themselves to sacrifice their lives (e.g., by throwing themselves onto a primed hand grenade) in order to save the lives of their comrades. During World War II thousands of Japanese soldiers, at first voluntarily and later under pressure, made attacks intended to be suicidal, by piloting kamikaze airplanes, rocket-powered
Traditional societies and states differ as to who are their soldiers. All state armies have included full-time professional soldiers who can remain in the field for years at a time, supported by civilians who grow food for themselves and for the soldiers. Either the professionals make up the entire army (as is currently true in the U.S.), or else their ranks are augmented (mainly in time of war) by non-professional volunteers or conscripts. In contrast, all band and tribal warriors, like the Dani warriors described in Chapter 3, and all or most warriors of chiefdoms, are non-professionals. They are men normally occupied with hunting or farming or herding, who suspend those subsistence activities for periods ranging from a few hours up to a few weeks in order to fight, and then go home again because they are needed for hunting or planting or harvesting. Hence it’s impossible for traditional “armies” to remain in the field for lengthy periods. That basic reality gave a decisive advantage to European colonial soldiers in their wars of conquest against tribes and chiefdoms around the world. Some of those non-European peoples, like New Zealand’s Maori, Argentina’s Araucanian Indians, and North America’s Sioux and Apache Indians, were determined and skilled fighters who could muster large forces for short times and achieved some spectacular successes against European armies. But they were inevitably worn down and eventually defeated because they had to break off fighting in order to resume obtaining and producing food, while professional European soldiers could continue to fight.
Modern military historians regularly comment on what strikes them as the “inefficiency” of traditional warfare: that hundreds of people can fight for an entire day, at the end of which no one or only one or two people have been killed. Part of the reason, of course, is that traditional societies lack artillery, bombs, and other weapons capable of killing many people at once. But the other reasons are related to the tribes’ non-professional army and lack of strong leadership. Traditional warriors don’t undergo group training that might enable them to be more lethal by executing complex plans or even just by coordinating their shooting. Arrows would be more effective if fired in a synchronized volley rather than one at a time: a targeted enemy can dodge an individual arrow but can’t dodge a whole flight of arrows. Nevertheless, the Dani, like most other traditional bowmen, had not practiced synchronizing their volleys. (Northwest Alaska Inuit were exceptional in that respect.) Discipline and organized formations are minimal: even if fighting units are well formed before a battle, the units quickly fall apart, and the battle degenerates into an uncoordinated melee. Traditional war leaders cannot issue orders for which the price of disobedience is court-martial. The 1966 massacre that broke apart the alliance of the Dani leader Gutelu may have resulted from Gutelu’s inability to prevent his own hot-headed northern warriors from massacring his southern allies.
One of the two biggest differences between traditional and state warfare involves the distinction between total war and limited war. We Americans are accustomed to thinking of total war as a new concept introduced by the northern general William Tecumseh Sherman during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Warfare by states and large chiefdoms tends to have limited goals: to destroy the enemy’s armed forces and capacity to fight, but to spare the enemy’s land, resources, and civilian population because those are what a would-be conqueror hopes to take over. General Sherman, in his march to the sea (from the inland hub of Atlanta to the Atlantic Ocean) through the heart of the Confederacy and then north through South Carolina, became famous for his explicit policy of total war: destroying everything of possible military value, and breaking Southern morale, by taking food, burning crops, killing livestock, wrecking farm machinery, burning cotton and cotton gins, burning railroads and twisting their rails to preclude their being repaired, and burning or blowing up bridges, railroad stock, factories, mills, and buildings. Sherman’s actions resulted from a calculated philosophy of war, which he described as follows: “War is cruelty and you cannot refine it…. We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make young and old, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war…. We cannot change the hearts of those people of the South, but we can make war so terrible… make them so sick of war that generations would pass before they would again appeal to it.” But Sherman did not exterminate Southern civilians or kill Confederate soldiers who surrendered or were captured.
While Sherman’s behavior was indeed exceptional by standards of state warfare, he did not invent total warfare. Instead, he practiced a mild form of what has been practiced by bands and tribes for tens of thousands of years, as documented by the skeletal remains of the massacre at Talheim described on page 134. State armies spare and take prisoners because they are able to feed them, guard them, put them to work, and prevent them from running away. Traditional “armies” do not take enemy warriors as prisoners, because they cannot do any of those things to make use of prisoners. Surrounded or defeated traditional warriors do not surrender, because they know that they would be killed anyway. The earliest historical or archaeological evidence of states taking prisoners is not until the time of Mesopotamian states of about 5,000 years ago, which solved the practical problems of getting use out of prisoners by gouging out their eyes to blind them so that they could not run away, then putting them to work at tasks that could be carried out by the sense of touch alone, such as spinning and some gardening chores. A few large, sedentary, economically specialized tribes and chiefdoms of hunter- gatherers, such as coastal Pacific Northwest Indians and Florida’s Calusa Indians, were also able routinely to enslave, maintain, and make use of captives.
However, for societies simpler than Mesopotamian states, Pacific Northwest Indians, and the Calusa, defeated enemies were of no value alive. War’s goal among the Dani, Fore, Northwest Alaskan Inuit, Andaman Islanders, and many other tribes was to take over the enemy’s land and to exterminate the enemy of both sexes and all ages, including the dozens of Dani women and children killed in the June 4, 1966, massacre. Other traditional societies, such as the Nuer raiding the Dinka, were more selective, in that they killed Dinka men and clubbed to death Dinka babies and older women but brought home Dinka women of marriageable age to force- marry to Nuer men, and also brought home Dinka weaned children to rear as Nuer. The Yanomamo similarly spared enemy women in order to use them as mates.
Total warfare among traditional societies also means mobilizing all men, including the Dani boys down to age six who fought in the battle of August 6, 1961. State war, however, is usually fought with proportionally tiny professional armies of adult men. Napoleon’s Grande Armee with which he invaded Russia in 1812 numbered 600,000 men and thus rates as huge by the standards of 19th-century state warfare, but that number represented under 10% of the total population of France at that time (actually even less, because some of the soldiers were non-French allies). Even within modern state armies, combat troops are generally outnumbered by support troops: the ratio is now 1 to 11 for the U.S. Army. The Dani would have been scornful of Napoleon’s and the U.S. armies’ inability to field combat troops, measured as a proportion of the society’s whole population. But the Dani would have found familiar Sherman’s behavior on his march to the sea, reminiscent of Dani behavior during the dawn raid of June 4, 1966, when they burned dozens of settlements and stole pigs.
Ending warfare
The remaining big difference between tribal and state warfare, after that distinction between total and limited warfare, involves the differing ease of ending war and maintaining peace. As illustrated by the Dani War of Chapter 3, wars of small-scale societies often involve cycles of revenge killings. A death suffered by side A demands that side A take vengeance by killing someone from side B, whose members now in turn demand vengeance of their own against side A. Those cycles end only when one side has been exterminated or driven out, or else when both sides are exhausted, both have suffered many deaths, and neither side foresees the likelihood of being able to exterminate or drive out the other. While analogous considerations apply to ending state
