Things to Watch

The more Iraq begins to settle down, the more Iran will begin to ratchet up the rhetoric, since the perceived momentum in the Gulf is beginning to return to the United States. A constitutionally stable Iraq next-door is nearly ipso facto fatal to the theocracy in Iran.

The more North Korea alleges it complies with new non-proliferation accords in exchange for money and aid, the more it is likely that its nuclear infrastructure will turn up in places like Syria. Since we don’t know exactly what the Koreans had, it is impossible to learn what is ‘missing’ when they ‘come’ clean. Instead, it is a sort of way of regaining some sort of satisfaction: while backing down to the United States, it nevertheless can cause it enormous problems elsewhere.

The problem with Iran is not just its breakneck effort to enrich uranium, but our inability to monitor how much is enriched and where it ends up. It could easily say that it has quit, while giving such material to terrorists, or if it announces it has a bomb or two, can confess it cannot ‘account’ for ‘missing’ uranium.

There are two ways of learning of the pulse of the Iraqi war: one, by the presence or absence of American mishaps on the front pages of American newspapers; and, two, the degree to which Democratic politicians cease talking about timetables and withdrawals without connection to the viability of the Iraqi government. By those two benchmarks, we are doing very well. If those trends continue, watch newspapers to begin emphasizing success and politicians claiming credit for the turn-about—since the human desire to associate with success finally trumps even ideology.

Another thing to watch is whether brilliant colonels in Iraq, who are mastering counterinsurgency, will be promoted to general. While our officer corps is exhausted by repeated tours, it is also not the same cadre that fought the 2003 war, but one of the most experienced and knowledgeable cohort of professionals we have produced in a long time. I look particularly at the career progress of Col. HR McMaster to be symbolic of how seriously the Pentagon begins to reward and utilize these gifted assets.

I suppose “devil” in not as bad as “pervert” or “feces”

Here is the response to more from LTC Bateman. My replies are again in brackets.

There is no need to reply to Mr. Alterman’s charge of McCarthyism, since the entire point of using his Media Matters website to attack Carnage and Culture seems political—a sort of surrogate effort to distract from my political commentary that is sometimes deemed too critical to the doctrinaire liberal agenda.

In any case, a simple internet search will reveal an extensive literature of tens of thousand of accounts, detailing the funding of Media Matters, which drew or draws on monies from Soros-funded organizations, but apparently argues that such third-party funneling is not “direct,” and, in Orwellian fashion, therefore de facto not really funding from Soros. The reader can survey these investigations, weight them against Media Matters’ passionate defenses—and come to his own conclusions.

I never understood the connection between a presumably egalitarian Left and an international speculator who found riches by betting on (and sometimes contributing to) wide currency swings, causing a great deal of losses and hurt in 1992 to the Bank of England and its depositors, and who was fined by a French court for insider trading. This is hyper-capitalism of the most cutthroat kind, a practice enriching an individual at the expense of the many. Given the moral pretensions of many on the Left, it would seem an unlikely source of subsidies.

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Media Matters for America

Altercation by Eric Alterman

Mon, Oct 29, 2007 1:33pm EST
Bateman on Hanson, Round 1: Cannae, 2 August 216 B.C.

It may be moderately obscene, I admit, but I have always enjoyed teaching students about this battle. At the tactical level, it is the story of a force, outnumbered and fighting far from their base, defeating another force almost twice their size and doing so in such a decisive manner as to stun the world and be passed down for more than 2,000 years. At the operational level of war, competing philosophies of conflict are at play. Finally, at the strategic level of war, there is a lesson to be learned about the strategic vision of one leader, and the inability of another to grasp more than what happens on the battlefield. In short, the story of Cannae is complex and a challenge to teach.

Rather than rail overmuch here at the outset, however, I prefer to allow Mr. Hanson to light his own petard. Hanson’s basic contention is that face-to-face infantry battle is a cultural legacy exclusive to the “West.” In Carnage and Culture, he sets out to demonstrate this by resurrecting the hoary old 19th century model of “Decisive Battles” and claiming that the study of battle is the One True Way. Here is how he lays out the reason for his focus upon individual battles:

In an analysis of culture and conflict why should we concentrate on a few hours of battle and the fighting experience of the average soldier - and not the epic sweeps of wars, with their cargo of grand strategy, tactical maneuver, and vast theater operations that so much better lend themselves to careful social and cultural exegesis? Military history must never stray from the tragic story of killing, which is ultimately found only in battle. (pg. 7)

[Despite the now familiar rhetoric and braggadocio—thankfully this time I am merely to be called a “devil” rather than a “pervert” or my work “feces”—this entire argument is sadly misguided. I apologize to the reader in replying to the serial misrepresentations in what inevitably will become tedious fashion.

Again, the entire point here is the focus of the military historian; it is not an argument here over something Bateman calls The One True Way—a silly term of course I never used.]

Also:

There is an inherent truth in battle. It is hard to disguise the verdict of the battlefield, and nearly impossible to explain away the dead, or to suggest that abject defeat is somehow victory.

[Again, apologies to those who are already bored, Bateman does not understand the very quotation he reproduces: I am not concerned in this particular discussion from which the quote derives with pitched battle versus other types of battling, but the battlefield—i.e. the landscape where people are killed—as an arena of men trying to kill each other, and the lessons that can arise from such an elemental experience.]

Just a short while later Hanson rams home the point … again:

We owe it to the dead to discover at all costs how the practice of government, science, law, and religion instantaneously determines the fate of thousands on the battlefield - and why. (pg.
[The more Bateman quotes, the more oblivious he seems to appear. Again, he seems to believe that here in this introductory discussion of the book’s historigraphical approach that this sense of “battle” means a particular type of battle, at the expense of other methods of fighting, rather than the generic human experience of killing within wars. That’s why sometimes [see below] in this discussion here I used the term “war” interchangeably.]

A few lines later he repeats himself, and at this point you are starting to think, “Hmmmm, maybe he’s serious about this focus on battle as being what matters thing”:

War is ultimately killing. Its story becomes absurd when the wages of death are ignored by the historian. (pg.
In case you weren’t listening, he keeps up the same drumbeat throughout the book.

Hanson is saying that the study of battle provides the evidence to support his main idea.

[The use of “Hmmmmm”, like “rail” and “drumbeat”, I think, is again revealing. It is hard to continue with this reply, because something seems wrong with Bateman’s ability to read and comprehend language, as in his first critique last week: My sentences, “War is ultimately killing. Its story becomes absurd when the wages of death are ignored by the historian” pace Bateman, do not mean, “Hanson is saying that the study of battle provides the evidence to support his main idea.”

Instead, as pointed out above, it emphasizes the moral responsibilities of the historian. One can agree or disagree with that argument, but it is not an argument at this particular place in the text that only decisive battle captures the essence of war.]

Hanson outlines his overall thesis in a section subheaded “The Singularity of Western Military Culture.” In that section Hanson puts it this way:

All armies engage in mass confrontations at times; few prefer to do so in horrendous collisions of shock and eschew fighting at a distance or through stealth when there is at least the opportunity for decisive battle …

And then:

Foot soldiers are common in every culture, but infantrymen, fighting en masse, who take and hold ground and fight face-to-face, are a uniquely Western specialty … (pg. 445)

In other words, only Western armies seek out shock battle and short, sharp, hard fights. Others try to avoid battles, using movement, misdirection, deception, and other stratagems so as not to fight.

[Again, there is evident an inability to analyze the very quote produced: Bateman quotes me, “all armies engage in mass confrontations at times” and then “Foot soldiers are common in every culture”—but then concludes that means [his words, not mine] that “others try to avoid battles.” That’s contradictory and not what I wrote and discussed at length in Chapter Three.

