Hi John,

Quote Originally Posted by John T. Fishel View Post
I tend to think that Huntington was wrong in detail about his cultures/civilizations but his arbitrary list is as good as any. If he is right - or we simply use his list - then none of the cultures except the Western can possibly succeed in taking good advice. If he is wrong and Latin American culture/civilization is simply a Western variant (as I believe) then why have they been so unsuccessful in learning the Western way of war? Or have they?
Well, as you know, I have a pretty low opinion of Huntington's work; too close to that of de Gobineau for my taste. I think that Huntington make a quintessential error in assigning causality via a black box to genetics, rather than looking to the environment as a second primary cause. This leads to his confusion of culture [area], which is a symbolic interface of a group of people with their environment and daily life, with something "absolute" and essentialist; ideal types which may be rank ordered on a singular line of "perfection". Admittedly, Huntington doesn't go quite as far as de Gobineau, but the base flaw is still there.

When we are talking about a "way of war", we are talking at multiple levels: philosophical, strategic, operational, technological and social to name some of them. The crucial ones, IMHO, are the philosophical, technological and social, with the strategic, operational and tactical flowing from them.

The philosophical defines the purpose of the game - why do we fight? when do we fight? to what ends do we fight? - and is bound up in a more generalized stance towards "reality". It also tends to place relative moral valuations on both the act of fighting (in any setting) and on those who fight.

The social level defines the general ways in which a group can fight, and is highly connected with the technological means of both fighting and, more generally, the use of technology within a society. These two, in turn, feed back into the philosophical level and change it over time.

So, when we speak of a "way of war" what are we actually talking about? It isn't, and really can't be, some "thing" that can be laid out and described in static detail since its components are constantly changing (well, at least for the past 12,000 years or so). What we can see are quasi-stable equilibrium points where we have relatively stable changes in the social, technological and philosophical roots of a "way of war".

Just to get back to your specific questions / ponders about Latin America, what answers would we get if we dumped Huntington's fatally flawed model and looked at reality instead? Probably the key areas would be the social and technological. Put simply, there is just no way that any of the Latin American states could (or would) become industrialized nations; their environments don't force them to (which, BTW, is what happened in England and the US, albeit for different reasons). Without mass industrialization and the consequent economic surplus to support massive bureaucracies, expensive militaries, large public school systems (for literacy), etc., you can't actually field the type of force that we tend to assume is "Western". Perhaps more importantly, without 100+ years of social organization around that industrial model, you don't have cultural expectations of "rightness" surrounding that way of war (actually, it's an exaptation of social organization between the social and military spheres).

Anyway, 'nuff of that - I'm going to get some more coffee and try and wake up .

Cheers,

Marc