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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  Geography and climate influence the brand of war, but in themselves are not determinant. The small inland valleys of Persian Anatolia, for example, were not all that much different from those found in Greece; but the culture of farmers who worked the soil there most certainly was. The armies of Mycenaean Greece were far different from what followed in the age of the Greek city-state, even though the weather, the landscape, and the agriculture of Greece were roughly constant from 3000 B.C. to 338 B.C. In other words, culture changed the way these very different Greek-speaking peoples of these two diverse eras fought—not climate or geography, which remained largely constant.

  Western warfare in general over two and a half millennia has shown a dynamism in its exercise of military power abroad that is not explained by the rather small population and territory of Europe, much less its natural resources. Why is this so?

  To generalize broadly: Reliance on group discipline, confidence in a greater degree of personal freedom and individualism, a faith in rationalism more likely to be divorced from cultural or religious stricture, open markets, civic militarism arising out of consensual government, and civic audit of military operations—sometimes in piecemeal—filtered down to the battlefield, embodying both the contradictions and unique achievements of Western civilization. Such advantages—sometimes nearly lost or vastly altered over 2,500 years—allowed Western armies, from Alexander the Great and the Crusaders to colonialists and present-day European and American militaries, to trump the usual criteria that explained tactical victory or defeat: weather, geography, numbers, location, individual genius and bravery, and simple chance. Once Xenophon’s Ten Thousand were trapped in Asia, the army became a veritable itinerant polis, as committees and assemblies delegated responsibilities and elected new leaders, and individuals sought to craft novel strategies and adopt weaponry to radically different challenges. In contrast, after Xerxes’ defeat at Salamis, he sailed back home, abandoning the fight, and entrusting his huge army to Mardonius, who was later defeated and killed at Plataea, and the survivors left to retreat home under Artabazus.

  A key component to the rise of Western military influence has been the role of military technology. Again, Westerners did not invent triremes, stirrups, or gunpowder. But their greater propensity to encourage unfettered research and profit through free exchange and markets ensured that Europeans soon improved on such inventions in a way impossible elsewhere. European navies and armies went to Tenochtitlán, Zululand, and China rather than vice versa because of singular oceangoing ships, superior guns, and better supply—not out of some singular savagery or monopoly on imperial grandeur. It is not that the West did not suffer occasional battle defeats, or learn from other illustrious military traditions, or steal military inventions from abroad. But rather Westerners were able to fashion a flexible military culture that could overcome setbacks and spread influence well beyond the shores of an often divided and warring Europe.

  While American military practice is inexplicable apart from this larger Western tradition, the American character and the peculiar history of the United States make its military force exceptional in ways that transcend the nation’s large territory, plentiful resources, and population. This military power by the mid-twentieth century became unmatched by contemporary Europe—a fact that suggests, as many have written, that America and Europe may be heading in different cultural directions. This exceptionalism has much to do with both America’s origins and recent past—both our democratic culture and frontier history—but also our unique role in the Second World War and the Cold War that followed, when leaders were determined after two global conflagrations to intervene permanently in world affairs and craft some sort of stable economic and political system contingent on U.S. security guarantees.

  In particular, the United States has taken preexisting Western notions of political and economic freedom, the culture of individualism, and the commitment to constant self-critique and change, and advanced these practices nearly to their theoretical limits—certainly in a manner unlike what is found in contemporary Britain, France, or Germany. While there is much to say about the divide between America’s military and civilian cultures, the shared dynamism of both is far more significant for understanding the future of American military power.

  Why We Fight as We Do

  WHAT, THEN, IS the American way of war? Without a national religion or a common race or ethnic culture, Americans are united first by shared ideas and commitments, such as the ideals of equal opportunity and individual merit, as well as the history and legends that give these ideas concrete meaning. Our military functions more as a reflection of our national meritocracy, where wealth and breeding, or tribal affiliations and favoritism, do not necessarily guarantee rank, privilege, and promotion.

  In theory, this allowed that a gifted but shabby-looking general like Ulysses S. Grant—a failure in both earlier civilian and military life—could more successfully lead the Army of the Potomac than the aristocratic ex-railroad president George McClellan. We admire the uncouth George Patton for his often crude genius, despite, not because of, his aristocratic roots—in the same manner that the plebian background of Omar Bradley and Dwight Eisenhower often seemed to work to their advantage by suggesting both were self-made men who had advanced without wealth or social connections, and they therefore easily resonated with the American public and press. This reliance on presumed merit rather than class has sometimes given American armies singular commanders who were swashbuckling and unseemly—an unlettered Nathan Bedford Forrest, a shabbily dressed William Tecumseh Sherman, a cigar-chomping Curtis LeMay—and who might otherwise have found little opportunity in more aristocratic or tribal militaries.

  Second, the frontier experience on such a vast continent made Americans by needs conquer time and space, explaining why European inventions in transportation and communication came into their own in America on a scale undreamed of elsewhere—railroads, steam engines, the telegraph and telephone, and electric power. America’s role as a “receptacle of the unwanted”—an arena where audacious individuals, fleeing from poverty or discrimination, were in a hurry to start over and succeed rapidly—only added to the restless fascination with machines that were so disruptive of the traditions and tranquility of the past. Mechanization was equated with a culture of youth, restless and eager to go places, the more distant and more quickly, the better.