We can see the occasional liabilities of those assumptions from the Athenian experience in Aitolia to our own in Iraq.]

But there is one big problem with that thesis: One of the most famous battles in all of history runs 180 degrees against Mr. Hanson’s thesis. It is a battle so famous that Hanson cannot ignore it or pretend that it didn’t happen, as he does with many other battles (which we will see in later weeks). But more than that, it was not just one battle, but a whole string of battles, all of which ran counter to his idea that the cultural legacy of the “West” generates an inclination for head-on battles, and that inclination leads to victory. Even worse, what eventually led to an overall victory for the Roman (”Western”) side in the war was not battle, but actually the active avoidance of battle! Those last two points, however, Hanson has concealed.

[Bateman does not seem to grasp the very essence of the Second Punic War. Rome in the first few years predictably tried to win it outright in a series of pitched battles. When they failed due to the rare genius of Hannibal, they opted for a short while to delay further set encounters until their legions were replenished and commanders experienced with Hannibal warfare. But not long after, decisive battles resumed all over the Western Mediterranean [see below], and the Punic War was won not by avoiding battle, but finally by crushing Carthaginian armies in horrific set battles in Italy, Spain, and North Africa.

That was not just my conclusion, but that of Greek historian Polybius as well: “For although the Romans had clearly been defeated in the field, and their reputation in arms ruined, yet because of the singularity of their constitution, and by wisdom of their deliberative counsel, they had not only reclaimed the sovereignty of Italy, and went on to conquer the Carthaginians, but in just a few years themselves became the ruler of the entire world.”]

The short version of what happened in the Punic Wars runs something like this: Rome and a North African city called Carthage fought a series of wars that spanned almost 120 years. During the second war, a Carthaginian leader named Hannibal marched his army from Spain, across what is now the south of France, over the Alps, and into Italy. During those marches he confronted small Roman detachments and Roman allies. He beat them all. Then, once he invaded the Roman homeland, he defeated several Roman armies in a row.

In the first major battle, Hannibal and his army directly confronted an equally sized Roman army and wiped out about 20,000 of perhaps 36,000 Romans on the field. In the next battle, he again offered direct combat with his army, again on equal terms, and in that battle his army killed 30,000 Romans while capturing the remaining 10,000. So, in two battles, Hannibal’s non-Western army killed or captured something like 60,000 out of almost 80,000 Romans sent against them, while barely losing any of their own strength. Hanson, of course, never talks about these numbers or battles in any detail. He grants them light, one-sentence asides and concessions, but generally brushes past their meaning. With the addition of Cannae, these three fights are examples that run counter to Hanson’s thesis. One battle might have been an exception to the rule. But when the historical record shows battle after battle where the “Western” way of war is shown up, on home turf, when the Westerners outnumbered the enemy, the thesis begins to lose air. Hanson, however, brushes this aside by admitting that Cannae “was not a fluke.” But he does so in just one sentence.

[This is completely disingenuous. The chapter, of course, mentions fatality numbers—cf. pp. 104, 110. Here is what I actually wrote: “From the time of his descent from the Alps in October 218 to the slaughter at Cannae on August 2, 216 BC., Hannibal had killed or captured in battle somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 legionnaires, along with hundreds of the senatorial and knightly classes, including two consuls at the head of their armies and numerous ex-consuls in the ranks. In the space of twenty-four months a third of Rome’s frontline troops of more than a third of a million men of military age were to be killed, wounded, or capture in the bloodbaths at Ticinus, Trebia, Trasimene, and Cannae. Cannae, then, was no fluke.”

Hannibal was a rare military genius, won several set pitched battles, but could not defeat a system that eventually trumped his innate talents and so crushed him— in a set battle. Bateman doesn’t seem to understand that victors in war often lose battles in the process.]

