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In 1901, military analyst Jan Bloch declared that new military technologies had changed war so radically that the study of history had become useless. He castigated military officers who prepared for future war based on “musty precedents” and who failed to recognize that the past was as irrelevant to the future as the experiences of caterpillars were to butterflies. Some of his tactical predictions did prove prescient: He anticipated that modern firepower and entrenchments would make decisive battle impossible. But he was very wrong about the continued value of history. After all, it was his study of past wars — above all the American Civil War — that produced his key tactical insights.
Moreover, a broader view of history could have helped him avoid his dramatically wrong conclusions about the strategic implications of his tactical and operational predictions. He thought that states, as rational actors, would abandon warfare, because its political gains could no longer justify its increased costs. Thucydides could have taught him that wars originate as much from honor and fear as from calculated interest. And a whole-war rather than tactical perspective on the history of the Civil War might have warned him off his mistaken belief that a proud nation could not endure the economic and human costs of modern warfare for more than a few months. Had the military leaders of his day been more accepting of Bloch’s analysis, they might have been better prepared for the battles of 1914, but they would have been even less ready for the war of 1914 to 1918.
Bloch was part of a long line of reformers arguing that imminent “revolutions in military affairs” would change warfare so dramatically as to undermine the value of a broad, history-based education for officers. But experience has often proven that idea to be wrong. Recently, some writers have taken a similar stance on the technological advances transforming the character of warfare, and proposed rebalancing American professional military education by putting more emphasis on technical proficiency in warfighting in response to them. Such changes are far from certain to make the United States better prepared for the fighting in the next war, because it is so difficult to predict the context of future combat. More importantly — assuming the number of hours students dedicate to study at their service colleges does not increase — spending more time on “the technical dimensions” of war’s “changing character” must mean less time devoted to understanding the unchanging nature of war and the eternals of strategy.
Given America’s recent history of tactical successes that failed to accomplish political goals, a strong case could be made for placing more emphasis on strategy, national security studies, and history as preparation to win wars — as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently called for — instead of cutting back in those areas. We, however, will not make an explicit case for a rebalancing of that sort here — others have done so elsewhere and are even building programs along those lines. Instead, our prescription is more modest: First, do no harm.
The challenges posed by AI, drones, and “lessons” from recent conflicts may warrant changes to the educational modalities within the portions of service college curricula devoted to tactics and the operational art. But a rebalancing that reduces the hours devoted to the broadening aspects of professional military education would not be wise. Nor would it be in consonance with the philosophy that made the Army War College of the interwar period such an extraordinary institution for developing military leaders capable of achieving strategic success against the strongest enemies America ever faced.
From the 1820s onward, commentators of every generation have suggested that war would be transformed into something unrecognizable by some new technology: from a steam-powered machine gun that would “render all valour useless” to railroads, anesthetic bullets, airplanes, nuclear weapons, precision munitions, and exquisite intelligence. If the military did not focus on how to wield these innovations in combat, reformers worried, the nation could lose the next war.
The related question of whether the military schools of the United States should focus more on preparing officers for the next war, or educating them to be wise forever, is not a new one. Capt. James S. Pettit wrote in a prize-winning 1888 essay that the “general question” of military education — “how much time and labor shall be given to the absolutely utilitarian, and how much to accomplishments and general knowledge that broaden the mind” — remained unanswered.
By the 1920s, however, the Army War College had developed curricula that balanced application with intellectual breadth. Allied success in World War II owed much to the first-rate strategists produced by the third-rate army of the United States. We concur with Thomas Bruscino, as well as with Benjamin Jensen and Brig. Gen. Matthew Tracy, that the sources of that success merit careful attention. Officer-students at the interwar War College developed military plans, conducted wargames, and wrote policy reports, but not at the expense of historical study, exposure to the classics of military theory, or, as Adm. William Halsey Jr.— a 1934 graduate — emphasized, a whole-war perspective.
These strategists witnessed rapid developments in military technology, but that did not dampen their enthusiasm for breadth of education. Dwight Eisenhower — who was more influenced by Clausewitz than by any more contemporary military writer — appreciated how education at the War College “desert[ed] the formerly rather narrow business of winning a tactical victory on the battlefield” to look at war as a national effort, though he also encouraged soldiers to study military engagements of the past — even the deep past — in detail. While “the facts of a given battle may no longer serve any practical purpose,” he later wrote,
when the serious student of the military art delves into the reasons for the failure of a specific attack … he is, by this very activity, preparing for a day in which he, under different circumstances, may be facing decisions of vital consequence to his country.
