“Put your sword back in its place,” Jesus said to him, “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.”
Williamson Murray. The Dark Path: The Structure of War and the Rise of the West. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024. 488 pp, $40.
Kierkegaard called the art of biblical interpretation a way of “defending oneself against God’s Word.” The text was the messenger from the emperor in Kafka’s famous parable, shouldering its way through the tightly packed throngs of interpreters, never arriving. “If there were an open field, how he would fly along, and soon you would hear the marvellous pounding of his fist on your door.” But to be fair, Jesus does speak in parables. He invites interpretation, then defeats it. He dazzles us with his subversions, his reversals, the upside-downness of his vision. (“You have heard that it was said… But I tell you…”) Then as soon as we get dialed in, he hits us with the change-up: he says something blindingly, water-is-wet obvious, and it sails straight over the plate. The saying about the sword is like that.
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Williamson Murray (1941–2023) was a prolific military historian and theorist. The Dark Path: The Structure of War and the Rise of the West (2024), published posthumously, is Murray’s attempt to synthesize the prodigious accumulations of historical data and strategic reflection from his long career. References to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 confirm that the author continued to work on the book until at least the year before his death, but the sketchy character of these references suggest that Murray may have had more to say than time in which to say it.
Like readers of his eminent predecessor, Carl von Clausewitz, we are left to guess how Murray might have revised his work if he had lived to complete it. One hopes, for example, that he would have better integrated the two elements of his fifteen chapters. On the one hand, Murray has a Grand Narrative, which is presented with some clarity in the eighteen pages of Chapter 1, but which thereafter recurs only fitfully in Chapters 2 through 14—primarily in introductory and concluding paragraphs—until in Chapter 15, it returns forcefully but strangely unaffected by the passage of over 350 pages. The bulk of the book, therefore, is a merciless barrage of Uninterpreted Facts. Names, dates, and figures are fired Maxim gun-like from Murray’s vast arsenal, with only occasional hints as to their relevance.
This might be the esotericism of a lifetime of Bible study talking, but Murray’s writerly technique could be read as a demonstration of his central thesis, which is that every war is a war of attrition. The reader’s resistance is ground down by the onslaught of erudition until surrender to Murray’s conclusions is all but inevitable. In any case, I will concern myself for the remainder of this review primarily with Murray’s Grand Narrative. The curious (and intrepid) reader is invited to see for themselves whether they can make heads or tails of Murray’s play-by-play of troop movements in the War of Spanish Succession or the tonnage of coal production over the course of the Combined Bomber Offensive. Your humble correspondent could not.
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“The spectre of attrition” is central to Murray’s grand narrative of the rise of the West. All through the middle chapters of The Dark Path, Murray endeavors to show how each conflict is decided not by tactical genius or even by military strategy but by the superior ability of one side to finance, supply, and man its war machine. “Friction” and chance are such dominant factors in warfare that no battle is decisive. In modern war, the brilliant maneuvers of celebrated generals have proved largely irrelevant to the outcome. Murray shows that, as a historical matter, the winning side frequently loses more men and expends more materiel, in both absolute and relative terms, than their opponents. His conclusion: the West achieved its hegemony by getting good at absorbing losses. Murray describes this evolution toward attritional superiority as occurring in a punctuated equilibrium of five stages, which he describes as “military-social revolutions.”
The first of these military-social revolutions was triggered by the introduction of gunpowder into European warfare. By dramatically increasing the lethality of pitched battles and rendering traditional castles obsolete, gunpowder weapons led directly to the invention and widespread adoption of the trace italienne, a new style of fortifications, which in turn greatly expanded the role of sieges in European warfare. Long sieges required new depths of logistical support as well as more disciplined and professional soldiers, both of which could only be delivered by new bureaucratic institutions. Thus, the introduction of gunpowder weapons led directly to the creation of the modern state. This first military-social revolution sets the pattern of Murray’s grand narrative: at each stage of development, warfare becomes more deadly and more expensive.
Following on the creation of the modern state is the second military-social revolution: the industrial revolution. Industrial production vastly increased the availability and efficacy of arms, which war came to demand (along with manpower) in ever larger amounts. The size of armies grew significantly during this period, as did casualty rates. Then came the third military-social revolution—ideologically motivated mass mobilization (the French Revolution’s levée en masse)—which rendered the nation state’s army coterminous with its able-bodied population. The fusion of the industrial revolution and mass mobilization in the phenomenon of total war, born in the American Civil War and coming of age with World War I, is Murray’s fourth military-social revolution.
Murray’s fifth military-social revolution is simultaneously the most relevant (because ongoing) and the least well-defined (perhaps for the same reason). Murray describes this revolution in terms of an accelerating pace of technological change and a dissolving barrier between military and civilian innovation. His thinking on the fifth military-social revolution is clearly shaped by his reflection on the Cold War. Murray’s insight is that the Cold War, like all others, was won by attrition. But instead of the destruction of men and materiel in combat, the attrition was inflicted by the peacetime obsolescence of military equipment. The Soviet Union was so economically and technologically outmatched by the United States that it collapsed under the weight of its own military spending.
With the rise of the science-military-industrial complex, research and development now flows freely between civilian and military sectors. Innovations pioneered in one sector soon find a market in the other: GPS in the family sedan, hobbyist drones spotting for artillery in Ukraine. Thus Murray’s fifth military-social revolution effectively erases the difference between combat and economic competition, war and peace. We see this dynamic all too clearly in the race to stay ahead of our great power rivals in developing artificial intelligence.
