"Zu," an OSU undergraduate who maintains Zu's Musings, offers a modest plea for more attention to tactics in military history coursework:

"Whenever a serious talk about tactics comes up, I always feel like I am on the outside looking in. In all of my history classes, whenever we have enough time to talk about a specific battle, it's usually just glossed over. I think this is a disservice." He adds, "I think that they should have a class based purely on tactics."

This has got me reflecting on my own exposure to history at the operational and tactical level. With the exception of Wick Murray's courses in European history, I don't recall getting much battle history in my undergraduate or graduate studies. Personally I didn't need it anyway. By the time I was seventeen I was pretty well self-educated in this regard, and indeed, in that respect I did not strike myself as unusual. I guess I have always assumed that you need professors and coursework to supply aspects of your education that you can't do on your own, and given the wealth of attention to commanders and battles in popular books, magazines and the History Channel, this didn't seem an area in need of special attention.

That said, there's no particular reason to assume that undergraduates will have made military history their hobby since the time they learned to read, which is basically how I acquired my fund of knowledge on operations and tactics. Nor are there guarantees that this auto-didactic approach will result in an accurate grasp of military tactics. Anyway, Zu has some interesting suggestions about how a course emphasizing tactics might be devised.

Like Professor Grimsley I am very leery of such a course. I mean no disrepect to Zu, but I honestly believe that such a course would essentially be enrolled in only by military wargamers who think this will be an easy "A", and I think a deep discussion of tactics would necessarily suffer as students focus on gaming (and gaming the system as well).

For people who want to do those sorts of things, I honestly believe they should volunteer to serve in the U.S. Army or Marine Corps. They can get plenty of hands-on experience and learn about tactics from professionals! As Professor Millett once said, "Military history does not exist so you can pretend to be in Alexander the Great's army... if you want to do that, go to Macedonia and join up!"

As for the efficacy of using computer war games, I am even more leery. Most computer war games are ultimately designed for the enjoyment of the player, not necessarily to reflect reality. When taking one course as an undergraduate, we were assigned to play a Jane's war game simulation as our "lab" period. Most of the students instantly concluded this was going to be easy and fun. Oh yes... but first we had to turn off all the cheats, and you weren't allowed to start over if you got killed. In short, a lot of people got wiped out in the first five minutes of a lab period and that was that. Grades plummeted. At the same time, as you learned how to play the game, you learned that even with the cheats off, it wasn't too terribly realistic. I like to think that I'm good, but I doubt that many submarine commanders can actually dodge 24 torpedoes in ten minutes while still sinking all their targets. Fun, yes, but real... I don't think so.

Finally, Professor Grimsley is right. There is a lot about tactics out there. Perhaps a lot of it is bogus, but it's out there and some of it is not too terribly difficult. The Osprey military books and the History Channel both dumb it down enough for just about anyone. You don't have to be Crazy Horse to know that having the high ground is usually a good deal (but if you are a 20-ish year old major named Washington, maybe a few books on the subject might have been good).

Well... Jane's wargames tend to be a simulation of a weapons system whereas the games I suggested are all based on commanding small to large groups of soldiers. There isn't really a way to cheat in any of these games, and they force you to learn effective tactics if you want to succeed.

There's only so much you can learn about Hannibal's battle at Trebbia just from reading ancient accounts. I think it really comes together when you actually command the attack against the half-frozen legionaries; deciding when to spring your ambush; struggling to keep your elephants from charging in the wrong direction and spoiling your assault.

If you have the time, bandwidth and required system specs, I invite you to download the demo (about 160MB) and play through a few times. Hopefully you can see the advantages this type of game could have for a discussion of ancient warfare.

Gah! At this point I really with I knew Philip Sabin, our Professor of Strategic Studies (who will be teaching me next year), His expertise covers a number of areas, two of the most notable being a) Ancient Warfare and b) wargames. I know he likes using war games (the highbrow type, rather the Total War type) in the courses he teaches but obviously right now I can't comment on how well it works or even on how it works.

