Vol. XXXII · 2001 · pp. 225-234 (10)

The Strategic Culture of the Habsburg Army

Lawrence Sondhaus

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Abstract

The concept of national ways of warfare as an organizational framework for military history and strategic studies dates from the early 1930s, when Basil H. Liddell Hart delivered a lecture to the Royal United Services Institution in London on "the British way in warfare." Liddell Hart's argument that there was such a thing as a distinctive British approach to military operations—taking full advantage of sea power to launch littoral campaigns, attacking an enemy on his weak periphery, supporting or subsidizing Continental allies, and so forth—received further elaboration in his monograph The British Way in Warfare (1942), published early in World War II, a conflict in which Winston Churchill's strategy for fighting Nazi Germany clearly reflected such an approach. Liddell Hart contended that the "British way" was rooted in the national culture of modern Britain: war was a business and was to be pursued with the greatest possible economy of force. When Britain broke from its own customary way of warfare, deploying a large field army in the trenches of northeastern France during World War I, victory came at a disastrous price in human and economic terms. Since the 1970s Liddell Hart's thesis has been subjected to increasing revision and criticism, yet it remains the point of departure for any discussion of British military strategy and operations. During the 1970s, historians and analysts began to apply the concept of national ways of warfare to studies of the armed forces of the United States, China, and the Soviet Union; eventually, a classical specialist postulated an ancient Greek "Western way of war" as the precursor of the European ways of warfare in more modern times. In 1977 political scientist Jack L. Snyder further developed the notion by introducing the term "strategic culture" in a RAND Corporation paper on Soviet nuclear strategy. Breaking with the "rational actor" analytical framework common to his discipline's approach to strategic studies, Snyder contended that analyses of military performance and decision-making processes must address the historical experiences that shaped the mentalities of the countries and the armed forces involved—their strategic culture. Coming full circle, in the 1990s further discussions of Liddell Hart's thesis of a "British way in warfare" were couched in terms of a British strategic culture. In one such work, Colin McInnes offered a distinction between the two concepts: whereas a way of warfare is limited to "the strategic options pursued in dealing with threats," strategic culture is far more comprehensive, encompassing the strategic options as well as "the basic assumptions held about the strategic environment, including the role of war, the nature and identification of threats, and the efficacy of the use of force."