Posted on 05/29/2011 5:16:54 PM PDT by neverdem
Military history teaches us about honor, sacrifice, and the inevitability of conflict.
Try explaining to a college student that Tet was an American military victory. Youll provoke not a counterargumentlet alone an assentbut a blank stare: Who or what was Tet? Doing interviews about the recent hit movie 300, I encountered similar bewilderment from listeners and hosts. Not only did most of them not know who the 300 were or what Thermopylae was; they seemed clueless about the Persian Wars altogether.
Its no surprise that civilian Americans tend to lack a basic understanding of military matters. Even when I was a graduate student, 30-some years ago, military historyunderstood broadly as the investigation of why one side wins and another loses a war, and encompassing reflections on magisterial or foolish generalship, technological stagnation or breakthrough, and the roles of discipline, bravery, national will, and culture in determining a conflicts outcome and its consequenceshad already become unfashionable on campus. Today, universities are even less receptive to the subject.
This state of affairs is profoundly troubling, for democratic citizenship requires knowledge of warand now, in the age of weapons of mass annihilation, more than ever.
I came to the study of warfare in an odd way, at the age of 24. Without ever taking a class in military history, I naively began writing about war for a Stanford classics dissertation that explored the effects of agricultural devastation in ancient Greece, especially the Spartan ravaging of the Athenian countryside during the Peloponnesian War. The topic fascinated me. Was the strategy effective? Why assume that ancient armies with primitive tools could easily burn or cut trees, vines, and grain on thousands of acres of enemy farms, when on my family farm in Selma, California, it took me almost an hour to fell a mature fruit tree with a sharp modern ax? Yet even if the invaders couldnt starve civilian populations, was the destruction still harmful psychologically? Did it goad proud agrarians to come out and fight? And what did the practice tell us about the values of the Greeksand of the generals who persisted in an operation that seemingly brought no tangible results?
I posed these questions to my prospective thesis advisor, adding all sorts of further justifications. The topic was central to understanding the Peloponnesian War, I noted. The research would be interdisciplinarya big plus in the modern universitydrawing not just on ancient military histories but also on archaeology, classical drama, epigraphy, and poetry. I could bring a personal dimension to the research, too, having grown up around veterans of both world wars who talked constantly about battle. And from my experience on the farm, I wanted to add practical details about growing trees and vines in a Mediterranean climate.
Yet my advisor was skeptical. Agrarian wars, indeed wars of any kind, werent popular in classics Ph.D. programs, even though farming and fighting were the ancient Greeks two most common pursuits, the sources of anecdote, allusion, and metaphor in almost every Greek philosophical, historical, and literary text. Few classicists seemed to care any more that most notable Greek writers, thinkers, and statesmenfrom Aeschylus to Pericles to Xenophonhad served in the phalanx or on a trireme at sea. Dozens of nineteenth-century dissertations and monographs on ancient warfareon the organization of the Spartan army, the birth of Greek tactics, the strategic thinking of Greek generals, and much morewent largely unread. Nor was the discipline of military history, once central to a liberal education, in vogue on campuses in the seventies. It was as if the university had forgotten that history itself had begun with Herodotus and Thucydides as the story of armed conflicts.
What lay behind this academic lack of interest? The most obvious explanation: this was the immediate post-Vietnam era. The public perception in the Carter years was that America had lost a war that for moral and practical reasons it should never have foughta catastrophe, for many in the universities, that it must never repeat. The necessary corrective wasnt to learn how such wars started, went forward, and were lost. Better to ignore anything that had to do with such odious business in the first place.
The nuclear pessimism of the cold war, which followed the horror of two world wars, also dampened academic interest. The postwar obscenity of Mutually Assured Destruction had lent an apocalyptic veneer to contemporary war: as President Kennedy warned, Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind. Conflict had become something so destructive, in this view, that it no longer had any relation to the battles of the past. It seemed absurd to worry about a new tank or a novel doctrine of counterinsurgency when the press of a button, unleashing nuclear Armageddon, would render all military thinking superfluous.
Further, the sixties had ushered in a utopian view of society antithetical to serious thinking about war. Government, the military, business, religion, and the family had conspired, the new Rousseauians believed, to warp the naturally peace-loving individual. Conformity and coercion smothered our innately pacifist selves. To assert that wars broke out because bad men, in fear or in pride, sought material advantage or status, or because good men had done too little to stop them, was now seen as antithetical to an enlightened understanding of human nature. What difference does it make, in the words of the much-quoted Mahatma Gandhi, to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?
