Martin L. Van Creveld

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About Martin L. Van Creveld
Martin van Creveld is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s leading experts on military history and strategy. He is the author of 27 books, which between them have been published in 20 languages. The best known one is The Transformation of War, which back in 1991 predicted the ongoing shift from large-scale conventional warfare to insurgency and terrorism.
In addition to military affairs, van Creveld has written extensively about political history (The Rise and Decline of the State), Israel history, American history, and women’s history.
He lives near Jerusalem with his wife, Dvora Lewy.
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Blog postAs many readers of this blog know, NATO and the US have been pressing Switzerland to abandon its long-standing policy of neutrality and join them in supporting the good, blameless, democratic Ukrainians against the big bad Russians. Conversely many Swiss … Continue reading →
The post The Other Side of the Coin appeared first on Martin van Creveld.
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Blog postNow that the initial momentum has been spent and replaced by attrition (on both sides), it is possible to speculate about the outcome of the war everyone has been talking about for the last few months.
So here we go.
Outcome No 1. The Ukrainians, supported by the West, succeed in pushing the Russians out and accomplishing their stated objective, which is to reassert their territorial integrity. Whereupon peace talks get under way and everyone goes home happily enough; this is2 weeks ago Read more -
Blog postFacts:
Women want to pee standing up just like men (look at the Net: you’ll find several different products and techniques that will allegedly enable them to do just that).
Women want (or wanted) to smoke just like men.
Women want to wear pants just like men.
Women want to work just like men.
Women want to have careers just like men.
Women want to explore space just like men.
Women want to play football just like men.
Women want3 weeks ago Read more -
Blog postAmidst the cannons’ roar, it is sometimes good to remember that there is more to the world than bloody slaughter. I am not an Islamic scholar. Even my knowledge of Arabic is limited to a few phrases most of us Jewish Israelis are familiar with: such as salam aleikum (peace be upon you), sabakh al khir (good day), tfadal (please), shukran (thank you), and others. That is why I, presumably like 99 percent of all non-Moslems, never spent any time reading the hadith. Not even in translation. For4 weeks ago Read more
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Blog postA question about the Ukrainian War that many Westerners have been asking—and that must have been haunting those hard-faced men in the Kremlin ever since they started their offensive on 24 February—is what they, the hard-faced men, have been doing … Continue reading →
The post The Iron Dice Keep Rolling appeared first on Martin van Creveld.
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Blog postWith the war in Ukraine spewing havoc, demand for geopolitics is high. However, the most clear-eyed writer on geopolitics was not Sir Halford Mackinder (1861-1947). Nor was he Prof. Samuel Huntington (1927-2008). The former in his 1904 essay, “The Geographical Pivot of History” made the mistake of assuming that Eastern Europe—“The Heartland,” as he called it—would always remain the crucible of the world, thus entirely missing the gigantic, and still continuing, struggle waged by the US, Russi1 month ago Read more
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Blog postReaders, please note: The following is the text of an interview about the book I did on 8 May with Mr. Pierre Heumann of the German-Swiss weekly Weltwoche. The translation from German is my own.
Heumann: Martin van Creveld, are you a Stalin Versteher (understander/sympathizer)?
Van Creveld: Writing a good biography of someone one hates is practically impossible. That is one reason why there are so many bad books about people like Hitler. And Stalin, of course. What Stalin was2 months ago Read more -
Blog postTwo basic ideas dominate this book. The first is that the post-Cold War era has definitely ended and that we have now entered the era of “the global enduring disorder;” a claim fully confirmed by recent events in Ukraine. The … Continue reading →
The post Jason Pack, Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder, Oxford, Oxford UP, 2021, 529 pages appeared first on Martin van Creveld.
