Celebrating the successful dissertation defense of "All for the King's Shilling," a reappraisal of the common soldier in Wellington's army during the Peninsular War of the Napoleonic conflict. Bottom line: Wellington's famous characterization of his troops as "the scum of the earth" does not withstand scrutiny.

From left to right: Ed Coss, the candidate (and soon to be Dr. Coss); Prof. John F. Guilmartin, Jr., the dissertation director; Prof. John A. Lynn of the University of Illinois (and also an adjunct professor in the Ohio State history department; and me, your humble blogger. (Click photo for a larger image.)

Sorry for the recent, unintended hiatus. I try to compose at least one blog entry a day, but obviously last week I didn't manage it. It figures that Ralph Luker's article in the current AHA Perspectives, Were There Blog Enough And Time, which has a nice mention of this blog, would appear at a time when I haven't posted for several days. But I hope to get back into the swing of things shortly--especially to flesh out Shadow Warriors and A Good Day to Die. In the meantime, I'll just have to plead to being swamped with "unbloggable" projects, which is probably the major drawback to keeping an academic blog of this sort.

Interesting recent debate on the ethics of torture. The two speakers were Prof. John Yoo (who teaches at Berkeley School of law, clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, and was deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department 2001-2003) and Prof. Jeremy Waldron (University Professor at Columbia University, who has critiqued the Bush Administration's approach to law in a forthcoming titled "Torture and positive law" that is to be published in the Columbia Law Review). A transcript is available at Ex Post. The debate is summarized and commented upon at Opinio Juris and Kenneth Anderson's Law of War and Just War Theory Blog (which is how I found it in the first place).

Just when you thought the world of Civil War prints had run out of kitsch: Springtime for Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Samuel Pepys was a naval administrator during the English Restoration and the first ever secretary of the Admiralty. He kept an extensive diary in code which was not discovered, deciphered, and published until the latter 1800s. The diary, which offers a fascinating picture of seventeenth-century England as well as an excellent window into the political, military, and naval affairs of the period, is being recreated at The Diary of Samuel Pepys.

MAJ Robert Bateman's most recent Letter from Baghdad is now online.

As a kid during World War II, my father read The War Adventure Series about the exploits of Dave Dawson, a dashing American pilot who flew with the Royal Air Force until the treacherous sons of Nippon bombed Pearl Harbor. After that he flew with the U.S. Army Air Corps. But either way, Dawson was always up to his ears in some secret mission on which the fate of great things depended. I read a couple of the books as a kid (Dave Dawson on Convoy Patrol and Dave Dawson at Singapore, to be exact). I was recently pleasantly surprised to find that the books are collectors' items--and bemused to learn that plans are in the works to revive the series. The first title? Dave Dawson at Umm Qasr: Fighting in Iraq with the Special Forces.

In a comment on Tactics Too, Donald Fleming wondered if the title might be a reference to the granddaddy of all modern strategy board games, Avalon Hill's Tactics II:



Bingo! That's just what I was thinking.

I confess, however, that I never owned or played a Tactics II. I cut my teeth on Bismarck (first published in 1962), which was actually not a bad recreation of the Royal Navy's hunt for the German battleship in May 1941.



I must have been nine or ten when I played it. I don't think I read C. S. Forester's nonfiction novel Sink the Bismarck for another couple of years, nor did I finally watch the 1960 docudrama Sink the Bismarck! until quite recently--last evening, in fact. Yet it gave me a feel for both the history and dynamics of the operation that was as good as if not better than these more traditional media forms.

Any war game, whether board- or computer-, is only as good as its design, and the second Avalon Hill game I owned showed a lot of the genre's weaknesses. Good games more or less recreate and reward playing by the operational and tactical rules of the campaign or battle they recreate.



Gettysburg (1964) did not, and its "fight until one side is eliminated" victory conditions invariably had the winning side chasing the last cavalry unit owned by the losing side 'round and 'round the map board until it could, literally, be cornered and destroyed.

Perhaps one of the better ways to use the computer games ZU mentions would be to have students critique them in light of what they learn from other sources.

Note: Avalon Hill is now defunct but remains beloved by many wargamers. The Avalon Hill Collection, for example, pays homage to the company and has good thumbnail summaries of most of its strategy board games.

A previous post, Tactics Too, has provoked some useful discussion of the extent to which tactics can and/or should be taught in military history courses and the means by which this could be done. Unmentioned so far is the staff ride, a focused battlefield tour that is used not only to discuss what happened historically but also to generate insights into some of the perennial issues of military leadership. The staff ride was pioneered by the German general staff in the late nineteenth century and adopted by other armed forces, including those of the United States. It was revived in the 1970s at the U.S. Army War College, chiefly by Prof. Jay Luvaas and Colonel Harold W. Nelson, and is now widely used; e.g., at West Point, where it is used to teach military history to cadets.






