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[Quotations from The Prince in this post are from the H. Mansfield translation, Univ. of Chicago Press, 2nd ed. 1998.]
Machiavelli didn't like mercenaries, something that is evident both from The Prince and (I see from a quick glance) The Discourses, where he writes that good soldiers are the sinews of war, not gold, and that it "is as impossible for good soldiers to fail to find gold as it is for gold to find good soldiers" (Penguin ed., 1970, p.303). [See also his The Art of War.]
In chapter 13 of The Prince, Machiavelli continues a lecture against the use of mercenaries begun in the immediately preceding chapters. Among other things he criticizes King Louis XI of France (reigned 1461-1483) for his reliance on Swiss pikemen:
...when he [Louis XI] gave reputation to the Swiss, he debased all his own arms.... For after they [the French] had become accustomed to fighting with Swiss, they did not think they could win without them. From this it follows that French are not enough against Swiss and without Swiss do not try against anyone else. Thus, the armies of France have been mixed, part mercenary and part their own. These arms all together are much better than simple auxiliary or simple mercenary arms, but much inferior to one's own. (pp.56-7)
In referring to French weakness, Machiavelli was thinking of a then-recent event: the French "having been forced out of Italy in 1512" (according to an editor's note in the Skinner & Price edition of The Prince, Cambridge U.P., p.50). However, Machiavelli does not mention that Louis XI largely owed the Swiss his victory over Charles the Bold of Burgundy at the battle of Nancy in 1477, a battle that altered the geopolitical landscape of western Europe. [Correction/clarification: It was not really "his" (i.e., Louis XI's) victory; see the discussion in the comment thread.] Machiavelli says that "a wise prince...has preferred to lose with his own [arms] than to win with others, since he judges it no true victory that is acquired with alien arms" (Mansfield trans., p.55). Louis XI presumably would have begged to differ.
Postscript: The problem for the Swiss mercenaries, according to Michael Howard (in War in European History, p.28), was their slowness to adapt to changing conditions of war: "...as shot became increasingly important and formations increasingly flexible the Swiss pike phalanxes became left behind like dinosaurs unable to adapt to a new environment, as much of a curiosity in the history of infantry as the English bowman of the later Middle Ages."
Btw, what would Machiavelli have said about how to combat ISIS, or about any other current issues? Is this question even worth asking?
David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It. Houghton Mifflin, 2007. 420 pp. (including notes, bibliography, and index).
Historians and social scientists do not agree, and likely never will, about when (or how) certain key features of the modern world originated. One such feature or phenomenon that eludes universally accepted definition and a universally accepted date of origin is "total war." International-relations scholars these days refer to "major war" or "hegemonic war" but don't use the phrase "total war" much, although Hans Morgenthau had used it, indeed had devoted a chapter to it, in Politics Among Nations. At any rate, for most people the phrase "total war" brings to mind the world wars of the twentieth century; however, a good case can be made that the kind of war that engulfs whole societies was invented in the era of the French Revolution. Although various writers have made this point before, in The First Total War David Bell explores it in detail, deftly combining cultural, intellectual, political, and military history.
The intensification of warfare during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic period reflected, Bell maintains, a change in the prevailing "culture of war," from one that assumed war was an unexceptional, normal phenomenon to one that viewed war in apocalyptic terms: "A vision of war as utterly exceptional -- as a final, cleansing paroxysm of violence -- did not simply precede the total war of 1792-1815. It helped, decisively, to bring it about" (p.316). He argues that a mindset that demonizes enemies and presents conflicts in stark good-vs.-evil terms continues to affect the way Western societies prosecute wars. Clearly this argument is influenced, perhaps overly influenced, by the rhetoric of the G.W. Bush administration, during which The First Total War was written. Bell refers to Carl Schmitt a few times, and those who see the 'war on terror' as a 'Schmittian moment' will find support for their position here. The book's value, however, lies perhaps not so much in its main thesis as in the wide range that it covers, from works of philosophy to poems and paintings to rhetoric to battles and strategy, and in its effort to draw connections among these. Most of the book's detail cannot be covered in this post, unfortunately.
