The suggestion, however, of a strong Greek preference for “decisive” battle came from Victor David Hanson’s controversial argument that the terms for a continuing Western way of war were set in classical times.8 Critics have challenged this theory on the basis of the analysis of Greek warfare and the subsequent history.9 Beatrice Heuser has demonstrated emphatically that at least one strong strand in Western military thought up to the Napoleonic wars was to avoid pitched battles: “Few believed either in the inevitability or the unconditional desirability of battle.”
