Have we followed Oedipus’s daughter, who sought a respectable burial for her brother Polynices, or her uncle King Creon? For Zambernardi, a Professor of Political Science at the University of Bologna, modern European societies started with a vast anti-Antigone sentiment, often treating soldiers, alive and fallen, as “scum of the earth.” Still, we have evolved: from around the middle of the nineteenth century, individualization took place; we started seeing soldiers as deserving dignity in death. At first, up until WWII, it meant glorifying combative death as a worthy sacrifice for the nation. Thereafter, we have come to see the loss of soldiers’ lives as personal tragedies, instilling deep societal aversion to military casualties, which, in turn, has undermined Western states’ ability to win irregular, asymmetrical wars.

Along the three stages—from “bare death” to “sacrificial death” to “irrecoverable death”—Zambernardi sees “the military institutions of any society” as driven by the “functional imperative” of security and the “societal imperative” of culture, ideas, and institutions. Think of how ancient Greece’s agrarian life or the chivalric codes during the Middle Ages had tamed violence or how the pre-WWI “cult of the offensive” cultivated it. Technology, too, dramatically affects military norms, tactics, and institutions, for example, gunpowder ending the chivalrous moral code of honorable and fair face-to-face combat.

Focusing on the modern West and the foot soldier, the most likely to die, Zambernardi draws evidence from historical changes in battlefield tactics, war memorials, and burial practices. For example, on early modern European battlefields, soldiers were often regarded as ‘rapacious and licentious’ and, once dead, and not always buried, were robbed of their possessions and their body parts, such as teeth, removed, and sold. Compare that with the 2003 UK decision to repatriate the bodies of fallen soldiers abroad at the government’s expense and to allow their families to choose the design for the headstones.

For Zambernardi, this value shift has come at a high cost: a growing Western aversion to military casualties. This, he argues, “[jeopardizes] the Clausewitzian relationship between military means and political ends,” especially when it comes to the increasingly common irregular warfare, which requires telluric strategy—controlling physical territory and the population within it. “Yet Western states are still trying systematically to remove soldiers from the ground” (pp. 7, 8)—fearing the “body bag effect,” they attack at a safe distance and employ indigenous forces—and thus sever Clausewitz’s knot.

Building on the “post-heroic warfare” thesis, in line with Edward Luttwak (1995, Toward Post-Heroic Warfare. Foreign Affairs 74:109–122), Yagil Levi (2019, Whose Life Is Worth More? Hierarchies of Risk and Death in Contemporary Wars. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press) and others, Zambernardi offers a valuable contribution to a familiar thesis: an interdisciplinary longue durée approach to back it up, and to hone it into a very well-structured argument. Perhaps too well structured? I wonder for example where to place Charles Ewart, the Scottish soldier who captured the French Imperial Eagle during the Waterloo campaign, or Robert Kirkwood, the American Captain who fought in the Revolutionary War and died in 1791 during St. Clair’s Defeat—both hardly top-ranking yet highly venerated soldiers of the period western societies putatively treated soldiers as disposable bodies. Or consider Nathan Hale, a young schoolteacher-turned-soldier in the American Revolution, or Joseph Bara, who was only 14 years old when he served with Republican forces during the French Revolution—both extolled by their nations as enduring symbols of patriotism and self-sacrifice—well over a century before, according to Zambernardi, we entered the phase of glorified sacrificial death.

While it is hard to tell if these are aberrations without quantitative data, Zambernardi’s fine qualitative analysis could have benefitted from such individual stories, which could have further benefitted from the renowned chronicles of common soldiers from the era. Jakob Walter’s The Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier (Penguin Books, 1993) and Joseph Plumb Martin’s A Narrative of Some of the Adventures, Dangers, and Sufferings of a Revolutionary Soldier (Signet, 2010) come to mind.

