In the Interest of Doctrine, and History

Delivering publications in spite of the need ...
for actual doctrine

As one long interested in military history, lately become a student of it, the subject of military doctrine fascinates me.  This happened quite by accident.  In 2007 barely started on a new job as a civilian training specialist, having retired from active duty only a couple years before and working as a contractor since, my former boss called me one day with an offer, should I be inclined, to leave government civil service after just a few months, to become a contractor once again, as a doctrine writer.  To make a short story longer, I accepted the offer and made the move, which took me out of the training side of the TRADOC house—where, counting my service time, I had been working for twenty-five years—and placed me in another world.

Ostensibly, the name of this other world was doctrine development, but I soon discovered that the larger universe which doctrine inhabited at the time was the realm of capability development, every bit as interesting as anything else I had experience in my quarter century’s association with the Army—all of which was in signal, I should add. My first six months in this new world was a struggle just to learn the new vocabulary and a new set of regulations associated with doctrine and capability development and integration.  Not to mention a new way of thinking.  Maybe to say six months is to give the impression that during that phase I mastered all there is to know about these areas.  That certainly was not the case.  Far from it.  Almost six years later I find myself still learning, like I’m starting from scratch sometimes—which is one of the reasons I find doctrine so fascinating.

The Latest from Rick Atkinson

The Guns at Last Light, Rick Atkinson's new book covering the last year of the European war, from Normandy to Berlin, will be published in May 2013.  

The Guns Last at Last Light will be the third in Atkinson's Liberation Trilogy.  The first two volumes were ...

An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943

The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944,

Rick Atkinson

Atkinson is also the author of several other books on military history ...     

     In the Company of Soldiers

     The Long Gray Line

     Crusade

Happy Birthday John -- I Wish

John H. Edinger, Jr., 1940-2010
(Photo: John H. "Jack" Edinger, III)

John would have been seventy-three years old today. I tried to always send him a card. His birthday follows so closely behind Christmas and New Years that it kind of sneaked up on me and I had to rush to find a card. As often as not, if memory serves, my card was late. 

Along with the card I also generally bought him a book. Books were about the only kind of gift from me that he appreciated. It was a challenge to find one that he had not already read or knew about. Memorable are the occasions when I got him one that he really enjoyed. He would tell me all about it, many times over the breakfast table at some greasy spoon, in Mount Airy where he lived or else here in Augusta. Whenever Connie and I visited him and Mom—or whenever the two of them visited us—John and I always went out for breakfast. It seems we did just about all our talking over sausage and eggs, grits on some mornings and hash browns on others, sometimes a little bacon, or a stack of pancakes, and gallons and gallons of coffee. 

A Failure of Diplomacy: U.S. Policy Toward Iraq Prior to the Gulf War

Ambassador Glaspie (L) and Saddam Hussein

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent Persian Gulf War were consequences of failed United States diplomacy. For almost a decade, from 1980 to 1988, Iraq had been at war with Iran. To a certain extent, the U.S. had aided Saddam Hussein’s government in their conflict with Tehran, Washington’s intent being to deny the Iranians hegemony in the Middle East. The long war placed a severe strain on Iraq’s economy which, with their large standing army, contributed to Iraq’s worsening relations with its neighbors, especially Kuwait. Disputes arose over their shared border, over drilling rights, over crude pricing, and such things. But Iraq’s issues with Kuwait went back much further than that. There had been a crisis in 1961-62 very similar to the 1990 dispute, which had only been quelled by a British show of force. 

There was also a study done in 1979 by Pentagon “conservatives”[1] that warned of an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia—a scenario very much like what actually occurred in 1990. The study was shelved by the Democrat administration because the 800-pound gorilla in the living room at the time was not Iraq but Iran. It was about that time, in fact, when the American embassy in Tehran was overran by Iranian students and the 444-day hostage drama torpedoed the Carter presidency. The subsequent Iran-Iraq war was seen in Washington as a way to beat down Iran’s designs on the larger Middle East, even if it meant sharing intelligence with Saddam. The Saudis also thought it was a good idea to back the Iraqi regime. By the end of that war, however, old tensions between Iraq and Kuwait resurfaced. A cash-strapped Iraqi government with long-standing designs on its neighbor’s wealth and its access to the sea couldn’t just do nothing. Especially with a 280,000-man army.[2] And the irony of it all was that some of the more prominent “conservative” members of that 1979 study team were serving in the Bush Administration. 

Too much is made, I think, about the role of April Glaspie, the United States Ambassador to Iraq.

What Can Never Be Recaptured

“History is lived forwards but it is written in retrospect.  We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only.”[1]

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[1] C. V. Wedgwood, William the Silent, cited in Carlo D’Este, Eisenhower: A Soldier’s Life (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2002), 7.

Bias and the 'Heroine of Popular History"

Barbara Tuchman

The Teleprompter, Barbara Tuchman told an interviewer in the early 1980s, "allows an inadequate, minor individual to appear to be a statesman" wrote Bruce Cole in the Wall Street Journal.[1]  Mrs. Tuchman (1912-1989) was a historian, probably best known for her 1962 history of the beginning of World War I, The Guns of August.  The WSJ’s Cole is careful to point out that, given Mrs. Tuchman’s “liberal leanings” (her father owned the leftist publication The Nation and Barbara Tuchman began her writing career as a correspondent for the magazine, covering the Spanish Civil War), she was actually referring to President—and statesman—Ronald Reagan.

