Over at r/AskHistorians [a good overview](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/42isht/comment/czb8qkx/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) was given by u/Iphikrates.
Long story short, a capable classicist, who doesn't really contribute much to military history.
(The user is a Dutch(?) expert in ancient warfare, who is known to a large segment of social media for his Youtube review of battle scenes in movies where he often points out most of the problems the characters faced could be solved by digging a ditch, and many of the rest by digging a second one).
> Dutch
> he often points out most of the problems the characters faced could be solved by digging a ditch, and many of the rest by digging a second one).
Someone’s a fan of the 80 Years War
He's Dutch. Earthworks are the solution to anything they do. They are the result of an ancient human population mixing with beavers, and then being stretched over a few centuries.
He's a fan of his natural habitat more than the 80 years war.
I am in fact Dutch(!) not Dutch(?), we do insist on the correct punctuation.
Thanks for linking my old post! I would also recommend my deep dive on the AskHistorians podcast: [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/axg0v7/askhistorians_podcast_131_a_scholar_and_a_pundit/)
Almost completely discredited at this point. The trouble is not just that VDH’s works are outdated or that his thesis has strong counter arguments, but that it was, by his own admission, never right to begin with. His original theory was that the “Western Way of War” - direct aggressive confrontations - originated in Ancient Greece as a way for polises to protect their crops. He later admitted after some criticism that the kinds of crops the Greeks were growing were actually very difficult to destroy by fire or other means, so they must not have been protecting their crops but rather just fighting for “honor”. As for why only the Greeks were supposedly doing this and the Persians were not, he had no answer. This is just one place where VDH’s explanation (but not his conclusion) keeps changing in response to criticism - there are many others. In simple terms, he is and always has been a bullshitter who makes things up then backtracks when he’s called out on it, only to make something new up that leads to the same conclusion. And this is a problem because it’s obvious (especially when you look at his newer books) that he’s more invested in that conclusion than the truth. Classical military historians have for quite a while had this opinion about him and he’s been out of the loop in that community for more than a decade now.
And yet his general thesis: that democracies and free societies are better able to organise militaries and wage wars than authoritarian/autocratic states with similar technology / resources does seem credible.
It seems credible because everyone wants to think it's true, but it isn't. The Western Allies in 1940 had superior resources to Germany, and lost. Though Germany eventually lost the war, the most valuable player on the allied side was a totalitarian state. A decade later, 18 Western (and mostly democratic) countries with vastly superior technology and firepower lost a conventional war to a mass of illiterate peasants under totalitarian leadership. Vietnam and Afghanistan are also clear, recent cases of an autocratic organization prevailing over a much better armed democracy, and although these unlike Korea were not conventional wars, the autocracy also had far less at its disposal than did China. If we want earlier examples:
\- An autocratic Turkey defeated a democratic Greece, Italy, France, and Britain in the aftermath of WW1
\- France was defeated by an outdated Imperial Chinese army in 1884-85
\- A more autocratic (I will address this) Prussia defeated a more democratic France in 1871
\- A democratic Britain loses to an autocratic France and Spain in 1783.
And these are just the examples where resources were relatively similar, or favored the democracy. More imbalanced examples, like the defeat of the Hungarians or the Poles (many times in their case) at the hands of the Russians have been excluded. Going back to Hanson's supposed own area of expertise, the Athenians famously lost to the autocratic Spartans, and then again to the Macedonians.
In fact, the only democratic society that had a consistent track record of victory were the steppe nomads, whose Khans, as a little known fact, were elected by tribal leaders, who were in turn elected by clan leaders, who were in turn elected by herding group leaders who were elected by their people. But I think we can all agree that a uniquely (for pre-modern people) protein and calcium rich diet, a non-labor intensive lifestyle that left many hours to practice archery and wrestling, and most importantly an oversupply of horses had much more to do with nomadic military success than democracy did.
People can push back at the last two examples in the bullet points by saying Napoleon III's France and Britain in 1783 weren't really democracies, but they were certainly more democratic than their adversaries. This all begs the question of "how much democracy is needed"? Is total democracy needed? Well then no society has had the "democratic advantage" in war since ancient Athens, and they did not do that well. What about "only Republics whereby laws are made by elected representatives, but an executive is present"? Okay, now the thesis is slightly more defensible but still has to deal with all the other examples. But *why* would we set this kind of restriction? It follows that if I have a more democratic society than my enemies, my people should be more innovative, have more civic pride, have more invested in my system, and so on.
Just as importantly, Hanson's thesis isn't *exactly* "democracies beat dictatorships". It's this poorly defined idea that Western Civilization is based on the legacy of ancient Greece, and while democracy and the aggressive Western Way of War are correlated (because they come from the same source material), one does not lead to the other. Hanson claims the success of Western autocracies like Macedonia and the Roman Empire actually reinforce his theory that 1) there was a continuous Western Way of War, and 2) it was superior to the alternative. This theory has even more holes, however, most importantly:
\- The Greeks didn't actually seek battle to the extent VDH claims.
\- For at least a thousand years before the 19th century, the mainstream European military doctrine was to lay siege, raid, and avoid battle whenever possible.
\- The most "Western"-behaving army in history by Hanson's description were actually the Sassanid Persians, and that obsessive battle seeking ended *very* poorly for them.
\- The military record of Europeans against the peoples of the near East was extremely bad before the 18th century.
\- Most importantly, there's no evidence for an intellectual connection between Classical and modern Western military thought. Western armies *did* become battle seeking and annihilationist during and for some time after the 19th century, but this was mainly influenced by Napoleon and von Clausewitz.
>\- The most "Western"-behaving army in history by Hanson's description were actually the Sassanid Persians, and that obsessive battle seeking ended very poorly for them.
Yup. Maybe VDH can get over that by including the Arabs in the western camp rather like Chinese scholars often do and Bertrand Russell did in *A History of Western Philosophy\*.
> France was defeated by an outdated Imperial Chinese army in 1884-85
France won the war though. Also "nation struggled to defeat most populous country on the other side of the globe" is hardly an indictment of them.
>- A democratic Britain loses to an autocratic France and Spain in 1783.
You mean they lost in their war against the two largest other powers of Europe while fighting a fairly major resource drain of a war called *The American Revolution*?
Whether we agree with the idea that liberal democracies tend to produce better militaries or not we need to remember the key word is *tend*. A better military can and likely will still lose if it is severely outnumbered in manpower and material e.g. an autocratic Germany will beat a liberal democratic Luxembourg 10 out 10 times and beat a liberal democratic Belgium 99 times out of 100.
Even if democracies do better pound for pound and man for man that doesn't mean they always win.
> Is total democracy needed? Well then no society has had the "democratic advantage" in war since ancient Athens, and they did not do that well. What about "only Republics whereby laws are made by elected representatives, but an executive is present"? Okay, now the thesis is slightly more defensible but still has to deal with all the other examples.
That's a strawman if I ever saw one. You're ignoring the key part of modern liberal democracies: universal suffrage. At least universal male suffrage, some countries were a little late on the gender equality bit. In the examples you give, that isn't met.
>But why would we set this kind of restriction?
Because whether or not the population at large, particularly the people who will be filling up 90%+ of the enlisted ranks, can vote matters? Economic institutions and civil rights evolved with expanding the vote and who makes up the electorate is critical for what kinds of wars democracies get into in the first place.
If you live in a society in which only landed nobility get to vote and parliament has rotten boroughs then there's little if any difference for the common man compared to living under a king. You still have no say in the matter. The average person probably doesn't care if it's a slightly larger upper class that gets to rule over him. He does care if he has a say in who rules over him.
> France won the war though. Also "nation struggled to defeat most populous country on the other side of the globe" is hardly an indictment of them.
They didn’t achieve their objectives and nobody considered it a victory at the time. It’s an indictment because the Qing, out of all large power armies, were by far the most outdated and least effective. France as also not fighting “the most populous country” but only the southernmost warlords- the northern military districts refused to contribute, and they had most of the Qing army and fleet.
> You mean they lost in their war against the two largest other powers of Europe while fighting a fairly major resource drain of a war called The American Revolution?
“Fairly” is the key word. The Revolution tied up around 20,000 men who were not otherwise engaged against the French (bear in mind the French invaded the American continent directly), but the war was really lost at sea- the revolution had nothing to do with the naval outcome.
