Decisive Point Podcast – Ep 5-31 – Michael P. Ferguson and Richard Kohn – The American Way of Studying War: What Is It Good For?

Academic military historians, government institutions, and defense practitioners have unique purposes for advancing the study of war that influence the way they consume and produce history. Although there is substantial scholarship covering how the discipline of military history has changed since the late nineteenth century, the literature surrounding why it changes and how it is used is less plentiful. Using primary and secondary sources to contextualize debates between historians, this study traces major developments in military historiography, considers the US Army’s relationship with its history, and explores potential connections between a history’s purpose and its use for military professionals.

E-mail usarmy.carlisle.awc.mbx.parameters@army.mil to give feedback on this podcast or the genesis article.

Keywords: Whig history, New History, American Historical Association, US military history, Society for Military History

Stephanie Crider (Host)

You are listening to Decisive Point. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guests and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

I’m talking with US Army Major Michael P. Ferguson and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Professor Richard Kohn about military history.

Ferguson is a PhD student and advanced civil schooling participant in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He’s coauthor of The Military Legacy of Alexander the Great: Lessons for the Information Age, published in 2024. He’s also the author of “The American Way of Studying War: What Is It Good For?” and that’s what we’re here to talk about today.

Kohn has focused on military history generally, emphasizing national security and military policy strategy and the American experience with war making and the connections between war, the military, and American society. In recent years, his concentration has been on current civil-military relations, particularly civilian control of the military.

Thank you for joining me remotely from North Carolina today.

Major Michael P. Ferguson

Thanks for having us.

Richard Kohn

Special pleasure.

Host

We’re here to talk about why military history remains relevant, and we’re going to talk about its values for individuals, institutions, and society.

Why has military history been so controversial?

Ferguson

It’s probably something that’s not as well known outside the halls of history departments on universities. Military history in general has a pretty turbulent background, and the way I open up the article, which I thought was kind of a fitting alpha, or beginning, to the story of military history is looking at the turn of the century in 1900 and Edward Eggleston, who was the president of the American Historical Association at the time. And, in 190Z, he drafted a speech to be given at the annual conference. Unfortunately, he was never able to deliver it because he fell ill and passed away the following year in 1902. But, his speech touches on this concept of new history and a lot of [lines ] from the speech really reflect this movement of new history—of looking at the smaller things and moving away from classical history, which was essentially “Ivory Tower” history looking at big policies and wars and politics. But, it also reflects this turn-of-century way of thinking at the time, where we’re on the back end of the Enlightenment. Mankind had supposedly liberated themselves from the shackles of predestination. And, you had Darwin’s theories taking traction, and it came out in 1859 on the origin of species. And then, you also had this massive progress in terms of art and science and industry, where it seemed like the sky was the limit at the time.

And, one of the outgrowths of this period in the history that Eggleston touches on in his speech is this belief that militarism, in general, and war, specifically, could be something that humankind would essentially evolve out of. It was this anachronistic relic of a past form of human life; this barbaric form that they could educate civilization away from it.

That leads into a lot of the themes of why do military historians do history? What’s the purpose of history? And, I want to read one line real quick from his speech because like in any written work, a lot of it ends up on the chopping room floor. But, this is according to Edward Eggleston. This was his purpose, the object of history:

Man is such a savage that until the lifetime of the present generation, he has insisted on settling everything by the gauge of battle. But the brute age and age of heroism in the contest with the brute must pass. We cannot always cover our pages with gore. It is the object of history to cultivate this out of man, to teach him the wisdom of diplomacy, the wisdom of avoidance. In short, the fine wisdom of arbitration that last fruit of the human experience,

End Quote.

The object of history to Eggleston and many other of his contemporaries was, essentially, to weed these remnants of militarism out of human beings.

Kohn

I would say that the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a time when war was being praised as the highest form of human behavior. Heroism changes history. It makes contributions to society. And, it wasn’t really until after World War I, with the horrible killing and no real decision for most of the war that there was a change, I think, in public opinion and among scholars—that war was to be avoided, that it was a mistake. And, it’s controversial because often there are many mistakes made in war. British generals came in for huge criticisms for just wasting human lives by the hundreds of thousands. There was really a turn, I think, in Western society after World War I, that experience that made and still makes war a controversial human endeavor, even though it might illustrate some positive human characteristics.

