Tag military history

TDI Friday Read: Cool Maps Edition

Today’s edition of TDI Friday Read compiles some previous posts featuring maps we have found to be interesting, useful, or just plain cool. The history of military affairs would be incomprehensible without maps. Without them, it would be impossible to convey the temporal and geographical character of warfare or the situational awareness of the combatants. Of course, maps are susceptible to the same methodological distortions, fallacies, inaccuracies, and errors in interpretation to be found in any historical work. As with any historical resource, they need to be regarded with respectful skepticism.

Still, maps are cool. Check these out.

Arctic Territories

Visualizing European Population Density

Cartography And The Great War

Classics of Infoporn: Minard’s “Napoleon’s March”

New WWII German Maps At The National Archives

As an added bonus, here are two more links of interest. The first describes the famous map based on 1860 U.S. Census data that Abraham Lincoln used to understand the geographical distribution of slavery in the Southern states.

The second shows the potential of maps to provide new insights into history. It is an animated, interactive depiction of the trans-Atlantic slave trade derived from a database covering 315 years and 20,528 slave ship transits. It is simultaneously fascinating and sobering.

First World War Digital Resources

Informal portrait of Charles E. W. Bean working on official files in his Victoria Barracks office during the writing of the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918. The files on his desk are probably the Operations Files, 1914-18 War, that were prepared by the army between 1925 and 1930 and are now held by the Australian War Memorial as AWM 26. Courtesy of the Australian War Memorial. [Defence in Depth]

Chris and I have both taken to task the highly problematic state of affairs with regard to military record-keeping in the digital era. So it is only fair to also highlight the strengths of the Internet for historical research, one of which is the increasing availability of digitized archival  holdings, documents, and sources.

Although the posts are a couple of years old now, Dr. Robert T. Foley of the Defence Studies Department at King’s College London has provided a wonderful compilation of  links to digital holdings and resources documenting the experiences of many of the many  belligerents in the First World War. The links include digitized archival holdings and electronic copies of often hard-to-find official histories of ground, sea, and air operations.

Digital First World War Resources: Online Archival Sources

Digital First World War Resources: Online Official Histories — The War on Land

Digital First World War Resources: Online Official Histories — The War at Sea and in the Air

For TDI, the availability of such materials greatly broadens potential sources for research on historical combat. For example, TDI made use of German regional archival holdings for to compile data on the use of chemical weapons in urban environments from the separate state armies that formed part of the Imperial German Army in the First World War. Although much of the German Army’s historical archives were destroyed by Allied bombing at the end of the Second World War, a great deal of material survived in regional state archives and in other places, as Dr. Foley shows. Access to the highly detailed official histories is another boon for such research.

The Digital Era hints at unprecedented access to historical resources and more materials are being added all the time. Current historians should benefit greatly. Future historians, alas, are not as likely to be so fortunate when it comes time to craft histories of the the current era.

The Sad Story Of The Captured Iraqi DESERT STORM Documents

The fundamental building blocks of history are primary sources, i.e artifacts, documents, diaries and memoirs, manuscripts, or other contemporaneous sources of information. It has been the availability and accessibility of primary source documentation that allowed Trevor Dupuy and The Dupuy Institute to build the large historical combat databases that much of their analyses have drawn upon. It took uncounted man-hours of time-consuming, pain-staking research to collect and assemble two-sided data sufficiently detailed to analyze the complex phenomena of combat.

Going back to the Civil War, the United States has done a commendable job collecting and organizing captured military documentation and making that material available for historians, scholars, and professional military educators. TDI has made extensive use of captured German documentation from World War I and World War II held by the U.S. National Archives in its research, for example.

Unfortunately, that dedication faltered when it came to preserving documentation recovered from the battlefield during the 1990-1991 Gulf War. As related by Douglas Cox, an attorney and Law Library Professor at the City University of New York School of Law, millions of pages of Iraqi military paper documents collected during Operation DESERT STORM were destroyed by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in 2002 after they were contaminated by mold.

As described by the National Archives,

The documents date from 1978 up until Operation Desert Storm (1991). The collection includes Iraq operations plans and orders; maps and overlays; unit rosters (including photographs); manuals covering tactics, camouflage, equipment, and doctrine; equipment maintenance logs; ammunition inventories; unit punishment records; unit pay and leave records; handling of prisoners of war; detainee lists; lists of captured vehicles; and other military records. The collection also includes some manuals of foreign, non-Iraqi weapons systems. Some of Saddam Hussein’s Revolutionary Command Council records are in the captured material.

