I find myself with a much less substantial set of follow-up comments
than those offered by Stephen, and I also find that there are some strong
areas of agreement in all of our respective initial comments.  Strangely,
however, I feel that there may be a slight need to defend Lynn a little
bit.  Let me repeat what I called Lynn’s characteristic phrase “Armies made
choices within menus of possibilities consistent with necessity and
technology” (p. 124).  The purpose of _Battle_ is NOT to offer a
comprehensive theory of warfare, nor to propose a connected narrative of
historical development.  So while it is true that he oddly jumps from the
mid-19th century to the middle of WWII, that does not undermine his
purpose.  His purpose is to get us to consider the ways in which thinking
about warfare can be determinative on its practice, in addition to other
factors.  The key phrase here is “in addition to.”  Now admittedly,
sometimes Lynn’s prose tends to push his point a little hard, and he
occasionally loses track of some of those other factors: technology,
geography, and etc.  But again his PURPOSE: to suggest a methodology by
which we can examine any given period for ways in which thinking about war
ALSO contributed to the practice of war.

        The reader may note that to this point in my follow up comments I
have avoided the word “culture.”  There is little doubt that occasionally
Lynn is very inclusive in his conception of culture.  I felt that it started
to get away from him in the chapter on Egypt.  But for the most part Lynn
confined that word to a meaning revolving around values, expectations, and
preconceptions (about war).  While that may still seem mushy, it is quite a
bit more specific than “culture,” and thus quite a bit more subject to
historical analysis.  We can seek an understanding of a past society’s
values about war, and then we can start to ask the hard, detailed, archival
questions of how those values affected behavior.  This is in part where much
of the discomfort arose in response to Lynn’s relatively thin layer of
archival research.  He, as we have all pointed out, relies very heavily on
the archival work of others (or at times on his own previous archival
work).  But that nevertheless suits his purpose of suggesting a model–with
an admittedly broad brush--while at the same time refuting the equally broad
brush model of Hanson.

        The focus on values and culture in war can also go too far.  Again
something that came out in all our initial comments.  I have just this
afternoon returned from the meetings of the Society for American
Archaeologists–a forum I use to keep abreast of how anthropologists treat
warfare.  I can state with some assurance that within that discipline, the
discussion of culture and values sometimes goes very much too far away from
the realities of weapons, death, and material need.  If I hear one more
archaeologist refer to a palisade as enclosing ritual space . . . .
Technology is certainly part of the bigger story, and I suspect Lynn dodged
it the way he did because he knows just how much we all worry about
technology anyway.  Like Paul Harvey, he wants us to examine the “rest of
the story.”

        Lastly let me simply agree that I wish Lynn had chosen more examples
of intercultural war.  The U.S. vs. Japan is perhaps not the best choice.
Here I reveal again my own interests, but a study of the impact of culture
and values on warfare can gain much from multiple examples of the violent
contacts between cultures.

        Bring on the dialog.  Lynn has definitely done that.

Wayne E. Lee
University of Louisville

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