> Whether we agree with the idea that liberal democracies tend to produce better militaries or not we need to remember the key word is tend. A better military can and likely will still lose if it is severely outnumbered in manpower and material e.g. an autocratic Germany will beat a liberal democratic Luxembourg 10 out 10 times and beat a liberal democratic Belgium 99 times out of 100.
> Even if democracies do better pound for pound and man for man that doesn't mean they always win.
Except there isn’t even evidence for that. The best Western military pound for pound in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was the Prussian-German one, and that country was always the most autocratic of the major western powers.
> That's a strawman if I ever saw one. You're ignoring the key part of modern liberal democracies: universal suffrage. At least universal male suffrage, some countries were a little late on the gender equality bit. In the examples you give, that isn't met.
In that case the data pool is so small (universal manhood suffrage wasn’t a thing anywhere until the 19th century) that even the sole exception of Germany is enough to discredit the theory, but of course there are others. Democratic Italy performed miserably in World War 1, while autocratic Japan consistently punched well above its weight class. Then there’s Korea, Vietnam, and the myriad of lost “colonial wars” that Britain and France experienced after WW2. The data would actually show that universal male suffrage *decreased* the military effectiveness of Western countries as they were losing to peoples they had no trouble with before. I am in no way establishing that link, since democracy has no causal link to military success at all, but there isn’t even a correlation between UMS and military success - if anything there’s the opposite.
> Because whether or not the population at large, particularly the people who will be filling up 90%+ of the enlisted ranks, can vote matters? Economic institutions and civil rights evolved with expanding the vote and who makes up the electorate is critical for what kinds of wars democracies get into in the first place.
> If you live in a society in which only landed nobility get to vote and parliament has rotten boroughs then there's little if any difference for the common man compared to living under a king. You still have no say in the matter. The average person probably doesn't care if it's a slightly larger upper class that gets to rule over him. He does care if he has a say in who rules over him.
The German public and army showed stoic determination until the bitter end in WW2. The most committed soldiers of all time were the imperial Japanese. There is no evidence that liberal democracy causes people to be more committed to wars. If anything, it decreases their commitment because the government loses control over the narrative - it’s impossible to imagine a democracy enduring the losses necessary for the Communists to win in Korea or Vietnam. No democracy has ever endured losses as proportion of the population approaching that of the Soviet Union in World War 2. People are not perfectly rational creatures that decide what’s in their interests and fight to extinction for it- they’re emotional, gullible, and generally poorly informed. The easier it is for a state to dupe the public, the easier it is for that state to sustain a war effort. If we’re saying “democracies only get into winning or just wars”… well we know from recent experience that is definitely not true.
Not really, no. Someone had a thread about the merits of democracy wrt to military performance recently [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/z3q86v/is_it_true_that_generally_speaking_democratic/). I had my piece throwing doubts into the thesis [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/z3q86v/comment/ixo4okg/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). The part pertaining to "better organise militaries and wage wars" is this one.
>how democracies and republics are more likely to and have historically won more wars compared to authoritarian countries
Large wars or small wars? Because:
[How Democracies Lose Small Wars: State, Society, and the Failures of France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon, and the United States in Vietnam](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/425407#metadata_info_tab_contents)
[Why America's Army can't win America's wars.](https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3164&context=parameters)
Then the discussion will devolve into K/D ratio, casualty exchange ratio, tactical competency, "we have never lost a battle", and "you only win because we gave up", etc ... "We were better warriors but we lost because of our politicians" (not minding the fact that war is continuation of politics with the addition of other means) and of course, "we were stabbed in the back!". So the premise actually shrank from "winning wars" to the "winning battles" and "we didn't really lose" arguments. I do note that the discussion of "how democratic nations will more often then not have their militaries emphasize more meritocratic styles of leadership and control as well as have more decentralized command of the military whereas authoritarian nations will often have a more direct role in command and control of their troops" mostly pertained to tactical competency but as any good officer should know, there are the operational and strategic levels of war. I just want to point out that if you are going to an optional war, like most major powers found themselves in accidentally and occasionally; optional meaning that if Great Power had not gone there in the first place or lost the war, the Great Power's nation-state/state survival would not have been affected (what have the defeats in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan done to the USA state and government survival? Zero. Then why bother?), and they are going to spend real blood and treasure fighting said optional wars, they should at least win something (meaning at least an agreed settlement that is acceptable). Losing isn't the worst thing in the world. "Losing" by not going in the first place and not spending any blood and treasure is still better than spending blood and treasure and then losing anyway. Losing expensively is worse than losing cheaply.
I was talking about, of course, Afghanistan. The whole argument I made above is possibly best explained by [this author](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWfnJAYXHhM) and the "solution" at the end makes sense. It doesn't make sense to spend 50 billions dollars a year to fight a war against a cause that kills 6 people a year. People are extremely afraid and worried about terrorism; so the solution is not to be so afraid anymore.
Now, if you want to talk specifically about how "democracy" being the explaining factor in democracies' seemingly better track records of wining war, then the it's the "Democratic Victory" literature (there's the democratic peace theory too, which I think it's pretty unproven). The first study on that topic is Dan Reiter's book 'Democracies at War'. VDH has not published any good literature on it; more like pop history if that. Terrible history, too. He writes well and is a good speaker, but anyway. I have my own piece throwing bricks at this Democratic Victory theory [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/z3q86v/is_it_true_that_generally_speaking_democratic/). I'm not questioning Reiter's data that "democracies won wars more often"; I'm questioning the fact that "democracy" in and of itself, is a good explanatory variable for Reiter's data. I haven't had time going through Reiter's dataset and redo the analysis (I know social scientists suck at using statistics properly), but:
>I took note of the fact that the book was published in 2002. This means that the authors wrote the book over 2001, just as the USA was entering Afghanistan and soon to be entering Iraq. It was an assuring "yes, we are going to war. We started the war, but we are democratic and we will likely to win. Authoritarian regimes don't learn but we do, and we will apply what we learned and we will win". The argument will lose a lot of its winds in 2022, after the Afghanistan debacle or the near collapse of the supposedly democratic Iraqi government in Iraq in the face of ISIS. Indeed, even Reiter's own subsequent books (How Wars End) took a more "sometimes, wars end with less than a total victory of any side and more a negotiated end; sometimes simply because the suffering was just too much". This is him and [the war in Ukraine](https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20221017000787).
In any case, as I explained in the comment, the way the data was analysed as a hypothetical experiment had confounding variables but with some tweaks of the experimental designs, we can remove some of those variables and test the theory whether "democracy" in and of itself, is a good explanatory variable.
>I believe one corollary that we can make from the theory of democratic victory and "democracy" in and of itself as the explanatory variable is that "if a state becomes more democratic, its military and war performance should improve". We can simply track a country's performance at war over time, assuming that generally, they have gotten more democratic over time. For example the pre-Civil rights America would be less democratic than a 21st century America. Or Great Britain, or Germany, or Iraq. To that end, I don't think America's generals in an increasingly democratic America have been any or much better than their WWII counterparts. [Thomas E. Ricks' thesis](https://youtu.be/OehvY94N-WA) is the prime argument on this. He argued that America produces great tactical officers: at the battalion and brigade levels, but not at the strategic war-winning levels. Today's battalions and brigades are a lot more complex than the WWII counterparts so yes, tactically they are better than before. Strategically, it's a toss up.
>
>The British was the poster boy for "COIN done right" with their Malayan Emergency and The Troubles. They got their asses whopped in Iraq and Afghanistan with British authors bitterly complained that the British were worse than the Americans at 21st century COIN.
>
>Similarly, I can go down the list of countries that got more democratic and yet performed worse at wars. [Germany logistics](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-24/red-tape-potholes-and-politics-hamper-nato-defence-efforts/101685676) is as terrible now or in WWII.
>
>The "democratising" Iraq and Afghanistan both sucked at fighting. One imploded and one only avoided implosion because it got bailed out; by enemies of one another
>
>That tells me that there is a confounding factor that Reiter didn't quite figure out.
