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  • A Scientific Way of War: Antebellum Military Science, West Point, and the Origins of American Military Thought by Ian C. Hope
  • Ricardo A. Herrera
A Scientific Way of War: Antebellum Military Science, West Point, and the Origins of American Military Thought. Ian C. Hope. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. ISBN 978-0-8032-7685-7. 334pp., cloth, $55.00.

Ian C. Hope’s Scientific Way of War is a provocative work that enters into the still lively debate over military theory and science in the antebellum United States. Historians have long deliberated the nature and inspiration of nineteenth-century American military thought. Thus far, Antoine-Henri Jomini, a Swiss staff officer with extensive service in the French and Russian armies during the Napoleonic Wars, has reigned supreme in most historians’ judgments. Of Jomini’s several works, historians have most often cited his 1838 Précis de l’Art de la Guerre: Des Principales Combinaisons de la Stratégie, de la Grande Tactique et de la Politique Militaire, first translated in 1854 into English as The Art of War, as having held sway over the American military imagination through the Civil War. Judging by American theories of warfare, officers’ correspondence, and commanders’ performance, Jomini seems a sure bet. Hope, however, disagrees (Antoine-Henri Jomini, The Art of War, trans. G. H. Mendell and W. P. Craighill [Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1862]).

While not dismissing Jomini, Hope argues that a distinctly American military science had developed in the decades before the Civil War. He identifies its home at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The academy’s leadership and faculty embraced a distinctly French Enlightenment and republican approach to military education in which science and meritocracy reigned. It did not, however, start smoothly. Following a fitful start in 1802 and its clumsy development through the War of 1812, the academy found its footing and hewed [End Page 330] to a path dominated by mathematics, science, and engineering. Hope notes that the aim of the curriculum was to produce a scientifically minded generalist capable of rotating through line and staff assignments. It was, in short, a general-purpose education for a general-purpose army whose responsibilities ranged from fortress design and construction to road building, civilian contracting, and frontier constabulary duties. This shared knowledge and common language was an incipient form of doctrine. As West Point evolved, so too did the army. By the 1820s, under the skillful leadership of secretaries of war like John C. Calhoun (1817–25), the army developed an early form of general staff. Not quite the American equivalent of the Prussian general staff, which was dedicated to war planning, it was, as Hope demonstrates, a distinctly American general staff that performed general purpose staff duties.

The figure who dominates Hope’s work is Dennis Hart Mahan, an 1824 graduate of the Military Academy who enjoyed a long and influential career at West Point (1826–71). Mahan, as Hope demonstrates, was committed to the scientific principles that had governed the academy’s ethos. While Mahan’s contributions are too many and too detailed to review in any great depth, for Hope, Mahan’s central contribution was his formulation of a coherent scientific body of knowledge and practice that graduates carried forward into their careers, even those short-lived ones in Confederate gray.

This work suffers from a number of shortcomings. Two, however, will suffice as examples. First, the author fails to address Michael Bonura’s Under the Shadow of Napoleon: French Influence on the American Way of Warfare from the War of 1812 to the Outbreak of World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2012), the most recent examination of French influence on the United States Army. Second, it is in need of more attentive fact-checking. The large number of minor errors will make many readers pause and take note. Among them, Hope refers to Col. Alexander Doniphan as a brigadier, when, in fact, no such rank existed in the United States Army (162). Maps 1, 2, and 3 refer to the federal armories at Springfield, Massachusetts and Harpers Ferry, Virginia as “foundries” and names Springfield as “Springhill” (32, 39, 58...

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