If I had to pinpoint a deficiency in both the teaching of tactics (and, yes, it's minimal, quite possibly with good reason) and the self-teaching of tactics it's this - geography. Reading the ground is one of the key skills of the professional soldier and you can't pick that up from books. Rather than a specific course in tactics, my personal view is that an academic battlefield tour would be the correct format. This would provide a forum in which the tutor can say, "OK, you've read about the high ground being an advantage, now stand here and you can SEE why it's an advantage" or "Ok, dead ground, you, you and you go and stand in point A and you, you and you go and stand at point B and see what we actually mean when we talk about this stuff" or "OK, the British were formed up here and the French began their advance from there, now you can see for yourself the sort of distance they had to cover. Now you're going to see for yourself exactly what the implications of the British reverse slope deployment were...".

That, to me, would be better than a formal self-contained course on tactics.

I find Zu's challenge intriguing. If and when I can find the time, I will certainly test out his assertions if I can on my computer since I have not played a computer war game for years -- just looking at the new games that have come out, I think technology has certainly progressed since the dark ages when I played anything on the computer (the 90s!). Having said that, however, I have a few points to press home.

1. I don't think any game or simulation, no matter how well-programmed, can truly capture the elements of "fog" and "friction". The game might put in handicaps, such as slowing your soldiers down in cold weather, knocking down their combat effectiveness if they haven't eaten, but there is only so much a game can do to replicate the contingency of reality. Furthermore, most simulations allow a "commander" to give orders which are instantaneously carried out (or at least they used to). Even today, most commanders find that even the simplest of orders can be misdirected, misinterpreted, or not even received.

2. Next off, is "tactics" really a suitable subject for a history course? As Zu noted, you can only learn so much from ancient texts (in fact, sometimes ancient texts are so confusing they might as well be worthless). We are still not entirely sure what actually happened at Little Big Horn, and that was in 1876! In short, we don't know much about tactics from many battles, and we have been forced to guess and attempt to use battlefield forensics to map out how battles went. While using a war game will be interesting, I'm not convinced it actually teaches you historically accurate tactics of the age. So, is playing a war game and postulating on the possible use of double envelopments at name-your-famous-battle really a historically worthwhile option?

Furthermore, if the subject comes up at a history faculty meeting, is it really defensible? I'm not convinced of that either. I think many professors will argue that a course on tactics belongs in the departments of military science and naval science, both of which probably offer some sort of course on "strategy and tactics".

3. I think Anthony is right when he notes that it's hard to duplicate the real world on a computer. There is a certain omniscience to a computer game and even to looking at a post-mortem battlefield map that is unavailable to a commander who is often at a vantage point that can only see certain portions of the battlefield. When you go to Castillo de San Marcos, Fort McHenry, Antietam, or Gettysburg, you suddenly understand a lot more about why attacking some places was so hard. When you are actually under sail, without a cool screen marker telling you which way the wind is coming from and in conditions of thrashing rain, mountainous waves, and freezing water, attempting to the run the British blockade in 1815 in a snow storm doesn't seem like such a good idea (and in 21st century, we have cool things like GPS, radio, a inboard motor, and inflatable life vests).

I think Zu is on to something in his call for using war games -- like movies and novels, they can be particularly effective in a course (I am now interested in how Professor Grimsley used it in his course that Zu cites on his web page).

I am not yet convinced, however, that (a) tactics is a suitable course for military history, or (b) that war games should be relied upon for teaching tactics.

Oh, such a tempting subject to discuss, but since I have more pressing problems to solve, this will be short.

Where should military tactics be taught? Well, the U.S military doesn't teach anything but "current tactics." Any discussion of past tactics either comes from stressing continuities in warfare, like the "principles of war," or in a "miitary hisstory class taught by military science professors. We are talking historical events, so I think it is appropriate for military historians to be able to talk about tactics, or perhaps even have a course that discusses tactics.

How should military tactics be taught? I won't outline all my reasons for saying so, but I feel that commercial (and even military developed) wargames are better used to demonstrate what tactics were not like rather than were liked. I have seen or played most all of the games mentioned by Zu. I'll just point out one. In medieval total war, a player eventually may have pikemen and arquebusiers. However, a player will have a very difficult time actually employing pikemen and arquebusiers effectively in a game in any formation or tactics that mirror what one can read about in any study of the 30 years war, english civil war, war of spanish succession, etc. The problem is, It takes a pre-existing understanding of tactics to know how and why Medieval Total War unsuccessfully models tercios and other pike-shot formations. Repeat this discussion for every other game and you begin to see the problem of using board or computer wargames.

on the other hand, in a certain sense these games are conceptual thought pieces on the nature of battle. They represent the author's point of view in an interactive graphical systems manner, rather than by text and pictures of a typical academic book. Perhaps a better course would be one on the efficacy of historical modeling (of the commerical and military kind) for understanding history. Such a course could include a section on kriegspiel, JANUS, game theory, commercial wargames, etc., and address the use of evidence for such models, assumptions (good or bad) built into the models, and perhaps consider alternate methods of education, such as staff rides mentioned in an earlier reply, that help a historian understand his own work.

