What, then, are we to make of this final tenet of Western military practice, this strange 2,500-year-old habit of subjecting military operations to constant and often self-destructive political audit and public scrutiny? Can anything good come of a volatile Western citizenry that dictates when, where, and how its soldiers are to fight, even as it permits its writers, artists, and journalists freely and sometimes wildly to criticize the conduct of their own troops? Surely in the case of reporting the Tet Offensive and the Vietnam War—whose vehemence and absurdity make it a pivotal case study of the entire wisdom of allowing dissent and open attacks on the military—cannot the argument be made that the public license lost a war that America could have won?
If the conduct of an unbridled media and constant public scrutiny of even the most minute military operations harmed the American effort in Vietnam, it is equally true that the institutions and process of that self-recrimination helped to correct serious flaws in American tactics and strategy. The United States military in Vietnam under General Abrams from 1968 to 1971 fought a far more effective war than it had between 1965 and 1967, largely as a result of dissent in and out of the military. The bombing of 1973, far from being ineffective and indiscriminate, brought the communists back to the peace table through its destruction of just a few key installations in North Vietnam. Nixon’s so-called Linebacker II campaign was far more lethal to the war machine of Hanoi than the much-criticized indiscriminate Rolling Thunder campaign years earlier. If in 1965 the Johnson administration had no idea what was at stake in Vietnam, or what would evolve as the ultimate rules of engagement, by 1971 the Nixon government understood precisely the American dilemma. As a result of the antiwar sentiment and the freedom of dissent, Nixon knew only too well the nature of the quagmire that he was in.
More important still, Tet was not a single battle, nor was Vietnam in and of itself an isolated war. Both occurred on a worldwide canvas of the Cold War, a much larger global struggle of values and cultures. In this context, the license of the West, while it was detrimental to the poor soldiers who were asked to repel the Tet Offensive, had the long-term effect of winning, rather than forfeiting, American credibility. To defeat the West, it is often necessary not merely to repel its armies but to extinguish its singular monopoly over the dissemination of information, to annihilate not merely its soldiers but its emissaries of free expression.
This more insidious component of Western military practice, the supposedly astute and tenacious communists of North Vietnam never understood. Instead, they were confused about America in Vietnam, condemning its administration but careful to avoid blanket criticism of its people; damning its military but praising its intelligentsia; ecstatic over the slanted reporting of the news but occasionally baffled and hurt when an honest story emerged about the nature of their own thuggish regime; smug in American television’s broadcast of the “liberation” of Saigon, furious at the later coverage of the boat people. If the perplexed North Vietnamese were gladdened that the Washington Post could say worse things about its own military than they did communists, and if they were curious why an American movie star could pose in Hanoi on an artillery battery rather than put on a patriotic play at Carnegie Hall—and still come home without a prison sentence—they were equally furious when asked about the nature of the 1976 “free” elections, and surprised at the few brave reporters who finally told the world of the communist holocaust in Cambodia.
This strange propensity for self-critique, civilian audit, and popular criticism of military operations—itself part of the larger Western tradition of personal freedom, consensual government, and individualism— thus poses a paradox. The encouragement of open assessment and the acknowledgment of error within the military eventually bring forth superior planning and a more flexible response to adversity. The knowledge that military conduct is to be questioned by soldiers themselves, to be audited and scrutinized by those outside the armed forces altogether, and to be interpreted, editorialized, and often mischaracterized by reporters to the public can ensure accountability and provide for a wide exchange of views.
At the same time, this freedom to distort can often hamper military operations of the moment, as Thucydides himself saw and Plato feared in the Republic—and as was the case of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. In Vietnam due to frankness and hysteria in place of reasoned and positive assessment, America may have prolonged its agony and lost battles in the field, but surely not the war against communism. Had America been as closed a society as was Vietnam, then it may well have won the battle but lost the war, much like the Soviet Union, which imploded after its involvement in Afghanistan—a military intervention similar to America’s in Vietnam in terms of tactical ineptitude, political denseness, and strategic imbecility, but a world apart in the Russians’ denial of free criticism, public debate, and uncensored reporting about their error. How odd that the institutions that can thwart the daily battle progress of Western arms can also ensure the ultimate triumph of its cause. If the Western commitment to self-critique in part caused American defeat in Vietnam, then that institution was also paramount in the explosion of Western global influence in the decades after the war—even as the enormous and often bellicose Vietnamese army fought for a regime increasingly despised at home, shunned abroad, and bankrupt economically and morally.
