THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES by Philip Bobbitt Read Free Book Online Page A

concluded that the modern administrative and bureaucratic state that emerged in the early eighteenth century was the driving factor behind
strategic
change.
    Challenging the thesis of a military-governmental revolution altogether, David Parrott attacked the claim that the expansion in the size of armies was indeed accompanied by a comparable expansion and centralization of the State. In fact, he argued, the great majority of forces that fought in Europe before the end of the seventeenth century were not raised by states at all, but rather were recruited and managed by an extensive system of private entrepreneurs. He concluded that there was no direct correlation between the growth of the forces being maintained and the development of the State. The principal reason for the large numbers of troops in Europe was to allow the military contractors who maintained them to recover their expenses by means of enforced contributions from local populations. The great seventeenth century commander Wallenstein, Parrott noted, told the Holy Roman Emperor in 1626 that he could maintain a self-financing army of 50,000 but not one of 20,000 because the larger force could man garrisons and extract contributions. Parrott proposed that we see the increase in military forces and expenditure as leading not to state-building, but to an unprecedented willingness of the State to offload its responsibilities onto private contractors. When the seventeenth century did witness an increase in the centralization of state authority, Parrott disparaged this as a reaction to the military developments of the preceding period.
    In the chapters that follow, I will trace developments in strategy from roughly the end of the fifteenth century onward and relate these developments to changes in the constitutional structures of the states of Europe. For these purposes, we need not attempt to resolve many of the questions about the “military revolution.” Whether in fact the numbers of troops employed in the sieges of Strasbourg, Breisach, or Turin were greater than those deployed in the preceding century, and whether the forces availablefor any particular battle in the Thirty Years' War really were as large as those nominally under Swedish command, are matters not directly germane to the present task. It is undeniable that developments in strategy changed the ferocity of and resources required for war from the beginning of the sixteenth century onward, even if we do not know precisely how these demands were met. What we must attempt to answer is Parrott's question: what is the relationship between strategic development and constitutional innovation? And if there is a causal relation, then we must answer Black's question: which way does it run? Does the state change, and with it the strategies it employs? Or do changes in the strategic environment force states to change their organization in order to cope with these developments? And if we can answer those questions, then we can perhaps decide at what point this profound change occurred—the question that divided Roberts and Parker and Black.
    This agenda, however, is not as tractable as it may at first appear. Take Parrott's question. It seems undeniable that there is a relationship between strategic and constitutional change, and the reason for this is not hard to gather. Strategic developments in a geography of proximate societies like Europe can present a similar, acute problem to states that otherwise may greatly differ. The endowments of states such as Spain and France may have little in common—that is, their material resources, cultural traditions, and political leadership may be absurdly unalike—but the cannon that confronts one will confront both. A new development in military tactics or technology will quickly spread through the available colleges and arsenals of all states. Every state must either mimic or innovate in response to such a development. And yet isn't Parrott right in implying that there