Guide to the Study and Use of Military History

A collection of essays that discuss for the military student and others the nature of history, the importance of military history, and the applied study of military history. The volume includes bibliographical essays on military history, descriptive accounts of the historical organization of the U.S. Army and other parts of the Defense establishment, and discussions of the study of military history in foreign armies and in the academic world.

OVER the years the study of military history has had its ups and downs within the Army. In the education of the World War II generation of military leaders it played an important part, for the study of past operations held a preeminent place in the Army schools curricula in the period between the two great world wars. In the years immediately following World War II it lost that place. This happened partly because the information explosion broadened so greatly the areas in which an officer had to be knowledgeable and partly because of a belief that the pace of change in technology had rendered the study of past experience irrelevant. In the Army’s higher schools, military history became largely a matter of using examples from the past in courses dealing with current problems.