According to Cox, DIA began making digital copies of the documents shortly after the Gulf War ended. After the State Department requested copies, DIA subsequently determined that only 60% of the digital tapes the original scans had been stored on could be read. It was during an effort to rescan the lost 40% of the documents that it was discovered that the entire paper collection had been contaminated by mold.

DIA created a library of the scanned documents stored on 43 compact discs, which remain classified. It is not clear if DIA still has all of the CDs; none had been transferred to the National Archives as of 2012. A set of 725,000 declassifed pages was made available for a research effort at Harvard in 2000. That effort ended, however, and the declassified collection was sent to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The collection is closed to researchers, although Hoover has indicated it hopes to make it publicly available sometime in the future.

While the failure to preserve the original paper documents is bad enough, the possibility that any or all of the DIA’s digital collection might be permanently lost would constitute a grievous and baffling blunder. It also makes little sense for this collection to remain classified a quarter of a century after end of the Gulf War. Yet, it appears that failures to adequately collect and preserve U.S. military documents and records is becoming more common in the Information Age.

Structure Of The U.S. Defense Department History Programs

With the recent discussions of the challenges facing U.S. government historians in writing the official military histories of recent conflicts, it might be helpful to provide a brief outline of the structure of the Department of Defense (DOD) offices and programs involved. There are separate DOD agency, joint, and service programs, which while having distinct missions, sometime have overlapping focuses and topics. They are also distinct from other Executive Branch agency history offices, such as the Office of the Historian at the State Department.

The Office of the Secretary of Defense has its own Historical Office, which focuses on collecting, preserving, and presenting the history of the defense secretaries. Its primary publications are the Secretaries of Defense Historical Series. Although the office coordinates joint historical efforts among the military services and DOD agency history offices, it does not direct their activities.

The Joint History Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) provides historical support to the Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and to the Joint Staff. Its primary publications are the JCS and National Policy series, as well as various institutional studies and topical monographs.

The Joint History Office also administers the Joint History Program, which includes the history offices of the joint combatant commands. Its primary role is to maintain the history programs of the commanders of the combatant commands. Current guidance for the Joint History Program is provided by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Instruction 5320.1B, “Guidance for the Joint History Program,” dated 13 January 2009.

Each of the military services also has its own history program. Perhaps the largest and best known is the Army Historical Program. Its activities are defined in Army Regulation 870-5, “Military History: Responsibilities, Policies, and Procedures,” dated 21 September 2007. The program is administered by the Chief of Military History, who is the principal advisor to the Secretary of the Army and the Army Chief of Staff for all historical matters, and is dual-hatted as the director of the U.S. Army Center for Military History.

The Air Force History and Museum Program is outlined in Air Force Policy Directive 84-1, “Historical Information, Property, and Art,” dated 16 September 2005. The Director of Air Force History and Museums, Policies, and Programs oversees the Air Force Historical Studies Office, and its field operating agency, the Air Force Historical Research Agency.

The Navy History Program is managed by the Director of Navy History. Its activities are described in OPNAV Instruction 5750.4E, “Navy History Programs,” dated 18 June 2012. The Navy’s central historical office is the Naval History and Heritage Command, which includes the Navy Department Library and the National Museum of the United States Navy in Washington, D.C.

The U.S. Marine Corps History Division, a branch of Marine Corps University, runs and administers the Marine history program. Its policies, procedures, standards, and responsibilities are outlined in Marine Corps Order 5750.1H, dated 13 February 2009.

In future posts, I will take a closer look at the activities and publications of these programs.

Military History In The Digital Era

Volumes of the U.S. Army in World War II official history series published by the U.S. Army Center for Military History [Hewes Library photo]

The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has released a draft strategic plan announcing that it will “no longer accept transfers of permanent or temporary records in analog formats and will accept records only in electronic format and with appropriate metadata” by the end of 2022. Given the widespread shift to so-called “paperless” offices across society, this change may not be as drastic as it may seem. Whether this will produce an improvement in record keeping is another question.

Military historians are starting to encounter the impact of electronic records on the preservation and availability of historical documentation of America’s recent conflicts. Adin Dobkin wrote an excellent overview earlier this year on the challenges the U.S Army Center for Military History faces in writing the official histories of the U.S Army in Afghanistan and Iraq. Army field historians on tight deployment timelines “hoovered up” huge amounts of electronic historical documentation during the conflicts. Now official historians have to sort through enormous amounts of material that is often poorly organized and removed from the context from which it was originally created. Despite the volume of material collected, much of it has little historical value and there are gaps in crucial documentation. Separating the useful wheat from the digital chaff can tedious and time-consuming.

Record keeping the paper age was often much better. As Chris wrote earlier this year, TDI conducted three separate studies on Army records management in the late-1990s and early 2000s. Each of these studies warned that U.S. Army documentation retention standards and practices had degraded significantly. Significant gaps existed in operational records vital to future historians. TDI found that the Army had better records for Red Cloud’s War of 1866-1868 than it did a hundred years later for Vietnam.

