Tomorrow's Wars

One of my favorite historians, Victor Davis Hanson, penned a very interesting (and very long) piece about the cyclical nature of warfare.

Enormous, massively destructive engagements may again be on the horizon. 

Have we not seen, then, in our lifetime the end of the Western way of war?”

Two decades ago, I concluded The Western Way of War with that question. Since Western warfare had become so lethal and included the specter of nuclear escalation, I thought it doubtful that two Western states could any longer wage large head-to-head conventional battles. A decade earlier, John Keegan, in his classic The Face of Battle, had similarly suggested that it would be hard for modern European states to engage in infantry slugfests like the Battle of the Somme. “The suspicion grows,” Keegan argued of a new cohort of affluent and leisured European youth—rebellious in spirit and reluctant to give over the good life to mass conscription—“that battle has already abolished itself.”

 Click here to read the entire article.

--tps