Mike, why don’t you talk about new history because you’ve [covered the] subject so much in your very, I hope, influential article in Army circles.

Ferguson

Absolutely. New history is kind of a misnomer because it’s not really new at all, but it’s still referred to as “new history.” And, as I mentioned, in Eggleston’s draft of his speech that he was going to give in 1901, he started using this term “new history.” And, he cited, going back to the sixteenth century, a couple examples of other historians who had looked at what he called “the little things in life.” So, social interaction, the everyday life of Americans—from what their bedrooms look like on to the ornate details in their kitchen and their everyday patterns of life. And, part of that concept of new history was that focusing on these things would help create a better citizen. And, that was another thing he mentioned in his speech was that the purpose, the object, of history, was to create good citizens (good men and women) who could contribute to society. And, obviously, the conduct of war and study of war didn’t really fall within that bailiwick of good, kind, productive citizens, especially at a time when a lot of intellectuals were of the mind that they could use reason and logic to essentially extinguish war from the human existence.

Kohn

I think, [at] this time, military history was equated with war history and with battle. And so, it was being studied, really, once wars began. Perhaps [there was] some study on the causes of war amongst states. And, it was almost considered to be war among states. And that, of course, just touches the most prominent part of military history.

It’s as though you can understand elections—we just had one in this country—by only studying the elections. What are the results? Why did someone do this? Why did someone do that? I mean, you can’t understand an election unless you know who’s running, what the issues are, what the background is, what the strategies were, what’s the electorate, what’s at stake. “War is an extension of politics” said the great nineteenth-century student of Carl von Clausewitz. If you don’t understand what’s at stake in a war, if you don’t understand why the sides are fighting each other, how they’re using military institutions, and so on, you really won’t understand war.

So, [I think] there was a sense of the need that developed over time in the twentieth century, and what became known as the new military history after World War II, is that if you don’t study it, as Sir Michael Howard said, in length, breadth, and depth, you really won’t understand it. It’s just military institutions clashing and trying to eradicate each other, or at least wound some so that the one side can win and the other side would lose, or there’d be a compromise. Win what? I mean, if you don’t understand, Clausewitz said, the kind of war you are in then you are really lost as military officers and as political leaders, which, in most Western societies now, are the ones that determine the making of war and peace.

Ferguson

And, I would add to that as the concept of new military history grew in the mid-twentieth century, particularly after 1973 and the institution of the all-volunteer force, a lot of educational institutions and scholars started looking at the question of why serve? Why serve, not only in a peace time when there’s no war being fought? Why serve in an all-volunteer military when there’s no forcing function to get you to put on the uniform?

That led to military historians wrestling with a lot of new concepts that really forced them to ask some new questions. And, what it did was broaden the aperture into other disciplines, whether or not internal to the field of history or external to history and political science and communications and other fields, where they started looking more at subjects that were adjacent to military history, not necessarily war or the battlefield or the conduct of war, as Dick was commenting on, kind of, the run up to war or what basically led to the declaration of war, to a conflict in some of those underlying conditions that supported either prolonging the war or bringing it, ultimately, to a close.

Host

This leads right into my next question. Why should we record military history?

Kohn

One of the great American philosophers, George Santayana, once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to relive it.” One [of the] other aphorisms which always struck me [is] an exchange between an Israeli general and a military historian. The general accosted the historian and said, “You know, why do you waste your time studying the past? It’s just not relevant in this new high-tech, fast warfare we’re engaged in or would engage in.” And, the historian looked at general and said, “What makes you think you’re so smart that you can win in the next war on the basis of your own experience alone?”

I mean, it is human experience in a critically important subject to every society, every state, to millions of individuals because wars often decide things. And, they make history as well as destroy things and lives. It’s always been understood as an important human endeavor, even if it’s to be avoided.

Ferguson

I think that ties into how we define history. How we define it correlates with its value, and Alan Evans said that, basically, history is the best possible version of the truth. One of the most common misunderstandings of what history is is its clarity. History is one of the muckiest, murkiest disciplines we have, and that’s what historians are charged to do is historical inquiry. If you were to throw a bunch of historians into a room and tell them to come to a unanimous consensus on why the Allies won World War II or when the Cold War started and why, if they all emerged out of the room unscathed, I can guarantee you they wouldn’t reach a consensus.

