All armies engage in mass confrontations at times; few prefer to do so in horrendous collisions of shock and eschew fighting at a distance or through stealth when there is at least the opportunity for decisive battle. Likewise, armies from the Persians to the Ottomans often developed sophisticated methods of mustering troops; none outside the West drafted fighters with the implicit understanding that their military service was part and parcel of their status as free citizens who were to determine when, how, and why they were to go to war. Foot soldiers are common in every culture, but infantrymen, fighting en masse, who take and hold ground and fight face-to-face, are a uniquely Western specialty—the product of a long tradition of a middling landholding citizenry who expresses unease with both landless peasants and mounted aristocrats.
The ability to use a weapon, even to improve its effectiveness with practice, is not comparable to inventing and fabricating arms in mass quantities. Africans and American Indians could employ European rifles, become crack shots, and occasionally repair broken stocks and barrels. Yet they could not produce guns in any great number, if at all, much less craft improved models or find in a written literature the abstract principles of ballistics and munitions to conduct advanced research.
Buying and selling is a human trait, but the abstract protection of private property, the institutionalization of interest and investment, and the understanding of markets are not. Capitalism is more than the sale of goods, more than the existence of money, and more than the presence of the bazaar. Rather, it is a peculiar Western practice that acknowledges the self-interest of man and channels that greed to the production of vast amounts of goods and services through free markets and institutionalized guarantees of personal profit, free exchange, deposited capital, and private property.
Warriors are not necessarily soldiers. Both types of killers can be brave, but disciplined troops value the group over the single hero and can be taught to march in order, to stab, thrust, or shoot en masse and on command, and to advance and retreat in unison—something impossible for the bravest of Aztecs, Zulus, or Persians. Every army possesses men of daring, but few encourage initiative throughout the ranks, and welcome rather than fear innovation, so apprehensive are they that an army of independent-thinking soldiers in war just might prove the same as citizens in peace. Bickering among soldiers and disagreement among a small cadre of generals—whether Hitler’s captains or Aztec lords—are universal traits of armed forces. But the institutionalization of critique in the military— soldiers’ subservience to political leaders, existence of law courts, uniform codes of discipline subject to review, appeal, and ratification—is unknown outside the West. The freedom among citizens to criticize wars and warriors openly and profligately has no pedigree outside the European tradition.
THE CONTINUITY OF WESTERN LETHALITY
What of the present and future? Will—and should—this lethal heritage of Western warfare continue? In a series of border wars during the years 1947–48, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982, the tiny nation of Israel fought and decisively defeated a loose coalition of its Arab neighbors, who were supplied with sophisticated weapons by the Soviet Union, China, and France. The population of Israel during those decades never exceeded 5 million citizens, whereas its surrounding antagonists—at various times including Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and the Gulf states—numbered well over 100 million. Despite having nearly indefensible borders and a tiny population base, and often being surprised, the outnumbered Israeli army—itself the creation of a brilliant generation of European émigrés— consistently fielded better-organized, -supplied, and -disciplined armies of superbly trained and individualistic soldiers. Israel itself was a democratic society of free markets, free elections, and free speech. Its enemies simply were not.
In less than three months—April 2–June 14, 1982—a British expeditionary force crossed some 8,000 miles of rough seas and expelled a well-entrenched Argentine army on the Falklands, which was easily supported by ships and planes from the Patagonian coast a mere two hundred miles away. At a cost of some 255 British lives—mostly seamen who perished from missile attacks on Royal Navy cruisers—the government of Margaret Thatcher won back the small islands in the South Atlantic at little cost, despite enormous logistical problems, the excellent imported weapons of its adversary, and the complete surprise of the initial Argentine invasion. Again, the democratic and capitalist society of the United Kingdom sent out better-trained and more disciplined combatants in this strange little war, soldiers far different from those fielded by the Argentine dictatorship.
On January 17, 1991, a coalition of U.S. allies defeated the veteran army of Iraq—1.2 million ground troops, 3,850 artillery pieces, 5,800 tanks, 5,100 other armored vehicles—in four days, at a loss of fewer than 150 American servicemen and -women, most of whom were killed by random missile attack, friendly fire, or other accidents. Saddam Hussein’s military, like the Argentines’, had purchased excellent equipment. Many of his soldiers were seasoned veterans of a brutal war with Iran. They were entrenched on or adjacent to their native soil. Their earlier invasion of Kuwait, like the takeover of the Falklands and the Yom Kippur War, was a complete surprise. The Iraqi army could be easily supplied by highway from Baghdad.
