Since the early years of the current century, scholars have turned their attention to the American practice of armed conflict and its consequences for the constitutional order. One striking aspect of this practice has been its persistence. To be sure, most conflicts have been “little wars” of various types, and not the grander wars that hold a more prominent place in the popular imagination. Still, one scholar has suggested that warfare has become a “way of life” in America. With War●Time, Mary Dudziak makes a material contribution to this growing area of scholarship.
As the title suggests, the book reflects on the relation between armed conflict and people's conceptions of time. This permits Dudziak to ask penetrating questions about the character and function of “wartime.” She pursues these questions at the micro level (e.g., how soldiers experience time in zones of battle), at an intermediate level (e.g., what policies the nation may adopt in times of war), and from on high (e.g., how war marks history into periods or eras). It is the third level that incites the book's constitutive questions. If war “breaks time into pieces,” what happens when the practice of war is essentially unceasing? How does continual war affect the practice of politics, the character of law, and the scope of governmental power? What difference does it make that the character of war itself is changing?
The introductory chapter is a meditation on the notion of time in the contexts of war and peace. Dudziak offers some interesting insights here—like the cultural conflict stoked by the adoption of daylight savings time as a wartime measure. The larger and more abstract discussion about the nature of time—Is it linear or cyclical? Is it natural or socially constructed?—is less successful, in my view. Still, her bottom line here seems right: that people generally view war to be an exceptional condition, perhaps enhancing governmental power, but bounded in time. How to square this perception with practices that make warfare continual? To get at the concrete implications of this question, Dudziak offers three discrete chapters, each of which presents a useful case study that not only illuminates the larger question, but also permits her to ask topical questions about different times and types of war. Each chapter also presents one or more judicial decisions that illustrate the ways in which law wrestles with questions and conflicts arising from particular practices and policies of war.
The first of these studies focuses on World War II. Dudziak's question is simple: When was World War II? Her answer is more complicated. For the United States, the war neither began with the bombing of Pearl Harbor nor ended with armistice. As is now widely understood, the ground for war was laid as Franklin Roosevelt maneuvered diplomatically and politically to prepare the country to enter what would become brutal conflicts in Europe, the Pacific, and Africa. As is less well understood, the war persisted as a legal matter well after 1945. The Supreme Court, for example, lent its legitimating sanction to Congress's invocation of war powers to regulate post-war rents in the United States. Thus, Dudziak shows that the boundaries of wartime are fuzzier than we might recognize. She also illustrates how even this “good war” foreshadowed a tension between governmental power and civil liberty.
The second narrative chapter focuses on the Cold War. Just what kind of war was it? She notes how the label and rhetoric of war came to underwrite an ideological and geopolitical conflict that was punctuated with spying and espionage, regional wars, and the rise of a national-security state. The Cold War was significant in four ways. First, although certain civil liberties were curtailed (with the Supreme Court's blessing), others expanded. Why? The answer is partly traceable to the influence of national security and international politics. Second, although the Supreme Court struck down President Truman's seizure of the steel mills, the conflict itself showed how closely connected the interests of the armaments industry and the nation's government had become. Third, the Cold War was conducted under social and economic conditions of superficial normalcy. Finally, the regional “hot” war in Korea marked the beginning of permanent war.
If the first and second cases are directly and indirectly about conflicts between nation-states, the third, involving the “war on terror,” is different. How to conduct—how to think about—a war against non-state actors? One trait that the war on terror has borrowed from the Cold War is its ideological heart. The enemy is an “ism,” although there is disagreement about how to characterize it. But this new war is unbounded both temporally and spatially. And “terror” has even provided cover for the national-security state to turn its attention inward to American domestic life and citizens.
If I had to criticize, it would be for Dudziak to do still more than she has done. Her legal analysis, for example, could be beefed up in places. More important, in my view, she largely overlooks a case that's critical to her narrative: the war in Southeast Asia. This conflict marked the end of the policy of using citizen-soldiers to fight our conflicts. Henceforth, the country would employ professional, volunteer forces. This move would help preserve a semblance of normalcy. But in more ways than one, it also severed an important link between armed conflict and the armed forces on the one hand and the civic polity on the other. The implications of this separation are enormous, and some are still unknown. Despite these quibbles, this small book makes large and profound points in perceptive ways. And the writing is so felicitous that even nonscholars can enjoy and profit from it.
