Registered: Oct 2001
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I'm just about done with this book. Dad sent it to me a short while ago when I was still reading The Crusades by Zoe Oldenbourg. This is a study of three commanders in history: Epaminondas, Sherman and Patton, and how they rank as the greatest commanders because of the nature of the armies they led and their unique mission as liberators. The book also goes into detail about the philosophy of battle that favors indirect attacks and flanking movements employed to minimize loss of life while still destroying enemy property and morale and ability to wage war.

Hanson also shows how historically hollow most militaristic slave states prove to be when they have been attacked in their heartlands. And there has been a difference between armies of conquest, such as those led by Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon and armies of liberation conscripted from consensual, democratic societies. Also, without exception, these armies always fight for a season and then melt away back into anonymity once their job is done.

I'm at the office, so I can't spend as much time reporting on this book as I'd like. But I encourage anyone to read it, even if you normally do not enjoy military history. This book has surprisingly little in it about actual battles; it is more about the nature of command in consensual societies and the soul of an army and how it is led by great men.

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Registered: Jul 2000
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Updated the links page to include your book, as well as a few others of wider interest.



http://www.madsmackdown.com/~waldro.../booklinks.html

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Just a short passage from the epilogue. I got tired of typin, and my boss was lookin at me funny:

“…never in human conflict have such vast democratic infantry forces appeared out of nowhere, wrought such havoc, and then dispersed among the consensual culture that fielded them. These marches are not akin to the invasions of history’s Great Captains. Alexander’s swath to the Indus River killed or displaced over a million people, the vast majority of them innocent civilians. His Macedonians were hired killers keen to loot a corrupt Persian kleptocracy, not to give anyone any freedom. Hannibal too was a mercenary commander of an imperial government who trekked across the Alps for glory and vengeance, not democracy, much less the genuine freedom of Rome’s subjects. Caesar crossed the Rubicon to destroy Republican government; his battle-hardened legionaries marched behind him out of personal loyalty to an autocrat and in hopes of a rich retirement and free land. The Crusaders who traversed the Holy Land were not a militia and they did not seek freedom for others as much as forced subservience to their Christian god. Cortes burned his ships and marched inland to destroy a great empire with a band of soldiers for hire, who had hopes of Mexican gold, vast estates, and knighthood at home. There was nothing democratic about Napoleon’s march on Moscow – and it led to disaster for both the emperor’s and the czar’s armies. The Germans who drove into Russia in June 1941 did so as fascists intent on destroying Stalinism, accompanied by the SS, who murdered in the same spirit as the murdering commissars they sought to replace. The Russians in turn who went back from Moscow to Berlin did so as much to enslave Eastern Europe as to free Russia from the Nazis. Marlborough, Frederick the Great, and Wellington – great generals all – won magnificent victories, but their marching armies were not democratic; they fought largely for the supremacy of monarchy or the preservation of empire; and they freed no enslaved. Montgomery chased the Germans back across Africa, but it was a plodding march that could not reach the enemy heartland, and might close out a distant theater, not the war itself. MacArthur nearly drove the Communists out of the Korean peninsula, but he had no authority to go into China, and his United Nations army at its moment of victory was nearly routed. What Epaminondas, Sherman and Patton did was very rare in military history, for democracy itself is rare in the larger history of civilization, and rare still its great armies of victory that seek no gold or land, but rather the enemy in its heartland only for the freedom of others.

Yet if history offers only three examples of democratic marches for freedom, the record is at least clear. When a free and consensual society feels its existence threatened, when it has been attacked, when its citizenry at last understands an enemy at odds with the very morality of its culture, when a genius at war leads an army with freedom to do what he wishes, when it is to march to a set place in a set time, then free men can muster, they can fight back well, and they can make war brutally and lethally beyond the wildest nightmares of the brutal military culture they seek to destroy.

The antithesis is equally valid: democratic armies do not fight well when they are not attacked, when they are stationary with nowhere to march, when they fight to preserve privilege or empire, when they are not supported at home, when they are led by careful clerks and bureaucrats who command by consensus – in short, when they are not moving forward with every means at their disposal to destroy the enemy in the cause of freedom. The entire American experience in Southeast Asia, like the Athenian disaster in Sicily, is proof enough of just how mediocre under those conditions – strategic, tactical, spiritual – a democracy at war can become.

Is the age of Epaminondas, Sherman and Patton long past? In an era of the global village and postmodern relativism, is the idea of a linear invasion against a clearly defined evil by a democratic nation in arms the stuff of fantasy? Decidedly not. Rather, the study of what these three armies once did holds wisdom for all democracies at the millennium. In the present age we are told that the presence of satellite reconnaissance and nuclear-tipped missiles makes large land armies seem in comparison small and redundant, or that the specter of terrorism, insurrection and insurgency ensures that they are in fact too big, untrained and unwieldy. Yet neither proposition is a valid criticism.

Marches for freedom are not frontal assaults but rapid inroads into the enemy’s heartland; they are not the horrors of classical Western warfare taken to its logical extreme – set pieces like Antietam, Verdun or Kursk – but throwbacks to the Hellenic ideal of mustering, invading, conquering and disbanding. If it comes to a general nuclear exchange – the ultimate apparition of the Western way of war – not just armies, but whole cultures will not matter and it will be the end of us all.

In contrast, if we are to fight with professional commandos perpetually in the jungle and on the street corner against the terrorist or freedom-fighter, the de facto we will not be warring to preserve our existence but our elective influence in places far from our homes. It is precisely when nuclear weapons are ruled out, and yet when our opponents are bellicose nations that field an army in the thousands, that our civilized interests will be imperiled and that an army of a season may well need to arise to battle afar, one that will seek rapid and mobile entry around the enemy to run rampant in its homeland. Defense analysts rightly worry about America’s lack of preparedness in the 1990’s, but their concern should transcend shrinking defense budgets and the abandonment of vital air wings, divisions and fleets. Every bit as important as our equipment and organization is the soul of our people, and their willingness to march out in mass against an evil that threatens our safety.”

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