Martin van Creveld

Van Creveld states in his introduction that the purpose of this book is to advance the serious study of warfare as an integral and universal part of the human experience, and to defend a long military tradition from the pernicious attacks of its enemies: pacifists, feminists, and pernicious neo-Clausewitzian battlespace managers. The result is sweeping, but also uneven and arbitrary.

The book starts quite well, with an examination of the importance of pomp, ritual, and ceremony in military show more affairs. As it moves on, it becomes clear that Van Creveld's best depth of sources are in the Classical world and the Napoleonic conflicts. World War 1 is mentioned in terms of its suprisingly militaristic poets, even Siegfried Sassoon loved the thrill of life in the trenches, and anything past 1940 seems to disappear from view. All examples of tribal warfare come from Fadiman's 1982 An Oral History of Tribal Warfare: The Meru of Mt. Kenya. The final chapters on collapses in military culture resulting from mob violence, roboticism, loss of bravery, and feminism are "old man yells at cloud" bad.

I'm someone inclined to be favorable to Van Creveld's arguments. Just look at my "war" shelf, or the airpower pictures I post weekly on Facebook. However, this book is a mess. For an good take on the topic, I strongly recommend Shannon French's The Code of the Warrior: Exploring Warrior Values Past and Present. show less

Command in War is an extremely ambitious work of military history, a study of command over millennia and six major types of war, using case studies from antiquity, Napoleon's battle of Jena-Auerstedt, the Prussian-Austrian War, World War I, Israeli battles in 1967 and 1973, and Vietnam, to examine the organization, processes, and technologies of command.

The theory is extremely robust, if somewhat idiosyncratic and limited in scope. Van Creveld is interesting in how information is taken in by show more commanders and used to manage uncertainty, so that orders may be given to forces to destroy the enemy. The first and last chapters are particularly well-constructed, containing Van Creveld's general theories on the best organization of an armed force: tactically flexible, self-sufficient units, with just enough formal structure to manage their logistical needs, and loosely controlled with robust informal back-channels. All the technique and technology of modern command, control, and communications is of little help.

The case studies are more uneven in quality. The sections on ancient warfare and Napoleon are strongest. I have come to agree with Van Creveld that strategy before Napoleon was non-existent. The best that a commander could do was guess to place himself at the decisive point of a battle and bull through with sheer physical force. The limitations of horse couriers made actual control of a campaign from a central point impossible. The staff, such as it was, would consist of the commander's household and a Quartermaster General in charge of scouting, selecting where to camp, the baggage train, and all the millions of details that made up the army. Napoleon's staff was still bound to him personally (though by charisma rather than feudal obligation), but Napoleon standardized some procedures of strategic intelligence and was the first to successfully direct multiple independent formations towards a single strategic end, although even the master of warfare ("the most competent man who ever lived" by Van Creveld's estimation) forgot to give orders to a third of his forces at a crucial battle and essentially blundered into the enemy. Likewise, the Prussian General Staff was far less powerful and formalistic than common history suggests--more informal sinews that occasionally managed to bring divided corps together than autocratic masters of battle.

This book gives a good sense of the imaginative and elegant letters and brave cavalrymen that characterized Napoleon's campaigns, and the rising tide of paperwork and schedules that entirely failed to manage the chaos of trench warfare. Where it is weakest is in the modern sections. Radio-based mobile warfare is clearly new in its relative independence from fixed lines of communication and physical space, yet the treatment of the 1973 Yom Kippur War is reduced to incoherence and the psychology of the various Israeli commanders, when it could've been the most robust part of the book. Van Creveld has a better perspective on the Vietnam War, where colonels in helicopter turned the 'directed telescope of command' into a paralyzing instrument of over-control, and statistical methods directed the army into doing what could be measured rather than what mattered. The heart of modern warfare; fast-moving combined arms operations linked through the 'hot medium' of voice radio, is sadly absent from the book.

For what it's worth, the nods towards the visible future of command, via technologies like Blue Force Tracker and streaming video via drone, seem to have turned out to be mostly right, which is an worthy bit of foresight. The conclusion, that the problems of command are intractable, that centralization is as harmful to military operations as chaos, and that the burden of technology may be greater than the benefits, are likely eternal truths. show less

Martin van Creveld has written outstanding military history books. His book on military logistics is a classic. Unfortunately, he has been struck by a severe case of cooties. He now sees himself in a task to combat the uppity womenfolk who take away the jobs of the manly men and demand equality. In this book, he informs his readers that the Swedish men "actually prefer to have sex with animals than with Swedish women — a practice sufficiently common to given rise to legislation aimed at show more banning it." He found this "fact" in Conservapedia and the Daily Mail, both right-wing projects with a precarious link to reality. At present, it seems easier to restore Don Quixote to sanity rather than turn back van Creveld to productive reality-based research.

He is deeply afraid of the manly men becoming a minority faced with an unholy alliance of women, gays and foreigners. His examination of the impossible quest for equality thus has the underlying mission to show that those uppity women should accept the wonderful world of inequality of yesterday: "In all historically known societies, women have always been subordinated to men." To sustain his reactionary views, he parades all conservative political thinkers.

Unfortunately, he fails to presents any economic ideas such as the tragedy of the commons or the free-rider problem. The principle of equality means to treat equal things equally and unequal things unequally. To sustain any equality, a border between these two zones is necessary. Many conservatives have well understood this point and the US political and legal system is hard at work dismantling the protective laws that preserve a sliver of equality in the United States. A true history of equality would be an interesting book to read. Unfortunately, Martin van Creveld is no longer the man to write it. show less

This is definitely the most interesting book about WW2 I’ve read. The setting is brilliant, and horrible, all at once. Hitler’s own thoughts on his life, as imagined by the author.

It is tough to read the (fictional) self-justification of a person responsible for so much death and misery, and that is also what is remarkable about this book. The author makes Hitler’s mind intelligible.

Rather than picturing him as the monstrous, unknowable evil, a kind of inhuman boogeyman, as Hitler is show more often portrayed, the author has managed to create a believable inner narrative, that explains the behaviour of the world’s most infamous dictator.

And that is an important perspective. While Hitler may or may not have gone insane at the end, most of the vile evils carried out by him and his party were not acts of madness, but rather calculated, well-planned actions.

War and genocide were not invented by the nazis, they were just frightfully efficient at it. It has happened many times before, and if we do not learn from history, understand what drives people to such extremes, it will happen again and again. A good place to start would be this book. Highly recommended. show less