The photos above show COL Robert Doughty taking cadets on a tour of the region of Sedan, France, where in May 1940 German panzer divisions ruptured the French defensive lines. While I doubt that either my department's budget or that of my students would permit staff rides at so great a remove from Ohio, it does seem feasible to take students on staff rides of such places as Fort Meigs, a reconstructed War of 1812 fort near Toledo, Ohio; Perryville, a Civil War battlefield about five hours' drive from OSU in central Kentucky; or even Gettysburg, which is almost exactly seven hours' drive from OSU.

And that's just OSU. Other colleges and universities have their own opportunities. It might also be rewarding to pool our resources and offer staff rides to locations at which instructors and students from several colleges could rendezvous.

Resources for staff rides abound. See, for example:

USMA Department of History web page on the staff ride.

The Staff Ride, an official US Army publication by historian William Glenn Robertson (available in pdf format here).

The Cowpens Staff Ride and Battlefield Tour, an example of the genre.

Gettysburg: A Battlefield Guide, by Brooks D. Simpson and myself, which incorporates staff ride techniques into a guidebook for general readers.

"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.

On H-War the number of responses re "the canon of military history" is up to fifteen, and tends now to divide between objections to and defenses of the concept of a canon in this or any academic field. The responses are very thoughtful and worth reading. You can find them easily by linking to the H-War Discussion List for April 2005/sorted by subject and then reading the messages under "REPLY: The Canon of Military History?"

My inspiration for using the term "canon" goes back to a discussion in my department some years ago concerning a prospective hire in a certain field. The field was one of the oldest in academic history but in recent years had undergone revolutionary expansion and reorientation, to the point where its original intellectual boundaries and orientation were considered almost passé.

The question arose whether a particular candidate, whose work was at the "cutting edge" of the field, yet retained the ability to train graduate students in the older tradition, or "canon." I will omit the department's verdict on this point as irrelevant for present purposes. Besides, it's a question that military historians ought to address as a field. Granted that we wish the field to grow and expand intellectually and to open itself to new voices and approaches, is it nonetheless advisable--even indispensable--for historians to share a basic common understanding of the field and its intellectual landmarks?

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 (link not yet active)

Once military historians accept their relative position within the academy instead of railing impotently against it, it becomes possible to think realistically and strategically about how to build the field. Sure, the situation is tough--but things are tough all over. Ask any Asian historian. In most U.S. departments you'll find approximately one of then, straining under the burden of teaching everything there is to teach about the world's largest, most populated continent, to say nothing of the one with its oldest civilizations--and almost certainly assigned to teach the world history survey as well.

The situation of military history is tough, but surely no tougher than that, and certainly should not be analogous to the pre-political situation of the average Malaysian peasant (who form the subject of Scott's Weapons of the Weak).

What "weapons" do we military historians have available to us?

First, we can create strategic partnerships with faculty in other fields. I have mentioned Asian history but there are plenty of others, most particularly women's history, for reasons I'll deal with another time. Indeed, about the only fields that have no need to partner with us are the "golden children" of most history departments: United States history and European history, which at least within the American academic community are considered essential to gaining a high place in the rankings. And yet US and European history are at present the traditional, almost the only, areas of strength for academic military history.

Second, we can reach out to every working historian we can find whose work intersects with military history. Some will be glad of our attention and support. Some will disdain it. No matter: As Gandhi argued, the hand of cooperation is initially rejected because it is mistrusted. Keep extending it--keep choosing to cooperate, over and over again--and sooner or later we will begin to win over the skeptics.

Third, we can take appropriate advantage that the benefactors to colleges and universities in the United States (and probably elsewhere) are chiefly people who made their fortunes by inheriting it or, more usually, by building it themselves--and that either way their political values are conservative. It's unlikely that a college/university development office would encourage them to give money to support a military history program or endow a faculty chair in military history. Such offices basically pursue the agenda they are given by their institution's deans and department heads. But there is no reason at all why, say, the Society for Military History could not partner with such benefactors, build endowments, and create strategic partnerships with history departments willing to hire in military history. Sure, some departments might be resistant to such partnerships based on misconceptions about the field or political antipathy to it--but attention to Weapons 1 and 2 lays the groundwork for Weapon 3.

Fourth, we can make use, selectively and carefully, of the generally conservative mood of the United States in political terms to ensure that college and university officials who oppose military history on narrowly political grounds are reminded that they serve a larger society and that the larger society can and just might oblige them to pay a price for that kind of politically-motivated intransigence. Use of Weapon 4 will never work if done as a cudgel. The field of academic military history will first have to do the serious work of getting its own house in order and of removing the legitimate intellectual objections to our enterprise. That, I feel confident, will get us much further on our path than many of us think it will. Until that work is well advanced, those who oppose the field on political grounds can find intellectual cover to hide their opposition. But once the intellectual cover is removed, conservative political power can be used as leverage--just as historians of women, race, and ethnicity employed it during the 1960s.

Indeed, I think that from an objective point of view, the prospects of academic military history are good. Certainly that was the assessment of John Lynn, Jeffrey Grey and myself in our discussions at the Charleston SMH. And in any event, what are the reasons not to build the field? What are the reasons not to take constructive action? What are the reasons not to emulate the bold Great Captains whom so many of us secretly and not so secretly admire?

