General George S. Patton cried. It’s true.His son saw it.
Major General George S. Patton, the oldest son and namesake of “Old Blood and Guts,” once shared with me his vivid memory of a night, sometime before the war, when the family was stationed in Hawaii.He had gone into his father’s library, where the old man retired each evening to read military history.
On this particular night, he found his father weeping. Patton had been reading “Generalship: Its Diseases and Their Cure,” by J.F.C. Fuller. The pamphlet argued that generalship in the last war (i.e., World War I) was poor because all the generals were too old.
To make the point, Fuller appended a list of the great captains of history and their age when they had fought their greatest campaign. Patton was in tears because he was older than everyone on the list.
When the famed British General Montgomery first met Patton, he felt insulted. Monty thought the Americans had just sent him an old fogy.
Patton proved to be one of the great commanders of the modern era. He owed his success in part to a lifetime of study, a long-course in critical thinking that helped make him a genius of war.
Today’s U.S. military stands on the precipice of losing its genius.In the 1970s, in the wake of the Vietnamese debacle, the military rediscovered the value of military history — a great well of information and analysis than can sharpen judgment and leadership. That renaissance in professional development contributed to the subsequent renaissance of America’s military prowess. It helped produce leaders like General David Patraeus.
Unfortunately, the end of the Cold War — the so-called “end of history” — brought with it an end to the emphasis on learning from military history. Professional development at the Pentagon has been on the down slope ever since. Today, it is on life support.
In an age of increasingly tight budgets, bean counters must choose between buying bullets and educating brains. Study of the art of war is being squeezed into oblivion.
In the Army, for example, every visiting professor military history chair is either empty or unfunded — at every level from West Point to the War College
Civilian academia is exacerbating the problem. Though military history classes are routinely rated among the most popular on campus, universities are increasingly loathe to teach them. Apparently they fear that teaching about war will only cause war.
Many colleges host Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs that prepare students for commissioning in the armed forces. ROTC has a military history course requirement, but virtually any course counts. Studying a semester of gender issues during the Civil War merits as much credit as learning about the fate of men and women at the sharp edge of combat.
Today, a significant percentage of officers come not from ROTC or the service academies like West Point, but from Officer Candidate School where they receive no military history education at all. Unlike Patton, they are starting their careers unprepared to pursue a lifetime of military learning.
Even when at war, an army can’t be too busy to learn. Had military leaders spent more time studying America’s long history of guerrilla warfare (from the French and Indian Wars to Vietnam) or its legacy of post-conflict occupations (from the Philippines to postwar Europe), our armed forces might have been able to sidestep many of the pitfalls they encountered in Iraq and Afghanistan.
To its credit, the House Armed Services Committee, under the leadership of Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., has just wrapped a series of important hearings studying the problem. It’s an issue that has received far too little attention — both inside and outside the Pentagon — for far too long.
Inattention to serious military history sows the seeds of disaster. The most important “soft power” weapon of all rests between our ears — and today’s military continues to empty the arsenal.
Examiner Columnist James Jay Carafano is a senior research fellow for national security at The Heritage Foundation (www.heritage.org heritage.org)