These things—that’s 100 years later, almost, and how many conferences and books and papers have been written about these issues? And, we’re still finding new ways of interpreting whether it’s new evidence or new ways of looking at the evidence. That provides a value. And, the reason why it’s so necessary is because practitioners have to use history in order to formulate doctrine, plans, and strategy. It’s all they have in order to anticipate future requirements. And, they have to go with what is, in their estimation, the best version of history. [In] the study of history, the careful, rigorous study of history, using primary source documents is so important because we’re constantly realizing that we really didn’t have quite as good of a grasp on an event or the causality, especially behind an event or events, as we thought we did. And, those assumptions are what feed into plans, strategy, and tactics in the practitioner world.

Kohn

One of the common misunderstandings, I think, of war and of military history is, and I think this is true, particularly in the Armed Services, is the feeling that history is like a fact. It’s there, we know it all, and all we have to do is to ask it the right questions and plumb it. And, I was walking in the hall of the Pentagon one day and one of my boss’s bosses, a four-star general said, “Your job is to give us the lessons of the past.” I said to him, “General, if there were lessons in the past—like you’re thinking—your forever, absolute kinds of things—they’d be so classified, I couldn’t share them with you.”

And, he looked at me like, wait a second, I know you, you’re not a wise guy. Why did you say that? I said that because it doesn’t have lessons, per se, that will be applied to any present problem. It’s only accumulated human experience around a certain phenomenon [or] incident, a question.

You, as a decisionmaker, a senior officer, or even a junior officer or even enlisted people and noncommissioned officers, have to try to understand the past so that you can be wiser and more informed about how to deal with your present problems. When I worked as the chief of Air Force history for the USAF, the first question I would ask someone who wanted something from me or from our program was, “Why do you want this? What’s the problem you’re facing?” So that we could isolate the history that might be valuable for this decisionmaker, and that’s really it. The lessons of the past is a concept that can be highly misleading.

Host

Are there any specific insights that military history offers compared to other kinds of history?

Kohn

It’s just the selection of, I think, the subject matter. It can be plumbed, if you will, by various people for various reasons. I’ve long thought that you can ransack the past, and to prove anything you want, because there’s so much there. Depending on what your problem is, it’s really the question of what are you asking about what that will determine its value if there is some historical experience that can be useful to a person trying to gain an understanding or to make a decision about something.

Ferguson

The values that military history specifically provides in comparison to, maybe, some of the other disciplines, is that it provides a window into phenomena that most will never experience. And, the only way you’re going to get any kind of window into how human beings act in those moments and why they potentially react the way they do, act the way they do—why do they charge forward instead of turning around? Why do they follow orders instead of disobeying them? These are the kind of things that you need military history to convey because history on the margins of that isn’t going to explain that to you. One of the services that John Keegan provided when he wrote The Face of Battle was to try and get in the boots of the soldier on the ground and understand not just, okay, they were doing a maneuver here. You know, now it’s a flanking here. This unit was here. That unit was here. X amount of troops died here. X amount of troops died there. Really trying to get into the mind of [the] individual soldier and understand the mind state of war, which is something that is an outgrowth of new history because you’re looking much more at that micro level of why individual human beings are acting the way they do as opposed to this broad 30,000-foot view of the battlefield like a Napoleonic war and view of history, essentially. And, you need military history to do that.

Unfortunately, that is one of the casualties of the move away from the drum and trumpet histories—which are focusing on the battlefield and on tactics—to focus more on the social and cultural [aspects] and the political origins of war, is you’re going to end up getting perhaps fewer people looking at the battlefield under the assumption that maybe everything has been learned about that battlefield that we need to learn. And, as we’ve already touched on a little bit, those [kinds] of assumptions are constantly being revisited and questioned and, in some cases, overturned.

Kohn

I think also it's valuable for senior leaders at the various levels to get inside the minds of decisionmakers in the past to try to understand why they made the decisions they made, what they studied, what they thought, and what affected their decision making. A lot of military history is often critical in hindsight of the decisions of senior officers—or even mid-level officers—in operational situations. Because, as we know, there’s often not a lot of time to make investigations when you’re in battle, but you have to be prepared. The military as a profession is one of the few in which people who are trained early in their lives, in their graduate-level studies, to practice a profession, and then once they get the degree, once they take jobs, they practice their profession. Surgeons, lawyers, clergy, teachers [get to], but soldiers of the various Armed Services are always facing new situations as they rise in rank. As a result, they are constantly, in a sense, having to learn their profession again at a different level, with different responsibilities, different problems. Of course, the environment changes also. So, history can really be critically important for preparing officers for higher responsibility.

