There’s
more
to military history than decisive
battles, great captains, and sexy
weapons
We sure
could use honest and critical teaching
about military history and war in America.
I don’t
mean celebratory BS. I don’t mean potted
histories of the American Revolution and
its freedom fighters, the Civil War and
its freeing of the slaves, World War II
and America’s greatest generation and so
on. I mean history that highlights the
importance of war together with its bloody
awfulness.
Two books
(and book titles) come to mind: “War is a
force that gives us meaning,” by Chris
Hedges, and “A country made by war,” by
Geoffrey Perret. Hedges is right to argue
that war often provides meaning to our
lives: meaning that we often don’t
scrutinize closely enough, if at all. And
Perret is right to argue that America was
(and is), in very important ways, made by
war, brutally so in fact.
Why study
war? Shouldn’t we affirm that we ain’t
gonna study war no more? Well, as Leon
Trotsky is rumored to have said: You may
not be interested in war, but war is
interested in you. Among other reasons,
students of history should study war as a
way of demystifying it, of reducing its
allure, of debunking its alleged glories.
War is always a bad choice, though there
may be times when war is the least bad in
a series of bad choices. (U.S. involvement
in World War II was, I believe, less bad
than alternatives like pursuing
isolationism.)
How
are
we to make sense and reach sound
decisions about war if we refuse
to study and understand it? A
colleague sent along an interesting
article
(from 2016) that argues there’s
not enough military history being
taught in U.S. colleges and
universities, especially at elite
private schools.
Visit
your local bookstore and you’ll probably
see lots of military history — it’s very
popular in America! — but critical
military history within college settings
is much less common. This is so for a few
reasons, I think:
1. Many
professors don’t like the “stench” of
military history. When I was at Oxford in
the early 1990s, I had a professor who
basically apologized for spending so much
time talking about mercenary-captains and
war in early modern Europe. Yet war and
controlling it was a key reason for the
growth of strong, centralized
nation-states in Europe in the 17th and
18th centuries.
2. Many
professors simply have no exposure to the
military — they’re ignorant of it, almost
proudly so. Having taught college myself
for fifteen years, including survey
subjects like world history, I know the
difficulty of teaching topics and subjects
where your knowledge is shallow or dodgy.
Far easier to stand on firm ground and
teach what you know and ignore what you
don’t know — or don’t like. But the easier
road isn’t always the best one.
3.
Critical military history suggests lack of
patriotism. I taught college as a civilian
professor for nine years, and I was once
told to “watch my back” because I wrote
articles that were critical of the U.S.
military’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And I’m a retired Air Force officer!
So, with
history professors often preferring to
ignore or elide military subjects,
military history is left to buffs and
enthusiasts who focus on great captains,
exciting battles, and famous weapons
(often featured in glossy coffee-table
books) like Tiger tanks and Spitfire
fighters. Such books often sell well and
make for exciting reads. What they don’t
do is to make us think critically about
the costs of war and how disastrous wars
often prove.
My own
book on Paul von Hindenburg is a critical
account of his life, including his
complicity in the “stab in the back” myth
and the rise of Adolf Hitler to power
A
subject I taught at the USAF
Academy was technology and
warfare, and one of my concerns
was (and remains) America’s blind
faith in technology and the
enormous sums of money dedicated
to the same. The Pentagon will
spend untold billions on the
latest deadly gadgets (actually,
as much as $1.7 trillion alone on
the F-35
jet
fighter
throughout
its
lifespan) but academia won’t spend
millions to think and teach more
critically about war.
As
an
aside, weapons alone don’t make an
effective military. It’s not the
gladius sword that made Rome
dominant but the citizen-soldier
wielding it, empowered by
republican ideals, iron
discipline, and a proven system of
leadership by example.
When
the
principled citizen-soldier ideal
died in Rome, a warrior ideal
consistent with a hegemonic empire
replaced it. There’s much for
Americans to learn here, as its
own military today identifies
as
warriors
and finds itself in the service of
a global empire.
There’s
more to military history than drums and
trumpets — or bullets and bombs. For
better or for worse, and usually for
worse, we as a people are made and defined
by war. We would all do well to study and
understand it better.
