THE WARRIOR HOW TO FIGHT So much of our current military approach - and often even our vocabulary - can be traced back to the transformations that were taking place on the Greek battlefields of Homer's time in the late eighth and early seventh centuries. Overwhelming military force, for instance, the doctrine put forward most notably in recent years by General Colin Powell at the outset of the First Gulf War, has proven far more decisive in diverse confrontations throughout Western history than the bravery of individual soldiers. Cold calculation and rational planning, not heroic rhetoric or mystical faith, have served as the principal weapons of the Western military machine. Through these means, the conquistadors, for instance, were able to subdue the populations of Mexico and the Caribbean and their haughty but brittle traditions within three decades. Whereas the Spaniards quickly took the measure of Aztec society, its strengths and weaknesses, by a combination of cool observation and inductive logic, the Aztecs, as [military historian Victor Davis Hanson] puts it, "for weeks after the entry of the Castilians were still baffled as to whether they were up against men or demigods, centaurs or horses, ships or floating mountains, foreign or domestic deities, thunder or guns, emissaries or enemies." Of course we occasionally overshoot. From Thermopylae to Little Big Horn to Vietnam, there stand out those historical exceptions that managed, at least for the moment, to overturn the machine of Western military dominance. And it has yet to be seen what the final outcome will be in the unending global "war" against terrorism, a war in which the enemy has no territory to defend and cannot be met on any known battlefield, a war in which all initiative lies with the enemy and every shadow may conceal a hideous surprise. Is it possible that international terrorism in the age of technological globalization represents an innovation for which we have yet to find an adequate military antidote (and is it possible that a military antidote is not what is needed)? Or is it more likely that our current arsenal of techniques will suffice to preserve our hegemony? Certainly, it is worth asking if the Western tradition of militarism, which can now boast nearly three millennia of success, is reaching the end of its usefulness, even if any attempt to answer this question definitely would be premature. Such a question, however distasteful to closed minds, is very Greek in spirit. Thinking the unthinkable, posing the impossible, considering all options: such habits of discourse can flourish only in free discussion among unfettered minds. A component of Greek militarism that we have yet to consider is that it was rooted in nascent notions of citizenship and popular participation. Homer understood that the societies of Agamemnon and Priam were tribal agglomerations, where all decisions of peace and war were made by powerful chieftains who could lead their followers into whatever dangers their whims might prompt them to. Thus are two societies brought to the brink of destruction by what should have been an ephemeral love affair. But Homer also tucked into his narrative examples of freewheeling discussion conducted by the Greek troops on everything from Agamemnon's personal limitations to alternative tactics for tomorrow's clashes. These level-headed, wide-ranging, open-ended discussions belong to the military culture of Homer's day and later, not to twelfth-century Mycenae, and they seem in their specificity to spring from Homer's own experience of a sort of campground town hall in which Greek troops took an intense interest in the enterprise they were engaged in and made lively contributions to the logistics of battle. It was the general invitation to discuss strategy beforehand - strategy being another Greek word, formed from stratos, Greek for "army," strategos for "general" - coupled with a commitment to subsequent group discipline, that helped create the unrivaled killing machine of Greek warfare.