[Denizen Commentary - Kat]
Just a quick drive by today...I'm reading Victor Davis Hanson's "A War Like No Other". I'll give a review later if the Armorer hasn't done so in the past. "A War Like No Other" is a book about the Peloponnesian War between Athen's and Sparta. At the end of the Third Peloponnesian War, democratic Athens was defeated by oligarchic, militaristic Sparta, a city state that was smaller in land, people, money and arms. Reflecting multiple discussions here, Hanson wrote:
Second, Pericles gambled that the Athenians - a people that had once marched out to Marathon to beat an army three times its size and had sunk a numerically superior Persian fleet at Salamis in the sight of the Acropolis - could now sit idly by without damage to their national psyche while thousands of enemies swaggered in to challenge their martial prowess. [snip]But the collective population at large would also have to stomach the even more odious idea that none of their men would dare to fight an enemy a few miles from the walls.
War is never nerely a struggle over concrete things. Instead, as great generals from the Theban Epaminondas to Napoleon saw, it remains a contest of wills, of mentalities and perceptions that lie at the heart of all military exegeses...
So once the Athenians had established the precedent that enemies could occupy their homeland with the near assurance that they would not or could not be forcibly removed, would not an inevitable sense of collective self-doubt and insecurity follow?
During the Third Peloponnesian War, Pericles had sought to mitigate the trouble Athens had experienced in other wars when they were forced to evacuate thousands from the city and surrounding country side. Instead, he decided to evacuate them into Athens. Largely because it had a nearby port and a walled access through which their maritime fleet could keep a besieged city well fed and its coffers still viable. He was hoping to avoid a war or greater bloodshed.
The Spartans and their allies marched in, ran the people from their homes and ate their crops and livestock, often within view of Athens itself.
Hanson is pointing out that, even though Athens was technically stronger than Sparta, the idea that, that strength could simply be held in check and the city state weather the attacks without significant damage to Athens, is wrong.
Physically, Athens could always have returned. But, psychically, Athens would never be the same.
War may begin over a myriad of material or economic means, but it is sustained and won or lost by the joining of passion and reason: the desire to fight and win, a cause or fire within, coupled with strategic thinking.
