American Classics

John C. Calhoun, Report on the Reduction of the Army (1820)

Patrick J. Garrity +
February 11, 2009

John C. Calhoun has gone down in American history as the great theorist of state rights, with the associated doctrines of nullification and the concurrent majority, qualifying him as the intellectual grandfather of secession and the Confederacy. But in his early public career, Calhoun was a staunch nationalist, a supporter of the War of 1812, and one of the Republic’s most distinguished Secretaries of War. Among his significant contributions to American statecraft was a Report on the Reduction of the Army, dated December 12, 1820.

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Classic Works

Machiavelli, The Art of War (1521)

Patrick J. Garrity +
January 16, 2009

In The Art of War, the only one of his major writings published during his lifetime, Machiavelli sets out to consider that topic from the standpoint of the superintending military commander. The Art of War is divided into a preface and seven books (chapters), presented as a series of dialogues that take place in the garden of Cosimo Rucellai, a friend of Machiavelli, who had died two years before the book was published. Cosimo and his guests, including a silent Machiavelli, respectfully question a visitor, Fabrizio Colonna, who is treated as a military authority. Fabrizio discusses how an army should be raised, trained, organized, deployed and employed. His model is the Roman Legion of the Republic, which he argues should be adapted to the contemporary situation of Renaissance Florence.

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American Classics

Abraham Lincoln, Resolutions in Behalf of Hungarian Freedom (1852)

Patrick J. Garrity +
December 17, 2008

Americans were naturally interested in the course and outcome of the European Revolutions of 1848, which included the overthrow of the July Monarchy of Louis Philippe in France, the deposition of Metternich in Austria, the establishment of the Frankfurt Parliament in Germany, the creation of republics in Venice and Rome, and an uprising in Poland against the Prussian occupation. The American imagination was particularly captivated by the revolution in the Hungarian lands of the Habsburg Empire and the subsequent struggle of the Magyars, the main ethnic group in those lands, to achieve independence from Austria. The administration of Zachary Taylor had already dispatched an envoy to central Europe, with instructions to recognize the Hungarian Republic if it proved to be viable.

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Essays & Reviews

Paul Seabury, The Wilhelmstrasse (1954)

Patrick J. Garrity +
December 09, 2008

The German Empire created by Bismarck inherited from Prussia a highly rationalized, professional trained, permanent bureaucracy, an important part of which was the Foreign Office (the Wilhelmstrasse). The prestige of this bureaucracy as a whole was enormous. Its personnel was recruited not only from the aristocracy but from the commercial and, later, industrial middle class. By the turn of the 20th century it represented an amalgam of the "liberal" nationalist and conservative elements of German society. The early Weimar Republic attempted to democratize German diplomacy by introducing "new blood" into lower career-service posts and appoint non-career officials into higher positions. The experiment failed.

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Essays & Reviews

On Halford J. Mackinder’s The Geographical Pivot of History (1919)

Patrick J. Garrity +
October 09, 2008

In 1904, British geographer Halford J. Mackinder presented a landmark paper, "The Geographical Pivot of History," to the Royal Geographic Society of London. In this and subsequent writings, Mackinder argued that changes in technology—especially the revolution in land transportation brought about by the railroad, the internal combustion engine, and the construction of a modern highway and road network—had altered the relationship between sea and land power, bringing the Columbian age of dominant sea power to a close. In this new, tightly connected global system, land power would hold the advantage. The center of emerging land power was the Eurasian core area—the geographical pivot, roughly coincident with the tsarist Russian empire—that Mackinder would come to call the Heartland.

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Classic Works

Herodotus, The Histories (5th Century BCE)

Patrick J. Garrity +
September 30, 2008

Herodotus, who wrote a generation after the Persian Wars, puts these battles in the context of a great clash of civilizations, between Greek freedom and Asian despotism. He seeks to explain why and how a relatively poor, small, and divided collection of Greek-speakers were able to defeat a much larger, wealthier, and centralized empire. On the battlefield itself, on land and at sea, the Greeks were better disciplined and employed superior close-order tactics, such as staying in ranks rather than attempting to kill the greatest number of enemy soldiers in open combat. But Herodotus' generic answer reflected the views of his contemporaries and greatly influenced the West's understanding of itself: "As long as the Athenians were ruled by a despotic government, they had no better success in war than any of their neighbors. Once the yoke was flung off, they proved the finest fighters in the world."

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American Classics

Walter Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (1943)

Patrick J. Garrity +
September 16, 2008

Shield of the Republic formulated what might be called the Lippmann equilibrium, which has become the standard of American realists: "Foreign policy consists in bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation's commitments and the nation's power. I mean by a foreign commitment an obligation, outside the continental limits of the United States, which may in the last analysis have to be met by waging war. I mean by power the force which is necessary to prevent such a war or to win it if it cannot be prevented. In the term necessary power I include the military force which can be mobilized effectively within the domestic territory of the United States and also the reinforcements which can be obtained from dependable allies." If this strategic equilibrium could be brought into being, American foreign policy would command domestic support. On the other hand, if American commitments exceed American power, the resulting insolvency—"the Lippmann gap"—would lead to deep political dissension.

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American Classics

U.S. Grant, The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (1885)

Patrick J. Garrity +
August 27, 2008

What was, and is, extraordinary about Grant's Memoirs is its clarity, which reflected the clarity of thought that distinguished Grant as a military commander. "There is one striking feature of Grant's orders," General George Meade's chief of staff noted, "no matter how hurriedly he may write them on the field, no one has ever had the slightest doubt as to their meaning, or even has to read them over a second time." With good maps at hand—one must have good maps—the logic and power of Grant's operational approach to the war stands out even to the unschooled reader.

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Classic Works

Winston S. Churchill, The Story of Malakand Field Force

Patrick J. Garrity +
August 19, 2008

"Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result." Thus wrote Lt. Winston Churchill, age 22, as he reflected on his experience as a member of the Malakand Field Force, dispatched in the summer of 1897 to deal with unrest on the Northwest Frontier of British India (now part of Pakistan).

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