The Invention of War

By Anargi Jayakody
The Citadel Archives

"The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his."
 

George S. Patton's famous remark is memorable precisely because it appears to strip war down to its most brutal essence. Yet for all its rhetorical force, it tells us remarkably little about what war actually is. We speak of wars with extraordinary confidence. Nations declare them, historians periodise them, politicians invoke them, and journalists report them almost daily. We imagine the concept to be self-evident. Curiously, it is anything but.

During my final year reading History at King's College London, I decided to audit a module offered by the Department of War Studies, one of the few academic departments in the world devoted exclusively to the study of war, conflict and strategy. Entering the first seminar, I expected discussions of campaigns, diplomacy and military tactics. Instead, the lecturer began with a deceptively simple question.

"What is war?"

The room fell silent.

Eventually, a fellow student of history sitting a few seats away offered what appeared to be an entirely reasonable answer.

"People fighting."

Before the sentence had fully settled, several students from within the War Studies programme objected. The definition, they argued, was hopelessly reductive. Violence alone could not explain war. Nor could war simply be reduced to organised fighting. At the time, I remember sympathising more with my fellow historian than with her critics. Surely, at its broadest level, war was precisely that: organised violence between opposing groups.

Yet as the discussion unfolded, my certainty began to dissolve.

If two men fight in the street, we do not call it war.

If two families wage a blood feud over generations, is that war?

When rival criminal organisations battle for control of territory, employing thousands of armed men and claiming more lives than many recognised conflicts, have we crossed the threshold into warfare?

If a state cripples another nation's electrical grid through cyber attacks without firing a single bullet, has war begun?

Conversely, when a kingdom mobilises tens of thousands of soldiers, yet no battle is ever fought because diplomacy prevails, has war occurred at all?

The more examples the class considered, the less obvious the answer became. What had initially appeared to be a question of vocabulary slowly revealed itself to be something far more fundamental. Before historians can explain why wars begin, why they are fought, or why they end, they must first decide what qualifies as war in the first place. That decision is far from straightforward.

It is tempting to imagine that war has always existed as a stable, self-evident category. Human beings have fought one another for as long as we possess written records, and almost certainly for much longer. Yet this should not be confused with the assumption that all organised violence is therefore war. The distinction matters because the words we choose inevitably shape the histories we write. A rebellion may become a war of independence; piracy may become maritime conflict; conquest may become liberation; terrorism may become insurgency. Historians are not merely describing violence. They are classifying it.

This is where the history of war becomes unexpectedly philosophical.

For much of the nineteenth century, military history concerned itself principally with campaigns, commanders and battlefields. It was, in many respects, another branch of political history. Wars were narrated through kings, emperors and generals. Victory belonged to tactical brilliance; defeat to military incompetence. The battlefield appeared to provide history with clear beginnings, decisive endings and obvious protagonists.

The twentieth century fundamentally altered that picture.

Two world wars, decolonisation, civil conflict, nuclear deterrence and the emergence of terrorism forced historians to confront an uncomfortable reality. The neat boundaries that had once separated war from peace, soldier from civilian, battlefield from society and victory from defeat no longer appeared adequate. War was proving far more elusive than the history books had allowed.

The Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously described war as "the continuation of politics by other means." Few definitions have exerted greater influence. It remains one of the most quoted sentences in military history, not because it resolves the problem, but because it shifts it. If war is politics pursued through organised violence, then understanding war requires us first to understand politics itself. Yet even Clausewitz's formulation has never escaped criticism. John Keegan argued that reducing war to politics overlooked its cultural and anthropological dimensions. Mary Kaldor, writing in the aftermath of the Cold War, suggested that contemporary conflicts no longer resembled the interstate wars upon which Clausewitz had built his theory. Identity, criminal economies, fragmented sovereignty and transnational violence had begun to blur distinctions that earlier generations had taken for granted.

The remarkable consequence is that historians today disagree not simply about particular wars, but about the nature of war itself.

Perhaps that should not surprise us.

History has repeatedly demonstrated that the most familiar words often conceal the most difficult questions. Just as "empire", "nation", "religion" and "civilisation" have all acquired meanings that shift across time and place, so too has war. Rather than representing a timeless category, it has continually evolved alongside the societies that wage it.

If the definition of war were as straightforward as "organised violence," historians would have settled the matter long ago. Instead, every period of history seems determined to frustrate the certainty of the last.

Take, for example, the world described by Homer. The Iliad has shaped Western conceptions of warfare for almost three millennia. Kings gather armies, cities are besieged, champions fight for honour and empires rise or fall upon the battlefield. Yet historians have long questioned whether the conflict Homer describes bears much resemblance to what we would recognise as organised war. Was it a struggle between states? A coalition of aristocratic warlords? A dynastic dispute magnified by generations of oral poetry. Or was it, perhaps, a memory of many smaller conflicts compressed into a single monumental narrative? Even one of history's most famous wars resists easy categorisation.

The same ambiguity appears much closer to home.

Early medieval Sri Lanka witnessed prolonged conflicts between rival dynastic claimants whose struggles frequently blurred the distinction between civil war, succession crisis and political rebellion. Consider the conflict between Kassapa and Moggallāna during the fifth century. The chronicles present the struggle as a moral drama of parricide and legitimate restoration, yet modern historians have interpreted it through rather different lenses: elite competition, dynastic instability, regional alliances and shifting military loyalties. Was it a civil war? A palace coup that escalated beyond the capital? Or simply another succession dispute within a monarchy where legitimacy itself remained contested? The answer depends less upon the evidence than upon the questions we choose to ask of it.

