Battle: A History of Combat and Culture from Ancient Greece to Modern America

Military Review, March-April, 2005 by Scott Stephenson

BATTLE: A History of Combat and Culture from Ancient Greece to Modern America, John A. Lynn, Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 2003, 352 pages, $27.50.

In the preface to his new book, John A. Lynn writes, "This volume has come to bury the universal soldier, not to praise him." There can be no universal soldier, Lynn says, no archetypal military, no globally consistent method of warfare, because every soldier, army, and form of warfare is a reflection of the unique culture from which it is drawn. In Lynn's view, culture is an essential tool for appreciating the diversity within warfare over the ages. In particular, a cultural analysis of war helps us study the chasm between the way societies think about war (in Lynn's words, "the discourse of war") and the way they actually conduct war (war's reality).

Lynn's approach, which is anecdotal rather than comprehensive, focuses on periods and locales where research best indicates culture's effect on warfare. Starting with ancient Greece, he moves to ancient China and India, considers medieval Europe, then moves on to the armies of the Enlightenment and the sepoys of India. After considering the Napoleonic period and the Pacific War of 1941-1945, he concludes by investigating how the Egyptian army adapted an operational plan to its military culture to gain a brief but important victory over the Israelis in 1973.

Lynn acknowledges the help of many of military history's most noted figures. Yet, one is not surprised to find Lynn most persuasive when dealing with the areas he knows best. With books like Bayonets' of Republic. Motivation and Tactics in the Army of Revolutionary France, 1791-94 (University of illinois Press, Champaign, 1984) and The Giant of the Grand Siecle: The French Army, 1610-1715 (Cambridge University Press, New York, 1997), Lynn has earned a reputation as a first-rate historian of the early modern and Napoleonic periods in Western Europe, and the chapters on European warfare are the strongest in the book. The chapter on medieval warfare is especially persuasive in demonstrating the contrast between the nobility's chivalric concept of war with the pillage, rape, and destruction that accompanied the campaigns of the Hundred Years War.

Inevitably, Lynn's approach will draw comparisons with that of Victor Davis Hanson, who has generated a storm of praise and opprobrium for his argument that Western culture, since the time of the Greek hoplite, has developed a consistent style of warfare based on "civic militarism," free inquiry, and "heavy infantry that fights face-to-face." This pattern of warmaking has made Western warfare uniquely lethal and, in the long term, unbeatable. More than economic or political dynamism, Hanson believes, the Western style of war has led to the dominance of Western civilization.

In the first chapter of the book, Lynn attacks Hanson's thesis head-on. Where Hanson finds consistency, Lynn sees diversity. There has been no consistent pattern of Western warfare, he says, and as Western culture has changed so have its methods of waging war. For example, Lynn finds that the civic militarism and emphasis on heavy infantry of classical Greece did not reappear together until the citizen-armies of revolutionary France. Lynn rightly observes that no argument for Western consistency can explain this interval of two-thousand years. Lynne also notes that Hanson's suggestion that the "oriental" style of war features raiding, evasion, and deception overlooks the fact that these features are frequently seen in the West as well. The most successful conquerors in history did not come from the West but, rather, from Central Asia, in the form of the Mongols and Turks.

But challenging Hanson is only a part of the task Lynn sets for himself. Throughout the book, his review of the effects of cultural influences on warfare leads him to challenge accepted beliefs. For example, he argues that the stylized, linear warfare of the 18th century was as much a response to Enlightenment thought as to the limitations of the smoothbore musket. He disputes the view that Carl yon Clausewitz was able to consider war outside the framework of his own time. Echoing Azar Gat, Lynn says Clausewitz's concepts of chance and passion in warfare were products of a military romanticism unique to the early 19th century. Lynn argues against the view that race differences dominated the fighting between the United States and Japan during World War II. The causes and the strategy of the war and the decision to use the atomic bomb were driven by other factors. If the U.S. "experience" of fighting the Japanese was so different, Lynn believes, it was more because of cultural than racial differences.

Lynn offers a practical application of his cultural approach by examining the current war on terrorism. Where Hanson believes Western values will give us the upper hand in the ongoing war against Islamic extremism, Lynn is not so optimistic. Unless we incorporate terrorism into our conception of war, we run the risk of losing the restraints we have placed on war since World War II. And, Lynn believes, over the long haul, we must see terrorism as something to be "managed" in the Cold War sense rather than exterminated.