The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

by Victor Davis Hanson

  In contrast, those who want to study war in the traditional manner, which centers on combatants on the battlefield, face intense academic suspicion, as Margaret Atwood’s poem “The Loneliness of the Military Historian” suggests:

  Confess: it’s my profession

  that alarms you.

  This is why few people ask me to dinner,

  though Lord knows I don’t go out of my way to be scary.

  “Scary” historians of war must derive perverse pleasure, their critics in the university suspect, from reading about carnage and suffering—as if the oncologist somehow has an odd attraction to cancerous tumors, or the volcanologist perversely enjoys the destructive effects of magma.

  Why not channel such interest to figure out instead how to outlaw war forever? society objects, as if it were not a tragic, nearly inevitable aspect of human existence. Hence, the recent surge of the noble-sounding discipline of “conflict resolution,” which emphasizes the arts of diplomacy, negotiation, and arbitration strategies in eliminating the need for force altogether and establishing a perpetual peace, even between antagonists of quite different methods, values, and objectives. Admirable peace studies professors surely must not like war; dark and gloomy military historians obviously do.

  War and the Popular Culture

  THE UNIVERSITIES’ AVERSION to the study of war certainly does not reflect the public’s lack of interest in the subject. Students—for both bad and good reasons—love old-fashioned war classes on those rare occasions when they are offered, usually as courses that professors sneak in when the choice of what to teach is left up to them. (I cannot imagine any dean, in today’s climate, complaining to a history department chair that a major university’s curriculum offered few, if any, classes on the history of war.) I taught a number of such classes at California State University, Fresno, and elsewhere. They would invariably wind up overenrolled, with plenty of students lingering after office hours to offer opinions on battles from Marathon to Lepanto. An absence of student interest does not explain the dearth of formal military history courses.

  In short, popular culture displays extraordinary enthusiasm for many things military. There is now a Military History Channel, and Hollywood churns out a steady supply of blockbuster war movies, from Saving Private Ryan and Das Boot to Enemy at the Gates and 300. Well after the Ken Burns documentary, the explosion of interest in the Civil War continues. Historical reenactment societies stage history’s great battles, from the Roman legions’ to the Wehrmacht’s. Barnes and Noble and Borders bookstores boast well-stocked military history sections, where scores of new titles appear every month. Stephen Ambrose, Rick Atkinson, Max Hastings, John Keegan, James McPherson, David McCullough, and Cornelius Ryan collectively have sold millions of books on war and became public figures at large. A plethora of Web sites obsess over the minutiae of ancient encounters, and popular video games grow ever more realistic in their reconstructions of battles.

  The public may feel drawn to military history because it wants to learn about honor and the ultimate sacrifice. Alternatively, some may have a more morbid interest in technology—wanting to know the muzzle velocity of a Tiger Tank’s 88mm cannon or the difference between the AK-47 and M16 automatic rifles, for instance—or an innate need to experience violence, if only vicariously. Yet the importance—and challenge—of the academic study of war is to elevate such popular enthusiasm into a more capacious and serious understanding, a discipline in which one seeks answers to such questions as these: Why do wars break out? How do they end? Why do the winners win and the losers lose? How can wars be avoided or their worst effects be contained? Do wars have any utility and sometimes accomplish some good that diplomacy cannot?

  The Price of Neglect

  A PUBLIC THAT’S illiterate about the conflicts of the past can easily find itself confused during wartime. Without standards of historical comparison, people prove ill-equipped to make informed judgments when the dogs of war are unleashed. Neither U.S. politicians nor most citizens seem to recall the incompetence and terrible decisions that, in December 1777, December 1941, and November 1950, led to massive American casualties and, for a time, public despair. We assume military legends—Ulysses S. Grant, John Pershing, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and George Patton—experienced nothing of the acrimony that our present generals encounter and avoided the costly blunders we have seen made by our own generation of leaders in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  Yet Grant was completely surprised at Shiloh, where Union forces were nearly routed on the first day of battle. Neither Eisenhower nor Omar Bradley fully comprehended the early days of the Battle of the Bulge—or, much later, the best way to force back the German salient. Patton repeatedly ordered frontal assaults against Metz that achieved little but high casualties. Such a lack of understanding of the realities of military history invariably leads to impossible demands on soldiers and officers when war breaks out. The Joint Chiefs of Stall had little idea what to do in Korea when the Communists invaded in June 1950.