Such ambiguities become even more striking beyond the medieval world.

For nearly four centuries, the Dutch East India Company maintained one of the largest private military forces on earth. At various moments it commanded tens of thousands of soldiers, possessed a formidable navy, negotiated treaties, occupied territory and declared war upon kingdoms from Ceylon to Java. Yet the Company was not a state. It was, at least in legal theory, a commercial corporation answerable to shareholders. If war is traditionally understood as organised violence between sovereign states, how should we describe conflicts fought by what was, on paper, a trading company? The question is more than semantic. It exposes the fragility of one of our most enduring assumptions: that war has always belonged exclusively to governments.

Nor does the emergence of the modern nation-state resolve the problem.

The Thirty Years' War began in 1618 with the Defenestration of Prague, an episode so absurd that it almost borders on theatre. Two imperial governors were thrown from a castle window by Protestant nobles. Yet what followed cannot be reduced to a simple religious war. Over three decades the conflict transformed into a dynastic struggle, a contest for imperial authority, a geopolitical rivalry between the Habsburgs and Bourbon France, and an economic catastrophe that devastated central Europe. By its conclusion, entire regions had lost a third or more of their populations. Religion explained the outbreak, but not the continuation. Dynastic ambition sustained the conflict, but not every campaign. To describe the Thirty Years' War by any single cause is to misunderstand its extraordinary complexity.

Modern history offers no greater certainty.

The Cold War dominated the second half of the twentieth century, yet its two principal antagonists, the United States and the Soviet Union, never formally declared war upon one another. Millions died in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Angola and countless proxy conflicts, while the world's two greatest military powers remained officially at peace. Can history's defining conflict of the twentieth century truly be understood as a "war" when its central participants avoided direct battlefield confrontation? Or does the adjective itself merely acknowledge that political conflict had expanded beyond conventional armies into ideology, economics, espionage and nuclear deterrence?

The twenty-first century has complicated matters still further.

A cyberattack capable of disabling hospitals, financial systems or electrical grids may inflict consequences comparable to aerial bombardment without a single soldier crossing an international frontier. Autonomous drones increasingly operate far beyond conventional battlefields. Private military companies undertake missions once reserved exclusively for national armies. Terrorist organisations control territory, levy taxes and administer populations whilst lacking international recognition as states. Violence has not diminished. It has become increasingly difficult to classify.

Perhaps, then, historians have been asking the wrong question.

The enduring problem has never been determining what war is. It has been determining who possesses the authority to decide.

Violence itself is remarkably indifferent to the labels imposed upon it. A village burned to the ground leaves the same ashes whether its destruction is described as conquest, pacification, rebellion or liberation. A soldier killed in battle is no less dead because historians later classify the conflict as a civil war rather than an invasion. The physical reality of violence changes very little. What changes, often dramatically, is the language through which societies choose to understand it.

This, I would suggest, is where the true ethos of war resides; not as a simple military phenomenon, but an intellectual one.

To declare something a war is to grant it a particular political and moral status. Wars possess beginnings and endings, heroes and martyrs, victories and defeats. They invite monuments, memorials and anniversaries. By contrast, the very same acts of organised violence, when labelled piracy, banditry, terrorism or criminality, occupy an entirely different moral universe. The distinction is rarely determined by violence alone. More often, it is determined by legitimacy.

History offers countless examples.

To the English Crown, William Wallace was not conducting a war of Scottish independence but leading a criminal rebellion against his lawful sovereign. To later generations of Scots, precisely the same conflict became one of the foundational struggles of the nation. The violence did not change. The historical interpretation did.

The American Revolution presents much the same paradox. In London, it began as an insurrection against legitimate authority. In Philadelphia, it became a war for independence. Both descriptions referred to the same campaigns, the same soldiers and the same battlefields. Yet each reflected a different understanding of political legitimacy.

Even our own historical vocabulary demonstrates this remarkable instability. We speak comfortably of the Gallic Wars, the Punic Wars and the Napoleonic Wars, yet we hesitate before describing prolonged conflicts involving piracy, corporations, indigenous resistance or non-state actors with the same certainty. The question is not whether violence occurred. It undoubtedly did. The question is whether contemporaries, and later historians, considered that violence worthy of recognition as war.

Perhaps, then, war is less a fixed category of human behaviour than a language through which civilisations interpret organised violence. Every society constructs its own threshold separating crime from conflict, rebellion from revolution, insurgency from war. Those thresholds shift with changing ideas of sovereignty, religion, law and political authority. As states evolved, so too did war. As empires expanded, so too did its meaning. As international law developed, entirely new distinctions emerged between combatants, civilians, occupation, genocide and crimes against humanity.

The history of war, therefore, is not merely the history of battles.

It is also the history of classification.

Every age has inherited violence. What differs is the conceptual framework through which that violence is understood. The Roman Republic, medieval Christendom, the Ottoman Empire and the modern nation-state all killed, conquered and resisted. Yet each understood the legitimacy of those actions through profoundly different political languages. Historians do not simply recover those languages. We inevitably contribute to them.

This perhaps explains why the deceptively simple question posed during that seminar at King's has remained with me for so many years. I no longer believe that historians disagree because some definitions are correct, and others mistaken. Rather, they disagree because war itself has never existed independently of the societies that define it.