Abstract
When we read about recent wars in distant places we are often struck by how differently foreign armies perform and the surprising ways in which hostilities end or do not end. During the 1982 episode in the serial Lebanon war, for example, regular Palestinian fighters gave a generally poor performance on the battlefield, shying away from head-on clashes, surrendering quickly, and breaking down easily under interrogation. Only militia in the refugee camps—when defending their homes and their families—displayed tenacity and resistance. In contrast, the Israeli army displayed aggressiveness and innovation on the battlefield. It not only prevailed over the Palestinians but operationally, tactically, and logistically out-fought the Syrian air force and air defense system.
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Notes
Exceptions include a group of security-policy analysts and Soviet area specialists who used the concept of “strategic culture” to explain why the two superpowers allegedly held dissimilar views on the use of nuclear weapons, e.g.: Jack Snyder, The Soviet Strategic Culture: Implications for Nuclear Options (Santa Monica, CA: RAND R-2154-AF, 1977);
Colin Gray, “National Styles in Strategy:The American Example,” International Security, vol. 6, no. 2 (1981), pp. 21–47;
Carnes Lord, “American Strategic Culture,” Comparative Strategy, vol. 5, no. 3 (1985), pp. 269–293.
Other than a few isolated works, little attention was paid to different countries or regions of the world: see Ken Booth, Strategy and Ethnocentrism (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979);
Joel Larus, Culture and Political-Military Behavior: The Hindus in pre-Modern India (Calcutta, India: Minerva Associates, 1979).
Examples include Jongsuk Chay, ed., Culture and International Relations (New York: Praeger, 1990);
Samuel P. Huntington, “A Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs, vol. 72, no. 3 (summer 1993), pp. 22–49;
Alastair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995);
Peter Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996);
Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil, eds., The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1996);
Kevin Avruch, Culture and Conflict Resolution (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 1998);
Dominique Jacquin-Berdal, Andrew Oros, and Marco Verqeij, eds., Culture in World Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998);
Keith Krause, ed., Culture and Security: Multilateralism, Arms Control and Security Building (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1999).
See Avruch, Culture and Conflict Resolution; Alexander Wendt, “Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics,” International Organization, vol. 46 (1992), pp. 391–425;
Thomas U. Berger, Cultures of Antimilitarism: National Security in Germany and Japan (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, “International Norm Dynamics and Political Change,” International Organization, vol. 52, no. 4 (autumn 1998), pp. 887–917. For a nuanced discussion of this debate, see Jack Snyder, “Anarchy and Culture: Insights from the Anthropology of War,” paper presented to the working group on Political Violence, War and Peace in the Contemporary World, Center for Global Change and Governance, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ, 19 October 2000.
Exceptions include: Berger’s Cultures of Antimilitarism; Elizabeth Kier’s work on the organizational cultures of the British and French militaries between the two world wars, Imagining War: French and British Military Doctrine between the Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Johnston, Cultural Realism on China; and Kenneth M. Pollack, “The Influence of Arab Culture on Arab Military Effectiveness,” (Ph.D. diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1996).
William C. Wohlforth, “Reality Check: Revising Theories of International Relations in Response to the End of the Cold War,” World Politics, vol. 50 (July 1998), p. 651.
Michael Vlahos, “Culture and Foreign Policy,” Foreign Policy, vol. 82 (spring 1991), p. 63.
Howard J. Wiarda, “Political Culture and National Development,” The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, vol. 13, no. 2 (summer 1989), p. 197.
Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society (New York: Free Press, 1964).
Howard J. Wiarda, Ethnocentrism in Foreign Policy: Can We Understand the Third World? (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1985).
Anthony Pascal, Are Third World Armies Third Rate? Human Capital and Organizational Impediments to Military Effectiveness, RAND Paper Series P-6433 (January 1980), p. 1.
W. Seth Carus, “Defense Planning in Iraq,” in Defense Planning in Less-Industrialized States, ed. Stephanie Neuman (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1984), pp. 42–43. This point is also made repeatedly in connection with Iraq’s ability to conduct combined-arms operations in Anthony Cordesman and Abraham R. Wagner, The Lessons of Modern War: The Iran-Iraq War, vol. 2 (Boulder, CO:Westview Press, 1991).
Anthony Cordesman, The Gulf and the Search for Strategic Stability (Boulder, CO.: Westview Press, 1984), pp. 652–655;
Edgar O’Ballance, The Gulf War (London: Brassey’s, 1988), p. 48;
Shahram Chubin and Charles Tripp, Iran and Iraq at War (London: I.B. Tauris, 1989), p. 59.
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Art of War (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), pp. 25, 61, 169, 202, quoted in Joseph Rothschild, “Culture and War,” in The Lessons of Recent Wars in the Third World: Comparative Dimensions, vol. 2, ed. Stephanie G. Neuman and Robert Harkavy (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1987), p. 54.
Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976), pp. 4, 278, 381, cited in Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch, Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War (New York: Free Press, 1990), pp. 8–10.
Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative (New York: Atheneum, 1966);
Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966).
