Comment on Gray

January/February 2006 Historically Speaking 31 Comment on Gray Victor Davis Hanson s a long admirer ofThucydides I must J^ plead guilty to agreeing with almost all ofthe sensible points that Colin S. Gray has made. Not long ago in the inaugural issue of The New Atlantis (Spring 2003 http://www.thenewatlantis .com/archive/1/hanson.htm) I wrote a brief article entitled "Military Technology and American Culture," which addressed, in the immediate aftermath of the three-week victory over Saddam Hussein, similar misplaced giddiness about the new technology and its role in the perceived "revolution " in war: The most dangerous tendency of military planners is the arrogant belief that all of war's age-old rules and characteristics are rendered obsolete under the mindboggling technological advances or social revolutions of the present . Tactics alter, and the respective roles of defense and offense each enter long periods ofsuperiority vis-à-vis each other. The acceptance of casualties is predicated on domestic levels of affluence and leisure. But ultimately the rules ofwar and culture, like water, stay the same—even as their forms and their pumps change. as Philip and Alexander protected such an unwieldy mass with light and heavy cavalry, the hypaspists, and missile and light-armed troops. Nevertheless, for the men asked to fight, victory was still achieved or lost by the degree of discipline and élan in the ranks, the acumen of their generals who sought out favorable terrain, and the larger political So I find very little in Gray's essay that I could argue with, inasmuch as he hits on themes of unchanging human nature that sober thinkers such as Angelo Codevilla, Michael Howard, and Donald Kagan have reiterated in warning us about believing that war reinvents itself ex nihilo each generation. Even the Macedonian sarissas that Gray alludes to in passing are instructive. They did entail a change in tactics (two hands were now required to hold such a long pike, requiring the mostly mercenary phalangites to jettison the old protection of the large hoplite shield held with the left hand), as the phalanx achieved greater killing power (five rows of spear tips, not three, hit the enemy in the initial crash). The sarissa-phalanx's resulting clumsiness necessitated a symphony offorces, A Fight of Foote against Foote. From Louis de Gaya's The An of War, 1678. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. objectives that such forces were used for. In other words, the newfound lethality of the Macedonian phalanx did not change at all the older rules of why men fight, the ingredients for their success or failure, or how such new technology was rightly or wrongly employed in an unchanging strategic landscape. All of the valuable examples Gray cites from the 19th and 20th centuries that refute the notion of a radical, technologically-based revolution of warfare have earlier antecedents in ancient and medieval times. Catapults were lamented in reactionary literature of the 4thcentury B.C. for destroying the old hoplite code predicated on battle courage. But by the century's end stouter walls, new styles ofconstruction , and counter-artillery mounted on the walls had neutralized even torsion catapults, relegating them to a mere cycle in the age-old tension between the besieger and the besieged. 1 5th-century fiery weapons, it is true, soon empowered the offense and eventually made iron, steel, and bronze body plate obsolete. Yet in an age ofKevlar and new ceramics that can stop many bullets, we are relearning not only the age-old science ofcrafting personal armor, but the reasons why such protection is needed when the training and costs of specialist warriors simply make them too expensive to lose. In that sense, Gray is absolutely correct to note: "We do not care about many of the details ofwarfare's changing character through two and a halfmillennia. What we care about is the unchanging nature of war." In this age of materialist thinking, Gray makes an even better point. He quotes Thucydides's famous "fear, honor, and interest" as motivations for war, invoked by the Athenians as the primary reasons that they acquired and kept an empire. The Spartans, Thucydides also says, started the Peloponnesian...