Wednesday, March 3, 2010

What Will Tomorrow's Wars Bring?

Tomorrow’s Wars: Enormous, Massively Destructive Engagements May Again Be On The Horizon. -- Victor Davis Hanson, City Journal

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.”

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My Comment: Victor Davis Hanson's gift is taking examples from history and comparing it to today's events. He does not disappoint in this commentary.

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