The academic neglect of war is even more acute today. Military history as a discipline has atrophied, with very few professorships, journal articles, or degree programs. In 2004, Edward Coffman, a retired military history professor who taught at the University of Wisconsin, reviewed the faculties of the top 25 history departments, as ranked by U.S. News and World Report. He found that of over 1,000 professors, only 21 identified war as a specialty. When war does show up on university syllabi, its often about the race, class, and gender of combatants and wartime civilians. So a class on the Civil War will focus on the Underground Railroad and Reconstruction, not on Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. One on World War II might emphasize Japanese internment, Rosie the Riveter, and the horror of Hiroshima, not Guadalcanal and Midway. A survey of the Vietnam War will devote lots of time to the inequities of the draft, media coverage, and the antiwar movement at home, and scant the air and artillery barrages at Khe Sanh.
Those who want to study war in the traditional way face intense academic suspicion, as Margaret Atwoods poem The Loneliness of the Military Historian suggests:
Confess: its my profession
that alarms you.
This is why few people ask me to dinner,
though Lord knows I dont go out of my
way to be scary.
Historians of war must derive perverse pleasure, their critics suspect, from reading about carnage and suffering. Why not figure out instead how to outlaw war forever, as if it were not a tragic, nearly inevitable aspect of human existence? Hence the recent surge of peace studies (see The Peace Racket).
The universitys aversion to the study of war certainly doesnt reflect public lack of interest in the subject. Students love old-fashioned war classes on those rare occasions when theyre offered, usually as courses that professors sneak in when the choice of what to teach is left up to them. I taught a number of such classes at California State University, Stanford, and elsewhere. Theyd invariably wind up overenrolled, with hordes of students lingering after office hours to offer opinions on the battles of Marathon and Lepanto.
Popular culture, too, displays extraordinary enthusiasm for all things military. Theres a new Military History Channel, and Hollywood churns out a steady supply of blockbuster war movies, from Saving Private Ryan to 300. The postKen Burns explosion of interest in the Civil War continues. Historical reenactment societies stage historys great battles, from the Roman legions to the Wehrmachts. Barnes and Noble and Borders bookstores boast well-stocked military history sections, with scores of new titles every month. A plethora of websites obsess over strategy and tactics. Hit video games grow ever more realistic in their reconstructions of battles.
The public may feel drawn to military history because it wants to learn about honor and sacrifice, or because of interest in technologythe muzzle velocity of a Tiger Tanks 88mm cannon, for instanceor because of a pathological need to experience violence, if only vicariously. The importanceand challengeof the academic study of war is to elevate that popular enthusiasm into a more capacious and serious understanding, one that seeks answers to such questions as: Why do wars break out? How do they end? Why do the winners win and the losers lose? How best to avoid wars or contain their worst effects?
A wartime public illiterate about the conflicts of the past can easily find itself paralyzed in the acrimony of the present. Without standards of historical comparison, it will prove ill equipped to make informed judgments. Neither our politicians nor most of our citizens seem to recall the incompetence and terrible decisions that, in December 1777, December 1941, and November 1950, led to massive American casualties and, for a time, public despair. So its no surprise that today so many seem to think that the violence in Iraq is unprecedented in our history. Roughly 3,000 combat dead in Iraq in some four years of fighting is, of course, a terrible thing. And it has provoked national outrage to the point of considering withdrawal and defeat, as we still bicker over up-armored Humvees and proper troop levels. But a previous generation considered Okinawa a stunning American victory, and prepared to follow it with an invasion of the Japanese mainland itselfdespite losing, in a little over two months, four times as many Americans as we have lost in Iraq, casualties of faulty intelligence, poor generalship, and suicidal head-on assaults against fortified positions.
Its not that military history offers cookie-cutter comparisons with the past. Germanys World War I victory over Russia in under three years and her failure to take France in four apparently misled Hitler into thinking that he could overrun the Soviets in three or four weeksafter all, he had brought down historically tougher France in just six. Similarly, the conquest of the Taliban in eight weeks in 2001, followed by the establishment of constitutional government within a year in Kabul, did not mean that the similarly easy removal of Saddam Hussein in three weeks in 2003 would ensure a working Iraqi democracy within six months. The differences between the countriescultural, political, geographical, and economicwere too great.
