It is 150 years since Sherman marched his army out of Atlanta and set out to “make Georgia howl.” At that time, the destructive consequences of war between industrialized states and societies were still a historical novelty whose strategic implications were only just becoming visible to nineteenth-century armies. Today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, such confrontations have become something of a rarity. Sir Rupert Smith, the former British commander of UN forces in Bosnia and Wesley Clark’s deputy in Kosovo, has argued that “war as battle in a field between men and machinery, war as a massive deciding event in a dispute in international affairs, such war no longer exists.” For Smith, Sherman’s “strategic decision to destroy the material base of the South . . . signalled the future direction of industrial warfare, both in the targeting of the enemy’s industrial and economic infrastructure, and in the development of an industrial base at home.”1
Such warfare, Smith asserts, has been replaced by “wars among the people” that are fought within states rather than between them, wars in which “the people in the streets and houses and fields—all the people, anywhere—are the battlefield” and the “destructive function” of military force is only one of an array of strategic options. Other analysts have made similar claims. “In the future, wars perpetrated by states will no longer include a Sherman’s march to the sea or the firebombing of Tokyo. Civilians and their property are now, to a large degree, off limits,” writes the former U.S. Special Forces officer-turned-counterterrorism adviser John Robb in his analysis of twenty–first–century warfare Brave New War (2007). In Robb’s estimation, the absence of “life-and-death stakes” in the more limited wars of the twenty-first century fought in the glare of an omnipresent “global media” makes it more difficult to “transcend moral boundaries” in the conduct of war and imposes moral constraints that “radically limit military options” for Western armies.2
Such claims are not without foundation. The last major interstate war fought between “men and machinery” with battles, trenches, mass infantry assaults, bayonet charges, and fixed front lines was the eight-year Iran-Iraq War. Though the First Gulf War threatened to become a similar confrontation, it was ultimately decided by a massive aerial bombing campaign that caused surprisingly few casualties. Recently airpower has not been used to inflict the mass civilian casualties that characterized the total wars of the twentieth century. Technological innovations in weaponry have resulted in more precise and selective forms of destruction by militarily advanced states, and computerization offers new possibilities of cyber war that can target the enemy society and economy. An increasingly demilitarized and unmilitaristic public is—at least for now—unwilling to tolerate wars based on the mass slaughter of combatants or civilians. The guerrilla wars and insurgencies that now dominate twenty-first-century warfare have blurred the boundaries between combatants and civilians, and experience has shown time and again that such conflicts are not generally decided by battlefield confrontations, let alone by rampaging armies engaged in campaigns of strategic devastation against civilians.
Nevertheless, the notion of a general moral transformation in the conduct of war is exaggerated and likely premature. Many nineteenth-century governments and armies believed that the conduct of war had reached a new level of moral advancement, only to dispense with such assumptions in order to win the new wars they found themselves fighting. Today, many of the Union practices that so appalled Southerners during the Civil War are prohibited by a corpus of international humanitarian law and the accumulated laws of war that have developed since the Hague Conventions. Article 54 of Additional Protocol I of the 1977 Geneva Convention states:
It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies, and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive.
These prohibitions are still subject to exceptions and reinterpretations based on specific and contingent notions of military necessity, just as they were in Sherman’s time, and the ability to enforce them or punish those who break them still depends largely on who wins. Today many of the strategies and tactics that Sherman and his fellow commanders once applied remain intrinsic to war—forced removal of civilians, reprisals against noncombatants, starvation, devastation of infrastructure and industries, bombardment of towns and cities. The bloody denouement of the Sri Lankan Civil War in 2009, in which some forty thousand Tamil civilians were killed during the Sri Lankan army’s bombardment of the “safe zone” adjoining the Indian Ocean; the destruction of some 2,800 Darfuri villages by Sudanese government forces and Arab Janjaweed militias; the scorched-earth campaigns waged by various warlords, armies, and rebel groups in the civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo; the siege and bombardment of Sarajevo by the Bosnian Serb army; the destruction of Grozny by Russian forces in the Second Chechen War; the bombardment of civilian areas by the Syrian army in the ongoing civil war—all these episodes demonstrate the continued prevalence of what Hugo Slim calls “anti-civilian thinking and practices” in modern war.
In some cases, civilians may become indirect victims of military operations directed against armed opponents, but the proliferation of “wars among the people” means that civilians are likely to be deliberate objects of terror and intimidation. In 2006 Israel responded to a cross-border raid by Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon with a ground offensive in south Lebanon and aerial attacks throughout the whole country that were specifically intended to turn the Lebanese civilian population against Hezbollah. Airports, bridges, electrical facilities, ports, supermarkets, water-treatment plants, gas stations, and residential areas were targeted in seven thousand air strikes that reduced many neighborhoods to rubble, including the Hezbollah stronghold Dahiya in Beirut. The strategy of bombing civilians in response to armed attacks has a long-established tradition in Israeli military thinking, based on the belief that popular anger at the resulting destruction will be turned against Israel’s enemies rather than Israel itself.
