ABSTRACT
As contemporary military historians are at pains to demonstrate, 'Culture is a prime determinant of war'. The importance of acknowledging the essential role played in war by the moral culture of war applies just as much to the moral theorist as it does to the military practitioner. The moral habits and dispositions that belligerents bring to war are formed in and through the moral cultures or communities to which they belong. A key element of the moral culture of any war is the concept of the enemy. It was not some inner necessity of war, but the moral culture of Nazi Germany that made the difference between the war in the west and the war in the east. Recognizing and countering this unjust disposition, this inflated perversion of the just war, is a key part of the just war project, the realization of which depends on the progressive elimination of assumptions of natural enmity from the prevailing culture of war.