Host

Looking through the lens of the Iraq war and maybe reflecting on Ukraine, what are your thoughts on whether the military is prone to misusing history to conform biases?

Ferguson

That kind of touches a bit on the Whig history aspect of the essay in Parameters. And, just for a quick wave-top overview, Whig history essentially refers to the Whig authors back in England, who wrote from a certain angle to try and, essentially, promote the British Crown’s values within their history. A lot of people refer to military history as the last stand of Whig history because it’s writing, you know, representing government entities and government agencies.

I think some of the challenges that the DoD encounters, whether it’s writing its own history or uniformed historians like myself trying to be objective and open to being as critical as possible, not only of your own service, but of the decisions made by your country as well, recognizing wholeheartedly that we still maintain a loyalty to our nation and to our service. When writing history, you have to be willing to be very critical of those things, as well, which has not, obviously, been very popular over time, and that’s one of the things I kind of touch on.

Dick can probably touch on this after I do because there’s a lot of civ-mil dynamics as far as interservice rivalry and loyalty at the service level that would prevent you from either creating or, basically, consuming a history objectively about some things you feel very passionate about. Whether it’s conflict you actually participated in, or a system or a weapons system or a platform that you have experience with, you see a lot of this going on right now, and I don’t want to go too far into the presentist weeds here talking about Ukraine and Iraq, of course. But, I mean, Ukraine’s essentially turned into a petri dish of confirmation bias. And, the people with experience with armor are coming away from Ukraine saying, “These are the lessons of Ukraine, right? We got to double down on armor.” People with experience with drones and unmanned aircraft are coming away, saying, “It’s drones and unmanned aircraft. We got to double down.”

You see a lot of that, and it’s to be expected, but I think that’s one of the challenges with the way the DoD approaches history is all the services are going to fight for their own interests. They’re gonna do that. That’s natural. I think it’s a matter of coming to what we talked about: What’s the closest version of the truth as far as historical patterns? Are there historical patterns that we can lean on to make decisions that will please all of the services going forward? And, that carries over into some of the ways that we write history. And, I touch on one example of that in the article.

Kohn

I think one of the greatest mistakes that the Armed Services makes, and has historically, about the use of history is that it’s an instrument [to] which they fight their battles in the Pentagon over budgets, over roles, over missions, and the rest. Or, it’s just an academic exercise to teach people to use their minds critically. So, it’s a sign to the professional military institutions, war colleges, and staff colleges. Or, it’s used [instrumentally] as a type of public relations to serve an institution. And, that’s just wrong. I mean, I had to fight off people who would say, “Well, you’re just academic. You ought to be . . .” or, “Why aren’t you stationed at the War College? Why don’t you do that kind of thing?” and, “Why aren’t you in the public relations business in the Pentagon because that’s what you’re most useful for?” And, I had to fight that off.

And, you have to [prove], as historians both in professional military education and in staff work, as to what you’re useful for. And, that’s why I would have to ask people, “Why are you asking me that question? What are you going to use this for?” and have an interactive relationship with the client. Our clients were uniformed military first and foremost and then other services and the public.

Interestingly enough, the Army and the Air Force use historians and history instrumentally to help them make strategy, do plans, do doctrine, and do it in a sophisticated and professionally valid way, and not misleading themselves. And, I would say to you, when asked why do we do this, 1) we don’t want to reinvent the wheel if we already know how to use this. And second of all, we don’t want to lie to ourselves on the basis of what we would like to know or what we would like to think happened and why. We need to get at, as Mike put it, the truth, the best we can—and the past, and then to use it wisely and carefully for the present and the future.

Ferguson

I think, too, another one of the risks of the abuse of history, which is a topic that’s been touched on by other historians in the past, is the military it takes them years to write doctrine. And, the military is also obviously downstream from its elected leaders in politics and strategy. The realities of the operational environment of the world are going to influence the priorities of the military, either in drafting doctrine or what it’s looking at in history as far as lessons it wants to use as instructive in crafting their doctrine, plans, and strategy.

One of the challenges with that is not only how long it takes to craft doctrine, and things might change, or our perception of history might change in that period, but, also, the political environment’s very mercurial. We saw in 2017 and 2018 with the new National Security Strategy, and the new National Defense Strategy. We completely turned almost 20 years of focus on counterinsurgency and counterterrorism on its head to refocus on interstate competition with a pacing challenge there.