TDI is often asked why it tends to focus on the World War II era and earlier for its analytical studies. The answer is pretty simple: those are the most recent conflicts for which relatively complete, primary source historical data is available for the opposing combatants. Unfortunately, the Digital Age is unlikely to change that basic fact.

Military History Publications By Women

Grace Person Hayes, The History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in World War II: The War Against Japan, Naval Institute Press, 1982. If you have an interest in World War II, strategy, and strategy-making and have not yet read this, I highly recommend it.

Lists of suggested and recommended books continue to be popular in national security and strategic studies circles. General Mark Milley, the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, recently released his professional reading list for 2017. This list covers topics addressing battles and campaigns, the army profession, and strategy and the strategic environment.

While the extended list comprises many relevant and notable works, some readers pointed out that it contains only one work authored by a woman, Barbara W. Tuchman’s classic The Guns Of August, published in 1962. In response, a call went out on Twitter to solicit titles of books by women on military history subjects. The initial version of this list is posted here.

This list of books on military history (and other related topics) is not exhaustive, nor the only one available, but it amply demonstrates that in 2017, there really is no shortage of worthy and appropriate publications written by women available for inclusion on professional reading lists. The addition of any of these titles would provide a broader perspective to any undertaking specifically intended to expand the thinking of students and practitioners.

It also shows that women are publishing works that are interesting in their own right but don’t seem to be getting the recognition that they deserve. Like Eric M. Murphy, I took a look at my own personal book collection and realized just how few of them were written by women. I am reasonably certain that I don’t intentionally avoid buying books by women, but I have tangible proof that I have done so regardless. I have read or am familiar with many of the works on the list cited above, many of which I can and have recommended without reservation. But there are also many titles that I have not yet looked at, so I have some work to do. I can do better at this and if I find something noteworthy, I can pipe up about it. I think we all can.

Why Do Americans Hate Military Theory?

B.A. Friedman, On Tactics: A Theory of Victory in Battle (U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2017)

In his new book, On Tactics: A Theory of Victory in Battle, Brett Friedman wrote:

[The] lack of strategic education has produced a United States military adrift. A cottage industry of shallow military thought attached itself to the Department of Defense like a parasite, selling “new” concepts that ranged from the specious (such as the RMA and effects-based operations), to the banal (like “hybrid” and “asymmetric” warfare), to the nonsensical (like 4th Generation Warfare and Gray Zone/Wars). An American officer corps, bereft of a solid understanding of strategic theory, seizes on concept after concept, seeking the next shiny silver bullet that it can fire to kill the specter of strategic disarray.

The U.S. military establishment’s general disregard and disinterest in theorizing about war and warfare is not new. Trevor Dupuy was also critical of the American approach to thinking about theory, especially its superficial appreciation for the value of military history. As he wrote in Understanding War: History and Theory of Combat (1987):

In general, and with only a few significant exceptions, until very recently American military theorists have shown little interest in the concept of a comprehensive theory or science of combat. While most Americans who think about such things are strong believers in the application of science to war, they seem not to believe, paradoxically, that waging war can be scientific, but that it is an art rather than a science. Even scientists concerned with and involved in military affairs, who perhaps overemphasize the role of science in war, also tend to believe that war is a random process conducted by unpredictable human beings, and thus not capable of being fitted into a scientific theoretical structure. [p. 51]

Like Friedman, Dupuy placed a good deal of the blame for this on the way U.S. military officers are instructed. He saw a distinct difference in the approach taken in the U.S. versus the way it was used by the (then) Soviet Union. In a 1989 conference paper, he contended that:

The United States Armed Forces pay lip service to the importance of military history. Officers are urged to read military history, but given little guidance on how military history can be really useful to them. The fundamental difference between the Soviet approach and the American approach, as I see it, is that the American officer is invited (but not really encouraged) to be a military history dilettante. The Soviets seriously study, and use military history. Figure 1 summarizes the differences in approaches of the U.S. and the Soviet armed forces to military history analysis.

Dupuy devoted an entire chapter of Understanding War to the Soviet scientific approach to the study and application of warfare. There was a time when the mention of Soviet/Russian military theory would have produced patronizing smirks from American commentators. In truth, Russian military theorizing has a long and robust tradition; much deeper than its American counterpart. Given the recent success Russia has had in leveraging its national security capabilities to influence favorable geopolitical outcomes, it might be that those theories are useful after all. One need not subscribe to the Soviet scientific approach to warfare to acknowledge the value of a scientific approach to studying warfare.