This Hoover Institution ebook makes the case for restoring
military history to its rightful place in academia and public
understanding. Victor Davis Hanson argues that war, far from
being obsolete, remains central to human affairs—and that
ignoring its lessons invites peril. Drawing on classical and
modern conflicts, Hanson reveals why deterrence matters, why
human nature resists utopian ideals, and how understanding
past wars can help prevent future ones.
I WAS A GRADUATE STUDENT SOME 40 YEARS
AGO, military history had already become unfashionable
on campus. And 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.
After the carnage and savagery of the twentieth
century’s world wars, leaders and governments attempted
to refashion international politics with therapeutic
organizations to make war a thing of the past. The League
of Nations and the United Nations both fostered the hope
that global cooperation would lead to collective security
and international order. Nuclear weapons and mutually
assured destruction were supposed to make future
conflicts unthinkable. Yet our world today is as violent and
conflict-ridden as ever. And whether we like it or not, the
central issue in our life is whether we are going to have a
war. Therefore, studying military history is, in essence, an
attempt to prevent it or at least ameliorate its catastrophic
effects.
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The importance—and challenge—of the academic
study of war is to elevate general interest into a more
serious and widespread 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.
This concept dates back to at least 400 BC, when
Thucydides wrote his history of the Peloponnesian War.
By studying that war, Thucydides believed, people would
be better prepared to interpret future conflicts. Human
nature, emotions, and rhetoric remain constant over the
centuries, and are thus generally predictable.
Indeed, by ignoring history, the modern age is free
to interpret war as a failure of communication, or of
diplomacy—as if aggressors don’t know exactly what
they’re doing. Yet it’s hard to find many wars that result
from miscommunication. Far more often they break
out because of malevolent intent and the absence of
deterrence.
Military history is as often the story of appeasement
4 WHY WE SHOULD STUDY WAR
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 societies
have often been reluctant to use force to prevent greater
future violence.
In the twenty-first century, it’s easier than ever to
succumb to technological determinism, the idea that
science, new weaponry, and globalization have altered
the very rules of war. But the study of war tells us that
it’s highly doubtful that a new weapon will emerge from
the Pentagon or anywhere else that will change the very
nature of armed conflict.
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, Verdun, and Okinawa, the crosses in our military
cemeteries are just pleasant white stones on lush green
lawns.
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?
“SOME MEN WILL ALWAYS
PREFER WAR TO PEACE; AND
OTHER MEN, WHO HAVE
LEARNED FROM THE PAST,
HAVE A MORAL OBLIGATION
TO STOP THEM.”
The challenge isn’t 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
history—of 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 always
just be men, not gods. Some men will always prefer war to
peace; and other men, who have learned from the past,
have a moral obligation to stop them.
Read more here.