  To meet General John Pershing’s promise of getting “a million men” to France before the end of the war—in truth, forty-eight divisions of 28,000 men made it to Europe by the 1918 armistice, or over 1,200,000 combat troops—Americans overnight reorganized their rail systems, built and commandeered hundreds of ships (building more tonnage in April 1918 than America had in all at 1914), and managed to implement a draft that sent hundreds of thousands from farms in the heartland to France without losing a single recruit to German submarines or surface raiders on the routes over. The Army of the Potomac and the Union navy started off with flintlocks and wooden sailing ships and fought a mere four years later with dreadful new weapons, such as repeating rifles (lever-action Spencers spitting seven shots in twelve seconds), Gatling guns (two hundred shots per minute), and ironclad warships with eleven-inch guns. There was rarely an American version of a Spartan king, a Chinese mandarin, or an aristocratic knight to deplore the unchivalrousness and egalitarianism of such new tools of mass killing.

  A sort of breakneck quality to American life arose where immigrants sought to find immediate status and economic security—often through an embrace of modernism and a rejection of tradition and custom. In reaction, American militaries in the technological sense have always reflected just that emphasis on impatient mobility and mass production—made easier because our youths are intimately acquainted with equipment of all sorts, from Model Ts to video games. By the mid-twentieth century, American sixteen-year-olds drove, owned, fixed, and customized cars. We entrust them at an early age with expensive and sometimes dangerous machines, whether pickup trucks,
tractors, or forklifts, perhaps explaining why twenty-year-olds drive seventy-ton Abrams tanks and wave fifty-million-dollar jets onto the decks of five-billion-dollar carriers.

  Those who “rolled with Patton” across France were at home with tank, truck, and jeep engines; they were eager and able to fix broken equipment that was analogous to what they had grown up with in both farm and town. Unlike that of modern Arab armies, Patton’s problem was not an inability to keep his motorized fleet in good repair, but rather the shortage of gasoline and the ensuing boredom—and danger—when thousands of restless G.I.s ground to a halt in September 1944. It was no accident that American divisions in the Second World War were the most mechanized of all those in the conflict—with almost four thousand vehicles in each division, allowing sixteen thousand men to move at almost fifty miles per day across poor roads. The great American contribution to the Red Army was not just food stocks and strategic materials but nearly four hundred thousand heavy transport trucks, which eventually allowed Stalin a mobility and rapidity lacking among his Nazi enemies on the eastern front.

  In contrast, the supposedly modern Wehrmacht largely was fed and fueled by horse-drawn transport. In 1991 and 2003, Americans moved hundreds of thousands of troops to new Persian Gulf quarters in the same way they built housing tracts here at home—rapidly, en masse, and with an eye to the next project even before the present job was done.

  Unlike Hitler with his finely crafted and calibrated Panther and Tiger tanks, which were qualitatively superior in terms of firepower and protection but harder to maintain and not so easily mass produced, Americans sought to turn out almost limitless supplies of easily accessible weaponry—Sherman tanks, B-24 bombers, and M1 assault rifles—to achieve quantitative advantage. True, a ponderous fifty-six-ton German Tiger tank could blow apart dozens of Shermans. But there was no guarantee that it would be running when hordes of the latter swarmed German rifle brigades. In general the mass-produced, standardized Sherman tank required far fewer hours of maintenance per hours driven—and was far more easily serviced by those who manned it than any of its better armored, better armed, and more lethal German counterparts.

  By late 1942 and early 1943, U.S. industry was already turning out more warplanes annually than Germany, Japan, and Britain combined, despite America’s virtual disarmament until the late 1930s. While German technical and engineering genius at war’s end produced the world’s first guided missile (the V-2), the first jet fighter (the Me-262), and the first surface-to-air missile (the Waterfall), it was the American propensity for mass production, coupled with constant debate about the mission and nature of such weapons, that made their successors appear in such great numbers in the Cold War arsenal of the United States.

  Despite the wizardry involved in crafting guided missiles and jet fighters, we should remember that neither weapon in the Second World War did a fraction of the damage done by thousands of more-pedestrian and more-practical B-17 bombers and P-51 fighters, which were mass-produced, reliable, easily piloted, and constantly improved. Hitler’s madcap directives for V-2 production—without American-style audit and consensus—cost as much money as the Manhattan Project, but one atomic bomb had more concentrated firepower than all the German V-2s put together.

  Alternatively, had Hitler invested in something akin to the B-17 or B-29 (which also cost more than the Manhattan Project), rather than in the more expensive research and development involved in guided missiles, he might well have been able to bring untold damage to Great Britain even in the latter months of the war. American pragmatism—in the tradition of a Henry Ford or Henry J. Kaiser—of delivering x-amount of explosive ordnance to the target at y-cost in men and materiel ultimately was at the foundation of most debates over military investment.