Instead, knowledge of past wars establishes wide parameters of what to expect from new ones. Themes, emotions, and rhetoric remain constant over the centuries, and thus generally predictable. Athenss disastrous expedition in 415 BC against Sicily, the largest democracy in the Greek world, may not prefigure our war in Iraq. But the story of the Sicilian calamity does instruct us on how consensual societies can clamor for waryet soon become disheartened and predicate their support on the perceived pulse of the battlefield.
Military history teaches us, contrary to popular belief these days, that wars arent necessarily the most costly of human calamities. The first Gulf War took few lives in getting Saddam out of Kuwait; doing nothing in Rwanda allowed savage gangs and militias to murder hundreds of thousands with impunity. Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and Stalin killed far more off the battlefield than on it. The 1918 Spanish flu epidemic brought down more people than World War I did. And more Americansover 3.2 millionlost their lives driving over the last 90 years than died in combat in this nations 231-year history. Perhaps what bothers us about wars, though, isnt just their horrific lethality but also that people choose to wage themwhich makes them seem avoidable, unlike a flu virus or a car wreck, and their tolls unduly grievous. Yet military history also reminds us that war sometimes has an eerie utility: as British strategist Basil H. Liddell Hart put it, War is always a matter of doing evil in the hope that good may come of it. Warsor threats of warsput an end to chattel slavery, Nazism, fascism, Japanese militarism, and Soviet Communism.
Military history is as often the story of appeasement as of warmongering. The destructive military careers of Alexander the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, and Hitler would all have ended early had any of their numerous enemies united when the odds favored them. Western air power stopped Slobodan Miloevićs reign of terror at little cost to NATO forcesbut only after a near-decade of inaction and dialogue had made possible the slaughter of tens of thousands. Affluent Western societies have often proved reluctant to use force to prevent greater future violence. War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things, observed the British philosopher John Stuart Mill. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.
Indeed, by ignoring history, the modern age is free to interpret war as a failure of communication, of diplomacy, of talkingas if aggressors dont know exactly what theyre doing. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, frustrated by the Bush administrations intransigence in the War on Terror, flew to Syria, hoping to persuade President Assad to stop funding terror in the Middle East. She assumed that Assads belligerence resulted from our aloofness and arrogance rather than from his dictatorships interest in destroying democracy in Lebanon and Iraq, before such contagious freedom might in fact destroy him. For a therapeutically inclined generation raised on Oprah and Dr. Philand not on the letters of William Tecumseh Sherman and William Shirers Berlin Diaryproblems between states, like those in our personal lives, should be argued about by equally civilized and peaceful rivals, and so solved without resorting to violence.
Yet its hard to find many wars that result from miscommunication. Far more often they break out because of malevolent intent and the absence of deterrence. Margaret Atwood also wrote in her poem: Wars happen because the ones who start them / think they can win. Hitler did; so did Mussolini and Tojoand their assumptions were logical, given the relative disarmament of the Western democracies at the time. Bin Laden attacked on September 11 not because there was a dearth of American diplomats willing to dialogue with him in the Hindu Kush. Instead, he recognized that a series of Islamic terrorist assaults against U.S. interests over two decades had met with no meaningful reprisals, and concluded that decadent Westerners would never fight, whatever the provocationor that, if we did, we would withdraw as we had from Mogadishu.
In the twenty-first century, its easier than ever to succumb to technological determinism, the idea that science, new weaponry, and globalization have altered the very rules of war. But military history teaches us that our ability to strike a single individual from 30,000 feet up with a GPS bomb or a jihadists efforts to have his propaganda beamed to millions in real time do not necessarily transform the conditions that determine who wins and who loses wars.
True, instant communications may compress decision making, and generals must be skilled at news conferences that can now influence the views of millions worldwide. Yet these are really just new wrinkles on the old face of war. The improvised explosive device versus the up-armored Humvee is simply an updated take on the catapult versus the stone wall or the harquebus versus the mailed knight. The long history of war suggests no static primacy of the defensive or the offensive, or of one sort of weapon over the other, but just temporary advantages gained by particular strategies and technologies that go unanswered for a time by less adept adversaries.
