The ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have generated an extensive commentary seeking both to define the characteristics of modern war and to identify lessons applicable for future conflicts. Reflecting today’s proliferation of information (and opinions), students of modern war can quickly exhaust themselves listening to podcasts and seminars, watching videos, and reading everything from blogs to official documents. Given the vast—and often contradictory—amount of current analysis, a study of how the pre–information age US Army’s professional journals assimilated and disseminated lessons from ongoing conflicts may assist those seeking a path through today’s flood of commentary. It also confirms the Harding Project’s recognition of the importance of both the quality and influence of the service’s professional journals.
Much of the current professional military discussion revolves around the purported lessons from Ukraine and Gaza. But will those lessons be propagated across the Army and inform the way it prepares for tomorrow’s wars? To explore this question, we can turn to the past and examine how Army journals derived lessons from the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) and the Balkan Wars (1912–1913). Both conflicts were seen by contemporaries as examples of modern war, involving the rapid mobilization of mass armies, costly infantry assaults, intense artillery barrages, machine guns, trenches, and appalling numbers of casualties. But how the Army leadership and its intellectual community perceived these two conflicts was very different.
When the Russo-Japanese conflict broke out, the US Army sent teams to both armies. Not only were they among the largest observer contingents, these teams included such outstanding officers as Peyton C. March and John J. Pershing. The observers’ reports were printed by the War Department in 1907 and widely disseminated throughout the service’s school system. The Army’s primary intellectual forum, the Journal of the Military Service Institution, published both American and foreign analyses within months of the war’s outbreak. Certain topics quickly sparked intra-Army debate—the risks of infantry assaults, the relative merits of offense and defense, methods of employing artillery, the relevance of cavalry—that generated an informed, multibranch dialogue. Combined with a flood of newspaper accounts and several memoirs and campaign narratives, even at an isolated post an officer could assimilate a large amount of relevant data, draw his own analysis, and submit it for publication. Until the US entry into World War I, the Russo-Japanese War remained a perennial topic in all military journals. Although the lessons of the war were hotly debated, both the dissemination of information and the ensuing debates provided a common foundation for officers to appreciate and adapt to problems they would soon encounter on the battlefields of France.
In contrast, the pre–World War I US Army’s efforts to draw lessons from the Balkan Wars were far less organized and thorough. These conflicts were on a massive scale—perhaps 1,500,000 combatants—and were characterized by both rapid mobile operations and trench warfare. Much of what would soon define the Western Front—artillery used for indirect fire, the slaughter of unprotected infantry assaulting with the bayonet, rapid maneuvers by corps and armies ultimately stopped by trenches, aerial reconnaissance, and much more—were previewed here. The US Army quickly sent Lieutenant Sherman Miles as an observer, and his reports were clear, accurate, and prescient. Among the lessons Miles identified, he noted the appalling cost of infantry attacks against entrenched opponents, the necessity for combined arms operations, and that indirect fire, field fortifications, unit cohesion, and aviation were essential components of modern war.
Despite their relevance for both modern warfare and professional education, the Balkan Wars had far less impact on the US Army than the Russo-Japanese War. The only military publication to cover them in any detail was the Journal of the Military Service Institution. And in comparison to the extensive coverage of the Russo-Japanese War, the journal’s examination of the Balkan Wars was limited to articles by Brigadier General James N. Allison, a commissary officer. Allison, who assumed editorship of the journal in 1914, based his analysis not on US observer reports, but on newspapers and articles in foreign journals. The journal also published a few translations and a five-page study of the postwar borders. But taken together, its coverage of the Balkan Wars barely equaled a series on the customs and traditions of the late-nineteenth-century Army. The branch journals, sponsored by their respective schools, all but ignored the conflicts until they were over. The Field Artillery Journal published a lecture by a junior lieutenant in 1915. That same year the Infantry Journal published an essay on the siege of Adrianople (written by an artillery officer); prior to that, it limited its analysis of the Balkan Wars to a five-page synopsis, an almost equally brief translation of a German article, and a handful of editorials. The Journal of the US Cavalry Association was even more dismissive: its treatment of the war consisted of a few sentences.
Why didn’t the Balkan Wars, such apparent harbingers of future war, create more of an impact? First, and probably foremost, they occurred at the same time the US Army was fully engaged in a border crisis with Mexico. This prompted extensive discussion not only on a possible war with that country but on the militia, mobilization, and force structure. The outbreak of World War I in August 1914 captured the journals’ attention and consigned the Balkan Wars to secondary interest.
