In this article I introduce the debate over a Western Way of War and some of the key works that have driven the discussion.
In twin books, The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece and Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power the eminent historian Victor Davis Hanson argued that that several cultural attributes — political freedom, individuality, free-thinking liberalism, and close-order valor manifested throughout the rise of Western civilization into how European armies fight.
Hanson was not interested in the details of battle but rather tried to link the exploits of Xenophon to U.S. Marines in Vietnam through a single cultural phenomenon. He argues that this type of warfare developed as a quick way to settle disputes before returning to their land and homes. However, Hanson’s argument fails to consider the nature of warfare during the Medieval period and can thus only loosely demonstrate a continuous cultural pattern. His argument also fails to consider other methods of waging war that were incredibly similar to so-called “eastern warfare” and perpetuates problematic stereotypes of Western superiority.
John Keegan’s A History of Warfare also asserts a distinct “Western” way of war contrasted with an “Eastern” way. He argued that war “is always an expression of culture, often a determinant of cultural forms, in some societies the culture itself,” and that Eastern warfare was different, relying on “evasion, delay and indirectness.” Hanson and Keegan’s books nonetheless inspired a growing branch of military history to explore the cultural implications of ways of warfare.
In his 2007 book Battle, John Lynn directly challenges Hanson’s notion of a “western way of war,” by arguing that how a society views war is largely determined by culture, which shapes, and is shaped, by the intersection between the ideal and reality of war. Lynn challenges the concept of a universal soldier and argues that because soldiers throughout time and place are different scholars should be wary of false dichotomies on ways of warfare and artificial continuities in military history.
Lynn argues that the French levee en masse represents a return to the sort of civic militarism Hanson extolls, but this, as well as decisive battle and total only return after the French Revolution and Napoleonic era “after an absence that stretched back to ancient Rome.” Lynn best contribution in this book is his discourse versus reality paradigm, then there exists a western discourse on war. Lynn argues that there is a difference between how a culture conceptualizes war
Moreover, the middle ages and renaissance period throw a major wrench in Hanson’s thesis, as John France and J.R. Hale show. France’s Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades depicts a way of war in the age of the crusades predicated on a landed elite that preferred to fight on the defensive. This style of warfare exacerbated class differences and was powerfully influenced by the relationships amongst small groups of families and their personal attitudes and relationships with each other., hardly the stuff of Greek phalanxes filled with equally free citizen soldiers.
In War and Society in Renaissance Europe, Hale demonstrates convincingly that states during relied on mercenary forces to do their bidding. Something Machiavelli lamented in his treatise, Art of War as antithetical to citizenship and statehood. Eventually with military reformation, states began to raise their own citizen armies again, similar to Greek and Roman ideals. The tenets that comprise Hanson’s thesis might be considered ideals, but hardly represent a consistent theme throughout history.
The ideals of a western way of war are certainly prevalent in western militaries, but that does not make them unique. They are a result of a number of contingent factors, not the least of which being competition within Europe, that drove innovation through market capitalism.
Patrick Porter’s work, Military Orientalism provides a thorough critique of how Western militaries have viewed Eastern adversaries through biased lenses, which has therefore shaped the discourse on western versus eastern ways of war. Porter acknowledges the popular notion of depicting epic decisive clashes between West and East since the time of Homer but notes that in reality battles are often indecisive and civilizations overlap.
For Porter, war is whatever is practical at the time and place of the fighting, drawing on prevailing notions of conduct and battle. Porter therefore emphasizes the contradiction and multiplicity within cultures and how these affect warfare as they and their enemies shape and are shaped by the forge of battle.
Like Hanson’s work, Russell Weigley’s The American Way of War: A History of U.S. Military Strategy and Policyposits a distinctly American way of war. Weigley examines American strategic thought and determines that there exists a strategic culture predicated on pursuing war through Hans Delbrück’s division of strategy into two lenses — attrition and annihilation.
Americans, he says, will pursue either a strategy of attrition, such as during the American revolution and World War I, or a strategy of annihilation as seen in the American Civil War or the European Theater of World War II. Weigley’s thesis is sound but limited due to his choice to focus on only the large shooting wars in American history.
He is correct in asserting that American strategy was often limited, and American military plans often ignored political ramifications of its chase for decisive battle and annihilation. Weigley’s primary contribution with this book — like Hanson and Keegan — is invigorating a lively and sustained discussion on the topic.
Brian McAllister Linn’s The Echo of Battle challenges the view that the United States has one coherent strategic culture, and instead argues that distinct internal cultural traditions create their own comfortable vision of war through their digestion of lessons from the past war. Linn argues that it is less about the wars themselves then how officers perceive their lessons. The discourse versus reality dichotomy as proposed by John Lynn, therefore informs the shifting “way of war” within the United States Army.
Adrian Lewis posits that, in at least the post-World War II era there has existed an American style of warfare predicated on limiting casualties, chasing decisive battle, and placing a premium on technological superiority, a reliance on airpower, and avoidance of committing ground forces. For Lewis, though, this is a byproduct of the American discourse on war informed by total war experiences in World War II and responding to the changing notions of war in the post war era.
Reconsidering the American Way of War from Antulio Echevarria challenges Weigley even more directly. Echevarria’s primary criticism of Weigley is not his broad ideas, but rather what he omitted — the “small wars” and other military actions in places like the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, Central America, Mexico, the Philippines, China, and Russia. Echevarria argues that American strategy has been open-ended, consistently engaging in conflicts with political considerations always at the forefront.
Despite the debate over strategic culture and practice, Echevarria shows that if there exists an American way of war, it is one predicated on tactical success. The American assumption is that battlefield victories lead to successful campaigns and victorious war.
This very thought leads to a narrow view of strategy and is the root cause of simplistic views about an American way of war. Instead, as Echevarria shows, battlefield success and victorious termination of war are not always compatible, and the failure to acknowledge the nuance of war termination has, as Echevarria says, “caused an American way of battle more than a way of war.” And in fact, “no single type dominated the American way of war for any appreciable length of time. Execution remained at the discretion of local commanders.”
The notion of a continuity of a “Western way of war” from ancient Greece to the modern United States is, at best, reductionist. Defining such terms as “East” and “West” is inherently problematic and often leads to presumptions of Western superiority. Nevertheless, any given society develops their set of practices, assumptions, and norms about how it fights wars.
A distinct Western “way of war,” thus connotes an oversimplification of an inherently complex phenomenon — warfare. This is common for large comparative works, but as Lynn shows, if the scope is widened ever-so slightly it becomes clear that warfare in east and west evolved over time to meet prevailing social, technological, and geographic conditions.
While Western militaries, and by extension the United States of America might have a preferred method of fighting — quick decisive battle by citizen soldiers — this is rarely, if ever, the case. Regardless, the predilection to explore “ways of war” has contributed to and expanded military history to contextualize war and military institutions within the culture that produces them.
What say you? Is there a so-called “Western” way of war?