So its highly doubtful, the study of war tells us, that a new weapon will emerge from the Pentagon or anywhere else that will change the very nature of armed conflictunless some sort of genetic engineering so alters mans brain chemistry that he begins to act in unprecedented ways. We fought the 1991 Gulf War with dazzling, computer-enhanced weaponry. But lost in the technological pizzazz was the basic wisdom that we need to fight wars with political objectives in mind and that, to conclude them decisively, we must defeat and even humiliate our enemies, so that they agree to abandon their prewar behavior. For some reason, no American general or diplomat seemed to understand that crucial point 16 years ago, with the result that, on the cessation of hostilities, Saddam Husseins supposedly defeated generals used their gunships to butcher Kurds and Shiites while Americans looked on. And because we never achieved the wars proper aimensuring that Iraq would not use its petro-wealth to destroy the peace of the regionwe have had to fight a second war of no-fly zones, and then a third war to remove Saddam, and now a fourth war, of counterinsurgency, to protect the fledgling Iraqi democracy.
Military history reminds us of important anomalies and paradoxes. When Sparta invaded Attica in the first spring of the Peloponnesian war, Thucydides recounts, it expected the Athenians to surrender after a few short seasons of ravaging. They didntbut a plague that broke out unexpectedly did more damage than thousands of Spartan ravagers did. Twenty-seven years later, a maritime Athens lost the war at sea to Sparta, an insular land power that started the conflict with scarcely a navy. The 2003 removal of Saddam refuted doom-and-gloom critics who predicted thousands of deaths and millions of refugees, just as the subsequent messy four-year reconstruction hasnt evolved as anticipated into a quiet, stable democracyto say the least.
The size of armies doesnt guarantee battlefield success: the victors at Salamis, Issos, Mexico City, and Lepanto were all outnumbered. Wars most savage momentsthe Allied summer offensive of 1918, the Russian siege of Berlin in the spring of 1945, the Battle of the Bulge, Hiroshimaoften unfold right before hostilities cease. And democratic leaders during warthink of Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and Richard Nixonoften leave office either disgraced or unpopular.
It would be reassuring to think that the righteousness of a cause, or the bravery of an army, or the nobility of a sacrifice ensures public support for war. But military history shows that far more often the perception of winning is what matters. Citizens turn abruptly on any leaders deemed culpable for losing. Public sentiment is everything, wrote Abraham Lincoln. With public sentiment nothing can fail. Without it nothing can succeed. He who molds opinion is greater than he who enacts laws. Lincoln knew that lesson well. Gettysburg and Vicksburg were brilliant Union victories that by summer 1863 had restored Lincolns previously shaky credibility. But a year later, after the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Petersburg, and Cold Harbor battlesCold Harbor claimed 7,000 Union lives in 20 minutesthe public reviled him. Neither Lincoln nor his policies had changed, but the Confederate ability to kill large numbers of Union soldiers had.
Ultimately, public opinion follows the ups and downsincluding the perception of the ups and downsof the battlefield, since victory excites the most ardent pacifist and defeat silences the most zealous zealot. After the defeat of France, the losses to Bomber Command, the U-boat rampage, and the fall of Greece, Singapore, and Dunkirk, Churchill took the blame for a war as seemingly lost as, a little later, it seemed won by the brilliant prime minister after victories in North Africa, Sicily, and Normandy. When the successful military action against Saddam Hussein ended in April 2003, over 70 percent of the American people backed it, with politicians and pundits alike elbowing each other aside to take credit for their prescient support. Four years of insurgency later, Americans oppose a now-orphaned war by the same margin. General George S. Patton may have been uncouth, but he wasnt wrong when he bellowed, Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. The American public turned on the Iraq War not because of Cindy Sheehan or Michael Moore but because it felt that the battlefield news had turned uniformly bad and that the price in American lives and treasure for ensuring Iraqi reform was too dear.
Finally, military history has the moral purpose of educating us about past sacrifices that have secured our present freedom and security. If we know nothing of Shiloh, Belleau Wood, Tarawa, and Chosun, the crosses in our military cemeteries are just pleasant white stones on lush green lawns. They no longer serve as reminders that thousands endured pain and hardship for our right to listen to what we wish on our iPods and to shop at Wal-Mart in safetyor that they expected future generations, links in this great chain of obligation, to do the same for those not yet born. The United States was born through war, reunited by war, and saved from destruction by war. No future generation, however comfortable and affluent, should escape that terrible knowledge.
What, then, can we do to restore the study of war to its proper place in the life of the American mind? The challenge isnt just to reform the graduate schools or the professoriate, though that would help. On a deeper level, we need to reexamine the larger forces that have devalued the very idea of military historyof war itself. We must abandon the naive faith that with enough money, education, or good intentions we can change the nature of mankind so that conflict, as if by fiat, becomes a thing of the past. In the end, the study of war reminds us that we will never be gods. We will always just be men, it tells us. Some men will always prefer war to peace; and other men, we who have learned from the past, have a moral obligation to stop them.