Zambernardi concedes that “the three stages do not mark a linear development and are to some extent arbitrary” (p. 4). However, to what extent? It remains unclear how strictly these stages can be separated. Sometimes the indicators conflict, for example, memorials suggest one ‘stage,’ battlefield tactics reflect another. If “widespread disregard for human life in war” (p. 46) is a marker of the first, “bare death” phase, World War I presents a puzzle. That war occurred well into Zambernardi’s second phase, yet on the battlefields of 1914–1918, ordinary soldiers arguably “counted for nothing” (p. 111). The ethos of bare death persisted in how the war was fought, even as societies lavishly commemorated the fallen afterward. Similarly, Zambernardi agrees with Vennesson that “eighteenth-century limited warfare is an early case of casualty aversion” (p. 52). Because it is rarely easy to conclude if pragmatic or humanitarian considerations drive such aversion, why would contemporary casualty aversion itself indicate a completely different stage?

A deeper question concerns the roots of this cultural transformation, which, however qualified, has undeniably transpired. Zambernardi rightly points to the process of individualization, which is concomitant with the rise of bourgeois and liberal values in the West. However, is the new “Western way of war” just a ripple effect of this larger transvaluation?

If not, shifting military necessities might be it. Zambernardi notes, in his penultimate footnote, “One may rightly argue that casualty aversion would virtually disappear if national survival were at stake in so-called wars of necessity, where an existential threat to a society is present” (p. 166). Indeed, no Western power has faced a conventional existential threat since 1945, and the last time the US fought for its survival was during the Civil War. There was no need to throw soldiers into the meat grinder. Western armies could further afford to spare its soldiers because of weapons that allow high-impact remote warfare like never before. With sub-existential stakes, the US’s handling of the dilemma of whether and how many boots on the ground to have in Afghanistan and Iraq may not indicate a distinct approach to soldiers’ lives and deaths. Arguably, sending over 200 thousand troops, while a small number compared to the 3 million fighting the civil war, is quite a lot for a non-existential war amidst the still-unipolar moment of the 2000s.

The existential facet may point to a deeper factor: choice. Humans venerate voluntary sacrifice for the greater good. Most foot soldiers, at first, did not fit that bill. Indeed, the modern usage of “soldier” emerged to designate a paid combatant (solidus was a Roman coin), unlike feudal knights, who fought for their sworn oath of fealty to their (land-)lord. Conversely, soldiering was less about honor, more about getting paid, often out of acute necessity, turning combatants into expendable hirelings, indeed coins, one pays to win a war. And so, beyond temporal shifts throughout modernity, it was possibly the warrior’s presumed motivation that was paramount: those who personally had most to lose and least to gain from going to fight were most respected.

Has growing respect for soldiers cost the West the capacity to win wars? For Zambernardi, recent US wars evince this: “Western armed forces were unable to impose their will on incomparably weaker enemies” (p. 7). True, and more boots on the ground could have possibly tipped the scale, though considering US myopic strategies, I doubt that. And here, Zambernardi’s counsel—realign war aims with the casualties you can tolerate—is germane.

However, was it respect for soldiers’ lives that forestalled victory or was it (also) the growing regard for the lives of the enemy’s population? After all, both sacrificing and sanctifying lives need not stop at the border. If fighting is constrained not just by casualty aversion but also by increasing ethical concerns about enemy civilians, then military effectiveness is not just about respect for one’s own soldiers—it is about an expanding moral horizon that limits coercion. Moral and emotional: Empathy—let alone extending it to your enemy—may temper your prowess on the battlefield. However, to abandon it entirely may leave you with nothing to return to upon your victorious way home.

Speaking of home, since Zambernardi occasionally refers to my homeland, it may merit a final note. Here is a putatively Western country that defies most recent Western war patterns. Israelis often feel under existential threat, and in the wake of October 7, Israeli leaders and the public alike hardly disputed the urgent need for a mandatory mass mobilization of troops, knowing fully well many will be killed. As for respecting humans, dead or alive, soldiers or civilians, whether Israeli or Palestinian, both Hamas and the Israeli government seem to share scarce care for such obstacles, on their hubristic path to “total victory.” Zambernardi’s work provides a compelling framework for engaging such dilemmas, even as Israel’s case suggests that context, not just culture, matters.