War and the Dominance of the Dominance of the West

With war, as with everything else, it turns out that it’s all about the money. That is the ultimate lesson of history, as explained by historian Williamson Murray in this masterful, posthumously published book.

Murray argues that five successive “military-social revolutions” shaped the structure of war (p. 9):

· Creation of the modern state in the 16th century

· The Industrial Revolution, beginning c. 1750

· The French Revolution (1789)

· The American Civil War, combining the French Revolution’s mass mobilization with the Industrial Revolution’s mass production (1861)

· The scientific computing revolution (1944 to the present)

The book is filled with shrewd insights, wry observations, and the sort of quantitative “hard data” that delights most readers of military history. For example,

“Over six months in the early 1800s the 36,000 sailors of the Channel Fleet consumed ‘2925 tons of biscuit, 1,671 tons of beef, 835 tons of pork, 626 tons of pease, 313 tons of oatmeal, 156 tons of butter, 313 tons of cheese and 32 tuns of beer.’” (page 89)

and,

“By 1865, the US Military Railroad was the largest rail organization in the world . . . . It controlled 2,600 miles of track over which it ran 433 locomotives and 6,605 cars.” (p. 111)

For most readers, the section of the book dealing with WWII and recent conflicts will be of greatest interest, and these are superbly executed. Murray pulls no punches in his evaluation of command decisions on both sides:

“The pursuit of oil in the Caucasus was always a pipe dream. The Germans never possessed the means to repair the damage the Soviets inflicted on captured oil fields, or any way to transport oil to the Reich.” (p. 294)

and,

“The idea of driving armored divisions up a single road open to attack by heavy enemy forces from both sides was nonsensical…MARKET GARDEN represented a combination of arrogance, incompetence and British military culture.” (p. 307)

The chapter on the Cold War, titled “The War That Never Was,” offers concise summaries of the Korean, Vietnam and Arab-Israeli wars, and ends with this grim conclusion about our Afghan and Iraq defeats:

“ . . . the conventional victories of 2001 and 2003, which seemed so impressive, mutated into political and guerrilla wars for which the American military had little preparation and to which it proved astonishingly slow to adapt. In its conduct of those wars, the United States repeated every mistake it had made in Vietnam.” (p. 370)

The book’s extensive Notes are not just source references, but often provide thoughtful commentary, and are worth reading. The book is marred by a few typos, mostly spelling errors in personal and place names. One would have expected more careful copy editing from Yale University Press. The numerous maps, by Bill Nelson, are uniformly good. Any college level course on military history, would do well to adopt The Dark Path as a required reading.

Williamson "Wick" Murray (1941 – 2023) was an American historian. He authored numerous works on history and strategic studies. A graduate of Yale, he served in the US Air Force, and taught at several war colleges and service academies. He was professor emeritus of history at The Ohio State University from 2012 until his death in 2023.

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Our Reviewer: Mike Markowitz is an historian and wargame designer. He writes a monthly column for CoinWeek.Com and is a member of the ADBC (Association of Dedicated Byzantine Collectors). His previous reviews in modern history include To Train the Fleet for War: The U.S. Navy Fleet Problems, 1923-1940, D-Day Encyclopedia: Everything You Want to Know About the Normandy Invasion, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War, Loyal Sons: Jews in the German Army in the Great War, Holocaust versus Wehrmacht: How Hitler’s "Final Solution" Undermined the German War Effort, Governments-in-Exile and the Jews During the Second World War,‘ Admiral Gorshkov, Comrades Betrayed: Jewish World War I Veterans under Hitler, Rome – City in Terror: The Nazi Occupation 1943–44, A Raid on the Red Sea: The Israeli Capture of the Karine A, Strike from the Sea: The Development and Deployment of Strategic Cruise Missiles since 1934, 100 Greatest Battles, Battle for the Island Kingdom, Abraham Lincoln and the Bible, From Ironclads to Dreadnoughts: The Development of the German Battleship, 1864-1918, Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City, The Demon of Unrest, Next War: Reimagining How We Fight, Habsburg Sons: Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Army, and Hitler's Atomic Bomb.

Note: The Dark Path is also available in e-editions.

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