Sir Hew Strachan: Is the nature of war changing?

In "On War", Clausewitz distinguished between war’s character and war’s nature. Its character reflects its context, social and economic as well as political, and changes over time. Its nature is enduring. War, in Clausewitz’s understanding, is both reciprocal and violent. Since 1850 industrialisation and technological change have confronted war with continuous and incremental change. Two recent developments, the employment of unmanned weapons systems and of cyber, seem to some to have the capacity to remove reciprocity (in the case of drones) and violence (if pure cyber war were to occur) from war. So have we reached the point where changes in war’s character have the potential to change its nature?

Hew Strachan, FBA, FRSE, Hon. D. Univ (Paisley) has been Wardlaw Professor of International Relations at the University of St Andrews since 2015. He is a Life Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he taught from 1975 to 1992, before becoming Professor of Modern History at Glasgow University from 1992 to December 2001. He was Chichele Professor of the History of War at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of All Souls College 2002-15 (where he is now an Emeritus Fellow), and Director of the Oxford Programme on the Changing Character of War 2003-2012. He has been heavily involved with the preparations for the centenary of the First World War, serving on the UK and Scotland national advisory committees and on the Comité Scientifique of the Mission du Centenaire in France. In 2016 he was awarded the Pritzker Prize for Lifetime Achievement for Military Writing. His publications include The Politics of the British Army (1997); The First World War: To Arms (2001); Clausewitz’s On War: a Biography (2007); The First World War: a New Illustrated History (2003); and The Direction of War (2013).

Photo: Det Norske Videnskaps-Akademi/Thomas B. Eckhoff