About a month ago, Fred Kagan published a short essay entitled “Why Military History Matters” that appeared on the web site of the American Enterprise Institute. Fred is one of the brightest military historians working today and his views are always worth a look. If you read the essay, you’ll find that Fred has two main points: First, to support their preferences, policymakers frequently deploy military history in questionable ways, and consequently an informed citizenry needs to have an independent grasp of military history. Second, the most useful form of military history is operational military history.
The first point is not exactly new. I encountered it from the time I began studying military history as a college undergraduate. The second is kind of odd. Here’s how Fred explains it (after the obligatory lament that military history receives short shrift in the academy):
To the extent that universities offer courses on military history, moreover, they are more likely to be “war and society” courses than studies of operational military history. The difference is extremely important. “War and society,” also sometimes called “new military history” (although it is by now decades old), normally studies everything about war except for war itself: how soldiers are recruited or conscripted, how they feel about war, how they and others write about it, how war affects society, politics and economics, gender and war, and so on. These studies are worthy and valid, and their conclusions can be very important. They are not a substitute, however, for the serious study of war itself.
Like any major area of human endeavor, the study of war has its own language and set of concepts. The minutiae of the military language — unit sizes and nomenclature, acronyms and abbreviations, typologies of military activity — are obscure enough to confuse casual observers. Thus throughout Operation Iraqi Freedom, correspondents embedded with military units sometimes misidentified those units because they did not understand the abstruse system of nomenclature the military uses. They can be excused for the error: probably few people outside the military could explain the hierarchical relationship of brigades, regiments, battalions, squadrons, troops, and companies.
The deeper and more important concepts are even less accessible. Words commonly used in daily speech, such as “strategy,” “operations,” and “tactics,” have technical meanings in the military lexicon different from their ordinary usage. The “Battle of Stalingrad,” for example, was really an operational-level undertaking (the Soviets, in fact, called it “Operation Uranus”). “Operation Iraqi Freedom” took place at the strategic level, whereas “Operation Anaconda” (conducted as part of “Operation Enduring Freedom,” the strategic-level attack on the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan) was a tactical mission. It normally takes West Point cadets the better part of a semester devoted to the study of the military art to understand this language.
Recent fascination with the idea of change and new approaches in warfare have larded military-speak with even more opaque phrases: “effects-based operations,” “network-centric warfare,” “system-of-systems,” “revolution in military affairs,” and so on. Military experts both civilian and uniformed toss such phrases around with abandon, but they convey little to the uninitiated.
I hardly know where to begin trying to untangle this part of Fred’s argument. To begin with, he creates a false dichotomy between “war and society” and “operational military history.” In my experience, you can’t understand the second except within the context of the first. It would be impossible, for instance, to grasp the battle of Stalingrad without first understanding that it was fought between two totalitarian societies. It would be impossible to understand the point of Operation Barbarossa without understanding Nazi ideology, impossible to understand the purpose of the 1942 German offensive without understanding the Nazi desire for economic autarky, and impossible to understand Hitler’s baleful influence on the whole campaign, especially Stalingrad, without understanding the fuhrerprinzip and his successful pre-war subjugation of the German high command, especially the Fritsch-Blomberg Affair of 1938. None of these fit the definition of operational military history.
Moreover, in my own experience — and I think that of many others — it is possible to teach oneself operational military history; such is not the case with “war and society” history. I spent my teenage years devouring operational military history. By the time I was a college freshman I knew all about “unit sizes and nomenclature, acronyms and abbreviations, [and] typologies of military activity.” I learned these things not just from books but also from Avalon Hill war games. The first course I took in military history was at the upper-division level and I scarcely attended class half the time. Nevertheless I got an A in the course, chiefly because of its emphasis on operational military history. I could never have gotten away with such a thing in a war and society course.
