Clausewitz out, computer in.

• Author: Murray, Williamson
• Position: US military culture

Military Culture and Technological Hubris

One of the great under-studied aspects of military history concerns the institutional cultures through which officer corps come to grips with the dynamic and ambiguous problems of war and peace. That institutional culture shapes the understanding of the strategic, operational, and tactical choices before the professional soldier, and it implants as well broader assumptions concerning the historical framework in which those choices find their meaning. It is a process that proceeds by means of formal education, informal acculturation, and practical experience.

Actual events on the battlefield have traditionally exercised the principal reality check on the understandings and assumptions of any institutional military culture, this despite ample evidence that military institutions sometimes prove astonishingly resistant to learning from their experiences.(1) And as difficult as they are to learn in combat, how much harder must it be to learn the lessons of war in peace, absent the harsh, unpredictable, and unforgiving world of death and destruction. Consequently, it is doubly important that in peacetime military professionals work hard to frame the right kind of questions and to generate realistic assumptions.

For the most part, however, the historical record suggests that peacetime military institutions postulate answers rather than questions, and adopt assumptions that speak more to their own intellectual comfort zones than to reality. American military culture has generated exceptions to this rule during the past century, in some cases dramatically so. But a major cultural shift now appears to be underway that does not bode well for the future, one that is liable to return us to a part of our past experience that is better discarded.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the American military reflected the peculiar insularities of the great republic it served. The nation had fought two great wars to that point in its history; the first, the Revolutionary War, hardly represented a standard of military professionalism, and the second, the Civil War, involved considerable tension between the nascent professional services and the novel demands of massive mobilizations of citizen soldiers and economic power. Otherwise, the American military had for the most part chased Indians and sailed on lonely stations as an annex to the Royal Navy.

But following the Philippines War the American military entered into a period of resolute professionalization. Serious institutions, such as the staff college at Fort Leavenworth and the Army and Navy War Colleges, were founded for the education as opposed to the training of officers. How those institutions functioned in peacetime explains a great deal about the successful adaptation of the American military to the challenges of the First World War. (West Point, meanwhile, was not an institution of professional military education in the nineteenth century - and many would argue that it still is not. It was an engineering and training school to turn young men into officers. Giving virtually no attention to military history, the conduct of operations, or strategy, it was in the business of turning out lieutenants.)

By the 1920s the American military services were firmly established with cultures that identified their officers as professionals, possessing a body of significant knowledge that could only be gained through systematic training, experience, and education. In that period the services received minimal funding from their civilian masters - to the extent that when war broke out in Europe in 1939, the army of the United States ranked in capabilities with the South American republics rather than with its future opponents and allies. And yet, in less than three years the U.S. Navy's carrier aviation had destroyed much of the Japanese navy's carrier force, U.S. Marines had executed an amphibious landing on Guadalcanal, and the army was preparing for landings in North Africa. Within another two years American military might would bestride the world, from the ravaged cities of Germany to the battlefields of Normandy and the Pacific.

How to explain this extraordinary transformation? Undoubtedly the massive arsenal of American industry was a crucial factor. But of great importance also was the cultural and intellectual verve of the U.S. officer corps that had been nurtured in the war colleges and staff colleges during the interwar period. The institutional ethos established there not only insisted that it was important for officers to go to school, but that many of them should serve on the faculties of those institutions as well.

The future Admiral Raymond Spruance attended the Naval War College as a student, and then went on to serve two separate tours on the faculty. Ernest King was promoted to rear admiral while at the war college. A substantial number of the air leaders in the Second World War not only attended the Air Corps Tactical School at Maxwell, but served on that school's faculty; the army's colleges and schools developed a generation of sophisticated leaders for the future. Across all the services, too, a broader cultural framework of serious professional reading and thinking encouraged the careers of the best officers. When General George Marshall commented that one could not understand strategy unless one had read Thucydides, he reflected the educational ethos of an entire generation of American military professionals.

And these educational institutions were not just repositories for book learning. The Naval War College played a crucial role in the development of carrier aviation. The Infantry School at Fort Benning, under Marshall's leadership, identified many of the best in the army and attracted them to its faculty. The marine schools at Quantico helped to develop the amphibious concepts and doctrine without which the Pacific campaigns would have been impossible.

When the Second World War was over, this educated military elite returned home...