But back to the narrative: Finally, the series of pitched battles culminated in the absolute destruction of the largest Roman army yet thrown against the Carthaginians. Out of an estimated 70,000 Roman legionnaires who arrived in the vicinity of the battlefield at a place called Cannae, Hannibal’s army killed about 50,000 of them in a few hours. The Carthaginians did this by pretending to pull back in the middle of their line, until they sucked the Roman army into a three-sided trap, which their cavalry then closed from behind. It was the definition of a historic battle, but the really interesting stuff came later. More on that in a moment.

[Again, “the series of pitched battles” and Cannae itself were possible only because, despite poor generalship, Rome commanders insisted on fighting Hannibal in such decisive encounters, eventually learned from them, and then used that very experience to win the war by victories in pitched battles.]

Now, to give the devil his due, Hanson’s description of the battle that occurred in 216 B.C. is generally accurate, in the broadest outlines. He does go pretty far, however, in trying to twist the language around to suit his needs. So, while he takes no liberties with the specifics of what happened on that day, he is tricky with his use of language. Hanson tries to minimize the impact of the horrific Roman defeat at Cannae by making it seem like the actual size of the massive Roman army did not matter. Instead, he suggests, the Romans that lost there were effectively the second-stringers.

[I never wrote they were second-stringers, and emphasized Hannibal’s genius, and inept Roman leadership, as accounting for the victory. And yes, after tens of thousands of dead in three prior pitched battles, the legions of the young republic were already, prior to Cannae, becoming attenuated, and Rome conscripted old men, youths, and slaves.]

For example, he mentions, how at Cannae the African troops in the Carthaginian army were “veterans.” Then he conversely describes many of the 70,000 Romans as, “adolescents who filled the Romans ranks, depleted by the thousands butchered earlier at Ticinus and Lake Trasimene” (pg. 101). In another part of the text, while Hanson says that Hannibal “arrayed 10,000 skilled horsemen,” he goes on to describe the opposing Roman cavalry as “6,000 poorly trained mounted Italians.” (pg. 102) Now, the problem with that is that the sources do not describe the Roman cavalry as “poorly trained.” It is true that the Romans generally did not have the best cavalry. But in this specific case, Hanson is just making an assertion. He does this because it fits his thesis. He does not know what training the Roman cavalry had, any more than he knows how many “adolescents” were in the Roman army that day. The historical record is, effectively, silent on those specific points. In other words, Hanson is merely guessing, but writing his guesses in such a way as to make them appear authoritative.

[It was not my judgment, but that of ancient historians that Roman cavalry was traditionally underappreciated, and thus weak and neglected, in general and here in the Punic War, as the first battle at Ticinus proved. Livy explicitly concluded of that battle that the Carthaginians were clearly superior in cavalry. Roman historians at all times lamented the need for foreign auxiliaries, particularly African and Gallic cavalry. The need not merely to draft slaves, but to find able-bodies legionaries at all costs was a reaction to the limited manpower reserves of the republic, that between 219-216 perhaps lost close to 100,000 soldiers in battle, and thousands as well to wounds or illness.]

But all of this is small fry compared to his greatest offenses.

How, one might be asking themselves at this point, can Hanson defend his thesis of the supremacy of the Western Way of War given the facts of these battles? How can he continue to assert that the West is supreme in infantry shock battle, when all major Roman battles of the Second Punic War mentioned in this chapter show the Romans being beaten in direct head-to-head shock battle by non-Westerners? Well, the answer is moderately simple. Hanson tries to save his thesis by saying something like, “Uh, battle matters … except when it doesn’t.” In fact, this is what he says:

[I don’t say “something like” at all. The historical record from our sources, not I, provides the proper context: the Romans wished to fight in pitched battle repeatedly, even when they lacked the leadership to match Hannibal. That they attempted to do so frequently, and eventually succeeded reflects their commitment to decisive battle and eventual success with it.

The chapter on Cannae argues that the institution of civic militarism and constitutional government were advantages that kept the Roman military viable and able to reconstitute the legions, learn from the prior mistakes and eventually destroy the Carthaginians—in a number of pitched battles well before the finale at Zama. (More below.)]