In the next few decades it shall come to pass that Vietnam will resemble the West far more than the West Vietnam. The freedom to speak out, the titillating headline, the flashy exposé, and the idea that a man in tie and suit, not one sporting sunglasses, epaulets, and a revolver, is commander in chief are more likely in the end to win than lose wars, on and off the battlefield. Thucydides, who deplored the Athenian stupidity surrounding the Sicilian expedition and had hardly a good word to say for the Athenian Assembly and its unchecked rhetoricians, was nevertheless impressed by the Athenians’ amazing propensity to correct past blunders and to persevere against unimagined adversity.
If we began this chapter with that historian’s sharp criticism of Athenian fickleness and absence of support for its own expedition, we should end by noting Thucydides’ other, less well known observation concerning such an open culture’s conduct of war. It turned out that the Syracusans fought so well against Athens, Thucydides believed, because they, too, were a free society and “democratic just as the Athenians” (The Peloponnesian War 7.55.2). He concluded that free societies are the most resilient in war: “The Syracusans proved this point well. For precisely because they were the most similar in character to the Athenians, they made war upon them so successfully” (8.96.5).
1 I have used the terms “Mexicas” and “Aztecs” (from the Nahuatl “Aztlan”) interchangeably, although Montezuma and his subjects probably called themselves “Mexicas.” The use of “Aztecs” came into common use by European chroniclers after the seventeenth century. Most of Cortés’s Spanish soldiers were Castilians, and so I employ both words to describe his conquistadors.
EPILOGUE
Western Warfare— Past and Future
For every state war is always incessant and lifelong against every other state. . . . For what most men call “peace,” this is really only a name—in truth, all states by their very nature are always engaged in an informal war against all other states.
—PLATO, Laws (1.626A)
THE HELLENIC LEGACY
FROM THE FIGHTING of early Greece to the wars of the entire twentieth century, there is a certain continuity of European military practice. As the chapter epigraphs suggest, this heritage of the Western war is not found in its entirety elsewhere, nor does it begin earlier than the Greeks. There is no Egyptian idea of personal freedom in the ranks; no Persian conception of civic militarism or civilian audit of the Great King’s army; no Thracian embrace of the scientific tradition; no disciplined files of shock phalangites in Phoenicia; and no landed infantry of small property owners in ancient Scythia—and thus no military in the ancient Mediterranean like the Greeks at Thermopylae, Salamis, or Plataea.
This 2,500-year tradition explains not only why Western forces have overcome great odds to defeat their adversaries but also their uncanny ability to project power well beyond the shores of Europe and America. Numbers, location, food, health, weather, religion—the usual factors that govern the success or failure of wars—have ultimately done little to impede Western armies, whose larger culture has allowed them to trump man and nature alike. Even the tactical brilliance of a Hannibal has been to no avail.
That is not to say that throughout three millennia all Western forces have shared an exact blueprint in their approach to war making through periods of upheaval, tyranny, and decay. Phalangites are a long way from GIs, and the victory at Tenochtitlán is distant from Salamis. Nor should we forget that the non-West has also fielded deadly armies, such as the Mongols, Ottomans, and communist Vietnamese, that have defeated all opposition in Asia for centuries and kept Europe at bay. But the military affinities in Western war making across time and space from the Greeks to the present are uncanny, enduring, and too often ignored—which suggests that historians of the present age have not appreciated the classical legacy that is at the core of Western military energy throughout the ages. There is a sense of déjà vu as these chapters unfold, an eerie feeling that phalangites, legionaries, mailed foot soldiers, conquistadors, redcoats, GIs, and marines all shared certain recurring core ideas about how to wage and win wars.
