Excerpts from: The Future of Western War, by Victor Davis hanson, from Imprimus, Hillsdale College. edited by Dean Kalahar
I want to talk about the Western way of war and about the particular challenges that face the West today. But the first point I want to make is that war is a human enterprise that will always be with us. Unless we submit to genetic engineering, . . human nature will not change. And if human nature will not change—and I submit to you that human nature is a constant—then war will always be with us. . . In this sense war is like water. . . Likewise war, because the essence of war is human nature.
Second, in talking about the Western way of war, what do we mean by the West? Roughly speaking, we refer to the culture that originated in Greece, spread to Rome, permeated Northern Europe, was incorporated by the Anglo-Saxon tradition, spread through British expansionism, and is associated today primarily with Europe, the United States, and the former commonwealth countries of Britain . . . And what are Western ideas? . . They include a commitment to constitutional or limited government, freedom of the individual, religious freedom in a sense that precludes religious tyranny, respect for property rights, faith in free markets, and an openness to rationalism or to the explanation of natural phenomena through reason. . . The resultant system creates more prosperity and affluence than any other.
Just as this system afforded more prosperity in times of peace, it led to a superior fighting and defense capability in times of war. This is what I call the Western way of war, and there are several factors at play.
First, constitutional government was conducive to civilian input when it came to war. . . civilian overseers have enriched military planning.
Second, 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. . . 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. (much different than the terrorist definition)
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. . . 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 another factor is that Western armies are impatient. They tend to want to seek out and destroy the enemy quickly and then go home.
Now, I would not want to suggest that the West has always been victorious in war. It hasn't. But consider the fact that Europe had a very small population and territory, and yet by 1870 the British Empire controlled 75 percent of the world. What the Western way of war achieved, on any given day, was to give its practitioners—whether Cortez in the Americas, the British in Zululand, or the Greeks in Thrace—a greater advantage over their enemies. . .
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 . . . these materials produce tremendous amounts of unearned capital . . . mean(ing) 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.
In addition to these new developments, there are five traditional checks on the Western way of war that are intensified today.
One of these checks is the Western tendency to limit the ferocity of war through rules and regulations. . . Unfortunately, the idea that Western countries can adjudicate how the rest of the world makes war isn't applicable anymore. . . In fact, (some) 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.
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. . . The U.S. and its allies can't even agree on sanctions against Iran. . .Westerners will 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 third check is what I call "parasitism." It is very difficult to invent and fabricate weapons, but it is very easy to use them. . . there (is no history) 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.
A fourth check is the ever-present anti-war movement in the West, stemming from the fact that Westerners are free to dissent. . . Our enemies know this, and often their words and actions are aimed at encouraging and aiding Western anti-war forces.
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. . . 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.
My point here is that all of the usual checks on the tradition of Western warfare are magnified in our time. And I will end with this disturbing thought: 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. And that's a very lethal combination.
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