"Battle" vs "Ripples of Battle", a book review

[a_majoor]

Victor Davis Hanson has aroused a lot of comment with his positions, and historian John A. Lynn took him on with "Battle", attempting to discredit VDHs idea there is a "Western Way of War" which has survived intact since the time of classical Greece. Although I am partial to VDHs ideas, I am not fully convinced there is a direct link between us and the ancient Greeks, but read these books and decide for yourself:

Cultures of War
by Thomas A. Bruscino, Jr.
Claremont Review of Books

Battle: A History of Combat and Culture, by John A. Lynn. Westview Press, 399 pages, $27.50 (cloth), $16.95 (paper)

Ripples of Battle: How Wars of the Past Still Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think, by Victor Davis Hanson. Doubleday, 278 pages, $27.50 (cloth), $14.95 (paper)

This book review appears in the winter 2004 issue of the Claremont Review of Books.

Over the past twenty years, Victor Davis Hanson, a one-time raisin farmer and now a fellow at the Hoover Institution, has become one of the world's most prominent military historians. Hanson's bestselling books and opinion pieces on culture, warfare, and foreign affairs have become so influential that in the aftermath of September 11, he receives consultation calls from the White House and Pentagon.

Not surprisingly, his high profile has brought criticism, ranging from the shrillâ ”in the mid-1990s one critic asserted that he could be the Unabomberâ ”to the professional. Battle, by University of Illinois professor of history John Lynn, belongs in the latter category.

Battle is an eclectic study of world military history, tackling a wide array of subjects, from virtue and ethics in ancient Chinese and Indian conflicts to the war on terror. Lynn brings a fresh cultural perspective to a number of long-standing historical arguments. He describes the brutality of medieval Western warfare, dominated not by chivalry in battle but by rape, pillage, and murder in the chevauchée, the great raids across the countryside. To those who find unchanging truth in the work of Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz, Lynn charges that Clausewitz must be understood as a creature of his cultural times. Before World War I, military thinkers studied the Prussian's principles of decisive battle; after World War II, they looked with equal fervor to his ideas on limited war. And contrary to the prevailing wisdom that the strategy and brutality of World War II in the Pacific stemmed from race hatred on both sides, Lynn wisely maintains that geography dictated the strategy and conflicting military cultures created the brutality.

Lynn shows that culture can also be an obstacle to battlefield success, using the Egyptian army from 1948 to 1973 as an example. The Egyptians' rigid, top-heavy command structure stifled fresh ideas, tactical flexibility, and honest communication from lower levels, leading to a drubbing by the Israelis in the Six-Day War. In the Yom Kippur War (1973), their preplanned attackâ ”scripted down to the individual soldierâ ”negated any advantage they might have had in surprise and personal initiative; even adjusting for their culture did not lead to ultimate victory. This brings us to our present situation in the Middle East. If you can't beat an enemy on the battlefield, you have two options: you go up, to weapons of mass destruction, or down, to terrorism.

Prof. Lynn makes a persuasive case for culture as a driving force in world history in this iconoclastic and learned study. Nevertheless, Battle will disappoint readers who long for broad conclusions and sweeping historical themes. To Lynn, complexity and discontinuity separate history's many ways of war.
* * *

Victor Davis Hanson begins Ripples of Battle with a personal narrative, describing the death of his father's cousin, and his namesake, in the battle for Okinawa in 1945. This death on a distant island almost sixty years ago has rippled through the Hanson family ever since. The killing and destruction of war, Hanson argues, ripples through human history in much the same way. â Å“Battles,â ? he writes, â Å“are really the wildfires of history, out of which the survivors float like embers and then land to burn far beyond the original conflagration.â ?

Hanson examines three battlesâ ”Okinawa, Shiloh, and Deliumâ ”describing how, in a matter of a few hours or days of fighting, they precipitated changes across entire societies. In the bloody Battle of Shiloh in 1862, Ulysses S. Grant's federal forces barely overcame a surprise rebel attack. A previously disgraced William T. Sherman played a key role in the federal stand, a role that rescued him from despair and obscurity. Shiloh launched him on a course that would end in his decisive march through the heart of the South. His capture of Atlanta two years later saved Lincoln's presidential election, and his partnership with Grant eventually won the war.

