Having read through the comments of my fellow panellists, Professors Mark
Grimsley, Wayne E. Lee, and Michael A. Ramsey, I wish to thank them all for
some enlightening observations. All four of us have employed writing
different styles and approaches in our first submissions, from the formal to
the discursive, but I am pleased to note that our conclusions on John A.
Lynn’s _Battle_ were, I think, broadly the same. We were asked to continue
by developing any issues raised by these first submissions. Partly because
of the time difference involved I am having to write my submission first and
very quickly, and I apologise for any lack of polish that results.

My fellow panellists all focus discussion on the differences between Lynn’s
thesis and that of Victor Davis Hanson in _The Western Way of Warfare_ and
_Carnage and Culture_ (UK title _Why the West Has Won_, by the way), and how
their students have received it. I don’t want to get pulled in that
direction for four reasons. First, I don’t want to be the foreigner debating
the educational methods of the United States. Secondly, one of the things
that we all teach students to do is to evaluate different theories of
history against the known facts, so there is value in having them study even
flawed books. Thirdly, as Voltaire is supposed to have said on his deathbed
when asked if he renounced the Devil and all his works, “This is no time to
be making enemies!” All large theories of history leak at the joints, and
many do not hold water at all (one of my favourites is a present view that
the French Revolution was “caused” by an excess of anti-government
pornography); military history itself is much too rooted in facts and
evidence (“reductionist,” if you prefer) to be comfortable with them. But if
the historical mainstream is embracing cultural approaches and issues, then
I am an enthusiastic supporter of military history joining in.

My fourth reason for not wishing to join the debate on how American students
respond to the Hanson-Lynn debate is that, in a point raised particularly by
Mark Grimsley, for most military historians true expertise is period-
specific. In fact, I think that it is only of military historians that we
expect otherwise; other historical specialists have their period and their
region. But this makes military history vulnerable to what I will call
the “Gosh” book, in which the author puts forward a contentious thesis based
on a period or subject about which the rest of us know a little but not
enough. Another good example is the plaudits awarded in the USA to Paul
Fussell for _The Great War and Modern Memory_ (1975), the British experience
of the First World War being vaguely familiar, followed by the crash of his
next attempt _Wartime_ (1989) because much greater familiarity with the
United States in the Second World War exposed his methodological
shortcomings. There is also a strong desire of non-historians faced with a
new phenomenon or situation to seek a spurious historical parallel or
precedent. This was seen in the desire of early theorists of the tank in the
1920s to draw parallels with ancient war chariots, and in recent attempts to
argue – apparently in all seriousness – that Genghis Khan practised
Information Warfare. This is behaviour for historians to study, rather than
serious historical study with which we might engage.

The issue that I most want to discuss that arises from my fellow
participants’ comments is Lynn’s rejection early in _Battle_ of
technological determinism as an explanation for warfare, and his use of this
to avoid discussions of the importance of technology in favour of cultural
explanations for the conduct of war. The belief that technology, and the
changes in technology, dictate the nature of warfare belongs largely to the
later modern period; attempts have been made to project it back beyond the
industrial age, but always with accompanying difficulties. Was the
superiority of the English (and sometimes Welsh) mediaeval longbowman
technological or cultural? Does technological superiority relate only to
weapons? If not, is it in fact cultural, such as the military roads of the
Roman Empire, or the sailing and navigation skills of Nelson’s Royal Navy?
Too many questions, not enough answers, but many possibilities for
historians to get excited about.

Since the Industrial Revolution, the idea that technology determines the
nature of war has been implicit in much military thought and writing (except
for orthodox Clausewitzians, who argue the distinction that the _nature_ of
war cannot change, only its methods), and indeed it still is, including
Marxist theory and its Soviet derivatives. It is also implicit in much
military history, in the brochures of arms manufacturers everywhere, and
particularly in the industrialised mass-production style of warfare
developed – even perfected – by the United States in the first half of the
20th Century. _But where is it actually explicit_? Someone may be able to
enlighten me on this, but as far as I know the only major theorist to state
openly that a new technology has changed the entire nature of war was
Guillio Douhet in his _Command of the Air_ in 1921, who took the idea much
further with his insistence that manned and powered flight had changed the
nature of war _for all time_, by providing a means of attack against which
there was no defence. Not even post-1945 theorists of nuclear warfare argue
from a position of technological determinism; they argue only that major
changes in the theory and practice of warfare have been brought about by a
major technological change, the invention of atomic and then nuclear
weapons.

