Cohesion: Heroic and Post-Heroic Combat

Abstract

In his celebrated article, ‘Post-heroic Warfare’, Edward Luttwak explored a potential contradiction between western concepts of warfare and the reality of post-Cold War conflicts in the 1990s.¹ Clausewitzian warfare prioritizes decisive victories by conventional military means; the central purpose of the armed forces is to defeat the forces of other states thereby forcing them into a political settlement. Luttwak notes that the possibility of such deci- sive victories and even of fighting in a conventional military had become remote by the 1990s. The West was confronted by a series of ‘new wars’ in the Balkans and Africa. In place of decisive military action, Luttwak recom- mended that the old Roman tactic of the siege in the form of trade embargos and limited military action might be resurrected as a strategy to ameliorate but not resolve complex crises.² Such a strategy would overcome the perni- cious casualty aversion, which in the 1990s had infected all western powers and especially the United States. Precisely because the armed forces only valued decisive conflict, they could not see the point of risking casualties in minor operations for less than crystalline political gains. Luttwak advocated a more nuanced ‘post-heroic’ strategy of small interventions with less to gain but also less to lose.