***
The opening chapter describes the aristocratic and relatively restrained character of eighteenth-century warfare (the key word being relatively). The nobles who dominated European officer corps before the French Revolution viewed their behavior on the battlefield as a kind of elaborate performance, similar in that respect to their behavior on the dueling field, on the dance floor, and (in certain cases) in the bedroom.
According to Bell, this aristocratic ethos took war to be a normal, ordinary part of existence. During the Enlightenment that assumption came under a dual intellectual assault: on one hand, from various philosophers who saw war as irrational, primitive, and likely to disappear as commerce, civilization, and morality progressed; on the other hand, from writers such as Wilhelm von Humboldt, who called war "one of the healthiest phenomena for the cultivation of the human race" (p.82). The eighteenth-century nobility generally saw war as neither primitive (in d'Holbach's or Condorcet's sense) nor healthy (in Humboldt's sense), but as something one regularly did between May and October (see p.25). The two-pronged critique of that view of war gave rise to what Bell calls "a new culture of war in embryo, one grounded precisely in the assumption of war's exceptionality" (p.82). Add the idealization of the classical (Spartan and/or Roman) ideal of the citizen-soldier, as extolled by Rousseau and Mably and then by various orators in the Revolutionary assemblies, and the ground was prepared for a new style of warfare.
Revolutionary and Napoleonic France led the way in the adoption of this new unrestrained and often brutal style of war, while the other European powers lagged behind. And in the case of the counterrevolution in the Vendée and its violent suppression, described vividly in chapter 5, the French turned the brutality on each other.
As for how and why the Revolutionary wars were launched in the first place, Bell emphasizes the belligerence of the faction known as the Girondins, and especially Jacques-Pierre Brissot. They thought war would "regenerate" the Revolution. While some scholars have seen France more as a victim of Austria and Prussia in 1792 than as an aggressor, Bell writes (pp.110-111): "The apparent weakness and chaos within [France] certainly tempted Austria and Prussia to behave more aggressively...but.... [w]hat proved decisive was that an influential group of French radicals [i.e. the Girondins] began to push for aggressive international action, in apparent contradiction of the declaration of peace [by the National Assembly in 1790]."
After almost 200 pages, Bell turns to Napoleon, discussing Napoleon's character and the cult of personality that he fostered, as well as Napoleon's campaigns. Even as French forces' often brutal suppression of insurrections in various parts of Europe (notably Spain) blurred or eliminated the civilian/combatant distinction, within France there was "a growing cleavage between military and civilian spheres" (p.217). The legitimacy of civilian authority was eroded by crises, factionalism, and incompetence, while the citizen army's main loyalty increasingly went to its generals and to Napoleon in particular. And although Napoleon as emperor was not exactly a military dictator, maintaining a civilian administrative apparatus and keeping or institutionalizing certain features of the Revolution, the influence of militarism on society and culture increased (p.243). The casualty figures on all sides in the Napoleonic wars (not only from battle but, significantly, from disease) still have the capacity to shock, lending some credence to Metternich's claim in his memoirs that Napoleon told him: "I grew up on the battlefield. A man like me does not give a shit about the lives of a million men" (p.251; see end-note on p.351). Yet, as Bell remarks in the epilogue, Napoleon's legend has survived the gore for which Napoleon was responsible: "Julien Sorel [the protagonist of Stendhal's novel The Red and the Black] stands for millions of real men and women who have breathed in [the legend's] intoxicating fumes" (p.307).
***
Not all historians are inclined to emphasize the discontinuities between the pre-1789 and post-1789 worlds as strongly as Bell does, nor will everyone be fully persuaded by his attempt to connect the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars to the early twenty-first century. Some will be irked by his dismissal of "trend analysis" as applied to armed conflict (p.315). Bell's stress on the causal role of ideas, rhetoric, and ideology will be congenial or not, depending at least partly on the reader's prior commitments. But whether one cottons to the main arguments or not, this book is well worth reading for its engaging narrative backed by solid research. Students of international relations will find much of interest in The First Total War, and they may find it worth comparing to the approaches of political scientists who have dealt with the same period, such as Stephen Walt (in Revolution and War) or Mlada Bukovansky (in Legitimacy and Power Politics).