And so, that’s what reorients a lot of the priorities and, obviously, the funds within the DoD, as far as what it’s looking at and how it’s using history. I think if you were to go to a lot of people in the United States right now and ask them what the number one lesson learned from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were, they might just tell you, “don’t do it” because we don’t really want to talk about it anymore. We’ve moved on. And, that’s one of the unfortunate realities that you do have to get on board with that and have to try and keep up with that political aspect of where the focus is strategically.

Kohn

[The] 2017, 2018 redo of the national strategy and of doctrine was headed in the Army by a lieutenant general named H. R. McMaster, a very sophisticated historian who’s written now three books and who had the breadth and depth of understanding to be able to assess what was going on then and what needed to be done for Department of Defense and Army strategy. It’s also Interesting, and I think we ought to bring this out, that when the Army’s modern military history program was set up at the end of World War II and into the ’40s and ’50s by Dwight Eisenhower, he wanted to make certain that it was kept out of the hands of the participants in the war who might have an ax to grind as to what they did and how they did it and why they did it and to put it in the hands of scholars working for the Army, trying to make history useful. The only way it can be useful, though, is to find out what happened—accurately and without fear or favor, as we used to say—even though it might reflect badly on some senior leaders who made decisions. There are many stories about that. But the point is, that Eisenhower knew, and the Army has, I think, for the most part, kept faith with the idea that it would be, first and foremost, accurate and not warped, for a certain outside purpose.

Host

I do have one more question: What takeaways can you leave us with today about military history?

Ferguson

I’ll just comment, maybe, on some of the things I’ve learned in my time here at UNC under two phenomenal advisers. Read the classics. Far more people discuss the classics than actually read them, and even fewer actually study them and discuss them. A lot of them are assigned in professional military education, but there’s just not enough time to really dive into them. So, that’s something that a lot of practitioners will need to do on their own time.

When reading the classics, I would say supplement them and try and find experts out there who speak the language and have read the original documents. This is especially true for things like [the works of] Sun Tzu and Machiavelli. Every time someone comes to me, or I read someone quoting about winning without fighting or something of that nature, I tell them to go read John Sullivan’s papers he’s [written] for Strategy Bridge, which are a phenomenal supplement to the readings of Sun Tzu.

Also, read history to understand the intersection of culture and human needs, not necessarily for dates and facts. And, I guess that is a nice little cherry on top to our conversation about new history. That’s something I think new history has done really well. It’s helped us to understand some of the causal factors behind war beyond, obviously Thucydides’ Fear, Honor, and Interest, which is still, though, relevant today. I think really reading history for an eye towards why certain social and cultural conditions existed and how those conditions either led to war or prevented war, is a really important way to look at history from a strategic perspective. But, from the tactical and operational perspective, I think, still, reading the classics is a phenomenal way to get that foundational understanding, and then can branch out from there.

Kohn

Well, that’s absolutely right. But [what] I always tell people who ask that question of “What should I be reading?” is try those things. Read the most important things that have been written on the subject but read as far as you can and as much as it holds your interest. Just because you start reading a book doesn’t mean you have to finish it. Just because you start a book doesn’t mean it’s the right book to continue. The point is, you’ve got to develop your mind around the subject you’re studying. You don’t do that by throwing away books. You have a responsibility to yourself to find out which are the most important books and select those which you are most interested in and can come to grips with.

And, always remember that you’ve got to be a critical thinker. You’ve got to think for yourself, and you’ve got to integrate what you’re reading and what you’re learning with what you know and what you know is right because there is no perfect answer to that question of what you should read, when you should read it, how you should read it, and how it should develop your own understanding of your profession. But if you’re not reading, if you’re not developing in your profession, you’re throwing away your experience and the potential of your contribution to American national defense, and that’s really, really important. Know your profession.

Host

Wise words to end with. Mike, Dick, thank you so much. I really enjoyed our chat today.

Ferguson

Thank you, Stephanie.

Kohn

Thank you. I, too. Thanks Stephanie.

Host

Listeners, you can read the genesis article at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 54, issue 4. There will also be a link to the article in the show notes (https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol54/iss4/3). For more Army War College podcasts, check out Conversations on Strategy, SSI Live, CLSC Dialogues, and A Better Peace.