Moreover, I would argue that an informed citizenry needs war and society history even more than it needs operational military history. An adequate understanding of the Global War on Terror, for instance, is much more dependent on a knowledge of the problems of Middle Eastern societies, which have done so much to generate militant Islam, than it is on the capabilities of Delta Force. An ability to assess the morality of the current Israeli campaign against Hezbollah requires a grasp of the ethics of war, especially as embodied in just war doctrine, even more than it does a grasp of the capabilities of Israeli F-16s and self-propelled howitzers.
Finally, there’s the practical matter of what to teach and how to teach it. There’s no administrator telling academic military historians what they can and cannot teach. Military historians, like other academics, have wide latitude in terms of choosing their subject matter and their approach to it. The limiting factor is really students. Courses in military history, like most college courses, are electives. Students can take them or not at their whim. Fred (who has taught at West Point) avers that it takes even military cadets most of a semester to learn the inside language of operational history. If I tried to do that, it would be the first and last time I saw most of my students. And to the extent they grasped it, it would be like learning the periodic table of elements but no actual chemistry.
At the end of the day, it seems to me that the only viable approach to military history is to blend “war and society” with operational history, and to emphasize the former more than the latter.
14 Comments
It would be impossible, for instance, to grasp the battle of Stalingrad without first understanding that it was fought between two totalitarian societies.
It depends on what “level of understanding” you hope to achieve. You can certainly “grasp” the Battle of Stalingrad at an operational / tactical level without any understanding of the broader social context. (All you need to do to gain this understanding is play Drive on Stalingrad or Streets of Stalingrad, heh heh heh.) Histories that state little more than “this division / regiment / battalion went here and did this on this date” have certainly been written. For example, David Glantz, From the Don to the Dnepr is of this type. It does not discuss social / political / ideological issues, it focuses on which Soviet units went where, at what time, and how the Germans responded. Do you argue that someone who reads such a history does not understand the Battle of Stalingrad at all? Yes, such a person’s understanding is incomplete, but why is it incomplete in a worse way than the understanding of someone who knows all about totalitarian dictators and Nazi economics but does not know how and why Manstein’s backhand blow frustrated the Soviet push to the Dnepr?
To use another example, look at the Army Green Books – the official history of WW2. My recollection is that those books have little if any discussion of the social and political context (“democracy army” vs. “totalitarian army”), do not discuss ideology, sequester economics into separate books, and have very very limited discussion of Hitler’s influence or FDR’s influence on strategy and operations. They are, in short, straight-up operational history. VII Corps attacked towards Marigny, and the remnants of Panzer Lehr opposed them, that sort of thing. Do you argue that such histories are in some way “invalid”, and that people who read them have no understanding of what the US Army did in World War II? Person A knows everything in the Green Books but nothing about social issues on the home front. Person B knows nothing about what’s in the Green Books, but everything about the US home front. Which person has the “better” understanding (or less incomplete understanding) of the war? Why should academia strive to produce a lot of Person Bs and no Person As?
I grant you that operational histories of this sort are not sufficient to give the reader a full understanding of the war, and are highly unfashionable in academic circles. But, (and I think this is Kagan’s point) they are absolutely necessary in order to understand the war properly. I took a class in undergrad where the focus was essentially “race, class, gender, and labor struggles on the home front” plus “the Holocaust, and why the Allies didn’t do enough to stop it”. There was minimal discussion of what the armies, navies, and air forces actually did during the war, which is of central importance to the study of the war in my view. In short, the professor emphasized the “war and society” and greatly de-emphasized the operational history (as you suggest doing), and I strongly believe this approach cheated his students. The students who were especially cheated were the ones who were not like you and me – they did not come into the course with a strong understanding of operational history and they did not gain such an understanding (or indeed any understanding) of operational history from the course.
The vast majority of students are not, after all, wargamers and history geeks. You cannot assume they have ANY understanding of operational history from the get-go. They won’t get it anywhere else, and where should they get it other than in a military history course?
Enoch, many thanks for a very thoughtful comment. But isn’t your argument predicated on a dichotomy between “war and society” and “operational” military history? That’s a dichotomy I explicitly reject as false, though I concede that my post may have inadvertently resurrected it by the back door.
