A NEW THEORY OF WARFARE: THE ‘THIRD WAVE’ ARRIVES : We Make War the Way We Make Wealth--With Information : First Wave: Hand-to-Hand

Ten thousand years ago the Agricultural Revolution launched the first great wave of change in human history. It led to permanent settlements and many other social and political innovations. Among the most important was war itself. Agriculture became the womb of war for two reasons. It enabled communities to produce and store an economic surplus. And it hastened the development of the state. Together these provided the preconditions for what we now call warfare.

Violent battles certainly occurred among pre-agricultural nomadic and pastoral groups. Small groups fought to avenge killings, to steal women or for access to protein-rich game. But conflict took on the true character of war--a bloody clash between organized states--only after the institution of the state had become common and after there was an economic surplus worth fighting over.

Not all First Wave wars, of course, had economic ends. The literature on the causes of war attributes it to everything from religious fanaticism to inborn aggressiveness in the species. Yet “war,” wrote economist Kenneth Boulding, “is particularly associated with the . . . expropriation through coercion of the food surplus of agriculture.”

From that point on the forms of war have paralleled the forms of economic production.

Most First Wave peasant economies were based on unremitting manual labor and handcraft production. Output was so low and food surpluses still so small, that more than 90% of the population was needed to work the land. The departure of a son for military service was an economic catastrophe.

Typically, First Wave armies were thrown together as needed. A European feudal lord who was attacked, writes Richard Shelly Hartigan in a history of the civilian in warfare, “could hold his vassals to their military obligations until the invader was repulsed; but a lord bent on offensive war could keep his men in the field only 40 days out of each year.” They were needed on the land.

For this and other reasons, he explains, “While the general population was not immune, the number of combatants (in medieval warfare) was relatively small.” Their payment, if any, was irregular, usually in kind rather than money. Not infrequently, victorious generals were paid with land, the most valuable resource of the agrarian economy.

Military units varied greatly in size, capability, morale, leadership quality and training. As in the economy, communications were primitive, and most orders were oral, rather than written. The army, like the economy itself, lived off the land.

Like tools for working the land, weapons were unstandardized and designed for the hand. Agrarian hand labor was mirrored in hand-to-hand combat. Despite limited use of stand-off weapons such as slingshots, crossbows, catapults and early artillery, for thousands of years the basic mode of warfare involved face-to-face killing, and soldiers were armed with weapons--pikes, swords, axes, lances, battering rams--dependent on human muscle power and designed for close-in combat. As late as 1650-1700, even senior commanders were expected to participate in hand-to-hand killing.

In brief, First Wave wars bore the unmistakable imprint of the First Wave agrarian economies that gave rise to them, not in technological terms alone but in organization, communication, logistics, administration, reward structures, leadership styles and cultural assumptions.