Of course, when one reads just the bare statement, without any clueing in as to its background, the image one immediately conjures up is of one sad excuse for a statesman—and president—Barack Hussein Obama, mmmm-mmmm-mmmm.

In his effort to present Barbara Tuchman as a ‘heroine of popular history,’ Mr. Cole unwittingly sheds light on more of the writer’s biases than intended.  (No judgment here, we all have them).  Describing her thinking as a writer and historian, Cole emphasized that Mrs. Tuchman stressed “the importance of using primary sources and unpublished material, the necessity of visiting the sites where history was made, the use of corroborative detail—‘history by the ounce’ as [Mrs. Tuchman] called it—to keep the historian from "soaring off the ground into theories of his own invention."[2]

All very well, an ideal for which all historians should strive, and quite interesting in light of what follows.  For Mr. Cole goes on to point out that Mrs. Tuchman also “believed sensibly that it's better to ‘arrive at theory by way of evidence than the other way around, like so many revisionists today.’”[3]

Again, sage advice; but, one cannot help but wonder if this was how the “heroine of popular history” arrived at her conclusion about Teleprompters and the fortieth president of the United States.

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[1] Bruce Cole, “a Heroine of Popular History,” The Wall Street Journal, March 10, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/

article/SB10001424052970203960804577243093554779020.html (accessed 28 August 2012).

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

On the Value of History

General Martin Dempsey

"He advised students to become students of history since many of the challenges that will face them are not new but are "variations on the theme."

---Army Chief of Staff, General Martin Dempsey in his August 18 address to the students at the Army War College.

http://tonyhowardsblog.blogspot.com/

Lexington

Washington and Lee University

Friday, on my journey back home from a month spent at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, I made a stop at Lexington.  Just off Interstate 81, Lexington is in the middle of Virginia's great Shenandoah Valley.  The views of the countryside are captivating.  Lexington is also a college town and home to some rich Civil War history.  One of its famous schools is Washington and Lee University.  One of its most famous presidents was Robert E. Lee, who served in that post from 1865 to 1870.  On the campus is a little chapel, named after General Lee.  In the basement of Lee Chapel, Lee and much of his family are buried.  Just outside the chapel, maybe fifteen feet from where the remains of his master lie in rest, is the burial place of Traveled, General Lee's favorite horse.  I took just a peek inside the chapel.  There was no one else inside save a lady seated up front who was obviously an employee. They offer unscheduled guided tours, but I didn't want to be the only one, so I ducked out and visited the museum on the basement level.  There, the nice lady tried to sell me Douglas Southall Freeman's seven volume biography of George Washington.  The books were in excellent condition and could be had for only five hundred dollars.  Not having that much cash on me at that particular time, I settle for some post cards and walk away having spent only two dollars.

John Neel, Sergeant Major to the
Corps of Cadets, Virginia Military Institute

The real reason I made the stop at Lexington, however, was not to sightsee; it was to visit with an old friend, John Neel.

What is History?

My Textbook's Cover

In my history class we had to select a couple of definitions from a list, one that best represented our view of what history is all about and another that is the antithesis of that view.  Here is what I turned in ...

The quotation from the list that most closely corresponds with my own idea of what history is is the one from E. H. Carr (#12), who said that "The function off the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present."  This very neatly expresses my own point of view and, at the same time, describes my chief reason for taking this course—and the whole string of courses that lead to a military history degree.

To become a military concepts and doctrine writer [what I do for a living], it was essential that I have an extensive military background.  When I started I felt sure that twenty-three years, four months and three days was more than sufficient; but, the more I experience the present, whether in meetings, or in conversation, in research, in reading concept papers or emerging doctrinal publications, or in studying current events, the more insufficient I find my experience to be.  So, in the words of our text, I have become a “relentless questioner,”(1) and a voracious reader.

Besides that particular motivation, which really only serves the ends of my day job, I am interested in history, as a man, a father, and as a citizen, for the very same reason.  Reading history illuminates much of the present, it makes things make sense.  It satisfies my curiosity about the present and, at the same time, creates a thirst to know more.  Perhaps that is the sentiment that suggested to someone that the only thing men learn from history is that men never learn from history.  Quite the contrary, I think that men do learn from history.  It is just that they don’t learn enough.

As to the alternative, the definition that captures the opposite of what I believe, I saw agreement between the William L. Burton quote (#13) "If you do not like the past, change it,” and the one by Fredrick Jackson Turner (#24) "Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time." These two represent something reprehensible.  They proclaim dishonesty as if it were a virtue.  This is where it starts in some, the propensity to alter history, to revise it, to re-write it, to re-craft it in such a way that it subtly changes and tells a story about something that did not happen.

History is the record of what happened.  A study of that record can reveal why what happened happened.  The record of history sheds light on the true characters of men and women.  It is a gold mine of wisdom showing the ways to peace and to war, to success and to failure, to victory and defeat, to liberty and destruction.  Changing that record reveals much more than present dishonesty.  It shows a contempt for truth and a motivation to justify continued dishonesty.

(1) Richard Marius and Melvin E. Page, A Short Guide to Writing About History (Pearson Education, Inc., New York, NY) 2.