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STRATEGIC STUDIES: IN FROM THE COLD Andrew J. Bacevich T1he existence ofstrategic studies as a distinct discipline has been relatively brief, dating only from the Second World War. The origins of the field can be traced with some precision to a seminar organized in 1941 by the scholar Edward Meade Earle at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Earle's seminar focused on grand strategy and the conduct of war, two subjects bound together so intimately as to make consideration of one in isolation from the other impossible. The participants, for the most part professional historians, approached their assigned topics from an historical perspective: it was self-evident that the past provided the most promising avenue for furthering a general understanding ofstrategy and war. The chief product of Professor Earle's initiative was a collection of remarkable essays published two years later under the title Makers of Modern Strategy. In a brief introduction to the work, Earle explained its purpose. Convinced that "as society becomes more highly industrialized, the art ofwar becomes more complex," Earle nonetheless warned against the temptation to treat strategy and war as subjects best left to specialists. In Earle's view, military matters had become "interwoven with economic, political, social, and technical phenomena." Persuaded that war, however awful, would remain inextricably linked to the rest of human experience, Earle declared that "it would be folly to leave the comprehension of war Andrew J. Bacevich is Executive Director of The Johns Hopkins Foreign Policy Institute. He was a Visiting Fellow ofStrategic Studies at SAIS for the 1992-1993 academic year. 11 12 SAIS REVIEW policies to soldiers alone or statesmen alone. ..." In a democracy, no war could be won and no strategy could prevail without "the support ofenlightened and determined citizens." The vast conflict that was even then thrustingthe United States into the forefront ofworldleadershipmade it"imperative that its citizens understand the fundamentals of strategy." It was in response to that imperative and to help Americans "comprehend the causes of war and the fundamental principles which govern the conduct of war" that Earle and his collaborators dedicated their efforts.1 In retrospect, the decidedly historical perspective of these pioneers of strategic studies and their democratic intent—theirbeliefthat understanding war and strategy was a legitimate "concern of all the people"—are ironic.2 Hardly had their insights become available to the reading public than their fledgling discipline divorced itself from history and abandoned any pretense of speaking to the ordinary citizen. Two developments lay at the root of this reversal. The first was the atomic bomb, the "absolute weapon" that bestowed on humanity (so it was said) the power to immolate itself. The mere existence of such a weapon along with the prospect of its delivery by guided missiles of intercontinental range, a threat presaged by the German V2 rocket, transformed all thinking about war. It became commonplace to assert that war could no longer serve any conceivable purpose. To suggest otherwise was to invite a charge of lunacy.'Nor were these simply liberal pieties. As he contemplated the implications of the bomb, even Basil Liddell Hart, a military commentator of unimpeachable credentials and international reputation, was forecasting that any future war would degenerate as a matter of course into a meaningless "orgy of mutual destruction."3 The secondjolt to strategic studies was the Cold War, the emergence of abipolarglobal system dominatedbyrival superpowerslockedinseemingly permanent crisis, each motivated by an ideology to which it was passionately devoted, each leading a heavily armed alliance. Togetherwith nuclear weapons, the Cold War decoupled strategy from such old-fashioned notions as actuallyusingforce inpursuitofpositivepoliticalobjectives. Suchrevolutionary circumstances made traditional concepts like victory and defeat, notions still very much in evidence throughout the pages of Makers of Modern Strategy, passé if not altogether dangerous. The efforts of earlier generations to formulate solutions to the difficulties oftheir day no longer provided a reliable guide to the perplexing problems of survival in a new era. Historians were no better equipped to divine the implications of this 1.Edward Mead Earle, ed., Makers ofModern Strategy. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943), pp. vii-xi. 2.Ibid. p. xi. 3.Basil Liddell Hart, The Revolution in Warfare (New Haven: Yale...

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