* This article is based on an address delivered at a Deputy Chief of Army Occasional Seminar at the Royal Military College in Canberra on 7 August 2003.
This article concerns war generally and the current war on terror in particular, and reflects on 2500 years of history and culture. From the fighting of early Greece to the wars of the 20th century, there is a certain continuity of Western military practice. Greek phalangites and British close-order volley fire are linked by culture. In his 2001 book Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power, the author argued that the Western way of war is lethal because it is amoral—that is, it is unshackled by concerns of ritual, tradition or religion. The book was not interested in the morality of Western warfare, but in how military prowess reflected larger social, economic, political and cultural practices that seemingly have little to do with war. Western armies bring to the battlefield an array of advantages that can usually trump an enemy. While one should avoid historical determinism, the menu of Western culture, when applied to the battlefield, gives Western societies at war a number of important advantages.
For example, Western armies have often fought with, and for, a sense of legal freedom. The latter does not mean, as Aristotle said, natural freedom, but simply a construct of freedom. The idea of fighting for legal freedom reflects the reality that Western armies have often been the products of civic militarism and of constitutional governments. In its pure form, civic militarism was a reflection of the willingness of the citizen body in the Greek city-state, the polis, to defend collective rights. Each citizen had a plot in the countryside or a small farm of about 10 acres and all had a stake in a common defence. The Athenian and Theban phalanx was a manifestation of a free citizenry, which fought to uphold the rights of autonomous yeomen.
Lethal, heavy infantry have been a particular Western strength. The latter can be traced to the Greek phalanx tradition and to Hellenic ideas of hoplite warfare and of land ownership. The rise of hoplite militias of the polis created the idea of Western warfare as decisive infantry battle waged by free men over property and local autonomy. Individualism and group discipline were aligned. Aristotle has an interesting remark in Politics, where he states that Greek armies do not reward people for killing other individuals. When dead soldiers are buried, they do not have markers celebrating individual kills as in many tribal warrior societies. In the West, there has been a linear tradition of attack based on group defence and group discipline—whether the Macedonian phalanx, the Roman legion, the Swiss pikemen or the Spanish tercio.
The classical Greek city-state also gave birth to the traditions of free inquiry and rationalism, which have since become Western trademarks. The dual legacy of the Greeks—decisive infantry battle and the polis—was to inspire most of later European warmaking during the medieval period and the Renaissance. Military planners sought to preserve the idea of civic militarism of the Greeks alongside superior tactics and technology. Vegetius was translated into modern European languages to glean information on ancient warfare. Phalanxes reappeared in Switzerland, Germany and Italy. Renaissance thinkers reapplied strategia (strategy) and taktika (tactics) to contemporary pikemen. Machiavelli and Grotius sought to employ armies in constitutional service to the state, arguing that infantry mustered from the populace were the most effective in warfare. By the time of the Enlightenment, the Hellenic idea that war could be regulated reappeared in the form of 18th-century limited war.
European armies have frequently marched to war with weapons that are superior to those of their adversaries because of the marriage—first evident in the Greek city-state—between Western capitalism, finance and logistics. In addition, Westerners have been quick to borrow technical inventions from elsewhere largely because European capitalists and scientists have been utilitarian and pragmatic and, from the 16th century onwards at any rate, had little to fear from religious fundamentalists or an aristocracy wedded to ritual.
Western armies are technological because technology is the wage of a commitment to scientific rationalism. The reason that the West began to achieve military superiority from the Renaissance onwards was that Western culture encouraged the dissemination of knowledge. Thus, while many of the great military discoveries of the world, from stirrups to gunpowder, were discovered outside the West, it was the West that exploited them because its societies were increasingly scientific in outlook rather than rigidly theological. Firearms, for example, were revolutionary and dangerous to the feudal status quo. Yet, gunpowder was borrowed from the Chinese and firearms were adopted in Europe. As a result, the cannon and the arquebus destroyed feudalism. By contrast, it was because guns could destroy a social order that the Japanese, largely for cultural reasons, ignored them as weapons until the 19th century.
