John Keegan: War and Our World
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The world was a different place when the illustrious military historian Sir John Keegan penned this short collection of essays for the BBC’s Reith Lectures series in 1998. It is somewhat strange to note that, for all his famous scholarship and unparalleled respect in the community of military history enthusiasts, Keegan, due to medical reasons, never served in uniform. This is a fact he touches upon in War and Our World, lending his insight about the countless military officers he has instructed and, indeed, learned from, during his tenure at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He paints a history of warfare in broad strokes, blending historical wisdom with philosophical discussions on the nature of war and of the soldier—and the relation of both to each other, the community, the state, and “our world.”
A historian, not a political scientist, Keegan writes with a practical clarity absent from the other side of the academic spectrum, those obsessed with theoretical constructs and model-based frameworks. “War is collective killing for some collective purpose,” he declares, adding, “that is as far as I will go in attempting to describe it.” The most interesting passages are those that discuss how familiar concepts have evolved over time. For example, he explains that the soldier was vilified in past centuries, viewed with fear and not with honor. Eventually, with the rise of the State in more modern times, the Soldier became a noble figure. Keegan notes that even German soldiers of the Third Reich are recognized as patriots, sympathetic “victims” of the State they served. Today, as fewer and fewer citizens find themselves in uniformed service, the modern world requires the modern soldier to embody “a particular ethic, a readiness of the individual to embody his – or her – life not simply for any of the traditional values by which warriors fought but for the cause of peace itself.” Recent operations involving both American and British troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, humanitarian and peacekeeping missions around the globe, all support Keegan’s view that we should continue to restrict the spread of arms, both small and large and massively-destructive, and to strengthen aid programs and alliances.
Presciently, Keegan states: “The rogue ruler, the terrorist and the fundamentalist movement, the ethnic or religious faction are all enemies as serious as any, in an age of junk weapons, as civilisation has ever faced.” Little did he know that a few years later he would cover the liberation of Iraq from one of those rogue rulers and write about intelligence as it relates to the fundamentalist religious faction known as al Qaeda. Curiously, though, he seems to place an inordinate degree of trust in the United Nations to keep the world safe. He writes that “war is now illegal, except in self-defence or unless sanctioned by the United Nations,” and explains the organization, with its increased operations tempo and responsibility, “is the most important of institutional antidotes.” Writing in the same year as Operation Desert Fox, Keegan acknowledges the UN’s critics. More recent events may force him to move beyond acknowledgment to changing his mind.
And his is a mind we must respect, for without history only ill-informed decisions may be made and only baseless opinions manufactured. Seven years after publication, this book is worth reading not only for what Keegan got right, but also what he got wrong.
War and Our World, by John Keegan. New York: Vintage Books, 1998. Pp. xv, 87. Biblio. ISBN:0-375-70520-1 (pbk.)
