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)

It is not only in operations that historians need to be involved as early as possible. It is becoming all the more important for you to be there at the outset of decision making on policy, force structure – you name it. And you need to be forging effective alliances with archivists and information managers. The fact is that, without these sorts of effort, the overload of information and data is such that the military are in danger of losing their recent past and all of us are in danger of losing any chance of achieving a coherent understanding of that past.

Let me next make one gentle request to the younger historians here tonight – to understand that a newly minted PhD in military history does not make an immediate expert in the range of military affairs. I am not here suggesting that military history requires practical experience. It certainly helps – as Garret Mattingly’s monumental analysis of the Spanish Armada demonstrates, illuminated as it was from his naval service in 1944 in the English Channel. But the fact is that intensive and extensive study and outstanding intelligence can and do combine to create not only a deep understanding but the leaps of imagination which mark the work of the best historians. I have learnt more about navies from historians who have never been to sea than I have from many outstanding senior naval commanders. Yet such understanding does not come easy. In the end, military and naval history is very hard work and there is no getting around this fact.

I want to return to the idea of uncertainty. I believe that one of the most difficult problems which a historian faces in work which will really help the military is to produce a coherent narrative and effective analysis without infusing the text with hindsight. It is sometimes possible to make the story too clear and too simple – indeed, I would suggest that the better the narration, the greater the risk that this is to happen. The problem is that it creates a false impression in the mind of the military novice – the impression that all events can be predicted, that all problems have a straightforward solution. I’ll go further and say that it may be part of the psychological profile of the average keen and well meaning junior officer to prefer such certainties to ambiguity and to grasp them as a sort of mental life ring. And that goes for most of us senior officers as well.

In a number of real world operations in which I have been involved, one of the greatest command challenges that I have faced in leading my younger people – particularly the more intelligent ones – is to explain to them just how messy reality is, to indicate that my confidence as a commander did not in fact equate to some infallible prescience about the future and to comfort them as best I could – generally with aphorisms such as ‘If you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t have joined’.

Adjusting to the unknown

But, more to the case, I have been able to point them back to other periods of uncertainty and confusion, to explain to them, with historical examples, of how people at all levels of warfare have had to deal with and adjust to the unknown – and how they have sometimes got their initial responses very wrong. In short, I have tried to make it clear that not all military disasters were easily predictable and that not all who failed were ‘bloody fools’. And that they had better start thinking about their own military situation.

I should say that I believe one of the great contributions of recent military historians to destroying the tendency towards the ‘bloody fool’ approach has been the work done on the First World War, particularly but not only in terms of the Western Front. I’ll add to that, in a naval context, the work on the Fisher era.

Key characteristics

Perhaps the area of history in which hindsight is least likely to wreak its subliminal evil is, in fact, biography and this is because the biographer’s first task is to describe the development of a person rather than the progression of events. Good biographers cannot help but illuminate the episodes in their subjects’ lives in which they were uncertain, unsure, disappointed and – often enough – plain wrong in the courses of action that they pursued. Biography can illustrate not only failure, but recovery – and there can be no doubt that the ability to recover, to be resilient in adversity, must stand as one of the key characteristics of the great military leader. I have always found it significant that biographies are particularly popular as sources for study amongst effective military leaders who have also been readers. They have certainly been important for me.