Content area
Full Text
THE UTILITY OF FORCE: The Art of War in the Modern World, General Rupert Smith, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2007, 430 pages, $45.00.
If British General Rupert Smith is right, the United States and its allies are creating the wrong forces, arming them with the wrong weapons, and using them in the wrong way. In The Utility of Force, Smith, who retired from the British Army in 2002, argues that war as we know it-the armed confrontation between two or more nation states-has become extinct.
In its place, we now engage in wars among the people, frustrating and seemingly interminable confrontations, conflicts, and combat actions in which weak, poorly armed adversaries exploit publicity, fear, and their stronger opponents' penchant for overwhelming force in order to gain sympathy, legitimacy, and power. The difficulties of current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan overshadow Smith's ideas, but Smith catalogues a host of such "asymetric" conflicts, from Spain to Chechnya, to expose the not-so-new realities confronting us.
Smith's thesis is an old one. Since the end of the cold war, Martin van Creveld, Ralph Peters, and other scholars and defense experts have written extensively on the rise of nonstate actors, and this discourse has influenced the U.S. Army and Marine Corps' new FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency, which specifically addresses the challenges of asymmetric warfare. Blogger John Robb's recently published Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization (Wiley, Hoboken, NJ, 2007) paints a particularly...