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jack s. levy is the Board of Governors Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University and former president of the International Studies Association (20078). william r. thompson is Distinguished Professor and the Donald A. Rogers Professor of Political Science at Indiana University and former president of the International Studies Association (20056). The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London 2011 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2011. Printed in the United States of America 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 1 2 3 4 5 isbn-13: 978-0-226-47628-5 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-47629-2 (paper) isbn-10: 0-226-47628-6 (cloth) isbn-10: 0-226-47629-4 (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Levy, Jack S., 1948 The arc of war : origins, escalation, and transformation / Jack S. Levy and William R. Thompson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn -13: 978-0-226-47628-5 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn -10: 0-226-47628-6 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn -13: 978-0-226-47629-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn -10: 0-226-47629-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. War and civilization. 2. WarHistory. 3. WarSociological aspects. 4. Social evolution. I. Thompson, William R. II. Title. cb481.l48 2011 909dc23 2011020001 a The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992.
to kim, partner in friendship, love, and lifejsl and to karen, despite all the celery crunching and the tachophobia on the slopeswrt
Contents
List of Tables and Figures ix Acknowledgments xiii chapter 1 . The Evolution of War 1 chapter 2 . The Origins of War 19 chapter 3 . Evolutionary and Coevolutionary Processes 54 chapter 4 . The First Two Agrarian Warfare Accelerations 87 chapter 5 . The Third Evolutionary Acceleration 126 chapter 6 . The Coevolution of the Western Military Trajectory 155 chapter 7 . Nonwestern Military Trajectories 186 chapter 8 . The Coevolution of War, Past and Future 207 Notes 219 References 243 Index 273
Table 2.6 Stages of early political organization / 40 Table 2.7 The size of the warrior aristocracy and the frequency of warfare / 41 Table 2.8 Otterbeins evolutionary trajectories for pristine states, stratification, and conflict / 42 Table 2.9 Otterbeins evolutionary trajectories for pristine states, military organization, and war / 43 Table 2.10 Haass overview of North American conflict propensities / 45 Table 2.11 Political centralization and economic subsistence / 48 Table 2.12 Subsistence, political centralization, war frequency, and rationale for war / 48 Table 2.13 Subsistence, political centralization, and military organization / 49 Table 2.14 Subsistence, political centralization, and weaponry / 50 Table 3.1 Six coevolutionary factors and their definitions / 55 Table 3.2 Warfare and political development from Cioffi-Revillas perspective / 64 Table 3.3 Cioffi-Revillas model recast / 65 Table 3.4 Main types of political economy / 66 Table 3.5 Political-economic influences / 66 Table 3.6 Stratification in 2005 military expenditures / 68 Table 3.7 Political-economic evolution and war / 70 Table 3.8 The western Eurasian military-war trajectory / 81 Table 3.9 Interstate warfare duration for less developed states, 19452007 / 84 Table 3.10 Three accelerations in coevolution / 85 Table 4.1 Energy (in footpounds) necessary to penetrate ancient armor / 91 Table 4.2 Empire and army size / 91 Table 4.3 Evolution and coevolution in ancient Egypt / 94 Table 4.4 Evolution and coevolution in ancient Greece and Rome / 106 Table 4.5 Evolution and coevolution in ancient China / 114
xi
Table 4.6 Evolution and coevolution in ancient Mesoamerica / 118 Table 5.1 The timing of hypothesized military revolutions / 129 Table 6.1 Lynns abbreviated matrix of core military style / 161 Table 6.2 The coevolution of organizations, technology, warfare, and political-economic context / 170 Table 6.3 The western military trajectory / 178 Table 6.4 Nonwestern influences on the western military trajectory / 180 Table 7.1 A comparison of external environments then and now / 189 Table 7.2 Implications of differences in external environments / 191 Table 7.3 Kaldors evolution of old wars / 195 Table 7.4 Kaldors main distinctions between old and new wars / 197 Table 7.5 Kalyvass types of warfare in civil war / 202 Table 7.6 Sources of different types of warfare / 202
