CHAPTER 1

The End of (Military) History?

The Demise of the Western Way of War

Andrew J. Bacevich

"In watching the flow of events over the past decadeor so, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamentalhas happened in world history." This sentiment, introducing the essaythat made Francis Fukuyama a household name, commands renewed attentiontoday, albeit from a different perspective.

Developments during the 1980s, above all the winding down of the ColdWar, had convinced Fukuyama that the "end of history" was at hand. "Thetriumph of the West, of the Western idea," he wrote in 1989, "is evident ... inthe total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism."

Today the West, its leading members wrestling with entrenched economicproblems, no longer looks quite so triumphant. Yet events during the firstdecade of the present century have delivered history to another endpoint ofsorts. Although Western liberalism retains considerable appeal and liberaleconomies may yet demonstrate an ability to get their house in order, theWestern way of war has run its course. Whatever doubts may have remainedon this score, events since 9/11 have removed them.

For Fukuyama, history implied a Hegelian dialectic. During the twentiethcentury, that dialectic had found expression in a fierce ideological competition,a contest pitting democratic capitalism against fascism and communism.By the time he published his famous essay, that contest was reaching itsdenouement. Defined as an unfolding sequence of events, history was likely tocontinue. As teleological process, however, history, according to Fukuyama,had arrived at an endpoint likely to prove definitive.

Yet from start to finish, military might as much as ideology had determinedthat competition's course. Throughout much of the twentieth century,great powers had vied with one another to create new, or more effective, instrumentsof coercion. Military innovation assumed many forms. Most obviously,there were weapons: dreadnoughts and aircraft carriers, rockets andmissiles, poison gas and atomic bombs—the list is a long one. Yet in their effortto gain an edge, nations devoted equal attention to other factors: doctrineand organization, training systems and mobilization schemes, intelligencecollection and war plans.

All of this furious activity, whether undertaken by France or Great Britain,Germany or Japan, Russia or the United States, derived from a common belief inthe plausibility of victory. Expressed in simplest terms, the Western military traditionreduces to this proposition: war remains a viable instrument of statecraft,the accouterments of modernity serving, if anything, to enhance its utility.

Great Expectations

That was theory. Reality, above all the two world wars, told a decidedly differentstory. Armed conflict in the industrial age reached new heights of lethalityand destructiveness. Once begun, wars devoured everything, inflicting staggeringmaterial, psychological, and moral damage. Pain vastly exceeded gain.In that regard, the war of 1914–1918 became emblematic: even the winnersended up losers. When fighting eventually stopped, the victors were left not tocelebrate but to mourn. As a consequence, well before Fukuyama penned hisessay, faith in war's problem-solving capacity had begun to erode. As early as1945, among several great powers—thanks to their affinity for war, now greatin name only—that faith disappeared altogether.

Among nations classified as liberal democracies, only two resisted thistrend. One was the United States, the sole major belligerent to emerge fromWorld War II stronger, richer, and more confident. The second was Israel, createdas a direct consequence of the horrors unleashed by that cataclysm andthe criminal regime of Nazi Germany. By the 1950s, both countries subscribedto this conviction that national security (and, arguably, national survival) demandedunambiguous military superiority. In the lexicon of American andIsraeli politics, peace was a code word. The essential prerequisite of peace wasfor any and all adversaries, real or potential, to accept a condition of permanentinferiority. In this regard, the two nations—not yet intimate allies—stoodapart from the rest of the Western world.

So even as they professed their devotion to peace, civilian and militaryelites in the United States and Israel prepared obsessively for war. They saw nocontradiction between rhetoric and reality. In the United States, this preoccupationwith war gave rise to the national security state, a vast network ofinstitutions, governmental and nongovernmental alike, centered on the misleadinglynamed Department of Defense. In Israel, the preoccupation withwar found expression in the creation of a people's army, which became (andremains) the preeminent manifestation of the nation and the state. To be anIsraeli citizen, remarked one Israel Defense Force (IDF) chief of staff, "was tobe a soldier on eleven months annual leave."

Yet...