Culture of War
Authors: Lee Wayne E. 
Published: April 2016

Military historians are increasingly interested in the interactions between culture and war. How, for example, might a society’s shared preconceptions about the nature of war influence the way their armed forces fight? Or, flipping the causation arrow, how does the experience of wartime loss and destruction influence a society’s postwar attitudes about war and security? Furthermore, although these two examples were at the societal level, there are many different layers or levels of culture at which one could undertake such an analysis. The title of this entry, however, suggests something more specific and limits our scope. This entry is about the culture of war. If we understand the concept of culture as a set of shared beliefs, understandings, and behaviors evolved to promote success or survival in the world, then it makes sense to suggest that the especially stressful environment of war promotes its own “cultures”—and it does so at several different levels. Participants in war, whether as polities or as individuals, develop specific cultures in response to its demands. Note that these are cultures, in the plural. At one level political leaders and senior commanders develop systems of thought—systems they deem rational—about what victory means and how one may best achieve it. Historians regularly cite patterns in national approaches to war, dictated perhaps partly by geography, subsistence system, or political structure, but nonetheless promoting a similar set of intellectual approaches to the problem of winning war, then shaped and reshaped by the dynamics of war. Sometimes called “strategic culture,” sometimes called “ways of war,” studies of these patterns form a significant thread within military history and they occupy much of the following entry. Some scholars have gone so far as to suggest that there are “civilizational” ways of war, positing a Western way versus an Eastern way. It is worth emphasizing that these constructs have more than just historical interest. Modern-day analysts and political leaders make calculations of likely enemy responses based on a sometimes-shallow assessment of their opponent’s strategic culture. Indeed some of the strategic culture literature was first generated to fill this need for prediction. These debates over national or civilizational ways of war are discussed in the categories that follow. At another level, war affects individual soldiers, beyond leaders’ calculations of means or methods of victory. War requires soldiers to adapt their behaviors and beliefs. Coping strategies then become patterns of behavior taught and shared within and across generations. Some mechanisms even seem, or have been claimed to be, universal. Speaking broadly we can call this a “soldiers’ culture,” varying according to time, place, and the changing character of combat, but within which issues of motivation, conformity to orders, willingness to serve, and so on remain crucial issues to be examined. Finally, military historians are increasingly interested in how the dynamics of war produce new cultural products in literature, in art, and in the memorialization of the dead. This is a large field, but here we focus on a few key entry points tied closely to the dynamics of war. In short, the culture of war here includes the intellectual traditions of commanders, the experiences and reactions of soldiers, and the memory products specific to combat. This definition of the culture of war excludes “front-end” questions: who is recruited and why, or institutional history, or arms races, or the quest for equal rights through military service, or even the impact of the war on the culture of the wider society. It also generally excludes narratives of specific conflicts except where those narratives are tuned to the questions addressed here. This is about the culture within war, as generated by the nature of war.