On the other side, the fluke death of Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston on the evening of the first day at Shiloh prevented any further rebel attacks on the wavering federal lines. Whether or not Johnston's survival would have turned the tide is irrelevant; the fact is that many Southerners did and do believe that to be the case. Chance, not the skill of the enemy, destroyed the Confederate cause. This myth would be cemented by the death of Stonewall Jackson and by the missed opportunities at Gettysburg.

Yet the effects of Shiloh pale in comparison to the Battle of Delium in 424 B.C., an obscure and strategically unimportant engagement in the Peloponnesian War that changed the course of Western civilization. In the midst of devastating war, the Athenians decided to turn and defeat Sparta's Boeotian allies to the north. Of the thousands of hoplites who took their place in the Athenian line, one was a middle-aged philosopher named Socrates. After being routed by the Boeotians, the Athenians fled in three directions. While others fled to the mountains or their fortress, Socrates headed for the woods; only those who chose the woods escaped slaughter. And so the father of Western political philosophy lived to pass on his wisdom to Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, and us.

* * *

A key idea separates Victor Davis Hanson and John Lynn. Hanson's work has championed a â Å“Western way of war.â ? For Hanson, Greek agrarian culture produced a war method based on civic militarism and decisive battle, and the West has more or less been fighting that way (and winning against the non-West) ever since. Western traditions like consensual government, secular rationalism, and individual ingenuity produced an unparalleled, lethal military dynamism. The Greeks and Macedonians defeated the mighty Persian empire; Rome, not Carthage, conquered the known world; Spanish conquistadors ran wild in Latin America; and gunpowder, a toy for the Chinese elite, became in Western hands the basis for repeating rifles and explosive shellsâ ”not due to superior numbers, higher IQs, guns, germs, or steel, but to a 2,500-year cultural tradition. The success of the Western way of war explains why â Å“the rest of the world copies its weapons, uniforms, and military organization from us, not vice versa.â ?

Lynn disagrees. He criticizes Hanson's Western way of war for creating a universal Western warrior, unchanged through time. Lynn maintains that the soldiers and fighting styles from Imperial Rome through the Early Modern period drastically departed from their Greek antecedents, rupturing Hanson's supposedly unbroken tradition. Besides, it is not as if the West has been universally successful against the rest of the world. The Huns, Muslims, Mongols, and Turks each held their own or had their way with Western armies.

But Hanson's gift is to summon history in ways meaningful to the present. Whereas John Lynn sees coincidence in the emergence of civic militarism combined with decisive battle, Hanson sees a pattern encoded in the West's culture. Lynn saw terrorists crashing planes into buildings as marking the emergence of a new type of warfare. Hanson does not. In late 1944, the Japanese began kamikaze and banzai attacks against U.S. fleets in the Pacific. They were attempting to frighten the U.S. out of invading the mainland, which would potentially lead to millions of deaths. It was this that persuaded U.S. military planners to drop the atomic bomb. â Å“There was a similar chain of events,â ? Hanson writes, â Å“after the terrible autumn of 2001.â ? Again, the U.S. found itself faced by thousands of suicidal ideologues, convinced their fearlessness would overcome the decadent U.S. Hanson observes, â Å“Romantics may have remembered the kamikazes; realists recalled how they were dealt with.... Okinawa taught the world that the chief horror of war is not the random use of suicide bombers, but the response that they incur from Western powers whose self-imposed restraint upon their ingenuity for killing usually rests only with their own sense of moral reluctanceâ ”a brake that suicidal attack seems to strip away entirely.â ? 

Ideas are tricky things, difficult to track and measure through time. Ripples of Battle demonstrates the lasting and unexpected influence that warfare can have on all aspects of culture. If there is a Western way of war, its path from the Greek hoplite to the American soldier remains at least partially obscured by history's mountains and valleys; hidden among the ideas, prayers, art, and actions of countless souls. John Lynn is right to point this out, because discovering such a path is the essence of the historian's work. But as Victor Davis Hanson so clearly understands, in an uncertain world, history can also tell us who we are and for what, if necessary, we fight.

Thomas A. Bruscino, Jr. is a Ph.D. candidate in the history department at Ohio University.

 

[enfield]

Victor Davis Hanson is an excellent author, with a lot of interesting ideas that I find myself agreeing with. His Op Ed pieces are good too.
However, his thesis on a Western Way of war requires an incredibly selective and biased reading of history. The chapters on individual campaigns and wars are very good, and raise a lot of solid points, but it doesn't prove a continuous theme of uniquely western warfare.

