The Father Of Us All: War And History, Ancient And Modern - Plot & Excerpts
WAR REFLECTS CULTURE. Weaponry, tactics, notions of discipline, command, logistics—all such elements of battle arise not just from the constraints of terrain, climate, and geography, but also from the nature of a society’s economy, politics, and sociology. This is as true for the American military today as it was in ancient and medieval times, and as valid for non-Western as for Western civilizations. For example, the files of the ancient Greek phalanx and the preference of its heavy-armored hoplites for quick, decisive shock battles over farmland grew out of a society of freeholding agrarian hoplites who purchased their own armor, worked farms of roughly equal size, and voted in land-owning assemblies on the condition of their own military service. Compare this with the rapid mounted onslaughts of nomadic horse-peoples of the steppes, or the huge imperial, multiethnic, and bureaucratic armies of autocratic and palatial Egypt and Persia. The infantry-minded Greeks of the city-state, it is true, lacked the large plains of Thessaly to the north that nurtured a horse-rearing culture of aristocratic grandees, but they also preferred panoplies of some fifty pounds that otherwise made no sense in a hot, dry Mediterranean climate.
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