The Iraqi soldiers were not merely poorly disciplined and organized. None of them were in any sense of the word free individuals. The Republican Guard turned out to be about as effective against Westerners as had been Xerxes’ Immortals. Not a single soldier who was incinerated by American jets voted to invade Kuwait or fight the United States. Saddam’s own military plans were not subject to review; his economy was an extension of an in-house family business. His military hardware— from poison gas to tanks and mines—was all imported. Any Iraqi journalist who questioned the wisdom of invading Kuwait was likely to end up like Pythius the Lydian on the eve of Xerxes’ invasion of Greece. The Iraqi military—itself having no ability to invade Europe or the United States— was nearly annihilated not far from the battlefields of Cunaxa and Gaugamela, where Xenophon’s Ten Thousand and Alexander the Great had likewise routed indigenous Asian imperial armies so long ago.
Analysis of most other recent wars suggests that even the direct importation of Western tanks, planes, and guns, or the adoption of Western-designed weaponry from other sources, does not always guarantee the success of the Other. That Arab and Argentine officers were trained abroad meant little. Nor did it matter much that their armies were organized and modeled after those in Europe. Israel, Britain, and the United States and its major European partners in the Gulf War, often despite difficult logistics, all found victory relatively easy, after short, violent fighting, drawing on a combination of practices common to Europe alone during the last 2,500 years of Western warfare.
Quite simply, the Israeli, British, and American military shared a common cultural approach to war making—a holistic tradition that transcended howitzers, and jets and one quite different from their respective and sometimes courageous adversaries. Nothing that has transpired in the last decades of the twentieth century suggests an end to Western military dominance, much less to war itself. Had the United States unleashed its full arsenal of brutal military power and fought without political restrictions, the war in Vietnam would have been over in a year or two and may well have resembled the lopsided affair in the Gulf War.
There are three often discussed military scenarios for the future: no wars, occasional wars, or a single, world-ending war. I think we can dismiss the first fantasy without much discussion. War, as the Greeks teach us, seems innate to the human species, the “father of us all,” as Heraclitus says. Both idealists on the left and pessimists on the right—whether Kantian utopians or gloomy Hegelians worried over the end of history— have at times prognosticated a cessation to civilized warfare. The former have hoped for global peace under the aegis of international judicial bodies, most recently incarnated by the United Nations and the World Court; the latter lament a spreading global atrophy as a result of de
pressing uniformity of worldwide capitalism and entitlement democracy, under which the unheroic and enervated citizens of the planet shall risk nothing if it might endanger their comfort.
Yet an often idealistic and self-proclaimed pacifistic Clinton administration (1992–2000) called out the American military for more separate foreign deployments than any presidency of the twentieth century. Contemporary wars are not merely frequent but often brutal beyond anything in the nineteenth century. The Rwandan and Balkan holocausts were tribal bloodletting of the precivilized variety, mostly immune to international stricture and denunciation. The Gulf War of 1991 drew down the might of the United States to its National Guard reserves, a state of mobilization rarely reached even during the worst crises of the Cold War. A not insignificant percentage of the world’s oil supply was for a time either embargoed, aflame, or in peril at sea. Belgrade was bombed and the Danube blocked; and there was unchecked mass murder for six years in Bosnia and Kosovo, only hours away from Rome, Athens, and Berlin. Nations, clans, and tribes, it seems, will continue to fight despite international threats, sanctions, and the lessons of history, regardless of the intervention of the world’s sole superpower, oblivious to the economic absurdity inherent in modern military arithmetic. The conduct of a war can be rational, but often its origins are not.
By the same token, despite a growing uniformity in the world’s militaries—their automatic weapons, chain of command, and the appearance of their uniforms are becoming Western to the core—there is little solace that some new global culture has ushered in a period of perpetual peace. Those consumers of different races, religions, languages, and nations, who all wear Adidas, buy Microsoft computer programs, and drink Coke, are just as likely to kill each other as before—and still watch Gilligan’s Island reruns on their international television screens afterward.
Gifted intellectuals of vision and character, products of this new Westernized intellectual culture, could only sigh when during the spring of 1982 in the isolated harsh seas of the South Atlantic, British seamen blew up Argentines and vice versa. The European-educated, Argentine poet and novelist Jorge Luis Borges remarked of the idiotic stakes involved in the Falklands War that the two civilized nations were “like two bald men fighting over a comb.” But fight they did, and neither seemed like Nietzschean “men without chests” who might think a few thousand windy hills of scrub in the middle of nowhere were not worth any disturbance to their Sunday afternoon televised football games. Thucydides, who claimed he wrote history as “a possession for all time,” reminds us that states fight for “fear, self-interest, and honor”—not always out of reason, economic need, or survival. Honor, even in this age of decadence, despite the gloomy predictions of Plato, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Spengler, still exists and will, I think, still get people killed for some time to come.
True, some key ingredients of traditional Western warfare appear to be all but gone. Mercenary armies in America and Europe are the norm. They are not necessarily entirely professional militaries, but outlets for the disaffected of society who seek economic opportunity alone in serving, with the realization that those of a far different social class will determine where, when, and how they will fight and die. Fewer Americans—soldier and civilian alike—are voting than ever before. Most have not a clue about the nature of their own military or its historic relationship with its government and citizenry. The rise of a huge federal government and global corporations has reduced the number of Americans who work as autonomous individuals, either as family farmers, small businesspeople, or owners of local shops. Freedom for many means an absence of responsibility, while the culture of the mall, video, and Internet seem to breed uniformity and complacence, rather than rationalism, individualism, and initiative. Will the West always, then, possess persons of the type who fought at Midway, or citizens who rowed for their freedom at Salamis, or young men who rushed to reform their battered legions in the aftermath of Cannae?
