This paper will provide a summary and critique of William H. McNeill's The Pursuit of Power. I will also provide a comparison and contrast with other readings and discussions from the course. Some of this will be quite evident, while some will definitely be less immediately evident. What this paper will, unfortunately, not contain is much of 'me.'
With over twenty years of personal military experience, with another almost five by my son, I am uniquely situated to this material in comparison to my classmates. I would love to comment on many aspects of material and human military technique. Having served with the 4th Infantry Division while it was undergoing most of the Task Force XXI testing cycle, to include six weeks in the Mojave Desert for the 21st-century Advanced Warfighting Exercises, I am certainly well acquainted with the technologically most up-to-date division currently fielded by the U.S. Army. I would also love to discuss many of the human techniques employed to control and discipline both the force and their families during peace, and particularly during wartime. Unfortunately, the simple act of writing this introduction is too much for me emotionally. My generation simply was not raised to send our children off to war. Over twenty years in the Army did nothing to prepare me for this either, except possibly to make it worse. My son is currently serving with the 4th Infantry Division in the heart of the Sunni Triangle. Having served with this same division as it tested new equipment and tactics I am well aware of its vast weaknesses, but it was fielded anyway. Of course, as McNeill (and others) shows quite clearly, technical rationality is often highly irrational. Thus, I am reduced to keeping my focus in this paper to the pretty much academic and the rational, full well knowing what that implies.
McNeill's masterful work, The Pursuit of Power, certainly lives up to its subtitle, Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000. In this scholarly work he traces the rise of the influence of technique, both material and human, on armed conflict and its impact on society throughout the last millennium. Avoiding a bias inherent in many works, McNeill ranges across the entirety of the Occident and the Orient giving us examples from the whole of the Eurasian continent, India, northern Africa, and the Americas.
The first of two primary theses espoused by McNeill is "that China's rapid evolution towards market-regulated behavior in the centuries on either side of the year 1000 tipped a critical balance in world history." (McNeill, 25) A massive commercialization of Chinese society arose, in part, due to a high technology iron and coal industry and a naval hegemony which included the Indian Ocean. China's iron industry in the eleventh century output 166% more than Britain's did in 1788. (McNeil, 26-7) Canals transported iron across the Chinese empire for use in coins, weapons, tools and construction. Modern currency management and taxation also quickly arose. Local differences allowed for specialization of products, which lead to "local, regional and trans-regional" markets. (McNeill, 29) Naval control of the southern seas and the Indian Ocean led to increased trade in all sorts of commodities, which in turn impacted the lives of hundreds of thousands. A similar growth in commercial activity, led primarily by Italian merchants, took place in the Mediterranean at about the same time. Medieval Europe's demand for, and trade in, these commodities further extended the number of lives impacted by these markets. Bureaucratic techniques of trade management, such as "[r]ules for partnerships, means for adjudicating disputed contracts, and bills of exchange that allowed settlements of debts across long distances with a minimal transport of hard currency…" arose in both locations and had far reaching scope. (McNeill, 55) "What was new in the eleventh century, therefore, was not the principle of market articulation of human effort across long distances, but the scale on which this kind of behavior began to affect human lives." (McNeill, 53) This massive impetus to market economies started the world on a path that is still rapidly escalating.
The second of McNeill's primary theses is that population growth has repeatedly placed great pressures on social, economic, and political institutions around the globe and across the ages. For example, Europe's population grew by over sixty-three percent in the eighteenth century. It manifested "itself both in rural underemployment in many parts of France and Great Britain and in the growth of city populations, especially in the two capitals." (McNeill, 185) This rapid growth was a particular strain in the north and west of Europe where most land suitable for cultivation was already in use. The resulting strain resulted in several wars and the ultimate end of divine right monarchy. (McNeill, 146) The resulting wars and revolutions actually helped relieve much of the pressures resulting from population growth; and conversely, "the defusing of social tensions arising from rapid population growth" was achieved by sending so many unemployed and underemployed dregs of society off to fight in the resulting wars. (McNeill, 200) The strain was far less in eastern Europe as there was still much land capable of conversion to agriculture; thus the resulting population pressures went unnoticed until the middle of the nineteenth century.
McNeill also credits population and demographic changes as one of three primary reasons for the unprecedented scale of the wars of the twentieth century. He says that they may be understood "as responses to collisions between population growth and limits set by traditional modes of rural life in central and eastern Europe in particular, and across wide areas of Asia…as well." (McNeill, 310)
His prospects for peace are also accordingly dim. Many parts of the Third World are currently facing severe strains on traditional ways of life due to populations in excess of sustainability.
