War & Peace Quote by Martin van Creveld

War is sold as a contest between uniforms, but van Creveld snaps the camera back to the real crowd in the frame. His line is bluntly statistical and quietly accusatory: unless you fight in a desert (a telling stand-in for emptiness, low population density, and cleaner sightlines), the “great majority” of war’s gravity lands on noncombatants. The parenthetical renaming - “civilians or ‘the people’” - is doing more than clarifying terminology. It’s exposing the moral sleight of hand that turns human beings into abstractions. “The people” is the phrase leaders invoke when they want legitimacy; “civilians” is what militaries say when they want collateral damage to sound like weather.

The intent is corrective, almost anti-mythic. Modern states narrate war as surgical and discriminating, a professional affair conducted by experts. Van Creveld’s formulation insists that this is less an exception than a propaganda posture, sustainable mainly under rare geographic conditions. In cities and villages, the battlefield is social infrastructure: housing, hospitals, power grids, food routes, schools. Harm doesn’t require direct targeting; it spreads through displacement, fear, famine, and administrative collapse.

Contextually, the quote speaks to late-20th-century conflict where the clean categories of “front” and “rear” erode: insurgencies, counterinsurgencies, aerial campaigns, sieges. It also hints at a legal and rhetorical battleground. If civilians are “the majority of those affected,” then humanitarian law and political accountability aren’t side issues - they’re the central stakes. The desert caveat isn’t a loophole; it’s a reminder that “clean war” is mostly a mirage with geography as its alibi.