Book Review: Warfare and Culture in World History
Warfare and Culture in World History
Eds: Wayne E Lee
New York: New York University Press, 2020,
ISBN 1479800007, 364pp
Review by: Mr John Mackenzie
In the second edition of this work Wayne Lee has updated and expanded the range of essays that he offers as examples of applying ‘culture’ as a tool to analyse the conduct of warfare. Lee’s analysis of military history through a focus on culture has challenges that I assess he, and the essayists, do not always successfully address. Despite this, I commend Warfare and Culture in World History to anyone in this journal’s audience who is serious about seeking to learn from history to prepare for future warfare.
Lee acknowledges that ‘culture’ is a ‘vast, amorphous and potentially troublesome word’. I encourage you to challenge aspects of Lee’s definition, which he acknowledges is ‘cobbled together’, and of his framework for levels of culture, but read it with an open mind. This work takes on an important topic—culture’s impact on the conduct of warfare. The effect of culture on action intuitively makes sense, and this is a topic with particular relevance for readers in the Australian Army in the wake of the recent allegations of misconduct allegedly committed by ADF members on operations in Afghanistan.
The book opens with Wayne Lee’s essay, where he argues for the utility of a cultural approach to understanding warfare and that the cultural approach applies to analysing warfare more broadly than the Western experience. The breadth of the examples (across time and geography) is expanded in this edition by adding examples of Mongol and Spanish conquests and a German colonial war. Lee highlights the cultural level of analysis applied in each essay in the collection. It is an eclectic mix and his broad selection is a thought-provoking exploration of culture’s influence on warfare across time and around the globe. The challenge comes when moving from the broad application of the approach to drawing specific judgements.
Lee’s essay lays out a definition of culture (pp. 3–4) and five levels of culture for military historians to use to guide their investigation: societal, strategic, organisational, military, and soldiers (p. 6). He highlights six elements of the utility of using culture as the framework for analysis: it shapes individual vision, exists in actions and symbols as well as words, requires transmission (through policy, doctrine, and training), requires consideration of hidden assumptions that may contradict stated policy, works at multiple levels and demands that we investigate the role of all these aspects of culture in shaping choices; for the military historian, that must include operational or battlefield choices.
The essays are all engaging reading but each of them should prompt the reader to consider the challenges in this approach to analysing history. For example, Lee’s selected essays focus on one or more of the five cultural levels outlined in his framework, but I consider they do not sufficiently make the case for their focus on the chosen level(s). In relation to each essay I encourage readers to consider the interaction across Lee’s societal, strategic, organisational, military and soldiers levels of culture and examine the broad questions posed by interaction between those cultural levels. Can Lee’s five levels be clearly identified and separated? Which of the five levels dominated the choices made on the battlefield(s) in the particular example? Whose culture was it that most influenced the conduct of the war discussed in the essay—that of the protagonist, their allies or their opponent? Melville’s essay on the fall of the Assyrian Empire acknowledges that data from the era is incomplete, and this should prompt readers to consider what data/artefacts should be relied on to determine the characteristics of culture and then determine its subsequent influence on choices and events? Is culture static? How quickly can it develop or change?
More specific contemporary questions are raised by some essays that are of direct relevance to Australian Army readers. Does Silbey’s essay on the influence of Commonwealth nations’ aims have contemporary lessons for Australia’s approach to contributing to coalition operations? Are there parallel lessons for Australia to draw from Lewis’s examination of the American ‘Culture of War’? A pressing question is: what does history have to tell us about the development of a soldiers’ culture that, in the example of the Brereton Report, appears to reflect Lee’s hidden assumptions that may contradict stated policy?
These criticisms and questions might seem mean in light of the importance and breadth of the subject that this work attempts to address. I acknowledge that I do not subscribe to the hype of the blurb on the paperback, which states that ‘[m]ilitary history today is cultural history or it isn’t anything at all’. However, my criticism does not diminish the relevance of the work as an inclusion in your professional reading. Warfare and Culture should prompt consideration of the development of culture in order to better understand how culture develops, interacts at different levels and influences the conduct of warfare in a future where, as Lee frames it, ideas about violence and its use ‘may prove far more threatening than any new weapons’.
