Not actually my cup of tea, The Future of War: A History is a massive data dump and analysis of what we used to think about the future of warfare. Lawrence Freedman has clearly Done the Research, and I have to hand it to him: there’s compelling stuff here. Thanks to NetGalley and Public Affairs for the eARC.

I love the premise of this book. It kind of merges my passion for literature and my mild interest in history. It is very easy for us to interpret the actions of people in the past through our hindsight and our own cultural lenses. Freedman reminds us what any good historian tries to remember: people in the past had a very different conception of the world, and as such, their motivations might be hard to unravel if they didn’t write them down. To us, the multitudinous causes of World War I and the line connecting it to World War II seem obvious. To someone living in 1920 or 1930, not so much. To us, the outcome of the Cold War and its influence around the world is just a matter of fact now—to someone living in 1950 or 1960, with the spectres of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still lingering in recent memory, it’s a very different story.

Freedman’s survey of the literature is thoughtful, perceptive, detailed, and critical. He intersperses the literature between arguments for an overall thesis—which basically seems to be that, following the end of the Cold War, we’ve reached a point where it is increasingly difficult to predict the “future” of war, simply because we have yet to settle on a redefinition of the word.

One part of the book that really jumped out at me is where Freedman explains the intense efforts put into statistical analysis of wars. In particular, he describes late-twentieth-century attempts to compile casualty databases. He points out all the assumptions that necessarily went into this work, since it is difficult to define what war is, how long it lasts, or what counts as a “death” or “injury” attributable to the war. As such, while these sources of information are invaluable for discussing war and the related politics, they are also flawed and biased. Freedman reminds us that methodology in these situations is so tricky—it’s not a matter of getting it right, but of understanding that there is no one right way to collect and interpret the data.

I also really enjoyed the first part of The Future of War, where Freedman analyzes what people were writing prior to and then following the First World War. I liked the glimpse at war fiction, from people like Wells and others whose names aren’t quite as well known today. And it’s interesting how Freedman draws connections between fiction and its influence on the population, as well as politicians. Later on, he recapitulates this by recounting President Reagan’s reaction to Tom Clancy’s first novels.

The last part of the book was less interesting, for a few reasons. By this point, I was getting fatigued. This is a long book, and more to the point, it is incredibly dense and detailed and technical. A student of history will find this a useful resource; the casual reader, like myself, might start feeling bogged down. Also, the incredibly globalized nature of warfare in the 1990s, the sheer number of internecine affairs, means that Freedman has to cover a lot of ground in comparably few pages. Like, entire books have and can be written about small parts of each of these conflicts. So it all starts to feel overwhelming, but rushed.

None of this is Freedman’s fault in particular. The Future of War is quite well-written and informative. It is a little drier and less engaging than I typically want my non-fiction to be, but I can’t really hold that against it. I’m just not quite the target audience. History buffs, though, particularly those who want to learn more about how we used to think about war, might have more patience and inclination to really dive deep into this.

Review will be published on Goodreads on October 18.

The study of History cannot be justified on the grounds that it teaches ‘lessons’, as the past “is infinitely various, an inexhaustible storehouse of incidents from which we can prove anything or its contrary”. So said Sir Michael Howard in his Inaugural Lecture as Oxford Regius Professor of Modern History and it is to Howard as ‘Teacher, Mentor, Friend’ that Lawrence Freedman dedicates his book ‘The Future of War’. One might, then, expect Freedman to detail how all efforts to predict the nature and course of future conflicts have failed.

The past is certainly littered with plenty of examples of generals assuming that the next war will be like the last one and thus devising strategies or tactics that seem bound to fail. A classic example is the Maginot Line. The French assumed that a Second World War would be like the Great War and accordingly devised a set of fortifications on the Franco-German border which represented a more elaborate version of the Western Front’s trench system, failing to appreciate that changes to warfare (to say nothing of the failure to extend the Line to the Channel) would render it virtually obsolete by 1940.

But hang on a minute – if Maginot represents a failure to conceive the future of war by the French, shouldn’t the German proponents of Blitzkrieg, like Guderian, building on the insights of Basil Liddell Hart and J. F. C. Fuller into the potential of armoured warfare, be credited with correctly piercing the veil of the future?

And isn’t Ivan Bloch an even better example of an accurate prophet of future war? It was Bloch, remember, who in the six volumes of his book ‘La Guerre, published between 1898 and 1900, stated that the lethality of modern firepower would drive men to dig trenches and that warfare would result in stalemate because frontal assaults against entrenchments would prove too costly.

This is, then, the central problem with Freedman’s book. He has no difficulty showing that many military experts and some gifted civilian amateurs (such as Bloch and H. G. Wells) expended considerable energy musing about future war from the mid-nineteenth century onwards (when war became increasingly destructive and changes to technology and weaponry begged the question of how they would be employed militarily). Nor does he have any trouble in detailing how the way in which “people imagined the wars of the future affected the conduct and course of those wars when they finally arrived.” What he does not do, and in the nature of History cannot do, is provide a satisfactory overarching explanation of how a few got the future right but most got it very wrong. Hence the book concludes that, “If there is a lesson from this book it is that while many [future speculations about future wars] will deserve to be taken seriously, they should all be treated sceptically”.

After almost 300 pages, in which there is admittedly much interesting material about imagined futures of past wars and even speculation about the future of war as an institution, one is nevertheless bound to question whether the journey was worth making for such a trite and anti-climatic insight.