Although Hanson only focuses on a few cultures that our society has decided to claim as 'western', I think what he does expose is that there has been contunuity in ideas, methods, and tactics as lessons were learned, history studied, and warfare evolved. I wouldn't describe this continuum as a straight line that led directly to modern western warfare, but more of a diffusion that spread and was picked up to varying degrees by many cultures. A similar diffusion, across cultures and continents, has given us modern philosophy, medicine, science, etc. 

 

[oyaguy]

Victor Davis Hanson does have some interesting ideas, but I also find that he seems to over generalize. He does espouse a sexy idea but I have trouble reconciling his thesis with the Mongols for example who consistently bested Western armies with their theoretically "tentative combat".

Lynn on the other hand I think suffers in his writing, because he isn't as good a writer as Victor Davis Hanson. Thought I must admit that while I have read both works, I honestly can't remember much of Lynn's thesis other than warfare is cultural, in all times with all peoples.

As a little aside about another book of Hanson's, Carnage and Culture, he makes a half-hearted attempt at refuting some of the ideas espoused by Jared Diamond on the dominance of the West on the rest of the world.

I personally find the Diamond's arguments on geography more convincing in explaining why some people a cultures make it, and why some don't. Victor Davis Hanson analysed Diamond's thesis superficially and again  only half heartedly tried to refute them. I just found Hanson's treatment of Diamond's work very condescending.

 

[a_majoor]

I actually found Jared Diamond's work very superficial; as Hanson points out in "Carnage and Culture", the soldiers of Hernan Cortez mined sulphur and other resources to replenish their supplies, natural resources which the Aztecs and prior Meso American civilizations had sat on top of for millenia, but never developed the knowledge or ability to exploit.

Accidents of geography only go so far, many of the civilizations conquered by the Greeks, Romans and Europeans were much richer in manpower and natural resources than the conquerers, but (according to Hanson's thesis), the Western soldiers had the cultural tools to seek out and exploit these resources in novel ways the natives could not. If Jared Diamond's thesis was correct, we should all be speaking Mandarin Chinese, since that civilization had the ideal combination of manpower and natural resources, while sheltered from "germs" by the sea and inhospitable climate and terrain of central Asia...The Mongols and Parithians show some of the weakness of Hanson's thesis, decisive action by shock battle isn't always the best way to settle armed conflict (against some types of enemies it may not even be a viable option).

I'm sure the truth is a complex blend of the various factors brought up in all these books, as well as other factors we haven't even begun to think of yet.

 

[TangoTwoBravo]

I'd better get to a library.  I'd go to Chapters but my kids are spending my pocket money on Star Wars toys.

It is very important to analyse an army in the context of the culture from which it is drawn.  Training will get you so far, but ultimately an army's character, methods and successes will be reflection of the raw material of its personnel.

We like to focus on technology, and of course any study of war (particularily the last 500 years) must involve technology, but culture is very important.  The last Persian emperor tried to copy the Macedonian phalanx with his own recruits after losing his own Greek hoplite mercenaries at the Granicus.  Although equipped much like Greek hoplites they were not able to stand up to the Macedonian pikemen.  The more fluid hit and run style of the Persians was not well suited culturally to the requirements for shock combat between heavy infantry, even if equipped to do so.  The same held true with the Cavalry, where the Macedonian Companion Cavalry was committed to charging home with lances, while the Persians favoured the use of javelins.  Hit and run tactics would not work well against Alexander's Macedonians because they were a tactically flexible combined arms army that incorporated several styles of war in one army.  Alexander's army, although smaller than the Persians, was composed of individuals who were each considered a member of an elite force.  They had a King, of course, but the individual soldier and leader was still important.

I think that we can identify a "western" way of war, although of course it has not been universally successful.  I believe that it is characterized by individual initiative, a degree of flexibility/openess to try new things and a willingness to engage in close combat (even if it can lead to disadvantages and be exploited by opponents).  This is not to say that other cultures do not possess these traits, just that they have exisited in some abundance in "western" armies.

Looking at the review above, I am a little leary of books that point out the "what-ifs" of single events.  I am also going to look at the 1973 bit with some interest.  The Egyptian crossing of the Suez did take the Israelis by suprise and did lead to some severe tactical reverses for the IDF.  It was indeed meticulously planned and as long as they operated inside the SAM and SAGGER belt things went fairly well for the Eygptians.  It is true that once they went further into the Siani (perhaps to draw pressure off the Golan) they were picked apart by the much more flexible Israelis (who had quickly adapted to the SAM and SAGGER threat) and the Egyptians were in fairly dire straits at the end of the conflict.  That being said, the Egptian war aims were met somewhat in that they could declare some meagre form of victory and salvage some pride after the 1967 debacle.  They had established themselves as a credible army and a few years later there was an accord between Egypt and Israel.  I only point this out because the author seems to use the 1973 war as a lead-in to terrorism.

