Bret Devereaux

Jonathan V. Last on Victor Davis Hanson: "Oh, come on, that guy's been a clown for 20 years." "VDH is the least serious serious person in all of intellectual public life." "A fool and a clown when he was cheering the Iraq War from his vineyard."

*when he wasn’t writing lauded academic and popular books or teaching relatively underprivileged students at a state school.

Hoplites is well regarded. His Western Way of War stuff is seen as interesting but wrong.

Just a point of clarification: Western Way of War is his hoplite book, and though the title is unfortunate, still represents the 'orthodox' position on hoplite battle (in contrast to H. van Wees' Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities, the heterodox position).

Ah, ok - it's the "western way of war" school that's controversial.

It’s only controversial because many are too chicken to admit the obvious in our PC age: Western civilization since the time of the Greeks has consistently produced military forces which are invariably superior to non-Western forces.

This was very much not true in the period c. 500 A.D. to c. 1500 A.D...about 1,000 of the c. 2,500 years 'since the time of the Greeks.' A general characterization which is wrong 40% of the time is hardly a good one.