Why Short Histories Matter
War has long been the domain of soldiers and scholars: studied by the few, practised by the fewer, but suffered by the many. In the absence of lived memory, the risk is that societies forget what war really means.
This fading memory matters. The 20th century saw war reach its historical zenith through extreme industrialised conflict. It was a time of mass mobilisation, unprecedented global integration, and civilian populations on the front and rear lines like never before. But today, nearly a century later, no full generation left alive can truly compute the scale of destruction the first half of the 1900s wrought outside of study, media, or memory.
Total war is often abstract. It is reduced to historical footage, elevated by academic study, rendered across film and games, or reflected through anecdotes by those who have experienced conflict in our lifetime. That makes public understanding not just desirable, but necessary. As Great Power Competition returns, we risk confronting future war without a logical and emotional foundation needed to respect its costs.
That is the challenge Gwynne Dyer takes up in The Shortest History of War. If war must be made intelligible to the many and not just the few, then its complexity simplified is key. His message is clear: violence certainly exists in nature, and fighting is too common across the animal kingdom; but war is something distinctly human. It is an institutional practice born of hierarchy, sustained by coercion, and shaped by political purpose.
What the Book Gets Right: The Impressive Scope
Dyer's narrative unfolds in broad chronological arcs, but its power lies in rejecting determinism. War, he argues, has never been inevitable and has always been enabled. Elites choose it, institutions entrench it, and ideologies justify it.
Going as far back as historically plausible for a self-respecting scholar, Dyer systematically dismantles romantic myths of honourable violence and the noble savage. Instead, he traces how conflict has been shaped by degrees of industrialisation across millennia, various forms of nationalism before and after Westphalia was even a thing, evolving methods of bureaucracy long before Mandarins, and even game theory as a thought experiment.
These are forces, Dyer outlines, which rhyme across history, reinforcing the institutional logic of violence and escalating its lethality. War is not some immutable condition of humanity - it is a social technology. A political invention, forged in the surplus of early agriculture and sustained by organised power ever since.
One of the book's most striking passages illustrates the intense changes in just the last few centuries. Outlining the use of phalanx-style tactics, Dyer observes that a well-trained army from 1500 BCE (if rearmed with iron instead of bronze) could plausibly hold its own against one from 1500 CE. Yet within just a century of that, the military revolutions of the 17th century made such continuity impossible. The accelerating pace of change, particularly in our lifetime, has transformed war's destructiveness beyond recognition. Where war once meant hours of bloody attrition with swords or muskets, today it can mean a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile capable of erasing cities in minutes. The gap between what war was and what it could become has never been wider.
Nowhere is this institutional absurdity clearer than in Dyer's analysis of Cold War nuclear doctrines. Mutually assured destruction (MAD), he writes, was not strategic brilliance but a global suicide pact rationalised into orthodoxy. What began as deterrence hardened into doctrine - a logic so widely accepted that he says its contradictions became invisible. But The Shortest History of War is not a book about tactics, doctrines, or battlefield dynamics. It is not concerned with how wars are fought, but why war became possible at all.
Dyer is philosophical as any other scholar of war, but he nonetheless br...