How to define and treat war phenomenologically has been one of the most vexing problems occupying the minds of scholars and statesmen throughout history. The very ubiquity of military conflict as an aspect of human interaction between societies has spawned questions as wide-ranging as the causes of war, how to prevent war, and significantly what exactly we understand as war. All of these can be combined into the overarching meta-historical question of whether and how, war is subject to change, and if so, what components are specifically subject to change?
In order for us to adequately provide an answer to the question “Has war changed?” it is imperative for us to initially elucidate what exactly is meant by the concept of “war” itself, and the conjoined concept of “change.” If we define change as consisting in an alteration of the fundamental nature of the subject in question, the explanandum would be the very nature of war itself. Conversely, if the concept centers of the instrumentalism of war or the ways in which war is applied as a practical policy tool, then the explanandum would be the character that war assumes practically, in the political sphere as an instrument to be applied for the furtherance of a political end. From these definitional questions we proceed naturally into the question of ways in which war has changed.
To Change or not to Change – Nature versus Character
How we approach change as an aspect of war will depend on how we conceptualize the concept of change relative to the phenomenon of war, which naturally produces the corollary question of what exactly war is. For answers to both of these the preeminent intellectual authority to have been consulted since the French Revolutionary Wars is Claus von Clausewitz and his theoretical framework presented in On War. As to the latter conundrum, Clausewitz provides a succinct definition, that “War is nothing but a duel on a larger scale. Countless duels go to make up war, but a picture of it as a whole can be formed by imagining a pair of wrestlers. […] War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will” (Clausewitz, 1976, p. 75). From this analogy it is clear that located at the center of war is the dialectical confrontation between two opposing autonomous actors, utilizing coercion to allow for the attainment of each actor’s end.
Turning to the former question, while Clausewitz does not provide a comprehensive framework for a causal sequence with regard to change, he establishes a fundamental difference between contingent manifestation and an enduring core:
War is more than a true chameleon that slightly adapts its characteristics to the given case. As a total phenomenon its dominant tendencies always make war a paradoxical trinity – composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and of its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone.
Clausewitz, 1976, p. 89
Clausewitz further elaborates that a highly variable interrelationship exists between these tendencies, not to be subjected to a fixed relationship, thus allowing for substantial variation in the relative weight ascribed to each across cases (Clausewitz, 1976).
This dichotomy between war’s nature and character remains one of the most contentious issues of interpretation for scholars on Clausewitz, and the phenomenology of war. In pointing a critique at the New America Foundation’s Future of War program’s equation of the changing nature of war with technological advances, Mewett contends that the “nature of war describes its unchanging essence: that is, those things that differentiate war (as a type of phenomenon) from other things,” while the “character of war describes the changing way that war as a phenomenon manifests […] by what Clausewitz called the “spirit of the age”” (Mewett, 2014). In other words, while the sociopolitical variables defining the “spirit” of the given historical context, (such as the level of technological prowess, normative legal perspectives, culture, and organizational structure of societies) may affect the character of how the act of war is conducted, what military forces are used, and etc., the nature of war is constituted by its continuities transcending its temporal boundaries – in Clausewitzian theory the trinitarian nature of war. Implicit is the assumption that an alteration in any of these variables will cause a parallel transformation in the character of war, such as was the case with the military application of gunpowder, the transition from small dynastic armies to the revolutionary levée en masse, and the so-called “Revolution in Military Affairs” (Mewett, 2014).
As regards discussions of the changing nature of war, Villacres and Bassford argue that the trinitarian concept has been subject to interpretive controversy, leading to misrepresentations of the possibility for a temporally continuous essence of war. At the heart of it is Clausewitz’s identification of the three tendencies respectively with “the people; the second the commander of his army; the third the government” (Clausewitz, 1976). According to Villacres and Bassford, a variety of scholars have conflated the trinitarian tendencies with the societal components, that is, people, military, and government. This consequently leads to a theoretical discrepancy between renderings of war’s nature as a function of these specific institutions, as opposed to Clausewitz’s focus on transcendent structural forces animating the human field of conflict (Villacres and Bassford, 1995).
