The American Culture of War

The History of U.S. Military Force from World War II to Operation Enduring Freedom

Adrian R. Lewis

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134845132
• Édition: 3
• Sujet: Geschichte
• Sous-sujet: Militär- & Seefahrtsgeschichte

Now in its third edition, The American Culture of War presents a sweeping critical examination of every major American war since 1941: World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the First and Second Persian Gulf Wars, U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the war against ISIS. As he carefully considers the cultural forces that surrounded each military engagement, Adrian Lewis offers an original and provocative look at the motives, people and governments used to wage war, the discord among military personnel, the flawed political policies that guided military strategy, and the civilian perceptions that characterized each conflict. This third edition features:

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• A new structure focused more exclusively on the character and conduct of the wars themselves

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• Updates to account for the latest, evolving scholarship on these conflicts

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• An updated account of American military involvement in the Middle East, including the abrupt rise of ISIS

The new edition of The American Culture of War remains a comprehensive and essential resource for any student of American wartime conduct.

Part I

Tradition and an Envisioned Future Collide

1War and Culture: An Analytical Approach

So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death. … So that in the nature of man, we find three principall causes of quarrel, First, Competition; Secondly, Diffidence; Thirdly, Glory. The first, maketh men invade for Gain; the second, for Safety; and the third, for Reputation. … Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in the condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man.¹

—Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

War is and always was a cultural phenomenon among humans. What we learned to do, we can choose to stop doing. … Our fate is in our hands. Technology, particularly nuclear technology, has rendered war, man’s most powerful social institution, obsolete. If we recognize this in time, we will probably remain alive.²

—Robert L. O’Connell, “The Origins of War”

War is primal. It is in our DNA. War is in human nature and the human condition. War is not a “cultural phenomenon.” The conduct of war is a function of culture. War is a historical force, and a necessary force in human development. War has influenced every aspect of human life. It is said that “war is an ugly thing,” but one cannot find a nation or state that was not shaped by it. The political geography of the Earth is primarily a function of war. War is a destructive force, but it is also a creative force. War has destroyed and created tribes, clans, nations, states, and empires. War has destroyed and created ideas, beliefs, ideologies, religions, and institutions. War has configured and reconfigured the borders between states. War has destroyed political, social, economic, and cultural systems and created the conditions for new systems to grow and develop. Every major political, social, economic, and cultural system on the Earth has been shaped in multiple ways by war. War created the conditions under which the vast majority of humanity has lived throughout recorded history, including the city-states of ancient Greece; the Empire of Rome; the dynasties of China; the shogunates of Japan; the monarchies of medieval and early modern Europe; the imperialist systems the British and French imposed on Africa, India, the Middle East, and Asia; the Communist system of the former Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China; the constitutional democracy of Japan and Germany; and the American “superpower” empire. All came into existence and most cease to exist as a function of war. All of humanity lives under conditions created by war. And still today nations and states in all parts of the Earth commit enormous human and material resources to the conduct of and preparation for war. War is not an aberration and it is not going away. Human communities are incapable of permanent, peaceful, coexistence; and if they were, humanity would still be in the agricultural stage of development.³ The machines created for war are the machines of everyday life. War is a fundamental and necessary process of the human condition—destroying and creating, purging and renewing, promoting and demoting, changing and reshaping.

War is a social force. It creates national unity, the cohesion necessary to bind people together in significant ways and form nations, cultural units. War turned peasants into Frenchmen, Prussians into Germans, Virginians into Americans, slaves into citizens, and Arabs into Palestinians. War creates the myths, legends, heroes, symbols, and monuments that form the most significant national memories and informed and motivated the actions of generations of people. War formulated, defined, and structured paradigms of human behavior. Constructs such as manhood and patriotism were formed and reformed, defined and redefined, through war. War placed real value and meaning on concepts such as duty, honor, freedom, independence, and equality. War also brings out the worst and the best in humanity. War purges societies of many of their trivial pursuits and places before them larger issues, objectives, and missions—survival. Arguably, it is only in the struggle for survival—the struggle for life—that the truest nature of humanity is revealed.