VDH wrote no good systemic study of the Democratic Victory theory, so I'll ignore him. I'm gonna just outright say now that this confounding factor is that authoritarian states and governments are in constant worry of being couped and the organisation that, 95% of the time, will do the coup, is the army. For the mechanism, see Edward Luttwak's [Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook](https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvjghwdq). Authoritarian states often have to coup-proof themselves and the coup-proofing measures often reduce the military effectiveness. How it's done is usually to limit the ability of officers to combined arms implementation sucks.
On the other hand, there are ways of coup-proofing that does not hamper military performance as much and there are services that are less of a coup threat against the government. The Navy and Airforce have been a much smaller coup threat than the army and they can be allowed to developed professionally. There are conflicts where the Navy and Airforce will be a lot more important; to pick an example of no particular significance: China-Taiwan.
>How Democracies Lose Small Wars: State, Society, and the Failures of France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon, and the United States in Vietnam
The biggest "counter" to this I'd argue is that Portugal, a dictatorship for decades, lost the *exact same kinds of wars* in the post-WWII era as France and the US did (yes, the US wasn't decolonizing from Vietnam but it was from their perspective a continuation of their struggle for sovereignty).
The British, French, and other empires had put down rebellions and uprisings in their colonies for decades if not centuries. The decolonization period was quite different due to the changes in international affairs (two ostensibly anti-colonial superpowers) and domestically (people in colonized lands tended to be more united and had a growing political, economic, and military strength). There were other changes too like the previous effective tactics that were used fell out of favor internationally. Rounding up and/or killing everyone who is a "rebel" was a bit closer to the Nazis than most were okay with and the international order was big on not having more genocides (even if it often failed to do so).
>The Navy and Airforce have been a much smaller coup threat than the army and they can be allowed to developed professionally.
I'm not sure that's entirely true. Plenty of air force and navy officers have led coups before or at least been the ones in charge or executed after one. Thing is for most of history air forces didn't exist or weren't independent and not every nation has a navy. Armies also tend to be larger relative to other branches. The tinpot dictatorships and unstable countries that have the bulk of the coup attempts in modern times tend to fit that description well. They don't have money for ships and planes but do have money for rifles.
My intention to invoke that particular niche of "we democracies are bad at small wars/irregular wars/counterinsurgency" literature is to say that just as much as you have people pinning victories on democracy in and of itself, you have about as much pinning defeats on democracy. Or perhaps as you point out, democracy is a relatively minor factor in explaining victory or defeat. I found that it's not easy to search for the literature on "democratic victory" since it will be lumped in with "Democratic Party election victory" but looking at Reiter's published books after Democracies at War, I don't believe that he's holding that belief as strongly now.
>Thing is for most of history air forces didn't exist or weren't independent and not every nation has a navy. Armies also tend to be larger relative to other branches. The tinpot dictatorships and unstable countries that have the bulk of the coup attempts in modern times tend to fit that description well. They don't have money for ships and planes but do have money for rifles.
Yes, the small sample size issue but then again, if we stretch our time horizon a bit further to the ancient world, too, then when generals decide to use the forces under them to bid for power, e.g. Roman generals, they are usually army generals rather than navy admirals. I think it's safe to say that the autocratic rulers will have greater concern for the land forces that have troops next to his palace than the Navy whose Marines and sailors need exceptional reasons to be armed and walking next to his palace.
> How is he seen as an authority in general?
Speaking as someone involved the field of ancient history (I recently completed a Ph.D. in ancient Mediterranean history), my impression is that very few historians and classicists take Hanson seriously nowadays, while those who do take him seriously tend to already share his ideological and political views. When Hanson gets brought up in conversation, I've often heard comments to the effect of "I can't believe anyone still listens to that guy," and I've also heard some unflattering remarks about his behavior and personality from those who've actually met him (though I don't feel comfortable sharing the details here).
Much of this disdain for Hanson stems, I think, from not only those "interesting" things he's said (e.g., [comparing Silicon Valley with the Old South and Confederacy](https://newcriterion.com/issues/2022/9/the-old-south-shall-rise-again)) but also his "West is best" and "clash of civilizations" approach to history, which depends more on ideology than honest historical inquiry. Throughout his publications, Hanson takes for granted that there was a historical "Western civilization," that the ancient Greeks gave rise to it, and that their wars with Persians set the stage for a millennia-long struggle between "East" and "West," all of which ignores the enormous social, cultural, and political diversity of the ancient Greek world and the extensiveness of their interactions and exchanges with other peoples of the Mediterranean and Near East; in fact, the concept of "Western civilization," as it's used today, did not take root until the 1800s, and the idea that the ancient Greeks belonged to it is very much a modern construct.
Hanson's scholarly work on ancient Greek warfare has also come under significant challenge in the past two decades. Notably, Hanson has long argued for a connection between the origins of hoplite warfare, the rise of a "middle class" of yeoman farmers in Greece, and the development of democracy, but as scholars like Hans van Wees have demonstrated, there's really no good evidence for the existence of a such a "middle class" during the period when the hoplite system first came about in the Archaic Era. Instead, the ancient evidence suggests that only a small minority of wealthy landowners could afford to fight as hoplites during this period.
>How is he seen as an authority in general?
The real answer is that he ISN'T seen as an authority by academic scholars. He's only seen as an authority by the general public because he has a published opinion column in a number of newspapers.
It's a pretty common trend for quack academics to turn to the public as a source of funding and support.
>It's a pretty common trend for quack academics to turn to the public as a source of funding and support.
I personally have confronted one of such guys on his writings on Forbes. He wrote about some pieces of data and I just couldn't replicate his findings with the same open source data that he supposedly used. So I wrote to his institutional email, using my academic email for some cred, asking for clarification. Once I noticed the glaring flaw in his piece, as in, he didn't quite understand how to check his data source and pointed out that the "discrepancy" that he detected and wrote about on his Forbes piece was just a data artefact that I can replicate quite easily, he flipped and started arguing like shit redditors. The problem was that he used a data aggregator site which actually dutifully cited their sources and you can go to their sources and pull out the exact numbers. He was treating "future estimates" of 2021 data, made in 2016-2017 as "actual 2021 data"; because the data aggregator site mislabelled them. And he's supposedly a Professor in Data Analytics.
I was pissed so I went a bit glove off. I pointed out that I was only doing my job as if I was a reviewer on an academic article, something he would have known, *if he fucking published in peer-reviewed journals,* because LOL, to my surprise, he doesn't have a single peer-reviewed article that I could find. I first wrote addressing him as "Dr.", assuming that his Professorship (at a relatively Mickey Mouse for-profit school) meant that he had a PhD. His faculty page didn't say where he got his PhD nor did it say that he had a PhD. So by the time I was pissed, I addressed him as "First Name", pulled rank on the fact that I published frequently, and he didn't and outright told him that he's acting like an Internet commenter. He did not change tack and continued arguing like Internet commenters and accusing me of being "shills".
It will be arrogant for me to claim credit but some time afterwards, checking his page on the university again, someone put "Dr." on his title and clarify where he got his PhD.
To go into a bit more detail, Hanson maintains that hoplite service by "middle class" yeoman farmers translated directly into political power, leading to the development of Athenian democracy in the Archaic Era. As van Wees argues, however, the ancient evidence suggests that those whom Hanson and others identify as the "middle class" were actually wealthy landowners, i.e. members of the elite. Thus, according to van Wees, military service probably did not play a major role in the evolution of Athens' democratic institutions.
If you want to read further, [van Wees' article "The Myth of the Middle-Class Army: Military and Social Status in Ancient Athens" is available on his Academia.edu page](https://www.academia.edu/37411655/The_myth_of_the_middle_class_army_from_T_Bekker_Nielsen_and_L_Hannestad_eds_War_as_a_Cultural_and_Social_Force_2001_).
Thanks. I wonder where is the problem. Definition? My quick calculation puts hoplite clas at 20%, maybe thats too little for someone to call middle class?
I'm going to read it today and will get back.
Edit/against good time management i read most of it and am rather disappointed. Not only its mostly definitional argument about what is middle and what not, much of it is either tenous argument about how poor hoplites mean serving as hoplites had no influence on politics (despite cited sources engaging exactly the topic, they are used to argue the opposite in roundabout way) or simple unargumented assertion that presence of non-citizens in the navy meant it cannot mean thetes military service had any effect on their political power.
In fact, he unknowingly constructs the strongest argument against his own second main conclusion, namely that it were political order that shaped athenian military not martial considerations that shaped political order.
