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

270 Pages·2010·1.16 MB·English

by  Victor Davis Hanson

THE FATHER OF US ALL
War and History, Ancient and Modern
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Co-director, the Group on Military History and
Contemporary Conflict, the Hoover Institution,
Stanford University
B L O O M S B U R Y P R E S S
New York Berlin London
To the soldiers
of the American military—
for all that they do.
War is the father of all and king of all.
—Heraclitus,
fragment 22B53
CONTENTS
Preface
PART I: MILITARY HISTORY: THE ORPHANED DISCIPLINE
CHAPTER 1.
WHY STUDY WAR?
CHAPTER 2.
CLASSICAL LESSONS AND POST-9/11 WARS
CHAPTER 3.
RAW, RELEVANT HISTORY: FROM THE 300 SPARTANS TO THE HISTORY OF
THUCYDIDES
PART II. WAR WRITING
CHAPTER 4.
THALATTA! THALATTA!
CHAPTER 5.
THE OLD BREED
CHAPTER 6.
THE WAR TO BEGIN ALL WARS
CHAPTER 7.
DON JUAN OF AUSTRIA IS RIDING TO THE SEA
PART III. THE POSTMODERN MEETS THE PREMODERN
CHAPTER 8.
THE END OF DECISIVE BATTLE—FOR NOW
CHAPTER 9.
“MEN MAKE A CITY, NOT WALLS OR SHIPS EMPTY OF MEN”
CHAPTER 10.
THE AMERICAN WAY OF WAR—PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE
PART IV: HOW WESTERN WARS ARE LOST—AND WON
CHAPTER 11.
YOUR DEFEAT, MY VICTORY
CHAPTER 12.
THE ODD COUPLE—WAR AND DEMOCRACY
CHAPTER 13.
WHO IS THE ENEMY?
EPILOGUE
Index
PREFACE
S
OME PORTIONS OF these essays have appeared in various publications or derive
from transcripts of public lectures I delivered. In every case, however, I have
greatly expanded, rewritten, and updated each chapter—and, in many instances,
combined two or three earlier shorter articles, along with entirely fresh material,
to form these newly titled longer essays.
Two themes resonate throughout the book: the unchanging face of war and
the tragic nature of its persistence over the ages. Despite the purported novelty
of today’s so-called war on terror, and the public furor and controversies that
arose over the wars of this new millennium, conflict in the present age still
remains understandable to us through careful study of the past.
War is an entirely human enterprise. Even with changing technologies and
ideologies, and new prophets of novel strategies and unconventional doctrines,
conflict will remain the familiar father of us all—as long as human nature stays
constant and unchanging over time and across space and cultures.
War seems to be inseparable from the human condition. I do not wish to
venture into the controversy about whether war is innate to the human gene
pool, or whether aggression is characteristic of our evolution. Rather, as an
empiricist, I note only that war—like birth, aging, death, politics, and age-old
emotions such as fear, pride, and honor—has never disappeared. This so-called
tragic view concedes that depressing fact about the human condition, and yet it
steels the individual to the notion that suffering is a part of our human lot, and
unfortunately cannot be entirely eradicated by any amount of well-intended
nurturing.
Yet acceptance of the frequent horror of war does not equate to either an
approval of or an abject inability to avert particular conflicts. If military history
suggests that it is almost impossible to outlaw outright by statute, or eliminate
entirely through progressive education, legalized killing on a grand scale, it
nevertheless offers the hope that we can learn from the past in order to both
lessen the frequency and mitigate the severity of particular conflicts. As the
Athenian dramatist Sophocles teaches us, the stuff of tragedy is the endless
struggle against something deep and persistent—and unpleasant—within
ourselves.
In short, this book is a small attempt in these confusing times of high
technology and intellectual haughtiness to remind us that past wars still best
explain present conflicts.
I wish to thank the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, for help in
preparing the manuscript. In particular I owe a debt of gratitude to Bill and
Nancy Myers, and their children, Mary Myers-Kauppila and George Myers, for
their support for my work, including the thinking contained in the essays herein.
The Myers family has long demonstrated to the Hoover Institution its
appreciation of scholarship in the classics, especially its application to
contemporary history.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
November 1, 2009
PART I
Military History:
The Orphaned Discipline
CHAPTER 1
Why Study War?
Military History Teaches Us About the Tragic Inevitability of Conflict*
Military History?—How Odd
T
RY EXPLAINING TO a college student that Tet was, in fact, an American
military victory. Or, in contrast, suggest that the Vietnamese offensive of 1968
was a stunning enemy success. Either way, you will not provoke a
counterargument—let alone an assent—but a blank stare: Who or what was Tet?
When doing some radio interviews about the recent hit movie 300, I
encountered similar bewilderment about battles of the past from both listeners
and hosts. Not only did most of them not know who the movie’s eponymous
three hundred Spartans were or what Thermopylae was, but they also seemed
clueless about the Persian Wars altogether. Was not Marathon a long-distance
race, nothing more?
Americans tend to lack a basic understanding of military matters. Even
when I was a graduate student, thirty-some years ago, military history—
understood broadly as the investigation of why one side wins and another loses a
war, and encompassing reflections on magisterial or foolish generalship,
technological stagnation or breakthrough, and the roles of discipline, bravery,
national will, and culture in determining a conflict’s outcome and its
consequences—had already become unfashionable on campus. Today,