“Pretty soon, it may become virtually impossible to find military-history professors who study war with the aim of understanding why one side won and the other side lost,” says Frederick Kagan [in "Sounding Taps"], a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who taught at West Point for ten years. That’s bad news not only for those with direct ties to this academic sub-discipline, but also for Americans generally, who may find that their collective understanding of past military operations falls short of what the war-torn present demands.
Come again??
Historians capable of teaching operational military history are scarcely in short supply. I know of no one trained in a military history program who lacks that ability. But operational military history — the study of campaigns and battles — is incomplete without bringing to bear the context in which those operations take place. One cannot understand the Western Front in 1914-1918, for example, without understanding the powerful nationalism and Edwardian cultural factors that enabled the belligerents to sacrifice millions of their youth on the killing fields of Verdun and Passchendaele.
Similarly, one cannot understand how the United States actually outclassed Nazi Germany in terms of mobilization because it had the flexibility to modify traditional gender norms to introduce millions of women into the work force, whereas the rigidity of German ideology led to a preference for forced labor by people from occupied countries or in concentration camps, rather than — as Albert Speer fruitlessly urged — the greater use of German women who were better motivated and, by dint of being fluent German speakers, better able to understand instructions.
This business of the serious study of war has already been discussed here and here.
2 Comments
Mark, I appreciate your thoughts on the Miller piece. I wonder if you are aware of the substantial importance that military history, diplomatic history, and security studies topics hold in the publications of the The Historical Society. Often when I mention this resource to fellow military historians (such as, did you see Peter Paret’s comments on Clausewitz in Historically Speaking?) I get a funny look. Would I get the same from you…or more to the point, from Miller? BTW, enjoyed your chapter in the Murray and Knox anthology. vr, John T. Kuehn, Assistan Professor of Military History
U.S. Army Command and General Staff College
I’m a member of The Historical Society, so your point is well taken. Its journal and newsletter are both terrific — loads more vital, interesting, and useful than the stodgy American Historical Review.
Readers of this blog unfamiliar with The Historical Society should seriously consider joining. Annual dues are $70 for faculty, $35 for students, $90 outside U.S. For that you get both the Journal of the Historical Society and Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society.