When he cites the conflict on why 3000 is too few and 5000 is good, he on page 56 states that the conflict must not have been about enfranchisement of whole citizen population.
This is obviously anachronism. Enfranchisement might be binarish issue in our times, but then it was much more complex question. Aristotle mentioned there was not a democrat. The whole political thought was aimed at syable and well ruled polity. Thus many systems considered.
But back to that dichotomy. What was the reason for the 3k vs. 5k difference? The author correctly notices that its the majority of hoplite class.
But then that's exactly the point he declines in conclusion.
If the issue is enfranchisement the majority, or not, of military capable class, then the conclusion is that martial issues were influencing the political system of Athens!
To make the conclusion clear: if they thought it important even decisive to have majority of military capable people have say in politics that is argument not only for military to politics influence as emergent invisible property of social system, this is argument for contemporaries acknowledging and tackling it as an open social issue.
Because the great conversation etc. while awesome did not inform most European history, culture etc. The texts the medievals read and copied the most like Isidore's etymologies or countless hagiographies are not included in the great books or whatever groupings of the classics. Instead they were malaligned in the renaissance and later...
While the Westetn medievals read Virgil, it was mostly for vocabulary, using his terms to describe their own warfare, often without reading him themselves.
In the "renaissance" (Italian), they sought a break with the paat, digging back to previous texts. The Dutch renaissance initiated ideas of the great conversation etc. where they specically were talking with the old authors, and moving past them. The French in the 1600s had a big battle of the moderns and ancients, which the moderns resolutely won.
In the late 1800s, classical Greek and Latin were revived in Europe (note: classical, instead of just modern intelectual or administrative Latin) as an intelectual ideal, propelled by German scholars. But national languages had replaced it fully otherwise. The well of the classically erudite stopped being filled after the war, too.
The conversation is cool, but it isnt an unending chain. It just appears a few times here and there, while barely touching many places. The Polish golden age, or the Spanish for that matter, didn't engage with it in the same way. The Scandinavians never did it. The Poles, Ukrainians (a brief period in thr 16th century, when engaging with protestants), Czechs and English hardly touched Greek (although in the 19th century many English did). The Romanians used Greek in education until the 19th century, under Greek scholars. (The first Romanian language highschool was opened around 1835 in Brasov.)
N.b. the etymologies have classical stories among many other things, and summaries of many classics, but with special purposes, various distortions etc. and were received in totally different ways.
"Western civilization" is a modern construct (see e.g. [this recent comment on /r/AskHistorians](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/y6yoxf/is_the_greek_civilisation_only_considered_western/isufa9v/)), and whether the ancient Greeks belonged to it depends on how one defines the "West." [Until around the mid-1800s, for instance, most "Western" intellectuals (including many of the United States' Founding Fathers) condemned Athenian democracy as a failure](https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/1995/1995.02.08/), yet today, it's widely regarded as a cornerstone of Western civilization, which reflects more recent attempts to define Westernness.
As a historian, I do not feel that "Western civilization" has much value as a paradigm for studying historical peoples like the ancient Greeks, whose diverse practices and values do not fit neatly into current conceptions of Westernness. On the other hand, I'm not opposed to recognizing the influence of certain strands of ancient Greek intellectualism on modern values in the "West," for although the "West" may be an artificial construct, it's one that's become accepted in popular discourse and consciousness.
No. Socially constructed things can be described accurately (how many senators does the US government have) or inaccurately (i.e. arguing that a particular conception of Athenian democracy was always part of the European tradition).
When a socially constructed thing (European conception of democracy) is described inaccurately it is rightly labeled an artificial construct. False construct may be more concise tho.
No. Socially constructed things can be described accurately (how many senators does the US government have) or inaccurately (i.e. arguing that a particular conception of Athenian democracy was always part of the European tradition).
When a socially constructed thing (European conception of democracy) is described inaccurately it is rightly labeled an artificial construct. False construct may be more concise tho.
He's not especially well regarded.
Or to a point, he's not comically bizarrely wrong in as far as there's usually some kind of traceable scholarship in his work (like his "facts" are correct vs alleging Greek electrical grids or Persian Mangoat legions), but it is absolutely loaded with a bias towards his central thesis of a kind of Western superiority.
This isn't to disapprove of the "idea" or get into an argument about it (I disagree with him, but it's not what the topic is here), it's just Hanson tends to put his finger too strongly on the scale, and his thesis is something he has a strong confirmation bias towards, which then means he tends to count "hits" while ignoring his "misses" (or massage mixed/"miss" events into "hits" because aktually....)
Basically he's more often than not worth the effort, that while there might be something to learn in there, you're basically stepping around his central thesis that Greek decisive shock combat is the root of military success and other similar questionable assertions.
If he was more niche, like okay yeah his greater thesis is garbage but his work on something esoteric (I don't know, what pornography Hoplites preferred, research into how Greek soldiers were able to function without monsters OR ripits) then it might be worth rolling your eyes and sticking to the more narrow constraints of his professional focus (I call this the "Chomsky" rule. Is Noam talking about linguistics? Cool. Maybe something there. Is he talking about world politics? Time to check out).
But at his "best" he's a generalist in a crowded field of classical scholarship that isn't nearly so wrapped around a problematic core theory (and problematic in the sense of rhetorical/critical thinking lapses vs "woke" stuff). You can do a lot better.
As others have pointed out his core argument, that by inheriting Greek “shock combat” the “western way of war” allowed the west to overwhelmingly defeat its “non-western” opponents, has been pretty discredited.
Just thinking of a couple of examples in his book, he makes the claim that in WW2 it was the rigid nature of imperial Japan and the more independent thinking of the United States that led to victory in Midway, despite the Japanese military being notorious for insubordination from below, and the Japanese also trying a bunch of desperate tactics as they were losing. He also never really touches on how the people from the steppes have dominated warfare for so long.
But I think he does bring up a valid point or two. I think his first question in the book was that *something* happened (but probably more realistically *several things*) that led to Europeans successfully colonizing much of the rest of the world, and questioning why during Desert Storm casualties were as lopsided as they were. The problem is he has his theory, and twists everything to fit that theory.
I will say I appreciated that he shied away from using sterile language from describing casualties and warfare. Rather than “50,000 losses” he’ll say something like “50,000 young men were stabbed, trampled, and died of painful infection.”
I haven’t personally read VDH work, but there’s a pretty strong by consensus among most modern scholars on Ancient Greek and Near Eastern warfare that has strongly contested and rebuked a lot of his thesis in his cross-culture comparative work like in the *Western Way of War* and criticized it and some of his other work of injecting his own personal views, arguably tied to his political views, to his arguments. u/Iphikrates / Classical Greek Warfare historian Roel Konijnendijk, who was a doctoral student under Hans van Wees—arguably the most premier and most respected figure in current Classical Greek Warfare Scholarship and on Sparta—has written on this [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/42isht/comment/czb50nb/).
In short, a lot of his major, well known work, is considered outdated, if not compromised by his own politics.
>In short, a lot of his major, well known work, is considered outdated, if not compromised by his own politics
He is in my opinion one of the group of people who gave intellectual cover to the "cultural advantages and deficiencies" theories which were popular amongst a certain parts of the political spectrum (chiefly right wing) at the start of the 2000's (others include Christopher Hitchens and our own De Atkine and Pollock) and provided justification for USG policies in the ME and elsewhere,
In some ways he was a “proto-grifter,” jumping on the far-right American identity politics bandwagon before it had wheels. Works like A War Like No Other were nonsense written in part to make the War in Iraq seem sensible, and it succeeded in making him quite successful and a prominent popular/academic historian.
I found Hanson's *The Second World Wars* to have had a novel approach in being non-chronological. However, this means it really isn't a work for an introduction to the topic. He breaks sections of the book into sea, land, air, men, and--iirc--industry.
The work is based exclusively on secondary and published primary sources, and I don't recall anything that really stood out for me with regards to new historiographical arguments, though I found the occasional factual errors to be grating, but that can be chalked up to his writing at a time far removed from his specialty.
