The Utility Of Force

Book Review
The Utility of Force
The Art of War in the Modern World
By
General Rupert Smith
After his retirement from the British Army in 2002 General Rupert Smith began writing a book on the use of force in our modern world, his sources drew from his personal experience to those of past leaders and conflicts and wars. Throughout his forty years of service in the British Army General Smithhad the privilege of commanding forces in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq. His position of command and control gave him the ability not only to shift the battlefield, but also to observe the way in which modern industrial nations have lost decisive power in wars that have shifted to be fought amongst the people. By combing his personal experience as a highly decorated militaryofficial and that of past military leaders and wars Smith in his The Utility of Force shows the reader how the tide of war has changed over the past two hundred years. The Utility of Force is divided up into three parts, the first titled Interstate Industrial War these chapters explain the use of force between nationalized states and span from their foundations under Napoleon and Clausewitz to theirdevelopments with iron, steam, and mass to their total culmination with the world wars, while the second part explains the post nuclear bomb age with the growing power of anarchist and guerillas and the difference between conflict and confrontation which lead to a new search for the use of force, and in his last four chapters of the book Smith explains how war has changed into a war amongst the peopleand give a new purpose in which nationalized states employ and deploy force.
Smith starts of in the first part of the book explaining the old paradigm of the use of force and its history. To explain to the reader what role force plays in our modern battlefield it is necessary to go back to the creators of industrial interstate war, these roots can be traced back to Napoleon and the NapoleonicWars in the early 19th century. During the Napoleonic Wars the two crucial elements of interstate industrial war, state and industry, were being matured and combined together. Before Napoleons time European states had traditionally fought static, no ideological wars intended to rearrange the map without significantly altering an overall balance of power, in this case rulers and governments wereexpected to remain in place. By creating the idea of war as a necessary event which would allocate all the resources of a nation, material and man power, and then focusing this force with the total goal of destroying the opponent and installing a new political order, Napoleon changed the idea of war completely.
Industrial war became a tool in which the decisive use of regular military forcewould be used to achieve whatever goal it was assigned, that usually being a political objective, by the destruction of the enemy´s armed forces. To wage war effetely the whole nation had to be industrialized in hopes of a final victory, this was achieved by wealth, population, and factories to contribute to the victory on the battlefield. With society completely militarized and dedicated tosupporting the war the people were crucial to the overall success of the military and therefore society became military targets to the opposing forces, the targeting of civilians would be known as total war. Napoleon realizing all of this then set up perfecting his army with the emergence of mass conscripted citizen armies reinforced by new technologies of the time, and between 1800 and 1814 anestimated two million men served under the French flag. His strategic aim then became the destruction of the enemy´s main force, while holding large numbers of reserves in peace and the creation of new armies in war. He also created a new hierarchal division of armies to allow for control and rapid movement and communication. He then tied professionalism and meritocracy to the command of the armies’...