Fallen — Chapter 1: A World at War

Most Americans mistakenly believe that peace is the normal condition of mankind, while war is some weird aberration. Actually, it's the other way around.^[1]

Lieutenant General Michael Flynn wrote those words in 2016. They were not popular then, and they are less popular now. We are a people who want desperately to believe that peace is the default — that the natural state of human affairs is cooperation, and that war is a disease that infects an otherwise healthy body. This is the great comfortable lie of the modern West. It is historically illiterate, philosophically naive, and spiritually dangerous.

The record of human civilization is not a record of peace interrupted by occasional wars. It is a record of war punctuated by occasional pauses. Open any history of any nation, any empire, any tribe, and you will find the same thing: conflict is the baseline. The pauses between wars are not peace in any meaningful sense; they are preparation, consolidation, and recovery before the next round. J.F.C. Fuller, writing in the aftermath of the First World War, observed that "the greater part of our lives is spent in preparing for war — in our lecture rooms, in our exercises, on our training grounds."^[2] He was speaking of professional soldiers, but the principle applies universally. Even in "peacetime," human beings are competing, positioning, maneuvering, and building the conditions from which the next conflict will emerge.

The writer of Ecclesiastes understood this:

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven... a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.^[3]

Notice the structure. War and peace are not opposites. They are seasons — phases of a single underlying reality, as predictable and as unavoidable as summer and winter. One gives way to the other, endlessly, because the thing that produces them — the human condition — has not changed.

War and Peace Are One

Colin Gray, one of the most rigorous strategic thinkers of the twentieth century, put it plainly: "Strategy is needed in both peace and war. War emerges out of a condition of peace, just as peace follows war. The strategist must always be on duty."^[4]

Read that again. War emerges from peace. It does not arrive from outside like an invading force. It grows from within, in the soil of peace itself — in the unresolved grievances, the shifting appetites, the accumulation of power and resentment that peacetime conceals but does not cure. "As peace of one kind or another must follow war," Gray continues, "so war must follow a period of peace. These points, which are so obvious as to appear banal, indicate problem areas of profound difficulty."^[5]

Banal, perhaps. But if they are so obvious, why does the modern world refuse to act on them?

Because the modern world has convinced itself that the cycle can be broken. That with the right institutions, the right treaties, the right international norms, humanity can achieve a permanent peace. The evidence for this conviction is thin. Fuller, surveying the wreckage of the peace that was supposed to end all wars, noted that "the Great War cost us nearly one million dead, and it was concluded by a series of peace treaties which reek with future wars."^[6] Twenty years later, sixty million more were dead.

Steven Pinker, in his widely celebrated The Better Angels of Our Nature, argues that violence has in fact declined dramatically over centuries — that we live in the most peaceful era in human history, thanks to the civilizing process, the expansion of trade, and the escalator of reason.^[7] His data is impressive. His charts are convincing. And his thesis is built on sand.

Pinker measures physical violence per capita. By that narrow metric, he may be right. Fewer people are dying in battle relative to the total population. But the book you are holding does not define conflict as body count. Conflict is the opposition of wills. And by that measure, the world has not grown more peaceful — it has grown more sophisticated in how it wages war. The shift from open warfare to economic coercion, information manipulation, cultural subversion, and the slow erosion of moral order is not a reduction in conflict. It is a change in mode. A world that has moved its battles from the field to the mind has not achieved peace. It has achieved concealment.

Nassim Taleb identified the deeper statistical problem: Pinker's data is drawn from a fat-tailed distribution. The "Long Peace" since 1945 may be nothing more than a statistical artifact — the calm between catastrophes in a system where catastrophes, by their nature, are unpredictable and extreme.^[8] We are not living in an era of peace. We are living in an era of waiting. The fact that the bomb has not fallen does not mean the war is over. It means the war has not yet reached its next physical expression.

The Marine Corps grasps this instinctively. Their capstone doctrinal publication, MCDP 1: Warfighting, opens not with tactics or organization but with a philosophical treatment of the nature of war — its moral, mental, and physical dimensions.^[9] It acknowledges that "all actions in war take place in an atmosphere of uncertainty" and that the military professional must be perpetually prepared for violence, not because he desires it, but because the world does not ask permission before inflicting it. The Army's ADP 3-0 describes an operational environment defined by "competition, crisis, and armed conflict" — a continuum in which forces are always engaged, even in the absence of declared hostilities.^[10] The joint force's JP 3-0 extends this into the competition continuum: cooperation, adversarial competition below armed conflict, and armed conflict — with the explicit recognition that the same actor can be at different points on the continuum simultaneously.^[11]

The military knows what the civilian world will not admit: there is no condition of non-conflict. There is only the question of which mode the conflict currently occupies.^[12]

Peace Requires Strength

There is a common error that equates peacefulness with harmlessness. It is a flattering delusion, and a lethal one.