2 months ago Read more -
Blog post
As others beside me have noted, one of the most astonishing things about the war in Ukraine is the fact that cyberwarfare does not seem to be playing a major role in it. To be sure, there has been what one source calls “a steady drumbeat of attacks, including disinformation campaigns, distributed denial-of-service attacks that temporarily knock websites offline, and ‘wiper’ attacks, which infect computer networks and render them inoperable by deleting all files. But no question2 months ago Read more -
Blog postFirst, a disclaimer. President Putin has neither been whispering in my ear nor appearing in my dreams. Nor did his advisers, senior or junior, civilian or military, official or unofficial. Nor, on the other hand, do I necessarily trust any … Continue reading →
The post What Putin Wants appeared first on Martin van Creveld.
2 months ago Read more
Titles By Martin L. Van Creveld
In vivid descriptions of key battles and campaigns—among others, Napoleon at Jena, Moltke’s Königgrätz campaign, the Arab–Israeli war of 1973, and the Americans in Vietnam—Martin van Creveld focuses on the means of command and shows how those means worked in practice. He finds that technological advances such as the railroad, breech-loading rifles, the telegraph and later the radio, tanks, and helicopters all brought commanders not only new tactical possibilities but also new limitations.
Although vast changes have occurred in military thinking and technology, the one constant has been an endless search for certainty—certainty about the state and intentions of the enemy’s forces; certainty about the manifold factors that together constitute the environment in which war is fought, from the weather and terrain to radioactivity and the presence of chemical warfare agents; and certainty about the state, intentions, and activities of one’s own forces. The book concludes that progress in command has usually been achieved less by employing more advanced technologies than by finding ways to transcend the limitations of existing ones.
For 200 years, military theory and strategy have been guided by the Clausewitzian assumption that war is rational - a reflection of national interest and an extension of politics by other means. However, van Creveld argues, the overwhelming pattern of conflict in the post-1945 world no longer yields fully to rational analysis. In fact, strategic planning based on such calculations is, and will continue to be, unrelated to current realities.
Small-scale military eruptions around the globe have demonstrated new forms of warfare with a different cast of characters - guerilla armies, terrorists, and bandits - pursuing diverse goals by violent means with the most primitive to the most sophisticated weapons. Although these warriors and their tactics testify to the end of conventional war as we've known it, the public and the military in the developed world continue to contemplate organized violence as conflict between the super powers.
At this moment, armed conflicts of the type van Creveld describes are occurring throughout the world. From Lebanon to Cambodia, from Sri Lanka and the Philippines to El Salvador, the Persian Gulf, and the strife-torn nations of Eastern Europe, violent confrontations confirm a new model of warfare in which tribal, ethnic, and religious factions do battle without high-tech weapons or state-supported armies and resources. This low-intensity conflict challenges existing distinctions between civilian and solder, individual crime and organized violence, terrorism and war. In the present global atmosphere, practices that for three centuries have been considered uncivilized, such as capturing civilians or even entire communities for ransom, have begun to reappear.
Pursuing bold and provocative paths of inquiry, van Creveld posits the inadequacies of our most basic ideas as to who fights wars and why and broaches the inevitability of man's need to "play" at war. In turn brilliant and infuriating, this challenge to our thinking and planning current and future military encounters is one of the most important books on war we are likely to read in our lifetime.
While paying close attention to the unpredictable human element, Martin van Creveld takes us on a journey from the last century’s clashes of massive armies to today’s short, high-tech, lopsided skirmishes and frustrating quagmires. Here is the world as it was in 1900, controlled by a handful of “great powers,” mostly European, with the memories of eighteenth-century wars still fresh. Armies were still led by officers riding on horses, messages conveyed by hand, drum, and bugle. As the telegraph, telephone, and radio revolutionized communications, big-gun battleships like the British Dreadnought, the tank, and the airplane altered warfare.
Van Creveld paints a powerful portrait of World War I, in which armies would be counted in the millions, casualties–such as those in the cataclysmic battle of the Marne–would become staggering, and deadly new weapons, such as poison gas, would be introduced. Ultimately, Germany’s plans to outmaneuver her enemies to victory came to naught as the battle lines ossified and the winners proved to be those who could produce the most weapons and provide the most soldiers.