These aspirations have never been realized, either in Lebanon or anywhere else, but Israel has never abandoned them. In 2008 Major General Gadi Eizenkot outlined a strategy known as the Dahiya doctrine. He promised, “What happened in the Dahiya Quarter of Beirut in 2006, will happen in every village from which shots are fired on Israel. We will use disproportionate force against it and we will cause immense damage and destruction. From our point of view these are not civilian villages but military bases.”3
In an article for Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies that same year, Dr. Gabriel Siboni, a colonel in the Israel Defense Forces Reserves, made the objectives of this strategy more explicit, declaring,
With an outbreak of hostilities, the IDF will need to act immediately, decisively, and with force that is disproportionate to the enemy’s actions and the threat it poses. Such a response aims at inflicting damage and meting out punishment to an extent that will demand long and expensive reconstruction processes. . . . Punishment must be aimed at decision makers and the power elite . . . attacks should both aim at Hezbollah’s military capabilities and should target economic interests and the centers of civilian power that support the organization.4
These principles also shaped Israel’s three assaults on the Gaza Strip, in 2008–9, 2011, and 2014. The idea that civilian populations bear responsibility for the armed groups in their midst and for the decisions of their governments was one of the essential assumptions of the hard-war policies of Sherman, Sheridan, and other Union generals and also of the strategic bombing of German and Japanese cities during World War II. In justifying the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden made the same argument:
The American people are the ones who pay the taxes which fund the planes that bomb us in Afghanistan, the tanks that strike and destroy our homes in Palestine, the armies which occupy our lands in the Arabian Gulf, and the fleets which ensure the blockade of Iraq. . . . Also the American army is part of the American people. . . . The American people are the ones who employ both their men and their women in the American Forces which attack us.5
The continued acceptance of this principle of collective responsibility by both state armies and “non-state actors” suggests that war has not changed as much as it might seem. If anything, the displacement or irrelevance of battle and combat as the defining components of war foretells amorphous conflicts in which civilians are likely to be the primary targets, whether by killing or simply intimidating them, or by destroying the economic and infrastructural basis of civilian society. Such conflicts may not be decided by a Shermanesque march, but Sherman’s willingness to wage war against civilians as well as armies continues to form an essential component of twenty-first-century warfare.
The world’s only superpower is no exception. Despite all the “humanitarian” considerations in the new American way of war, civilians have been the primary victims in all the wars that the U.S. military has fought since World War II. Even in the new era of “surgical” warfare, civilian casualties have outnumbered combatant deaths, whether as an immediate consequence of military operations or from longer-term effects on food production, access to health care, and damage to essential services and infrastructure. After watching the Grand Review of the Civil War Armies on May 24, 1865, the New York Herald’s editors looked forward to a new era of American military power, in which the U.S. military would establish republics everywhere and go on “till the soldiers of Grant, Sherman and Sheridan have saved the world as they saved the Union.”
Today the United States remains a global military colossus with a defense budget in 2013 of $716 billion, more than the next ten countries combined. Though proponents of American exceptionalism still regard America’s armed forces as an essential instrument for the world’s salvation, the country’s appetite for military intervention since World War II has left a trail of death, destruction, and chaos and produced very few positive results, either for the countries it set out to save or for the United States itself. Since the Bush administration launched its open-ended “war on terror” in 2001, American military power has been checked or neutralized by far less powerful opponents and has produced outcomes that are unlikely to produce the triumphal victory parades that once greeted Grant’s and Sherman’s armies.
This disjunction between stated aims and actual outcome raises questions about the legitimacy of these wars, the strategies that have been adopted to win them, and whether they were ever winnable in the first place. In theory, the U.S. military’s primary mission remains the defense of the nation, just as it was in Sherman’s time, but the wars of the twenty-first century have been “defensive” only by an extremely elastic and tortuous definition of defense, which in the case of Iraq was based entirely on false and essentially fabricated premises. Stripped of its “preemptive” and “preventive” rationalizations, Iraq was a war of choice and another product of a culture of militarism that has become deeply rooted in the American elite since World War II, one that sees enemies and threats everywhere and uses these perceptions to justify the endless projection of U.S. military power in pursuit of geopolitical advantage and ultimately unrealizable fantasies of absolute military supremacy.
Enraged by the humiliation of 9/11, the United States has embarked on a succession of ill-conceived wars in the new century that have contributed little to its national interest but have enriched the weapons manufacturers, defense contractors, private military companies, and logistics and military-services companies that have profited from them. At a time when the U.S. economy has yet to emerge from its worst financial crisis since the 1930s, when its infrastructure and cities are crumbling, when the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have drained the U.S. treasury of trillions of dollars, Dwight Eisenhower’s warning of the dangers to the American republic of a preponderant military-industrial complex appears particularly prescient.
Like the Civil War, the war on terror was seen by some of its more fervent supporters as a moral crusade that would regenerate a supposedly decadent and materialistic American society with a new sense of purpose and “moral clarity.” Since then these expectations have been eclipsed by Abu Ghraib, Haditha, the Stryker Brigade “kill teams,” and the killing spree of Sergeant Robert Bates. “Clarity” has been conspicuously absent from a sordid trail of violence that has produced thousands of dead and wounded non-combatants and record numbers of military and veteran suicides. In 2013, a war-weary Congress and American public forced the Obama administration to back away from another potential Middle Eastern war, in Syria. This reticence may be the beginning of a new preference for diplomacy rather than war, or it may be just a fad. The retired colonel and Vietnam veteran Andrew Bacevich has written that Americans are “seduced” by war. Today that attraction may be wearing off. Bacevich has warned that America must wean itself from its “addiction” to militarism and its “outsize martial pretensions” or face ruin.6
The memory of William Tecumseh Sherman can contribute to such rehabilitation. Sherman has often been cited as the great military realist. His most famous observation, “War is hell,” has become an endlessly repeated justification for those who want to wage war more hellishly. But Sherman was not a militarist and did not take war lightly. Though he once described war as “part of the grand machinery by which this world is governed,” he dreaded the Civil War and did not welcome it when it came. Today when so many Americans who’ve never been near a battlefield advocate new wars and pursue dreams of military omnipotence based on fantasies of immaculate destruction, Sherman’s actual attitude to war is more relevant than ever. In the Civil War’s aftermath, he described its glory as “moonshine” and denounced “those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated . . . [but] cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation.” That sentiment, too, is part of Sherman’s legacy.