In battles against the peoples of Asia, Africa, and the New World, tribal and imperial alike, there is a shared legacy over centuries that allowed Europeans and Americans to win in a consistent and deadly manner—or to be defeated on rare occasions only when the enemy embraced their own military organization, borrowed their weapons, or trapped them far from home. Notice that nowhere in these case studies were Western victories a product of innately superior intelligence, Christian morality, or any notion of religious or genetic exceptionalism. While Persians, Carthaginians, Muslims, Aztecs, Ottomans, Zulus, and Japanese all battled in a wide variety of ways, they do share two affinities throughout the ages: none fought exactly as Westerners—or across the oceans as well. Xerxes, Darius III, Abd ar-Rahman, Montezuma, Ali Pasha, and Cetshwayo all envisioned war as a theocratic, tribal, or dynastic crusade, in which speed, deception, numbers, or courage might negate the discipline of Western infantry or the technology and capital of Europe. Montezuma could not envision fighting in the Mediterranean, just as Ali Pasha would never see the Americas.
In just the few episodes we have examined, the similarities are clear. Greek sailors in 480 B.C., in the way that they created and manned their fleet, discussed and voted on strategy before battle, and chose and audited their leadership, were far more similar to Venetians at Lepanto two millennia later than they were to the sultan’s men, who by law were slaves like Xerxes’ seamen at Salamis. By the same token, the rows and files of Alexander’s small army of expeditionary phalangites were in spirit replicated at Cannae, as well as Rorke’s Drift and the other battles of the Zulu War. Outnumbered British redcoats fired on orders, sought to form rank, and charged on command and in unison. The close-ordered ranks and files of the phalanx, whether of Macedonian pikemen or British shooters, are not known outside of the European experience. The manner in which Rome reconstituted its armies after the defeat at Cannae was not all that unlike the American restoration after Pearl Harbor in the months before Midway. Both cultures in the aftermath of defeat drew on common republican traditions of drafting their free voting citizenry into nations-in-arms.
It is a general rule that the Macedonian phalanx, like the army of Hernán Cortés, the Christian fleet at Lepanto, and the British company at Rorke’s Drift, fought with weaponry far superior to that of their adversaries. There was little chance that the Aztecs, for all their rich local natural resources, on their own accord could make harquebuses, gunpowder, or crossbows, the Ottomans topflight bronze cannon, and the Zulus Martini-Henry rifles—and little doubt that a harquebus was deadlier than a javelin, a Venetian 5,000-pound cannon more lethal than its Ottoman clone, and a .45-caliber slug far superior to an assegai. Japan learned to its advantage in the nineteenth century that Europe alone could design battleships—and that battleships were superior to anything that floated in the Sea of Japan. The North Vietnamese did not fight with the tribal spears of their past.
Western military power, however, is more than superior technology. Just as the peace movement and the constant political audit of the military in Vietnam conditioned the behavior of American armies in Southeast Asia, so Bishop Colenso and his family published critiques against the British invasion of Zululand. Bernardino de Sahagún’s narrative of the Spanish conquest of Mexico sought to criticize the morality of his countrymen’s army—in a way unthinkable in Aztec, Vietnamese, or Zulu society. It is no accident that Themistocles, like both the victorious Cortés and Lord Chelmsford, did not die a hero in a homeland grateful to him for the slaughter of its enemies. Did such dissent weaken consistently Westerners’ ability to wage war? Not always, at least not in the long term. The tradition of Western critique and audit has not only established European credibility and so served to ensure that the written and published story of war was largely Western; it has also shown that minds outside the battlefield ultimately had a say in how their nation’s treasure and manhood were spent, sometimes saving the military from itself.
OTHER BATTLES?
The battles of this study are offered as representative examples of general traits rather than absolute laws of military. They are episodes that reflect recurring themes, not chapters in a comprehensive history of Western warfare. That being said, however, I am not certain that the conclusions would have been very different if we had examined other randomly chosen encounters from roughly the same periods and places with similar outcomes—say, Plataea (479 B.C.), Granicus (334 B.C.), Trasimene (217 B.C.), Covadonga (718), the conquest of Peru (1532–39), the siege of Malta (1565), Coral Sea (1942), and Inchon (1950). In nearly all those engagements the same paradigms of freedom, decisive shock battle, civic militarism, technology, capitalism, individualism, and civilian audit and open dissent loom large. In the flesh it is a long way from Greek fire to napalm, from ostracism to impeachment, but in the abstract, not so distant after all.