Second, the US Army leadership and educational establishment made far less effort to study and disseminate the lessons of the Balkan Wars than it did the Russo-Japanese War. Lessons cannot be learned if a military institution does not inform its members, and in the case of the Balkan Wars, the War Department published neither an official history, a summary of lessons learned, or Miles’s reports. The limited analysis provided to and by American officers was haphazard, episodic, and delayed.
Third, many authors and editors viewed the Balkan Wars as an opportunity to confirm preexisting beliefs rather than to learn new lessons. This perfunctory treatment may reflect widespread intellectual exhaustion brought on by a decade of numerous organizational changes (the Root Reforms) and revisions to both branch-specific and Army-wide doctrine. It is not surprising that the branch schools, which sponsored their respective military journals, believed their primary responsibility was to teach bewildered readers the new methods, and not to expose them to still newer ones. Unfortunately, in their focus on equipment, drill, and inspirational tales of past glories they too often fell victim to the compartmentalization and narrow focus identified by J. P. Clark. Thus, the Infantry Journal, whose editorial board passed up no opportunity to bemoan America’s military unpreparedness, identified as the most important lesson of the Balkan Wars that the Bulgarians had mobilized an entire army and defeated the Turks in a fraction of the time the United States had taken to deploy a skeleton division on its borders. The Cavalry Journal, representing a branch on the defensive against charges of obsolescence and irrelevance, found in the Balkan Wars proof of the cavalry’s importance. This problem of confirmation rather than learning was not unique to the Americans. Miles noted his fellow observers from other countries, drawn from their respective general staffs, were so engrossed in strategy, maps, and the movement of divisions and armies, they remained indifferent to the realities of trench warfare, food, and soldiers’ morale that proved decisive in the war’s outcome.
Finally, there was the question of immediacy. It took barely a year for US Army officers studying the successful Japanese siege of Port Arthur to conclude the US Navy’s proposed base in Subic Bay was indefensible. In contrast, besides Miles the few Army officers who wrote on the Balkan Wars did not identify lessons that required immediate application. With the US Army fully engaged in its traditional mission of border protection and an imminent war with Mexico, a faraway war in a distant land was not high on its list of priorities.
Are there still lessons for today’s military professionals in this treatment of the Balkan Wars by the Army’s pre–information age professional journals? Rather than present a list of lessons—the dangers of confirmation bias, overspecialization, branch parochialism—well known to most military readers, this article will be content with one. The Army should sponsor a publication with a broad, generalist perspective like the Journal of the Military Service Institution.
The proposed new journal would serve as what J. P. Clark terms a “watering hole” where Army readers could find longer articles dealing with topics of broad, collective interest. These articles would be written by authors with sufficient research, analytical, and writing skills to discuss military issues that transcend headlines. This journal’s editors could offer a prize for the best essay on a topic of perennial Army concern such as conceptualizing future warfare, improving morale and leadership, winning the information battle both at home and abroad, recruitment and retention, or comparisons of US, allied, and potentially hostile forces. The winning essay and runners up might be published in a single issue. The journal would encourage contributions by all grades and tolerate both criticism and praise. And, in keeping with the new and welcome emphasis on critical thinking and clear and cogent writing, articles would provide officers (and potential authors) with templates for writing.
Within the US Army, there is an active search for lessons about the modern battlefield from the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. This process is vital and should be continued. But there is a danger that these conflicts will become the template for modern warfare, much as the Gulf War, and particularly the Battle of 73 Easting, did for the 1990s US Army. In the process, the lessons of the numerous conflicts today ranging from ethnic insurgency in Myanmar to gang warlords in Mexico will be as ignored much as pre–World War I officers ignored the Balkan Wars. For both the US Army and its officers to prepare for the future it is essential that lessons be identified from a variety of sources, that they are properly analyzed, and that they are spread across the entire service and used to inform the way the Army prepares for tomorrow’s wars. To do so, the infrastructure must be in place. That should include a broad, generalist publication like the Journal of the Military Service Institution.
Brian McAllister Linn recently retired as a history professor at Texas A&M University. He is the author of six books including Real Soldiering: The US Army in the Aftermath of War, 1815–1980.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.