Wending Through the Way of War

For starters, we ought to be speaking of "ways of wars." There is an underlying premise to this viewpoint for military history. How both state and non-state actors fight reflects their national character. Combatants enter conflict with assumptions, perceptions, and preferences that shape the way they intend to engage in warfare. These are shaped before the battle. They are unique to the competitor. They change over time.

The three papers here argue for the utility of thinking about "ways of wars," though they all find problems with past efforts at mastering this approach. To me, weighing the good and the bad suggests at least three principles for applying the ways of wars perspective to the study of conflict.

A first principle of war ways should be: think big and broadly. As Rob Citino points out, it would be too much to speak of the study of the ways of wars as a historiographical school. That said, what often purports to serve as the guiding idea for determining how militaries wage warfare looks mostly at doctrine and tradition. The more I study military history the more I have come to believe that that perspective is far too narrow.

From Berthold Laufer, Chinese Clay Figures: Prolegomena on the History of Defensive Armor, Part 1 (Field Museum of Natural History, 1914).

The dynamic relationships between the civilian and military spheres of society can dramatically affect ways of going to war. This is not to suggest that New Military History is a good idea. In fact, I think that approach has turned into a historian's dead end. In 1991 Peter Paret heralded its arrival. "The New Military History," he wrote, "stands for an effort to integrate the study of military institutions and their actions more closely with other kinds of history." He saw it as a potent weapon that military historians could use to "fight the indifference or hostility of their colleagues on the one hand, and against the narrowness of much of military history on the other."¹ Unfortunately, rather than enriching our understanding of warfare by studying issues of gender, culture, and social structures, it has for the most part done anything but. University departments continue to push military studies to the margin. Meanwhile, New Military History cranks out monographs that only tangentially inform our understanding of the conduct of warfare.

New Military History's first cousin is national identity theory, which claims that cultural traits influence how nations act.² Political scientists mimicked historians with their promises. The results, however, have generally been similar, with studies that tell us more about the authors' cultural assumptions and political and social axes to grind than how and why enemies confront one another. My favorite example is Natalie Bormann's National Missile Defense and the Politics of U.S. Identity: A Poststructural Critique (Manchester University Press, 2008). She starts out assuming that the desire for missile defenses is irrational. She dismisses all the feasibility and cost issues in two pages, citing only the opinions of outspoken missile defense critics. She then spends one hundred plus pages "creating" a national identity that explains why Americans would try doing something so stupid as to protect themselves from nuclear attack.

If the study of ways of wars is going to better it will have to integrate the study of military operations and activities with the wider world—not push them to the sidelines. This story can only be told by bringing together disparate brands of history that hardly ever get mentioned in the same breath: military history, the story of battle, blood, and bugles; the history of science and technology; and social, economic, business, cultural, and intellectual history, the exploration of how changes in beliefs and relationships among individuals and communities shape the way humans respond to the world around them.

A second principle could be: don't think deterministically. No right thinking person would axiomatically assume that an economic historian would be the best person to give advice on a good 401K or predict the next move in the Dow Jones. Yet many, including...