Abstract
Scholars are rightly suspicious of, or disdainful of and actually hostile to, common sense. After all, common sense is not really common, rather is it value-charged by culture, the subject of this essay. Nonetheless, we discard and despise common sense at our peril. Among other points, I will suggest that one can explain strategic culture and its associated concepts (public culture and military or organizational culture), what they are, how they work, and why they are important, both simply and accurately enough. Accurately enough for what? Accurately enough to grasp the essentials of “the plot” concerning strategic culture. And that, after all, is all that a defense community needs to achieve. I might proceed further, if pressed, and argue that the bare outlines of the plot are the most that can be achieved. By way of a thought-provoking analogy, you might care to consider the practical inutility of the nearly ninety years of scholarship that have been devoted to that highly scholarunfriendly subject, the causes of war. Just about everything that has been written on the subject with a view to developing a general theory of the causes of war has been a thorough waste of effort. The reason is not hard to find. The job cannot be done. The relevant history is too complex, contexts are too rich and contingent. If you attempt the impossible, settle upon the wrong organizing question, you will accomplish nothing of much value, save by serendipity. I suspect that scholarship on strategic culture, albeit for a different reason, similarly is bound to fail when it ventures far beyond our culture-bound common sense and positivistically seeks a certain general wisdom. Strategy does not yield to the scientific method; nor does the study of culture.
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Notes
Jeremy Black, Rethinking Military History (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 1.
For an opposing point of view, see Lawrence Freedman, The Transformation of Strategic Affairs, Adelphi Paper 379 (London: IISS, March 2006), pp. 22–26.
U.S. Army, Army Campaign Plan (Washington, DC: Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, G-3, Department of the Army, April 12, 2004), p. 10.
Bernard Brodie, War and Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1973), p. 332.
Hedley Bull, “Strategic Studies and Its Critics,” World Politics, Vol. 20, No. 4 (July 1968), p. 600.
Alastair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Ralph D. Sawyer (ca. 400 BC; reprinted Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), p. 179.
See Donald H. Rumsfeld, Quadrennial Defense Review Report (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense, February 6, 2006), esp. pp. 21–22.
For a useful guide to the scholarly debate, see Stuart Poore, “Strategic Culture,” in John Glenn, Darryl Howlett, and Poore, eds., Neorealism Versus Strategic Culture (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 45–71.
Leslie A. White, The Concept of Cultural Systems: A Key to Understanding Tribes and Nations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), p. 4n.
Jack L. Snyder, The Soviet Strategic Culture: Implications for Limited Nuclear Operations, R-2154-AF (Santa Monica, CA: Rand, September 1977), p. 8.
Colin S. Gray, Modern Strategy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), Chapter 5.
Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1979).
Graham Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1971).
Isobel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), p. 96.
For an unrestrained and politically incorrect portrayal of the importance of culture, see Victor Davis Hanson, Why the West Has Won: Carnage and Culture from Salamis to Vietnam (London: Faber and Faber, 2001).
Raymond Williams, “The Analysis of Culture,” in John Storey, ed., Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (Hemel Hempstead, UK: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1994), p. 56.
Keith B. Payne, The Fallacies of Cold War Deterrence and a New Direction (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2001).
Karl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (1832; reprinted Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 101.
See James S. Corum, The Roots of Blitzkrieg: Hans von Seeckt and German Military Reform (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1992). Despite this praiseworthy and probably historically unique exercise, it is interesting to note that the Wehrmacht revealed some lethal weaknesses in World War II that had a long history behind them and therefore may warrant ascription as cultural.
See John I. Alger, The Quest for Victory: The History of the Principles of War (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982)
and Anthony D. Mc Ivor, ed., Rethinking the Principles of War (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2005).
See Forrest E. Morgan, Compellence and the Strategic Culture of Imperial Japan (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003).
As in Michael C. Desch, “Culture Clash: Assessing the Importance of Ideas in Security Studies,” International Security, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Summer 1998), pp. 141–70.
For an outstanding recent historical analysis of transcultural warfare, see Hew Strachan, “A General Typology of Transcultural Wars—The Modern Ages,” in Hans-Henning Kortum, ed., Transcultural Wars: From the Middle Ages to the 21st Century (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2006), pp. 85–103.
Colin S. Gray, “The American Way of War,” in Mc Ivor, ed., Rethinking the Principles of War (Newport, RI: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2005), pp. 13–40.
Michael Howard, The Continental Commitment: The Dilemma of British Defence Policy in the Era of the Two World Wars (London: Temple Smith, 1972), p. 57
Also see David French, British Strategy and War Aims, 1914–1916 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986), Chapter 6.
See Eliot A. Cohen, “The Mystique of U.S. Air Power,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 73, No. 1 (January/February 1994), PP. 109–24. In his Storm over Iraq: Air Power and the Gulf War (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), Richard P. Hallion, the USAF’s Official Historian, claims that “[a]s dominant land power characterized a Pax Romana, and dominant sea power a Pax Britannica, dominant air power is the characteristic of modern America,” p. 267.
This danger was flagged many years ago in Gerald Segal, “Strategy and ‘Ethnic Chic’,” International Affairs, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Winter 1983/84) pp. 15–30.
The case studies are excellent in Emily O. Goldman and Leslie C. Eliason, eds., The Diffusion of Military Technology and Ideas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).
John J. Weltman, World Politics and the Evolution of War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 152.
The finest work of strategic theory since Clausewitz’s On War warns that “planning for certitude is the greatest of all military mistakes, as military history demonstrates all too vividly.” J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control (1967; reprinted Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1989), p. 72.
“Cultural thoughtways” is an inspired concept borrowed gratefully from Kcn Booth, Strategy and Ethnocentrism (London: Croom Helm, 1979), p. 14.
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© 2009 Jeannie L. Johnson, Kerry M. Kartchner, and Jeffrey A. Larsen
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Gray, C.S. (2009). Out of the Wilderness: Prime Time for Strategic Culture. In: Johnson, J.L., Kartchner, K.M., Larsen, J.A. (eds) Strategic Culture and Weapons of Mass Destruction. Initiatives in Strategic Studies: Issues and Policies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230618305_14
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