Military Review English Edition July-August 2016 | Page 104

Foreign Language
and History

The Enlightened Study of War
Col. John C. McKay, U.S. Marine Corps, Retired
The greatest leaders must be educated broadly.
—Maj. Gen. George H. Olmsted, U.S. Army

T

hirty-eight years ago, as a combat-seasoned
captain of infantry, and a recent Olmsted
scholar fluent in Spanish, I was counseled by a
revered senior officer distinguished for valor and highly
esteemed. I had served under him in war and would
again serve under his command in peacetime. He was
a consummate professional and a gentleman of the first
order. The officer bluntly informed me that my ongoing
pursuit of a master’s degree at Georgetown University
in Washington, D.C., undertaken on my own time
while carrying out demanding duties at Headquarters,
U.S. Marine Corps, was a waste of time. In the 1970s,
the Marine Corps did not permit returning Olmsted
Scholars to pursue a master’s degree while on duty.
Funding for my studies, regardless, was borne by the
Olmsted Foundation and GI Bill education benefits.
In the 1970s, U.S. military culture tended to devalue
graduate study. Today, advanced, refined education
cannot be treated as a nice-to-have frill for the officer
corps. For all of recorded history, the Four Horsemen
of the Apocalypse—war, death, pestilence, and famine—have ridden stirrup to stirrup as causes of human
misery and political change. Of the four, war still rides
a glossy steed, foddered by many of the advances that
have weakened its companions. The war-horse remains
a charger that casts a long shadow. The design of its bit
and bridle should become one of the principal, if not
the principal, preoccupations of political leaders, military officers, and learned thinkers. That preoccupation
should take the form of advanced study.
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The study of the causes of war, in contrast to its
course or its conduct, is a modern phenomenon that
dates no earlier than from the Age of Enlightenment.
The attention the officer corps has now grown accustomed to paying the subject is more recent still—
coterminous not only with a sense of horror of the
military failures of the past century but also with an
interest in political and social sciences.
One author states that studying war is somewhat
similar to studying economics.1 Western scholars have
made some progress in mastering the intricacies of
economics, but not so much the study of war and preserving peace. In fact, in the United States, it was not
until the dawn of the nuclear age that the study of war
and peace commanded anywhere near the degree of intellectual attention that had been devoted to economic
analysis. Suffice it to say the incidence of war today,
the state of play in the actual study of war, the rising
Far Eastern powers, and the actions of Russia suggest
focusing intellectual attention toward the study of war.
Moreover, it behooves the military services to engender
and to ensure an enlightened study of war. That study
is accomplished only through advanced education that
includes languages and history, in order to come to
grips with the dynamics of human social behavior.

The Field of Strategic Studies as a
Human Endeavor
The field of strategic studies, that is, the analysis of
force in international relations, has not found its own
John Maynard Keynes. Can we isolate strategic studies, as economists isolate topics of study with varying
success, from the problems of human organization and
international politics?2 Perhaps not.
July-August 2016  MILITARY REVIEW