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Porter, a political scientist at Brigham Young University, demonstrates that wars have been catalysts for increasing the size and power of Western governments since the Renaissance. The state's monopoly of effective violence has diminished not only individual rights and liberties, but also the ability of local communities and private associates to challenge the centralization of authority. Porter's originality lies in his thesis that war, breaking down barriers of class, gender, ethnicity and ideology, also contributes to meritocracy, mobility, and, above all, democratization. Porter also posits the emergence of the "Scientific Warfare State," a political system in which advanced technology would render obsolete mass participation in war. This provocative study merits wide circulation and serious discussion.

Surveying the past 500 years of Western history, Porter examines the effects that warfare has had on the growth of the centralized state in the West. Although we do not like to admit it, our contemporary society clearly has been shaped by war's effects. In the United States, the demands of fighting the Civil War, two world wars, and the Cold War all influenced the contours of our government and social institutions. Porter voices concerns about the impact that the end of the Cold War will have on the overall cohesiveness of American society. Without the specter of an aggressive USSR, how will our political leaders rally the nation to solve our more intractable and messy domestic problems? Porter is not sanguine about our overcoming the very human trait of using violence to effect change. If we have not learned any lessons from the past, new and awful wars await us in the next century. This fine survey of Western military history is recommended for academic collections emphasizing military and political history.

Bruce D. Porter

Bruce Douglas Porter (born September 18, 1952) has been a general authority of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) since 1995. He is a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy.

Porter was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico and later began attending Brigham Young University as a recipient of a David O. McKay scholarship. In 1970 he interrupted his studies to serve as a full-time missionary for the LDS Church in the Germany Central Mission, based in Düsseldorf, West Germany. Porter served in Germany under two mission presidents who were both native Germans holding United States citizenship, Walter H. Kindt and Rudolf K. Poecker. They served as consecutive mission presidents and had served as missionary companions in the immediate postwar period in what became communist East Germany. Kindt and Poecker had both been arrested a number of times by Soviet authorities because of their missionary activities, and Poecker used his time in Russian incarceration to learn the Russian language and tried to teach the doctrines of the church to any Russians he met. The stories that these two men frequently related to the missionaries under their supervision inspired Porter to change his university major to Russian Affairs.

Before attending Harvard University, where he received a doctoral degree in political science emphasizing Russian affairs, Porter spent a summer in the Soviet Unionas an exchange student. He has worked for the federal government on the United States Senate Armed Services Committee and as executive director of the U.S. Board for International Broadcasting. He also worked for two years for the Northrop Corporation. Before accepting a professorship at Brigham Young University (BYU), he served for three years (1990–93) as the Bradley Senior Research Fellow at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University. During this period he authored War and the Rise of the State (Simon and Schuster, 1994.)

Porter continued his service in the LDS Church. In the 1980s, while a resident in Munich, West Germany, where he worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty as a foreign policy specialist, Porter served as the president of the church's Munich Servicemen's Branch. He later served as a bishop in Virginia, and after he accepting a position of Associate Professor, was called to serve as a counselor to Noel B. Reynolds in a student stake presidency at BYU.

Porter was initially called to the Second Quorum of the Seventy in 1995, but in 2003 was transferred to the First Quorum of the Seventy. Since being called as a general authority, he served in the presidencies of the church's Europe East and Salt Lake City areas. Since 2004, he has been Executive Director of the church's Correlation Department, and since 2008, he assists in coordinating the Middle East/Africa North areas of the church, administered from the church's headquarters in Salt Lake City.

Porter is the author of several books dealing with politics and religion:

USSR in Third World Conflicts: Soviet Arms and Diplomacy in Local Wars 1945-1980 (1984)

Red Armies in Crisis (Csis Significant Issues Series) (1992)

War and the Rise of the State (1994)

The King of Kings (2007)