  It is no surprise, then, that today so many seem to think the violence in Iraq is unprecedented in our history. Some have frequently compared the war in Iraq to the Second World War on the strange logic that it has lasted longer than the American involvement from late 1941 to mid-1945. No one seemed to remember that the Philippine Insurrection (1899–1913) lasted, at least unofficially, much longer than either the fighting in Iraq or the Second World War.

  The toll of more than four thousand combat deaths in Iraq after some six years of fighting is, of course, a terrible thing. And by 2007 this growing death toll provoked national outrage to the point that the government was considering withdrawal and an admission of defeat in stabilizing the Iraqi democracy. Public acrimony led to controversial responses over everything from up-armored Humvees to increased troop levels. Yet nothing so far in the present Middle East compares with an average month or two of violence in the Second World War.

  A previous generation considered the ill-thought-out Okinawa campaign a stunning American victory and prepared to follow it up with an invasion of the Japanese mainland—despite losing three times as many Americans between April and July 1945 as we have lost in Iraq. Many were preventable casualties, due to faulty intelligence, poor generalship, and unimaginative suicidal head-on assaults against Japanese fortified positions. Indeed, Japanese kamikazes killed more Americans off Okinawa in a few weeks than Middle Eastern suicide bombers have in the last thirty years. Cries arose then, as now, that there was no defense against such zealots who were living to die—before a variety of innovative measures in fact nullified most of the airborne threat.

  When more than three hundred thousand Chinese troops unexpectedly crossed the Yalu River into North Korea in November and December 1950, surprised American soldiers gave up most of all their hard-won gains of the prior three months and fled over three hundred miles southward—many throwing away their helmets and ammunition to expedite their flight from the supposed “hordes” of zealous Communists. Most in the media wrote off Korea as “lost”—for the second time in six months. Yet within four months, under the magnetic leadership of newly appointed reformist general Matthew Ridgway, American and Allied forces were back on the offensive. In spring 1951 they retook Seoul and recrossed the 38th parallel.

  The Utility of Military History

  WE SHOULD NOT study military history because it promises cookie-cutter comparisons with the past, or diagnostic wartime formulas, or hopes of salvation in dark times. Germany’s 1917 victory over Russia in under three years apparently misled the military autodidact Hitler into thinking that the German army could overrun the Soviets in three or four weeks. After all, his Wehrmacht had brought down historically tougher France in just six weeks in the late spring of 1940. The führer, remember, grasping at historical straws just before his end, felt that his Reich would be saved after the death of Franklin Roosevelt—just as Frederick the Great had been given a reprieve from his anti-Prussian coalition that broke up on news of the sudden
death of Empress Elizabeth of Russia.

  Similarly, the conquest of the Taliban in eight weeks in 2001, followed by the establishment of a constitutional government within a year in Kabul, did not mean that the similarly easy removal of Saddam Hussein in three weeks in 2003, according to the prior formula, would ensure a working Iraqi democracy within six months. The differences between the countries—cultural, political, geographical, and economic—were too great to guarantee a predictable outcome.

