War as the Father of All Things?

Whoever wants to justify rearmament likes to reach for a sentence two and a half thousand years old. It sounds inescapable because it is general. And it is one of the most successful truncations in the history of ideas.

“War is the father of all things,” the Greek philosopher Heraclitus is supposed to have said. We show three things. First, that Heraclitus meant something else. Second, that the innovation we credit to rearmament today is not a natural event but follows a programme pursued for decades. Third, that the same dynamic can be had without war, and that the world proved it before our eyes in 2020.

I. What Heraclitus meant

Heraclitus of Ephesus left behind a sentence that became a stock phrase of Western education: pólemos patér pánton, war is the father of all things. For him, however, the word pólemos did not primarily mean military violence. It denoted the tension of opposites from which all becoming arises. Day and night, hot and cold, up and down: the one brings forth the other by contradicting it. Heraclitus was a natural philosopher. He described what Hegel, two and a half millennia later, would call dialectics.

Later generations turned the philosophical concept into a military one. The tension of opposites became gunpowder, the contest became battle, and the father became the authority that justifies war. The truncation is so successful that it has detached itself from Heraclitus. Whoever quotes the sentence today mostly no longer knows that the original said something else. It is no longer a quotation but a slogan.

Whoever makes Heraclitus the star witness for warlike innovation is not saying what Heraclitus meant. He is saying what he himself wants to say, and borrowing the authority of antiquity to do so.

II. What war actually does

The truncation is not entirely wrong. In wars, technical innovations arise that would probably have arisen differently without war. The American sociologist Charles Tilly captured the pattern in one sentence: “War made the state, and the state made war.”

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, gunpowder and siege artillery forced the construction of huge star forts that cost a fortune. Whoever wanted such a fortress needed a tax system. Whoever wanted taxes needed an administration, officials, censuses and statistics. The modern state did not arise from an idea of civic life but from the needs of war. Prussia is the caricature of this genesis.

The twentieth century perfected the pattern. In 1909 Fritz Haber succeeded in synthesising ammonia from the nitrogen in the air. Until then Germany had depended on saltpetre from Chile for fertiliser and explosives. Carl Bosch made the process ready for industry at BASF by 1913. When the British naval blockade cut off the saltpetre during the war, the Reich financed the construction of the Leuna works. Without the Haber–Bosch process, Germany would by a widely held assessment have lost the First World War sooner. The same Haber who brought poison gas to the front received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 1918. Today, through fertiliser, the same process feeds a large part of humanity. Dual use in the most literal sense.

Peenemünde on the Baltic. In 1942 the Aggregat 4 reached an altitude of about 85 kilometres; in 1944 a test flight became the first man-made object to cross the boundary into space. In the same year the same rocket struck London and Antwerp as “Vergeltungswaffe 2”, Retaliation Weapon 2. More people died in its production than from its use: about twenty thousand prisoners in the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. Wernher von Braun, its technical director, was brought over by the Americans after 1945. He led the development of the Saturn V rocket that carried people to the Moon in 1969. The Moon landing is a child of the V2.

The Dutch social psychologist Carsten De Dreu has studied how people become creative under threat. He speaks of “motivated focus”. Threat does not block, it concentrates. Whatever does not contribute to solving the pressing problem falls away. If the threat is connected with the task, this can release astonishing creativity. If not, it blocks. That is exactly what happens in war: everything that does not serve the front falls away, and whatever serves it gets every available resource. The result is concentrated innovation in a narrow corridor and standstill everywhere else.

War is not magic. War is the concentration of scarce means on narrowly set goals, with inhibitions suspended. What it produces depends on who sets the goals.

III. Andrew Marshall and the programme

What today’s debate overlooks is this: the innovation we are currently observing is not a natural event. It follows a programme, and this programme has a name and an address.

The address is the Office of Net Assessment in the US Department of Defense. From 1973 to 2015 it was headed by Andrew Marshall, for over four decades and under eight presidents. Marshall was neither a politician nor a general but a strategist who thought long-term for the Pentagon, in decades rather than budget years.

The idea itself came from the Soviet Union. From the late 1970s, Soviet officers around Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov wrote of a “military-technical revolution”: precision weapons, reconnaissance and data processing would change warfare as fundamentally as the tank and the aircraft once had. Marshall took up the idea. In 1992 he had an assessment written for his office by Andrew Krepinevich. It predicted that long-range precision strikes, information superiority, unmanned systems and control of space would decide war, while heavy armoured formations, manned aircraft and large ships would lose importance. The transition, it said, would take several decades. In Washington this soon became the “Revolution in Military Affairs”. Since 2014 the Pentagon has pursued it further under the name “Third Offset”.

Drones, precision weapons, small networked units instead of mass armies: what counts as new today was written down as a programme more than thirty years ago.

