The More Things Change…
The wisdom of the ages.

By Victor Davis Hanson, author most recently of Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power.
November 30, 2001 12:35 p.m.

here are two types of military analysts — those who believe that the essence of war is unchanging, and others who insist that its very nature is constantly and forever altered by rapidly transforming technologies, mentalities, and physical realities. The former are mostly historians. They see the nature of man as fixed, and so identify real change only in the pump — the delivery system — not the water or essence, of war. The latter are social scientists, technologists, and sometimes military men themselves, who believe new hydraulics pour forth an entirely novel liquid.

Social scientists have warned us that we are up against an entirely new enemy. His lethal brand of Islamic fundamentalism, parasitic use of Western technology, and propensity for mass murder borne on the wings of suicide are purportedly like nothing we have yet encountered. But traditionalists counter that terrorists — whether the sicarii in Roman Palestine, or 19th-century central-European assassins — are hardly novel. Remedies for their defeat are time-tried and effective, since brutal force, coupled with hope for repentance and renewal, eventually extinguish the threat entirely.

Scenes of fanatics in the streets of Pakistan have startled and frightened some Americans. To my mind, far scarier are the half-educated here at home who analyze this "new" challenge on television, sternly lecturing us about Western ignorance and a decade of unstoppable massacre and killing ahead. But history teaches us that the most thunderous Islamic crowds — as is always the way of the mob — are nourished on false hopes, and scatter with real defeat. Such frenzied haters listen not to calls for more talk and understanding, but only to more B-52s and parachuted food. In 1941, evil Nazis who slaughtered innocent Greeks in barbaric reprisals could only abate, but not stop, Communist commandos. Later, idealistic Americans who promised food for the innocent and guns against the guilty ended such insurgency.

Professors of Middle Eastern studies warn that radical reinterpretations of the Koran, aided by global technologies, will make these novel groups unstoppable, so powerful is their new brew of anti-Americanism. In contrast, history sighs and advises to look at what they do rather than say. The past reminds us that most in Pakistan would prefer a nap and coffee after an afternoon's shouting on global television, to weeks of misery in Afghanistan's frontline bunkers amid the stink of shredded flesh — in a bankrupt cause, no less, to outlaw cameras, books, and videos.

It is an iron law of war that overwhelming military superiority, coupled with promises to the defeated of resurrection, defeats terrorists — in the past, now, always — whether they be zealots, dervishes, or Ghost dancers. We do not really care whether bin Laden and his thugs are real Islamic fundamentalists, old-time Mahdists, or Christian nuts in drag. Nor does it ultimately matter much whether they plan to poison water, hijack airplanes, spread germs, or throw spitballs at us — only whether we have the military power and will to kill them first, destroy their enclaves, strip away their money and refuges, and demonstrate to their followers that death and misery are the final and only wages of a terrorist's life.

If, like the Romans, we can inflict death on the violent and ensure peace and security to the repentant, then the Muslim world's lust for bin Laden will pass — as it has in the past with other such thugs and madmen. For all the much-publicized talk of a new wave of fanatical suicide killers, most of the Taliban in Afghanistan — as in the case of most Christians — would duck out on a prayer service if a daisy-cutter was on its way down; and if hungry, skip the holy man's harangue for the chance of a square meal. That may explain why those who hate us in the streets of the Muslim world have been less, not more, bold since we began the bombing.

We were initially told that bombing would win this war, and then it would not, and then that it almost has — punditry being proved wrong or right or again wrong, as it sorts out the latest hour's news from the front, never apologizing for the prior misappraisals, always ready to promulgate more. Historians, however, would instead seek constants across time and space, and so put our air campaign in the context of the ages.

Air attack — whether arrows, Greek fire, catapult bolts, or grapeshot — has always been a valuable ancillary to, but not a replacement of, ground troops. The Greeks defeated the Persians because eastern missiles could neither penetrate their armor nor distinguish friend from foe in the melee — even as enemy bowmen were helpless when hoplites charged ahead. Bombing in its original incarnation promised to win wars outright. It did not, but within three decades helped to smash the Germans and Japanese (despite the denials of the flawed postwar Strategic Bombing Survey). In Vietnam, our jets by themselves could not ensure victory; in Serbia they did — and in the Gulf and Afghanistan, almost. Why so?

There are also precepts of the ages that determine whether aerial assault will be vital to victory, and these unchanging determinants hinge entirely on the attacker's degree of lethality, accuracy, and safety. Catapults were occasionally precise, but rarely deadly to the mass of infantry, always vulnerable to counterattack, and so seldom appeared on the battlefield outside of sieges — unlike rifled artillery, which was both exact and fatal, although equally vulnerable to counterassault. B-17s could be lethal, but they were not always accurate and often perilous to fly over Germany — and so were valuable, but not in themselves deciding factors in our victory.

