Stopping the Killing: How Civil Wars End by Roy LickliderReview by: Eliot A. CohenForeign Affairs, Vol. 73, No. 6 (Nov. - Dec., 1994), p. 162Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20046952 .

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Recent Books

Military, Scientific, and Technological

ELIOT A. COHEN

Misfire: The History of How America's Small Arms Have Failed Our Military. BY WILLIAM H. HALLAHAN. New

York: Charles Scribner s Sons, 1994,

578 pp. $30.00. The expos? genre of military technology studies took a beating in the aftermath of the Gulf War?all that gold-plated hard

ware seemed not only to work, but to work

amazingly well. No matter. In this book

Hallahan revives some well-worn tropes. His thesis?highlighted with words like

"scandalous" for the benefit of his more

obtuse readers?is that the U.S. Army's ordnance department has always favored

weapons designed for slow, accurate fire, and that this approach to small arms has

brought tragedy in more than one war and

will do so again. This book is well-written

but shows almost no evidence of primary

research, as opposed to mining of sec

ondary sources that confirm the author's

thesis. In the tangled story of the M-16

rifle, for example, Hallahan barely men

tions Thomas McNaugher's sober and

authoritative review of the evidence, in

which the ordnance experts appear no

great villains. In areas on the margins of

his work (for example, German military inventions in the latter part of World War

II) the author is wildly inaccurate. Unfor

tunately, this kind of sensationalist and

superficial history will probably do well. We take an odd comfort in the belief that

governments make mistakes only because

public servants (soldiers, above all) are

implacably and dangerously stupid.

Stopping the Killing: How Civil Wars End. by ROY LiCKLiDER. New York: New

York University Press, 1993, 372 pages.

$50.00.

A book that can be read either for the seven well-executed case studies or the

more theoretical chapters in the preced

ing and concluding parts of the book, or

both. The cases are consistently better

than the theoretical chapters, which

include such observations as: "The effects

of warfare are different in civil wars

where possible compromise solutions

exist than in conflicts where they do not."

Presumably, readers who have seen Gone

With the Wind understood that point without the aid of social science.

Nonetheless, this book helps in the

understanding of the dominant form of

armed conflict in the world today.

Moltke on the Art of War: Selected Writings. EDITED BY DANIEL J. HUGHES. San

Francisco: Presidio, 1993, 275 pp.

$35.00. Helmuth von Moltke, the Prussian chief of

staff who, together with Bismarck, master

minded the wars of German unification, was a prolific writer. In this important book we have a wide-ranging collection of

his essays and orders, ranging from philo

sophical reflections on the nature of war to

instructions for handling wagon trains.

The 1869 "Instructions for Large Unit Commanders" is alone worth the price of

the volume: a careful reading ofthat docu

ment helps explain the approach to war

and command that helped make the Ger

mans so formidable in the field for almost a

century. Moltke molded the Prussian and

ultimately the German army at a time of

technological and economic change. For

[162] FOREIGN AFFAIRS - Volume73No.6

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