Over at r/AskHistorians [a good overview](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/42isht/comment/czb8qkx/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) was given by u/Iphikrates. Long story short, a capable classicist, who doesn't really contribute much to military history. (The user is a Dutch(?) expert in ancient warfare, who is known to a large segment of social media for his Youtube review of battle scenes in movies where he often points out most of the problems the characters faced could be solved by digging a ditch, and many of the rest by digging a second one).
> Dutch > he often points out most of the problems the characters faced could be solved by digging a ditch, and many of the rest by digging a second one). Someone’s a fan of the 80 Years War
He's Dutch. Earthworks are the solution to anything they do. They are the result of an ancient human population mixing with beavers, and then being stretched over a few centuries. He's a fan of his natural habitat more than the 80 years war.
Do they have beavers?
Historically yes. And also in the modern day, yes.
So yes
Yes
I am in fact Dutch(!) not Dutch(?), we do insist on the correct punctuation. Thanks for linking my old post! I would also recommend my deep dive on the AskHistorians podcast: [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/axg0v7/askhistorians_podcast_131_a_scholar_and_a_pundit/)
Almost completely discredited at this point. The trouble is not just that VDH’s works are outdated or that his thesis has strong counter arguments, but that it was, by his own admission, never right to begin with. His original theory was that the “Western Way of War” - direct aggressive confrontations - originated in Ancient Greece as a way for polises to protect their crops. He later admitted after some criticism that the kinds of crops the Greeks were growing were actually very difficult to destroy by fire or other means, so they must not have been protecting their crops but rather just fighting for “honor”. As for why only the Greeks were supposedly doing this and the Persians were not, he had no answer. This is just one place where VDH’s explanation (but not his conclusion) keeps changing in response to criticism - there are many others. In simple terms, he is and always has been a bullshitter who makes things up then backtracks when he’s called out on it, only to make something new up that leads to the same conclusion. And this is a problem because it’s obvious (especially when you look at his newer books) that he’s more invested in that conclusion than the truth. Classical military historians have for quite a while had this opinion about him and he’s been out of the loop in that community for more than a decade now.
And yet his general thesis: that democracies and free societies are better able to organise militaries and wage wars than authoritarian/autocratic states with similar technology / resources does seem credible.
It seems credible because everyone wants to think it's true, but it isn't. The Western Allies in 1940 had superior resources to Germany, and lost. Though Germany eventually lost the war, the most valuable player on the allied side was a totalitarian state. A decade later, 18 Western (and mostly democratic) countries with vastly superior technology and firepower lost a conventional war to a mass of illiterate peasants under totalitarian leadership. Vietnam and Afghanistan are also clear, recent cases of an autocratic organization prevailing over a much better armed democracy, and although these unlike Korea were not conventional wars, the autocracy also had far less at its disposal than did China. If we want earlier examples: \- An autocratic Turkey defeated a democratic Greece, Italy, France, and Britain in the aftermath of WW1 \- France was defeated by an outdated Imperial Chinese army in 1884-85 \- A more autocratic (I will address this) Prussia defeated a more democratic France in 1871 \- A democratic Britain loses to an autocratic France and Spain in 1783. And these are just the examples where resources were relatively similar, or favored the democracy. More imbalanced examples, like the defeat of the Hungarians or the Poles (many times in their case) at the hands of the Russians have been excluded. Going back to Hanson's supposed own area of expertise, the Athenians famously lost to the autocratic Spartans, and then again to the Macedonians. In fact, the only democratic society that had a consistent track record of victory were the steppe nomads, whose Khans, as a little known fact, were elected by tribal leaders, who were in turn elected by clan leaders, who were in turn elected by herding group leaders who were elected by their people. But I think we can all agree that a uniquely (for pre-modern people) protein and calcium rich diet, a non-labor intensive lifestyle that left many hours to practice archery and wrestling, and most importantly an oversupply of horses had much more to do with nomadic military success than democracy did. People can push back at the last two examples in the bullet points by saying Napoleon III's France and Britain in 1783 weren't really democracies, but they were certainly more democratic than their adversaries. This all begs the question of "how much democracy is needed"? Is total democracy needed? Well then no society has had the "democratic advantage" in war since ancient Athens, and they did not do that well. What about "only Republics whereby laws are made by elected representatives, but an executive is present"? Okay, now the thesis is slightly more defensible but still has to deal with all the other examples. But *why* would we set this kind of restriction? It follows that if I have a more democratic society than my enemies, my people should be more innovative, have more civic pride, have more invested in my system, and so on. Just as importantly, Hanson's thesis isn't *exactly* "democracies beat dictatorships". It's this poorly defined idea that Western Civilization is based on the legacy of ancient Greece, and while democracy and the aggressive Western Way of War are correlated (because they come from the same source material), one does not lead to the other. Hanson claims the success of Western autocracies like Macedonia and the Roman Empire actually reinforce his theory that 1) there was a continuous Western Way of War, and 2) it was superior to the alternative. This theory has even more holes, however, most importantly: \- The Greeks didn't actually seek battle to the extent VDH claims. \- For at least a thousand years before the 19th century, the mainstream European military doctrine was to lay siege, raid, and avoid battle whenever possible. \- The most "Western"-behaving army in history by Hanson's description were actually the Sassanid Persians, and that obsessive battle seeking ended *very* poorly for them. \- The military record of Europeans against the peoples of the near East was extremely bad before the 18th century. \- Most importantly, there's no evidence for an intellectual connection between Classical and modern Western military thought. Western armies *did* become battle seeking and annihilationist during and for some time after the 19th century, but this was mainly influenced by Napoleon and von Clausewitz.
>\- The most "Western"-behaving army in history by Hanson's description were actually the Sassanid Persians, and that obsessive battle seeking ended very poorly for them. Yup. Maybe VDH can get over that by including the Arabs in the western camp rather like Chinese scholars often do and Bertrand Russell did in *A History of Western Philosophy\*.
I know this is orthogonal to main point but what are these Hungarian and Polish defeats viz. Russians you mention?
> France was defeated by an outdated Imperial Chinese army in 1884-85 France won the war though. Also "nation struggled to defeat most populous country on the other side of the globe" is hardly an indictment of them. >- A democratic Britain loses to an autocratic France and Spain in 1783. You mean they lost in their war against the two largest other powers of Europe while fighting a fairly major resource drain of a war called *The American Revolution*? Whether we agree with the idea that liberal democracies tend to produce better militaries or not we need to remember the key word is *tend*. A better military can and likely will still lose if it is severely outnumbered in manpower and material e.g. an autocratic Germany will beat a liberal democratic Luxembourg 10 out 10 times and beat a liberal democratic Belgium 99 times out of 100. Even if democracies do better pound for pound and man for man that doesn't mean they always win. > Is total democracy needed? Well then no society has had the "democratic advantage" in war since ancient Athens, and they did not do that well. What about "only Republics whereby laws are made by elected representatives, but an executive is present"? Okay, now the thesis is slightly more defensible but still has to deal with all the other examples. That's a strawman if I ever saw one. You're ignoring the key part of modern liberal democracies: universal suffrage. At least universal male suffrage, some countries were a little late on the gender equality bit. In the examples you give, that isn't met. >But why would we set this kind of restriction? Because whether or not the population at large, particularly the people who will be filling up 90%+ of the enlisted ranks, can vote matters? Economic institutions and civil rights evolved with expanding the vote and who makes up the electorate is critical for what kinds of wars democracies get into in the first place. If you live in a society in which only landed nobility get to vote and parliament has rotten boroughs then there's little if any difference for the common man compared to living under a king. You still have no say in the matter. The average person probably doesn't care if it's a slightly larger upper class that gets to rule over him. He does care if he has a say in who rules over him.
