Category: Professional Development
“Mastery of Military History…”
Military history provides the required context, width, and depth to understand past ways and means in the absence of physical combat experiences. It allows professionals to test their knowledge and ideas against a framework of historical military experience. It also provides insights into successful methods and permits learning through vicarious failure. The study of history can also, as Richard Neustadt and Ernst May argue in Thinking in Time, stimulate imagination by seeing the past as a way to better envision the future.
Michael Howard has proposed the most compelling reason for studying military history is that unlike other enduring professions, the military profession is intermittent. In essence, military history is the case law for military professionals to prepare for future operations. And as Howard has also noted, military professional must hone “the ability to look at the past to see what works and what does not … the last war provides the only firm data that they have.” Military history provides an intellectual foundation for dealing with the ambiguity, uncertainty, and friction inherent in war…
All around excellent article. I wish I would have read it twenty years ago.
“Hybrid Warfare” is just another name for “Warfare”
Great Video. 7 Brigade Hybrid Warfare Symposium: Prof Michael Evans Challenges ‘Hybrid Warfare’
If you are a military/history/security professional, this’ll be the best 23 minutes of your day. The whole presentation is a moneyline. One of the nice aspects of being retired is that I can continue my professional education without the shackles imposed by the Division DTO or mandatory silliness, so I get to read and listen to speakers and lectures quite a bit more. If I had a capstone argument for everything I have learned in the last 18 years, this video is essentially it. Hybrid Warfare is just another name for warfare. If you aren’t preparing for it all, you’re just preparing to lose.
From the time my troop commander as a PL arrogantly told me, “We will NEVER wear our flak jackets in training because we will never wear them in combat”, through all of my body armored deps, to being the sole and only wide area security planner on each of the three brigade staffs I was a FG on, I’ve found that nothing in warfare is new and saying otherwise keeps biting us in the ass. Alexander’s men cutting six feet off of their sarissas (pikes) 2300 years ago to be better able to chase tribal insurgents through the Hindu Kush while he established what became the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom is conceptually no different than what we are trying to do today in Afghanistan. The concepts and principles don’t change.
The American people demand that its Army be competent in the ENTIRE spectrum of conflict. No excuses. Look how it worked out for us after June 2003. If you don’t have the mental or physical agility to move from decisive action, to wide area security, to stability, to peace operations, to foreign internal defense, to assisting civil authorities, and back and forth as the situation demands within weeks and days, and dare I say within hours and minutes, then you need to take a hard look as to why that is. Where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, in 1997 with a very prophetic marine talking about “Three Block Wars”. The American people demand no less. Defeating your adversaries demands no less. And you might just find you’ll have more tools in the kit bag than just a hammer. If you don’t have the training time, ask yourself “why?”. (I got in so much trouble when I kept bringing this up.) The successful armies in history figured it out, and they didn’t do it by just using one “form of warfare”. Saying, “But war is different now” is just an excuse, and an eye-rolling one at that.
“War. War never changes.”
It really bothers me that the speaker in this video in the “dissenting voice”.
/rant over.
Watch the video. Every one of the books he quotes is a great read as long as you take it in the context of when it was written.
Buk's Historical Ad Hockery 