Acknowledgments
e want to thank numerous scholars who provided helpful comments on various sections of the manuscript: Jeremy Black, Christopher Chase-Dunn, Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, Brian Ferguson, Edward Ingram, Tim Knievel, John Lynn, Charles Tilly, Joyce Marcus, Jean-Bertrand Ribat, Randy Schweller, and two anonymous reviewers for the University of Chicago Press. We also received useful feedback from audiences at seminars or lectures in which we presented material from the book. These include talks at the political science departments at George Washington University, the University of Washington, the University of Illinois, and Indiana University; the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California; the Mershon Center at Ohio State University; the The Transformation of Warfare: Symmetry and Asymmetry of Political Violence conference, Hamburg Institute for Social Research, Hamburg, Germany; and at the 2005 annual meetings of the International Studies Association (ISA)Midwest and the International Studies Association Northeast (Thompsons keynote addresses as ISA president). Sections of chapter 5 were published in Jack S. Levy, Thomas C. Walker, and Martin S. Edwards, Continuity and Change in the Evolution of War, in War in a Changing World, edited by Zeev Maoz and Azar Gat, 1548 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). An earlier form of chapter 6 was in published in William R. Thompson, A Test of a Theory of Co-evolution in War: Lengthening the Western Eurasian Military Trajectory, International History Review 28 (2006): 473503. We would also like to thank the team at the University of Chicago Press. David Pervin, our editor, provided substantive feedback, guidance, and encouragement, for which we are grateful. Davids colleagues at the Press also played an important role in moving the process along in a relatively quick but seamless fashion. Dawn Hall did a fine job of copyediting.
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and lethal. Military organizations have expanded. Political organizations have expanded to manage larger and more deadly military forces and more intensified threat environments. The expansion of warfare, however, has not been inexorable. An important constraint is the escalating cost of warfare, which has especially impacted the probability of warfare between industrial states. . The pace of change/transformations in warfare and related processes has signif icantly accelerated three timesfirst in the late fourth to early third millennium BCE, then in the last half of the first millennium BCE, and again in the second half of the second millennium CE. 5. The attempt to centralize regional political-military power is one of the major drivers of periods of acceleration and transformation, especially in the third acceleration, which was concentrated in the western trajectory.
6. Much of the world did not experience the third acceleration directly (other than as targets), and it remains more agrarian than industrialized. As a consequence, states outside of the western trajectory tend to be weaker, vulnerable to internal warfare, and prone to fight fewer and shorter interstate wars.
Figure 1.1 provides a succinct summary of our argument. In brief, war originated and coevolves with other activities. The pace of evolution and coevolution has been characterized by three periods of acceleration. The contemporary outcomes of these changes and transformations are twofold: (1) strong, industrialized states for which warfare with other strong industrialized states has become very expensive and, therefore, less probable; and (2) weaker, agrarian states that have not experienced the third acceleration in the same way, and that are more likely to engage in internal warfare than in external warfare. Our primary aim in this book is to elaborate and test these arguments about the arc of war. We must begin, however, by answering some preliminary questions. Does war in fact change over time? Are there major turning points? With what factors does war evolve and coevolve? What are the causal links among these processes?
