Why Study War?
Victor David Hanson has an interesting article up arguing for a greater emphasis on the study of military history. I can't exactly recommend the article, because he sprinkles in all sorts of his regular ideological foolishness into the argument. This nugget in particular is just lovely:
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 hasn't evolved as anticipated into a quiet, stable democracy-to say the least.
I get a picture of Hanson writing in Germany in 1945, "The swift conquest of France and crushing of several Russian armies in 1940-41 refuted those doom-and-gloom critics who predicted millions dead and the destruction of Germany, just as the subsequent messy attempts to establish a glorious thousand-year Reich over the last four years haven't evolved exactly as anticipated."
Anyway, I can't speak to the state of military history education in the US, but I do think that it is something people should learn a lot more about, if only because I think it is the general ignorance of such that allows people like Hanson to get away with their highly selective readings of it.
My recommendations are for two books not on Hanson's list. The first is Sun Tzu's "The Art of War"; short, philosophical, and ever contemporary despite it's being written 2,500 years ago, and Israeli historian Martin van Creveld's "The Transformation of War", which explores how warfare has changed and evolved over time, why the dominant form is no longer the state-on-state warfare the US military is trained for, and how assuming what worked in the past will work in the future is a good way to find yourself on the losing side.
