Western culture stands in stark contrast to the nativism, xenophobia, ethnocentrism, and chauvinism of other cultures. One distinctive characteristic of Western culture is that it is open to, curious about, and eager to see the good features in other cultures.
A general discussion of how to define, describe, and explain Western Civilization is far beyond the scope of the present discussion. Instead, the question is about a narrow subtopic: What could be meant by the phrase “The Western Way of War”?
Exploring this topic, historian Victor Davis Hanson begins by listing three factors which have given Western societies advantage in warfare. The first is that civilian government is separate from, and has authority over, the military:
Constitutional government was conducive to civilian input when it came to war. We see this in ancient Athens, where civilians oversaw a board of generals, and we see it in civilian control of the military in the United States. And at crucial times in Western history, civilian overseers have enriched military planning.
Outside of Western Civilization, there is often no clear distinction between civilian government and military commanders. On a simple level, many of those who are heads of state and heads of government in the non-Western world often wear military uniforms, and military leaders often give orders to the civilian government instead of the other way around.
By contrast, in Western nations, it is often required that anyone who wishes to hold office in the civilian government must sever any connections he might have with the military. Those who were the highest leaders in the military — presidents like Washington, Grant, and Eisenhower — had to first be humbled and resign their commissions before they could become presidents.
In the Western world, there have been moments in which non-western ways have asserted themselves: the eras of Napoleon and Hitler.
The second factor which has yielded an advantage for Western nations in combat is a unique sense of honor. Western soldiers are not honored for the number of men they’ve killed. The differences between the earliest phases of Greek history around 1000 B.C. and the classical phase around 400 B.C. are instructive. The earlier era understood the military man to be a killer, and the more he killed, the better. By the later phase, a Greek soldier did not wear trophies or souvenirs to commemorate each man he’d killed:
Western culture gave birth to a new definition of courage. In Hellenic culture, the prowess of a hero was not recognized by the number of heads on his belt. As Aristotle noted in the Politics, Greek warriors didn’t wear trophies of individual killings. Likewise, Victoria Crosses and Medals of Honor are awarded today for deeds such as staying in rank, protecting the integrity of the line, advancing and retreating on orders, or rescuing a comrade. This reflects a quite different understanding of heroism.
Another factor which Victor Davis Hanson identifies is the Western advantage in technology and economics. Outside of the Western world, societies place little value on individualism, and the individual is not encouraged or given the freedom to pursue her or his goals; individualism is not protected. In Western societies, a balance of valuing both the individual and community allows for freedom in experimentation and invention, leading to discoveries and explorations of the natural sciences, which in turn yield new technologies. At the same time, individualism offers chances for people to find ways to build, improve, and bring these technologies to market.
A third factor underlies our association of Western war with advanced technology. When reason and capitalism are applied to the battlefield, powerful innovations come about. Flints, percussion caps, rifle barrels and mini balls, to cite just a few examples, were all Western inventions. Related to this, Western armies — going back to Alexander the Great’s army at the Indus — have a better logistics capability. A recent example is that the Americans invading Iraq were better supplied with water than the native Iraqis. This results from the application of capitalism to military affairs — uniting private self-interest and patriotism to provide armies with food, supplies, and munitions in a way that is much more efficient than the state-run command-and-control alternatives.
Yet the economic advantage is also one ingredient to a political pressure on the military in Western nations, a pressure which sometimes hinders rather than strengthens military might. The economic systems of the West desire to keep military spending to a minimum. While the military expenditures of some Western nations might be large in absolute terms (e.g., the United States), they are smaller in relative terms than the military spending of many non-Western nations. Simply put, the voters want to spend enough money on the military to bring about a victory in just war, and not a penny more.
Western Civilization is generally reluctant to start wars, perhaps sometimes for ethical reasons, but directly and explicitly for economic ones.
Another ingredient which creates a pressure for a short and inexpensive war is the concept of the volunteer army. Presently, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Western nations have mostly volunteer armies, while other parts of the world enforce large-scale conscriptions. In the past, Western nations often had to cajole or give incentives to their citizens to obtain sufficient soldiers. While it would be anachronistic to retroject concepts like “conscription” and “the draft” onto the constituent kingdoms which formed the Holy Roman Empire, it was the case that the emperor could not simply demand that soldiers be given to him. He had to persuade the nobles to turn over their soldiers, and he had to make a plausible case to the aristocrats that it was both in their interests and in the empire’s interests that they release their soldiers into the emperor’s service.
It is not unusual for Western military leaders to find themselves fighting a war on a budget. George Washington’s army was perpetually underfunded, as was the United States Army in the Korean War. In non-western societies, the military has an absolute priority in the economy, especially in wartime.