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Like Clausewitz—who argued that war logically entails the maximum use of force—Murray is a realist. He believes that self-interest drives the conflicts between individuals and nations and is fond of quoting Thucydides: “Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can.” Insofar as humans have a moral nature, it is irrelevant to grand strategy. For the realist, the only check upon the libido dominandi is the balance of power: “right [and wrong], as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
The realist typically argues that projecting military strength is a way of minimizing bloodshed or avoiding conflict altogether—deterrence, on the one hand, swift, decisive victory, on the other. But Murray thinks both of these arguments rely on illusions. In the wake of the fifth military-social revolution, the great powers are always already at war with one another: the lines between economic competition, technological innovation, and military rivalry have become impossible to draw. Any advance by one power, especially any military buildup, is a provocation to the others. Again, he quotes Thucydides: "it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” So much for deterrence.
As for decisive victory, Murray’s whole book goes to show that it is an illusion. War is decided by attrition, and the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war is proof that this has not changed. Even in an age of cheap drones and fire-and-forget missiles, when a hot war does break out, it is not decided by a few surgical strikes, but by the slow, bloody grinding down of both sides. Russia has lost twice as many troops in its invasion of Ukraine as America lost in all of World War II.
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It is difficult to overstate the pessimism of Murray’s narrative. He reports that at one point in the Cold War the policy of the Strategic Air Command “proposed throwing all of America’s nuclear weapons against the Soviets in one massive strike, some 133 atomic bombs on 70 cities.” He adds, “This, in the planners’ words, represented ‘an opportunity to put warfare on an economical, sensible, reasonable basis.’” The effect of such repugnant conclusions—in light of Murray’s grand narrative—should be to reduce warmaking to an absurdity. (“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”) Yet Murray sees an iron logic in the cycle of greed, aggression, reciprocal action, and escalation.
But more than this, he seems to take a grim pleasure in the approaching Götterdämmerung. The final line of his book is another approving quotation from the Melian Dialogue: “[Hope] is by nature an expensive commodity, and those who are risking their all on one cast find out what it means only when they are already ruined.” Realism is not without romance. For the Stoic, “His finest hour is to sit tight-lipped and ironic while the world comes crashing down around him.” The same could be said for Murray with his fondness for Thucydides.
There are at least two problems with Murray’s Byronic realism. The first problem is that the Athenians are wrong: it is not a necessary law to rule wherever we can. If, as Murray argues, the West is exceptionally powerful because its constituents are exceptionally greedy and competitive, then that just goes to show that the West’s insatiable libido dominandi is another facet of its general W.E.I.R.D.ness. Exceptional greed is, by definition, exceptional. If everyone is exceptional, no one is. There have always been would-be tyrants, but there is nothing general and necessary about this ambition.
The second problem is that the realist theory of victory is incoherent. Clausewitz famously imagines the opponents in a war as “a pair of wrestlers. Each tries through physical force to compel the other to do his will; his immediate aim is to throw his opponent in order to make him incapable of further resistance. War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.” In wrestling, when you throw your opponent, they are obliged by the rules to grant you your victory. In war, you will need to keep a boot on their neck for the rest of your life. (Clausewitz: “The defeated state often considers the outcome merely as a transitory evil...”) Having once subjugated the helots, the Spartans were prisoners in their own country, condemned to sleep with one eye open, to renew their war against their servants every year.
More generally, the realists reverse the true relationship between compulsion and rule. As Aristotle demonstrates in his Politics, the tyrant who rules by force is, in reality, the most enslaved: “They are always either the masters or servants and never the friends of anybody; the tyrant never tastes of true freedom or friendship…. will he not be in an agony of fear lest he and his wife and children should be put to death by his slaves?” Like a good realist, Mao said, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Aristotle saw clearly that human beings cannot be ruled by force.
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Murray need not have despaired. Yes, war may be irrational, and the cycle of friction, attrition, and escalation may be deeply entrenched in the West’s approach to international relations. But these are contingent choices, not inescapable facts. A return to sanity begins with acknowledging that war is not, in Clausewitz’s famous phrase, “a continuation of politics by other means” but a suspension of politics—that power politics is a contradiction in terms. A return to politics is a real alternative to the self-defeating logic of realism.
War is dominated by friction, because human beings resist coercive force. The alternative to violence is persuasion, and the means of persuasion is speech. Politics again:
[S]peech is designed to indicate the advantageous and the harmful, and therefore also the right and the wrong; for it is the special property of man in distinction from the other animals that he alone has perception of good and bad and right and wrong and the other moral qualities, and it is partnership in these things that makes a household and a city-state.
Given how far the disease of militarization has progressed, it may be necessary in the short-term to undermine the offensive capacity of rival powers and violent non-state actors. But the heart of any sane grand strategy must be persuasion—friend-making, the formation of partnerships in moral agreement. Leaders who have learned to sleep soundly atop hoards of WMDs are terrified to adopt non-violence or unilateral disarmament, but the alternative is an endless cycle of escalating violence. Murray saw the world fettered on its dark path, but there are ways, however long and hard, that lead up to light.
Originally published in the spring 2025 Mere Orthodoxy print journal. To become a member and receive future issues, join today.
Charlie Clark is the executive director of the Eleazar Wheelock Society.
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