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Book Review
| War Since 1945. By JEREMY BLACK. London: Reaktion Books, 2004. 216 pp. $24.95 (paper).
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Jeremy Black, professor of history at the University of Exeter, UK, makes one very important point in his recent book, War Since 1945: the dominant school of military history and its policy counterpart are inadequate to explain the variety of wars that have occurred throughout the world since 1945. |
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A distinct improvement over the theoretical immaturity of old-style military history and the sterile economic approach of Cold War defense strategy, the military revolution/revolution in military affairs (RMA) paradigm, which emerged from the combined efforts of British and American military historians and defense intellectuals in the 1980s and 1990s, offered a persuasive interpretation of the military's role in the rise of the West beginning with Edward III's crushing victories over France in the fourteenth century and up to the U.S.-led coalition's defeat of Iraq in the first Gulf War in the 1990s (see MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray, eds., The Dynamics of Military Revolution 1300–2050, 2001). In recent years, however, this model has seemed less useful for explaining the variously motivated civil wars and insurrections in the non-Western world since the end of World War II or for understanding the difficulties of employing superior Western military resources and technical know-how to political advantage against "rogue" states, "failed" states, nationalist insurgents, and transnational terrorists that refuse to follow the Western way of war. |
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