  In addition, unlike the Soviet experience or even modern European practice, Americans tend to distrust central government and state-run industries. A nation of citizens with the constitutional right to bear firearms has kept most of the American arms industry outside state arsenals, or at least in the hands of private subcontractors with government licenses. Such companies usually operate more on free market principles, for the most part guaranteeing a greater propensity to produce cheaper and more plentiful weaponry. It is hard to think of other militaries that have produced better or more numerous carriers, jet fighters, or tanks since 1945. For nearly thirty years, the Soviets achieved theoretical military superiority in central Europe, but the Warsaw Pact’s advantages in the numbers of tanks and artillery were explained by its favorable location and Russia’s spending 30 to 40 percent of its GNP on defense versus the 6 percent allotted by the United States. In the end, as we learned, this “superiority” was unsustainable.

  In short, the culture of the United States—characterized by an emphasis on youth, individualism, and practicality—is evident in our manner of making war. The controversial practice of widespread gun ownership in the United States has meant that a large segment of American youths does not grow up afraid of, or inexperienced with, firearms. Young people with guns—other than those in inner-city gangs—do not arouse the suspicions of the state police or incur social ostracism. From the pensions of the Grand Army of the Republic to the G.I. Bill and the Veterans’ Hospitals, the American military has been closely integrated with American society, whether as a source of income in old age or of subsidies for continuing education. The result is that military service and the idea of using weapons are not seen as strange or antithetical to our society at large—as has become true in contemporary Europe. For millions of Americans, military service provides access to education, health care, and retirement benefits—as well as generally recognized prestige and public thanks.

  Shooting guns in uniform is accepted not only as central to the defense of our country but also as a legitimate avenue for career advancement—all paradoxically in a democratic climate deeply suspicious of militarism. American ideas of muscular independence are deeply embedded in our frontier experience, when guns and the willingness to use them were a means to feed one’s family, enforce justice when the “law” was a three-day-ride away, and form ad hoc militias to hunt down organized intruders, rather than serving in a centralized and permanent army.

  Rising Expectations and Modern War

  AMERICAN THINKING ABOUT military strategy reflects these larger restless imperatives. The public puts a premium on employing overwhelming firepower to end wars quickly—as in Grant’s unthinking bloody hammer blows at the Wilderness and Cold Harbor, Pershing’s insistence on keeping a cohesive American army for massive assaults on German lines, and the Overlord strategy of simply blasting a path in a “broad thrust” through Normandy across the Rhine. Even our most skilled and successful commanders, such as William Tecumseh Sherman and George Patton, who sought to avoid casualties by employing flank attacks or deep sweeping penetrations into the enemy heartland, always labored against the charge that they were afraid of head-on assaults that might more quickly batter the enemy and end the war.

  With such vast reservoirs of men and materiel, and a democratic population far removed from Asian and European squabbling, wouldn’t conventional American doctrine suggest using our forces to win quickly and bluntly, and then go back home? Indeed the purportedly uncouth language of a maverick Sherman or Patton may have simply been a necessary convention to ensure the public of their wartime ferocity. In fact, both were cerebral generals who sought a more mobile and flanking sort of indirect approach that might reduce American battle causalities and cause the collapse of enemy formation without costly frontal assaults.

  Aircraft carriers are perhaps the best symbols of the contradictory American desire to be mobile, independent, and yet overwhelmingly powerful enough to annihilate an enemy through direct massive blows. They have now evolved into a virtual American institution. France has one, England three—all four together possess less offensive power than any one of our current eleven fleet counterparts.

  Indeed, an American carrier’s flight deck of alm
ost five acres possesses more lethal planes than the entire air force of most other nations. These hundred-thousand-plus-ton homes to five thousand men and women appear to the untrained eye as clumsy behemoths, but they can cruise well over six hundred miles in a day, at a clip of thirty-five knots, without seeking the permission of nearby countries or granting concessions to hosts for landing rights. The initial cost to build, man, and deploy an entire American carrier group can easily exceed twenty billion dollars.

  American restlessness and mobility have also meant that political pressure can quickly mount against wars that get bogged down with high casualties and little progress. By spring 1951 the United States had essentially stopped North Korean and Chinese aggression, and was poised to retake the north. Yet public opinion was already tired with a conflict that did not seem to ensure decisive and immediate victory, had cost tens of thousands of American dead and wounded, and raised the specter of nuclear escalation. So Americans settled for stalemate and saw it as a victory that at least South Korea was saved. Yet over a half century later the United States was still talking of North Korea as “evil,” as the regime threatened to send ballistic missiles toward Hawaii.

  Despite the establishment of a viable South Vietnamese government by 1973, the American public, after nearly a decade of fighting, was in no mood to continue bombing to repel the Communist invasions of late 1974 and 1975 that violated the armistice. And so the United States lost the peace negotiated at the Paris peace talks, not the shooting war against invading North Vietnam forces. It is controversial to what degree an American president can maintain support for a distant war of high casualties; what is not in dispute is that the American public will turn quickly on any commander in chief who cannot assure them that American armies are mobile, are on the offensive, and will bring home victory rather than become mired in stalemate, pitted against terrorists and insurgents, and subject to a negotiated armistice.