To wage war, become an anthropologist. Lose the fascination with Clausewitz,and embrace culture as the way to understand conflict. Or so argue anumber of strategists, historians, and officers on both sides of theAtlantic. Fromthe academy to the Pentagon, fresh attention is being focused on the value ofknowing the enemy. Those who take this view assume that different ways of lifeproduce different ways of war. They see today?s global war on terrorism as aclash of profoundly different cultures, betweenAmerican-led forces on one side,and jihadist warriors or tribalwarlords on the other. Tomake sense of recentmilitaryfailures, they have turned back to cultural knowledge of the adversary. Thisalso often influences their reading of history. They project the same themes backinto the past. Today?s military confrontation of ?the West vs. the rest,? they argue,replays ancient differences between strategic cultures.

Do non-westerners approach war in fundamentally different ways?......American military strategy of the 1990s was marked by a technology drivenquest for a Revolution inMilitary Affairs (RMA). The RMAenvisageda future in which the American colossus would prevail against armies in thefield by exploiting its strengths, such as information and knowledge of thebattlespace, precision munitions, rapidmobility, and decisionmaking.6 But theworld?s dominant superpower now faces a very different world. Neither thedoctrine, training, or tools designed to counter the Soviet threat nor the RMAseem capable of dealing with low-intensity insurgency....But in light of recent difficulties encountered by the Americanmodel of warmaking, another version of similar ideas is gathering strength.Military officers such as John Poole have used concepts of Asian or Islamicways of war didactically to highlight the defects of their own nations? strategiccultures. Poole identifies an ?Eastern thought process? stretching fromancient China to the modern Middle East, which generates effective light infantryand fights indirectly with loose encirclements, probes, dispersal, andtrickery.18 This has been endorsed by William Lind, the prophet of ?fourthgeneration warfare? who urged the military to re-imagine the nature of futurewar and recognise its own deficiencies