Study War Some More

Brad DeLong on the value of military history:

The highly intelligent David Bell gets his arrow into the target, but nowhere near the center. He writes:

Open University: The founders of [the modern social sciences]... believed that warfare was something fundamentally irrational and primitive that would disappear.... War was simply not something whose processes could be usefully elucidated....

As long as history remained as much an art as a science... it was not really affected.... The great nineteenth century historians--Michelet, Macaulay, Parkman, Ranke--all gave pride of place to war, and did a great deal of what would now be described as "operational" military history. But when historians embraced the social sciences... they took on the social sciences' assumptions and interests, and therefore turned away in large part from military questions....

Now, we can deplore all of this, and we should--the great narrative historians had a much better sense of the fundamental importance of military history than we do. But we can't simply ignore it. The fact is that "operational" military history remains separated by a large gulf from... our most important intellectual traditions in the social sciences and humanities, and to the questions.... On the whole, it tends to be more technical, less open to interdisciplinary dialogue, and less self-aware than most other areas of history. As Sir John Keegan, who is a very very good military historian, once complained: "Not even the beginnings of an attempt have been made by military historians to plot the intellectual landmarks and boundaries of their own field of operations." This is not a statement that could possibly be made about cultural history, social history, economic history or political history....

In short, yes, this is a question of liberalism. But the "liberals" who are really to blame here are not the familiar American "tenured radicals" whom the National Review so loves to hate. They are named Montesquieu, Condorcet, Benjamin Constant and Karl Marx.

Three points here:

First, simply no, there should not be more "operational" military history. "Operational" military history of the style beloved of the National Review tells us relatively little about war. If you want to know about the American Civil War, you need to hear something like this:

Not even the deep South was strongly for secession. Those voting for delegates to Georgia's secession convention, for example, were almost evenly split--and you can bet that the African-Americans who did not get to vote for delegates were overwhelmingly against secession. Because there was no Southern consensus for secession, Lincoln was able to hold the border--Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, western Virginia, eastern Tennessee--by making it a war for the Union. And the war began with a Confederacy of 5 million whites (and 4 million African-Americans) and a Union of 21 million whites (and 1 million African-Americans).

The Union mobilized 2.6 million soldiers--24% of its total male population. The Confederacy mobilized 900 thousand soldiers--36% of its white male population. Armies would march down secured railroad lines or navigable waterways until they ran into other armies. Because they could not function far from railhead or water-based supply depots, strategic outflanking moves were rare. When armies clashed, casualties were horrendous, but decisive victories impossible. The rifled musket was too good in defense, and the large size of the armies made them too clumsy in pursuit.

The result was that the armies fought, and soldiers died in battle, afterwards of wounds, and in camp of disease. By April 1865 300,000 Union soldiers were dead, 300,000 more were disabled by wounds, about 200,000 had deserted and returned home, and 400,000 had been discharged--leaving 1.4 million with the colors. By April 1865 300,000 Confederates were dead, 300,000 more were disabled by wounds, and 300,000 had deserted or returned home--leaving next to nobody with the colors to surrender to Grant and Sherman. The war was then over.

That's the history of the American Civil War wie es eigentlich gewesen. That's not the history you get by reading "operational" military historians like Shelby Foote or Bruce Catton. They do what they do excellently, but it is a distorted vision of the war.

Second, the current state of military history looks, to me, extremely good. I think that better military history is being written now than ever before. Why, from where I am sitting right now I can see six excellent recent books of military history: Robert Citino's The German Way of War, David Glantz and Jonathan House's When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler, Omer Bartov's Hitler's Army, Gordon and Trainor's Cobra II, Barbara Ehrenreich's Blood Rites, and Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain. It is much easier to get an education in military history than ever before.

That's the past history of warfare. To study the future of war, go here