The Changing Face of War then propels us to the even greater global carnage of World War II. Innovations in armored warfare and airpower, along with technological breakthroughs from radar to the atom bomb, transformed war from simple slaughter to a complex event requiring new expertise–all in the service of savagery, from Pearl Harbor to Dachau to Hiroshima. The further development of nuclear weapons during the Cold War shifts nations from fighting wars to deterring them: The number of active troops shrinks and the influence of the military declines as civilian think tanks set policy and volunteer forces “decouple” the idea of defense from the world of everyday people.
War today, van Crevald tells us, is a mix of the ancient and the advanced, as state-of-the-art armies fail to defeat small groups of crudely outfitted guerrilla and terrorists, a pattern that began with Britain’s exit from India and culminating in American misadventures in Vietnam and Iraq, examples of what the author calls a “long, almost unbroken record of failure.”
How to learn from the recent past to reshape the military for this new challenge–how to still save, in a sense, the free world–is the ultimate lesson of this big, bold, and cautionary work. The Changing Face of War is sure to become the standard source on this essential subject.
Israel is a tiny country. From tip to toe, it stretches 260 miles long but is only 60 miles at its widest point. Since the days of the British mandate, the question of "defensible borders" for the Jewish state has always been problematic. Yet considering the larger picture of what has happened in the Middle East over the last 25 years -- the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, the weakening of Syria as a result of the collapse of the USSR, the smashing of Iraq by the U.S. -- Israel is, militarily speaking, stronger than ever before. The greatest remaining threats are terrorism and guerilla warfare; and those, this book argues, are best dealt with territorial concessions. Martin van Creveld's Defending Israel is a compact, incisive study that is certain to draw attention.
The definitive one-volume history of Israel by its most distinguished historian
From its Zionist beginnings at the end of the nineteenth century through the past sixty, tumultuous years, the state of Israel has been, as van Creveld argues, "the greatest success story in the entire twentieth century." In this crisp volume, he skillfully relates the improbable story of a nationless people who, given a hot and arid patch of land and coping with every imaginable obstacle, founded a country that is now the envy of surrounding states. While most studies on Israel focus on the political, this encompassing history weaves together the nation's economic, social, cultural and religious narratives while also offering diplomatic solutions to help Israel achieve peace. Without question, this is the best one-volume history of Israel and its people.
The survival of every country, government, and individual is ultimately dependent on war - or the ability to wage it in self-defence. That is why, though it may come but once in a hundred years, it must be prepared for every day. When it is too late-when the bodies lie stiff and people weep over them-those in charge have failed in their duty.
Nevertheless, in spite of the centrality of war to human history and culture, there has for long been no modern attempt to provide a replacement for the classics on war and strategy, Sun Tzu's The Art of War, dating from the 5th or 6th century BC, and Carl von Clausewitz's On War, written in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.
What is needed is a modern, comprehensive, easy to read and understand theory of war for the 21st century that could serve as a replacement for these classic texts. The purpose of the present book is to provide just such a theory.
Martin van Creveld's Moshe Dayan tells the story of one man and of one people, to whom he was a figurehead - a symbol of their patriotism and their determination to survive. Born in a kibbutz in 1915, Dayan joined the Hagana when he was just fourteen, thus starting early a military career that saw him serve in every war fought in the Middle East from the War of Israeli Independence in 1948 to the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Twice he led his country's forces into smashing victories. Having planned and executed the one and directed the other, with his one eye he towers over them like Nelson over the Battle of Trafalgar.
Skilled in battle, skilled in diplomacy, like many powerful public figures, Moshe Dayan's private life was far from mundane. The book quotes from little-known sources, including an account written by one of his mistresses, that reveal much about his character and his life away from the battlefield. This is an honest portrayal of both the private and the public figure, which seeks to understand a man whose contribution to the state of Israel in its developing years was immeasurable.
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