The analytical implication of this non-trinitarian view is that Clausewitz’s conceptualization of the enduring essence of war is considered obsolete as a consequence of the reconfiguration of its societal components, namely the minimization of the state in processes of war, and the erosion of the distinction between the military and the people as the primary institutions waging war. This view is most explicitly articulated by Martin Van Creveld in his theory of non-trinitarian war. To dispel this conceptual confusion, Villacres and Bassford argue that while Clausewitz might have mentioned these three specific sociopolitical categories, his use of the word “mainly”, signifies that the empirical manifestations within which the trinity is embedded is subject to variation (Villacres and Bassford, 1995). As they conclude:
In any conflict organized enough to be called war, there will be some kind of leadership organization, some group of fighters, some kind of population base – if not people, army, and government per se, then people, army, and government analogs.
Villacres and Bassford, 1995, p. 15
Thus, while the historically contingent fabric of society and its organizational mode might differ substantially from one age to another, it is the trinitarian tendencies embedded within the given units expressing the animus of violence and hatred; doing the actually fighting; and channeling of the aforementioned animus in the direction of the attainment of a specific end, which constitutes the enduring nature of war, as echoed by Azar Gat: “The “primordial violence, hatred, and enmity” of the nature of war are directed by the “commander’s creative spirit” through the “play of chance and probability” to achieve the political aim. This is the “remarkable trinity” […] which makes war “more than a true chameleon that slightly adapts its characteristics to a given case” (Gat quoted in Villacres and Bassford, 1995, p. 12).
As is evident from the previous paragraphs, a pervasive aspect of scholarly treatments of Clausewitz’s conception of war’s essence is its instrumentality embedded within the political dimension. Colin Gray touches upon the insight that the subordination of military strategy, and thus war, as an instrument for the effectuation of political objectives is the preeminent aspect characterizing the position of war within the broader sociopolitical context, clarifying that new “environments and new weapons will add to the pile of matters needing attention by strategists, but the nature of war and strategy, and the relationship between policy and military instrument, endure” (Gray, 1999, p. 93). Gray’s statement alludes to Clausewitz’s observation that an activity characterized by the application of force between two organized entities, that is, war, is inseparable from the overall domain of politics within which it breathes. Hence, “war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means. […] The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose” (Clausewitz, 1976, p. 87). From this perspective, it is implied that in the same way that the proper meaning of a historical event can never be understood in separation from its broader context, so war can never exist as a set of military actions divorced from the political process giving birth to these.
Bassford substantiates this argument as well, while simultaneously incorporating explanations of the causation of changes to the character of war as an aspect of war as a political phenomenon:
Clausewitz, on the other hand, sees war as simply what happens when the process of politics, by which power is distributed in any society, assumes an emotional intensity that leads to organized violence. […]Regardless of the motivation, the contest is for power and is therefore political. War is thus liable to eternal reinvention.
Bassford, 1994
Bassford’s exposition goes to the heart of the inherently complex nature of war as a human social phenomenon, deeply embedded within the fabric of the organization of political life, as opposed to a merely mechanistic rendering of war as a rational instrument isolated from broader societal influences. What we see is war as simply one out of a multitude of phenomena emerging from the nature of politics, war being distinguished by the inclusion of force to the political process. This conceptualization is furthermore echoed by Robert Dahl’s seminal definition of politics as equating with the exercise of power, as “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do” (Dahl, 1957, pp. 202-203). Insofar as the concept of power is central to politics, war is thus simply the political exercise of power with the added element of force.
As regards the changing character of war, the second point in Clausewitz’s dichotomy, there seems to exist a rough consensus that transformations in the underlying sociopolitical structure of human relations and modes of societal organizations cause parallel changes to the way in which war manifests in reality. Echoing Clausewitz’s injunction that war’s manifestations “result mainly from the transformation of society and new social conditions” (Clausewitz, 1976, p. 515), Moran states that variation in war is essentially governed by contingent circumstances particular to historical and social context, such as “cultural or institutional preferences, economic resources, geographic facts, or ethnic animosities, many of which are poorly understood even by the participants.” (Moran, 2002, p. 19) In our contemporary age, however, a degree of uniformity has been imposed across the military establishment of the international system as a result of the extension of Western intellectual models, variously through European colonialism, and from conscious emulation. (Baylis et al., 2002)
While Clausewitz’s theoretical scripture has dominated the limelight of strategic studies, his contemporary, Antoine-Henri Jomini, conceptualized warfare in ways reminiscent, and yet distinct, from Clausewitz. His signal achievement was to infuse the enlightenment spirit of universalizable principles, which nevertheless allowed for broad adaptability depending on the circumstances. Jomini thus founded warfare theoretically on a more positivist-rationalist basis, still exerting significant influence within the strategic studies community. (Baylis, 2002)
Wither War?
