Military Review English Edition July-August 2016 | Page 109

FOREIGN LANGUAGE

The Understanding of
Human Nature
Our captains of war need to be absorbed in
thought and study that can only come through advanced education. The mastery of languages should
come from acculturated immersion. Rosetta Stone
and even the Defense Language Institute Foreign
Language Center may be good for what they purport,
but they are entry level, introductory. Likewise, there
is a need to truly understand history, or otherwise
military leaders will stumble about blindly.

Foremost, our captains of war must strive to understand human nature. Advanced education of the
officer corps is not a mere luxury but rather an absolute. Anything short of taking this on board is foolish
and perilous.

This article is adapted from a speech given 24 July 2015 for
the Naval Postgraduate School Marine Dining Out, at the
Pacific House, Monterey, California.

Biography
Col. John McKay, U.S. Marine Corps, retired, is a writer, consultant, and speaker. He is a twice-wounded infantry officer
having served in three wars. He holds master’s degrees from Georgetown University and the National War College. Reared
in Latin America, he is an Olmsted Scholar and a Spanish linguist. He served as naval attaché to El Salvador during the
civil war in the 1980s, and in 1995-96 as commanding officer of Joint Task Force-160, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He has
worked in South America for a national intelligence agency and in Mexico for the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Notes
Epigraph. U.S. Army Maj. Gen. George H. Olmsted, quoted at
the Olmsted Foundation website, accessed 12 May 2016, http://
www.olmstedfoundation.org.
1. Alastair Buchan, War in Modern Society: An Introduction
(London: C.A. Watts & Co. Ltd., 1966), xi.
2. Ibid., ix–xiii.
3. For more on failed U.S. interventions in Vietnam, Lebanon, and the Middle East, see Andrew J. Bacevich, Washington
Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (New York: Metropolitan
Books, 2010), 93, 98–100, and 121–27; and America’s War for
the Greater Middle East: a Military History (New York: Random
House, 2016).
4. For more on El Salvador and Honduras, see Douglas V.
Porpora, How Holocausts Happen: The United States in Central
America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990). Also see
the writings of Horacio Castellanos Moya, such as Con la congoja
de la pasada tormenta (San Salvador: Editorial Tendencias,
1995); Recuento de incertidumbres: cultura y transición en El Salvador (San Salvador: Editorial Tendencias, 1993); and The Dream
of My Return, trans. Katherine Silver (New York: New Directions
Books, 2015).
5. Gertrude Bell, quoted in Christopher Dickey, “‘The
Unraveling,’ by Emma Sky,” New York Times online book review, 8 July 2015, accessed 18 May 2016, http://www.nytimes.
com/2015/07/12/books/review/the-unraveling-by-emma-sky.
html?_r=0. See also Gertrude Bell, The Letters of Gertrude Bell, vol.

MILITARY REVIEW  July-August 2016

I, at Project Gutenberg Australia website, accessed 19 May 2016,
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks04/0400341h.html.
6. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, eds. and trans. Michael
Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1967), 139.
7. See Gilles Kepel, trans. Anthony F. Roberts, Jihad: The Trail
of Political Islam (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2002), 317–19, and Bacevich, America’s War for
the Greater Middle East: a Military History, 143–59.
8. The Olmsted Foundation, “Locations Announced for
OSC 2016,” The Olmsted Foundation website, accessed
19 May 2016, http://www.olmstedfoundation.org/news/
locations-announced-for-osc-2016.
9. Winston S. Churchill, “The Old Lion,” (radio speech broadcast from London to America, 16 June 1941).
10. Rudyard Kipling, “Fuzzy-Wuzzy (Soudan Expeditionary
Force),” Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads, (New York: Macmillan
and Co., 1893), 150–52.
11. John Whiteclay Chambers, II, ed. The Oxford Companion
to American Military History (New York: Oxford University Press,
1999), 96.
12. Winston S. Churchill, The Collected Works of Sir Winston
Churchill, Centenary Limited Edition, vol. VIII, The World Crisis,
Part One, 1911-1914 (London: The Library of Imperial History,
1974), 58.
13. James A. Russell et al., Navy Strategy Development: Strategy
in the 21st Century, Navy Research Program Project FY14-N3/N50001 (Monterey, CA: Naval Postgraduate School: 2015), 6.

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