-too-brief update on war’s latest frontiers—space and cyber—and the new technologies that will become increasingly important in future conflicts. She also offers some observations that simply are not accurate. Contrary to her assertion that “except among a small subgroup of military families, the military is no longer seen as a desirable career,” in the United States at least, recruitment and retention among both the officer corps and enlisted personnel have a far wider catchment area than just the children of military families. Volunteers have many reasons for joining the military. They include not merely the fact that “daddy or grandpa served,” but also patriotism, a wanderlust for travel, love of flying or sailing the seas, long-term career prospects, and for some, pay and benefits. 

When she writes of the West, her primary focus throughout the book, Macmillan asserts that “we may have moved beyond war.” Russia and Turkey, given their ongoing operations in Syria and Libya, or for that matter, France and the United States, which continue to conduct low level but nevertheless lethal operations in Africa’s Sahel, belie her observation. Macmillan does concede that major wars cannot be ruled out in the future, for which reason military planners will continue to have job opportunities for years to come.

It is unfortunate that Macmillan’s book lacks notes; it is the volume’s most serious shortcoming. She merely provides brief bibliographies for each of the book’s chapters, but these do not help the reader if the text itself does not cite a specific author. In addition, when a quotation is not attributed to any particular individual, one is left to puzzle where exactly to find it and, equally important, its context.

That Macmillan on occasion fumbles her facts is a lesser concern, and perhaps not surprising, in a book that is so far-ranging. She can be pardoned for mistakenly assuming that Maimonides “laid down rules that banned the wasteful destruction of, for example, fruit trees” when it is explicitly mandated in Deuteronomy. More surprisingly, she includes Douglas MacArthur among the pantheon of generals who “had the ability of great actors to reach out and make their men feel that their commanders knew them, cared about them, and were speaking directly to them.” That characterization applies far more to Omar Bradley, the “soldiers’ general” who rose from poverty to become the Allies’ field commander on D-Day and later the first chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, than to the imperious MacArthur, the privileged son of another senior general. These and other minor glitches that occasionally appear throughout the book should not detract from its value as an investigation into how men and women think about war. Stephen Pinker may be right in arguing that total deaths from wars have been on the decline. Nevertheless, wars continue to erupt—between states, and within them. As long as they do, they must be studied and understood, for otherwise it is far less likely that can truly ever be controlled.

Dov S. Zakheim served as the Undersecretary of Defense (Comptroller) and Chief Financial Officer for the U.S. Department of Defense from 2001–2004 and as the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (Planning and Resources) from 1985–1987. He also served as the dod’s civilian coordinator for Afghan reconstruction from 2002–2004. He is Vice Chairman of the Center for the National Interest.

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