Even a random catalog of exclusively abject Western defeats— Thermopylae (480 B.C.), Carrhae (A.D. 53), Adrianople (A.D. 378), Manzikert (1071), Constantinople (1453), Adwa (1896), Pearl Harbor (1941), and Dien Bien Phu (1953–54)—would not lead to radically different conclusions. In most of these cases, vastly outnumbered Western armies (Romans under Crassus, Byzantines under Romanos, Italians in Ethiopia, French in Vietnam) were unwisely deployed or poorly prepared—and again far outside of Europe. Even these catastrophes did not always endanger in their immediate aftermaths Greece, Rome, Italy, America, or France. Defeats that had more lasting historical impact— Adrianople, Constantinople, or Dien Bien Phu—came at the borders of European territory and near the end of collapsing regimes or empires. And the victorious Other had either Western-inspired arms or Western-trained consultants among the ranks.
The Western military heritage, itself a dividend of a much larger and peculiar cultural foundation, did not determine in some preordained fashion the outcome of every encounter between West and non-West. Rorke’s Drift, but for Chard, Bromhead, and Dalton, could have easily been lost. Salamis, Lepanto, and Midway also involved brilliance in tactical command. Wars are fought by men who are fickle and in real conditions that are wholly unpredictable—heat, ice, and rain, in tropical and near arctic conditions, close and far from home. Western armies in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, as soldiers everywhere, were often annihilated— often led by fools and placed in the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time. But their armies, for the cultural reasons this book has outlined, fought with a much greater margin of error than did their adversaries.
Themistocles, Alexander the Great, Cortés, and the British and American officers of the last two centuries enjoyed
innate advantages that over the long duration could offset the terrible effects of imbecilic generalship, flawed tactics, strained supply lines, difficult terrain, and inferior numbers—or a simple “bad day.” These advantages were immediate and entirely cultural, and they were not the product of the genes, germs, or geography of a distant past. The Zulu empire was doomed to be conquered once the British decided to invade its borders, regardless of its victory at Isandhlwana, despite the tactical lapses of Lord Chelmsford, and irrespective of courageous impis.
In examining many of these worst-case scenarios of the Western approach to war making, such as Cannae or Tet, the resilience and lethality of the West seems even more remarkable. If the tradition of dissent can survive Vietnam, then its place in Western military practice will remain unquestioned. If Western infantry was prevalent during the so-called Dark Ages of the mounted knight, then its intrinsic advantages at Poitiers seem even more evident both earlier and later. Mustering legions of free citizens at Cannae, only to lose to a mercenary army of Hannibal, requires careful consideration of the entire value of civic militarism. The war against the Zulus, Africa’s most disciplined and organized army, is an unlikely but valuable lesson in understanding the unmatched worth of Western order, rank, and file.
THE SINGULARITY OF WESTERN MILITARY CULTURE
Discussion of Western military prowess demands a precision in nomenclature often lacking in most accounts of the history of warfare. Political freedom—an idea found nowhere outside the West—is not a universal characteristic of humankind. Western elections and constitutions are not the same as tribal freedom, in which much land and few people occasionally give individuals opportunity to find solitude and independence. The desire to fight as freemen is also different from the simple élan of defenders who expel tyrants and foreign powers from their homeland. Persians, Aztecs, Zulus, and North Vietnamese all wished to be free of foreign troops on their native soil, but they fought for the autonomy of their culture—not as free voting citizens with rights protected by written and ratified constitutions. A Zulu could roam relatively free on the plains of southern Africa, enjoying a somewhat more “free” lifestyle than a British redcoat in a stuffy barracks; but the Zulu, not the Englishman, was subject to execution by a nod of his king. Shaka proved this tens of thousands of times over. North Vietnamese communists duplicitously promised to their troops a Western-style “democratic republic”—not an Asian dynasty, communist police state, or feudal society—the reward for conducting a nationalist war against foreign intruders.
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