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An oddity of the field of military history is that although its principal focus is violence--the application of power in its most naked form--the field tends to reflect very little on the nature of power. In that respect, military historians resemble jet-setting playboys who have inherited their fortunes and therefore think very little about money.

The people with the most intimate knowledge of the value of a dollar (or a peso, pound, Euro, or shekel) are usually the poor. In the same way, the scholars who are the closest students of power tend to be those who study groups of people with very little power in the formal sense. Military historians measure power by the battalion, battleship, and megaton. Social historians often measure it by the gesture, the inflection, the choice of word.

This has been particularly true for fields like women's history, whose central intellectual puzzle has been to explain why a majority of the world's population has been, at most times and in most places, excluded from the levers of formal power. Historically, such power as women have possessed they have gained by exploiting small chinks and contradictions in patriarchy. I would argue that when the time came to gain a place within the academy, the emerging canon of women's history could be smoothly (though probably implicitly) translated into strategies for securing such a place. As a glance at almost any present-day history department will tell you, the effectiveness of these strategies cannot be gainsaid.

It might therefore behoove the field of military history to recognize that when it comes to comes to the academy, our position is analogous to that of the campesino, not the caudillo. And I recommend that we add to our reading list, if not our canon, the namesake book of this series of posts:



Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8 - Part 9 - Part 10

Visitation Day, a sort of prequel to Part 1 of this post, has so far produced 23 comments. A query to H-War on the same issue--"What falls within the shared definitions of what counts as relevant within the field of military history?"--has so far produced six replies. Where does the discussion stand as of now? In this installment I'll cover the H-War replies.

David A. Borys of the University of Alberta offers the view that the canon must include the innovations of Gustavus Adolphus, "specifically the implementation of standardized musket infantry training and the doctrine of combined arms in respect to artillery and musket infantry." Implicit within this formulation is the notion that "infantry," "artillery," "[military] doctrine" and "combined arms" are canonical terms. Military historians who complain about the obscure language used in other fields often fail to realize that the language of our field seems equally arcane to others.

Lt. Col. Philip Ridderhoff , currently on active duty in Okinawa, observes "that the first definition [of the canon] (rule or body of rules) has more applicability than the second (a collection of books). I think that the argument can be endless on what books or knowledge
provide an absolute foundation. For example, if a scholar spends his life researching Sun Tzu and ancient Chinese military campaigns, is he less a military historian if he knows not one whit about Clausewitz or WWII?" (Henry Sirotin makes a similar observation.)

George Eaton, an AFSC Command Historian (whatever that is: I confess I can't crack the acronym), has no such hesitation about considering the canon in terms of indispensable books: "What a great question! Unfortunately, I think our answers are going to be cultural-centric. Most of us using this forum tend to be Euro-centric, so we will have different answers than those with an Asian, African, or other indiginous perspective. Here is a list of what I consider are some of the greats:

Jomini- The Art of War
Douhet- The Command of the Air
Mahan- The Influence of Sea Power Upon History
Machiavelli- The Prince
Sun Tzu- The Art of War
Parker- The Military Revolution
Brodie- Strategy in the Missile Age
Keegan- Face of Battle
Oman- The Art of War in the Middle Ages"

Interestingly, only three books on Eaton's list are works of military history. The rest are works of strategic thought--a related but different animal. And, commenting on Eaton's list, Nicholas Agrait remarks:

As a medievalist, I would say that:

1) We should use Keegan only with the utmost care and only to perhaps humanize warfare for students at an undergraduate level. Otherwise, the work has so many research and methodological problems that it would actually hinder one's understanding of Agincourt.

2) Oman's work should be used as an example of what not to read (along with Lot and Delbruck), and how not to study medieval military history.

3) As for the canon of Military History, I would include Maurice Keen, ed. Medieval Warfare, Contamine's War in the Middle Ages, and Jan Frans Verbruggen, "The Art of Warfare in Western Europe during the Middle Ages from the Eighth Century to 1340."

John T. Kuehn, a professor at the U.S. Command and Staff College has a perspective that I found so useful I quote it here in full:

In his query Professor Grimsley has implicitly divided the "canon" of military history into two categories: theory and practice/narrative. A third category might be a combination of the two or --more broadly -- the always useful category of "other."

I would offer the work of Sunzi and Mao as certainly belonging to theory part of the canon. I would also add Jomini, Mahan, Corbett, and Douhet. For those who question the influence of Jomini on things military and therefore military history itself I comment by one of my students [a major going back to Iraq] might suffice: "We talk the Clausewitzian talk but we walk the Jominian walk." See Williamson Murray's comments in this regard at Clausewitz and Computers .

If I were to boil this down, I'd say that an indispensable point of departure for the canon would have to be Peter Paret (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy.

I would also add that the thought of Jominians loose in the Sunni Triangle is a disquieting one.

Part 1 - Part 2