Today’s Urban Battles in Syria and Iraq May Be a Preview of a Grim Future of War

Carl von Clausewitz, the eminent 19th-century Prussian military theorist, believed war could best be understood as the interplay of three powerful forces: hatred, rationality that focuses hatred on political objectives, and chance. Chance made war unpredictable, but rationality, by making killing a means to an end rather than purely an act of hatred, kept it from becoming even more violent than it otherwise might be. This perspective reflected Clausewitz’s personal experience in the Napoleonic Wars. At that time, the military strategists of Europe’s great powers attempted to avoid killing civilians whenever possible, at least when fighting each other. Although the […]