“We are at a moment in world affairs when the essential ideas that govern statecraft must change”

The Shield of Achilles’ opening line is deceptively simple, but dense to unpack. Recommended by the CA Professional Study Guide as a reading list extension, this is not a book about war, or the conduct of war. Rather, it is a study of how war shapes the legitimacy of states who make war.

Table 1 – A brief overview of the ideas within each part of Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles

War is merely a narrative, or symptom, to exemplify points in history where competition tips into conflict, thereby giving birth to a new order of statehood. Therefore, Army officers and soldiers should brace themselves for two books in one as Philip Bobbitt, an American constitutional lawyer and professor, convinces the audience of three major ideas.

War shapes culture, and culture shapes war

Inspired by the pivotal device in Homer’s Iliad ensuring Achilles’ immortality, Bobbitt reconciles not only the inter-relationship between a society and war. He more specifically outlines examples through (predominantly Western) history of how the transition from nation-states to market-states has changed culture and vice versa.

• We (the Army) must be excellent in the profession of arms, and this can sometimes feel distinct, or removed, from the society and culture we defend. Bobbitt’s reminder is a much deeper analysis at why this is the case, building on examples of how society shapes power structures, and in turn how those societies are rewarded by the power of the day. The book is dense, and I would recommend Al Palazzo’s Land Warfare, an Introduction or Army’s Essentials of Land Warfare: The Soldier as primers.

The Long War

Secondly, Professor Bobbitt, proposes the idea of the “Long War” – a series of major conflicts from the start of the First World War in 1914, through to the decline of the Soviet Union in 1990. Bobbitt proposes that this Long War is one of many “epochal wars” which determine the replacement constitutional format to succeed a former, viable power. Is it possible that the “wars of choice” Australia has been fighting, could retrospectively be seen in our descendant’s history lessons as an extension of this “Long War”?

• Readers should, likewise, be open-minded to the origins of today’s nation states. In early chapters of Book I, Bobbitt identifies the precedents to the modern nation-state, their pros and cons, and the correlating technology of the day which enabled that change to the power structure. Driven by necessity, Bobbitt argues that states claim legitimacy today through being a “market state” and uplifting opportunities for their societies.

The Rise of the Market State

Thirdly, having justified the current landscape for market-states transitioned from nation states, Bobbitt proposes how a new society of market states is being born. Echoing back to the opening line of the prologue, Bobbitt identifies strategic innovations (which “won the Long War”) to undermining the nation state’s ability to govern. Nuclear weapons, global telecommunications, and rapid computation, he describes, will make it harder for nations to defend their territories, tackle transnational problems, and protect their national culture from outside influences.

The future of statehood, according to Bobbitt, need not be territorial. It might not be sovereign – and if not sovereign, then it cannot generate law or make war.

The storytelling is far from perfect in Bobbitt’s lengthy account: readers will find it overwhelmingly exclusive to Western history, and ignorant of the human societies around Australia’s Indo-Pacific neighbours. Published in 2002, the book should be read as part of the “trilogy” of Bobbitt’s works – Terror and Consent (2008) is considered a sequel on how nation states might, or should, contend with terrorism and extremism. An upcoming book, “The Bow of Odysseus” has been revealed by the author at King’s College London last year, sharpening ideas on the future of world order.

Bobbitt’s works are instrumental at this time because we are witnessing a change in the global order, with a rising power and an incumbent hegemony. Regardless if the China-US competition tips into a military conflict (another war in the Long War?) the technologies named by Bobbitt have accelerated the development of innovations which may very well define the next version of statehood.

Army officers and soldiers must consider a changed world (yes, past tense) as the media landscape has evolved, and pandemics were not treated as a matter of nation-state security. It seems that The Shield of Achilles offers no closure, however, on its main question:

Which sort of nation-state would lay claim to the legitimacy previously enjoyed by the Imperialist state nations of the 19^th Century?

Bobbitt posits that between the three choices of fascism, communism, or parliamentarianism, a fascist replacement lost its momentum through the Long War. Perhaps Bobbitt did not foresee the Long War getting longer, as a People’s Republic of China remains the “Pacing Challenge” for the (parliamentarian republic) United States.

He does, however, hint that the answer to that question may ultimately be determined in conflict.