Part III - Post-total warfare, 1945–2005

Summary

Introduction to Part III

World War I was widely processed as the war to end war. World War II, like the proverbial second marriage, privileged hope over experience. Dennis Showalter’s contribution to this section establishes the limits of stabilization in the contexts of occupation during and after World War II. More was necessary. Some combination of global free trade, Marxism–Leninism, and fear of nuclear Armageddon had to encourage the lion and the lamb, if not to lie down together, at least to settle non-violently and preferably through the United Nations, any debates about the dinner menu.

The succeeding decades have in fact been another age of war. The worst possibility has so far been averted. The “Doomsday Clock,” which has been kept since 1947 by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, started at seven minutes to midnight. By 1953 it was at two minutes. In 1991, it was reset to twelve minutes. By 2007 it had crept up to five. The pattern itself is hardly comforting – and arguably less so in an enduring context of protean conflict: global in scope, comprehensive in scale, and kaleidoscopic in conduct.

While war since 1945 defies facile generalizations, it can be addressed in three contexts: method, material, and mentality. Method – the how of wa-rmaking – has been governed by the asymmetry that shaped initial understandings on both sides of the Cold War in the late 1940s. The west believed that the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies were dominant in numbers of everything – divisions, tanks, and aircraft.