I can’t speak to the course you took that de-emphasized operational history so greatly. In the courses that I’ve taught, I’ve found that the optimum approach is usually to walk students through a couple of representative operations. To omit them altogether is, I agree, unwise. But to discuss a lot of operations causes more bewilderment than enlightenment to students who aren’t already “wargamers and history geeks.” It also comes at the expense of context.
There’s another point I’d like to make. Some years ago Allan Millett and Williamson Murray assembled a team of historians to examine military effectiveness in the two world wars and interwar perod. Their findings took the form of three volumes. Each volume focused on eight nations and their performance at the political, strategic, operational, and tactical levels of war. The study’s overall conclusion was that mistakes at the political and strategic levels could not be retrieved at the operational and tactical levels. (Think of the superior battlefield performance of the Germans in two calamitous world wars.) That strikes me as an excellent argument for emphasizing the political and strategic over the operational and tactical levels. While I think that societal issues influence war at all levels, the influence is especially pronounced at the political and strategic levels.
One thing that strikes me about Kagan’s argument is that it really only supports teaching recent American military history. “The minutiae of the military language” changes from place to place, and learning about Soviet Fronts or Mongolian tumen gives a student relatively little assistance in decoding modern military lingo. The same problem applies with terms like “strategy” or “operations,” whose definitions regularly change with the historical context.
There’s a disconnect between trying to teach a sort of basic “military literacy” and solving the problem Kagan
sees with the use of history in his introductory bullet points. A military history course that fails to teach some operational history is probably not the best it can be, but neither learning the organisation of the US army or the technical meaning of “operations” is going to solve the larger problem Kagan describes – after all, we can assume both Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld knew the difference between a regiment and a brigade already.
Stephen, you’re right. As expressed in his essay, Fred’s argument does seem to support the teaching of recent military history. I doubt, however, if he really believes that: His father, Donald Kagan (with whom he has co-written a book) is a world authority on the Peloponnesian War. I imagine Fred’s argument is better made in his forthcoming book, Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy (New York: Encounter Books, 2006), which Fred cites as an effort to “demystify” such concepts as “operational military history, military theory, and the study of contemporary operations.”
Ironically, Fred is making his appeal for a citizenry capable of thinking independently about military subjects by way of the American Enterprise Institute, a well-known conservative think tank. In my experience, these think tanks, like their liberal counterparts, are not in the business of generating independent thought but rather of providing support for a predetermined point of view. In this respect, the wonderful thing about focussing on “war itself” is that it forecloses discussion on the restraint or elimination of war, the curbing of defense budgets, and so on.
I think he was speaking not so much that other strata of war shouldn’t be studied with much attention, but that operational history (I am thinking of several David Glantz lectures I have been fortunate to attend over the years) also needs to be part of the mix.
I believe Professor Grimsley’s approach is correct. Operational history, while interesting, is something that should be taught and discussed only when time permits. Since most survey courses cover a broad stretch of time, such a focus on operational details such as the nomenclature of units might be too-much-information, particularly since, for instance, a corps in the 21st century army does not exactly mean what it did in the 19th century army.
The study of war should be holistic and focus first on broad topics. What were the goals of a warring nation? Why did national leaders perceive that conflict would resolve those goals? How did the leadership of the armed forces map out a plan that accomplished the goals of their national leaders? How did war happen? What were the resources with which the nation went to war and how did a nation call up its resources in time of war (or did it?). To take Enoch’s example: As neat as Manstein’s “backhand blow” was, what were the Germans and the Soviets doing there to begin with? Why was Stalingrad so important to begin with? Why did it end up becoming so much more important?
To take another example: I once met a student who knew all about the major battles of the Civil War. He loved the stuff. But when I asked him to explain why the war started, i.e., why the North refused to let the South secede and why the South seceded, and what, in particular, were the Constitutional questions upon which the war rested, all I got was: “Uhhhhh.”