At the War College, Eisenhower and his classmates delved not just into the campaigns of World War I, but also into Austerlitz, Jena, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Sedan, and Mukden, not to mention Trafalgar and Jutland. Robert Eichelberger found his War College study of Caesar, Napoleon, Wellington, and Sherman particularly valuable. At the strategic level, George Marshall — an instructor when Eisenhower was a student — later concluded that “the lessons of history provide plain guidance” regarding the necessities of national security, and doubted that anyone could “think with full wisdom” about them without having studied the Peloponnesian War.
Yet, argues historian and former Air Force officer Williamson Murray, the next generation of top military leaders — for whom combat experience had been far more important than schooling — lacked an equal appreciation for “the larger political and strategic framework, which a real education would have supplied.” In Vietnam, they and the officers they mentored had the expertise to win battles, but not to win the war. Overemphasis on superior technology and “game-theoretical assumptions” produced strategic hubris and ultimately failure.
Defeat in Vietnam spurred a revival of interest in military history, cultural competency, and Clausewitz, though without abandoning American excellence in innovation, operations, and tactics. From 1976 through 1991, to quote Murray, “In every respect, American forces … trained and prepared themselves … within a Clausewitzian approach.” The School of Advanced Military Studies especially “rested entirely on a Clausewitzian conception of the study of war” by integrating theory and history. The “fundamental payoff” of that approach was overwhelming success, from the tactical level to the strategic, in the First Gulf War.
Writing in 1997, however, Murray worried that U.S. leaders had learned the wrong lessons from 1991. Far too much attention was going to how technology was changing the character of war, as a putative “Revolution in Military Affairs” was expected to eliminate the fog of war, give American commanders complete “battlespace dominance,” and mean “the end of Clausewitz.” “The emerging American military culture,” Murray warned, “is throwing history and all its associated intangibles overboard,” and therefore “preparing our officer corps to repeat the Vietnam War.”
As the United States labored to avoid that fate in Afghanistan eighteen years later, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster echoed Murray, warning against believing that “technology and firepower are sufficient to achieve lasting strategic results in war.” He dubbed that idea the “vampire fallacy” because, despite being killed by experience time after time, it kept rising from the grave. Reducing the time dedicated to analyzing strategy and military history to increase focus on new technology and enhanced lethality would be a move in the direction of the “Clausewitz Out, Computer In” era that Murray described 30 years ago.
How can educators arm military leaders with the tools they need to connect tactical victories to strategic objectives, while retaining the ability to win those fights in the first place? The current fixation on drones, AI, and the war in Ukraine has brought the question again to the fore.
Jensen and Tracy recently offered their vision for transforming military education to match the new revolution in military affairs. Their underlying point is sound: Times change, and so too should military education and training. Because AI and multi-domain operations are rapidly transforming the character of war, they argue, professional military education should devote more time to those areas, partly through an expansion of classified wargames in “a modern laboratory where officers test new ideas about military advantage.” The authors acknowledge the high resource demands for infrastructure and security associated with their proposal, but those would not be the only costs incurred and are not the ones with which we are most concerned.
Jensen and Tracy recognize, and indeed elegantly express, the value and importance of history and strategic studies, and call for them to still have a place in a reformed curriculum. But in the zero-sum game of curricular time, spending more of it developing technical expertise for near-future fights must leave less time for exploring questions like why Athens lost the Peloponnesian War, why Maj. Gen. George McClellan failed to take Richmond, or why the United States lost in Vietnam. The “main effort,” they argue, “shifts back to reflections on the art of warfighting and the science of joint all-domain operations.” In other words, they call for more emphasis on “the technical dimensions of modern war” with a “deep dive into tactics and operational art,” implying less focus on the political and strategic framing that they acknowledge shapes all wars.
We have no doubt that the educational experiences advocated by Jensen and Tracy are valuable, and it is very clear they are not among the “callow critics” who, to quote Gen. Douglas MacArthur, “hold that only in the most recent battles are there to be found truths applicable to our present problems.” The question is not whether officers benefit from “reviewing modern war plans”: Of course they do. It is also not whether they benefit from reading Thucydides: Of course they do. Rather, the question is whether military leaders will perform better in future wars if their education increases emphasis on discontinuities in the character of war introduced by current technologies and their implications for combat, while devoting correspondingly less time to reading the classics and analyzing continuities in war’s nature. The following three truths suggest the answer is no.
