RALEIGH – There are a number of fascinating insights in Max Boot’s latest book, War Made New: Weapons, Warriors, and the Making of the Modern World. As a prolific fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an advisor to John McCain, Boot will no doubt draw a new round of attention in the coming months for a book that actually came out more than a year ago. As for me, a favorite passage of War Made New has to do with experts who make bad predictions.
Journey back to Summer 1866. Otto von Bismarck’s Prussian state was about to fight the second of three wars that would consolidate the position of the new German state. The first was a brief, one-sided border war with Denmark. But the second, a major conflict with the rival German-led state of Austria-Hungary, promised to be far more dangerous affair.
Prussia had, after all, not exactly bathed itself in military glory during most of the last major European war, the struggle against Napoleonic France. In Austria, Kaiser Wilhelm’s army faced an adversary with a more-experienced officer corps, nearly 40 percent more men in arms, and a far larger budget for arms and equipment. Austria’s population was about 80 percent larger than Prussia’s.
Virtually every outside observer who had closely examined the order of battle thought that Austria was destined to win any war with its grasping northern neighbor. Among them was the journalist and former Prussian soldier Friedrich Engels, who proclaimed confidently that “the odds are against the Prussians.” Perhaps he was right about the odds on paper – the co-author of The Communist Manifesto was bound to get something right at some point in his life – but the outcome was radically different from his prediction. On July 3, 1866, at Koniggratz, just over the Austrian border from Prussian Silesia, the Austrians and their Saxon allies suffered a catastrophic defeat. More than 20 percent of their soldiers were killed, wounded, captured, or missing – 44,200 men in all. The Prussians lost only 9,200 men, or 4 percent. The war was soon over.
Although many factors contributed to the Prussian victory, including luck, Boot convincingly argues that the most important was the invention of the German state’s new General Staff. “War had become too complex to be managed by one person,” Boot writes, “even a great captain like Napoleon, Frederick the Great, or Helmuth von Moltke” (the creator of the Kaiser’s victorious war machine). Quickly, other European states adopted the Prussian model of complex and meticulous planning by an expert corps of senior, highly educated officers.
Of course, the Prussian model, so important to the operation of modern military arms, also bled over into the civilian realm. Beginning in the late 19th century and continuing until today (unfortunately), Western and non-Western elites alike visited Germany and came away convinced that regimentation and central planning would make any human endeavor better, be it education, job training, or economic production. This proposition proved to be disastrously wrong. And even in the case of military affairs, the lesson was learned too well – fixated on the success of the General Staff, outsiders misunderstood the organizational design of the German Army, which actually pushed authority and autonomy far down the chain of command. By World War II, the soldiers of Nazi Germany, fighting for one of the most tyrannical regimes in human history, enjoyed a freedom of action at the company, platoon, and squad level that surpassed those of the liberal democracies with whom they were at war.
Boot’s War Made New is not a tendentious history or a one-sided brief for technological supremacy. One of his major themes is that having the latest military weaponry is no guarantee of success. The Indian states with which Britain warred for influence in the subcontinent often had more and superior equipment, but lacked the organization, leadership, and cultural flexibility to make effective use of it. Another insight is that, contrary to what some have said, superior numbers are not a reliable indicator of military outcomes. In many of Boot’s examples of the effects of military innovation – such as the Swedish victories in the Thirty Year’s War, Britain’s defeat of the Spanish Armada, and Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 – the outnumbered power won decisive victories on the battlefield.
“In a statistical analysis of twentieth-century wars,” Boot writes, “the side with the larger GNP, population, armed forces, and defense expenditures won only a little more than half the time, making these factors about as useful in predicting military outcomes as flipping a coin.”
Just one of the gems in this jeweled crown of a book. Students of military and economic history probably won’t agree with everything they read in War Made New, but they’ll come away with a renewed appreciation for the fragility of national preeminence and the fallibility of human prediction.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.