The Shortest History of War – Gwynne Dyer

Thoughts: Meh. I read this in the fall of 2021, and recall finding it interesting while I was reading it. By the time I finished converting my highlights into these notes in early 2025, my main takeaway recollection was that on more than one occasion, Dyer would make a causal pronouncement—“event A occurred, which led inevitably to phenomenon B”—leading me to feel skeptical of his other conclusions. His commentary on historical trends in warfare seem more-or-less sound, however. The edition I read was poorly edited, with typos and formatting errors.

A reader interested in the history of warfare might possibly find something of interest here (such a reader might also be able to evaluate Dyer’s takes better than I am). Can’t say I’d recommend it to the general reader.

(The notes below are not a summary of the book, but rather raw notes - whatever I thought, at the time, might be worth remembering. I read this as an e-book, so page numbers are as they appeared in the app I used, Libby.)

Dyer, Gwynne. 2021. The Shortest History of War. Old Street.

1. Origins

• 12: In a study of the Murngin people (who had only recently come into regular contact with Europeans) of Arnhem Land in Australia in the early 20th century, ethnologist Lloyd Warner concluded that “chronic low-level raiding and ambushes, rarely killing more than one or two people at a time, nevertheless accounted over the 20-year period he studied for the deaths of about 25 percent of the adult males in the various bands that made up the Murgin people.” Dyer uses this figure and several others to illustrate that warfare and violent death was fairly common in humanity’s past - though individual skirmishes would inflict a low number of casualties, their frequency meant that a high proportion of people would die at the hands of other people
• 14: controvertial study by Napoleon Chagnon found that “the average death toll of this chronic warfare over a generation… Was 24 percent of the men and 7 percent of the women” among the Yanomamo people
  • Dyer asserts that “the notion of an in-built tendency to war was just too much of an affront to the doctrines of Rousseau, and to those anthropologist who tended his flame.” Chagnon was accused of distorting/fabricating his data, but by 2012 their validity has generally been accepted.
• 17: similar results found in studies of chimpanzee bands: “endemic warfare ultimately caused the deaths of about 30 percent of the adult males and 5 percent of the females”
• 19: Dyer asserts that “two conditions [are] needed to account for the war-like behaviour of any species towards other members of its own kind: is the species predatory, and does it live in groups of variable size?”
• 23: “Almost all the horticultural societies we know of were egalitarian, at least when it came to adult males. Not just a little bit egalitarian, but intensely, even obsessively so.”

2. How Combat Works

• 37: “The dead and wounded in a major pre-20th-century battle often amounted to 40 or 50 percent of the men engaged. Given a couple of battles a year, the infantrymen therefore stood and even chance of being killed or wounded for every year the war continued”
• 38: “The casualty toll in a single day of battle has plummeted since the 19th century: the average daily loss for a division-sized force in intensive combat in World War II was about 2 percent of its personnel. The problem is that battles can now continue for weeks – and the battles follow each other in quick succession. ¶ The cumulative loss rate is about the same as before, with infantrymen facing an even chance of death or a serious wound within a year, but the psychological impact of combat is very different. Troops are shelled every day, the enemy is always close, and they live among constant death. This inexorably erodes men’s faith in their own survival, and eventually destroy’s everybody’s courage and will.”
• 44-46: Dyer discusses several studies suggesting humans have an inborn reluctance to killing other human beings, and since the middle of the 20th century, part of military training has been directed toward training this inhibition out of recruits.
  • 45: “From a human point of view, it is good news that most people of every nationality and culture have a strong objection to killing other people, and avoid it if they can. It is less encouraging to learn how easily they can be tricked into doing it anyway by some elementary psychological conditioning and training.”

3. The Evolution of Battle 3500-1500BC

• 62: “Fighting between groups who recognize their common humanity is generally constrained by custom and ritual, while the same groups approach hunting wild animals in a more ruthlessly pragmatic spirit: deceive the animal, then kill it. The psychological relationship between nomads and farmers was similar: the settled peoples were seen as lesser beings, no longer fully human.” (emphasis mine) -j: really? There’s no citation on this paragraph, though a citation of Robert O’Connell, 1995, Ride of the Second Horseman on the paragraph following could possibly cover this.

4. Classical War 1500BC-1400AD

• 86: “Nobody needed navies until civilisations began to produce goods like grain, wine, minerals and timber that were worth trading in bulk. Most of that trade was conduced by sea.. and attacking the commercial ships of wealthy states became an obvious and highly profitable strategy in war.”

5. Absolute Monarchs and Limited War (1400-1790)

• 101: “[It was in China where] the explosive results of mixing saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal had first been discovered. As early as 1232 Chinese troops defending the city of Luoyang against the Mongols had used a ‘thunder bomb’, an iron vessel filled with gunpowder and launched from a catapult. Within twenty-five years, they were using the ‘fire-lance’, a primitive gun consisting of a bamboo tube stuffed with gunpowder that would fire a cluster of pellets about 250 yards. It was probably Mongol armies, having copied the Chinese weapons, who brought them to Europe, where the first real metal guns were cast in the 1320s.”
• 110: Dyer states that in Europe in the 18th Century, wars’ “political and economic impact on civilian society was very small. Some distant territory might change hands or a different candidate might gain a throne somewhere, but population, prosperity, and industry continued to grow across most of Europe and the wars barely registered in the consciousness of the average civilian.”
• 112: “Armies could only campaign when there was grass in the fields (May to October), because an army of 100,000 men was typically accompanied by 40,000 animals. Those 40,000 animals went through eight thousand acres of grass a day, so armies spent much of their time just moving to new grazing grounds.”

6. Mass Warfare (1790-1900)

• 123: “Once mass societies cracked the problem of numbers and regained the ability to discuss their affairs and make decisions collectively, the pyramidal structure of power and privilege in civilised states—never popular with most people—was no longer an unavoidable necessity. Societies could become self-directing—democratic, in other words—and as soon as that became possible, people remembered that they had always preferred equality to hierarchy.”

7. Total War

8. A Short History of Nuclear War, 1945-90

9. Trifurcation: Nuclear, Conventional and Terrorist

• 200: “To grasp the scale of the escalation in cost of military hardware, consider the Spitfire, probably the best fighter in the world when it entered service with the Royal Air Force in 1939. Then cost £5,000 to build: equivalent to the average annual income of about 30 British adults…. The RAF’s most recent acquisition, the American-built F-35B… costs £190 million a copy including engines and electronics (6,785 Brits’ annual income). To put it another way, after allowing for inflation an F-35B is 225 times as expensive as a Spitfire. No country is 225 times richer than it was at the beginning of World War II, so far fewer weapons can be built.”
• 202: if a war were to have broken out between two world powers in the 1980s, Dyer estimates that “Each day’s fighting might easily have seen the destruction of a thousand tanks and several hundred aircraft, and neither side would have been able to replace them quickly.”
• 205: “Measured against an admittedly terrible past, traditional ‘conventional’ war actually seems to be declining—whereas it has been a golden age for guerrilla war and ‘terrorism’.”
• 209: “The disappearance of the colonial/anti-imperial context in which the rural guerrilla technique originally flourished has drastically diminished its utility, because it hardly ever works against on locally based government supported by the most powerful local ethnic group. There is no foreign occupation to attract recruits to one’s cause, and the end-game that delivered victory in anti-colonial struggles no longer applies.”

10. The End of War

• 229: “Three great changes are underway that could tip the international system back into the old disorder: global heating, the rise of new great powers, and nuclear proliferation.”