IV. Lothar Rühl, July 2000

How naturally this programme had arrived in the German security-policy establishment is shown by an article by Lothar Rühl in the CDU-affiliated journal “Die politische Meinung” of July 2000. Rühl, state secretary in the Ministry of Defence from 1982 to 1989, describes the “Revolution in Military Affairs” with undisguised enthusiasm. The armed forces of the future would turn their superiority in weapons and information technology into strategic dominance, without nuclear weapons. The United States was therefore the only world power, and the European allies would have to make up their deficits in order to keep pace.

What is interesting is not the enthusiasm but the precision. In 2000 Rühl describes almost every component that was used in the war of the United States and Israel against Iran from February 2026: networked small combat groups, reconnaissance from space, long-range precision weapons, regional missile defence, joint operations in the air, at sea and in the electronic domain. What he does not mention is artificial intelligence. At the time it was not yet in view.

What appears as innovation born of necessity is often innovation according to plan.

V. The other innovation

The thesis of war as the father of all things would be questionable on that basis alone. It becomes untenable through the counter-example the world provided in 2020. Within a year, researchers in several countries developed highly effective vaccines against a new virus. mRNA technology, which had previously been researched for decades without a fixed goal, came into use in the emergency of the pandemic. What usually takes ten to twelve years succeeded in less than one.

It was the same mechanism as in war. Means were concentrated, procedures simplified, chains of command shortened, knowledge shared at once. Results were freely available online before other experts had reviewed them. Authorities approved trials in weeks instead of years. Pharmaceutical companies competed and cooperated at the same time. None of this needs a war. It needs an emergency that cannot be dismissed, and the willingness to reduce the usual frictions.

This shows what the thesis conceals: it is not violence that brings forth the new but the inescapable emergency that forces the concentration of forces and quick solutions. Such an emergency cannot be produced at will. But an existing one can be recognised as inescapable. The climate crisis would be one candidate, security of supply another, care a third. What counts as inescapable and what does not is a political decision. At present only the military threat is treated that way; everything else counts as business as usual. That is no law of nature but a choice. That it is also the most expensive choice economically is shown by the figures in “Münchhausen’s Heirs”: a euro spent on arms brings at most fifty cents of additional output.

Then there is a whole class of innovations that do not appear in the thesis at all, because they are not technical: women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, parliamentary democracy, freedom of the press, free trade unions. They were not won in battles but in conflicts that made dispute their method and ruled out killing. Democracy, says the Frankfurt political scientist Nicole Deitelhoff, “lives from the dispute of opinions and positions in the public sphere”. That is Heraclitus’ pólemos in the original sense: a tension of opposites that brings something forth without anyone dying.

And finally there is the other side of the balance sheet, which is never discussed in this debate: what war destroys. The Mongol campaigns of the thirteenth century devastated irrigation systems that had grown over generations. In 1258 the Mongols destroyed Baghdad and with it the House of Wisdom, where Greek, Indian and Persian science flowed together. After the Moroccan conquest of Timbuktu in 1591, the scholars of the West African city of learning were deported and their libraries scattered. European colonisation wiped out entire systems of knowledge in the Americas, Africa and Oceania: medicine, astronomy, agriculture, social orders. No one can put a value on them any more, because those who knew them are dead. Whoever praises war as an engine of innovation sees what became visible and overlooks what could never come into being.

VI. The roast pig

In 1822 the English essayist Charles Lamb told a story that he passed off as a Chinese tradition. A peasant kept a pig in his wooden hut. The hut burned down. In the ruins the pig was found, perfectly roasted and delicious. Soon everyone in the region was setting fire to their huts to get at this roast. Only after a long time did someone hit on the idea that one can roast a pig without burning down the house.

The thesis of war as an engine of innovation is the attitude of those who keep setting houses on fire because they do not know how to make the roast without arson. They overlook that there is a stove. They overlook that the house itself has value. They overlook the inhabitants.

Soberly considered: war concentrates means, that is true. It suspends inhibitions, that is true as well. It brings forth a particular kind of innovation, namely the kind that serves the logic of the Megamachine, because the Megamachine distributes the means and suspends the inhibitions. But war is neither the only nor the best method of creating the new. It is the most expensive, the most destructive, and the one with the narrowest range of results.

Why does a society that has read Tilly and developed mRNA vaccines in a year nevertheless keep reaching for the most expensive method? Why does it truncate Heraclitus, forget Timbuktu and act as if a Pentagon programme were a force of nature? The answer needs no puppet master. It lies in a structure that lives from the truncation and therefore keeps it alive, without anyone having to order it.

War is not the father of all things. It is the father of a particular kind of things, those needed by the system that manages war. All other things must find other fathers.

Further reading: Sparring Is Not a Fight · Münchhausen’s Heirs · The Birth of Industry from the Destructive Spirit of War · The Megamachine in the First World War · The Megamachine in the Third Reich · The Peace-Loving · The Megamachine – where to start?