Search Results for: Army War College

Colin S. Gray on Thucydides and the Definition of Future Threats

April 30, 2015

Thucydides leaves us no doubt that the principal threat to the security of Athenians flowed more from the distinctly flawed working of the empire’s democratic politics, especially its proclivity to promote crowd pleasing demagogues who were short of competence, high ethical standards, or both, than from vengeful Persians or strategically pedestrian Spartans. Political ruin tends to begin and end at home. Students of international relations need to remember this plain warning from the historical record.

The Role of Military History in the Contemporary Academy (Tami Davis Biddle and Robert M. Citino)

Patrick J. Garrity +

February 10, 2015

Tami Davis Biddle and Robert M. Citino published a white paper for the Society for Military History, “The Role of Military History in the Contemporary Academy.” The white paper provides an account of military history’s revitalization over the past four decades and assesses its current place in American higher education. According to the authors, in addition to the sub-field’s maturation in academic terms, its enduring popularity with the public and college students makes it an ideal lure for history departments concerned about course enrollments and the recruitment of majors and minors. Knowledge of the uses, abuses, and costs of war should also constitute a part of the education of future American leaders.

Dwight Eisenhower, Monuments Man

Patrick J. Garrity +

November 25, 2014

Are high-level military strategists born or made? Some of both, one must suppose. Strategic excellence means something more than the proficiency to win battles and conduct successful military operations, but to win wars. Winning wars, in turn, means something more than being able to defeat an adversary’s armed forces and/or occupying its territory. Which means that Army officers (in this case) must not only be able to coordinate operations with those of the other services, but also take into account the overarching political and geopolitical components of the conflict (or potential conflict).

Circumspect Foreign Policy: Washington and Eisenhower’s Farewell Addresses

Michael R. Gonzalez

January 17, 2024

While Washington famously urges America in his 1796 Farewell Address to focus on preserving union at home for the “permanency of [its] felicity as a people,” Eisenhower in his 1961 Farewell Address identifies extensive foreign involvement as a necessity to preserve peace and “enhance liberty, dignity, and integrity among people and among nations.” These two presidents seem to offer very different visions of American foreign policy’s basic purposes. Can the principles of the two speeches admit reconciliation?

Kaiser Wilhelm II points out an event of interest to the British Junior Minister at the Colonial Office, Winston Churchill, during the summer manoeuvres of the Imperial German Army in 1906.

“Unvarying Courtesy” or “Unbending Determination”? The 1907 Eyre Crowe Memorandum and the Dilemmas of Strategic Forecasting

Eric Fleury

March 02, 2022

Two general schools of thought regarding Crowe and his famous Memorandum have emerged. Some scholars paint Crowe as a latter-day Cassandra who foresaw the structural trends that were hurling the two powers toward confrontation and articulated the necessary course of action, which his government failed to undertake until it was too late. Harvard’s Graham Allison compares the Crowe Memorandum to the writings of Thucydides, whose History of the Peloponnesian War identified the dilemma that a dominant power faces when it must either accede to the rise of a challenger or risk eventual war with it. The other school of thought argues that Crowe delivered only self-fulfilling prophecies by helping to institutionalize an attitude of anti-German animus. One prominent German historian even dubbed Crowe the “evil spirit of the Foreign Office.” With these two schools of thought forming in play, the bulk of the literature on Crowe has accordingly sought to determine the precise extent and manner of his influence on British-German relations both before and after the First World War.

Alfred Thayer Mahan: “The Influence of Sea Power Upon History” as Strategy, Grand Strategy, and Polemic

Thomas Jamison

February 09, 2022

As a history of naval war Influence makes for dull reading. Rather, Mahan is interested in the more fundamental relationship between national primacy and the sea. Without commerce, territorial infrastructure, and political will, naval preponderance is unsustainable. Momentary superiority in tonnage or deployable warships often masks a deeper brittleness. As Mahan puts it when discussing the War of the Spanish Succession: “The sea power of England therefore was not merely in the great navy, with which we too commonly and exclusively associate it; France had had such a navy in 1688, and it shriveled away like a leaf in the fire.” In this respect, Mahan actually shares a great deal with later critics who highlight the importance of a dynamic economy as the ultimate source of national or imperial power. Today, U.S. strategists concerned with the vulnerability of sea lines of communication, a retreat from global commitments, or the hollowing out of the domestic industrial base, could find common cause with Mahan’s logic. Without those elements of Sea Power, pure military or naval strength is a colossus with feet of clay.

Uncovering the French Origins of COIN

M.L. deRaismes Combes

September 25, 2021

The history of COIN doctrine can be traced across Francophone Africa and Southeast Asia to better understand how it is used or misused today. Perhaps because many counterinsurgency tactics have evolved and been adapted away from those used in the nineteenth century, analysis of contemporary COIN often ignores the doctrine’s colonial origins. Doing so, however, fails to consider how the foundational assumptions of the doctrine may well still limit its successful application in the twenty-first century. This essay, accordingly, sets out to unearth the possible repercussions of adopting the heart of a doctrine without a firm understanding of its initial purpose, seeking to understand whether that is compatible with today’s geostrategic objectives.

The Fleet was Ready

Patrick J. Garrity +

May 08, 2021

When Winston Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, he oversaw major revisions to the Admiralty’s basic strategic concept for European war, and in the suite of war plans associated with this concept. A shift in the probable enemy of a future war—to Germany from France, for instance—necessitated these changes and, hence, necessitated a change in the strategic naval front, from the South to the East Coast, and from the Channel to the North Sea.

Christopher Harmon, Classics of Counterinsurgency

Christopher C. Harmon

February 27, 2021

When faced with an insurgency, how do we learn about it? Soldiers and officers need practical advice, and often show close interest in past practices which clearly succeeded or clearly failed. On the other hand, historians and cultural specialists have a bent for insisting on the uniqueness of a thing. Questions and challenges come with any recommendation

Professor Harold Rood’s Reading List

CSD

February 20, 2021

Professor Harold W. (Bill) Rood (1922-2011) taught courses in International Relations, Diplomacy and Military Power, American Foreign Policy, Constitutional development in the West, and Politics and Technology, at Claremont McKenna (Men’s) College and Claremont Graduate School (now University), and in the Defense and Strategic Studies programs at