Historia Mentem Armet: Lessons of the Past

Abstract

It is a distressing paradox of our time, when we are concerned as never before with military problems on whose solution may depend our national existence and even the survival of civilization, that we should turn our backs on history and deny that the lessons of the past have any validity for the present.There are many reasons for this. The problems we face are enormously complex and highly technical; the weapons on which we must rely and which threaten our existence are so revolutionary in character as to make past experience seem highly irrelevant. And there are few to tell us that this is not so, for military history has never really been seriously studied in this country. The historian has stood on the sidelines while his academic colleagues, the political scientists, the economists, the physicists, and others, have become increasingly active, officially and unofficially, in the study of national security problems.

Military Leaders and Foreign Policy-Making

“…I t may also be that, while the weapons are new, "the concepts that guide their use are old." 29 Neither the character of modern weapons systems nor the apparent acceleration in the dynamics of political decision-making in certain states ipso facto makes past experiences irrelevant. If nothing else, historical comparisons should help us to examine more closely the validity of the assumptions on both sides.…”