The Changing Character of War

The Changing Character of War edited by Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011 564pages $110.00

In the aftermath of al Qaeda's attacks on the United States in September 2001, the British Leverhulme Trust awarded Oxford University a grant for a five-year study to examine what it called "The Changing Character of War." The result is this ambitious edited volume, consisting of twenty-seven essays along with an introduction and conclusion that attempt to tie them together into a coherent whole-a remarkably difficult task, given their widely varying subjects.

The leader of this effort is the exquisitely qualified Hew Strachan, Chichele Professor of the History of War at Oxford's All Souls College and noted historian of the First World War. Assisted by Sibylle Schiepers, who teaches at St. Andrews, he has assembled many of the United Kingdom's best thinkers on war and international relations, along with several Americans and a scattering of authors from around the world. The focus was to understand what appeared to be, at least on this side of the Atlantic, a revolution in the character of warfare in which nonstate actors were suddenly able to challenge the most powerful state in the world.

The historians who wrote most of the essays are unsurprisingly skeptical about the magnitude of the apparent change-a skepticism which appears more firmly grounded the more the September 11th attacks recede into history. They find more continuity than change in the relationship between the state and war as best explained by Carl von Clausewitz. Napoleon...