Studying War: Where to Start
While Thucydides Peloponnesian War, a chronicle of the three-decade war between Athens and Sparta, establishes the genre of military history, the best place to begin studying war is with the soldiers stories themselves. E. B. Sledges memoir of Okinawa, With the Old Breed, is nightmarish, but it reminds us that war, while it often translates to rot, filth, and carnage, can also be in the service of a noble cause. Elmer Bendiners tragic retelling of the annihilation of B-17s over Germany, The Fall of Fortresses: A Personal Account of the Most Daring, and Deadly, American Air Battles of World War II, is an unrecognized classic.
From a different wartime perspectivethat of the generalsU. S. Grants Personal Memoirs is justly celebrated as a model of prose. Yet the nearly contemporaneous Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman is far more analytical in its dissection of the human follies and pretensions that lead to war. Likewise, George S. Pattons War As I Knew It is not only a compilation of the eccentric generals diary entries but also a candid assessment of human nature itself.
Fiction often captures the experience of war as effectively as memoir, beginning with Homers Iliad, in which Achilles confronts the paradox that rewards do not always go to the most deserving in war. The three most famous novels about the futility of conflict are The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane, All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque, and August 1914, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. No work has better insights on the folly of war, however, than Euripides Trojan Women.
Although many contemporary critics find it passé to document landmark battles in history, one can find a storehouse of information in The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, by Edward S. Creasy, and A Military History of the Western World, by J. F. C. Fuller. Hans Delbrücks History of the Art of War and Russell F. Weigleys The Age of Battles center their sweeping histories on decisive engagements, using battles like Marathon and Waterloo as tools to illustrate larger social, political, and cultural values. A sense of high drama permeates William H. Prescotts History of the Conquest of Mexico and History of the Conquest of Peru, while tragedy more often characterizes Steven Runcimans spellbinding short account The Fall of Constantinople 1453 and Donald Morriss massive The Washing of the Spears, about the rise and fall of the Zulu Empire. The most comprehensive and accessible one-volume treatment of historys most destructive war remains Gerhard L. Weinbergs A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II.
Relevant histories for our current struggle with Middle East terrorism are Alistair Hornes superb A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 19541962, Michael Orens Six Days of War, and Mark Bowdens Black Hawk Down. Anything John Keegan writes is worth reading; The Face of Battle remains the most impressive general military history of the last 50 years.
Biography too often winds up ignored in the study of war. Plutarchs lives of Pericles, Alcibiades, Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Alexander the Great established the traditional view of these great captains as men of action, while weighing their record of near-superhuman achievement against their megalomania. Elizabeth Longfords Wellington is a classic study of Englands greatest soldier. Lees Lieutenants: A Study in Command, by Douglas Southall Freeman, has been slighted recently but is spellbinding.
If, as Carl von Clausewitz believed, War is the continuation of politics by other means, then study of civilian wartime leadership is critical. The classic scholarly account of the proper relationship between the military and its overseers is still Samuel P. Huntingtons The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations. For a contemporary Jaccuse of American military leadership during the Vietnam War, see H. R. McMasters Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam.
Eliot A. Cohens Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime is purportedly a favorite read of President Bushs. It argues that successful leaders like Ben-Gurion, Churchill, Clemenceau, and Lincoln kept a tight rein on their generals and never confused officers esoteric military expertise with either political sense or strategic resolution.
In The Mask of Command, Keegan examines the military competence of Alexander the Great, Wellington, Grant, and Hitler, and comes down on the side of the two who fought under consensual government. In The Soul of Battle, I took that argument further and suggested that three of the most audacious generalsEpaminondas, Sherman, and Pattonwere also keen political thinkers, with strategic insight into what made their democratic armies so formidable.
How politicians lose wars is also of interest. See especially Ian Kershaws biography Hitler, 19361945: Nemesis. Mark Moyars first volume of a proposed two-volume reexamination of Vietnam, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 19541965, is akin to reading Euripides tales of self-inflicted woe and missed chances. Horne has written a half-dozen classics, none more engrossing than his tragic To Lose a Battle: France 1940.
