Tea at Trianon: Using History to Prepare for Future Warfare

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, April 2, 2023

Using History to Prepare for Future Warfare

From The Strategy Bridge:

The value of history as a means of informing the future conduct of war is not new. James Mattis holds that “a real understanding of history means that we face nothing new under the sun.”[2] The fundamental reason for this lies in the Clausewitzian adage that no matter the age, all wars conform to a set of universal principles that constitute its nature.[3] The great captains of the past would therefore not find the conflicts of today any more foreign conceptually than those they themselves experienced. The struggle they would have to overcome would rather be in adapting to the new means available with which to wage them.[4]

Another reason why learning from history is essential comes from the practical reality that many militaries do not engage in wars frequently. Whether due to resource constraints or an inward focus on security, such militaries go to war only as a matter of last resort. As a result, it is possible that most of their members, including the regular officer corps, would have no personal experience of war throughout their entire professional careers. History then, as argued by the influential military historian Sir Michael Howard, represents the best alternative to actual experience for the military institution to hone its craft, and by extension, to prepare for the next war.[5] The degree to which this is successful may in turn be the difference between victory and defeat

For example, while the tank was an entirely new invention that had been introduced during the First World War, the development of German armoured warfare in the interwar period saw it employed in a manner that reflected the army’s basic doctrine which had itself been refined through an objective study of Germany’s wartime experience, centering around the principles of initiative, exploitation, and manoeuvre.[6] In contrast, the French adopted a more limited study of their own experiences, influenced in part by the failure of their more offensive-minded doctrine in the war’s earlier years, and the subsequent success of a more controlled operational approach in 1918 that emphasised firepower over manoeuvre.[7] As a result, French armoured warfare developed under more narrow parameters, preventing it from being utilised to its full potential. This divergence in learning would ultimately culminate in Germany’s stunning successes against France in the early stages of the Second World War using its armour-enabled brand of manoeuvre warfare that has come to be popularly known as blitzkrieg.[8]

Yet, it should be noted that the Germans were not the pioneers on the subject of armoured warfare. That honour should go to the British, who had first employed the tank on the Somme. Unsurprisingly, they were for a time at the forefront of armoured warfare development, and their ideas would help to further refine German armoured warfare doctrine.[9] While the reasons why the British failed to hold on to their advantage go beyond the scope of this essay, it does highlight the point that learning from history is not as straightforward as it would seem. Indeed, two main pitfalls hamper the objective study of history in the conduct of war: the failure to understand context, and to extrapolate correctly. (Read more.)