- Author
- Goldrick, James, Commodore, RAN
- Subjects
- History - general
- Tags
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- RAN Ships
- None noted.
- Publication
- March 2010 edition of the Naval Historical Review (all rights reserved)
History has been described as the railway junction of learning and, in my view, it can equally properly be described as the railway junction of military professionalism. I suppose that I could use a more modern analogy with nodes and networks, but railways have that connotation of travel, of a journey, that is central to history’s importance.
And the journey is one that the military must take themselves – historians cannot do it for them. What do I mean by this? Simply, that it is the best work of historians, done for its own sake, that creates the opportunity for insights to be gained on contemporary military problems – insights, I emphasise, not solutions. In my own experience, I can cite works such as Nicholas Rodger’s The Wooden World and its analysis of the mid-eighteenth century Royal Navy, unbound by ideology and with a flexibility of class structures which created a curiously informal disciplinary system highly reliant upon the quality of personal relationships. There is much in this book which sounds strangely familiar to those who must lead a navy in the social context of the early twenty first century – much more familiar to us, let me say, than is the navy of 1914, despite its closer proximity in time. My point here is that it is the military that must arrive at such insights – although I accept that historians may be allowed the use of very sharp sticks to get them there.
Role of history
I will keep returning to the theme of insight because I firmly believe that the real role of history in military education is to create a sensibility, an outlook, which better equips commanders to deal with complex and dynamic situations. I am not here simply talking about an outlook founded in a particular tradition or culture – the sort of atmosphere criticised in the US Navy by Secretary Stimson in which it retired ‘into a dim religious world in which was Neptune was God, Mahan his prophet and the United States Navy the only true church.’ A professional outlook steeped in history needs to be much more than that – and too often it is not.
Pace of change
I have long believed – and often said – that navies are bad at history because, in peace and war, they are inherently highly practical organisations bound up with the complex technology which they must operate in a dynamic and unforgiving environment. Historically, they have had more demanding peacetime roles than armies and, frankly, less leisure to contemplate the higher aspects of their profession. Naval officers tend to distrust what cannot be directly related to their own experience. In the sailing era, this in fact made navies highly conservative, suspicious of innovation and dependent upon proven methods. From the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the pace of technological change picked up to the point that navies became wholly contemporary in their approach. They paid lip service to history, but they came to regard historical studies as relevant only for the demonstration and inculcation of moral virtues, not for strategic matters or even practical operational details. And to this extent, Stimson’s assessment was absolutely right, and not just for the United States Navy.
I am not sure that this situation has altered much in the last one hundred and fifty years, despite the efforts of many naval historians to change it. It is probably also true for air forces within their shorter history. On the other hand, armies could make a connection between the battlefield then and battlefields now and between the foot soldier then and now that navies and air forces could not make. Yet even these connections seem increasingly tenuous in the context of networked capabilities. Armies, once so much better in the past than navies in their use of history, seem increasingly to be in the same situation.
I would suggest two other reasons for this. The first is that, to continuing technological change, is being added accompanying social, political, economic and thus strategic change at an ever faster rate, resulting in ever increasing degrees of complexity in armed conflict and less time and space for detached contemplation. Even cavalry officers now work after lunch as well as before it. The second reason is that the pace of military activity and the nature of modern operations are making all our people highly task oriented and very much situated on the here, the now and the immediate future – drawing directly and very largely on their own hard won experience as the measure which they apply to any situation. They are all, in other words, becoming more like naval officers have always been.