Carnage And Culture By Victor Davis Hanson

In his book, Carnage and Culture, Victor Davis Hanson, a military historian and professor at California State University, reasons that the west and its armies have been the most lethal and effective force in the world because of the inseparability between armies and their cultures. He illustrates the cultural superiority of the west by explaining the tenets of western society (freedom, citizenship, right to property, capitalism, and individualism) and applies them to nine landmark battles in which the west take part. Hanson uses “the term ‘Western’ to refer to the culture of classical antiquity that arose in Greece and Rome; survived the collapse of the Roman Empire; spread to western and northern Europe; then during the great periods of exploration and colonization of the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries expanded to the

In the book, Culture War?, by Morris Fiorina, the myth of a polarized America is exposed. Fiorina covers issues such as why Americans believe that America is polarized, that Red and Blue State people aren’t as different as they are made out to be, and that the United States is not polarized along traditional cleavage lines. This book even covers perspectives on abortion, homosexuality, and whether or not electoral cleavages have shifted. A large point of Fiorina’s is his take on the 2004 election. He ends the book with, how did our great nation get to this position of proclaimed polarization, and how do we improve from here?

The notion of an American way of war informs how scholars, policymakers, and strategists understand how Americans fight. A way of war—defined as a society’s cultural preferences for waging war—is not static. Change can occur as a result of important cultural events, often in the form of traumatic experiences or major social transformations. A way of war is therefore the malleable product of culturally significant past experiences. Reflecting several underlying cultural ideals, the current American way of war consists of three primary tenets—the desire for moral clarity, the primacy of technology, and the centrality of scientific management systems—which combine to create a preference for decisive, large-scale conventional wars with clear objectives and an aversion to morally ambiguous low-intensity conflicts that is relevant to planners because it helps them address American strategic vulnerabilities.

War is a human endeavor. Humanity continually pursues solutions to counter evolving threats with the end of preserving power while also enabling peace. Civilizations resort to war to maintain their perception of this equilibrium. Defined threats and adversaries have changed throughout history, however, the essence of human nature and the base concept of conflict itself have not. Carl von Clausewitz’s theories on warfare capture the relationship between humanity and its application of war, remaining relevant in today’s era through their pensive explanations of timeless philosophical principles regarding the concept of war. These theories regarding war in politics, the key factors affecting war, and the extent that war is applied are inherently interconnected, providing insight on the relationships between humanity and its application of war.

3. Author's Purpose and Intended Audience: The purpose of Thucydides' histories includes simple historical documentation of events, along with a deft political analysis taking into account the socio-political context of the Peloponnesian War. It is likely that the author writes for a Greek-speaking audience but one that is conscious of its role in an increasingly militaristic world. Thucydides' historiography is self-conscious in the sense that the author is aware of the potential reverberations of the war on neighboring countries and the future of Hellas. The book also comes across tacitly as ethnography, given the author's intent to provide a cultural context relevant for discussing military issues.

In his 1996 work titled Hoplites into Democrats: The Changing Ideology of Athenian Infantry, Victor Hanson analyzes the timeline of the Athenian government as it transitions into a democracy and the effect this transition had on their warfare culture. Throughout the article, Hanson refers to the seventh and sixth century BC as the ‘normative polis’ before democracy when the government was timocratical and Athens was an early agrarian polis; and then continues his article to emphasize the fifth and fourth centuries BC during the political reforms and the emergence of democracy as the main form of government. Hanson mentions the tensions that arose between landowners and non-landowners as the government transitioned from timocratic to democratic,

The western way of war consists of five foundations that have shaped a significant amount of military cultures; the foundations are superior technology, discipline, a finance system, innovation, and military tradition. Perhaps people believe that discipline is not one of the most important foundations of the western way of war, since people tend to emphasize technology. However, discipline is the key to maximizing the other four foundations before and during conflict. Historian Geoffrey Parker agrees that technology can give a military advantage, but it is not sufficient without superior discipline. That is because discipline consists of the ability of armies to act within battle plans even when not supervised, obey orders, exercise loyalty, and restrain their fears when faced with danger. Discipline as a western way of war has influenced military cultures from the Roman Empire to today’s militaries. Discipline shaped military cultures by how they prepared for war, effectively giving them the ability to act during combat and expanding commander’s operational reach, thus aiding in conflicts throughout history and increasing the likelihood of defeating the adversary.