The Western style of warfare puts a premium on the idea of annihilation, of head-to-head combat rather than ritualistic fighting. This style of warfare can be traced back to antiquity. Indeed, from the fighting of early Greece to the industrial wars of the 20th century, there is a certain continuity of Western military practice. Greek phalangites and American mounted infantry are linked by Hellenic characteristics of battle: superior discipline, matchless weapons, egalitarian camaraderie, individual initiative, tactical flexibility and a preference for shock battle. The Spartan general, Brasidas, once dismissed the tribes of Illyria because they could not endure shock battle, and this belief in face-to-face battle is found in the Western way of warfare today.
When guns were added to the Western military tradition, Western armies became even more formidable. Thus, when Hernan Cortés landed in Mexico in 1519 with 1500 Spanish conquistadors, he encountered an Aztec empire of four million people. Although vastly outnumbered, his army was able to destroy the Aztec imperium through applying the superior technology of pike, sword and cannon. Technology, however, also requires tactical organisation. As indigenous peoples such as the Zulus and the North American Indians were to discover in the 19th century, guns without military formations are often ineffective. Firearms required the discipline of the formation and the technique of volley fire.
In 1879, in South Africa, at the battle of Rorke’s Drift, some 4000 Zulus were equipped with 800 captured Martini Henry rifles sited at 1000 yards. The Zulu force surrounded a garrison of only ninety-eight able-bodied British soldiers. However, the Zulu warriors fired their rifles as individuals; they shot high and sporadically, and succeeded in killing only sixteen British soldiers. In contrast, before the battle at Rorke’s Drift started, British sergeants were preparing to deliver deadly volley fire in a method of using firearms derived from Greek formation warfare. Through technology combined with technique, the vastly outnumbered British won the subsequent battle.
Another feature of Western warfare has been a confidence in the capacity for individual officers to undertake decision-making. For example, the Battle of Midway in June 1942 between Japan and the United States is a battle that the Americans should never have won from the point of view of relative resources on each side. The Americans enjoyed superiority only in radar and communications. Japanese dive-bombers and torpedoes were superior to those of the Americans, and in the Zero fighter Japanese aviation possessed a formidable aircraft.
What won the battle for the United States was individual initiative—initiative in breaking the Japanese naval codes, in rapidly repairing the carrier Yorktown and in the behaviour of US pilots. Referring to American code-breaking, official historian, Samuel Eliot Morison, wrote that Midway was ‘a victory of intelligence, bravely and wisely applied’. The American admirals demonstrated a degree of flexibility that was not found on the Japanese side. When Admiral Nagumo was informed that the Japanese fleet had sighted US carriers, he made the fateful decision to remove land-based bombs from his attack aircraft and to refit them with torpedoes. He was also concerned at the lack of fighter escorts available. In contrast, once Admirals Spruance and Fletcher realised that the Japanese were vulnerable, they hurled dive-bombers into action irrespective of fighter cover. When American aircraft found the Hiryu, it had gasoline, torpedoes and bombs littered on its flight deck, and was blasted to pieces.
The Tragic View of History
Heraclitus of Ephesos, the pre-Socratic philosopher, said that war is ‘the father of all, the king of all’. In Greek political thought, war was not necessarily bad or good; it was only tragic. The Greeks’ tragic vision of war was captured by Herodotus when he observed that ‘in peace, children bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their children’. Solon, the lyric poet, once warned, ‘Everybody, war has your name on it, and it [war] hunts out young men’. In his first book, of The Peloponnesian War, the Greek historian, Thucydides, outlines the reasons for wars occurring. Thucydides has the Athenian statesman, Pericles, say that the people of Athens are fighting the Spartans out of fear or phobos, out of self-interest or ophelos and for honour or timē.