The restless and impassioned search for new faiths, new lands, new ways of life provoked by such circumstances is sure to disturb any and every form of constituted governmental authority until such time as the demographic crisis somehow diminishes." European history of the last two hundred and fifty years show that "this will take a long time and may cost many lives. (McNeill, 380)
The natural comparison for this book would be with Gibson's piece from The Perfect War. I will, in fact, comment on Gibson, but as the war in Vietnam comes at the end of the period covered by McNeill that discussion can wait. A more general comparison and contrast, particularly with Ellul, is in order first. From there I will move on to relating this work to Schivelbusch, Perrow and Gibson.
I would first like to consider McNeill's work within the context of the lecture and discussion of Ellul's concept of the technological system from 23 October. The technological system is comprised of the static technological phenomenon and the dynamic technological progress. The technological phenomenon is comprised of the characteristics of autonomy, monism, and universalism. The characteristic of autonomy means that technology tries to become a closed system; that is, it tries to remain isolated from its environment, much like a perfectly constructed machine. Modern technological warfare fits this characteristic perfectly. It follows its own logic operating without any true feedback remaining oblivious to the moral control of humans. The rapid acceleration of the arms race during the twentieth century demonstrates this perfectly. For more than a few decades mankind has been able to eradicate most of life on earth many times over, but this has not slowed the progress of improvements in technological weaponry. Although America no longer faces any other power with near the capacity for waging war that it has, we still pour billions of dollars in programs like the Strategic Defense Initiative, which any respectable scientist would say would never work. The second characteristic in this group is monism. Technique is everywhere the same. The history of the arms races that McNeill shows clearly demonstrates this. Very closely related to monism is universalism; that is, that technique permeates everywhere and everything. It rapidly diffuses geographically and culturally into all aspects of human life. Again, McNeill clearly shows this with his thousand year history of the technique of warfare and its impact and encroachment into all spheres of life, political, cultural, economic, health, and so on. "The arms race thus proved contagious, affecting all parts of the earth." (McNeill, 374) An example of universalism is the spread of scientific knowledge of human dietary requirements. In the First World War they were applied to combatants which helped keep down the spread of infectious diseases. By the Second World War increases and diffusion of this knowledge applied to rationing actually led to general health improvements in the population of Great Britain. (McNeill, 360)
Technological progress, the dynamic portion of the technological system, consists of the characteristics of self-augmentation, automation, and a causal progression and the absence of finality. Self-augmentation refers to the fact that technique progresses almost without human intervention. Humans of course build the machines and invent or discover the techniques but do so almost unconsciously. As a result of backing off of our responsibilities and our freedom our techniques combine and drive the system forward without any conscious effort on the part of humans. In this manner, technique could be said to be self-directing, or to have the characteristic of automatism. This drive manifests itself through the search for the single best method. One example of this in McNeill is the history of cannon making. Causal progression and the absence of finality means that technique develops according to possibility, and not to any moral ends. McNeill and Gibson show this with their pieces on the nuclear arms race and the bureaucratic management of the Vietnam War.
McNeill's book contains multiple examples of all of Ellul's characteristics of the technological system. Without using Ellul's terminology he has clearly shown that technological warfare is a system (and sub-system) out of control. When the United States with its massive stockpiles of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, not to mention conventional weapons, can invade a sovereign country on the pretext that they have weapons of mass destruction and need to be contained, well can any more be said about a system that clearly has absolutely no moral guidance and is no longer under human control?
The lecture on systems theory meshes beautifully with the history of warfare also. McNeill does not use or discuss systems theory at all, but the concepts of progressive integration, progressive differentiation, progressive mechanization, and progressive centralization with the accompanying greater flexibility and fragility are extremely applicable to militaries and warfare. They have become increasingly integrated within societies and even transglobally. The 'parts' have become increasingly specialized in so many ways. Units, individual service members, specific weapons and weapons systems all are increasingly specialized. As weapons systems become highly specialized they become more mechanized leading to greater fragility, as U.S. experiences in Iraq are demonstrating. The amount of high tech equipment, which is used to coordinate and control the Army's 4th Infantry Division, is proof of the progressive centralization of the system. All of the Division's combat systems are highly computerized and feed into central Command and Control Centers, while the Commanding General guides his combat commanders via video-teleconferencing. Concluding these more general comments on how warfare fits within the technological system and systems theory I would like to move on to more specific comparisons.
Ellul, in discussing the autonomy of technique, includes a claim that parallels McNeill very closely.
Gaston Bouthoul, a leading sociologist of the phenomena of war, concludes that war breaks out in a social group when there is a "plethora of young men surpassing the indispensable tasks of the economy." When for one reason or another these men are not employed, they become ready for war. It is the multiplication of men who are excluded from working which provokes war. (Ellul, 137)
This claim by Bouthoul and Ellul is highly similar to McNeill's demographic thesis.