Guess I'll get reading...

2B

 

[oyaguy]

I actually found Jared Diamond's work very superficial; as Hanson points out in "Carnage and Culture", the soldiers of Hernan Cortez mined sulphur and other resources to replenish their supplies, natural resources which the Aztecs and prior Meso American civilizations had sat on top of for millenia, but never developed the knowledge or ability to exploit.

This is kind of funny. That very quote of Hanson's about Cortez is what makes me think that Hanson didn't understand Diamond's thesis. Primarily because of the dearth of suitable agricultural animals and crops and the North-South axis of North and South America, the Aztecs, Mayas, Incans etc... weren't going to be advancing anywhere as fast as say the Europeans and the Chinese. So while they may have had the resources for gunpowder, they weren't at a stage where they could have done anything about. I simply don't see ANY culture making the jump from using stone-bronze age weapons to using gunpowder and from there to firearms. The Greeks themselves never made the that jump, so I don't see the reason why North and South Americans never made the jump as cultural.

I think its more pertinent to ask why cultures that we know had gunpowder, didn't make the jump to using firearms. The natural answer is cultural conservatism. Culture Y didn't want to use gunpowder. Perfectly reasonable, but it still doesn't really answer the question of why then Culture X wanted to use gunpowder.

This is where Diamond's thesis on geography gives a reasonable solution on why the Culture X and Y give different answers.

China, for example, never developed firearm  equal to those of Europe. China, because of its geography, had the resources to do so, but in turn never had any real incentive to do so. Cultural conservatism paid off in the case of China because they had no serious rivals, or rivals that adopted firearms.

Japan is even more interesting. They adopted and then abandoned firearms. When Japan finally united itself under a single shogun, it no longer paid to have firearms as a way to beat up the other clans they were a threat to the social order of samurai. As a result of Japan's island geography this cultural conservatism didn't reap the whirlwind for centuries since there were no rival nations that could seriously threaten Japan.

Europe on the other hand, with islands and many peninsulas was almost always divided. Cultural conservatism didn't pay off because it meant someone else would come along with cannons, tear down your castle and turn you into a peasant.

Of course, too much competition and you get situations like the million and one German states, principalities, electorates... or the Italian States disunity which made them easier pray for a united outsider {like Napoleon}.

I personally like Diamond's thesis better, because it doesn't discount culture anywhere as completely as Hanson discounts geography. I like to think that geography paints the broadstrokes while culture fills in the details.

 

[a_majoor]

The great thing about Hanson is he has developed his thesis over several decades, giving argumentative guys like me lots of material (guess who has pride of place on my bookshelf?)

The ultimate answer to the culture vs geography debate can be found by looking at Greece itself. During the Bronze age, a relatively uniform civilization we call Mycenaean dominated Greece, and spread their influence over part of the Aegean. From Homer and archaeological investigation, we can see they were an aggressive, war-like people who's idea of a good time included hunting for lions on foot while armed with a spear (Lions were not yet extinct in Europe). Their civilization was fairly centralized and seemed to revolve around a "palace culture" which centrally controlled agriculture, food distribution, craftsmanship, trade, pillage and so on. A climate change collapsed the Bronze age cultures, and the Mycenaeans fell so far even written language was lost.

Several hundred years later, the Greeks redeveloped a decentralized civilization based on equality, individual property ownership, intensive agriculture and civic militarism. This civilization survived assaults by the immensely more powerful Persian Empire, spread colonies throughout the Mediterranean and Black sea and was the most powerful civilization of the age when it finally self destructed during the Pelleponnesian wars. Its influence is felt in our own civilization even today, yet they started with the same land and resources, and even spoke the almost same language and worshipped the same gods as the previous Mycenaean civilization. Culture is most certainly the difference between the Mycenaean and Greek civilizations.