Most people who see themselves as "peaceful" really aren't. You see, in order to be peaceful, you must have the ability and willingness to use violence, but choose not to. When someone has neither the willingness or ability to use violence, they are not peaceful. They're helpless.^[13]

The distinction matters. A man who cannot fight and does not fight is not peaceful. He is merely incapable. A man who can fight and chooses not to is exercising restraint — and restraint is a moral act that requires strength, not weakness. The strongest pacifist in history was not a man who lacked the capacity for violence but one who possessed it completely and laid it down willingly. That is the pattern of Christ Himself, who could have called twelve legions of angels and chose the cross instead.^[14] But make no mistake — He could have called them. His peace was underwritten by infinite power.

The democratic peace thesis, articulated by scholars from Kant to Bruce Russett, holds that liberal democracies rarely wage war against one another and that conflict can be structurally eliminated through the right political institutions.^[15] This is a seductive idea, and it has a grain of truth: democracies with shared economic interests have strong incentives to avoid the destruction of open war. But the thesis describes a correlation within a narrow historical window, not a causal law. It assumes the permanence of democratic institutions, which history does not support — democracies collapse, degrade, and radicalize with depressing regularity. Athens, the first democracy, voted to exterminate the population of Mytilene. The Weimar Republic voted itself into dictatorship. More fundamentally, the democratic peace thesis addresses interstate war only. It says nothing about civil conflict, class warfare, cultural dissolution, or the quiet wars waged within every human heart. You can have a world without declared wars and still have a world drowning in conflict. We may, in fact, be living in one.

The Spiritual Root

This brings us to the question that modern strategic theory refuses to ask: Why?

Why is conflict permanent? Why does every peace carry within it the seeds of the next war? Why do human beings, who so often profess to desire peace, so reliably produce war?

Clausewitz located the answer in politics. "The political context within which a war is nested," Colin Gray writes, summarizing the Clausewitzian view, "is literally the source of any and every conflict."^[16] But here I must differ with Gray, whose work I respect enormously. His assertion is far too Clausewitzian, and Clausewitz — for all his brilliance — was operating within the materialist assumptions of his age. Politics is a proximate cause, not an ultimate one. It describes how conflicts are organized, not why conflicts exist.

John Keegan, from a different angle, argues that war is fundamentally cultural — an expression of the society that wages it, shaped by material conditions, geography, and social organization rather than by any grand theory.^[17] Keegan is right that culture shapes how wars are fought. The Spartan phalanx and the Comanche raiding party wage war in ways that are recognizably distinct — products of geography, social structure, and material circumstance. But culture itself is downstream of something deeper. Augustine understood what Keegan would not admit: "Two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self."^[18] Culture is the expression of what a people loves. What they love determines what they fight for. And what they love is a question of the will — which is, at root, a spiritual question. The way a people wages war — the Spartan's discipline, the Comanche's mobility, the modern drone operator's detachment — reflects the material and social conditions Keegan describes. But the reason a people goes to war at all, and what they are willing to die for, is downstream of what they worship. The cultural expression of combat is shaped by geography and technology. The impulse to combat is shaped by desire.

Reinhold Niebuhr — the twentieth century's most penetrating theologian on the question of collective sin — would caution us here against oversimplifying. He is right that collective human behavior is messier than individual moral choice, that institutions generate their own momentum, that the righteous cause rarely looks as clean on the ground as it does in the theology textbook.^[19] All granted. But Niebuhr's realism about the complexity of collective sin does not undermine the claim that sin is the root cause. It reinforces it. The very messiness he describes — the way institutional evil compounds, the way groups do what individuals would be ashamed to do — is precisely what a fallen race would result in. A world in rebellion against its Creator will produce exactly the tangled, self-justifying, endlessly proliferating conflict that Niebuhr observed and despaired of. His despair is the evidence.

I argue that the spiritual context is not only the most ignored dimension of contemporary conflict but the primary context we need to understand all conflict in relation to. The emphasis of the political aspect of war may simply be the secular and naturalistic understanding of true causes. Peel back the politics and you find competing desires. Peel back the desires and you find competing wills. Peel back the wills and you find the one primordial opposition: the creature's will against the Creator's. Every human conflict is a downstream manifestation of that original rebellion — sometimes directly, sometimes through a thousand mediating layers of culture and politics and personal grievance, but always traceable to the same source.

This is not a metaphor. This is not a poetic way of saying that war is complicated. This is a claim about the structure of reality. Every conflict — from the child who defies his parents, to the husband and wife who cannot see eye to eye, to nations embroiled in world wars — is an outworking of the fact that there are two wills at work in the world: God's will, and not God's will.

Radical Uncertainty

One final observation before we move on.

Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all. For man does not know his time. Like fish that are taken in an evil net, and like birds that are caught in a snare, so the children of man are snared at an evil time, when it suddenly falls upon them.^[20]

Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.^[21]

Human beings act under radical uncertainty. We do not know when the net will close, when the snare will spring. "The world was not how you wanted it to be," Michael Crichton wrote. "The world was how it was. There were bad people in the world. They had to be stopped."^[22]

A necessary caveat before we proceed. Even knowing and exercising every one of the principles in this book perfectly does not guarantee victory. Final outcomes belong to the Lord. The race is not to the swift. The battle is not to the strong. Time and chance happen to them all. But in the overwhelming number of cases, the victor in any conflict — whether a physical fight, a verbal confrontation, or a spiritual battle — is the party that applies these principles better. The principles do not promise invincibility. They describe how the created order rewards certain patterns and punishes others. The man who understands them fights with the grain of reality. The man who ignores them fights against it. And reality, over time, is unforgiving.

This uncertainty does not excuse us from action. It demands action. If conflict is the baseline condition — and it is — and if we cannot know when it will find us — and we cannot — then vigilance is not paranoia. It is the only rational posture for a creature living in a world at war with its Creator.

The prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it.^[23]

We begin.

---

1. Michael T. Flynn and Michael Ledeen, The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War against Radical Islam and Its Allies (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2016), Introduction. ISBN 978-1-250-10622-0. ↩︎

2. J.F.C. Fuller, The Foundations of the Science of War (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1926; repr. Eastbourne: Antony Rowe, 2012), 24. ISBN 978-1-78155-064-0. ↩︎

3. Ecclesiastes 3:1, 8 (ESV). ↩︎

4. Colin S. Gray, Fighting Talk: Forty Maxims on War, Peace, and Strategy (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007), 16. ISBN 978-0-275-99131-2. ↩︎

5. Gray, Fighting Talk, 25. ↩︎

6. Fuller, Foundations, 32. ↩︎

7. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011). ISBN 978-0-670-02295-3. See especially Part I, "The Pacification Process," and Part VI, "The New Peace." ↩︎

8. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "The Long Peace is a Statistical Illusion," published on fooledbyrandomness.com (2012) and expanded in The Black Swan, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 2010), Postscript Essay. ISBN 978-0-8129-7381-5. Taleb's core objection: Pinker draws conclusions about the mean from a fat-tailed distribution where the mean is dominated by rare, extreme events. The absence of a world war since 1945 is not evidence that world wars have become less likely — it is exactly what you would expect from a random process with long inter-event intervals. ↩︎

9. U.S. Marine Corps, MCDP 1: Warfighting (Washington, D.C.: Headquarters, United States Marine Corps, 1997), Chapter 1, "The Nature of War." Available at: https://www.marines.mil/Portals/1/Publications/MCDP%201%20Warfighting.pdf ↩︎

10. U.S. Department of the Army, ADP 3-0: Operations (Washington, D.C.: Headquarters, Department of the Army, July 2019), Chapter 1. Available at: https://armypubs.army.mil ↩︎

11. Joint Chiefs of Staff, JP 3-0: Joint Campaigns and Operations (Washington, D.C.: Joint Chiefs of Staff, June 2022). Available at: https://www.jcs.mil/Doctrine/Joint-Doctine-Pubs/3-0-Operations-Series/ ↩︎

12. The irony is that even those institutions that do study conflict systematically often fail to internalize their own findings. An old Soviet joke holds that "the Americans do not read their manuals, nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine." See Steve Leonard, "Broken and Unreadable: Our Unbearable Aversion to Doctrine," Modern War Institute (18 May 2017), https://mwi.westpoint.edu/broken-unreadable-unbearable-aversion-doctrine/. If the professional military struggles with doctrinal aversion, the civilian world's refusal to think systematically about conflict is hardly surprising. ↩︎

13. Attributed to various sources; this formulation appears in Ox and David Morris, "Helping The Most Peaceful Loved Ones Protect Themselves," 17 September 2021. The underlying concept — that peacefulness requires the capacity for violence under restraint — traces to Aristotle's distinction between continence and temperance, and is echoed in Dave Grossman, On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace, 3rd ed. (Millstadt, IL: Warrior Science Publications, 2008). ISBN 978-0-9649205-2-3. ↩︎

14. Matthew 26:53 (ESV): "Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?" ↩︎

15. Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). ISBN 978-0-691-03346-2. See also Michael W. Doyle, "Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs," Philosophy & Public Affairs 12, nos. 3-4 (1983): 205-235, 323-353. ↩︎

16. Gray, Fighting Talk, 21. ↩︎

17. Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 12. ISBN 0-394-58801-0. "War is not the continuation of policy by other means... War is always an expression of culture, often a determinant of cultural forms, in some societies the culture itself." ↩︎

18. Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, Book XIV, Chapter 28 (c. 426 AD). Trans. Marcus Dods. Available at New Advent: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120114.htm ↩︎

19. Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932; repr. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001). ISBN 978-0-664-22474-5. See especially Chapters 1-3 on the divergence between individual and collective morality. ↩︎

20. Ecclesiastes 9:11-12 (ESV). ↩︎

21. James 4:14 (ESV). ↩︎

22. Michael Crichton, State of Fear (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), loc. 59. ISBN 978-0-06-621413-9. ↩︎

23. Proverbs 22:3 (ESV). Repeated verbatim at Proverbs 27:12. ↩︎