Bureaucratic management is a prime cause and symptom of the technological society. The rise of the bureaucratic management of armed forces is well documented by McNeill. It begins with the ancient Assyrian kings who implemented common bureaucratic management techniques such as standard equipment, standard units, and a standard promotion sequence. Italian city-states in the fifteenth century contracted with military units for their protection, but rivalries between these units caused problems when they tried to appoint an overall commander. Their solution was to contract with smaller and smaller units which thus allowed them greater flexibility with unit assignments and to appoint whomever they wished in charge of however much of the force as was needed. "The effect was to promote the emergence of a corps of officers whose careers depended more on ties with civic officials who had the power of appointment and less on ties with the particular soldiers…." (McNeill, 77)
The next stage in bureaucratic management arose in European armies after the rise and spread of drill, routine drill, weapons drill and marching which I discuss below under standardization. The standardization of drill led to requirements for standard weapons. This significantly lowered costs in the short-run as it ensured steady work for the artisan suppliers of these arms. The long-run effect was to introduce rigidity into the arms market. In this way rational planning came to the fore in decisions whether or not to re-equip an army. By the end of the seventeenth century rational planning had grown into so many areas, with military manpower and material at the forefront of these decisions, that "managerial decisions began to change the lives of millions of persons." (McNeill, 158)
Four limits to military organization became apparent by the middle of the eighteenth century according to McNeill. These were the difficulty of controlling armies greater than 50,000 men, supply, organization and tactics, and "the sociological and psychological restraints that went along with the professionalization of warfare." (McNeill, 161) Accurate mapping became a necessity, which in turn required officers trained in these skills. Written orders required literacy throughout the officer corps and even down to the noncommissioned officer level. These advances led to changes in unit sizes and organization, which led to the invention of the self-sufficient division. Supply presented greater problems but one partial solution was that governments invested much more heavily in the improvements of roads and canals than had previously been the case. Recruitment became standardized with fixed terms of service and pay. Promotion followed published rules, and uniforms were introduced, along with identical tables of organization. These and other changes meant that bureaucratic management controlled more and more aspects of military management. (McNeill, 158-65)
The Prussians led the way with further changes at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They implemented general schooling for all officers and required exams for appointment and promotion, which led to the creation of a general staff. Their function was to plan future campaigns by collecting various forms of intelligence, studying past campaigns, and critiquing simulated tactics and strategy. "The staff officers thus became a kind of collective brain for the Prussian army, seeking systematically to apply reason and calculation to all aspects of army administration and operations." (McNeill, 218)
It was in these and myriad other ways that rational planning and bureaucratic management led to the fiasco of the Vietnam War for the United States, which Gibson so eloquently shows in his piece. Technowar, as Gibson calls it, was based on McNamara and Kissinger's management style and the advice of their experts that assumed that quantification was the best form of human reasoning. Concepts such as bombing as communication, the ground war as a production line, assumptions that the Viet Cong was just like us only with less technology, and the wholesale rejection of conventional definitions of victory and defeat combined to assure our defeat at the hands of an enemy who most definitely was not like us. Policies such as "[b]urn; blow; bulldoze; salt," along with massive indiscriminate killing encouraged by body count rules drove the peasants to the Viet Cong. (Gibson, 145) Describing the procedures of search and destroy, Gibson quotes a soldier, "If there wasn't an enemy out there, we made it the enemy." (Gibson, 145) Echoing Gibson, McNeill tells us "American technological superiority did not defeat the Viet Cong. Acts of destruction merely hardened Vietnamese opinion against the foreigners." (McNeill, 375)
Rules of Engagement (ROE), body count policies, re-written or flagrantly produced official reports led to "the paper graphs and charts bec[oming] the ultimate reality." (Gibson, 152 emphasis in original) Gibson's comments about how this came to pass parallels comments from the lecture on The Death of Common Sense. Procedural rules had become an end in themselves, eliminating all judgment and leading to objectification as a management device. War management became more about efficiency than actually winning.
McNeill has quite a lot to say about the rise of railroads and their impact on the logistical side of warfare. His first claim is that British government expenditures for the purpose of war with France during the revolutionary years lead to a "precocious iron industry." (McNeill, 211) The military demand for iron had a significant impact on the industrial revolution in Britain and made "such critical innovations as the iron railway and iron ships possible at a time and under conditions which simply would not have existed without the wartime impetus to iron production." (McNeill, 212) By the time of the Crimean War (1854-56) railroads covered much of Britain and the western European continent. This fact, along with much improved steamships, allowed the transport of men and equipment to a level never before dreamed possible. "Accordingly, armies began to count their soldiers by the million." (McNeill, 223) Due to the cargo carrying capacity of their railroads, the vastly outnumbered French and British were able to overcome the Russians who had to rely on peasant carts pulled by horses for their supplies. Transportation of supplies by this method was an utter failure as transporting fodder for the horses reduced carrying capacity to virtually nothing. McNeill claims that the use of the railroads in the U.S. Civil War shows "the vital importance of industrial capacity for waging a new kind of war" by allowing large armies "to fight for years while drawing supplies from hundreds of miles away." (McNeill, 243)
What I find particularly interesting is that Schivelbusch entirely neglects the importance of war on the growth of the railroad, particularly in Britain, and of the importance of the railroad for war. These themes may not be directly related to his thesis, but given the importance McNeill accords to them it seems that they would have been mentioned. On the other hand, an interesting aspect found in Schivelbusch, that of the standardization of time as railroad time, is missing from McNeill. Surely this is a critical element in military planning.
