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Hello, in the early 19th century, the Prussian General Karl von Klaushvitz seemed to define

war for all time when he called it an act of violence intended to compel our

opponent to fulfill our will and nothing but a continuation of politics with the

admixture of other means. But after the nuclear bomb, the Cold War, and the brutal

and perplexing recent wars in Africa and Eastern Europe, does his definition still hold true?

Or are we in a new era when the idea of a continuation of peacetime politics and the notion

of a national will is increasingly irrelevant.

With me to discuss whether the conflict today constitutes something new in the history of warfare

is the military historian Sir Michael Howard, emeritus professor of modern history at Oxford University, the conflict analyst Dr Mary Caldor from the

London School of Economics and also someone who's had direct experience of

Modern Warfare, General Sir Michael Rose, former commander of the United Nations Protection

Force in Bosnia and author of Fighting for Peace lessons from Bosnia.

Let's start Michael Howard with Von Klaisvitz.

Would you define for us the concept of modern warfare that he described

and tell us a little of how it developed? Well, what he was writing about was warfare in his time,

which was war between organized states. In his youth he had

been used to very limited warfare conducted by states, yes, but states under the strict control of princes using professional armies

who are extremely expensive and war as a result was conducted in a very limited and

circumscribed way.

With the French Revolution, you do get involved to

...