War: Sir Rupert Smith is the very model of a modern media general. Good looks, the global brand of the British "Paras" and a neat line in soundbites make him a darling of the UK and US media. Like Wesley Clark and Tim Collins, he is one of that new breed of televisual intellectual-soldiers: a man's man who can also think, writes Richard Aldous.
Even before it was published, The Utility of Force attracted huge coverage, not least because it gave newspapers one clear headline: "You're fighting the wrong war, Tony."
Books such as this, written by men like Smith, are part of the recent (if somehow perennial) fascination with combat. Publishing houses inevitably go through fads. After the Cold War there was an avalanche of books about "the end of history"; after 9/11 lots of books on terror. Now Iraq brings assessments of new methods of warfare for the 21st century.
No-one can argue that Rupert Smith does not understand what it is like to stand in the heat of battle. He commanded the UK Armoured Division in the first Gulf War, UN forces in Bosnia and was Deputy Commander of Nato. He was also General Officer Commanding (GOC) in Northern Ireland. Perhaps it is a shame that The Utility of Force does not show a bit more of the soldier and rather less of the intellectual. The first half of the book is a gentle run through 200 years of military history, with a sprinkling of the strategist, Clausewitz, of the kind that soldiers might get in training at the staff college in Camberley. The heart sinks when, on reaching page 161, we realise that we have only got as far as "By June 1900 . . . ".
What most readers want from Smith is an assessment of war in the contemporary world. His central thesis is that conflict as we have previously understood it - "battle in a field between men and machinery . . . as a massive deciding event in a dispute in international affairs" - no longer exists. Instead it has been replaced by "war amongst the people". He offers six basic trends that make up this new paradigm of war: that "we fight amongst the people, not on the battlefield"; the "ends for which we fight are changing from the hard objectives that decide a political outcome to those of establishing conditions in which the outcome may be decided"; that "our conflicts tend to be timeless, even unending"; "we fight so as to preserve the force rather than risking all to gain the objective"; that "on each occasion new uses are found for old weapons and organisations which are the products of industrial war"; and that "the sides are mostly non-state, comprising some form of multi-national grouping against some non-state party or parties".
Smith explains this theory in a cogent and detailed way, showing how the nature of modern conflict is fluid and constantly evolving. For example, "war amongst the people" is not itself a new experience: Smith fought in one that lasted decades between the British army and the IRA in Northern Ireland. Similarly, the recent war in Iraq was not a "new" war, but an old-fashioned conflict between conventional forces that ended in regime change. The aftermath has been messy, yet this has more often been the rule rather than the exception when wars throughout the ages have ended.
Perhaps Smith's most insightful contribution comes in his assessment of the role of the media. Drawing on his own experience, he explains how the media has become indispensable to the dynamics of a conflict.
"The players were given visibility", he writes of Bosnia. "Petty officials and thugs, the vast majority of leaders on all three sides, took centre stage and became stars of the show, whilst international statesmen and generals fluffed their lines or appeared to be following a different script. Personalities rather than the actual issues at stake became the basis of analysis and commentary."
In such environments, liberal democracies need thoughtful, plausible soldiers such as Rupert Smith, who can articulate their tactical and strategic objectives to television and internet audiences across the watching world. He'll be coming to a news channel near you.
Richard Aldous teaches modern history at UCD. His Macmillan, Eisenhower and the Cold War was published this year by Four Courts Press
The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World. By Rupert Smith, Allen Lane, 428pp. £20