History in Military Pedagogies

(61) So how is history treated in military pedagogies? Within British and other western military academies officers undertake extensive studies of past battles, sieges and campaigns, even to the extent of visiting the actual battlefields. The idea seems to be that studying the plans and decisions of past commanders and the results that ensued will make today’s officers better informed about their profession and better able to make the right decision when they themselves meet real tactical and operational challenges. For instance, the charge of the Light Brigade continues to be studied by modern military historians as an example of what can go wrong when there is no accurate military intelligence and orders are less than clear.

(62) But how can such historical knowledge be used? Niall Ferguson, the British historian, writing in the London based Daily Telegraph in January 2007 cited the British experience of occupying and pacifying Iraq in 1922 as an object lesson that today’s political and military leaders should take note of when trying to formulate a coherent British strategy in Iraq more than 80 years later (Ferguson 2007). There is an underlying assumption here that unless you learn the lesson of the past, you condemn yourself to repeating its mistakes: neglecting history could, in the worst case, lose you a battle, a campaign or even a war. Or, one might add, it could even lose you the peace.

(63) The view espoused by Ferguson seems to afford history a very narrow, limited, and even uncritical role. Nevertheless, there are many examples of those who did look to history as a guide, thought they had learned the right lessons and then went on to fail both militarily and politically. For example, the French military and strategic planners put great effort into the construction of the Maginot Line between the two World Wars on the assumption that the next conflict with Germany would be essentially of the same nature as the last, namely positional warfare from heavily fortified positions. From their history of huge losses in WW1 the French drew the lesson that what was needed was a more strongly fortified system defending their own frontiers. Whilst the Maginot Line might have made an excellent counter to the German infantry attacks of 1914, it proved completely inadequate to counter the Combined Arms nature of German Blitzkrieg in 1940. Germany, by contrast, had taken a far more radical and forward looking doctrinal approach to warfare, without being bound by the past.

(64) What kind of use of history do we see here? An uncritical use without factoring in contemporary realities surely amounts to putting too much faith in history, as well as entertaining the assumption that history repeats itself almost perfectly. Putting too much faith in history may well be dubbed an abuse of it. Furthermore, a very limited conception of history seems to be at play, if the only lesson to be learned concerns military strategy and tactics. A wider understanding of history and memory and their role in people’s lives opens up for different uses of history, but also for different abuses.

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 872