As far as operations are concerned, I think more emphasis should be placed on relevance to overall strategy, logistcs, prior planning, and intelligence.
If, by some chance, you have time to fully elaborate on the tactics, etc., of such a campaign, great. But trying to do so in a single class period can be pretty confusing, particularly for students who have never ever had anything to do with the military (and even those who had will find operations beyond their immediate interest to be like a foreign language).
I would like to recommend, particularly for active duty military servicemen/historians, Williamson Murray and Richard Hart Sinnreich’s recent edited volume “The Past as Prologue: The Importance of History to the Military Profession”. Although perhaps not as pertinent for the lay civilian, I think the various authors make a compelling case for the avid study of military history by both civilian policy makers and military professionals.
An adequate understanding of the
Global War on Terror, for instance, is
much more dependent on a knowledge of the problems of Middle Eastern
societies, which have done so much to generate militant Islam, than it
is on the capabilities of Delta Force. An ability to assess the
morality of the current Israeli campaign against Hezbollah requires a
grasp of the ethics of war, especially as embodied in just war
doctrine, even more than it does a grasp of the capabilities of Israeli
F-16s and self-propelled howitzers.
I agree that Delta Force haigiography isn’t particularly useful,
however, independent of nominal location and putative scope, “war on terror” as a conceptual
framework does not do well operationally.
Further, “morality” is not the best critical approach to the operations
of a resistance organization and an occupying power.
Air and artillary
operations against dispersed, entrenched, reinforced infantry do not
attrit effectively. Operational practices that are ineffective against
opposition forces should be viewed with the presumption that its
planners were aware of the limitations, and are pursuing other goals.
FYI, here is the text of the IDF Response to Events in Qana:
Responsibility
for any and all casualties among uninvolved Lebanese
civilians lies squarely on the shoulders of Hezbollah, which abuses
civilians as human shields, and on the Lebanese government which fails
to prevent this.
Incidental high CEP rocket artillery against FEBA targets do not
attrit effectively or provide area denial. The same guidance applies to
the presumption of its planners.
The May 2000 withdrawal of Tsahal from all of
Lebanon was caused by Hezbollah (paraphrasing Al Jazeera’s summary).
The Summer 2006 incursion of Tsahal into Lebanon is probably going to
have the same outcome.
I think someone’s missed a key point that Kagan is trying to make, so let’s try a pop quiz: What do you call it? Is it: a. The Global War on Terrorism; 2) just another round of fascist Western colonialism (or similar Marxist/socialist/IWW ‘keep them down’ critique); or -> a fight against Islamic fundamentalism (Salafism/Wahhabism/Qutbism) that needs no provocation to hate and kill you?
Pick one and defend it.
Kagan (or the editor) says in the subtitle “Far from being simply an academic study, military history powerfully shapes the way decision-makers and the
American public think about the war in which we are engaged.”
I read this as being less an argument about the merits of the current academic rage versus the study of the operational art, than a discussion of how an understanding of the operational art will inform the fight.
God forbid, I think Kagan may feel the academy ought to discuss winning the war, whatever it calls it. Do I detect a bias?
“To take another example: I once met a student who knew all about the major battles of the Civil War. He loved the stuff. But when I asked him to explain why the war started, i.e., why the North refused to let the South secede and why the South seceded, and what, in particular, were the Constitutional questions upon which the war rested, all I got was: “Uhhhhh.””
First, I agree with you that the other levels on the continuum need to be a large part of the curriculum. From grand strategy to tactics. However a friend this year had a college level class where the instructor (a very good social historian) talked about the union “submarine” used when the monitor fought the merrimack. There needs to be at least some minimal operational understanding.
As for Qana,
The IDF doesn’t operate under Christian Just War doctrine. It has its own concept called tohar haneshek. Hizballah operates under an Islamist philosophy, which is not exactly cuddly. But, one could argue that the current IDF air campaign has something to do with the current IDF chief of staff and his philosophy, which derives from operational air power theory stuff:
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2006/07/post.html
“… a friend this year had a college level class where the instructor (a very good social historian) talked about the union ’submarine’ used when the monitor fought the merrimack. There needs to be at least some minimal operational understanding.”
