Thucydides on the Nature and Character of War

So as most of you know I am currently a visiting faculty member at the School of Strategic Landpower at the US Army War College.  Teaching here is different than teaching… just about anywhere else.  Setting aside the relative uniqueness of the student body (mostly colonels and lieutenant colonels from the US, as well as a variety of other countries), the structure of instruction differs quite a bit from a conventional civilian university.  The student body is divided into “seminars,” each of which contains sixteen students.  Four or five faculty members are attached to each seminar, and (generally speaking) each take the lead of one in a sequence of courses in the fall semester.  From the second week of the academic year through the fifth, students only take one class (Theories of War and Strategy, or TWS), but they spend four days per week, three hours per day in the classroom, plus 2-3 standalone lectures each week.  The entire school then moves along to the next course.  It’s worth noting that the USAWC is experimenting with changing this structure next year; stay tuned.

In this configuration I initially taught Theories of War and Strategy, which begins with Thucydides and takes us all the way to contemporary international relations theory on the causes and consequences of war.  The assignments are relatively modest, but the reading is heavy. Along the way we touch upon Sun Tzu, Jomini, and of course Old Dead Carl. In terms of workload this is a lot, in comparison with my normal load (3-2, separate preps, graduate students), but it’s heavily front-loaded, involves groovy extra-curriculars (including a staff ride to Gettysburg), and leaves a lot of white space on the calendar into which I can fit travel, research, and attending other classes as a faux-student.

Regarding this last, because I’m only here for a year, I feel very much as if I have feet in two camps; student, and teacher. While I’ve taught most of the material in TWS before (in many ways it mirrors a couple of classes that I teach at the Patterson School),  the students engage with the material in different ways.  Moreover, the other courses in the sequence are much more afield than TWS (with the exception of National Security Policy and Strategy, where I’ll be doing some instructional work), meaning that I can actually take the classes as a student and potentially learn something.

The Directive (a syllabus here is called a Directive, but it’s really much more all-encompassing than any syllabus I’ve ever seen) calls for a paper of some 1250 words, conceived as a blog post appropriate for an online publication, on the question of how one or more of the theorists we have read think about the distinction between the nature and character of war.  The topic below emerged as part of a conversation with a student, but also came out of some long-running questions that I’ve had about Thucydides’ approach to history.  It is hardly new to note that for an ancient, Thucydides feels profoundly modern in his approach.  One reason for this, I think, is that Thucydides has what amounts to a teleological view of history, which he makes clear in the first half of the first book, called the “archaeology.” This, I think, has implications for deriving a theory of the distinction between the nature and character of war.

Accordingly, I’ve decided to complete this assignment on my own, and given that I actually have a blog getting the piece published shouldn’t be any trouble at all.

Thucydides on the Nature and Character of War

We take as axiomatic that Carl von Clausewitz offers us a dichotomy; some things constitute the unchanging nature of war, while other things constitute the transient character of war. Submission to policy, for example, is part of the nature of war, while certain objectives or formations represent war’s character. While we can debate how strongly Clausewitz wished to make this distinction, for now it is enough to accept that the Army War College understands On War in these terms. With respect to what we call the character of war, Clausewitz grants that both social and technological factors affect how people fight wars in any particular era.  Along with Jomini and others, Clausewitz distinguishes the kinds of wars fought in the 17th and 18th century from the Napoleonic Wars, even though the technological foundations of the armies remain largely unchanged. But familiar with military history, Clausewitz also understood that technological shifts changed, in consequential ways, how people fought wars. Thus, the “character” of war rests on both social and technological foundations.

But what of Thucydides, who did not have the same survey of history available to Clausewitz? Can we plausibly say that Thucydides appreciated a distinction between the nature of war and the character of war on the terms that we have imposed upon Clausewitz? In this essay I offer an unqualified “yes” to this question. Thucydides held strong views on the “nature” of war and international conflict, and on his role in uncovering this nature.  But Thucydides also appreciated, like Clausewitz, that the character of war depended upon technological, economic, and social foundations.  These latter, in particular, provided the fundamental structure of his inquiry into the causes and conduct of the Peloponnesian War.  On his own account, the Peloponnesian War is worth of study because its unusual character reveals timeless truths about the nature of conflict.