Cannae, like so many of these landmark battles, is the exception that proves the rule: even when Roman armies were poorly led, foolishly arranged, squabbling before battle over the proper deployment, and arrayed against a rare genius, the catastrophic outcome was not fatal to their conduct of the war. (pg. 105)

What is remarkable about Cannae is not that thousands of Romans were so easily massacred in battle, but that they were massacred to such little strategic effect. (pg. 111)

Students of war must never be content to learn merely how men fight a battle, but must always ask why soldiers fight as they do, and what ultimately their battle is for. (pg. 131)

So, you see, despite Hanson having written over and over again that battle is what matters, when confronted with irrefutable historical evidence contrary to his thesis that the “West” is supreme in infantry-centric shock battles, Hanson becomes a flip-flopper. In these quotes above he is saying, because he must, that it actually does not matter who wins the battle!

[Bateman seems to think either that successful armies never lose battles, or that Rome lost the Punic War, or that it won it without defeating Carthage in a variety of brutal set battles!

Note especially—ignored by Bateman—that I mention the phenomenon of westernization (see the section “Carthage and the West”), as in the case of Midway. The Spartan Xanthippus had introduced Western ideas of infantry during the first Punic war. Greeks like Sosylus accompanied Hannibal and reflected a transmission of Greek thinking to Carthage, from military thought to agriculture practice—and likewise helps to explain why Hannibal himself sought to engage Romans directly, at times with spearmen in battles of shock, at times even when it was wiser not to.]

But what about what happened afterward? If what really matters, according to this new Hanson formulation, is the bigger picture, then what happened next? What happened after the Romans were crushed, for a third time, on their home turf? Hanson writes:

Marcus Junius was appointed dictator, with formal directives to raise armies in any manner possible. He did so magnificently. More than 20,000 were recruited into four new legions. Some legionaries were not yet seventeen. Eight thousand slaves were purchased at public expense and given arms, with a proviso that courage in battle might lead to freedom. Junius himself freed 6,000 prisoners and took direct command of this novel legion of felons. (pg. 127)

Huh? Wait a second. In an earlier passage Hanson wrote, “Western armies often fought with and for a sense of legal freedom.” (pg. 21) This, in fact, was a foundation to his hypothetical motivation for the Western soldiers. According to Hanson, it was because of their freedoms that men in the West fought so hard and so well in infantry shock battles.

[This is, I am afraid, adolescent and becoming rather embarrassing. I discussed the ancient concept of freedom in an entire chapter on Salamis, noting carefully that it was an evolving idea, and is to be understood in the context of the general morality of the times. Bateman perhaps by extension would argue that the Founding Fathers did not bequeath constitutionally protect freedom to Americans, some of whom who held slaves, because it was still an imperfect and not fully evolved idea.

Or as I wrote, “Freedom is an evolving idea, a miraculous and dangerous concept has no logical restrictions on its ultimate development once it is hatched.”]

Yet here, of 20,000 new troops Hanson is lauding the Romans for raising in the wake of the disaster at Cannae, a full 14,000 of them are either slaves or prisoners. (And I thought our recruiting difficulties in the U.S. Army were rough.) How can one be a slave and at the same time fight due to a sense of one’s civic responsibility to the Roman state? This is an especially difficult question since most Roman slaves were from foreign sources in the first place, and so would have had no allegiance to Rome.

[The point is obvious: it was precisely because Roman citizenship was prized, especially the protection of Roman law accorded to free citizens, that made it so attractive to slaves, foreign born or not, to risk dying in battle to get it.]

But the legions were raised, and by the end of the chapter Hanson’s logic has become so twisted around that this fact, not the facts of what happened in the battle, is what Hanson contends matters. But then what did the Romans do with those legions? Perhaps this line might help. (Primer: Hasdrubal is another Carthaginian leader; Metaurus was a battle that took place in 207 B.C., nine years after Cannae.) Here Hanson is offering a hypothetical and comparing the strategic levels of war by talking about the Carthaginian political leadership vice that of the Romans.