War causes adaptation, innovation, research, and development. War created the conditions for great advances in science and technology, including vessels capable of traversing oceans and exploring their depths, aircraft capable of moving hundreds of people at close to the speed of sound, communication systems capable of informing millions of people of events taking place on the other side of the Earth at the speed of light, and vehicles capable of orbiting the Earth and exploring the Solar System. Nuclear energy, jet and rocket propulsion systems, antibiotics, satellite communications, the Internet, and numerous other technologies that most of humanity take for granted, are primarily a function of war. Without war men would not traverse oceans in hours, travel in space, or microwave popcorn.

War is a major historical, social, political, economic, and cultural force, influencing almost every facet of human life. All people ultimately have recourse to war, and the life of every human on Earth has been, and will continue to be, influenced by war.

War and Humanity

A long view of history, a study of war, and an objective, honest look at unchanging facets of human nature and the human condition reveal a number of facts:

First, from a quote attributed to Plato: “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”War is a function of human nature and the human conditions. And, the human condition is a function of war. War will come to an end only when humanity comes to an end. To be sure, Western democracies will again fight total wars, which will require the active, willing support and participation of the people. Democracy, capitalism, and free trade have not, and will never eliminate war. As long as there are weak and strong, as long as there is greed, as long as people covet, as long as people are prideful and arrogant, and as long as people hold systems of beliefs that create and diminish “others,” there will be war.⁴ The question for each nation throughout history has not been whether there would be another war, but whether in the event of war, the people, their government, and their armed forces would be ready to face the challenges; whether there was sufficient will, spirit, unity, cohesion, resolve, love of country, selflessness, and trained men and women ready to meet the crisis; and whether there was sufficient technological achievement and production capability to sustain the nation during the period of crisis.

Second, nations and states rise and fall through war. The United States became a “superpower” through war, and has retained that status because of war and its continuous preparation for war. And it is a fact that the United States will not always be a superpower, or even the dominant power on Earth. Like Rome and Britain, it too will ultimately be diminished, and war will be one of the major factors that cause or influence its decline. Every day during World War II the United States grew in power and prestige. Every day of the Vietnam War, and every day of the second war in Iraq, the United States was diminished.

Third, men and women—not the machines they make—are the dominant weapons on Earth. The richest, most technologically and militarily advanced state in all of history, the United States, was defeated in Vietnam by a poor, undeveloped nation. It was not technology or the abundance of machines and other resources that determined the outcome of war; it was the will of the people. The human body is the most resilient, precision weapon ever produced. The human brain, spirit, will, and ability to adapt and bond with other human beings and courageously sacrifice, even life itself, for the good of comrades and community, these are the attributes that make men and women the dominant weapon. People, humans, are the most adaptable instrument and animal on Earth. The human ability to adapt—physically, psychologically, intellectually, culturally, socially, and emotionally—has made humanity the most successful species. And while war motivates men and women to adapt by creating and producing tools and machines and new strategies and doctrines, it is the human—not his tools or strategies—that is the ultimate instrument of war.

Fourth, humans are social animals that form the bonds of cohesion that make war possible. It is our connectedness that makes us able and willing to kill for the security of others and to risk life. War is the function of the combined effort of a people. Political, social, and cultural bodies make war possible. Something has to hold people together, connect them in significant ways—empathy; some system of beliefs, ideology, or religion; some form of shared identity, ancestry, language, and culture—to make war possible. Rousseau observed that: “It is man’s weakness which makes him sociable; it is our common miseries which turn our hearts to humanity; we would owe humanity nothing if we were not men. Every attachment is a sign of insufficiency. If each of us had no need of others, he would hardly think of uniting.”⁵ War requires willing sacrifices. Sacrifice requires multiple, strong threads of connectedness. War demands that humans do the two most difficult tasks that can be asked: risk one’s life and take another’s life, risk death and kill. We are programmed at birth with the instinct for self-preservation. War requires that we override this programming. To do this on a large scale people have to be connected to something beyond themselves. They ultimately have to place the survival of the political/cultural body above the survival of their physical body. Something stronger than self-interest or the instinct for survival has to influence and inform individual decision making and behavior.

