this is totally gonna work…

In addition to technical geekery and social commentary, one of my favorite intellectual pursuits is the study of military history. It’s one of my many interests that makes me so very thankful that I met my wife when I did or I would never have had a date in my adult life.

I am not a pro-war person. Anyone who reads good military history will often find that the best historians are quite anti-war. I had the opportunity to see Rick Atkinson speak in Seattle last winter as he was promoting his book, Day of Battle. He has written several titles about both WWII and Iraq and said that all of his books as anti-war and hopes his readers understand that. No historian has summed that notion up as well as John Keegan in his introduction to The History of Warfare.

To study war is not necessarily to glorify it. To be sure, a good bit of the military history bookshelf is filled with martial hagiography (see Ambrose, Stephen), but to those who study the history with more than a simple fascination of the technologies and armies there is a rich depth of human experience and tragedy to explore.

Like most men (and I’m sure that 99.9% of all military historians are male), I began with that very boyish fascination with all things violent and martial. As I grew older I realized that this was a silly childish interest. I either needed to stop reading about this subject, or I needed to understand it better. I chose the latter in an attempt to cull meaning from so many centuries of meaningless slaughter.

Humans go to war for a variety of reasons–most of them not good. Greed, hatred, and lust for power have fueled more than their fair share of conflict and tragedy. However that doesn’t mean that I think all war is useless. There are some things worth fighting and dying for, but those moments are few and far between in human history. While I cannot condone military action in most of the cases in which it occurs, I believe that it is an inevitable part of the human experience. We were simply bred to beat each others brains out. This is a depressing and tragic conclusion, but I believe that human history is on my side when I make that statement.

So what’s the point of reading military history? If all we are going to do is make the same mistakes over and over again what possible good can from studying the past? Despite my pessimistic outlook on the short-term chances of humanity straightening itself out, I think in long-term we may learn from our mistakes. Military history is nothing if not a study of mistakes. Yes the Hannibals, Napoleons and Pattons of history get the accolades, but there isn’t nearly as much to learn from their successful campaigns. We need to look at the spectacular failures too.

For example, we can learn far more from the fateful decisions of both Napoleon and Hitler to campaign in the Russian winter. While the technical reason for their defeat was weather and logistics, the true cause of their downfall was hubris. It wasn’t that neither failed to comprehend the risks, but rather they felt that their leadership and the elan of their troops transcended reality. Can anyone else think of a recent example where a leader ignored the facts on the ground in pursuit of their own personal policy? Hmm? Anyone?

Another fine example is the book I’m currently reading, Mr. Atkinson’s aforementioned The Day of Battle. The Italian campaign is an oft-forgotten part of World War II. This is due in no small part because there was very little to celebrate in that campaign. No gutsy fortitude like Guadalcanal or Stalingrad, no tragedy like Poland or Saipan, just lots of dumb decisions that required a tremendous amount of cannon-fodder to achieve victory.

Few campaigns offer such a textbook example of group-think gone horribly wrong as the Allies in Italy during World War II. From Churchill and Roosevelt, to Eisenhower, to the theater commanders, everyone in the chain of command was eager to cast what they saw with their own eyes in terms of what they desired, not what the actual realities on the ground were. While we may not be in a war in our day-to-day work, each of us can certainly come up with examples where group-think led everyone to bad conclusions.

The other valuable outcome of studying military history to come to a better understanding of just what the cost of war truly is. Obviously anyone who has not experienced combat cannot imagine the horrors of that experience. I thank my lucky stars that I never had to go to war. But I feel that it’s disingenuous to rail against the horrors of war without making an attempt to understand them.

I attended the University of Oregon and there are few places on earth that have a stronger innate anti-war bias. I have no problem with the pursuit of peace, but to do so in ignorance serves no one. It’s vital that we all understand what the consequences of going to war are. I fear that the cavalier attitude with which the United States has prosecuted the Iraq War and insulated the public from the horrifying facts on the ground only serves to keep us ignorant of the true costs of war. This is not a game of cops and robbers–people are dying daily for questionable causes, to say nothing of the long-term political consequences. But I digress…

One final reward of the study of military history is to recognize how leadership within a corporate, in the purest sense of the word,  setting can work. I don’t mean the famous generals such as Grant, Lee or Washington. Rather, a kind of leadership that few successfully execute consciously. Instead it is the Joshua Chamberlains of the world that provide insightful, meaningful case studies of what true leadership is. Most of us don’t work in groups of one thousand or more, but instead in “squads” of ten or less people. Learning how Captains and Sergeants command, push and prod their troops and maintain esprit de corps is worth the time of anyone who is interested in exercising any form of leadership.

It’s rare that at the end of a good military history read I don’t feel the need to weep. Maybe I’m a sucker for heartache but I can’t help but feel just a teeny bit smarter after turning the last page of a well-written piece of military history. So before parting, let me leave you with a short list of great military reads (in no particular order) that I’ve come across over the years:

1. The Peloponnesian War – Thucydides
2. The Civil War (Trilogy) – Shelby Foote
3. At Dawn We Slept – Gordon Prange
4. Just about anything by John Keegan
5. The Best and the Brightest – David Halberstam
6. We Were Soldiers Once…And Young – Harold G. Moore
7. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers – Paul Kennedy
8. Diplomacy – Henry Kissinger