Historian John A. Lynn wrote in 2005:
Historians need to differentiate between the reality of war and die way in which a culture conceives of war: between the concrete and the conceptual. At die conceptual pole, the term ‘discourse’ signifies the complex of assumptions, perceptions, expectations, and values regarding conflict, violence, and armed struggle. Discourse does not necessarily assume an ideal of war, as it often encompasses elements that are far from ideal. As demonstrated by the highly conventional style of warfare practised by the classical Greeks, a discourse can exert great influence in shaping reality. Sometimes, however, the discourse does not match die contemporary weaponry and logistics, and must adjust. During die First World War, romanticized conceptions of warfare perished in the trenches of 1915. A feedback loop circulates between discourse and reality, even though the two are never identical.
A particular society and culture can produce different discourses, defined by class, gender, or profession. Thus, during the Middle Ages, the aristocracy idealized and lauded chivalric violence, the peasantry feared it because they became its unwilling victims, and the Church condemned it as sin, except on crusade. Since the rise of general staffs, military professionals have systematized their discourses in theory and doctrine. This has never been clearer than in the masterful, but culturally specific, work of Karl von Clausewitz, which has influenced military conceptions of warfare for over one hundred and sixty years. The tensions between conflicting discourses and the discord between the dominant discourse and reality make for some of the most interesting questions to be answered by military history.
If a society produces a discourse on violence, central to its value system but unable to be matched with the reality of war, it may devise a perfected reality that conforms with its ideal discourse, if only for the élites.
…When one side interprets the enemy’s actions as improper conduct of war, it may exchange its own dominant discourse for an alternative that justifies a reality stripped of constraints. This is most easily done when cultures collide in battle, as they did in the Pacific in the Second World War. Each side came to see the other as uncivilized and to be treated with unbridled brutality.
…The racist views of the Japanese held by US troops only registered at the peripheries of combat: the reluctance to take prisoners, the treatment of those taken, and the abuse of the dead. Racism determined neither US miHtary doctrine nor the US strategy that culminated in the use of the atomic weapons.
…Bodi the chosen case studies and the theory challenge the claim made by Victor Davis Hanson, John Keegan, and Geoffrey Parker that one can trace a definably Western way of war back to classical Greece. Hanson insists that an unbroken 2,500-year tradition based originally on Greek practice explains not only why Western forces have overcome great odds to defeat their adversaries but also their uncanny ability to project power well beyond the shores of Europe and America.
…Claims of continuity in the West become less tenuous as analyses of cultural discourse rather than as statements about the reality of war. Western literature kept alive stories of classical commanders and conquests and preserved some classical studies of warfare, but the memory of the classical past was used selectively, often as metaphor.