Fifth, war damages people in unseen ways. The very nature of war causes trauma, which causes distortion and delusion. Killing extracts something from people. Living with the fear of death extracts something from people. Pain—physical, emotional, and psychological—reforms people. The destructive nature of war, the sight of carnage, the loss, the wounding, the pain, the suffering, the destroyed homes, the disrupted lives, the destroyed bodies, the blood and flesh, the sounds of dying, the shrieks and cries of pain of friends and enemies, the destroyed dreams, and the witness to all that war is, damages survivors emotionally and psychologically. War reconfigures the way the brain operates. It causes people to do as follows: to believe and feel they are not the aggressor but the aggrieved; to project unique, dehumanizing qualities on their enemy; to accept ideologies that diminish others; to hate others; to look for remedies in gods, miracle weapons, and invincible technologies; and to seek out new doctrines, new tactics, and extraordinary men. War distorts the world for those who survive it. This pained and distorted view can be passed from people to people, from generation to generation. Throughout history, even the greatest empires, the greatest states, the greatest leaders, and the most successful armies have fallen under the weight of time through distorted perceptions and delusions about the nature of war, enemies, and humanity.

Culture: An Approach

The conduct of war—the way nations go about fighting—is a function of culture. Culture decisively influences the conduct of war.⁶ In fact, it is impossible to understand the actions of a nation at war without some understanding of its culture. A nation is a cultural entity. A state is a political entity. A state has well-defined geographic borders, a military force capable of defending them, an internal security force capable of enforcing laws, a hierarchy of leadership that has legitimacy, and a bureaucracy capable of organizing people, extracting resources from the people, and directing their combined energy and resources toward specific objectives. The modern nation-state combines these two forms of human organization to produce a single entity that was and is capable of conducting total war, the commitment of the majority of the human and material resources of a nation-state to the objective of the destruction of another political and cultural entity. The noted anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski, wrote:

In the terminology here adopted, we can say that the tribe as a cultural entity can be defined as a federation of partly independent and also coordinated component institutions. One tribe, therefore, differs from the other in the organization of the family, the local group, the clan, as well as economic, magical, and religious teams. The identity of institutions; their potential cooperation due to community of language, tradition, and law; the interchange of services; and the possibility of joint enterprise on a large scale—these are the factors which make for the unity of a primitive, culturally homogeneous group. This, I submit, is the prototype of what we define today as nationality: a large group, unified by language, tradition, and culture. To the division as we find it between primitive culturally differentiated tribes there correspond today such divisions as between Germans and Poles, Swedes and Norwegians, Italians and French.⁷

The modern nation-state is the most powerful historic force in history. The concept of nation takes us beyond the legal considerations of the individual as a subject of states.⁸ The people of a given nation are connected by a common identity, a common culture, and it is this connectedness that creates the cohesion that makes possible total effort in war, that makes possible the will to sacrifice for others. It is the state’s ability to extract and the nation’s ability to motivate willing sacrifice that makes total war possible. In the five-year duration of World War II seventy million people were killed. The modern nation-state made this possible.

However, the political entity, the state, can cause the cultural entity, the nation, to act in ways that are culturally irregular and, by so doing, diminish its power to achieve objectives through war. During the Vietnam War, the state developed strategies and acted in ways that were culturally irregular,...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the Third Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Military Map Symbols
• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Tradition and an Envisioned Future Collide
• Part II The Efforts to Adapt to a Nuclear World
• Part III The New American Practice of War: War Without the People
• Notes
• Index