We've been talking about, among other things, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and here's a passage from John W. Dower's Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq (Norton/New Press, pb, 2011) in which he lists a number of (to use an inappropriately antiseptic word) factors:
It is possible to see a terrible logic in the use of the bombs that is unique to the circumstances of that moment and at the same time not peculiar at all. This logic still begins with (1) ending the war and saving American lives. It no longer ends there, however, but extends to additional considerations, including the following: (2) fixation on deploying overwhelming force, as opposed to diplomatic or other less destructive alternatives including, most controversially, an unwillingness to back off from demanding Japan's unconditional surrender; (3) power politics in the emerging Cold War, notably playing the new weapon as a "master card," as Stimson put it, to intimidate the Soviet Union in eastern Europe as well as Asia; (4) domestic political considerations, in which using the bomb was deemed necessary to prevent partisan post-hostilities attacks on Truman...for wasting taxpayers' money on a useless project -- and simultaneously to build support for postwar nuclear and military projects; (5) scientific "sweetness" and technological imperatives -- coupled with (6) the technocratic kinetics of an enormous machinery of war -- which combined to give both developing and deploying new weaponry a vigorous life of its own; (7) the sheer exhilaration and aestheticism of unrestrained violence, phenomena not peculiar to modern times but peculiarly compelling in an age of spectacular destructiveness; (8) revenge, in this instance exacted collectively on an entire population in retaliation for Pearl Harbor and Japan's wartime atrocities; and (9) "idealistic annihilation," whereby demonstrating the appalling destructiveness of an atomic bomb on real, human targets was rationalized as essential to preventing future war, or at the very least future nuclear war. (p.223)
Those interested in military issues may find this piece by Peter Mansoor (in the Jan./Feb. Foreign Affairs) worth reading.
Not directly related but of possible interest: Gates's speech to West Point cadets; link here.
This interesting article by James Glanz (hat tip: HC) is also a bit of a mess. Some historians now think the English were not quite so outnumbered at the Battle of Agincourt (Oct. 25, 1415) as has long been assumed. Other historians disagree. Only military history buffs are going to be able to get really worked up about this.
The article's messiness comes from another point: the alleged similarities between the Hundred Years War and contemporary counterinsurgency conflicts. Really? Yes, like, riilly. I'm no expert on medieval warfare, but I think this kind of analogy has to be approached with extreme caution. The article mentions Conrad Crane, military historian and lead author of the not-entirely-uncontroversial revised U.S. Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency field manual (see the symposium on it in Perspectives on Politics, June 2008), "some of [whose] own early historical research involved a comparison of strategic bombing campaigns with attacks on civilians by rampaging armies during the Hundred Years’ War, when England tried and ultimately failed to assert control over continental France." I haven't read Crane's work, but I assume he points out that attacks on civilians in the Hundred Years War were partly motivated by the fact that the armies, and the roving bands of armed men that hung around and sometimes supplemented the armies and were sometimes indistinguishable from them, needed to seize food and provisions from local civilians to continue campaigning. (There was also no doubt a good deal of rape and pillage as well.)
Yes, as Mr. Glanz suggests, the Hundred Years War could be seen as a kind of civil war into which an outside power "intervened," except the "outside" power -- England -- had long claimed dynastic title to, and in part controlled, sections of France. Moreover, the Burgundians were not just a "faction," as this article says; Burgundy was a separate polity, distinct from the kingdom of France, from the late 14th century, and a very powerful one well into the 15th century. Do these historical nitpicks affect the contention that there are parallels between the Hundred Years War and contemporary counterinsurgencies? I'm going to duck that for now. Those who are interested can ponder the question at their leisure. (And see also Alexander Downes, Targeting Civilians in War, which I mentioned previously in a comment thread here.)
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