The Most Dangerous Invention: Gwynne Dyer and the History of War

Why Short Histories Matter

War has long been the domain of soldiers and scholars: studied by the few, practised by the fewer, but suffered by the many. In the absence of lived memory, the risk is that societies forget what war really means.

This fading memory matters. The 20th century saw war reach its historical zenith through extreme industrialised conflict. It was a time of mass mobilisation, unprecedented global integration, and civilian populations on the front and rear lines like never before. But today, nearly a century later, no full generation left alive can truly compute the scale of destruction the first half of the 1900s wrought outside of study, media, or memory. 

Total war is often abstract. It is reduced to historical footage, elevated by academic study, rendered across film and games, or reflected through anecdotes by those who have experienced conflict in our lifetime. That makes public understanding not just desirable, but necessary. As Great Power Competition returns, we risk confronting future war without a logical and emotional foundation needed to respect its costs.

That is the challenge Gwynne Dyer takes up in The Shortest History of War. If war must be made intelligible to the many and not just the few, then its complexity simplified is key. His message is clear: violence certainly exists in nature, and fighting is too common across the animal kingdom; but war is something distinctly human. It is an institutional practice born of hierarchy, sustained by coercion, and shaped by political purpose. 

What the Book Gets Right: The Impressive Scope

Dyer’s narrative unfolds in broad chronological arcs, but its power lies in rejecting determinism. War, he argues, has never been inevitable and has always been enabled. Elites choose it, institutions entrench it, and ideologies justify it.

Going as far back as historically plausible for a self-respecting scholar, Dyer systematically dismantles romantic myths of honourable violence and the noble savage. Instead, he traces how conflict has been shaped by degrees of industrialisation across millennia, various forms of nationalism before and after Westphalia was even a thing, evolving methods of bureaucracy long before Mandarins, and even game theory as a thought experiment. 

These are forces, Dyer outlines, which rhyme across history, reinforcing the institutional logic of violence and escalating its lethality. War is not some immutable condition of humanity – it is a social technology. A political invention, forged in the surplus of early agriculture and sustained by organised power ever since.

One of the book’s most striking passages illustrates the intense changes in just the last few centuries. Outlining the use of phalanx-style tactics, Dyer observes that a well-trained army from 1500 BCE (if rearmed with iron instead of bronze) could plausibly hold its own against one from 1500 CE. Yet within just a century of that, the military revolutions of the 17th century made such continuity impossible. The accelerating pace of change, particularly in our lifetime, has transformed war’s destructiveness beyond recognition. Where war once meant hours of bloody attrition with swords or muskets, today it can mean a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile capable of erasing cities in minutes. The gap between what war was and what it could become has never been wider. 

Nowhere is this institutional absurdity clearer than in Dyer’s analysis of Cold War nuclear doctrines. Mutually assured destruction (MAD), he writes, was not strategic brilliance but a global suicide pact rationalised into orthodoxy. What began as deterrence hardened into doctrine – a logic so widely accepted that he says its contradictions became invisible. But The Shortest History of War is not a book about tactics, doctrines, or battlefield dynamics. It is not concerned with how wars are fought, but why war became possible at all. 

Dyer is philosophical as any other scholar of war, but he nonetheless breaks with much of the traditional literature by sidestepping Clausewitz, ignoring Thucydides, and barely engages with the debates that dominate professional military education like conflicts character or nature. Instead, he writes how war came to be normalised – and asks what that tells us about the structures of power that maintain it.

Dyer’s style reflects the clarity of a brisk and accessible thesis largely free of jargon. He writes with dry wit and forward momentum, synthesising insights from anthropology, political theory, and strategic history without drifting into overreach. He rarely moralises, but his analysis invites serious reflection on how strategic thinking has often reinforced the very institutions that perpetuate war.

In this sense, The Shortest History of War is less a work of strategy than a manifesto on human behaviour. Dyer’s aim is not to model escalation scenarios or catalogue military innovations. It is to provoke. And in a field that still too often speaks only to itself, that provocation is timely.

Still, and appreciating the book’s self-titled brevity making some generalisations inevitable, there a few stand out missed opportunities, mostly around China.