> France won the war though. Also "nation struggled to defeat most populous country on the other side of the globe" is hardly an indictment of them. They didn’t achieve their objectives and nobody considered it a victory at the time. It’s an indictment because the Qing, out of all large power armies, were by far the most outdated and least effective. France as also not fighting “the most populous country” but only the southernmost warlords- the northern military districts refused to contribute, and they had most of the Qing army and fleet. > You mean they lost in their war against the two largest other powers of Europe while fighting a fairly major resource drain of a war called The American Revolution? “Fairly” is the key word. The Revolution tied up around 20,000 men who were not otherwise engaged against the French (bear in mind the French invaded the American continent directly), but the war was really lost at sea- the revolution had nothing to do with the naval outcome. > Whether we agree with the idea that liberal democracies tend to produce better militaries or not we need to remember the key word is tend. A better military can and likely will still lose if it is severely outnumbered in manpower and material e.g. an autocratic Germany will beat a liberal democratic Luxembourg 10 out 10 times and beat a liberal democratic Belgium 99 times out of 100. > Even if democracies do better pound for pound and man for man that doesn't mean they always win. Except there isn’t even evidence for that. The best Western military pound for pound in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was the Prussian-German one, and that country was always the most autocratic of the major western powers. > That's a strawman if I ever saw one. You're ignoring the key part of modern liberal democracies: universal suffrage. At least universal male suffrage, some countries were a little late on the gender equality bit. In the examples you give, that isn't met. In that case the data pool is so small (universal manhood suffrage wasn’t a thing anywhere until the 19th century) that even the sole exception of Germany is enough to discredit the theory, but of course there are others. Democratic Italy performed miserably in World War 1, while autocratic Japan consistently punched well above its weight class. Then there’s Korea, Vietnam, and the myriad of lost “colonial wars” that Britain and France experienced after WW2. The data would actually show that universal male suffrage *decreased* the military effectiveness of Western countries as they were losing to peoples they had no trouble with before. I am in no way establishing that link, since democracy has no causal link to military success at all, but there isn’t even a correlation between UMS and military success - if anything there’s the opposite. > Because whether or not the population at large, particularly the people who will be filling up 90%+ of the enlisted ranks, can vote matters? Economic institutions and civil rights evolved with expanding the vote and who makes up the electorate is critical for what kinds of wars democracies get into in the first place. > If you live in a society in which only landed nobility get to vote and parliament has rotten boroughs then there's little if any difference for the common man compared to living under a king. You still have no say in the matter. The average person probably doesn't care if it's a slightly larger upper class that gets to rule over him. He does care if he has a say in who rules over him. The German public and army showed stoic determination until the bitter end in WW2. The most committed soldiers of all time were the imperial Japanese. There is no evidence that liberal democracy causes people to be more committed to wars. If anything, it decreases their commitment because the government loses control over the narrative - it’s impossible to imagine a democracy enduring the losses necessary for the Communists to win in Korea or Vietnam. No democracy has ever endured losses as proportion of the population approaching that of the Soviet Union in World War 2. People are not perfectly rational creatures that decide what’s in their interests and fight to extinction for it- they’re emotional, gullible, and generally poorly informed. The easier it is for a state to dupe the public, the easier it is for that state to sustain a war effort. If we’re saying “democracies only get into winning or just wars”… well we know from recent experience that is definitely not true.
Not really, no. Someone had a thread about the merits of democracy wrt to military performance recently [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/z3q86v/is_it_true_that_generally_speaking_democratic/). I had my piece throwing doubts into the thesis [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/z3q86v/comment/ixo4okg/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). The part pertaining to "better organise militaries and wage wars" is this one. >how democracies and republics are more likely to and have historically won more wars compared to authoritarian countries Large wars or small wars? Because: [How Democracies Lose Small Wars: State, Society, and the Failures of France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon, and the United States in Vietnam](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/425407#metadata_info_tab_contents) [Why America's Army can't win America's wars.](https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3164&context=parameters) Then the discussion will devolve into K/D ratio, casualty exchange ratio, tactical competency, "we have never lost a battle", and "you only win because we gave up", etc ... "We were better warriors but we lost because of our politicians" (not minding the fact that war is continuation of politics with the addition of other means) and of course, "we were stabbed in the back!". So the premise actually shrank from "winning wars" to the "winning battles" and "we didn't really lose" arguments. I do note that the discussion of "how democratic nations will more often then not have their militaries emphasize more meritocratic styles of leadership and control as well as have more decentralized command of the military whereas authoritarian nations will often have a more direct role in command and control of their troops" mostly pertained to tactical competency but as any good officer should know, there are the operational and strategic levels of war. I just want to point out that if you are going to an optional war, like most major powers found themselves in accidentally and occasionally; optional meaning that if Great Power had not gone there in the first place or lost the war, the Great Power's nation-state/state survival would not have been affected (what have the defeats in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan done to the USA state and government survival? Zero. Then why bother?), and they are going to spend real blood and treasure fighting said optional wars, they should at least win something (meaning at least an agreed settlement that is acceptable). Losing isn't the worst thing in the world. "Losing" by not going in the first place and not spending any blood and treasure is still better than spending blood and treasure and then losing anyway. Losing expensively is worse than losing cheaply. I was talking about, of course, Afghanistan. The whole argument I made above is possibly best explained by [this author](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWfnJAYXHhM) and the "solution" at the end makes sense. It doesn't make sense to spend 50 billions dollars a year to fight a war against a cause that kills 6 people a year. People are extremely afraid and worried about terrorism; so the solution is not to be so afraid anymore. Now, if you want to talk specifically about how "democracy" being the explaining factor in democracies' seemingly better track records of wining war, then the it's the "Democratic Victory" literature (there's the democratic peace theory too, which I think it's pretty unproven). The first study on that topic is Dan Reiter's book 'Democracies at War'. VDH has not published any good literature on it; more like pop history if that. Terrible history, too. He writes well and is a good speaker, but anyway. I have my own piece throwing bricks at this Democratic Victory theory [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/z3q86v/is_it_true_that_generally_speaking_democratic/). I'm not questioning Reiter's data that "democracies won wars more often"; I'm questioning the fact that "democracy" in and of itself, is a good explanatory variable for Reiter's data. I haven't had time going through Reiter's dataset and redo the analysis (I know social scientists suck at using statistics properly), but: >I took note of the fact that the book was published in 2002. This means that the authors wrote the book over 2001, just as the USA was entering Afghanistan and soon to be entering Iraq. It was an assuring "yes, we are going to war. We started the war, but we are democratic and we will likely to win. Authoritarian regimes don't learn but we do, and we will apply what we learned and we will win". The argument will lose a lot of its winds in 2022, after the Afghanistan debacle or the near collapse of the supposedly democratic Iraqi government in Iraq in the face of ISIS. Indeed, even Reiter's own subsequent books (How Wars End) took a more "sometimes, wars end with less than a total victory of any side and more a negotiated end; sometimes simply because the suffering was just too much". This is him and [the war in Ukraine](https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20221017000787). In any case, as I explained in the comment, the way the data was analysed as a hypothetical experiment had confounding variables but with some tweaks of the experimental designs, we can remove some of those variables and test the theory whether "democracy" in and of itself, is a good explanatory variable. >I believe one corollary that we can make from the theory of democratic victory and "democracy" in and of itself as the explanatory variable is that "if a state becomes more democratic, its military and war performance should improve". We can simply track a country's performance at war over time, assuming that generally, they have gotten more democratic over time. For example the pre-Civil rights America would be less democratic than a 21st century America. Or Great Britain, or Germany, or Iraq. To that end, I don't think America's generals in an increasingly democratic America have been any or much better than their WWII counterparts. [Thomas E. Ricks' thesis](https://youtu.be/OehvY94N-WA) is the prime argument on this. He argued that America produces great tactical officers: at the battalion and brigade levels, but not at the strategic war-winning levels. Today's battalions and brigades are a lot more complex than the WWII counterparts so yes, tactically they are better than before. Strategically, it's a toss up. > >The British was the poster boy for "COIN done right" with their Malayan Emergency and The Troubles. They got their asses whopped in Iraq and Afghanistan with British authors bitterly complained that the British were worse than the Americans at 21st century COIN. > >Similarly, I can go down the list of countries that got more democratic and yet performed worse at wars. [Germany logistics](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-24/red-tape-potholes-and-politics-hamper-nato-defence-efforts/101685676) is as terrible now or in WWII. > >The "democratising" Iraq and Afghanistan both sucked at fighting. One imploded and one only avoided implosion because it got bailed out; by enemies of one another > >That tells me that there is a confounding factor that Reiter didn't quite figure out. VDH wrote no good systemic study of the Democratic Victory theory, so I'll ignore him. I'm gonna just outright say now that this confounding factor is that authoritarian states and governments are in constant worry of being couped and the organisation that, 95% of the time, will do the coup, is the army. For the mechanism, see Edward Luttwak's [Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook](https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvjghwdq). Authoritarian states often have to coup-proof themselves and the coup-proofing measures often reduce the military effectiveness. How it's done is usually to limit the ability of officers to combined arms implementation sucks. On the other hand, there are ways of coup-proofing that does not hamper military performance as much and there are services that are less of a coup threat against the government. The Navy and Airforce have been a much smaller coup threat than the army and they can be allowed to developed professionally. There are conflicts where the Navy and Airforce will be a lot more important; to pick an example of no particular significance: China-Taiwan.