As an example of such an approach, I recommend Gary Brueggeman's web site on the Roman army:


http://garyb.0catch.com/site_map.html

I warn you now, there are plenty of pop-ups, but this web site uses several different modeling techniques in order to attempt to answer some basis questions about Roman Warfare that still have not found satisfactory answers.

Whether one should study military tactics? That's a discussion for another post.

I would like to make a suggestion that is a level below Ensign Holwitt's suggestion for Zu to enlist in either the Army or the Marine Corps. You can learn more about tactics by participating as a reenactor or by just walking the battle sites on your own. I suspect you are going to learn some tactical insight that neither a book nor a lecturer can impart if you take a more active interest. To give a personal example, I never realized how much of an incompetent commander Burnside was until I walked the Fredericksburg battlefield.

First, the guilty 'showing my age and how I got interested in military history question'--is the title of this post (Tactics Too) a deliberate reference to the old Avalon Hill board wargame? If I recall correctly, Zu's complaint about the neglect of tactics has been raised on the level of research, not teaching, by Paddy Griffith and Steve Fratt (among others). That is, according to Griffith, we actually know a good deal less about how armies maneuvered and fought on the battlefield than we might, hence his book on _Battle Tactics of the Civil War_. So perhaps there is something to be said for spending more time and energy on the subject in military history classes. OTOH, I'm dubious about a course that focuses on tactics as such, particularly if it covers a long span of time and wide area of space.

Wow. My random thought certainly started a nice discussion.

I wasn't trying to suggest that video games or wargames alone would be good for a course, just that they are a unique medium that has yet to be exploited at all. I think that staff rides would be an excellent way of supplimenting book and computer learning with a real experience, but it could also be as easy as having the class walk through a few steps from a manual of arms on the oval (if it ever reopens).

I see military history as it is taught now as a chemistry class without the lab work, or a math class where all you do is read through ready-made problems and never do one on your own. I'd wager that the best bet, outside of joining the service, would be a class that incorporated books, movies, wargames, and battlefield visits into a cohesive discussion of tactics.

As a side note, just because a class attracts war buffs doesn't mean it can't be difficult or worthwhile. Professor Rosenstein's 504.01 class was full of guys who were just there because it was about war, and it was a challenging class. I'm sure that Professor Grimsley's 380 class was filled with lots of people who liked watching the History Channel, but it was one of my favorite classes here.

Zu, I would add one more type of instruction for your class about tactics. The army and marine corps make their officers actually plan operations at the Company, Battalion, Brigade, etc levels to facilitate a better understanding of tactics. Perhaps adding a portion to the course that would require students to serve on a mock staff as S1, S2, S3, S4, etc and write the operations orders, war game on a map, and draw graphics. Actually planning this stuff on paper and acetate makes you think quite a bit about tactics and how you would maneuver forces. You pick a few key battles throughout history and go to town. Just a thought.

I think Zu is absolutely right when he says that having a class full of war buffs is not a bad thing. Having taken and taught courses, I know that it is much more fun to learn or teach in a class full of students who WANT to be there and are eager to learn about the subject matter, than it is to be in a required survey course.

The fact that this idea has sparked so much discussion is indicative that it has inherent merit. With some more intellectual give-and-take, which ultimately is the purpose of this blog, I think we can decide the degree to which tactics and more are appropriate as material for study.

To a certain degree, I think that a rudimentary discussion on the way a battle occurred is vital. I genuinely enjoyed watching Professor Guilmartin explain the course of events at Waterloo in his 580 and I have always been fascinated about the chain of events at other battles, which are usually discussed in most college courses I have been in. There are also a lot of myths about why battles turned out the way they did, which a college course should dispel. For instance, there are many people (including graduate students and full professors) who still believe that Admiral Togo won the decisive Battle of Tsushima by crossing the T. As a matter of fact, David Evans and Mark Peattie in KAIGUN empasize that the Japanese did not open fire and decimate the Russian fleet until they were actually on a parallel course. I first heard this myth when I was 11 or 12 years old. I just heard it again on Wednesday in a graduate seminar... it is myths like this, perpetuated in poor survey textbooks and other unreliable sources, that need to be addressed. As you can see, this myth and conversation are all about tactics. I am sure there are other examples out there.

