The endless battle hymn

A full quarter of the book is devoted not to chronicling the past connections between culture and war but to speculating about future threats to that nexus. Here, the august historian gives way to the quirky commentator who has assailed Israel's occupation of the West Bank for softening the Israeli army and whose pronouncements on the genetic limitations of women were denounced by female students and faculty members at his own Hebrew University. Now Van Creveld lives up to his curmudgeonly reputation by identifying the four factors that, he claims, can undermine a society's ability to defend itself. The first two -- the breakdown of law that leads to the emergence of rapacious "wild hordes" and the worship of war that fuels a Nazi-like "soulless machine" -- are hardly controversial. The concluding two, though, are incendiary.

"Men without chests" is Van Creveld's term for the pampered males of today's hyper-industrialized societies who will not bear arms irrespective of the provocation. Though the designation might apply to certain European states, it scarcely pertains to the United States, whose armed forces have been engaged in combat operations in the Middle East and elsewhere, almost uninterruptedly, since the early 1980s. But the true exemplars of chestless men in Van Creveld's opinion are Diaspora Jews. Before Zionism re-empowered them, he posits, "Jews were like a flag on a windless day," feckless and stooped. That assertion would come as a shock to my father, who, like thousands of American Jews, fought his way from Normandy to Berlin, and served in the Korean War as well.

More debilitating than epicene men, however, are the militant feminists. These, Van Creveld alleges, undermine society's defenses by mocking the troops and even wishing for their deaths while demanding an equal status for women in the military. Physically weaker than men, women soldiers lower combat effectiveness and divert their male counterparts from the serious task of killing. Infected with feminism, culture "will surely collapse like the house of cards," forfeiting its "ability to fight and win." That conclusion is unlikely to impress the officer I recently met aboard the USS Truman, the mother of a 2-year-old and the commander of an F-18 squadron, five of whose pilots are women.

Marred by these repellent and largely unsubstantiated theories, "The Culture of War" manages to tarnish its many contributions to our understanding of the ways in which conflict and societies interact. Van Creveld ultimately does himself -- and us -- a disservice, and leaves the question "Are war and culture indeed inseparable?" unanswered.