"The enemy resembles us. Therefore, he needs to be approached not as an assembly of 'targets' to be destroyed one by one; but as a living, intelligent entity capable of acting and reacting"
About this Quote
Van Creveld’s line is a quiet rebuke to the video-game abstraction of war: the temptation to treat conflict as a checklist of targets, each neatly “serviced” into victory. His hook is unsettling because it collapses the moral distance militaries often rely on. “The enemy resembles us” isn’t kumbaya humanism; it’s an operational warning. If the adversary thinks, learns, improvises, then the fantasy of clean, linear destruction becomes not just unethical but stupid.
The phrasing does a lot of work. “Assembly of ‘targets’” mocks a bureaucratic, technocratic vocabulary that turns people into coordinates and outcomes into metrics. The scare quotes around “targets” signal suspicion: this language isn’t neutral, it’s anesthetic. By contrast, calling the enemy a “living, intelligent entity” restores agency to the other side, which is precisely what planners want to deny when they’re selling certainty, timelines, and body counts.
Context matters: van Creveld’s career has orbited the limits of conventional military thinking, especially in insurgencies and asymmetric wars where firepower doesn’t translate cleanly into control. The subtext is Vietnam, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan - campaigns where superior forces discovered that killing units doesn’t necessarily kill a movement. He’s arguing for strategy that anticipates feedback loops: every strike produces information, resentment, adaptation, and narrative.
The intent isn’t to romanticize the opponent; it’s to force a more adult model of war - one where the adversary gets a vote, and where “success” depends less on destruction than on understanding the system you’re inside.
The phrasing does a lot of work. “Assembly of ‘targets’” mocks a bureaucratic, technocratic vocabulary that turns people into coordinates and outcomes into metrics. The scare quotes around “targets” signal suspicion: this language isn’t neutral, it’s anesthetic. By contrast, calling the enemy a “living, intelligent entity” restores agency to the other side, which is precisely what planners want to deny when they’re selling certainty, timelines, and body counts.
Context matters: van Creveld’s career has orbited the limits of conventional military thinking, especially in insurgencies and asymmetric wars where firepower doesn’t translate cleanly into control. The subtext is Vietnam, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan - campaigns where superior forces discovered that killing units doesn’t necessarily kill a movement. He’s arguing for strategy that anticipates feedback loops: every strike produces information, resentment, adaptation, and narrative.
The intent isn’t to romanticize the opponent; it’s to force a more adult model of war - one where the adversary gets a vote, and where “success” depends less on destruction than on understanding the system you’re inside.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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