Let’s now compare these war-related death rates (expressed again as percentages of the population dying per year of war-related causes, averaged over a long period of alternating war and peace) for traditional small-scale societies and for modern populous societies with state government. It turns out that the highest values for any modern states (20th-century Germany and Russia) are only one-third of the average values for traditional small-scale societies, and only one-sixth of Dani values. Average values for modern states are about one-tenth of average traditional values.
It may astonish you readers, as it initially astonished me, to learn that trench warfare, machine guns, napalm, atomic bombs, artillery, and submarine torpedoes produce time-averaged war-related death tolls so much lower than those from spears, arrows, and clubs. The reasons become clear when one reflects on the differences between traditional and modern state warfare that we shall discuss in more detail below. First, state warfare is an intermittent exceptional condition, while tribal warfare is virtually continuous. During the 20th century Germany was at war for only 10 years (1914–1918 and 1939–1945), and its war deaths during the remaining 90 years were negligible, while the Dani were traditionally at war every month of every year. Second, casualties of state war are borne mainly just by male soldiers age 18 to 40 years; even within that age range, most state wars use only small professional armies, with the mass conscription of the two world wars being exceptional; and civilians were not at direct risk in large numbers until saturation aerial bombing was adopted in World War II. In contrast, in traditional societies everyone—men and women, prime-age adults and old adults, children and babies—is a target. Third, in state warfare soldiers who surrender or are captured are normally permitted to survive, whereas in traditional warfare all are routinely killed. Finally, traditional but not state wars are periodically punctuated by massacres in which much or all of the population on one side gets surrounded and exterminated, as in the Dani massacres of June 4, 1966, the late 1930s, 1952, June 1962, and September 1962. In contrast, victorious states nowadays routinely keep conquered populations alive in order to exploit them, rather than exterminating them.
Similarities and differences
In what respects is traditional warfare similar to state warfare, and in what respects is it different? Before answering this question, we should of course recognize that there isn’t a polar opposition between these two types of warfare, with no middle ground, but that warfare instead changes along a continuum from the smallest to the largest society. The larger the society, the larger the armed force that it can muster, hence the lower the possibility of concealing the force, the lower the potential for raids and ambushes by small concealed groups of a few men, and the greater the emphasis on open battles between large forces. The leadership becomes stronger, more centralized, and more hierarchical in larger societies: national armies have officers of various ranks, a war council, and a commander-in-chief, while small bands just have equal-ranked men fighters, and medium-sized groups (like the Gutelu Alliance among the Dani) have weak leaders directing by persuasion rather than by authority to give orders. Warfare in large centralized chiefdoms may approximate warfare in small states. Despite this continuity of societal size, it’s still useful to compare small and large societies in how they fight.
One similarity is in the importance of enlisting allies. Just as the Wilihiman-Walalua Confederation of Dani sought allies among other confederations in fighting against the Widaia and their allies, World War II pitted two alliances against each other, whose main members were Britain, the U.S., and Russia on one side, and Germany, Italy, and Japan on the other side. Alliances are even more essential for warring traditional societies than for warring nations. Modern nations differ greatly in military technology, so that a small nation may be able to rely on superior technology and leadership rather than on more allies to win a war. (Think of the successes of Israel’s armies against far more numerous Arab alliances.) But traditional warfare tends to take place between opponents with similar technology and similar leadership, so that the side with the advantage of numbers from enlisting more allies is likely to win.
Another similarity involves the reliance of societies of all sizes on both hand-to-hand fighting and long-range weapons. Even the small Fayu bands fighting around the Kueglers’ house had bows and arrows, while the Dani threw spears as well as killing Wejakhe and Jenokma at close quarters with spear thrusts. The range of weapons increases with a society’s increasing size and level of technology. Although Roman soldiers continued to use swords and daggers for hand-to-hand fighting, their weapons-at-a-distance included arrows, javelins, slings, and catapults with a range of up to half a mile. By the time of World War I, the German army had developed a cannon (nicknamed Big Bertha) to bombard Paris from a distance of 68 miles, while modern intercontinental ballistic missiles have ranges of up to half of the world’s circumference. But modern soldiers still have to be prepared to use a pistol or a bayonet to kill at close quarters.
A psychological consequence of this increasing range of modern long-range weapons is that most military killing today is by “push-button” technology (bombs, artillery, and missiles), permitting soldiers to kill unseen opponents and not to have to overcome their inhibitions about killing face-to-face (Plate 37). In all traditional fighting one selects one’s target individually and sees his face, whether one is stabbing him at close quarters or shooting an arrow at him from a distance of tens of yards (Plate 36). Men in traditional societies grow up from childhood encouraged to kill, or at least knowing how to kill, but most modern state citizens grow up taught constantly that killing is bad, until after age 18 they suddenly enlist or are inducted into the army, given a gun, and ordered to aim at an enemy and shoot him. Not surprisingly, a significant fraction of soldiers in World Wars I and II—some estimates run as high as one-half—could not bring themselves to shoot an enemy whom they saw as another human being. Thus, while traditional societies lack both the moral inhibitions against killing an enemy face-to-face, and the technology necessary to bypass those inhibitions by killing unseen victims at a distance, modern state societies have tended to develop both the inhibitions and the technology necessary to bypass the inhibitions.
As for the numerous differences between traditional and state warfare, one difference follows straight on from that discussion of the psychology of killing. Even when modern soldiers see an enemy face-to-face, the enemy is almost always a nameless person, someone whom they never met before and against whom they hold no individual grudge. In contrast, in small-scale traditional societies one recognizes and knows by name not only every member of one’s own society, but also many or most of the enemy warriors one is trying to kill—because shifting alliances and occasional intermarriages make one’s neighbors familiar as individuals. The taunts that Dani warriors shouted at each other in the battles recounted in Chapter 3 included personal insults. Readers of the Iliad will recall how opposing Greek and Trojan leaders addressed each other by name before attempting to kill each other in battle—a famous example being the speeches of Hector and Achilles to each other just before Achilles fatally wounded Hector. Personal vengeance against an individual enemy known to have killed one of your own relatives or friends plays a major role in traditional warfare, but much less of a role or none in modern state war.