Victor Davis Hanson has an excellent article in City Journal that examines the role and value of military history in education. It deserves to be read in full. Hanson explores how military history became marginalized in mainstream academic study, picking up on some common themes that others have expounded on at length (take, for example, Eliot Cohen’s 2005 op-ed discussing the growing divide between the military and formal academic training).

What lay behind this academic lack of interest? The most obvious explanation: this was the immediate post-Vietnam era. The public perception in the Carter years was that America had lost a war that for moral and practical reasons it should never have fought—a catastrophe, for many in the universities, that it must never repeat. The necessary corrective wasn’t to learn how such wars started, went forward, and were lost. Better to ignore anything that had to do with such odious business in the first place.

Historians of war must derive perverse pleasure, their critics suspect, from reading about carnage and suffering. Why not figure out instead how to outlaw war forever, as if it were not a tragic, nearly inevitable aspect of human existence? Hence the recent surge of “peace studies…”

I’ve noticed during research and visits to graduate program related to military affairs, national security policy and strategy, that what a program calls the study of war says a great deal about its feelings towards military history. Whether one is attempting to end war or simply attempting to understand war, it seems inescapable that one will need to study how wars started in the past, how they were prosecuted and why the results came out as they did. Yet some programs feel the need to bin such studies under the title of “conflict resolution studies” or “peace studies,” while others seem content to merely categorize them as “strategic studies” or “security studies.” Look, for example, at how the International Security Policy concentration at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs takes great pains to diplomatically address this point:

ISP attracts many students interested in the field known elsewhere as Conflict Resolution. The flexible requirements of the concentration make it possible for courses focused on conflict resolution to comprise up to half of the six needed for concentrating in ISP. Many students interested in non-forcible conflict resolution also decide that it is in their interest to get a solid grounding in how force is used in international politics in order to buttress the credibility of their claims, in working environments, to expertise in dealing with conflict.

Apparently, it is less than obvious that a foreign policy, international policy or national security professional needs a solid understanding of how and why groups have and continue to use force. In undergraduate political science seminars, I railed against neo-Rousseauian arguments that in order to spread peace, we simply had to remove the evil structures that had perverted our natural harmony. But that doesn’t meant that I do not appreciate the sentiment that motivates such arguments - as Hanson discusses,

Perhaps what bothers us about wars, though, isn’t just their horrific lethality but also that people choose to wage them—which makes them seem avoidable, unlike a flu virus or a car wreck, and their tolls unduly grievous. Yet military history also reminds us that war sometimes has an eerie utility: as British strategist Basil H. Liddell Hart put it, “War is always a matter of doing evil in the hope that good may come of it.”

But understanding the underlying sentiment does not excuse incorrect assumptions. Mistaken assumptions lead to mistaken policy prescriptions.

Indeed, by ignoring history, the modern age is free to interpret war as a failure of communication, of diplomacy, of talking—as if aggressors don’t know exactly what they’re doing. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, frustrated by the Bush administration’s intransigence in the War on Terror, flew to Syria, hoping to persuade President Assad to stop funding terror in the Middle East. She assumed that Assad’s belligerence resulted from our aloofness and arrogance rather than from his dictatorship’s interest in destroying democracy in Lebanon and Iraq, before such contagious freedom might in fact destroy him. For a therapeutically inclined generation raised on Oprah and Dr. Phil—and not on the letters of William Tecumseh Sherman and William Shirer’s Berlin Diary—problems between states, like those in our personal lives, should be argued about by equally civilized and peaceful rivals, and so solved without resorting to violence.

The first example that sprang to my mind was Donald Kagan’s description of Kennedy’s first meeting with Khrushchev in 1961. Hoping to cut through all the threatening rhetoric and militant posturing, Kennedy attempted to connect to Khrushchev man-to-man. Kennedy had great faith that if he could just get the Soviet premier alone, the two leaders would be able to talk as reasonable men and find common ground upon which to compromise. What Kennedy did not appreciate at the time, however, was that Khrushchev knew he occupied the weaker position and therefore could not compromise - a bluffer must either go for total victory by continuing to raise the stakes, or he must fold and surrender completely. His weak position means that the one course of action he will never take is the middle path of admitting his position and bargaining with the stronger party from a position of weakness.

The long history of war suggests no static primacy of the defensive or the offensive, or of one sort of weapon over the other, but just temporary advantages gained by particular strategies and technologies that go unanswered for a time by less adept adversaries.

This closing reminder is especially important for Americans. Revolutions in military affairs do not solve war, they simply bring about new equilibriums. Like foreign policy, the character of war is better understood as a punctuated equilibrium than as a system searching for a static final state. Kissinger has pointed out (and i’ve discussed before) how this model runs counter to how much of America wants to view foreign affairs. Perhaps the distinction between understanding the dynamics of war and morally endorsing the dynamics of war is too fine. It may be unavoidable that those who seek to connect the goals of peace studies programs with the realities of war will be sometimes treated as ghouls, indulging an immoral appetite for their own macabre pleasure.