I am always amused by incidents like that, but I also regard them as part-and-parcel of teaching and learning. When I was a teaching assistant, the lecturer I worked for (also a social historian) used a History Channel (oh no!) video about the start of World War II to discuss the origins of the Second World War. The other TAs and I got a very good laugh when the program stated that Adolf Hitler was elected chancellor and then given substantial power by the “ailing and senile German President, Otto von Bismarck”, not Paul von Hindenburg. As I quipped later to my students: “Bismarck definitely would have been ailing and senile at that point — being that he had been dead for quite some time when Hitler was elected.”
I’m guessing that the course your friend was taking was a U.S. History survey course. I’m actually surprised that the instructor even mentioned MONITOR vs. VIRGINIA, but more power to them. As for getting the facts of that battle wrong, I’m not terribly sure it’s a big deal. First of all, most of those students weren’t going to remember it. Second of all, I’m guessing that it didn’t come up on the exam. Third of all, if it had been an important matter in the class, I would hope that a more knowledgable student would have talked to the teacher afterward about clarification. Finally, if a student did become intrigued in the whole battle thanks to the teacher’s comments, then he or she would study it on their own and learn more about it, which is always a good thing.
College-level instructors are just as apt to get things wrong that have little to do with their field of speciality as anyone else. I had a very good military history professor who made the mistake of stating that the United States started building ships-of-the-line when the U.S. Navy was re-founded in the early 1790s. In fact, the first U.S. Navy ship-of-the-line didn’t even make it in time for the Second Barbary Wars, but on the other hand, it wasn’t a major deal. The important thing was the fact that yes, before the early 1790s, the U.S. had no effective way to defend its maritime trade and protect its overseas citizens and interests. With the establishment of a small U.S. Navy, on the other hand, the United States began taking the steps towards becoming a world presence.
Had your friend been taking a course on naval history, obviously his teacher’s gaffe regarding MONITOR would be far worse. But as he wasn’t, and as I suspect the teacher did not discuss (a) the importance of the potential breaking of the Union blockade by VIRGINIA, (b) the impact on naval warfare by the battles of 8 and 9 March 1862, or (c) the importance of civilian shipmaking industry and civilian design ingenuity in creating MONITOR, I once again have to say that I don’t think getting this small detail wrong in a course on the big-picture history of the United States was such a big deal.
College courses are like fractions — you are stuck teaching to the lowest common denominator. If you want more focus and detail, you have to get it through independent study and graduate school.
I have certainly made my share of errors (on this page last week even!), but I also don’t have aspirations beyond being a civil servant, part time history buff, a (hopefully) good spouse and to serve my Cause.
“I read this as being less an argument about the merits of the current academic rage versus the study of the operational art, than a discussion of how an understanding of the operational art will inform the fight.”
Good operational history (the best class I ever had in my life was Prof. Murray’s WW1 and WW2 class) very much covers that angle, while also fitting it into the bigger picture.
Hi Mark.
1. Would it be fair to say that the vast majority of academic military historians already appreciate the need for teaching all levels (tactics to grand strategy and military culture), whereas historians not trained in military history quite readily accept in practice the false dichotomy of W&S-vs.-operational history? I’m thinking Kagan’s audience for this piece isn’t academic military historians (the already-converted), but non-military historians and (more likely) policy-makers, non-academics…
And if there are academic military historians whose teaching still focuses solely on the operational level and below (though I’d be surprised if a military history course didn’t focus on strategic/grand strategic ideas at least), is that military history’s ‘fault’ or is the limiting factor less student interest (I was given wide lattitude here to teach the students drums and trumpets if I wanted to) than academic history’s ‘ghettoization’ of the subject and thinking “anyone can teach military history (read adjunct or a conscripted new young faculty or one already-tenured)” vs. hiring tenure-track faculty who are trained in academic military history?