Remember also, though, that college courses are meant to challenge students -- to force them to think about things they do not already know. At the faculty meeting that I brought up in an earlier post, will a professor really be able to justify a course on the minutiae of how old wars were fought to students who could already tell you everything you ever wanted to know, and more, about the Battle of the Saints? True, such a course may correct a whole hosts of myths, but I'm not sure that it will get past, because as Professor Grimsley has noted, this is a political world we live in.

As for the place of tactics in a general course on war, an instructor must weigh the emphasis they will give to tactics and other minutiae with the importance of ensuring the students get the big picture and don't get lost in the forest. It's all nice and good to know how Emory Upton breached the trench works at Spotsylvania, but students also should know about the causes of the Civil War and its long-term consequences. There is only so much that can be taught in 10 weeks. The student who wants to learn more, however, can always buy books, talk to the professor, and who knows, eventually become a graduate student and professor themselves.

"As for the place of tactics in a general course on war, an instructor must weigh the emphasis they will give to tactics and other minutiae with the importance of ensuring the students get the big picture and don't get lost in the forest. It's all nice and good to know how Emory Upton breached the trench works at Spotsylvania, but students also should know about the causes of the Civil War and its long-term consequences. There is only so much that can be taught in 10 weeks. The student who wants to learn more, however, can always buy books, talk to the professor, and who knows, eventually become a graduate student and professor themselves."

But that doesn't speak for a total exclusion of tactics. Yes, of course you must see the total forest and a course should make that the major theme. But at some point in the 10 week quarter, there should be some attention paid to looking in great detail at least one typical tactical tree so as to get some exposure to it. Then back to the big picture. Birds eye and worms eye both, if ye will. So, no you don't need to break down every battle in the civil war course down to every company. But maybe that should be done for at least one exemplar battle to give a flavor for it.

I have been following the comments with interest. The question that seems to remain unanswered is what is the objective of teaching tactics to students? I think military historians in academic settings have more at stake here than we generally acknowledge. All of us tend to enjoy re-hashing battles over a couple of beers or a cup of coffee. The risk, especially in developing a course solely devoted to the study of tactics, is that we further alienate ourselves from the community of historians. Focusing our attention only on the conduct of battle tempts other academics to view us as perhaps one step above ESPN post-game analysts. The challenge is to historicize the study of tactics and this can be done, in many instances, fairly easily. For example, one might approach the First World War by discussing the inability of civilians to envision such a conflict and the inability of most military experts to anticipate the course of action on the battlefield. Such an approach opens the door to an exploration of how opponents innovated tactically to resume the offensive throughout the war. Furthermore, I could envision teaching tactics to civilian students to communicate some sense of how the war was fought and what the experience of battle might have been like. In this instance, I would try to select a "typical" battle or two from a war to examine in greater detail.

As both an academic and a military officer, I would caution against the use of computer games to develop a historical understanding of tactics. That is not to say that these games could not serve a useful purpose. I firmly believe that, if approached correctly, computer simulations can sharpen the tactical mind. If a player, presumably familiar with his own forces, develops a thorough understanding of the manner in which an enemy fights, becomes familiar with the capabilities of various weapons and weapon systems, both friendly and enemy, learns how external forces such as weather, night-time illumination and terrain impact the battle, and finally, grasps the "rules" of the game, he or she can develop considerable decision-making skills applicable to any number of tactical situations. Likewise, these games may be used to illustrate certain limited concepts. The downside is extensive, though I will only mention a few problems here. Too often, students approach these games as exactly games. The players risk more because they do not have to defend themselves the next day from a possible enemy counterattack, achieving effective but unrealistic results in the context of a larger campaign. Furthermore, I have yet to encounter a computer game that does not equip an individual with a vastly greater situational awareness than his or her "counterpart" would have had in battle. Many computer games offer the "commander" the ability to direct forces at every subordinate echelon. This proves a very faulty reproduction of command relationships. Much more needs to be said about a wholistic approach to understanding tactics that incorporates a whole host of factors in battle that computer games fail to replicate. I sense, however, that I have already rambled for too long.