Book Review: “The Future of War: A History” could be a bit more forward-looking

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 fore­think­ing 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 deci­sion­mak­ers 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.

In Part Three, Freed­man gets into the dif­fi­cul­ty of dis­tin­guish­ing where wars start and end when a U.S. mil­i­tary pilot can remote­ly kill some­one halfway across the world and go home to their spouse, and an extrem­ist group can use online net­works to inspire their neigh­bor for a mass casu­al­ty attack.

More­over, is Afghanistan a dif­fer­ent con­flict than Iraq? Is Syr­ia a con­tin­u­a­tion of events in north­ern Iraq or some­thing distinct?

Is it a civ­il war in Brazil when the gov­ern­ment has lost direct con­trol of large sec­tions of São Paulo to crim­i­nal orga­ni­za­tions and has to send in thou­sands of police offi­cers and mil­i­tary ser­vice­mem­bers to retake it?

What about in Mex­i­co, where vio­lence relat­ed to the flow of nar­cotics north and attempts to stop it have led to an esti­mat­ed 120,000 deaths?

Is what Rus­sia has done — assault­ing demo­c­ra­t­ic elec­tions through online pro­pa­gan­da and send­ing orga­nized “vol­un­teers” into neigh­bor­ing coun­tries like Ukraine — a new mod­el for war­fare or some­thing pecu­liar to that nation? These are inter­est­ing ques­tions, but Freed­man doesn’t def­i­nite­ly answer them, or attempt to.

He brings up Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Pow­ers as an exam­ple of a failed attempt to pre­dict the future because, in 1989, Kennedy expect­ed a weak­en­ing Sovi­et Union to last into the pro­ceed­ing decades and Japan to rise in the 1990s, but Kennedy at least both­ered to make pre­dic­tions, and his larg­er the­sis — that spend­ing resources on mil­i­tary efforts to expand or main­tain empire inex­orably weak­ens it — doesn’t look so bad right now.

Kennedy thought that the Sovi­et Union and Unit­ed States would decline rel­a­tive­ly while the then-Euro­pean Eco­nom­ic Com­mu­ni­ty and East Asian nations of Japan (and Chi­na) would rise because they didn’t have to spend as much mon­ey on their mil­i­taries. Pre­dic­tions like that have the poten­tial to be embar­rass­ing, but can also turn out to be insight­ful and prescient.

Freed­man doesn’t have this courage, and it’s a shame because he might have syn­the­sized the sec­ond sec­tion into some­thing worth­while and for­ward-look­ing had he been braver. His the­sis, such as I can tell, is that peo­ple are often wrong when they attempt to pre­dict the future. That’s true, but it’s also ter­ri­bly boring.

So if you’re a his­to­ry buff, you’ll prob­a­bly enjoy this book and learn some things, and have the notes to fol­low all sorts of rab­bit holes.

Whether or not you’re already inter­est­ed in such mate­r­i­al, though, you won’t walk away feel­ing you’ve gleaned any insights about the decades to come beyond what you already know: the future is blur­ry and always tough to foretell.