War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, written by the talented author Chris Hedges, gives us provoking thoughts that are somewhat painful to read but at the same time are quite personal confessions. Chris Hedges, a talented journalist to say the least, brings nearly 15 years of being a foreign correspondent to this book and subjectively concludes how all of his world experiences tie together. Throughout his book, he unifies themes present in all wars he experienced first hand. The most important themes I was able to draw from this book were, war skews reality, dominates culture, seduces society with its heroic attributes, distorts memory, and supports a cause, and allures us by a

In the two hundred years since 1775, there has been thirty-five years of fighting in what we consider major conflicts or wars. This averages out to about one year of war to every almost 6 years of our existence as a nation and during that time, we have not been without formal military organizations. Over the course of history, the United States has engaged in many battles that were a crucial phase in developing who and what we have become. Throughout this assessment, we will analyze what were some of the true tipping points that shaped (1) America’s paradoxical love-hate relationship with war and, (2) How this relationship influences American warfare.

Cultural contact in history has always played a large role in introducing religion, technology and social change. Warfare in particular is an area where contact between different cultures has led to rapid changes in the understanding and conduct of war. Changes that take place as a result of contact are often unprecedented and subtle to the nations involved. The past can show that the influence cultural contact had on developing warfare and how the effect was not necessarily unidirectional. Alexander’s campaign across the ancient world is filled with examples of army diversity as a result of cultural

The battles of Philippi remain one of the best examples of how audacity on the battlefield can influence history. The battles are the climax of the civil war following the assassination of Gaius Julius Caesar in 44 BCE by a band of prominent political figures of Rome; (led by Marcus Junius Brutus (Brutus) and Gaius Cassius Longina (Cassius)) who will be referred to in this paper as ‘the Liberators’. The Battles that occurred on the Macedonian plains from the 1st-21st of October 42 BCE will clearly show that no matter the period of history the battlefield considerations of Political, Military, Economic, Social, and Physical Environment can be exploited to achieve victory.

Martin van Creveld wrote The Transformation of War book in 1991 when he detailed a predictive hypothesis about the changing character of war into what he called ?Nontrinitarian War. There were conflicts arise as intrastate wars and were not based on the simplified version of Clausewitz?s ?remarkable trinity? of government, people and military forces (Van Creveld, 1991, pg. 49). In his book, Van Creveld offers an account of warfare in the previous millennium and suggests what the future might hold. The drive was that major war was draining and the emergence of forms of war ?that are simultaneously old and new? now threatened to create havoc.

In War in Human Civilization, Azar Gat asserted that, “Europe experienced a so-called military revolution,” in the 16th and 17th centuries as a result of social, technological, and economic factors. Likewise, historians Williamson Murray and MacGregor Knox affirmed that European militaries experienced revolution during the same period for a variety of other reasons, including the development of the military profession and the disbursement of regular pay. These authors recognized the extensive and lasting impact of the radical military, social, and economic transformations resultant to the rise of the nation state from approximately 1560 to 1700, culminating in a post-Westphalian Europe. The product of this military revolution, subsequently, was a shift from, “bellicose persons… [and] men acting in unison with plenty of brute ferocity but no effective control,” to a professionalized force, with the equivalent of a functioning institutional “central nervous system.” Fundamentally, the emergence of the modern state constituted a military revolution because it subordinated the act of warfare and the monopoly of violence to the newly formed state, enabled the establishment of the modern military institution where none existed previously, and instituted a process for integrating modern and emerging science with military matters. Consequently, the conclusion of feudalism and the emergence of modern states demonstrated a paradigm shift in both the conduct of governance and

As long as one can remember, war has always been prevalent in society. Whether cavemen hitting each other with clubs and rocks, to America dropping an atomic bomb on japan and killing over 100,000 people with a single press of a button, violence seems to have always been humanities go to way of solving conflict. As society evolves intellectually, one can only expect the battles to become more complex. One of the most significant times that warfare is seen to have evolved is through the Napoleonic wars and into WWl and WWll. Looking deeper into the significance of the Napoleonic wars, WWl and WWll, there is a critical influence of mass armies, technological advancements in weaponry, and the different roles played by the homefront and the battlefront.

There are numerous studies that say that the nature and character of war are quite similar to one another and can be even used synonymously. However, according to some writers, there