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This is the third of three chapters on the three traditions of war, and introduces the republican tradition, which is represented partially through the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, who, along with Pasquale Paoli and Tadeusz Kosciuszko, advanced a unified system of the republican good life and war in conjunction with the laws of war. The way in which this tradition developed in the nineteenth century is depicted. The different sections of the chapter are: The Republican Tradition of War; Republicanism; The Three Founders [Rousseau, Paoli and Kosciuszko]; Rousseau’s Republican War; Rousseau, Paoli and Kosciuszko; The Nature of Man and the State of Nature: Rousseau contra Hobbes and Grotius; The Nature of War; Liberty; Government, Society, and the Republic; Republic; Patriotism and Nationalism; Republican Nationalism; Republican Founders of the Tradition of War: Paoli and Kosciuszko; The Republican Tradition in the Nineteenth Century; The Nineteenth-Century Republican Tradition of War; and The Development of the Republican Tradition of War.

This chapter discusses Clausewitz's understanding of the nature of war. He argued that the nature of war was complex and variable, not static or immutable. It was made up of a trinity of forces: hostility, chance, and purpose.

Having explored Clausewitz's concept of the nature of war so far in this book, this chapter applies it to the contemporary war on terror. The wondrous trinity — the core of the Clausewitzian nature of war — provides a useful framework for understanding the nature of the war on terror.

Many of the theories on war in the information age predict substantial changes to the character of war. Should these changes come to pass, the very nature of war could be transformed. This could have significant implications for Clausewitz's work, which is regarded as the literary manifestation of the nature of war. However, the nature of war is far more robust than many modern theorists suggest. This robustness emanates from the core elements of strategy, which ensure that war remains an uncertain, non-linear human activity as Clausewitz identified.

Clausewitz's On War aroused controversy from its first publication in 1832-4, and the validity of its interpretation of war's nature was challenged in the wake of both world wars and in the Cold War. Those who condemn Clausewitz today as the exponent of an outdated form of inter-state war therefore form part of a familiar tradition. They are however guilty of reading Clausewitz's text selectively. Because he used dialectics as a means to understanding war, he himself provided counters to many of his best known propositions.

Since the end of the Cold War, the status of Clausewitz's On War as the pre-eminent text on its subject has been challenged, most notably by Martin van Creveld, John Keegan, and Mary Kaldor. Their criticisms have rested on assumptions about the perceived changes in war's character since the end of the Cold War, but they have not always distinguished between what is genuinely new and what seems to be new. Moreover, their reading of On War has itself been unduly shaped by the considerations which dominated in the Cold War. The chapters in this book are based on a more inclusive reading of the original text.

This chapter analyzes Clausewitz's arguments about the instrumental nature of war, and considers the degree to which political aims and objectives may guide military operations. Clausewitz's ideas in this area have not lost their saliency under modern conditions, while some forms of violence may be more amenable to instrumental analysis than others. An understanding of military aims and objectives, while essential to strategic clarity, does not afford complete intellectual mastery over the multifaceted reality of war, nor does it guarantee strategic success.

Changes in the nature of warfare are traced from the 1945–89 era of strategic stability through the Balkans imbroglio of the 1990s to the advent of the new threat of global terrorism marked by 9/11. The current fashion, inaugurated by Kaldor and Smith, to talk of ‘new wars’ that have replaced industrial inter‐state war, is criticized. War is a protean monster that regularly changes its nature. It is mistaken to suppose that the latest protean mutation is the form war will henceforth take. Recent trends, including the shift from wars of necessity to wars of choice, have underlined the importance of both moral clarity on why war is being undertaken and of virtuous behaviour by all involved in its conduct. Morality not just provides a necessary external constraint on war but may also furnish both the ground for undertaking military operations and a vital internal tool for their successful conduct.

The third chapter was written after listening to several ground officers and historians argue that the nature of war was unchanging and immutable. One stated that war as experienced by an ancient Greek hoplite was the same as for any soldier today in Iraq or Afghanistan. That statement bears examination. Such attitudes are almost always expressed by those who know only of land warfare—which they equate to war in general. For sailors, aviators, space or cyber warfare practitioners, the experience of war is fundamentally different, especially today. New methods, but also old ones too often ignored, clearly demonstrate that war is indeed mutable.

This chapter marks the gendered division of memoirs and testimonies that have been attempted in this book. This is based on the assumption that women and men experienced the war differently and found themselves in different situations and roles. When they become the author of their own stories, the gendered nature of war itself becomes clear. While memoirs are written by middle class women, testimonials are more diverse. This chapter also studies in detail the work done on victims of wartime rape (birangonas), custodial torture, and sexual violence in Bangladesh. Worls of authors such as Jahanara Imam and Guhathakurta are examined. While certain aspects are problematized, the chapter ends with the testimony of Firdausi Priyobhashini taken and translated by the author herself, pointing towards what is meant when one talks of the unfinished and unquiet commemorations of 1971.

This chapter addresses the question of what counterinsurgency (COIN) is from a practical military outlook. It questions whether COIN constitutes a set of techniques that may be exercised irrespective of time and place, or if it is more contingent in its application to diverse conflicts. COIN remains nontransparent in both theoretical and practical terms, despite establishing the dominant view influencing both military planning and the interventions of the major Western powers, as well as being a vital concept steering military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The chapter demonstrates that the considerable amount of COIN theorizing reduces the highly unpredictable nature of war to a series of techniques, the application of which are deemed reasonable whenever a state meets a conflict that may be defined as an insurgency.

This chapter summarizes the main contentions of the book. This begins with an examination of the enduring role of reciprocal risk in the nature of war, followed by its more specific role in the moral justifications for battlefield violence. The historical challenge of asymmetry will also be examined. The chapter will then outline the theoretical and empirical challenge of radically asymmetric violence. It argues that in both significance and implications, the moral tension generated by the UAV-exclusive violence of the United States is qualitatively distinct from previous episodes of asymmetry. The chapter concludes by exploring the potential of radical asymmetry to undermine essential restraints between warring parties.

Even and Maoz note that by its nature, war is waged to achieve goals, and as such, there is a continuum of victory to defeat rather than a win/lose dichotomy. They discuss the varied aims Israel had when entering the Yom Kippur War, from their goals prior to the 1973 war, to their practical goals for the Yom Kippur War, as well as Egypt’s objectives. At the war’s end in 1973, both Egypt and Israel believed, justifiably, that they had won a great victory because they fought for two separate but related goals. Israel sought to remove Egypt from the circle of war, and Egypt hoped to regain territory it had lost in 1967. Even and Maoz conclude that, ultimately, everyone won the war.

This chapter discusses the just war theory, or the proportionality of conditions that morally justifies certain acts during a war so long as these acts are not excessive. These proportionality conditions are generally divided into two categories, the jus ad bellum conditions and the jus in bello conditions, which concern the resort and means to fight the war, respectively. These conditions provide the basis of weighing one act of war over the other, in order to determine whether or not the relevant evils or relevant goods inherent in the act are normally proportional or otherwise. Of course, judgments of proportionality are often indeterminate due to the complex nature of war. However, this should not discourage one from applying the proportionality theory—one can still make determinate judgments where it is clear what the relevant goods and evils are.