Attributes of Ancient Greek Warfare

From Victor Davis Hanson's Wars of the Ancient Greeks, the eight distinctive attributes of Ancient Greek warfare which distinguished them from the past, from their contemporaries, and which attributes reverberate today as part of the Western heritage of warfare.

1. Advanced technology: the unsurpassed excellence of both weapons and armour, a superiority in design and craftsmanship over non-Greek equipment that was wide-ranging and well-established, from the hoplite breastplate and shield to the Macedonian sarissa, from catapults to wheeled siege engines . . .

2. Superior discipline: the effective training and ready acceptance of command by soldiers themselves, whether in close-knit ranks of the Classical phalanx or the ad hoc democratic councils of the mercenary Ten Thousand stuck in Persia. . . .

3. Ingenuity in response: an intellectual tradition, unfettered and uncensored by either government or religion, that sought constant improvement in the face of challenge. . . .

4. The creation of a broad , shared military observance among the majority of the population: the preference for citizen militias and civilian participation in military decision-making that led, as Aristotle saw it, to a clear battlefield edge over mercenaries. . . .

5. Choice of decisive engagement: the preference to meet the enemy head-on, hand-to-hand in shock battle, and to resolve the fighting as quickly and decisively as possible, battle being simply the final military expression of the majority will of the citizenry.

6. Dominance of infantry: the notion that property-owners on foot with muscular strength, not horse-men or even missile-men, alone win wars.

7. A systematic application of capital to warmaking: the ability to collect assessments, impose tribute and borrow monies to field men and materiel for extensive periods of time.

8. A moral opposition to militarism: the ubiquity of literary, religious, political and artistic groups who freely demand justification and explication of war, and thus often questioned and occasionally arrested the unwise application of military force.

All of these ring true regarding the imperial and colonial wars of the 1500s-1900s. These are often characterized as simple clashes of Western technology against primitive technologies. Particularly in the 1800s and 1900s, this was manifestly not true. The Sikh against the British, the Ethiopians against the Italians, the Brits at Rorke's Drift, and numerous other engagements, the non-European combatants had obtained both the arms and training from other European powers, and often numerically outnumbered the European combatant. It was the other factors that made the difference.

I read a history many years ago, and I do not recall which book it might have been, but the central argument was that the long pax britannia was in significant part enabled by not just superior British technology but superior British financing and logistics, particularly in the case of the Napoleonic wars. That British innovations in finance were as material a contributor as innovations in weaponry.