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

is no single relationship between state formation and strategy because history provides far too many counterexamples of retrenchments that follow growth, of successful military innovations that lead nowhere constitutionally, and profound constitutional changes that seem to have no impact on military matters? To take but two examples: Consider the Polish army's practices during the seventeenth century that considerably diverged from those of the European states discussed by Roberts, Parker, and Black, yet were highly successful against the Swedes. Nevertheless, these innovations forced neither military nor constitutional changes on the rest of Europe. One might add also the Hungarian tactics against the Turks in 1686, which were similar in style to those of the Poles. Or consider the downsizing of European forces after Waterloo. Of the great powers, only Prussia elected to follow Napoleon's example and retain a large standing army; the others were far too wary of having so many soldiers garrisoned at home with large numbers of weapons that could be turned against the state.
    Nor can one easily answer Black: if, as Parrott asserts, there is no linear, causal relationship between changes in the State and changes in strategy, how can we determine in which direction the causal relation holds? And if we don't know that, how can we say at which precise point the decisive revolution occurred—for if the constitutional changes in the State are dominant, the point at which those changes occur dates the revolution, but if the strategic change is determinant, then
its
hour of change is decisive. And so we cannot answer Roberts and Parker either.
    Nor can they answer each other, for on the facts as we know them—that the nation-state has been the outcome of modern history, and that modern warfare has proceeded from loosely organized bands of mercenaries to the vast, professionalized standing armies of the present—there is no decisive fact that cannot be accommodated by each of the various proposed theses. If we focus on the Battle of Nödlingen in 1634, for example, the Swedish innovations so praised by Roberts look ineffectual against an apparently traditional Habsburg force—but it was just such innovations that won battles at Breitenfeld (1631), Lützen (1632), and Wittstock (1636). A partisan of either position can parry such evidence with the ease of a sociobiol-ogist asked for evidence of adaptive traits. Biogenetic evolution is punctuated; why can't the evolution of states also be? And therefore what counts as a significant event is one that fits a general account whose terminus is the world we know now. Other events, other battles, are pruned away as evolutionary dead ends.
    Can it be a sheer coincidence that Roberts, one of the most distinguished contemporary historians of the Swedish empire, locates the military revolution in the campaigns of Gustavus Adolphus, while Black, a prominent historian of the regimes of the eighteenth century, finds his revolution there, and Parker, whose evidence goes beyond his special distinction in the history of the Spanish empire of the sixteenth century, nevertheless discovers in that century, in the Spanish campaigns in Flanders, the true beginning of the military revolution? It seems the more one learns about a period, the more pivotal and unique it appears. This appearance might simply be owed to that situating perspective that can accompany scholarly immersion. But in the case of historians as able and judicious as these, that seems an insufficient conclusion. Mightn't it also be that each of these historians is right because they are all right? More than one revolution has occurred because more than one constitutional order of the state has arisen. In the following narrative, I will discuss the transformations of the State that have accompanied military revolutions. I count six of these, not one—and thus do not answer Roberts's, Black's, and Parker's question by choosing one single