The Greeks understood that peace is linked to a willingness to undertake war. In the fourth book of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, and predating the Roman writer, Vegetius, are the words, ‘He who wants peace, prepare for war’. The modern West has a difficult time accepting the bitter truth that wars are ubiquitous; they are part of the human landscape; they are tragic. Wars take on the characteristic of evil or good, according to the moral landscape under which they are waged. Much of this situation is unpalatable to many Westerners because of what the Romans call luxus—a mixture of licence, luxury, smugness, cynicism and nihilsm. In most affluent, free Western societies, it is very difficult to convey the idea that people should risk their lives to fight for belief. Today the American public, which for the most part does not read military history, has given up the tragic view of history and adopted the therapeutic mentality.
When the events of 11 September 2001 occurred in the United States, there was a plethora of false knowledge that abounded among commentators about war. The first falsity was the idea that war was a rarity, something that the ancient Greeks would have dismissed as an illusion. In Greece one can drive through the battlefields of Plataea, Tanagra, Oenophyta, Coronea, Delium, Haliartus, Tegyra, Leuctra and Chaeronea—all fought on the farmlands of Boeotia in a single afternoon, attesting to the intensity of war. If one looks at the corpus of Western philosophical thought, it soon becomes obvious, as Plato once said, that peace is a parenthesis. For most of human history the unfortunate and natural state of mankind was one of perennial war, or that which Thomas Hobbes called bellum omnium contra omnes or the ‘war of everybody against everybody’. As a classicist, the author once examined how many years Athens was at war in the 5th century BC and discovered that hostilities occurred three out of every four years—and this was in the city-state that was the cradle of Western civilisation.
After 11 September 2001, there was no shortage of commentators who informed us that the peaks of Afghanistan were too high for the United States to storm; the country was too rugged and snowy; and it was the graveyard of the Russian and British armies. Few analysts made an informed judgment based on the calibre of the respective forces. We heard little about the historical realities that condition military skill—group discipline, technology and individual capacity—and whether these skills resided in the Taliban forces. As a result, when some commentators predicted that the war would be over in six weeks, they—including the present author—were dismissed as either unhinged or as militaristic.
Sometimes peace can be little more than a truce. The Romans, who were supreme realists, coined the phrase bellum interruptum—a peace in which both sides rearm and prepare to resume fighting. The fatal flaw in Pericles’s thinking in the Peloponnesian War was his defensive strategy to exhaust the Spartans and to withdraw inside the walls of Athens. Although a great statesman, he did not realise that the essential way to defeat Sparta was to march on the Spartan Acropolis, destroy the Spartan Army and free the helots in order to remove the Spartan state’s capacity to make war. The Spartan general, Lysander, a lesser man than Pericles, understood war with realism. Lysander grasped that the key to Spartan victory was to destroy Athenian power based on its fleet.
The great Theban liberator, Epaminondas, did not make the same mistake as Pericles. Following the Peloponnesian War, he fully understood that, in order to defeat Sparta, it was necessary to destroy its army. After ending forever the myth of Spartan invincibility, at Leuctra in 371 BC, Epaminondas gathered a massive army of 70 000 Thebans, Argives and Arcadians, and invaded Sparta. The Thebans ravaged Spartan territory, drove the enemy into the city and freed the Messenian helots. Through the instrument of war, the Thebans ended Sparta’s status in Greece as a major power.
The Challenge of Radical Islam
In many respects, Osama bin Laden’s al-Qa’ida movement is at war with the West mainly out of Thucydidean fear—fear of the combination of personal freedom, market capitalism and secular rationalism, which are the hallmarks of Western modernity. The mixture of Western-style freedom, prosperity and reason is a combination that has a global cultural appeal from which Muslims are not immune—whether that appeal is found in cell phones, Viagra or heart surgery—and it is an appeal that moves faster than radical Islam can repress. The madrassa of radical Islam offers nothing of positive value to the world community and the author does not think that any young Australians are going to say, ‘Hey, Dad, I’m going to the madrassa to hang out’. By contrast, the youth of the Islamic world might find playing video games or watching an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie to be attractive recreations. For traditional societies, the challenge of modernity is deep and abiding.