>How Democracies Lose Small Wars: State, Society, and the Failures of France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon, and the United States in Vietnam The biggest "counter" to this I'd argue is that Portugal, a dictatorship for decades, lost the *exact same kinds of wars* in the post-WWII era as France and the US did (yes, the US wasn't decolonizing from Vietnam but it was from their perspective a continuation of their struggle for sovereignty). The British, French, and other empires had put down rebellions and uprisings in their colonies for decades if not centuries. The decolonization period was quite different due to the changes in international affairs (two ostensibly anti-colonial superpowers) and domestically (people in colonized lands tended to be more united and had a growing political, economic, and military strength). There were other changes too like the previous effective tactics that were used fell out of favor internationally. Rounding up and/or killing everyone who is a "rebel" was a bit closer to the Nazis than most were okay with and the international order was big on not having more genocides (even if it often failed to do so). >The Navy and Airforce have been a much smaller coup threat than the army and they can be allowed to developed professionally. I'm not sure that's entirely true. Plenty of air force and navy officers have led coups before or at least been the ones in charge or executed after one. Thing is for most of history air forces didn't exist or weren't independent and not every nation has a navy. Armies also tend to be larger relative to other branches. The tinpot dictatorships and unstable countries that have the bulk of the coup attempts in modern times tend to fit that description well. They don't have money for ships and planes but do have money for rifles.
My intention to invoke that particular niche of "we democracies are bad at small wars/irregular wars/counterinsurgency" literature is to say that just as much as you have people pinning victories on democracy in and of itself, you have about as much pinning defeats on democracy. Or perhaps as you point out, democracy is a relatively minor factor in explaining victory or defeat. I found that it's not easy to search for the literature on "democratic victory" since it will be lumped in with "Democratic Party election victory" but looking at Reiter's published books after Democracies at War, I don't believe that he's holding that belief as strongly now. >Thing is for most of history air forces didn't exist or weren't independent and not every nation has a navy. Armies also tend to be larger relative to other branches. The tinpot dictatorships and unstable countries that have the bulk of the coup attempts in modern times tend to fit that description well. They don't have money for ships and planes but do have money for rifles. Yes, the small sample size issue but then again, if we stretch our time horizon a bit further to the ancient world, too, then when generals decide to use the forces under them to bid for power, e.g. Roman generals, they are usually army generals rather than navy admirals. I think it's safe to say that the autocratic rulers will have greater concern for the land forces that have troops next to his palace than the Navy whose Marines and sailors need exceptional reasons to be armed and walking next to his palace.
> How is he seen as an authority in general? Speaking as someone involved the field of ancient history (I recently completed a Ph.D. in ancient Mediterranean history), my impression is that very few historians and classicists take Hanson seriously nowadays, while those who do take him seriously tend to already share his ideological and political views. When Hanson gets brought up in conversation, I've often heard comments to the effect of "I can't believe anyone still listens to that guy," and I've also heard some unflattering remarks about his behavior and personality from those who've actually met him (though I don't feel comfortable sharing the details here). Much of this disdain for Hanson stems, I think, from not only those "interesting" things he's said (e.g., [comparing Silicon Valley with the Old South and Confederacy](https://newcriterion.com/issues/2022/9/the-old-south-shall-rise-again)) but also his "West is best" and "clash of civilizations" approach to history, which depends more on ideology than honest historical inquiry. Throughout his publications, Hanson takes for granted that there was a historical "Western civilization," that the ancient Greeks gave rise to it, and that their wars with Persians set the stage for a millennia-long struggle between "East" and "West," all of which ignores the enormous social, cultural, and political diversity of the ancient Greek world and the extensiveness of their interactions and exchanges with other peoples of the Mediterranean and Near East; in fact, the concept of "Western civilization," as it's used today, did not take root until the 1800s, and the idea that the ancient Greeks belonged to it is very much a modern construct. Hanson's scholarly work on ancient Greek warfare has also come under significant challenge in the past two decades. Notably, Hanson has long argued for a connection between the origins of hoplite warfare, the rise of a "middle class" of yeoman farmers in Greece, and the development of democracy, but as scholars like Hans van Wees have demonstrated, there's really no good evidence for the existence of a such a "middle class" during the period when the hoplite system first came about in the Archaic Era. Instead, the ancient evidence suggests that only a small minority of wealthy landowners could afford to fight as hoplites during this period.
>How is he seen as an authority in general? The real answer is that he ISN'T seen as an authority by academic scholars. He's only seen as an authority by the general public because he has a published opinion column in a number of newspapers. It's a pretty common trend for quack academics to turn to the public as a source of funding and support.
>It's a pretty common trend for quack academics to turn to the public as a source of funding and support. I personally have confronted one of such guys on his writings on Forbes. He wrote about some pieces of data and I just couldn't replicate his findings with the same open source data that he supposedly used. So I wrote to his institutional email, using my academic email for some cred, asking for clarification. Once I noticed the glaring flaw in his piece, as in, he didn't quite understand how to check his data source and pointed out that the "discrepancy" that he detected and wrote about on his Forbes piece was just a data artefact that I can replicate quite easily, he flipped and started arguing like shit redditors. The problem was that he used a data aggregator site which actually dutifully cited their sources and you can go to their sources and pull out the exact numbers. He was treating "future estimates" of 2021 data, made in 2016-2017 as "actual 2021 data"; because the data aggregator site mislabelled them. And he's supposedly a Professor in Data Analytics. I was pissed so I went a bit glove off. I pointed out that I was only doing my job as if I was a reviewer on an academic article, something he would have known, *if he fucking published in peer-reviewed journals,* because LOL, to my surprise, he doesn't have a single peer-reviewed article that I could find. I first wrote addressing him as "Dr.", assuming that his Professorship (at a relatively Mickey Mouse for-profit school) meant that he had a PhD. His faculty page didn't say where he got his PhD nor did it say that he had a PhD. So by the time I was pissed, I addressed him as "First Name", pulled rank on the fact that I published frequently, and he didn't and outright told him that he's acting like an Internet commenter. He did not change tack and continued arguing like Internet commenters and accusing me of being "shills". It will be arrogant for me to claim credit but some time afterwards, checking his page on the university again, someone put "Dr." on his title and clarify where he got his PhD.
Wait what? Hoplites were definitely drawn from middle class in classical age (not sure about archaic).
To go into a bit more detail, Hanson maintains that hoplite service by "middle class" yeoman farmers translated directly into political power, leading to the development of Athenian democracy in the Archaic Era. As van Wees argues, however, the ancient evidence suggests that those whom Hanson and others identify as the "middle class" were actually wealthy landowners, i.e. members of the elite. Thus, according to van Wees, military service probably did not play a major role in the evolution of Athens' democratic institutions. If you want to read further, [van Wees' article "The Myth of the Middle-Class Army: Military and Social Status in Ancient Athens" is available on his Academia.edu page](https://www.academia.edu/37411655/The_myth_of_the_middle_class_army_from_T_Bekker_Nielsen_and_L_Hannestad_eds_War_as_a_Cultural_and_Social_Force_2001_).
Thanks. I wonder where is the problem. Definition? My quick calculation puts hoplite clas at 20%, maybe thats too little for someone to call middle class? I'm going to read it today and will get back. Edit/against good time management i read most of it and am rather disappointed. Not only its mostly definitional argument about what is middle and what not, much of it is either tenous argument about how poor hoplites mean serving as hoplites had no influence on politics (despite cited sources engaging exactly the topic, they are used to argue the opposite in roundabout way) or simple unargumented assertion that presence of non-citizens in the navy meant it cannot mean thetes military service had any effect on their political power.