Jensen and Tracy argue that while there is still a place for history in military education, “there needs to be better balance to prepare students for the wars they will fight in the next decade.” That, however, presumes the U.S. military can predict what those wars will be like. The problem is that while leaders can and should try to anticipate how technology might shape the fighting in the next war, their best guess will most likely be wrong, and may be very wrong. A broad education, rather than one focused on recent and current developments, is what gives officers a malleable framework for developing solutions in the wake of shattered expectations.
Before World War I, military leaders steeped in the “lessons” of recent wars believed that offensive élan could overcome new defensive weapons. They were disastrously wrong. Giulio Douhet postulated in 1921 that airpower would render ground forces “helpless,” and strategic bombing would bring quick victory in war to the side with the stronger air force. The airpower theorists proved wrong, too. Bernard Brodie in 1946 argued that the development of atomic weapons meant armed forces should start concentrating on deterring war rather than fighting it — just before millions of soldiers clashed in brutal conventional fighting in Korea. The “system of systems” touted by Revolution in Military Affairs enthusiasts in the 1990s neither eliminated the fog of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, nor made it easy to deal with insurgents, snipers, or improvised explosive devices. Directing military education toward preparing for a relatively narrow vision of near-future warfare could similarly leave today’s joint force ill-prepared to navigate an array of alternative battlefields.
The catastrophic military errors of 1914 arose not just because of military leaders’ failure to anticipate how technology would affect tactics, but also because planners failed to account properly for the strategic characteristics of the most recent major conflict: the Russo-Japanese War. It was a war limited to two belligerents and waged far from the heartland of either one, not a clash of coalitions fighting for the survival of their nations. That is not an argument against the value of history, but rather an illustration of how history can be misleading when studied too narrowly.
A generation later, the Soviet Union studied the German Blitzkrieg of 1939, and planned to fight the next war as “the most offensive-minded of all the attacking armies that ever existed.” But in 1941, the Soviet Union instead found itself fighting a deep defense against an attack it had failed to anticipate, and teetered on the brink of national extermination as a result.
After 1991, many Americans thought the United States should and could expect the next war — like the one they had just finished — to involve the use of overwhelming force, have popular support, and be aimed at clear military objectives that would accomplish political ends without requiring nation-building. Once again, it didn’t work out that way in Somalia, Iraq, or Afghanistan.
Early in the “Global War on Terror,” U.S. Quadrennial Defense Reviews compared violent extremism to the fight against “communism and fascism before it,” and labeled “winning the Long War” against terrorism the “central objective of the [United States].” Military education adapted accordingly. But Russia’s invasions of Ukraine soon shifted strategic focus back to large-scale combat operations, and China’s military-industrial expansion pivoted Washington’s attention to the Pacific. Counter-terrorism, the focus of national strategy in 2015, was already relegated to a strategic footnote by 2022.
Planning consistently proceeded from the belief that the present was the most valuable foundation for education and anticipation, because it was closer to the future than the past and therefore more likely to reflect its features. History shows that sometimes that is true, but often it is not. Indeed, that presumption can lead not just to misguided preparations, but also to shock and slow adaptation when the predictions that guided planning prove incorrect.
The modern U.S. military excels in winning battles and conducting joint, multi-domain operations, but often struggles to connect those wins to strategic outcomes. As one observer wrote recently, many leaders are “calling for [professional military education] to focus on lethality and warfighting, [but] there seems to be little evidence that U.S. [strategic] defeats were due to a lack of ‘capability or capacity to destroy.’” The counterargument to this point assumes that AI and other new technologies have jeopardized America’s tactical edge, implying that the study of the theorists and wars of the past should be trimmed to allow more technical preparation. Jensen and Tracy, for instance, cite recent wars in which the United States has yet to commit ground combat forces, such as Ukraine, as evidence of this potentially diminishing tactical edge.