This pressure on the military, writes Victor Davis Hanson, is at times an advantage, and at times a disadvantage:
Western armies are impatient. They tend to want to seek out and destroy the enemy quickly and then go home. Of course, this can be both an advantage and a disadvantage, as we see today in Afghanistan, where the enemy is not so eager for decisive battle. And connected to this tradition is dissent. Today the U.S. military is a completely volunteer force, and its members’ behavior on the battlefield largely reflects how they conduct themselves in civil society. One can trace this characteristic of Western armies back to Xenophon’s ten thousand, who marched from Northern Iraq to the Black Sea and behaved essentially as a traveling city-state, voting and arguing in a constitutional manner. And their ability to do that is what saved them, not just their traditional discipline.
The West hasn’t “always been victorious in war.” It has lost a number of them. On balance, however, the distinctive characteristics of Western warfare have often been advantageous.
In the early years of the twenty-first century, changes in technology, economics, diplomacy, global trade, and society itself are changing these centuries-old dynamics. The West may have to recalibrate to maintain its ability not only to defend itself, but also to defend its concepts and way of life. One of these changes is the rapid transfer of knowledge, and a second change is leveraging raw-material exports and cheap labor (low tech) which are needed for high-tech civilization:
There have been two developments over the last 20 years that have placed the West in a new cycle. They have not marked the end of the Western way of war, but they have brought about a significant change. The first is the rapid electronic dissemination of knowledge — such that someone in the Hindu Kush tonight can download a sophisticated article on how to make an IED. And the second is that non-Western nations now have leverage, given how global economies work today, through large quantities of strategic materials that Western societies need, such as natural gas, oil, uranium, and bauxite. Correspondingly, these materials produce tremendous amounts of unearned capital in non-Western countries — and by “unearned,” I mean that the long process of civilization required to create, for example, a petroleum engineer has not occurred in these countries, yet they find themselves in possession of the monetary fruits of this process. So the West’s enemies now have instant access to knowledge and tremendous capital.
Western societies face additional challenges in warfare in the twenty-first century. Victor Davis Hanson lists five of them:
One of these checks is the Western tendency to limit the ferocity of war through rules and regulations. The Greeks tried to outlaw arrows and catapults. Romans had restrictions on the export of breast plates. In World War II, we had regulations against poison gas. Continuing this tradition today, we are trying to achieve nuclear non-proliferation. Unfortunately, the idea that Western countries can adjudicate how the rest of the world makes war isn’t applicable anymore. As we see clearly in Iran, we are dealing with countries that have the wealth of Western nations (for the reasons just mentioned), but are anything but constitutional democracies. In fact, these nations find the idea of limiting their war-making capabilities laughable. Even more importantly, they know that many in the West sympathize with them — that many Westerners feel guilty about their wealth, prosperity, and leisure, and take psychological comfort in letting tyrants like Ahmadinejad provoke them.
Western democracies pose questions to their militaries: Western nations want to know that they are fighting a “just” war, that they can ensure humane treatment of enemy combatants and enemy civilians, and that they use weapons which are not cruel and unusual, and similar concerns. Admittedly, Western nations have occasionally — rarely — violated these ethical standards: there have been instances in which POWs were mistreated, tortured, or even executed. It is telling that such instances provoke a loud and universal outcry from civilians, politicians, and military leaders.
By contrast, warfare as conducted by those who reject Western standards is assumed to include torture, inhumane treatment, and careless action against POWs and civilian populations. Ad hoc, large-scale executions are conducted without any legal or ethical qualms. Indeed, those who reject Western standards do not merely tolerate brutality in their militaries, they demand it.
It is, of course, somewhat misleading to write of “the West” as if it were homogenous and indivisible. Victor Davis Hanson continues:
The second check on the Western way of war is the fact that there is no monolithic West. For one thing, Western countries have frequently fought one another. Most people killed in war have been Europeans killing other Europeans, due to religious differences and political rivalries. And consider, in this light, how fractured the West is today. The U.S. and its allies can’t even agree on sanctions against Iran. Everyone knows that once Iran obtains nuclear weapons — in addition to its intention to threaten Israel and to support terrorists — it will begin to aim its rockets at Frankfurt, Munich, and Paris, and to ask for further trade concessions and seek regional hegemony. And in this case, unlike when we deterred Soviet leaders during the Cold War, Westerners will be dealing with theocratic zealots who claim that they do not care about living, making them all the more dangerous. Yet despite all this, to repeat, the Western democracies can’t agree on sanctions or even on a prohibition against selling technology and arms.
The West’s strengths are also its weaknesses: one of those strengths is freedom — freedom to disagree, to exercise one’s own agency, or in the case of a nation, to exercise the nation’s agency, even if it means disagreeing with an ally. Alliances among Western nations are fussy. Alliances among non-western nations are smoothly functioning, because one nation is superior and the rest of the nations in the alliance are vassal states.
There is a great disparity between the technological savvy required to design and build sophisticated weaponry, and the savvy required to use it. A ragtag group of guerilla fighters can’t design and manufacture RPGs, or even understand the details of their physics and electronics, but such a group can use them efficiently and accurately.