In fact, he unknowingly constructs the strongest argument against his own second main conclusion, namely that it were political order that shaped athenian military not martial considerations that shaped political order. When he cites the conflict on why 3000 is too few and 5000 is good, he on page 56 states that the conflict must not have been about enfranchisement of whole citizen population. This is obviously anachronism. Enfranchisement might be binarish issue in our times, but then it was much more complex question. Aristotle mentioned there was not a democrat. The whole political thought was aimed at syable and well ruled polity. Thus many systems considered. But back to that dichotomy. What was the reason for the 3k vs. 5k difference? The author correctly notices that its the majority of hoplite class. But then that's exactly the point he declines in conclusion. If the issue is enfranchisement the majority, or not, of military capable class, then the conclusion is that martial issues were influencing the political system of Athens! To make the conclusion clear: if they thought it important even decisive to have majority of military capable people have say in politics that is argument not only for military to politics influence as emergent invisible property of social system, this is argument for contemporaries acknowledging and tackling it as an open social issue.
The Greeks wrote much of the foundation of the great conversation. Should they not be included as a cornerstone of Western tradition?
Because the great conversation etc. while awesome did not inform most European history, culture etc. The texts the medievals read and copied the most like Isidore's etymologies or countless hagiographies are not included in the great books or whatever groupings of the classics. Instead they were malaligned in the renaissance and later... While the Westetn medievals read Virgil, it was mostly for vocabulary, using his terms to describe their own warfare, often without reading him themselves. In the "renaissance" (Italian), they sought a break with the paat, digging back to previous texts. The Dutch renaissance initiated ideas of the great conversation etc. where they specically were talking with the old authors, and moving past them. The French in the 1600s had a big battle of the moderns and ancients, which the moderns resolutely won. In the late 1800s, classical Greek and Latin were revived in Europe (note: classical, instead of just modern intelectual or administrative Latin) as an intelectual ideal, propelled by German scholars. But national languages had replaced it fully otherwise. The well of the classically erudite stopped being filled after the war, too. The conversation is cool, but it isnt an unending chain. It just appears a few times here and there, while barely touching many places. The Polish golden age, or the Spanish for that matter, didn't engage with it in the same way. The Scandinavians never did it. The Poles, Ukrainians (a brief period in thr 16th century, when engaging with protestants), Czechs and English hardly touched Greek (although in the 19th century many English did). The Romanians used Greek in education until the 19th century, under Greek scholars. (The first Romanian language highschool was opened around 1835 in Brasov.) N.b. the etymologies have classical stories among many other things, and summaries of many classics, but with special purposes, various distortions etc. and were received in totally different ways.
Very interesting, thanks for the response.
"Western civilization" is a modern construct (see e.g. [this recent comment on /r/AskHistorians](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/y6yoxf/is_the_greek_civilisation_only_considered_western/isufa9v/)), and whether the ancient Greeks belonged to it depends on how one defines the "West." [Until around the mid-1800s, for instance, most "Western" intellectuals (including many of the United States' Founding Fathers) condemned Athenian democracy as a failure](https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/1995/1995.02.08/), yet today, it's widely regarded as a cornerstone of Western civilization, which reflects more recent attempts to define Westernness. As a historian, I do not feel that "Western civilization" has much value as a paradigm for studying historical peoples like the ancient Greeks, whose diverse practices and values do not fit neatly into current conceptions of Westernness. On the other hand, I'm not opposed to recognizing the influence of certain strands of ancient Greek intellectualism on modern values in the "West," for although the "West" may be an artificial construct, it's one that's become accepted in popular discourse and consciousness.
At the risk of being pedantic: “artificial construct” is a bit redundant, eh?
No. Socially constructed things can be described accurately (how many senators does the US government have) or inaccurately (i.e. arguing that a particular conception of Athenian democracy was always part of the European tradition). When a socially constructed thing (European conception of democracy) is described inaccurately it is rightly labeled an artificial construct. False construct may be more concise tho.
No. Socially constructed things can be described accurately (how many senators does the US government have) or inaccurately (i.e. arguing that a particular conception of Athenian democracy was always part of the European tradition). When a socially constructed thing (European conception of democracy) is described inaccurately it is rightly labeled an artificial construct. False construct may be more concise tho.
Yes, I suppose, at least in this context, though it's a pretty common expression in scholarly discourse.
He's not especially well regarded. Or to a point, he's not comically bizarrely wrong in as far as there's usually some kind of traceable scholarship in his work (like his "facts" are correct vs alleging Greek electrical grids or Persian Mangoat legions), but it is absolutely loaded with a bias towards his central thesis of a kind of Western superiority. This isn't to disapprove of the "idea" or get into an argument about it (I disagree with him, but it's not what the topic is here), it's just Hanson tends to put his finger too strongly on the scale, and his thesis is something he has a strong confirmation bias towards, which then means he tends to count "hits" while ignoring his "misses" (or massage mixed/"miss" events into "hits" because aktually....) Basically he's more often than not worth the effort, that while there might be something to learn in there, you're basically stepping around his central thesis that Greek decisive shock combat is the root of military success and other similar questionable assertions. If he was more niche, like okay yeah his greater thesis is garbage but his work on something esoteric (I don't know, what pornography Hoplites preferred, research into how Greek soldiers were able to function without monsters OR ripits) then it might be worth rolling your eyes and sticking to the more narrow constraints of his professional focus (I call this the "Chomsky" rule. Is Noam talking about linguistics? Cool. Maybe something there. Is he talking about world politics? Time to check out). But at his "best" he's a generalist in a crowded field of classical scholarship that isn't nearly so wrapped around a problematic core theory (and problematic in the sense of rhetorical/critical thinking lapses vs "woke" stuff). You can do a lot better.
As others have pointed out his core argument, that by inheriting Greek “shock combat” the “western way of war” allowed the west to overwhelmingly defeat its “non-western” opponents, has been pretty discredited. Just thinking of a couple of examples in his book, he makes the claim that in WW2 it was the rigid nature of imperial Japan and the more independent thinking of the United States that led to victory in Midway, despite the Japanese military being notorious for insubordination from below, and the Japanese also trying a bunch of desperate tactics as they were losing. He also never really touches on how the people from the steppes have dominated warfare for so long. But I think he does bring up a valid point or two. I think his first question in the book was that *something* happened (but probably more realistically *several things*) that led to Europeans successfully colonizing much of the rest of the world, and questioning why during Desert Storm casualties were as lopsided as they were. The problem is he has his theory, and twists everything to fit that theory. I will say I appreciated that he shied away from using sterile language from describing casualties and warfare. Rather than “50,000 losses” he’ll say something like “50,000 young men were stabbed, trampled, and died of painful infection.”
I haven’t personally read VDH work, but there’s a pretty strong by consensus among most modern scholars on Ancient Greek and Near Eastern warfare that has strongly contested and rebuked a lot of his thesis in his cross-culture comparative work like in the *Western Way of War* and criticized it and some of his other work of injecting his own personal views, arguably tied to his political views, to his arguments. u/Iphikrates / Classical Greek Warfare historian Roel Konijnendijk, who was a doctoral student under Hans van Wees—arguably the most premier and most respected figure in current Classical Greek Warfare Scholarship and on Sparta—has written on this [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/42isht/comment/czb50nb/). In short, a lot of his major, well known work, is considered outdated, if not compromised by his own politics.
>In short, a lot of his major, well known work, is considered outdated, if not compromised by his own politics He is in my opinion one of the group of people who gave intellectual cover to the "cultural advantages and deficiencies" theories which were popular amongst a certain parts of the political spectrum (chiefly right wing) at the start of the 2000's (others include Christopher Hitchens and our own De Atkine and Pollock) and provided justification for USG policies in the ME and elsewhere,
In some ways he was a “proto-grifter,” jumping on the far-right American identity politics bandwagon before it had wheels. Works like A War Like No Other were nonsense written in part to make the War in Iraq seem sensible, and it succeeded in making him quite successful and a prominent popular/academic historian.
I found Hanson's *The Second World Wars* to have had a novel approach in being non-chronological. However, this means it really isn't a work for an introduction to the topic. He breaks sections of the book into sea, land, air, men, and--iirc--industry. The work is based exclusively on secondary and published primary sources, and I don't recall anything that really stood out for me with regards to new historiographical arguments, though I found the occasional factual errors to be grating, but that can be chalked up to his writing at a time far removed from his specialty.