Patrick Porter makes the case that acculturation is not a fog light of war.
On the war in the culture or the culture in the war:
The dogma of cultural determinism, then, often fails to deal with many of the complexities of military performance. Its empirical and conceptual shortcomings reflect a more fundamental problem. Cultural determinism sees what it wants to see in history, making facts fit a theory to confirm its urgent contemporary agenda, which is to alert today’s militaries and decisionmakers to the profound differences between cultural traditions. But however seductive and well-intentioned the theory, competing ways of war are hammered out in a matrix in which culture was one element that interacts with others, such as material circumstances, power imbalances, and individuals. It would be ironic if the many war cultures of the past were forced into simplistic categories in order to encourage cultural sensitivity in the present. -PP
Seminal piece for follow-on questions:
Other writers, including Richardson, have made the case for managing strategic cost-consideration in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations. This seems to me the point at which cost and assymetry meet:
From Ho Chi Minh to Osama bin Laden, weaker sides have announced their will to make sacrifice without limit. It is precisely this which they reckon advantages them against the stronger enemy, with its nervous politicians and civilian population reluctant to spend endless blood and treasure. As demonstrated by more than a million dead communists in the North’s ultimate victory in Vietnam, bloodless methods and being economical with casualties was emphatically not a war-winning strategy.
Also, looking below, we can muse about how the 'culture warriors' have put war back into the culture:
