Prepared Remarks of Colonel (Ret) Bruce B.G. Clarketo be delivered to the students of the Middlesex School

Concord, Massachusetts, September 10, 2008

On War

I am privileged to be here today and share with you insights into that greatest and most costly ofhuman endeavors – war.As I look around at the names on the walls surrounding us this morning I am poignantly remindedthat the best and brightest of Middlesex, and all of America, have held our freedoms so dear thatthey were willing to give the final measure of sacrifice – their very lives – in maintaining thosefreedoms for you and I. I dedicate this talk today to those brave men and women and call uponyou to remember the proud heritage of unsurpassed commitment that goes before you. In theirdays they understood what General Douglas MacArthur meant when he said that there is nosubstitute for victory. As war and its causes have evolved over time since MacArthur uttered thatphrase what it means to win may have changed, or at least the understanding of what victory is,may have changed.

Dynamics of War

In 1968, as a young Captain, just having returned from Vietnam, I studied the causes of war as afocus in my graduate studies at UCLA. Since then I have looked at not only the causes of war,but what it means to win a war. Why do we go to war and what constitutes victory? These arethe two questions before us today.Today I join you not only as a former warrior, but as the son of a warrior (LTC Arthur F. Gorham),who gave his life while leading his airborne soldiers in Sicily against a determined foe at thebeginning of the effort to rid Italy and Europe of the scourge of Fascism’s two evil dictatorships. Iam proud to be an American and proud to be an American with a military history of service,commitment and sacrifice.Today I hope to put war not only into the perspective of a warrior, but also in the perspective of astudent and a strategist. I also hope to define what the meaning of victory might be. Or at least toframe your future studies on this important question.

Why do nations fight? Why do people fight? Many theories:

The history of war runs parallel with the history of mankind. As long as there have been urbanpopulations of people those people have found cause to battle. Stones and arrows have beenreplaced by highly sophisticated weapons such as the precision munitions of today that can beguided from remote terminals and have a near 100% chance of hitting their targets, but the storyis the same – conflict that cannot be resolved politically or socially becomes the rallying cry to donthe armor of war.Nobody likes war. Least of all the soldier – he is the one that gives and suffers the most. But warwill always be with us and when we are called upon to defend ourselves, our freedom, ourfamilies, our way of life then we must be ready to take up the sword to protect the very things wehold dear.

There has always been much discussion on what comprises a ‘legitimate war’.International law recognizes only two cases for a legitimate war:1. Wars of defense: when one nation is attacked by an aggressor, it is considered legitimatefor a nation to defend itself against the aggressor.2. Wars sanctioned by the UN Security Council: when the United Nations as a whole actsas a body against a certain nation. Examples include various peacekeeping operations aroundthe world. Actually, some believe that Operation Iraqi Freedom was also sanctioned by the UN—the present mandate for forces in Iraq runs out at the end of this year.However, international law really only applies when the states choose to have it apply. And theabove provisions say nothing about non-state actors as we see in Al Qaeda, the Taliban andHezbollah.The studies of what causes wars are extensive and I only hope to scratch the surface in bringingthem into perspective.

Psychological Causes:

Psychologists have argued that human beings are inherently violent. While this violence isrepressed in normal society, it needs the occasional outlet provided by war. This combines withother notions such as displacement, where a person transfers his grievances into bias and hatredagainst other ethnic groups, racial groups, nations or ideologies. While these theories may havesome explanatory value about why wars occur, they do not explain when or how they occur. Nordo they explain the existence of certain human cultures completely devoid of war.John Stuart Mill a liberal English philosopher, when thinking about the American RevolutionaryWar, put this view into perspective when he wrote:

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

Sociological Causes:

Sociology has divided into a number of schools. One is the Primacy of Domestic Politics Schoolwhich sees war as the product of domestic conditions, with only the target of aggression beingdetermined by international realities. The Spanish American War might be an example of this.Some have argued that jingoism (a national fervor over the sinking of the battleship Maine in theharbor of Havana) caused the US to invade Cuba. Others would apply some form ofexpansionism to explain that war.This differs from the traditional primacy of foreign politics approach that argues it is the decisionsof statesmen and the geopolitical situation between nation states that leads to war. There werenot great tensions between Spain and the United States in 1898. And I am not sure that we reallywanted to rule the Philippines.

Demographic Theories:

Demographic theories can be grouped into two classes, Malthusian, which was a theoryespoused by an English economist and geographer who lived in the period between 1766 and1833, and youth bulge theories.

Malthusian theories see expanding population and scarce resources as a source of violentconflict. Nations must expand their resource base –the British Empire and the Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere of the late 1930s are examples of this explanation. The Japanese felt that theyneeded to expand their control of natural resources in Asia. To do this they needed to keep theUnited States from denying this expansion. The way to buy time to consolidate the Co-ProsperitySphere was to destroy the US Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor.The youth bulge theory suggests that wars may break out when 30 to 40 percent of the males ofa nation belong to the "fighting age" groups from 15 to 29 years of age. This theory argues thatmany "angry young men" find themselves in a situation that tends to escalate their adolescentanger into violence. They are:

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Being demographically superfluous,

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Being out of work or stuck in a menial job, and

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Having no access to a legal sex life before a career can earn them enough to provide fora family.The combination of these stress factors, it is argued, usually leads to one of six different forms ofbehavior:

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Violent Crime

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Emigration ("non violent colonization")

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Rebellion or putsch (?)

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Civil war and/or revolution

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Genocide (to take over the positions of the slaughtered)

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Conquest (violent colonization, frequently including genocide abroad)Much of what is happening in Africa and parts of the middle-east might be said to fit into thismodel—sorta. I say sorta, because I am not sure that history will ever record a single cause of awar. However, for example, there is a body of literature that argues that the reason that YasserArafat wanted to keep the Palestinians in refugee camps was to create these angry young men.

Economic Theories:

Another school of thought argues that war can be seen as an outgrowth of economic competitionin a chaotic and competitive international system. In this view wars begin as a pursuit of newmarkets, of natural resources, and of wealth. This theory is most often advocated by those to theleft of the political spectrum, who argue such wars serve the interests of the wealthy but arefought by the poor.Obviously Marxist theories fit perfectly here. And this school is very close to the Malthusiantheory. Marx argued that elites bought off the workers with the gains from new markets, but thatwhen these new markets were no longer enough that the workers would arise and overthrow thegovernment.

Rationalist Theories:

Rationalist theories of war assume that both sides to a potential war are rational, which is to saythat each side wants to get the best possible outcome for itself for the least possible loss of lifeand property to its own side. Wars happen when one group of people or organization perceivesthat the benefits that can be obtained are greater than the cost. This can happen for a variety ofreasons:

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To protect national pride by preventing the loss of territory