Despite the public emphasis on novelty in that war, some Ukrainian officers have found simpler weapons more useful in bypassing Russia’s electronic warfare capabilities. Other commanders cite ammunition and equipment shortages as root causes of the stalemate there. Former NATO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg even described the conflict as “a battle of ammunition,” and recent reports suggest that Ukraine’s heavy reliance on drones is “driven less by doctrine than by a shortage of other systems.” According to these accounts, the keys to victory in Ukraine are not necessarily tactical or doctrinal, but rather industrial — a lesson most notably recognized and applied during both world wars.
As Jensen and Tracy admit, hasty change in military institutions is risky. It is even riskier, however, when those changes are driven by purported lessons extracted from disparate wars with as-yet-undetermined outcomes. The lessons of the Civil War appeared much different to observers in 1862 than they did in 1865. The same could be said of the lessons military leaders took away from the battles of 1915 compared to 1918, or 1940 and 1945.
Moreover, transforming educational frameworks requires sacrifice, which means that even if the result is moderately successful, it is often a pyrrhic victory, not worth what it cost. If reformers are wise — or lucky — enough that their changes enhance rather than undermine warfighting proficiency, that perceived gain will be a net loss if it comes at the price of an officer’s ability to provide good strategic advice or discern the broader implications of military operations on and beyond the battlefield. Any major change in professional military education should therefore aim not at shoring up current American advantages in lethality, but rather at improving how the joint force ties lethal and non-lethal effects to desired strategic outcomes. That calls for emphasizing the continuities in warfare revealed by history, as McMaster advocates.
The only thing we really can know about the next war is that it will share the characteristics present in all wars: War is political, war is human, war is uncertain, and war is a violent contest of physical and moral forces through the means of the former. Gaining a better understanding of those enduring truths, their interrelationships, and their implications fosters sound military judgment, and will pay dividends not only in the next war, but also in future conflicts that we cannot begin to imagine today.
We support pedagogical innovation, wargaming, and the responsible incorporation of AI into the classroom and the war-planning process. Dealing with the changing face of war does call for adjustments to curricula. But it would be a mistake to reduce opportunities to study history, strategy, and the political context of warfighting. If other priorities and limited resources mean that the service colleges cannot expand instruction in these topics, then the time allocated to studying them should at least be protected from cutbacks, perhaps even by enshrining such protections within Chapter 107 of Title 10, U.S. Code. Legally obligating the study of history and strategy would ensure that future technological revolutions do not overrule the founding vision of American professional military education.
In 1901, the same year that Bloch made the pronouncement that began this essay, Secretary of War Elihu Root stressed that officers’ wide range of responsibilities — both on and beyond the battlefield — and “the manifest necessity that the soldier, above all others, should be familiar with history” made it of “great importance” that they receive “a thorough and broad education.” Moving away from that prescription by the father of the War College would risk reinforcing America’s recent history of winning battles but losing wars.
The U.S. military should continue training its leaders to apply doctrine in what the intelligence community assesses are the most likely theaters of war. Officers spend most of their careers in the operational force learning to do that in combined training centers, joint commands, and multinational exercises. But they should spend much of the little classroom time they have learning about war more broadly. That includes applying the Clausewitzian method of integrating theory — and doctrine — with wide, deep, and contextualized study of experience, both current and past. The country needs not only officers who can do things right, but also leaders who think critically about how to do the right things. Professional military education should arm its graduates with the wisdom to perceive the difference. If it fails to do so, future generations could be robbed of a proper foundation in military history — something Gen. John R. Galvin referred to as “the coin of the realm” — and sent intellectually impoverished into the next war.
Michael P. Ferguson is a U.S. Army officer and instructor in the Department of History and War Studies at West Point. His previous assignments include combat tours to Iraq and Afghanistan, and operational billets in Europe and Africa. He holds master’s degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and San Diego State University, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at UNC Chapel Hill. His latest publications appeared in Parameters, Texas National Security Review, and the International Journal of Military History and Historiography.
Clifford J. Rogers, Ph.D., has taught the history of warfare and military theory at West Point since 1995, is a recipient of the U.S. Military Academy’s Dean’s Career Awards for Distinguished Excellence both in teaching and in scholarship, and helped develop West Point’s new War Studies major. His books and articles on military history have been awarded numerous accolades, including recognitions from the Society for Military History, De Re Militari, the Royal Historical Society, and the Army Historical Foundation.
The views expressed here are those of the authors and not those of the U.S. Military Academy, its Department of History and War Studies, the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.
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