Having outlined the theoretical basis for thinking about changes to the phenomenon of war, and the causal theories describing its change within the international system, we can now examine the ways in which war is changing.
While the trinitarian argument of Clausewitz clearly posits that the nature of war seems constant, alternative theories of war have been proposed in recent scholarship. Mary Kaldor’s New Wars-thesis argues that war as a phenomenon of international politic has been fundamentally transformed from Old Wars. Central to this is the assumption that the Weberian conception of the state’s monopoly on the use of force has been eroded in parallel with the eroding autonomy of the state due to processes of globalization. Kaldor argues that this can be ascribed to forces pressuring from above (increased destructiveness of weapons, transnationalization of military force, and norms against unilateral aggression), and from below (the privatization of violence). On the latter point, Kaldor concludes that “new wars occur in situations in which state revenues decline because of the decline of the economy as well as the spread of criminality, corruption and inefficiency, violence is increasingly privatized both as a result of growing organized crime and the emergence of paramilitary groups, and political legitimacy is disappearing” (Kaldor, 2012, p. 6). She further goes on to state that “there has been a revolution in military affairs, but it is a revolution in the social relations of warfare” (Kaldor, 2012, p. 4). While the thesis is intended as a rebuke against the dominance of the Clausewitzian paradigm of conventional war, it nevertheless holds a tremendous degree of reminiscence with the previously noted point, as elaborated by Clausewitz, that changes to the character, or manifestation, of war derive from sociopolitical transformations.
Further, as Kaldor elucidates, the intention with her case studies on the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan is to furnish an exposition of how differing categories of war coexist within the same conflict-zone. From a Clausewitzian angle, this analytical distinction seems to be a repackaging of the conceptual distinction between the nature of war and the character of war. Put slightly differently, Kaldor’s analysis pertains more to variations in the mode of warfare. Hence, Kaldor’s argument might unwittingly be compatible with the Clausewitzian analogy of war as a chameleon (Hoffman, 2018, p. 32; Kaldor, 2012).
An argument not too dissimilar to Kaldor’s is articulated in Holsti’s thesis of wars of the third kind. Holsti posits three criteria for distinguishing between forms of war, the same three being the basis for determining whether war has undergone a transformation, arguing that when “two or more of these criteria change fundamentally, we can say that there has been a transformation of war” (purposes; the role of civilians; and the institutions of war) (Holsti, 2010, p. 27). Holsti seeks to substantiate his hypothesis that war has fundamentally changed by arguing that the role of war as an instrument of policy is abolished in wars of the third kind, as the purposes for which they are fought revolve around questions of statehood and identity, making the people the primary target in efforts to create states, in the process dissolving the distinction between soldier and civilian. This attests to the view that internal conflict has come to predominate the landscape of war to the detriment of trinitarian wars. As he writes the “clear distinction between the state, the armed forces, and the society that is the hallmark of institutionalized war dissolves” in peoples’ war (Holsti, 2010, p. 37).
These arguments, however, while providing an alternative prism through which war can be conceptualized from conventional state-on-state war, it nevertheless falls into the very trap identified earlier by Villacres and Bassford. While it might be true that the particular composition of forces engaged in war is different from the era of Clausewitz, they are nevertheless animated by the very same trinitarian tendencies. Nothing in Clausewitz’s conception of the nature of war impedes the primordial passion and hatred, and the play of chance and probability, from inhabiting the same physical entity, in Holsti and Kaldor’s examples, military forces comprised of citizens. Here again, we may take Clausewitz use of the word mainly, with reference to the three physical components, to constitute more than a semantic triviality, that is, the trinitarian tendencies are not subject to arbitrary fixation, but function in accordance with the idiosyncrasies of the particular manifestation of war. Concerning Holsti’s argument regarding the elimination of war as an instrument of policy, again invoking the insights of Bassford and Dahl, insofar as politics is characterized as contestation of the relative distribution of power within or beyond a polity, the end of establishing statehood, essentially the vehicle of politics, for a particular group, then taking up arms, as a military force of and for a people, this must be considered an eminently rational instrument for a political end.