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the definition of war.4 Our definition is behavioral. If two or more political units engage in the sustained and coordinated use of violence, it is a war regardless of the motivations for the violence. Although we believe that most wars are driven by political motivations, we prefer to leave that as an empirical question rather than to assert it by definition. One issue is that the use of military force can be motivated by interests of actors other than the political organization itself. Political leaders may resort to military force for the primary purpose of bolstering their domestic political support, and bureaucratic organizations may advocate war to serve their own parochial needs. We do not want to imply that coercive force always aims to advance the interests of the organization in whose name force is used. A second issue is that we can imagine instances in which military force is used not to influence others to act in a way to advance ones own interests, or to advance those ends by taking or destroying resources, but instead out of nihilistic or at least nonpolitical motivations. Although we think that most terrorist acts are politically driven, we concede that some might be more nihilistic. Note, however, that even if individual terrorists act out of nihilism, they almost always work for terrorist organizations for whom terror is a calculated political act. One exception might be the release of the nerve gas sarin in the Tokyo subways in 1995 by Aum Shinrikyo, a religious sect that was fixated on the impending end of the earth.5 Finally, we concede that some uses of military force may be driven by cultural rituals rather than by means-ends calculations to advance interests. This is one of the things that John Keegan (1993, 3) had in mind when he began chapter 1 of his A History of Warfare with the provocative anti-Clausewitzian statement that war is not the continuation of policy by other means. If war is defined as sustained, coordinated violence between political organizations, there is little evidence of war 50,000 years ago. Population sizes were small, political organization was restricted to the hierarchies of small bands, and their frequency of contact was limited. Weaponry was certainly available but its lethal effects were limited. Resource scarcity varied by location and by episodes of climate deterioration. One caveat worth noting, however, is that the movement of the Homo sapiens species into areas earlier controlled by Neanderthals could well have generated incentives for something resembling interspecies warfare about 35,000 years ago (Otterbein 2004). We know only that the Neanderthals ultimately were extinguished and that our own hominid species triumphed.
It is certainly conceivable that this outcome involved bloodshed. Nicholas Wade (2006, 9094) speculates that Homo sapiens slow penetration of Europe, requiring some 15,000 years of border skirmishes, was due in part to stubborn resistance on the part of Neanderthal groups unable to retreat without encroaching on neighboring Neanderthal territory. Three assumptions underlie this speculation: (1) ancient huntergatherers tended to move into new territory to find new food sources and (2) to moderate overpopulation in their former habitats, and (3) the original occupants were fairly belligerent about defending home territories, given some fixed carrying capacity. None of these assumptions is implausible, and each is supported by much of what we do know about the interaction of hunting-gathering groups. Note, however, that Wade emphasizes NeanderthalHomo sapiens border skirmishes rather than war. Just how sustained specific clashes might have been and whether they reflected the coordinated behavior of organized groups so as to satisfy our definition of war is anybodys guess. It is also possible that the two species had no or little contact and that Neanderthals disappeared because they could not cope with climate change and/or a shift in the nature of their customary food supply.6 Whatever the NeanderthalHomo sapiens relationship, there is reason to believe that organized violence began to take place on a limited and sporadic basis long ago. The probability of some rival hunting groups occasionally coming to blows was moderately high, though evidence is scarce. Evidence of warfare begins to accumulate, if only slowly at first, for the last ten thousand years (Keegan 1993, chap. 2; Haas 1999; CioffiRevilla 2000; Gat 2006, chap. 2). Mass burials of bodies with projectile wounds, fortifications, burned walls, and pictures of armed combat and soldiers begin to appear. For the last five thousand years, evidence becomes more plentiful and reliable. Full-fledged armies with armor-wearing soldiers in infantry formations begin to appear (Ferrill 1997). Gradually these armies became larger in size and more lethal in weaponry. States and empires emerged, grew in size, and built larger armies, and their wars became more lethal and began to claim more resources and lives. As we indicate in table 1.1, which focuses on major battles, estimated deaths per war more than doubled between the fifth century BCE and the fourteenth century CE, more than doubled again between the fourteenth and early nineteenth centuries CE, and then increased by as much as a factor of ten between the early nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To
table 1.1 Selected major battle attributes Number of Armed Forces Involved Possibly 10,000 Egyptians
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Historical Significance sometimes referred to as the first recorded battle of history (even if it undoubtedly was not the first battle)* Greek defeat of the first Persian invasion of Greece Major defeat of heavy cavalry by much smaller force of infantry armed with the long bow Final defeat of Napoleon
Casualties Unknown