"Ideas matter in warfare. Guns may kill, but it is the ideas behind when, where, and how to use them that make them effective. Traditionally, military historians attempted to explain the ideas behind warfare in strictly rational terms, but over the past few decades, a stronger focus has been placed on how societies conceptualize war, weapons, violence, and military service, to determine how culture informs the battlefield. [This book] is a collection of some of the most compelling recent efforts to analyze warfare through a cultural lens..."--back cover.

Warfare and culture /Wayne E. Lee -- Last campaign : the Assyrian way of war and the collapse of the empire / Sarah C. Melville -- Disciplining Octavian : a case study of Roman military culture, 44-30 BCE / Lee L. Brice -- Herding the enemy: culture in nomadic warfare / Timothy May -- How Spanish was the Spanish Conquest? Reexamining Spanish success in the new world / James B. Wood -- Of bureaucrats and bandits : Confucianism and anti-rebel strategy at the end of the Ming Dynasty / Kenneth M. Swope -- Battle culture of forbearance, 1660-1789 / John A. Lynn II -- Success and failure in civil war armies : clues from organizational culture / Mark Grimsley -- Imagining African warfare: war games and millitary cultures in German East Africa / Michelle Moyd -- German military culture and the colonial war in Southwest Africa, 1904-1907 / Isabel V. Hull -- Connecting culture and the battlefield : Britain and the empire fight the hundred days / David Silbey -- American culture of war in the age of artificial limited war / Adrian R. Lewis.