Whatever we can say about Thucydides’ approach to the character of war, he seemed to believe that he was making observations about conflict that would have a timeless quality.   The causes of war that Thucydides offers, laden with assertions about laws of human nature, permeate Athenian and Spartan planning at the strategic level.  Moreover, Thucydides  regularly puts claims about law-like regularities in human behavior into the speeches of statesman, often but not always Athenians.  Thucydides law-like statements cover not only the nature of competition between states, but also the impact of war upon domestic polities.  Such claims about the nature of conflict and competition necessarily imply claims about the nature of war, which will reflect the political and strategic expectations of its participants.

But what of the transient aspects of war? Thucydides is rare and notable among the ancients for his discussion of what amounted to the “ancient” history of Hellas.  He recognized that social, economic, and technological realities in the distant past differed from those that held in the recent past.  While the idea of such changes seems natural to a modern reader familiar with histories of how societies have changed over time, Thucydides had far less in source material to work with in developing an understanding of what life looked like in the past.  Nevertheless, in his “archaeology,” the first third of the first book of the History, he offers an account of the development of city-state life in Hellas from a relatively low level of socio-economic development to the cosmopolitan political order of his own day.  While Thucydides does not offer a careful account of how warfare changed across this period, he does detail the relationship between socioeconomic conditions and the security environment.

For example, Thucydides discusses the development of the trireme, the primary warship of the Hellenic period.  He discusses how the steadily increasing level of economic development affected how cities changed the way in which they fortified themselves against attack.  Moreover, he argues that the extant level of economic development within Hellas made possible the level of mobilization that characterized the Peloponnesian War, and that distinguished that conflict from everything which had taken place in the past.  Thucydides is certainly familiar with the characterization of war in Homer, and as a practitioner would have appreciated that war as conducted by infantry and its accompanying arms during the Peloponnesian War differed considerably from Homer’s description.  He is less clear on whether to attribute this to poetic license on the part of Homer, or to differences in the social and technological foundations of Homeric armies.  But we know that Thucydides is aware that technological change happens, that this change has an impact on war, and that such changes have happened in the period intervening between the Trojan War and his present day.

Indeed, Thucydides’ (implicit) appreciation of the distinction between the nature and character of war is fundamental to his project. Thucydides description of the Peloponnesian War as a single conflict was certainly controversial among his contemporaries; if it were not, Thucydides would not have spent time defending his decision to treat the war as a unitary whole.  Given that Athens and Sparta had fought as recently as 446, and competed with one another in military terms during the course of the 30 years peace, and began to fight again in 395 (around the time of Thucydides death, in fairness), treating 433-404 as single analytical unit clearly invites controversy, unless Thucydides can find a way to distinguish what came before and what came after from the events of the war itself.

Thucydides accomplishes this by arguing that the Peloponnesian War (perhaps better termed the Wars of Athenian Imperial Dissolution) was different in political character from proceeding conflicts.  In describing the ideological conflict in Cocyra, he suggests not only that the intensity and brutality of conflict had spread across the Hellenic system, but also that this intensity was unique to the Peloponnesian War.  This necessarily evokes Clausewitz’ interpretation of the French Revolution, which had an immense impact on how he described “absolute” war in his first chapter.  We can also connect Thucydides’ account of the destruction of Melos to this intensity; in the conventional characterization of the Dialogue, the demands of the war have caused Athens to abandon all pretense to morality and moderation in its foreign relations, even against a city as relatively blameless as Melos.  Indeed, Thucydides seems to want us to believe that the war has had a uniquely pernicious impact on Athenian democracy, and thus has taken on a different character than other conflicts.

In short, Thucydides has strong, if not fully developed, views on the distinction between the nature and character of war.  He explicitly defends a model of inquiry fully compatible with the idea that war (and more broadly international competition) has an unchanging, permanent nature.  He acknowledges, if often implicitly, that economic and technological foundations have an impact on the fighting of war, both at the strategic and tactical levels.  Most importantly, however, Thucydides argues that social factors strongly characterize the conduct of war.  Indeed, this idea permeates his unit of analysis; the Peloponnesian War was uniquely important not merely because of its extent, but also because of the intensity of its participants.