The technological advances made possible by the West’s societal structure are easily appropriated to work against the west. The West’s open and free culture of experimentation can be used by a rigid and controlling culture against the West.
The third check is what I call “parasitism.” It is very difficult to invent and fabricate weapons, but it is very easy to use them. Looking back in history, we have examples of Aztecs killing Conquistadors using steel breast plates and crossbows and of Native Americans using rifles against the U.S. Cavalry. Similarly today, nobody in Hezbollah can manufacture an AK-47 — which is built by Russians and made possible by Western design principles — but its members can make deadly use of them. Nor is there anything in the tradition of Shiite Islam that would allow a Shiite nation to create centrifuges, which require Western physics. Yet centrifuges are hard at work in Iran. And this parasitism has real consequences. When the Israelis went into Lebanon in 2006, they were surprised that young Hezbollah fighters had laptop computers with sophisticated intelligence programs; that Hezbollah intelligence agents were sending out doctored photos, making it seem as if Israel was targeting civilians, to Reuters and the AP; and that Hezbollah had obtained sophisticated anti-tank weapons on the international market using Iranian funds. At that point it didn’t matter that the Israelis had a sophisticated Western culture, and so it could not win the war.
When Victor Davis Hanson explains his next point, he refers to Michael Moore, a filmmaker who was famous for his opposition to America’s involvement in the Iraq War, i.e., the version of the Iraq War which started in March 2003; Hanson wrote these words in 2009. The reader will understand the dynamic and apply it to later eras.
The freedoms of thought and speech which the West fosters are freedoms which can be used against it. As the West fights to preserve those freedoms, those within the West will oppose such fighting, exercising their rights to free speech to oppose the protection of free speech.
A fourth check is the ever-present anti-war movement in the West, stemming from the fact that Westerners are free to dissent. And by “ever-present” I mean that long before Michael Moore appeared on the scene, we had Euripides’ Trojan Women and Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. Of course, today’s anti-war movement is much more virulent than in Euripides’ and Aristophanes’ time. This is in part because people like Michael Moore do not feel they are in any real danger from their countries’ enemies. They know that if push comes to shove, the 101st Airborne will ultimately ensure their safety. That is why Moore can say right after 9/11 that Osama Bin Laden should have attacked a red state rather than a blue state. And since Western wars tend to be fought far from home, rather than as a defense against invasions, there is always the possibility that anti-war sentiment will win out and that armies will be called home. Our enemies know this, and often their words and actions are aimed at encouraging and aiding Western anti-war forces.
The last point which Victor Davis Hanson makes regarding the obstacles which the West faces in warfare is this: When a culture that values human life, which sees something sacred in every human life, which hopes to honor every human life, which sees a dignity in every human life, and which respects every human life — when such a culture encounters another culture which sees human life as expendable to be reckoned cold-bloodedly as one of several costs in warfare — then there is an imbalance. One of the strengths of Western culture is that it values human life; this strength can seemingly become a weakness in the face of an opponent who places little value on human life.
Finally and most seriously, I think, there is what I call, for want of a better term, “asymmetry.” Western culture creates citizens who are affluent, leisured, free, and protected. Human nature being what it is, we citizens of the West often want to enjoy our bounty and retreat into private lives — to go home, eat pizza, and watch television. This is nothing new. I would refer you to Petronius’s Satyricon, a banquet scene written around 60 A.D. about affluent Romans who make fun of the soldiers who are up on the Rhine protecting them. This is what Rome had become. And it’s not easy to convince someone who has the good life to fight against someone who doesn’t.To put this in contemporary terms, what we are asking today is for a young man with a $250,000 education from West Point to climb into an Apache helicopter — after emailing back and forth with his wife and kids about what went on at a PTA meeting back in Bethesda, Maryland — and fly over Anbar province or up to the Hindu Kush and risk being shot down by a young man from a family of 15, none of whom will ever live nearly as well as the poorest citizens of the United States, using a weapon whose design he doesn’t even understand. In a moral sense, the lives of these two young men are of equal value. But in reality, our society values the lives of our young men much more than Afghan societies value the lives of theirs. And it is very difficult to sustain a protracted war with asymmetrical losses under those conditions.
The examples offered reflect the 2009 context; the reader will provide more recent examples to illustrate the principles.
In sum, Victor Davis Hanson has compiled a list of West’s strengths and weaknesses, advantages and disadvantages, and how the relative impact of them has changed in the last century. He closes with this sentence:
We who created the Western way of war are very reluctant to resort to it due to post-modern cynicism, while those who didn’t create it are very eager to apply it due to pre-modern zealotry.
The challenges which face the West include these: How does the West re-frame and re-phrase its values in the light of the last century’s developments? Which strategies and tactics honor those values, avoid the decline into barbarism, and are powerful enough to protect those values?
If the West can’t find answers to those questions, the planet could lose a heritage which strives for human equality. The West has been able to articulate what all people in all cultures seek: peace, prosperity, freedom, and justice. If the West falls, the yearnings of all people will be unfulfilled.
