[craigepo]

Just read "The Soul of Battle" by Victor Davis Hanson. In-depth look at how three generals from different time periods took armies from democratic societies and used them to conquer tyranny/slavery (Patton, Sherman, and Epaminondas).

An interesting snip from the book:
"The great danger of the present age is that democracy may never again marshal the will to march against and ultimately destroy evil. In the era of television, the image of war's brutality in our living rooms may stop the attack; the education system of the present, with its interest in self-esteem, sensitivity, and the therapeutic, may not turn out sufficiently idiosyncratic, audacious-and well-read-leaders; and instant communications may serve to bridle a mobile column at its moment of victor. But even a greater peril still in present-day democratic society is that we may simply have forgotten that there finally must be a choice between good and evil, that the real immorality is not the use of great force to inflict punishment, but, as the Greeks remind us, the failure to exercise moral authority at all. When men like Epaminondas, Sherman, and Patton go to war to stop evil and to save lives, there is a soul to their battle that lives on well after they are gone.
This tradition of democracy's mustering quickly huge armies, to be led by eccentric fighters, on a moral trek into the heart of slavery, is not the stuff of romance and it is not a fantasy from our past, but rather a rare and hallowed tradition as old as the beginning of the West itself. In the West epic marches for freedom across time and space have liberated us from our own worst enemies. Armies of liberation are the precious dividends of democracy, and we abandon the memory of Epaminondas, Sherman, and Patton and what their hoplites, Westerners, and GIs did only at our great peril."