BLUF
Military professionals get few opportunities to practice their profession—however, military history can fill the gap by giving context about what has worked in the past and why it worked.Summary
McLeod William Wood writing in The Cove, makes the following points:
- War is complicated.
- Training and limited time on operations provide some learning, but it isn’t enough.
- Military professionals need to know the difference between causation (A results in B) and correlation (a link but no certain outcome).
Worth noting the following on the importance of reading:
“If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you,” Jim Mattis writes in his new memoir, which came out yesterday. “Any commander who claims he is ‘too busy to read’ is going to fill body bags with his troops as he learns the hard way.”
- Jim Mattis previous Marine General and US Secretary of State for Defense.
- Jim Mattis’s reading list - The Washington Post
- LtGen James Mattis' Reading List | Small Wars Journal
References
SEP 2018 The Role of Military History in the Contemporary Academy-The National WW2 Museum
Source Information:
- Article Source: Home | The Cove (army.gov.au)
- Media Check: Home | The Cove (army.gov.au) (No Media Bias Fact Check)