Deterrence is an important factor in preventing the outbreak of wars, but deterrence is often in the eye of the beholder. Al-Qa’ida’s war of terror on the West was encouraged by events that go back to at least 1979. In that year, the storming of the American Embassy in Iran signalled a growth of tension between Islam and the United States. In 1983, the killing of 262 American Marines in Lebanon by suicide bombers and the subsequent withdrawal of American forces suggested weakness. In 1993, events in Mogadishu in Somalia created a similar perception. For Islamic terrorists, the reprisal for an attack on Americans in the 1990s was either a cruise missile or a stern lecture, but surely never an all-out war.
Deterrence, once lost, is difficult to re-establish. In the United States today, critics are castigating President George W. Bush for his policies regarding the war on terror. Many classicists, however, would observe that all the President has done is to seek to re-establish deterrence by force of arms in order to try to restore peace. It is Osama bin Laden’s great belief that Americans have no stomach for military sacrifice, that they live in shopping malls in a perpetual state of nihilism, looking at stomach rings and listening to compact discs. Yet American soldiers of the Third Mechanised Division, wearing Raybans and with ‘anger management’ written on their tanks, listened to rock music as they blew apart the Iraqi Republican Guard.
How do wars end? And how will the war on terror end? It seems to the author that, throughout history, wars usually end for good when there is victory or defeat—a reality that again disturbs the modern Western mind. There was a first Punic War, there was a second Punic War, there was a third Punic War, but there was not a fourth Punic War because Carthage was destroyed. There was a first Peloponnesian War, there was a second Peloponnesian War, but there was not a third Peloponnesian War because the Athenians were destroyed. During the American Civil War, if George McClellan rather than Abraham Lincoln had been elected in the North in 1864 on the Copperhead ticket, there probably would have been an armistice with the Confederacy and another civil war twenty years later.
In the Middle East, there have been five inconclusive wars: in 1947, 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982; yet there has been no resolution of differences by force of arms. Why have we not had another conventional Middle East war? The argument can be made that there is no longer a Soviet Union to act as a patron of the Arab states. Should there be another full-scale war in the Middle East, the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) would quickly capture Damascus or Cairo. A classical military historian might observe that what encouraged the Intifada against Israel was the IDF’s withdrawal from Lebanon in the 1980s and the later offer to give back 97 per cent of the West Bank. Israeli magnanimity was, in many ways, interpreted as weakness within parts of the Arab world. Whether the Israelis understood it or not, they weakened the concept of deterrence.
Conclusion
The Western way of war is so efficient and lethal that war is seen as impossible between democracies. Many have accepted the truism that democracies do not fight each other, but consensual governments have occasionally gone to war throughout history. Athens wrecked its culture by invading democratic Sicily in 415 BC. Democratic Boeotia fought democratic Athens at Mantinea in 362 BC. The Italian republics of the Renaissance fought each other. Britain and the United States were at war against each other twice—first in the War of Independence from 1776 to 1783 and then in the War of 1812. Yet, if history is any guide, the real danger to world progress is when Western armies turn against each other and deploy the deadly menu of their arsenals.
Today we have reached a paradox in war. Such is the lethal character of the Western way in war that non-Westerners seek to avoid open confrontation with such forces. As a result, we in the West may increasingly have to fight as non-Westerners—in jungles, mountains and cities—in order to combat enemies that avoid our strengths in positional warfare. In consequence, we may not always be able to draw on the Hellenic traditions derived from consensual government of superior technology and the discipline of free soldiers fighting in formation. As products of the Enlightenment, we in the West must not forget the tragic view of history and our heritage from antiquity. Our modern Western societies must not become so educated, so wealthy or so moral that we lose our resolution to use arms in order to protect ourselves.
