Introduction

Mark Neocleous

For the War Machine rolls on, never stopping, never resting, never sleeping, on and on, always rising, always consuming, always devouring. On and on, the War Machine rolls on, across the fields and through the forests, on and on, over looted house and over stripped corpse, on and on, and from severed hand into bloody hands, forever-bloody hands, money passes, money changes, money grows.

David Peace, Occupied City (2009)

In 2005 yet another book was published on that perennial theme loved by military theorists, strategic thinkers and IR scholars: ‘the art of war’. Called The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World, the book was written by a British General with 40 years’ experience in the British army and as NATO Supreme Commander, and was published as a cheap paperback to reach a wide audience. It begins with a stark statement: ‘war no longer exists’. Conflict, confrontation and combat continue, but ‘the entire concept of war … has changed’. It sounds like a provocation, a neat rhetorical device with which to open a book on war, until one realises that the author is far from alone in making such a claim. A report on the lessons of the Kosovo campaign published by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington claims that'it may be that one of the lessons of modern war is that war can no longer be called war’.

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Introduction

Summary

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