After Hasdrubal’s catastrophic setback at the Metaurus, there was no likelihood that the Carthaginian Assembly, as Rome had done after the far worse slaughter at Cannae, would have ordered a general muster of all its able-bodied citizenry — a real nation in arms arising to crush the hated resurgent legions. (pg. 9)

Now, from that sentence one gets the impression that after the battle of Cannae, the Romans did, in fact, arise as a “real nation in arms” and that they subsequently immediately sought battle and then “crushed” the Carthaginian army under Hannibal, right?

Wrong. Though Hanson makes only one slight mention of it, the fact is that Hannibal stayed in Italy for the next 14 years. He stayed on Roman soil, moving with near impunity, year after year. How could Hannibal do that?

Well, completely contrary to Hanson’s thesis about how Western armies seek battle, hold ground, and strive for short and sharp shock conflicts, the reality was that the Romans, for the next 14 years, deliberately avoided shock and pitched battles with Hannibal. (Remember these Hanson lines? “All armies engage in mass confrontations at times; few prefer to do so in horrendous collisions of shock and eschew fighting at a distance or through stealth when there is at least the opportunity for decisive battle…” and “Foot soldiers are common in every culture, but infantrymen, fighting en masse, who take and hold ground and fight face-to-face, are a uniquely Western specialty…” (pg. 445))

What the Romans actually did was exactly the opposite of the Hanson thesis. They broke up their armies into smaller forces and harassed Hannibal indirectly. They gave ground, regularly, and lived to maneuver another day. They sought to wear him down, while preserving their own forces. They avoided pitched battles on any large scale. In short, they followed the direct advice of one of the other most famous generals of all time, one who is only mentioned by name a single time in the entire chapter (and then without noting his actions). That man was Quintus Fabius Maximus, called “Cunctator” (The Delayer), and it is from him that we have the term “Fabian Strategy,” which was so magnificently put into play by a fellow named George Washington a couple of millennia later.

[After Ticinus, Trebia, Trasimene, and Cannae—disastrous pitched battles which Roman commanders insisted on fighting despite problems in command and generalship (such was the pull of the Roman tradition to fight pitched battles even if unwise against a genius like Hannibal)—Roman manpower was exhausted, after losing perhaps 100,000 soldiers in battle.

Bateman appears unaware that very rarely has a war seen so many decisive battles in which tens of thousands perished in horrific encounters at sea, and in sieges, and in scores of costly direct engagements (not fought by Fabius) all over Italy and the Western Mediterranean almost every year of the conflict—at, for example, Asculum, Baecula, Baetis, Bagbrades, Beneventum, Cannae, Canusium, Capua, Cissa, Cornus, Croton, Dertosa, on the Ebro River, Grumentum, Herdonia, Metaurus, Nola, Numistro, Saguntum, Silarus, Suessula, Tarentum, Ticinus, Lake Trasimene, Trebia, Utica and Zama.]

How Hanson missed that extra 14-year part where the Romans avoided major pitched battles in Italy is curious.

Folks, this is just one chapter, and it was a chapter dealing with events within Hanson’s specialty. It gets worse from here.

[It should be clear now that there were plenty of pitched battles in which thousands died after Cannae—not mere skirmishes or ambushes—between 216 and 202, fought by generals other than Fabius, and not only in Italy, but in Spain, Sicily, and Africa as well. That is why I wrote: “For the next fourteen years Hannibal would experience a seesaw series of victories and defeats inside Italy…”

I will write more briefly on future misrepresentations, since the point has been made now that the first two critiques were politically-driven, contracted-out journalism, and not intended to be serious historical examinations.]

Next Week: Leaping Through Time to Poitiers and Beyond.

You can write to LTC Bob at R_Bateman_LTC@Hotmail.com
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