The Western Frame: What the Book Leaves Out

The largest omission in Dyer’s narrative involves China. After tracing early technological growth in the West, he makes a highly speculative claim that chariot warfare may have reached ancient China via Western diffusion – possibly even suggesting that Westerners played a formative role in the emergence of the Shang dynasty, China’s first recorded civilisation, circa 1600 BCE.

While it’s true that foreign-established dynasties have historically been absorbed to become thoroughly ‘Chinese’ once in power – most famously the Yuan (13th century) and Qing (17th century) – the idea that the Shang origins, and by extension the foundations of Chinese civilisation, reflect a Western military transfer is unfounded. Chariots do appear in Shang and, more extensively, in Zhou (the successor dynasty) archaeological contexts. But the evidence for early Western influence is far too tenuous to sustain such a claim without at least caveating it – or better yet, omitting it entirely.

A second reference to China is equally underdeveloped. Dyer remarks that “why China never developed firearms any further is a major historical puzzle.” It is – and it has a name: the “Needham Puzzle,” after the British sinologist Joseph Needham, who famously asked why modern science and industry took off in Europe and not in China, despite China’s early technological advances. As Dyer rightly implies, the question is complex, spanning political centralisation, Confucian orthodoxy, economic incentives, and strategic priorities – each with lasting implications for how states approach innovation, military development, and strategic autonomy. While Dyer cannot be expected to explore these dimensions in detail, he misses an opportunity to signpost readers towards the broader debate – or even to the companion volume The Shortest History of China. It’s not that Dyer is unaware of the issue. By calling it a “puzzle,” he gestures to the complexity – but he stops short of using that gesture to steer curious readers further.

A third omission – or rather, a framing issue – lies in Dyer’s treatment of the American Civil War. In discussing its death toll, he writes that “the greatest of the mid-century wars [in the 1800s] was not fought in Europe at all.” This is not inaccurate, but it is misleading – and reflects a broader tendency in Western historical narratives to centre American experiences without adequate global comparison. The war Dyer goes on to describe is the US Civil War, not the vastly more destructive Taiping Rebellion (1850–64), which occurred contemporaneously in Qing China and killed an estimated 20 to 30 million people – perhaps 5–10% of the Chinese population. In both nominal and proportional terms, the Taiping Rebellion ranks among the most devastating conflicts in history. That Dyer omits it in a passage explicitly focused on wartime death tolls is striking. It risks reinforcing a common but narrow assumption: that the Civil War represents the apex of military tragedy, without acknowledging that many of the external wars America later fought were part of far larger conflicts that dwarfed it in scale and consequence.

To say that more Americans died in the Civil War than in World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan combined is not incorrect under some estimates. But it is a peculiar framing – one that overlooks how those later wars collectively cost over 100 million lives globally, with American casualties accounting for less than 0.5% of that total. The Civil War was horrific, but it was also internal: every death was American by definition. That does not make it more tragic – it simply renders the casualty count structurally incomparable. A proportional analysis would have offered a clearer, more globally grounded lens through which to view the scale of wartime suffering.

Dyer had many ways to express the horrors of the US Civil War – and does so effectively in isolation. But the statistical framing he chooses risks minimising the far greater human costs endured elsewhere. None of this undermines the book’s value, but it does underscore the importance of nuance, proportion, and signposting – especially in a volume aiming to distil the essence of war for a general readership. Dyer succeeds in raising big questions. He might have done more to direct readers toward where deeper answers lie.

Conclusion: Strategy Can Be Concise

The Shortest History of War does not claim to be definitive, and it is not. It is Western in focus, selective in evidence, and occasionally too quick in its conclusions. But its purpose is not to close debate – it is to open it.

Dyer’s core insight is that war is a human invention, not a biological imperative. It may not be new, but he delivers it with clarity, speed, and accessibility. In doing so, he lowers the barrier to entry for one of the most important topics in human history. And in a world where strategic thinking is too often confined to insiders, that is no small contribution.

While its centre of gravity is unapologetically Western, Dyer’s account raises powerful questions that resonate globally. The omissions – especially around China – matter. But the achievement lies in what he includes, and in how deftly he compresses a vast and violent history into something the public must, and might, actually read.