Few historians can weave military narrative into the contemporary political and cultural landscape. James McPhersons Battle Cry of Freedom does, and his volume began the recent renaissance of Civil War history. Barbara Tuchmans The Guns of August describes the first month of World War I in riveting but excruciatingly sad detail. Two volumes by David McCullough, Truman and 1776, give fascinating inside accounts of the political will necessary to continue wars amid domestic depression and bad news from the front. So does Martin Gilberts Winston S. Churchill: Finest Hour, 19391941. Donald Kagans On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace warns against the dangers of appeasement, especially the lethal combination of tough rhetoric with no military preparedness, in a survey of wars from ancient Greece to the Cuban missile crisis. Robert Kagans Dangerous Nation reminds Americans that their idealism (if not self-righteousness) is nothing new but rather helps explain more than two centuries of both wise and ill-considered intervention abroad.
Any survey on military history should conclude with more abstract lessons about war. Principles of War by Clausewitz remains the cornerstone of the science. Niccolò Machiavellis The Art of War blends realism with classical military detail. Two indispensable works, War: Ends and Means, by Angelo Codevilla and Paul Seabury, and Makers of Modern Strategy, edited by Peter Paret, provide refreshingly honest accounts of the timeless rules and nature of war.
Victor Davis Hanson
Good post!
Happy Memorial Day to those who “took the oath” and the Patriotic Americans as we honor those who paid the ultimate sacrifice for our freedoms.
“Hand Salute” “Two”
I had exactly one teacher in school who not only loved history, but loved teaching it - especially the history of warfare. Most were like that Ben Stein character - joyless and monotonous.
Most of the class thought him a fuddy-duddy but I really enjoyed his lectures. I don’t think that they make them like him anymore.
Nice post, indeed.
My only comment is that I have found Keegan rather derivative. Keegan’s book, “The Fact of Battle”, which was hailed as such a landmark work at the time of its release, is pretty much a a re-hash of Martin Middlebrook’s “First Day on the Somme” and Ardant du Picq’s “Battle Studies”
The Art of War - By the master. Significant in its omission.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_War
From the article -
The Department of the Army in the United States, through its Command and General Staff College, has directed all units to maintain libraries within their respective headquarters for the continuing education of personnel in the art of war. The Art of War is mentioned as an example of works to be maintained at each individual unit, and staff duty officers are obliged to prepare short papers for presentation to other officers on their readings.
The Art of War is listed on the Marine Corps Professional Reading Program (formerly known as the Commandant’s Reading List). It is recommended reading for all United States Military Intelligence personnel and is required reading for all CIA officers.
Bookmarked
“We fought the 1991 Gulf War with dazzling, computer-enhanced weaponry. But lost in the technological pizzazz was the basic wisdom that we need to fight wars with political objectives in mind and that, to conclude them decisively, we must defeat and even humiliate our enemies, so that they agree to abandon their prewar behavior.”
There were two generals of the Civil War that understood this principle of “total war.” Thomas J. Jackson on the Southern Side (but he didn’t live long enough to have the influence), of course the Northern general was William T. Sherman. His “march to the sea” greatly shortened that conflict (apologies to Southern brethren that are still angry about that one). Sherman said, “War is cruelty, there is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”
Sheridan did a number on the Shenendoah Valley in Virginia. That was total war in action.
I tutor an 8th grader who LOVES military history. I have a book, 100 Great Battles of the World, or something like that, that I bring out whenever I have a minute. “Today we’re doing Gettysburg.” “Oh good,” he responded. “I always wondered why Lee’s troops came up and over the road...” or whatever it is. Hahah, I am a musician — I don’t know beans about the strategy, but my husband loves history and we have visited every battlefield everywhere, so i love it too.
Once he was studying a particularly cool machine gun, to write me an essay. We googled a picture and sent it to the copier. When we got there, we could not find the copy anywhere. Finally I found it wadded up in the trash. Some peace-loving hippie had thrown it away. We made another, of course.
One by one....
It is not ommitted -
The books listed are HISTORIES - Von Clausewitz is the only excemption.
The Art of War is theoretical treatise.
It is brilliant - but not a history.
Bump for later collections.
Do you prefer the scribblings of those who've never served a day, wallow in all things liberal and claim all U.S. military personnel are psychopathic baby-killers?
Amazing post, amazing VDH! So much great information, books to read. That Margaret Atwood poem he quoted rings so true. Imagine that military historian at a DC cocktail party. Imagine Ed Schultz, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, et al. They can’t think their way out of a paper bag and don’t care in the least if they spew lies that endanger the republic.
And VDH’s first sentence tells it all. We disregard it at our peril.
Great essay. Thanks for posting.
Great post! Thanks!
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