In Afghanistan, however, the American Air Force of the present age has for the moment quite miraculously met the age-old triad of success: our pilots, protected with an array of electric countermeasures and by the destruction of enemy planes, are relatively safe; their bombs, whether of 1,000 or 15,000 pounds, are alike lethal; and their laser and satellite-guided ordnance strike with real precision, ensuring that the evil are killed and the innocent mostly spared — again and again. And so they save us from the moral quandary of a Dresden, and the fiasco of a Schweinfurt alike. Will this edge always be the case?

Hardly. As we speak, tacticians seek to improve anti-aircraft missiles, to craft new sorts of defensible bunkers, and to jam and confuse smart projectiles — hoping once more to ensure that the pilot is vulnerable, ineffective, and amoral. Our military knows all this, and so strives in turn to make both our planes ever more deadly and the methods to destroy them more practicable.

Weapons change. Tactics are altered. But the prerequisites of war from the air — lethality, accuracy, and safety — remain the same. To the degree they are met, planes will either be superfluous, handy, or indispensable in our wars to come. Unfortunately for the Taliban, they are ignorant of both war's laws and history — and so apparently thought this conflict was circa 1985, rather than a rare moment of aerial renaissance of the new century.

What are we to make of the thousands who are surrendering in Afghanistan? Kill them, capture them, or let them go? Call in the U.N.? The Northern Alliance's Islamic courts? American wardens? Johnny Cochran? The wigged from England? Once more we are told that we are caught up in an entirely new dilemma — a new terrorist enemy who has no country to represent him, no home to return to, no oath to take, no apology to give, and no identity to proffer.

All defeated combatants — and the al Qaeda are at least that — face the same age-old tripartite range of fates: death, incarceration, or conditional freedom. And such choices themselves always remain contingent on the circumstances of their surrender — the key ingredient for successful conclusions of wars being humiliation coupled with mercy, a true end to hostilities impossible without both. World War I led to II because the German army was defeated, but not disgraced — and so it limped back across the Rhine, convinced that it had been defeated abroad not at home, through a stab in the back rather than a bullet in the brow.

Yet nearly three decades later, Nazis and Japanese soldiers faced different fortunes: Neither could believe that they had fought to a near draw — when their armies were ruined, the homeland ransacked, and their spirits crushed. That surrender gave us peace, not round two. It was not necessary to kill surrendering soldiers of the Wehrmacht — many of whom would be working with the American army in the postbellum cleanup — just to ensure that they realized that they were bankrupt, utterly defeated, and their cause discredited. So too with the Afghanis of the Taliban.

Saddam Hussein thought he had survived the world's armada, and so defined the Gulf War as success, not defeat. The unbiased touchstone of success — Baghdad not stormed, Hussein's head not in a noose, and the Imperial Guard not liquidated — suggested that he, not us, knew better. And so, like Churchill in 1939, we now face the same enemy in the same place because of naiveté and the misplaced humanity of the past.

A defeated army — now and always — must not merely surrender. Rather it and its infrastructure must be dismantled and its ideology disgraced. Lee gave in not because he was merely beaten — Gettsyburg had done that months earlier — but only when his army was decimated, his cause lost, and his adherents embarrassed. Grant and Sherman accepted no less — and so gave us peace, not decades of terror and counterinsurgency. The firebrand Nathan Bedford Forest once promised unending resistance, but after what he'd seen in Tennessee and Georgia, thought it better to quit and go on home.

The terrorists of al Qaeda who give up and throw down their weapons must be embarrassed and dishonored as they are sorted to meet either hangmen, wardens, or rehabilitation. If caught alive, Mullah Omar and his Keystone Clerics, along with thuggish mercenaries from the Arab world, should ideally be shaved, paraded in stripes, and muzzled as they await destiny. Those found to be killers and accessories to murder must be dispatched; others who are veterans of the organization must be jailed for years; while the newly recruited ignorant, young, and misled so far without blood on their hands must be debriefed, photographed, fingerprinted, and cataloged before being sent home to their just deserts — their identities, the names of their families, their very homes recorded among the world's criminal archives, and available even for the novice on the Internet or at the local library. For the captured new recruits, it must become a shameful and foolish thing to have served with bin Laden. Anything less and we shall be back in Afghanistan and elsewhere in less than a decade.

We must not forget the wisdom of the ages in the noise and clutter of the present. In general, Plato, Sun-Tzu, and Shakespeare, who know the unchanging nature of man, are more valuable guides in our present war than the New York Times or MSNBC. So far we should be thankful that our military leadership is guided more by Thucydides than by Marx, Freud, or Foucault, and so believes that the more things change in war, the more the fundamentals remain the same.