William McDougal, “The Instinct of Pugnacity,” in An Introduction to Social Psychology (London: Methuen, 1915), ch. 11;
William James, “The Moral Equivalent to War,” in Memories and Studies (New York: Longman’s Green, 1910), pp. 267–296;
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Penguin Books, 1986; originally published in 1651).
R. Paul Shaw and Yuwa Wong, Genetic Seeds of Warfare: Evolution, Nationalism and Patriotism (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp. 23–42.
See also D. G. Meyers, Psychology, 5th ed. (New York: Worth, 1998), pp. 56–57.
Lucian W. Pye, Asian Power and Politics: The Cultural Dimensions of Authority (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 9.
This is particularly true for political culture since. Some of the publications include: Samuel P. Huntington, “Will More Countries Become Democratic?” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 99 (1984), pp. 193–214; Aaron Wildavsky, “Choosing Preferences by Constructing Institutions: A Cultural Theory of Preference Formation,” American Political Science Review, vol. 81 (March 1987);
Harry Eckstein, “A Culturalist Theory of Political Change,” American Political Science Review, vol. 82 (September 1988), pp. 789–804;
Herbert Werlin, “Political Culture and Political Change,” American Political Science Review, vol. 84, no. 1 (March 1990), pp. 249–253.
Paul B. Pedersen, Juris Draguns, Walter J. Conner, and Joseph E. Trimble, Counseling across Cultures (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989);
Alan Roland, In Search of Self in India and Japan: Toward a Cross-Cultural Psychology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); Daniel Goleman, “Making Room on the Couch for Culture,” New York Times, 5 December 1995, pp. C1 and C3.
Roger D. Masters, “Evolutionary Biology and Political Theory,” American Political Science Review, vol. 84, no. 1 (March 1990), p. 198;
See also Albert Somit and Steven A Peterson, Darwinism, Dominance, and Democracy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997).
Over the years, “national character” became a “loaded” term thought to have racist connotations. Beginning in the 1970s, authors started using the more neutral term “national styles”— defining it more probabalistically as the tendency of a particular cultural group to exhibit a particular type of behavior. See Snyder, Soviet Strategic Culture; Gray “National Styles in Strategy.” A closely related theoretical school focuses on national images—how a people sees itself— as a determinant of conflict behavior: see Nathan Leites, The Operational Code of the Politburo (New York: McGraw Hill, 1951);
Alexander L. George, “The ‘Operational Code’: A Neglected Approach to the Study of Political Leaders and Decision-Making,” International Studies Quarterly, vol. 13 (June 1969), pp. 190–222;
Noel Kaplowitz, “National Self-images, Perception of Enemies and Conflict Strategies: Psychopolitical Dimensions of International Relations,” Political Psychology vol. 11, no. 1 (1990), pp. 39–82.
Raymond L. Garth off, Soviet Military Doctrine (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1953), pp. 236–237, cited in Booth, Strategy and Ethnocentrism, p. 9.
Benjamin Schwartz, Casualties, Public Opinion, and U.S. Military Intervention (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corp., 1994).
Harrison Salisbury, Behind the Lines: Hanoi (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), cited in Miroslav Nincic, “Casualties, Military Intervention, and the RMA,” paper presented at the conference on the Revolution in Military Affairs, Monterey, August 1995, <http://ps.ucdavis.edu/JCISS/cmi.html>. On the role of U.S. public opinion see also John Mueller, War, Presidents, and Public Opinion (New York: John Wiley, 1973).
See, for example: Norville de Atkine, “Why Arabs Lose Wars,” MERIA Journal, vol. 4, (March 2000); Yehoshofat Harkabi, “Basic Factors in the Arab Collapse during the Six Day War,” Orbis, vol. 11 (fall 1967), pp. 677–691; Pollack, “The Influence of Arab Culture”; William O. Stauden-maier, “Commentary: Defense Planning in Iraq: An Alternative Perspective,” in Defense Planning in Less-Industrialized States.
Hew Strachan, “The Battle of the Somme and British Strategy,” The Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. 21 (March 1998), pp. 79–95, cited in Colin S. Gray, “Strategic Culture as Context: The First Generation Strikes Back,” Review of International Studies, vol. 25 (1999), p. 59.
Richard Pipes, “Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War,” Commentary, vol. 64, no. 7 (1977), pp. 21–34.
Lincoln P. Bloomfield, “American Approaches to Military Strategy, Arms Control, and Disarmament:A Critique of the Postwar Experience,” in Edward Kolodziej and Robert E. Harkavy, eds., American Security Policy and Policy-Making (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1980), chapter 14, esp. 225–226.
Scott A. Boorman, The Protracted Game (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). Developed in China between three thousand and four thousand years ago, “Go” (called Wei Ch’i in China) is played with black and white stones on a board marked by nineteen intersecting lines into 361 crosses. It has as its object the possession of the larger part of the board and the capturing of the opponent’s stones.
Steven Stinemetz, “Clausewitz or Khan? The Mongol Method of Military Success,” Parameters, vol. 14, no. 1 (spring 1984), pp. 71–80.
Lynn Montross, War through the Ages, 3d ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1960).
