Victor Davis Hanson is an author, military historian, and professor of classics at California State University, Fresno. He also contributes to the National Review's website, and has appeared as a commentator on the History Channel's recent program The Rise and Fall of the Spartans.

Dr. Hanson recieved his BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1975, attended the American School of Classical Studies in 1978 and 1979, and recieived his Ph.D in Classics from Stanford University in 1980. He is currently (2002-2003) a guest lecturer at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, MD., and has also been a full time farmer (grapes, I believe,) in California. He has recieved the American Philological Association Excellence in Teaching award, and has also been named a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, CA.

Dr. Hanson has authored or edited:

Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece

The Western Way of War

Hoplites(editor)

The Other Greeks

Fields Without Dreams

Who Killed Homer?(with John Heath)

The Wars of the Ancient Greeks

The Soul of Battle

The Land Was Everything

Bonfire of the Humanities(with John Heath and Brian Thornton)

An Autumn of War

Carnage and Culture

Dr. Hanson has a unifying theme running through his works which I hope he would forgive my summarizing in 2 points:

1). There are unique cultural characteristics of 'Western' civilization that combine to give Western armies pre-eminent efficiency and lethality on the battlefield.

2). This phenomenon can be traced back all the way to the city-state Greeks, beginning with the Persian invasions of 490 and 479 BC.

Point 1 is an attempt to explain the lopsided historical scoreboard: Over the last 2000+ years, whenever a Western army has encountered a non-Western one, the Western army has almost invariably prevailed. This generalization is not without exceptions, but even Western defeats have almost always been followed by cold, terrible Western revenge. From the very beginning of Western civilization, the only real threat to a Western army has been another Western army. Furthermore, Western armies have often dominated non-Western ones despite being out-numbered, often ridiculously so. Nor is technological superiority an adequate explanation; it has applied in recent centuries, but has not always done so.

Dr. Hanson's analysis of all this arrives at the conclusion that this can only be explained by social and cultural factors: for some reason discipline, tactics, organization and other concepts simply developed in the West to an extent that has made Western armies pre-eminent.

Dr. Hanson's list of what he thinks are the reasons why include the following:

a)The Western tendency, since the time of the Greek Hoplite battles, to seek a quick, decisive battle as the most efficient way of ending a conflict on favorable terms.

b)A concept of military discipline peculiar to Western Civ that has resulted in armies that have tended to be more cohesive. This also involves a relationship between officer and private soldier that stems from a relatively greater degree of egalitarianism than is found in non-Western civilizations (though you can find plenty of exceptions to this one!)

c)A relentless application of technological and tactical innovation to an extent far beyond anything permitted in more change-averse cultures.

All of which seems strongly established, at least to me. As the sports fan says, it's hard to argue with the scoreboard. And, appropo of recent (and, as I write, looming) wars in the Middle East, this part of Dr. Hanson's thesis seems even more strongly established by the vivid contrast drawn of the 'other side' in a recent essay by Norville de Atkine, 'Why Arabs Lose Wars'. This work, widely available online, draws a picture of rampant class-division and strife, corruption, paranoia, refusal to share information, and pathological attitudes towards education, training, discipline, and military service in general that has made the performance of Arab armies utterly dismal in recent conflicts. As such, it is a nice, diametrical opposite of the picture drawn of Western armies by Dr. Hanson.

The second part of Dr. Hanson's thesis - that these phenomena can be traced in a line all the way back to the polis Greeks, is the part I'm not sure I buy 100% yet. Without in any way having standing to dispute him, I'm just not ready to put the Merovingian Franks on the same historical conveyor-belt as the polis Greeks. A line there may be, but I don't think it's an unbroken one.

Dr. Hanson, though to my mind refreshingly un-PC, is hardly an uncritical cheerleader for Western Civ, or at least Western militaries. He fastidiously notes that the proximate result of this tradition of military development is a world where we could all be vaporized at the twitch of a button-finger. Nor does he avert his eyes from the dark side of Western military superiority, whether that take the form of ghastly atrocities committed by crusaders or the pig-headed stupidity and failure at all levels of the military establishments in World-War I.