An attempt to resuscitate the trinitarian concept in a reconfigured form for the contemporary battlefield is provided by Krieg and Rickli, in their theory of neotrinitarian warfare, thus focusing on the changing character/manifestation of war, as opposed to its essential nature. At the heart of this theory is the type of warfare known as surrogate warfare, by which an actor (usually, but not limited to, state-actors) externalizes the burden of conducting warfare to a variety of surrogates, whether proxies, technological platforms, or the militaries of client states. However, in light of globalization, they identify a reconfiguration of the security assemblages traditionally constituting the triptych of society, military, and government, in that these evolve into transnational structures, not necessarily bounded territorially (Krieg and Rickli, 2019). Recognizing that while the nature of war has not changed, warfare has:
It is the reconstitution of sociopolitical complexes amid the era of globalization, exponential technological progress, and transnationalization that appears to redefine how communities interact with their political authority and ultimately how community and political authority approach organized violence.
Krieg and Rickli, 2019, p. 7
While contestation as to whether the essential nature of war as a political phenomenon has changed or not is clearly evident from the divergent perspectives presented above, that certain observable characteristics of war as a manifest form of sociopolitical practice have changed seems to be equally clear from historical comparisons. This assumption begs the simple question, how, and further, do these changes have implications for how we understand and analyze war ontologically?
One of the most vexing issues in such discussions is whether methods of coercion traditionally considered to lie beyond the standard definition of war, that is as containing an element of violence, can be reconceptualized as war. Jessica Wolfendale articulates a definition which seeks to capture unarmed conflict as a manifestation of war, based on three criteria: (1) Includes two or more organized groups; (2) these are engaged in intense hostility; (3) no party, including third parties, possess authority or ability to adjudicate the dispute, or otherwise exert control over the conflict (Wolfendale in Gross and Meisels, 2017, p. 16). If placed in relation to a Clausewitzian frame of mind, there is nothing a priori that would exclude the employment of unarmed means of coercion from what could be considered war, as is evident if we recall Clausewitz metaphor of the wrestlers and his admonition that “war is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will” (Clausewitz, 1976, p. 75). While most would intuitively associate force in this context with the use of physical means, it essentially comes down to our particular definition of what constitutes force. If taking our cue from the Cambridge Dictionary the term can be understood as “influence and energy” (Cambridge Dictionary), and is thus consonant with a broader understanding of politics.
In this vein, Wolfendale clarifies that in her framework “the concept of hostilities should incorporate ways of inflicting harm that do not involve the infliction of physical violence”, and therefore be understood as “the intentional infliction of substantial damage (which need not be limited to physical damage) to the lives and welfare of individuals […] and to the infrastructure, environment, and basic functioning of states and communities” (Wolfendale in Gross and Meisels, p. 22). This definition allows us to include modes of political contestation which, despite an absence of the direct application of kinetic military force, have as their primary political end the enforcement of desired goals vis-à-vis the adversary requiring coercive means.
A possible example of such forms of unarmed war gaining, increasingly in prominence in recent years, is so-called economic warfare. Joy Gordon chronicles how economic sanctions as a component of the economic warfare toolkit have been widely used as an instrument of statecraft in varying conceptions throughout history, and in a way that conforms to a more inclusive definition of war. During the Cold War, for example, the use of economic sanctions was prevalent among the superpowers as a means to attain particular political goals by way of significant economic disruption of the targeted adversary, with “individual countries acting on their own behalf, and in pursuit of their own policies” (Gordon in Gross and Meisels, 2017, pp. 49-50). By the 1980’s, economic sanctions had assumed a privileged position in U.S. statecraft as a cost-efficient way of effecting diplomatic and political results in the international arena without incurring the risks of a Vietnam-style military interventions. Such was the case with sanctions regime instituted against the apartheid-regime in South Africa, and Rhodesia (Gordon in Gross and Meisels, 2017). One might see economic warfare acquiring ever greater similarity to conventional state-on-state modes of conflict with the Trump administrations trade war against China, and the latter conversely applying reciprocal means of economic coercion in a cycle of increasing escalation (Rosenberg, Harrell, and Feng, 2020).
Another field of contestation which we might consider an arena of war is what Dorothy E. Denning calls information warfare (alternatively known as cyber warfare). Citing the definition formulated by John Alger, information operations are conducted “in order to achieve a significant advantage, objective, or victory over an adversary” (Denning, 1999, p. 10). The framework of the attainment of a particular end in a contest of wills is again present. Furthermore, as Nugent and Raisinghani argue, cyber warfare will become increasingly prevalent with rapid digitalization of all spheres of life, including infrastructure, communications, data-storage, etc. This might have substantial implications for escalation dynamics due to the nature of technological capabilities, as these are more easily obtained by second and third tier actors, providing an asymmetrical advantage against more developed, but more digitalized adversaries (Nugent and Raisinghani in Janczewski and Colarik, 2008).
