Why the West wins wars
by Keith Windschuttle
April 2002
Last October, when many liberal commentators in the media were predicting that America and its allies would end up in a quagmire in Afghanistan- "another Vietnam," they foretold-they would have been better advised to ponder the statistics compiled by Victor Davis Hanson about the previous conflict between a Western and an Islamic power.[1]
On January 17, 1991, Hanson reminds us in his book Carnage and Culture, a coalition of U.S. allies faced the veteran army of Iraq, which included 1.2 million ground troops, 3850 artillery pieces, 5800 tanks and 5100 armored vehicles. The Iraqis were entrenched on their native soil, easily supplied by highway from Baghdad, and equipped with the best military hardware, from poison gas to tanks and mines, that petrodollars could buy. Yet the Western allies defeated them in just four days, leaving tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers dead for a loss of one hundred and fifty American servicemen and -women, most of whom were killed by friendly fire, random missile strikes, and other accidents. The media skeptics would also have been wise to consider the implications of another of Hanson's points. The Iraqi army was obliterated not far from the ancient battlefields of Cunaxa and Gaugamela, where Western forces-Xenophon's Ten Thousand in 401 B.C. and Alexander the Great in 331 B.C.-had also annihilated indigenous Asian armies.
Hanson's book is subtitled "Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power." It describes in considerable detail nine battles between 480 B.C. and 1968. It has a similar structure and is a worthy successor to Edward Creasy's enormously popular Victorian classic The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World (1851). Hanson, however, has produced something far more important than Creasy. Although its narrative is based on a series of battles, Carnage and Culture is really an argument about the culture that defines what we call "the West." The book is an intervention into a debate that has been raging since the end of the Cold War over how we should conceive of the West and why it has achieved such dominance in the world.
Those historians who support the West usually provide explanations of its success in terms of a 2500-year-old tradition of reason and law, inherited from ancient Greece and Rome and tempered by the Judeo-Christian religion. The detractors of the West (mostly Westerners themselves, of course, or at least Western-educated) have argued that this account is a comforting myth, invented by European scholars after the Renaissance to give their culture a depth it does not deserve. They focus more on economic and military power. Europe, they claim, was a small and backward periphery on the fringes of the Eurasian continent that only burst onto the world scene in the sixteenth century but which, by force of arms and the expropriation of wealth, came to dominate it by the nineteenth.
Hanson has taken this debate and transformed it completely by adding a whole new dimension that neither of the two sides had ever seriously considered. As a result, his book is not only one of the most important works of military history written in our time but also a study of Western civilization from a perspective that illuminates it more vividly than anything else produced in the past decade.
Previous military historians who have ventured onto the terrain of culture have taken a fairly narrow course. They have mainly focussed on the culture of fighting men themselves, either to explain the intense loyalty many soldiers demonstrate towards their comrades in battle or to account for some of the more bizarre forms of military behavior, such as the emperor worship of Japanese kamikaze pilots in World War II. Hanson's thesis, by contrast, is as broad as you can get. He argues that the very nature of Western military performance can be explained by Western civic culture.
Against those who claim that European military dominance only dates from the last five hundred years, Hanson says the main tenets of Western warfare were well established during classical antiquity. Since the fifth century B.C., Hanson writes, the West has had a culture of civic militarism in which people with a democratic stake in their country have been prepared to fight for it. On the field of battle, this civic culture has produced an unmatched combination of group discipline and inventive decision-making. Western soldiers have been prepared to fight to the death in great decisive battles that have annihilated their opponents. Individual soldiers have known that their military service was governed by a legal regime that applied as equally to their superiors as to themselves. Coupled with a similarly long-standing tradition of the dissemination and proliferation of knowledge that culminated in the scientific and industrial revolutions, Western militarism has been supplied with better armaments and more innovative military technology than any of its opponents. Moreover, market-based economies have meant that the needs of Western armies for ordinance and supplies could be more rapidly and cheaply produced than by the command economies of any of its rivals.
The West has also had a civilian culture that has always been ready to criticize military strategies and ambitions and even to replace military chiefs when it has thought fit. In some cases, most notoriously in Vietnam, these criticisms have resulted in hard-won military gains being abandoned, but over the long course of Western history they have produced military policies that have usually put the West on the winning side. Most importantly, this culture has meant the civilian population has been largely united behind the military effort. In short, Hanson argues that Western military dominance derives from its traditions of democracy, law, liberty, free markets, and free expression. Everything has sprung from these cultural attributes.
This is a bold argument that Hanson first advanced in 1989 with a book entitled The Western Way of War. In that work he argued for the origins of the Western concept of the "decisive battle" in the culture of the classical Greek city states. Tired of drawn-out, small-scale conflicts and skirmishes with their enemies to the east, the Greek cities assembled hoplite troops into an impenetrable formation, the phalanx, to challenge their rivals. The troops were highly-disciplined, property-owning, demo- cratic-voting civilian farmers prepared to fight together to the death in one great battle on which they waged all. If they won, their enemy would be totally defeated and its forces completely dispersed. The victors could then go back to their farms to enjoy a long period of peace. Although they came from smaller states with poorer resources than their rivals, the hoplites prevailed over enemy soldiers who had little stake in the regimes for which they fought, who had to be either paid or flogged into battle, and who owed their allegiance to a tribe or to friends of the moment rather than to an enduring civic system that would preserve their values and the memory of their heroism.