2. I am however puzzled by Kagan’s emphasis on *operational* history, since his three errors at the beginning of the article seem to focus more on strategic/grand strategic issues – plus he points out their error of losing the historical context, which is largely beyond the operational level. His article seems to be more about the need for strategic rather than strictly operational history, even though he labels it operational. Making that change, is his point still valid? W&S history is usually quite separate from even the (grand) strategic level, at least in its scholarship.
3. We can’t rely on the vast majority of our students to have even basic military literacy (at least I can’t from my experience thus far – the SMH panel on the state of British military history this past May said the same thing with their incoming ‘War Studies’ majors, ditto Russell H. at Hawaii). One doesn’t have to go into gory detail, but I’d think a basic understanding of the levels of war, units and rank hierarchies, etc. would be broadly relevant to military history in any period, and if we want to encourage students to be critically-thinking citizens. I think it’s important for students to understand, for example, the difference between tactical surprise and operational/strategic surprise, as we saw journalists several years back asking how ever could the US military find itself surprised by the enemy? Clearly the war is lost as of D+5 because a unit was ambushed! (Not to be a war-booster I should say). As a result I am including a Military Literacy quiz in my “European Warfare 1337-1815″ course with some of the basic terms we’ll encounter (I do a more general Historical Literacy equivalent in my Western Civ courses).
Personally, I’m still trying to figure out what exactly to teach for my “European Warfare 1337-1815″ course – right now it’s pretty much a hodgepodge of all levels (including some famous personalities and a few battles/sieges). I have encountered the allure of “face of battle” history among students especially, so I noted Kagan’s comments on that. My students (and anyone who watches TV news or recent movies) have easily ‘taught themselves’ the face of battle type of social history of combat. I’d think fog of war/friction etc. would be very well illustrated with operational history, as an antidote to wishful-thinking invasion plans (past and present).
On the other hand, my “Religion, War and Peace in Early Modern Europe” course is humming along nicely with its narrower focus. And, à propos this discussion, it’s interesting to note that there’s extremely little scholarship on how religion affected the *conduct* of European war in the early modern period (vs. the issue of causes of war, and what specific religious authorities thought of war/peace, and how religious rituals influenced crowd violence) – in other words, here at least operational history has really been ignored. This despite all the conventional wisdom of it being clearly an “age of religious wars.”
But I’ve babbled on long enough.
Hi Jamel,
I think Fred’s de facto audience was probably prospective readers of his fortcoming book, at least those who work inside the Beltway as policymakers or analysts. But he plainly approached the subject by way of criticizing the way military history is taught in civilian academe, and by definition, that history is taught by academics. Since I incline to agree with you that academic military historians — whether formally or self-trained — already consider war at a variety of levels, including the operational, this part of his essay struck me as gratuitous.
It’s possible that Fred’s essay was an imperfect springboard to do what I hoped to accomplish, namely spark a discussion about the relative weight to give to operational history in our military history courses. I actually think that Fred’s use of the term “operational” was unfortunate — the sort of jam one often gets into when writing a short piece — and what he really meant was a focus on strategic policy-making and military thought as well as operational art.
I still think that the separation of “war and society” from strategic/operational military history is artificial. It’s certainly true that books and articles may focus on one or the other, but that’s not unusual in published work, especially monographs. When you look at synthetic works, however, you almost invariably see a cross-pollinization between the two. The Making of Strategy, edited by Williamson Murray, Alvin Bernstein, and MacGregor Knox, for example, discusses in detail how such things as religion, ideology, and the nature of a given regime fundamentally influence the process of creating strategy. And as we both know, neither Wick, Al, nor Mac would describe themselves as war and society types. They’re simply good military historians.
I won’t belabor my comment by responding to yours on a point-by-point basis. But it is very useful to have a practicing military historian weigh in on this issue. Thanks!
1) AEI.
2) Kagan.
There is no need for 3.