Pessimists see in the lethargic teenagers of the affluent American suburbs seeds of decay. But I am not so sure we are yet at the point of collapse. As long as Europe and America retain their adherence to the structures of constitutional government, capitalism, freedom of religious and political association, free speech, and intellectual tolerance, then history teaches us that Westerners can still field in their hour of need brave, disciplined, and well-equipped soldiers who shall kill like none other on the planet. Our institutions, I think, if they do not erode entirely and are not overthrown, can survive periods of decadence brought on by our material success, eras when the entire critical notion of civic militarism seems bothersome to the enjoyment of material surfeit, and an age in which free speech is used to focus on our own imperfections without concern for the ghastly nature of our enemies. Not all elements of the Western approach to warfare were always present in Europe. The fumes of Roman republicanism kept the empire going long after the ideal of a citizen soldier sometimes gave way to a mercenary army.
Nor is a second scenario likely either, that of a total war brought on by a nuclear America, Europe, Russia, China, or a warlike Islamic world that would incinerate the planet. Two colossal enemies—the Soviet Union and America—did not employ their huge nuclear arsenals for some fifty years of the Cold War. There is no reason to think that either is more rather than less bellicose after the fall of communism. Their legacy to others is nuclear restraint, not recklessness. Strategic arsenals, both nuclear and biological, are shrinking, not growing. If the history of military conflict is any guide, there is also no assurance to believe that possession of nuclear weapons will always be tantamount to mutually assured destruction. Defensive systems in the cosmos are already on the verge of being deployed. The ability to shield blows is a law of military history, forgotten though it has been in the last half century during the threat of a nuclear Armageddon. The swing is once more toward the defensive, as vast sums are allocated to missile protection, to counterinsurgency, and even to body armor to deflect bullet, shrapnel, and flame.
Any nation in this new century that threatens the use of the atomic bomb realizes that it is faced with two unpleasant alternatives: massive reprisal in kind, and soon the possibility that its use will be deflected or destroyed before harming its adversary. Prudence in the use of strategic nuclear weapons, not profligacy, remains the protocol in hot and cold wars. Plague, nerve gas, and new viruses not yet imagined, we are told, will kill us all in the future. But military historians will answer that the forces of vigilance, keen border defense, technologies of prevention and vaccination, and counterintelligence are also never static. The specter of deterrence draws on a human, not a culturally specific, phenomenon, inasmuch as all nations—even democracies—engage in brinkmanship to protect their self-interests. A rogue state that sponsors a terrorist with a vial in Manhattan is still cognizant that its own continued existence is measured by little more than a fifteen-minute missile trajectory.
If we are to have neither perpetual peace nor a single conflagration to end the species, the third option, that of random and even deadlier conventional wars (more men and women have died in battle since World War II than perished in that conflict), seems to be a certainty in the thousand years to come. We in the West still shudder at the carnage of World War II largely because it took the lives of so many Westerners. We forget that far more Koreans, Chinese, Africans, Indians, and Southeast Asians have died in mostly forgotten tribal wars, at the hands of their own government and during hot spots of the Cold War in the half century after the end of Hitler’s Germany.
In this regard, the future of Western warfare seems somewhat more disturbing since so many have perished since 1945 due to the diffusion of Western arms and tactics to the non-West. The most obvious worry is the continual spread of Western notions of military discipline, technology, decisive battle, and capitalism without the accompanying womb of freedom, civic militarism, civilian audit, and dissent. Such semi-Western autocracies on the horizon—a nuclear China, North Korea, or Iran—may soo
n, through the purchase or the promotion of a Western-trained scientific and military elite, gain the capability nearly to match European and American research and development of weaponry and organization without simple importation or sale—and without any sense of affinity with, but abject hostility to, their original mentors. Just as deadly as satellite guidance systems in China is a Chinese chain of command with a flexibility and initiative modeled after that in Europe and America, or a private rather than state munitions industry.
In these new flash points to come, can the non-West import our weaponry and military organization and doctrine apart from the cargo of their birth? Can a capitalist China, Iran, Vietnam, or Pakistan, with a scientific elite, for any sustained period really equip and organize a sophisticated army, superior to any Western military, without free citizens, individualism in command hierarchy, constant audit, and oversight of its strategy and tactics? Or do such would-be antagonists merely pick the fruit of the West which soon withers without the deep taproots of intellectual, religious, and political tolerance? Will they merely win occasional battles but not wars, or perhaps threaten us endlessly with the specter of a half dozen nuclear-tipped missiles over Los Angeles?
Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power Page 59