The Changing Face of War: Lessons of Combat, From the Marne to Iraq, recently published by Presidio Press (320 pages, $25.95), is either Martin van Creveld’s seventeenth book or his twentieth, depending on who’s counting. Van Creveld, an Israeli of Dutch origin, is one of our time’s most highly regarded military historians; his most influential book, Supplying War: Logistics From Wallenstein to Patton, pretty much invented a key field, the history of logistics. This one, which looks at the evolution of war over the last century, has remarkable sweep. It divides the military history of the twentieth century into three distinct phases: the era of the world wars, the ongoing nuclear revolution, and what he calls the New World Disorder, the age of the insurgent.

He begins his story on the eve of World War I, when seven or eight great powers had recently and pretty much effortlessly conquered almost the whole of the earth. They faced no conceivable danger from any adversary other than one another. “Around 1900,” van Creveld writes, “the idea that the only possible threat to a ‘Great Power’ could come from another ‘Great Power’ was taken very much for granted,” for “political power rested on an equally impressive accumulation of economic muscle.” Between them, those great powers produced around 88 percent of world manufacturing output (in 1750, the same societies had produced something like a quarter of world manufacturing output). Nowadays, a few years into the twenty-first century, this group of nations’ relative share of economic power has fallen quite remarkably, and now, van Creveld says, they are menaced not by one another but only by non-state threats.

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