I am sure geography has a role to play in the grand scheme of things, it is a very big strech to draw a direct link from Classical Greece to today, and the emphasis Hanson places on shock battle is probably overdone. People, however, are not stupid as a rule (the stupid ones get eaten by lions, or whatever danger exists in their time and place), so attempting to blame lack of advancement on the climate or geography only works in very limited and extreme cases (like the Innuit living in the high arctic). Western civilization has (for better or worse) identified resources even in the high arctic which the Innuit never recognized, despite their long familiarity with the territory.

 

[Acorn]

Looking at the review above, I am a little leary of books that point out the "what-ifs" of single events.   I am also going to look at the 1973 bit with some interest.   The Egyptian crossing of the Suez did take the Israelis by suprise and did lead to some severe tactical reverses for the IDF.   It was indeed meticulously planned and as long as they operated inside the SAM and SAGGER belt things went fairly well for the Eygptians.   It is true that once they went further into the Siani (perhaps to draw pressure off the Golan) they were picked apart by the much more flexible Israelis (who had quickly adapted to the SAM and SAGGER threat) and the Egyptians were in fairly dire straits at the end of the conflict.   That being said, the Egptian war aims were met somewhat in that they could declare some meagre form of victory and salvage some pride after the 1967 debacle.   They had established themselves as a credible army and a few years later there was an accord between Egypt and Israel.   I only point this out because the author seems to use the 1973 war as a lead-in to terrorism.

'73 is an interesting campaign. There wasn't a SAGGER "belt" per-se by the way. The Egyptians failed to exploit opportunities as they only planned to advance to the limit of their SAM coverage in the first place. The later, tenative, advances deeper into the Sinai were due to pressure from Syria, and pressure from within their own forces to exploit their victory.

It's fascinating to read about the spectacular intelligence failures of the Israelis that lead to operational suprise, and nearly total strategic surprise.

Acorn

 

[TangoTwoBravo]

Acorn,

I admit that I was lazy in my terminology.  My point was that the two major technological suprises (SAGGERs and SAMs) were somewhat static and did not help the Egyptians much once they moved further into the Siani (which I don't think was their plan in the first place).  The initial Egytpian plan worked very well in that the IDF counterattacks were pretty much wiped out by SAGGERs and SAMs.  I believe that most of the Egytptian SAGGERs where man-portable and thus of less use once the battle was mobile (and the Israelis had begun to bring in counter-measures and did not simply charge the Egytpians with tanks).

The war is a useful example of not underestimating your foe (which may well have led to the intelligence failures).  It also teaches the value of combined arms and the need to adapt tactics and organization to new techonology.  I don't think that it teaches anything about why there are suicide bombers in the Middle East.  This war led in no small part to peace between Israel and Egypt (both sides could declare victory).

Cheers,

2B

 

[oyaguy]

To Mr. a_majoor. I could quote you, but you know perfectly well what you wrote.

I think when I read Diamond's geography argument, I see geography as the base. Without a certain amount geographical luck, all the culture in the world is not going to make the difference.

I personally see the geography argument as a better explanation for the really big differences such as between the Americas, sub-Sahara Africa, and Europe-Asia. The Americas and sub-Sahara Africa have little in the way of suitable animals and plants for domestication and therefore agriculture. A people with cows is going to be better off than a culture without cows, at least in terms of food. Look at North America, no cows, no horses, no pigs, no chickens. Right there, Native Americans have to make do without animals that Europeans and Asians had. Without those animals, becoming a sedentary civilization is that much harder {though it can be done} which makes specialization that much harder, which makes certain arts and trade practically  impossible to obtain {metallurgy, writing etc...}.

I think you {a_majoor} make a very good point with your Greek example. Simply put, some cultures will be better at exploiting the same resources. In turn, some cultures, i.e. the Hanson thesis, would be better at waging war.

I also think we're both striving for the middle ground from opposite ends of the arguments.

 

[Acorn]

2Bravo,

I wouldn't say you were lazy in terminology. The common perception of how things unfolded was Egyptian advance-usupported Israeli counterattacks defeated-Egyptian advance beyond their SAM cover-successful Israeil counterattacks (with air support) and so on. It's nearly accurate, however the SAGGERS and RPGs were a factor throughout. There were a couple of swirling tank battles (Chinese Farm, frex) but even they were influenced by Egyptian infantry that was lavishly equipped with AT weapons.

Anyway, enough of this thread hijack. Maybe a discussion in the History folder? I wish I could remember some of the books I'd recommend. There are a couple of more recent scholarship that have actually been able to access Egyptian accounts (unfortunately Syria is still pretty closed).

Acorn