That earlier book, however, would have been more accurately titled "The Greek Way of War," for while it is a richly researched and gruesomely realistic account of hoplite warfare, it never analyzed any form of Western conflict beyond that. When he wrote it, Hanson was a professor of classics at California State University, Fresno, working within his own specialized field. In the ensuing decade, however, he has grown into a military historian who can convincingly encompass the whole span of Western civilization, right up to the present. The result is a book that, in both scope and insight, is every bit as good as John Keegan's magisterial survey A History of Warfare (1993).
Hanson organizes Carnage and Culture so that his nine chosen battles illustrate each of the qualities of Western culture on which he makes his case. Some of his battles were decisive for the future of Western civilization, such as Salamis in 480 B.C., in which Athenian and Spartan allies defeated the Persian navy of Xerxes, then the most powerful ruler in the world. They ended the Persian monarch's threat to turn the Greek city states into Asian satraps that would have destroyed their peculiar institution of political freedom. The same was true of Poitiers in 732 A.D. where Charles Martel, deploying disciplined columns and rows of infantrymen inherited from classical antiquity, defeated the previously invincible cavalry of Abd ar-Rahman, thus curbing the advance of Islam into Europe.
Some other of Hanson's battles, however, did not alter the course of events even in the regions where they occurred. This was true of Cannae in 216 B.C. where the great general of Carthage, Hannibal, defeated a badly led Roman army. What was remarkable about Cannae, Hanson argues, is not that thousands of Romans were so easily massacred in battle, but that they were massacred to such little strategic effect. Within a year, Rome had organized a general muster of its able-bodied citizenry so that it could field new legions nearly as good as those that fell. Hannibal's success at Cannae, Hanson writes, resembled the Japanese surprise attack at Pearl Harbor: a brilliant tactical victory that had no strategic aftermath and only worked to galvanize the defeated. "The assemblies of Romans and Americans mobilized vast new armies after their embarrassments; the confident forces of the imperial war states of Carthage and Japan basked in their battle success and hardly grew."
Hanson"s book is not simply an academic argument about Western military culture. He starts each of his chapters with a lengthy description of the action itself, of the military tactics involved and how they played themselves out, and of the "face of battle," what it felt like to fight and die there. He produces some of the frankest descriptions ever written about these events, especially in his account of the drowning of 40,000 Persian sailors at Salamis, the destruction of a force of 4000 Zulus by one hundred and thirty-nine British soldiers at Rorke's Drift in 1879, and the reduction of Japanese aircraft carriers to floating infernos by American dive bombers at Midway in 1942. The book's battle scenes alone make it a compelling read.
Even though the British publishers of the book have retitled it Why the West Has Won, Hanson's case is not that the West has always defeated its enemies. Among his nine battles are some spectacular Western defeats and withdrawals, such as Cannae in Italy and Tet in Vietnam. He also acknowledges that for a thousand years, from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries, European power declined after the fall of the Western Roman empire. He argues, however, that most states in Europe proper managed to retain the cultural traditions of classical antiquity over all this time, thus giving them a great- er military power than their individual populations, resources, or territory would otherwise have allowed.
Nonetheless, I think many readers would have liked more detail about how the thesis fits this long decline, especially when the forces of Islam were seriously challenging much of eastern Europe. In this period, Europe did not enjoy an ascendancy in armaments. The horsemen of the Asian steppes developed the skill of firing arrows from horseback and changed the rules of cavalry engagement. And while Hanson's argument about the central role played by Western infantry discipline is persuasive, he does not discuss in any detail siege warfare, a practice that corresponds to almost the entire period he covers.
In the middle ages, Islam produced two military forces, the Egyptian Mamelukes and the Ottoman Janissaries, who showed that an army organized on authoritarian, bureaucratic lines could be more than a match for the medieval militarism of the West. In this period, Islam conquered the Christians of the Holy Land and Byzantium, driving them from the Middle East and seizing territory deep into the Hapsburg and Russian empires. Hanson has a very good chapter on the Battle of Lepanto which in 1571 put an end to this process and left the Ottoman Sultan the "sick man of Europe," but his thesis would have been more formidable had he discussed the clash between Islam and medieval Europe, when the latter was very much on the defensive.
While some of the author's Islamist critics might claim this omission leaves a large hole in his argument, Hanson would actually have little trouble in filling it. There have been several times in the past 2500 years when the West has abandoned its founding principles of liberty, democracy, and the rule of law and succumbed to absolutism. This is, I believe, the most plausible explanation of why both the Western and Eastern Romans lost their martial spirit and eventually their empires to the tribesmen of the German forests and the Asian steppes. Western absolutism produced Western decline. But since the Renaissance, when Europe began its revival of the original political culture of Greece and Rome, it has swept all before it. This is too big an issue to be mere coincidence and is one more confirmation of Hanson's daring and enticing thesis.
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