To return to Lynn’s _Battle_: one of the signs that he is writing a broad-
sweeping book against the pressures of length is that he sometimes claims
one contrary example as enough to invalidate an entire theory. In the case
of technological determinism he chooses the defeat of France in May-June
1940. It is indeed a very good example of why weapons technology may not
determine the outcome of a war: the French (with their Allies) had
quantitive and qualitative superiority in tanks over the Germans, and also
quantitative superiority in infantry divisions. The Germans did have (as
Lynn fails to mention) a considerably superior airforce, and (as he mentions
only in passing) also considerable superiority in radio communications. It
is a big but not impossible leap from this to his conclusion that “the key
German advantage was conceptual not mechanical”, but that does not mean that
it was not in large part technological. Theories abound on the reasons for
the French defeat in 1940, from Marc Bloch’s essentially cultural and social
explanation in _Strange Defeat_ (1944) that the French nation in arms failed
itself to Ernest R. May’s recent _Strange Victory_ (2000), which argues that
victory came purely by superior German military planning and execution.
Having studied the battle for years I would add another factor, one that
historians hate having to confront: incredibly good luck on one side and bad
luck on the other. One problem is that French historians are themselves
relatively uninterested in the episode, preferring to focus on the Vichy
regime.

If anyone has about a decade and a large number of graduate students, there
is a historical study that needs undertaking. This is a comparison of wars
that took place contemporaneously in countries with equivalent levels of
technology, including weapons. One obvious choice would be to compare the
American Civil War (1861-1865) not with the First World War (which has been
done in valuable ways) but with the Franco-Austrian War 1859, the Austro-
Prussian War 1866 and the Franco-Prussian War 1870-1871, all wars fought in
the “railways and rifles” era. The first widely-held conclusion is that the
three European wars were relatively short because the political context in
which they were fought demanded it: score one to Clausewitz?

I would like to try a grand theory of my own here. Armies fight wars for
many reasons, some of them perhaps cultural (at least in Lynn’s elastic use
of the term). The way in which they fight, and their fighting effectiveness,
is determined by their motives and objectives, the terrain in which they
fight (a very neglected issue in modern military history), and – relative to
their opponents – their sheer size, their access to technology including
weapons, and their command of professionalised skills some of which might
also be described as cultural in nature. If all the other factors are
largely equal between them, such as in Lynn’s mid-18th Century Europe, these
last cultural issues will form the largest difference between the warring
sides and may do most to determine victory. But to emphasise non-
quantifiable or cultural factors over purely material and technological
factors as determining the conduct of war is the hallmark of a society that
has enjoyed a long period of peace and arguably of decadence, such as France
before 1914 or Japan before 1853. It is not an argument that you hear very
often in a country that has just fought, or worse has lost, a war.
As a final thought at this stage, all of us seemed agreed that Lynn’s
greatest success was his Chapter 3 dealing with the mediaeval ideal of the
knight and his conduct when compared with the _chevauchee_. This may be
because the mediaeval period is sufficiently close for familiarity while
sufficiently distant from our own culture and experience for the separation
between its ideals and its reality to be apparent to us. Or it may be
another case of semi-familiarity misleading us (and I gave up serious close
study of the mediaeval period over two decades ago, very reluctantly). But I
wonder if this mediaeval example is not the best parallel for studying the
present immense gap between the American – or perhaps Western – discourse on
war and its practice, to which Lynn briefly alludes at the end of his book.

Stephen Badsey

Humanities & Social
Sciences Online

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