The crucial implication of this more inclusive definition for theory is that it begs the question: do these changes to the character of war consequently change the nature of war? The problem can be illustrated by reference to differing perceptions between Western and Russian strategic culture as to when a state of war exists. While a relatively clear-cut understanding of exists within Western circles based on a legalistic distinction between war and peace as separate, mutually exclusive spheres, Jonsson contends that if Russian information activities are measured against “what Russian information theory suggests permissible in times of peace and in times of war”, a state of war already exists (Jonsson, 2019, p. 16).
This connects with a recent proliferation of new terminology to describe the novel state of conflict incorporating non-traditional spheres of activity into what constitutes war, such as hybrid war, gray zone conflict, new generation warfare, etc. Hybrid warfare, for instance, has traditionally been conceived as the blending of various categories of means, such as conventional military force and irregular forces, state and non-state actors (variously known as proxies, in furtherance of a political end (Murray and Mansoor, 2012). If combined with Krieg and Rickli’s theory of surrogate war, encompassing any substitute, whether non-state proxy, technological platform, or alternatively domain (such as cyber), the effect is that the conceptual boundary between war and peace effectively evaporates.
Thus, while war’s essential nature may not have changed, as the trinitarian tendencies can be argued to still exist, a more fruitful avenue of inquiry might be whether changing applications of coercive force reconfigure our perceptual lens of what is considered to be, as a matter of fact war. If our perception of what constitutes a state of war based on the nature of the application of particular means for political ends change, so as to effectively dissolve the division between war and peace, we might ask whether the predominant change to war might be our perceptual frame, so that reality is defined by a gradational spectrum of contestation with variations of conflict coexisting.
Such a perceptual frame would have implications for notions of the prevalence of war relative to peace. For instance, if war is understood as a gradational spectrum of varying typologies of contestation, the arguments of Mandelbaum as to the obsolescence of major power war (Mandelbaum, 1998) would be blunted by positing that a form of war, or contestation, exists between the U.S. and Russia by reference to the significant disruption leveled upon the American political system and infrastructure by information operations against election integrity and infrastructure, as well as the American sanctions regime instituted against the Russian economy since the 2014 annexation of Crimea (Jonsson, 2019; Gould-Davies, 2020).
Further, our categorization of war would have to be reevaluated. The Correlates of War dataset only includes the categories of interstate and intrastate war, however, as Andrew Mumford has argued, proxy war is quickly proliferating as a form of coercion utilized by the great powers (Mumford, 2017). Barkawi and Laffey equally argue that we need to escape the territorial trap, of conceiving war solely as an interstate phenomenon (Barkawi and Laffey, 1999).
Conclusion: Has war changed?
The question of whether war has changed essentially comes down to how we conceptualize the phenomenology of war. If discussing war’s nature – its enduring essence – a Clausewitzian perspective would stand on the negative, while if adopting the non-trinitarian perspective of the new war-thesis the answer would be positive.
Alternatively, if one considers war’s character – its contingent manifestations – most can agree that historical, technological, and socio-political factors have significantly reconfigured war as a social practice. What we should consider, is how our conceptualizations of what constitutes a state of war have changed. By other words, it can be argued that with the recent incorporation of different forms of political contestation into a more inclusive definition of war, the division between war and peace is essentially dissolved, and the purpose of analysis centers more on the various gradations and manifestations of multifaceted forms of political conflict as placed on a typological spectrum, from conventional armed confrontation, to non-kinetic forms of war, based more on the time-honored Clausewitzian concept of politics as central to war.
The implication of this is to nullify the assumption of war as an exceptional state of affairs from peacetime and recognize that all attempts at compellence can essentially be considered a form of war.
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Further Reading on E-International Relations
- The Metaphysical “On War”: Is Clausewitz Still Relevant in the 21st Century?
- Misreading Clausewitz: The Enduring Relevance of On War
- Is the Nature of War Changing? Time to Avoid a Supposedly Unavoidable Question
- Does War Ever Change? A Clausewitzian Critique of Hybrid Warfare
- Re-reading the Notion of Ontological Change in War: The Problem of Knowledge
- Cyber War Forthcoming: “It Is Not a Matter of If, It Is a Matter of When.”
