ABSTRACT
The concept of national “ways of war” dates from the 1930s, when former British army officer Basil H. Liddell Hart theorized that there was such a thing as a traditional “British Way in Warfare.” The concept of “strategic culture” dates from the 1970s, when American political scientist Jack Snyder introduced it to explain the strategy of the Soviet Union, after concluding that the Soviets did not behave according to rational choice theory. Starting with Liddell Hart, historians and military writers produced the literature on national ways of warfare independent of political scientists. Likewise, Snyder’s initial piece and subsequent works on strategic culture preoccupied political scientists but were largely ignored by military historians. By the turn of the century, however, cross-disciplinary reading had begun to breach the wall between the two mutually exclusive bodies of scholarship (e.g. Macmillan 1995). Scholars in either discipline bothering to read the works of the other have recognized the obvious: that the concepts are complimentary inasmuch as a country’s way of war may be viewed as both a subset and a product of its overall strategic culture (McInnes 1996: 3).