  Instead, knowledge of past wars establishes only wide parameters of what we can legitimately expect from new ones. The scale of logistics and the nature of technology changes, but themes, emotions, and rhetoric remain constant over the centuries, and thus generally predictable. Athens’s disastrous 415 B.C. expedition against Sicily, the largest democracy in the Greek world, may not prefigure our war in Iraq. (A hypothetical parallel to democratic Athens’s preemptive attack on the neutral, distant, far larger, and equally democratic Syracuse in the midst of an ongoing though dormant war with Sparta would be America’s dropping its struggle with al-Qaeda to invade India). But the story of the Sicilian calamity and the changing Athenian public reaction to it, as reported and analyzed by the historian Thucydides, do instruct us on how consensual societies can clamor for war—yet soon become disheartened and predicate their support only on the perceived pulse of the battlefield.

  Military history teaches us, contrary to popular belief, that wars are not necessarily the most costly of human calamities. The allied coalition lost few lives in getting Saddam out of Kuwait during the Gulf War of 1991, yet doing nothing in Rwanda allowed savage gangs and militias to murder hundreds of thousands with impunity. Bill Clinton stopped a Balkan holocaust through air strikes, without sacrificing American soldiers. His supporters argued, with some merit, that the collateral damage from the NATO bombing of Belgrade resulted in far fewer innocents killed, in such a “terrible arithmetic,” than if the Serbian death squads had been allowed to continue their unchecked cleansing of Islamic communities. Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and Stalin killed far more off the battlefield than on it. The 1918 Spanish flu epidemic brought down more people than did the First World War. And more Americans—over 3.2 million—lost their lives driving cars over the past 90 years than died in combat in this nation’s 230-plus-year history.

  What bothers us about wars, though, is not just their occasionally horrific lethality; it’s that people like ourselves choose to wage them. Such free will makes conflict seem avoidable—unlike a flu virus, a landslide, or a car wreck—and its toll unduly grievous. The contemporary global community can fathom that hundreds of thousands have been lost to earthquakes, tsunamis, and biblical floods; but given the element of human culpability, it is not so ready to accept that a few thousand have been lost in armed struggles. The earthquake in Bam, Iran, in December 2003 killed well over 25,000 innocents—and was largely ignored by a global media focused on the far-less-lethal ongoing fighting in Iraq.

  We remember the 192 Athenians who died at Marathon and the 300 Spartans who fell at Thermopylae, both groups immortalized in Greek literature, but not the tens of thousands of anonymous ancient Greeks who perished when their mud-brick homes collapsed from earthquakes—a natural phenomenon that appears in our ancient sources almost as frequently as does war. Yet no ancient monograph is devoted to the murderous earthquake at Sparta in 464 that decimated the population, taking far more lives than King Xerxes ever did at Thermopylae.

  Military history also reminds us that war sometimes has an eerie utility. As British strategist Basil H. Liddell Hart put it, “War is always a matter of doing evil in the hope that good may come of it.” I would not agree with Hart’s choice of “always.” But wars—or the threat of war—at least put an end to American chattel slavery, Nazism, Fascism, Japanese militarism, and Soviet Communism. It is hard to think of any democracy—Afghan, American, Athenian, contemporary German, Iraqi, Italian, Japanese, ancient Theban—that was not an outcome of armed struggle and war.

  Military history is just as often the tangential story of an appeasement that fails to head off warmongering as it is of an aggressive chest-thumping that prompts conflict. The destructive military careers of Alexander the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, and Hitler all would have ended earlier had any of their numerous enemies united when the odds favored them, had any listened to a Demosthenes, a Cato the Younger, or a Churchill.

  Western air power, despite its clumsiness and the collateral damage that killed perhaps 1,500 Serbian civilians, stopped Slobodan Milošević’s reign of terror at little cost to NATO forces—but only after a near decade of inaction and dialogue had made possible the slaughter of tens of thousands in a series of regional Balkan wars. Affluent Western societies understandably have often proved reluctant to use force to prevent greater violence in the future—an acceptance of constant preparedness that philosophers sometimes warn us is called for. “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things,” observed the British philosopher John Stuart Mill. “The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing is worth a war, is worse.” Mill, of course, wrote before the battles of Somme and Verdun—and the era of mutually assured destruction.