Carlo M. Cipolla, Guns, Sails, and Empires: Technological Innovation and the Early Phases Of European Expansion, 1400–1700 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965), chapter 2.
Examples include Charles A. Kupchan, The Vulnerability of Empire (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1994); Johnston, “Cultural Realism”; Berger, “Cultures of Antimilitarism.” To date, however, as Gray observes, rigorous empirical and theoretical scholarship on strategic culture remains limited. (Gray, “Strategic Culture as Context,” p. 50.)
Adda Bozeman, writing somewhat later, declared that the early religious and quasireligious texts or oral tradition of non-Western cultures are “indisputably at one in hallowing war, whether fought in open pitched battles, coverdy in devious protracted style, or permanently as low-intensity conflict and cold war of nerves. In short, we need not go on wondering just why violence and war were and continue to be endemic throughout Asia and Africa. Peace, by contrast, does not emerge from the culture histories of non-Western societies as either norm, superior value, or actual condition. Indeed, reflections on the records cannot bypass the well documented reality that peace is not conceived as the opposite of war or as different from war. What one learns instead is that war and peace interpenetrate in thought and in behavior on the levels of both internal and external statecraft. An Islamic definition of peace as dormant war and a Hindu view of peace as ruse of war may thus tell it like it is in most of the world.” Adda B. Bozeman, “Non-Western Orientations to Strategic Intelligence and Their Relevance for American National Interests,” Comparative Strategy, vol. 10, no. 1 (1991), pp. 67–68.
Edward S. Boylan, “The Chinese Cultural Style of Warfare,” Comparative Strategy, vol. 3, no. 4 (1982), pp. 341–363.
Harlan W. Jencks, “China-Vietnam, 1979,” in The Lessons of Recent Wars: Approaches and Case Studies, ed. Robert E. Harkavy and Stephanie G. Neuman (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1985), p. 145.
Michael I. Handel, Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought, 2d rev. ed. (London: Frank Cass, 1996), p. 33.
Rothschild, “Culture and War,” p. 65; See also R. A. D. Applegate and J. R. Moore, “The Nature of Military Culture,” Defense Analysis, vol. 6, no. 3 (September 1990), pp. 302–305.
Yitzhak Klein, “A Theory of Strategic Culture,” Comparative Strategy, vol. 10, no. 1 (1991), p. 5.
See also Jeffrey Legro, “Which Norms Matter? Revisiting the ‘Failure’ of Internationalism,” International Organization, vol. 5, no. 1 (winter 1997), p. 57.
Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius (New York: Random House, 1950), book 2; The Prince (New York: Random House, 1950), chapters 12, 13, 24, cited in Joseph Rothschild, “Culture and War,” p. 54.
Efraim Karsh, The Iran-Iraq War: A Military Analysis, Adelphi Paper no. 220, International Institute for Strategic Studies (spring 1987), p. 15.
W. G. Sumner, Folkways (Boston: Ginn, 1906), p. 13, quoted in Booth, “Strategy and Ethnocentrism, p. 15.
C. W. S. Brodsky, “India and Pakistan,” in Fighting Armies, Nonaligned, Third World, and Other Ground Armies: A Combat Assessment, ed. Richard A. Gabriel (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983); see also discussion below.
Dewitt C. Ellinwood, “Ethnicity in a Colonial Asian Army: British Policy, War, and the Indian Army, 1914–1918,” in Ethnicity and the Military in Asia, ed. Dewitt C. Ellinwood and Cynthia H. Enloe (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1981), p. 91.
Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 447–448.
Ralph Bolton, “The Hypoglycemia-Aggression Hypothesis: Debate versus Research,” Current Anthropology, vol. 25 (1984), pp. 1–53, cited by James M. Wallace, “Is War a Cultural Universal? Anthropological Perspectives on the Causes of Warfare in Human Societies,” in Culture and International Relations, p. 25.
For a discussion of the transformation in the Jewish self-image, see Paul Breines, Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry (New York, Basic Books, 1990).
Neville Maxwell, India’s China War (New York: Doubleday, 1972).
Keith F. Otterbein, The Evolution of War: A Cross-Cultural Study (New Haven, CT: HRAF Press, 1970), p. 104, cited by Wallace, “Is War a Cultural Universal?” p. 25.
Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), p. 39.
I. W. Zartman and M. R. Berman, The Practical Negotiator (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 226.
Peter Young, The Israeli Campaign 1961 (London: William Kimber, 1967), chapter 7; Cordesman and Wagner, The Lessons of Modern War: The Iran-Iraq War, pp. 437–440.
Jeffrey Herbst, “War and the State in Africa,” International Security, vol. 14, no. 4 (spring 1990), p. 118.
John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989), p. 240. The author argues that the experience of past wars have had an effect on the mental habits and values of Western states so that war has now become “subrationally unthinkable” to them.
Harry Eckstein, “Political Culture and Political Change,” in American Political Science Review, vol. 84. no. 1 (March 1990), p. 256.
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© 2001 Robert E. Harkavy and Stephanie G. Neuman
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Harkavy, R.E., Neuman, S.G. (2001). Culture and Warfare. In: Warfare and the Third World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07926-8_6
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