Perrow's comments on the second order controls of standardization and specialization are highly applicable to the management of warfare. Specialization arose at least as early as the appearance of war chariots, if not sooner. The spread of the great horse to Latin Christendom also led to specialization in the form of the knight. Both of these technologies led to fundamental shifts in the social structure giving rise to aristocratic classes which became for a while the primary warrior class, another form of specialization. Specialization in the modern U.S. military is such that every service member is given a particular military occupational specialty (MOS), or job. In the Army there is even a rank entitled Specialist. As for standardization, McNeill tells us that arose as far back as the ancient Assyrians. Common bureaucratic management techniques such as standard equipment, standard units, and a standard promotion sequence were also implemented by the Italian city-states of the fifteenth century. Perrow states that, "Standardization and specialization channel behavior, and if the channel is well constructed by the organization, more predictable and efficient behavior is emitted, as the operant psychologists put it." (Perrow, 8) McNeill similarly states "A well-drilled army, responding to a clear chain of command…, constituted a more obedient and efficient instrument of policy than had ever been seen on earth before." (McNeill, 117) Schivelbusch states that "…the modern body of soldiers functions according to an abstract discipline that has nothing to do with the fighting per se, but merely serves the cohesion of that body. Its function, according to Sombart, 'is to create, by mechanical means, the connection between leading and executive organs.'" (Schivelbusch, 152-3) Again from Perrow, "…standardization and specialization also control people because they limit the variety of stimuli a person has to attend to…." (Perrow, 7) The standardization of weapons drill, and repeated drilling, around the beginning of the seventeenth century had a powerful psychological effect on the soldiers who underwent it. One of the things that has always stuck out in my mind from my elementary school American history lessons was why in heaven's name the Redcoats would stand in a line and have the sheer stupidity to expect us to do the same while shooting at each other. McNeill sums it up beautifully for me in his pages on the rise of drill as technique.
Yet consider how amazing it was for men to form themselves into opposing ranks a few score yards apart and fire muskets at one another, keeping it up while comrades were falling dead or wounded all around. Instinct and reason alike make such behavior unaccountable. Yet European armies of the eighteenth century did it as a matter of course. (McNeill, 133)
Clearly, the combatants in this form of warfare have been made to respond to a severely limited range of stimuli.
There are many more comparisons and contrasts that could be made between The Pursuit of Power and other course material. In particular comparisons between McNeill and Schivelbusch's use of the concept of shock, the rise of rational planning on materiel testing, and the use of propaganda to mobilize the home front for war, particularly in the wake of 9/11. As McNeill states, "An enemy at the gates has always been the best substitute for spontaneous consensus at home." (McNeill, 380) I would like to conclude this section with an extended quote reference the Holocaust that eloquently sums up much of this material from an Ellulian perspective.
Extremes of inhumanity, bureaucratized and rendered efficient by the same methods used for managing other aspects of the war effort, illustrate more poignantly than any other event of modern history the moral ambivalence implicit in every increase in human power to manage and control our natural and social environment. POW camps in other countries, and wholesale displacements of distrusted ethnic groups, such as occurred in both the United States and the Soviet Union during the war, also exhibited the demonic side of the administrative virtuosity that flourished so luxuriantly during the two wars of the twentieth century. (McNeill, 360)
This book seems to be very well researched, and although it is heavily footnoted they never intrude. One could read the book and never bother with the footnotes. But, such a reading would certainly leave said reader less informed, as the footnotes are rarely pedantic asides, but often further his argument in new and illuminating ways, or add to the historical depth and breadth of the work. Thus, I find it quite humorous that in the Preface he calls this work "a belated footnote to The Rise of the West." (McNeill, ix) I liked this book very much and look forward to re-reading it in the future to further acquaint myself with its' arguments and the sheer amount of information that is contained within it. My only complaint is that it fairly breezes through the post-World War II period. But, seeing as it was published in 1982, and much, if not most, military data from this period was still highly classified, this is certainly no real criticism.
Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.
Gibson, James William. The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam. 1st ed, Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986.
McNeill, William Hardy. The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society Since A.D. 1000. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Charles Perrow, "The Bureaucratic Paradox: The Efficient Organization Centralizes in Order to Decentralize," Organizational Dynamics Spring 1977, pp. 3-14.
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 1986.