  Indeed, by ignoring military history, those today are naturally liable to interpret war as a result of the failure of communication, of diplomacy—as if aggressors do not know exactly what they are doing. Who, after all, would knowingly start a violent, unnecessary war?

  Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, frustrated by President George W. Bush’s supposed intransigence and archaic rhetoric in the so-called war on terror, flew to Syria in April 2007. In rather freelance diplomatic fashion, she was hoping to persuade President Bashar al-Assad to stop funding terror in the Middle East. Perhaps the Speaker assumed that Assad’s belligerence resulted from American aloofness (we have no embassy in Damascus and had not recently spoken to the Syrian leader) and from Bush’s intransigence—rather than from Assad’s interest in destroying democracy in Lebanon and Iraq before such contagious freedom might destroy him. A few months after Pelosi’s visit, Israeli jets flattened a partially finished Syrian covert nuclear reactor. Facts on the ground some day will determine which act, the Pelosi visit or the Israeli strike, diminished the chance of Syria’s participation in a regional war.

  For a generation more familiar with Oprah and Dr. Phil than with the letters of William Tecumseh Sherman and William L. Shirer’s Berlin Diary, the problems between states—like those between spouses, friends, and co-workers—ideally, should be discussed by equally civilized and peaceful rivals and solved without resorting to violence. Thus, in a more ideal world, serial apologies for past sins by American presidents to theocratic Iran, dictatorial Russia, socialist Latin American leaders, or postmodern Europe should at least convey that the United States is not unpredictable or occasionally bellicose—and therefore reassure possible belligerents that there will be greater opportunities for lasting peace in the contemporary age.

  Yet it is hard to find many wars that have resulted from miscommunications or misunderstandings. Far more often they break out because of malevolent intent and the absence of deterrence, or because a prior war ended without a clear resolution or without settling disagreements—in a manner of Rome’s first two wars with Carthage. Again, Margaret Atwood was empirical when she wrote in her poem, “Wars happen because the ones who start them / think they can win.”

  Hitler did. So did Mussolini and Tojo—and their assumptions were mostly logical, given the relative disarmament of the Western democracies at the time. In the summer of 1990, Saddam Hussein believed, after speaking with an American diplomat, that the territorial integrity of Kuwait was not a concern of the Western governments, at least not to such a degree that would prompt a military response from them.

  Osama bin Laden did not attack on September 11 because there was a dearth of American diplomats willing to talk with him in the Hindu Kush. He did not think America denied its Muslim citizens the
right to worship freely. He did not think his native Saudi Arabia was impoverished or short of lebensraum. Instead, he recognized that a series of Islamic terrorist assaults against U.S. interests over two decades had met with what he would judge as insignificant reprisals. And he therefore concluded, in rather explicit and public fashion, that the supposedly decadent Westerners would never fight, whatever the provocation—and that if the United States, the “weaker horse,” ever should engage, it would withdraw as it had from Mogadishu once images of American killed and wounded blanketed our television screens.

  “We also believe our war against the United States is much simpler than our war against the Soviet Union,” bin Laden boasted to a journalist in March 1997, “because some of our mujahideen who fought here in Afghanistan also participated in the operations against the Americans in Somalia—and they were surprised at the collapse of the American morale. This convinced us that the Americans are a paper tiger.” Over many years bin Laden cited dozens of concocted reasons about why he attacked the United States; the only valid one was that he attacked America because he thought—to paraphrase Margaret Atwood—with good reason, he could get away with it.

  The More Wars Change …

  WITHOUT GUIDANCE FROM the past, it is easier now more than ever to succumb to technological determinism, the idea that science, new weaponry, and globalization have altered the very rules of war. But military history teaches us that our ability to strike a single individual from thirty thousand feet up with a global-positioning-system-guided bomb and a jihadist’s ability to have his propaganda beamed to millions in real time do not necessarily transform the conditions that determine who wins and who loses wars. Nor do they alter the thinking that prompts leaders to prompt or forgo wars.