Conflict Realism
Understanding the Causal Logic of Modern War and Warfare
Amos Fox, Howgate, 2024, 230 pages
Book Review published on: September 18, 2025
The relationship between theory and military practice has long been a contentious topic as perceptions of war and warfare have evolved throughout the Modern Era. Exemplified by visionaries such as Liddell Hart and Jean de Bloch who criticized their military establishments before and after the first World War, a procession of theorists, intellectuals, and practitioners have challenged Western orthodoxy pertaining to military affairs with new and novel ideas. Amos Fox, a retired U.S. Army officer with a PhD in international relations from the University of Reading, has joined this tradition by publishing a critical study that directly questions how Western militaries in general and the U.S. Army in particular have allowed stale conventional thinking to obscure the realities of conflict in the twenty-first century. Identifying the problem as "the nexus of strategy, concepts, doctrine, and plans" that create "institutional bias," Fox argues that these institutions have disincentivized new ideas that do not align with existing institutional values, preferences and procurement designs. Conflict Realism is a well-researched, complicated book that employs precise academic language to construct a nuanced argument that revised theories are required to understand the realities the contemporary political and military environment. Divided into eight topical chapters, the author begins with broad exploration of the taxonomy of contemporary military thought and foundational ideas of international realism before delving into paradoxes, principles, urban conditions, and attritional dynamics that are largely defining modern conflict. Incorporating a series of tables and charts to buttress the main ideas with data and statistics, the author likewise weaves analysis of both historical events and contemporary affairs to ground his thesis in evidence-based assertions. While the Fox's combat experience with the U.S. Army doubtlessly informs the book's thesis, he avoids making the book a memoir or employing personal anecdotes to justify theoretical arguments.
Fox's exploration in the third chapter of what he calls the "paradoxes of modern warfare" offers a particularly incisive presentation. Articulated as a "set of vogue conceptual arguments" that "corrupt clear-sighted understanding," he argues that Western military infatuation with a series of beliefs that privilege the primacy of command superiority, the effectiveness of light and deployable forces, assumptions of battlefield transparency, the influence of organizational warfighting preference, and unhelpful reliance on defeat mechanisms have undermined "cognitive maturation" concerning the "causal logic" of both contemporary and future conflict. Of these arguments, the critique of the Western institutional embrace of maneuver as its near-universal preference finds timely resonance given how destructive conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East are demonstrating how situation, necessity and terrain will prove determinative in selection of methods and tactics.
This discussion of paradoxes establishes the setting for another interesting aspect of the study: the author's arguments concerning the increasing urbanization of warfare, the realities of attritional dynamics, and overreliance on precision strike strategy. This sequence again finds Fox offering evidence that Western military concept and structure may be ill-suited, in many instances, for the stark realities of the modern battlefield. He argues, with supporting data, that trends in siege warfare which often require significant investment in manpower, material, and time are a problem that cannot be ignored even as strategists and planners have sometimes failed to recognize combat attrition as a fundamental feature of contemporary conflict. The final chapter, which criticizes the U.S. military's reliance on precision strike to enable campaigning, cautions against elevating such technological advancements to "silver-bullet solutions" designed to solve problems that may require different and costly operational approaches.
Conflict Realism, as a critique of Western military orthodoxies, makes an important contribution to the ever-evolving discourse over how to conceptualize modern ideas of war and warfare. While readers may disagree with controversial aspects of Fox's analysis of how new theories can inform better practice in military affairs, the arguments are well worth considering for both intellectuals and practitioners who seek to better understand the changing character of warfare. Further, while at times slightly provocative in tone, the book engages important topics at a time when the U.S. military has struggled to achieve strategic objectives over past decades and is observing challenging dynamics across a series of destructive conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Given these realities, and considering the imperative for institutions to constantly question assumptions and refine thinking, Fox's book arrives as a welcome addition to the existing literature on modern military theory and will stimulate debate over how to fight and win wars into the middle decades of the twenty-first century.
Book Review written by: Lt. Col. Nathan Jennings, U.S. Army, Leavenworth, Kansas