Military Education – Reflections of a Naval Fellow Traveler

Author

Goldrick, James, Commodore, RAN

Subjects

History - general

Tags

Military history, Military education

RAN Ships

None noted.

Publication

March 2010 edition of the Naval Historical Review (all rights reserved)

The Irish Question

So, how do we deal with these tendencies and what can the study of military history offer? First, and above all, we have to accept that the world is changing – as it always has – and that we must avoid the facile cry of ‘learning the lessons of history’. I like to use here the example of that wonderful satire of the history that people actually remember, not what they were taught – 1066 and All That – and its analysis of the Irish Question. Remember it – ‘every time the English found the answer, the Irish changed the Question.’

For my part, I will be content if historical study results in our people knowing what some of the questions are that they should ask, even if those questions are continually changing. I certainly don’t want them using history alone as the basis for the conclusions that they draw. I have always kept in my head the picture of the historically well read Chief of the British naval war staff declaring towards the end of 1914, that a patrol on the Broad Fourteens in the southern waters of the North Sea was something that the Royal Navy had always done in previous conflicts – a few days later the submarine U-9 sank the armoured cruisers Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy.

‘Situate the appreciation’

But there is, in reality, no alternative, because historical studies remain the only source of insights of which we can have some hope that they are not in some way ‘cooked’. Many of the world’s armed forces are placing increasing emphasis on simulation and gaming, on scenarios and futures. This is absolutely vital work, but the pressures that always exist in any organisation mean that we can never completely trust the conclusions of what are inherently artificial products. Even when there has been no conscious effort to ‘situate the appreciation’ to achieve desired results, subconscious limitations inevitably confine the product. I don’t propose here to talk much further about this problem – it has been aired extensively in the United States in the context of experimentation – but I am convinced that honest and thorough historical studies provide the best means to check that such future efforts are at least on the right track.

In all of this, I have several pleas to make to historians. The first concerns a matter that I have already touched upon, doing the history for its own sake. I know that even historians must eat. A certain amount of work has to be done to pay the rent – anniversaries are always the cause of increased popular interest and thus of a livelier market for historical products – and such work is not invalid just because of its origin. I have read and much admired several of the products of the Nelson Bicentenary. Similarly, as I have described, we in the military will ask you to examine particular issues and we need the benefit of your expertise and your analysis on those issues. In Australia, for example, some excellent work has been done on the historical performance of tanks as close support for infantry – work that contributed significantly to some important force structure decisions. But I urge historians also to go where you want to go, not where you think we in the military want you to go.

It may even be that we need to consider funding for military historical research in the same way that scientific organisations manage theirs. A healthy science organisation, however ‘applied’ its mission, will always retain a certain proportion of its resources for ‘blue skies’ research, however tenuous its connection with the concerns of the present day.

The second plea, and I’ll admit it seems somewhat contradictory, is that you cannot start too early. History begins now. I make this point because the nature of modern information systems and decision making are at a point where construction of any kind of coherent narrative of events, let alone analysis, is becoming more and more difficult. Historians, in my view, need to be involved as early as possible, even if their initial focus is solely upon the identification and preservation of key material. In The Rules of the Game, Andrew Gordon made the point that the British flagship in the 1982 conflict in the Falklands processed over 170,000 signals in little more than ten weeks, 62,000 of which (one every 107 seconds) called for ‘flag action’. And this was before the era of Powerpoint and, even more significant, of command and control being conducted in ‘Chat Rooms’.