Michael Pezzullo
In his first autobiography, My Early Life: A Roving Commission, Winston Churchill set down a timeless formula for thinking about war odds: however sure one might be of victory, there would not be a war ‘if the other man did not think that he also has a chance’.
Churchill’s lesson for us is that war is an intrinsic and unrelished feature of the human condition. Therefore, we are faced with the grim burden of calculating the chance of war realistically, no matter how much we might naturally yearn for peace. Preparations for war have to be made as those calculations dictate, recognising that we still always have to deal with what Churchill called the ‘unforeseeable and uncontrollable events’ of war.
Churchill did not believe that war should be avoided ‘at all costs’. Likewise, Carl von Clausewitz did not counsel the reflexive avoidance of war. In the continuation of policy by other means that he described in On War, wars are fought in the pursuit of objectives that cannot otherwise be attained. He cautioned us to look beyond the emotional dimension of war, but rather to treat it as an instrument of policy—a risky, chance-determined one.
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