Battle: A History of Combat and Culture

Consciously fashioned in part as a refutation of arguments advanced by Victor Davis Hanson, Lynn agrees with the latter on the key importance of culture in shaping the ways nations fight, and on little else. In a series of case studies ranging from Classical Greece to the Egyptian assault on the Bar Lev line during the Yom Kippur War, he discusses the ways in which culture and warfare interact in different societies through the ages. He also argues that many societies have maintained a discourse or representation of war and military activity that is at variance with the realities of war in their time.