In 2006, Jonathan Bailey published “Military History and the Pathology of Lessons Learned: the Russo-Japanese War, a Case Study,” a chapter in an edited volume on history and the military profession. Bailey, a historian and retired British Army general, focused on why militaries failed to incorporate lessons learned during the 1904–05 conflict into pre–World War I planning. Nearly two decades later, his work is worth revisiting as militaries struggle to modernize and balance the potential need to “fight tonight” with the imperatives of future force design. Planners reasonably consider peer competitors and expected challenges when making acquisition decisions, but Bailey’s work suggests that technology and threats are not the only pieces of the modernization puzzle. Lessons learned via humble introspection and debrief in service of rapid innovation is a sacrosanct pillar of modern militaries; by equating the concept with pathology and disease, Bailey takes a controversial stance. Militaries often excel at identifying mistakes and adapting under fire, but evolving in peacetime for future conflicts is far more difficult.
To avoid the pitfalls of the past and repeating another instance of lessons observed over lessons learned, force design must account for technological, cultural, and tactical biases. Furthermore, even an unbiased and non-parochial force design might fall short if it does not consider two distinct observations: first, that escalation is a tactical—not just strategic—paradigm, and second, that militaries must have the humility to anticipate ambiguity and wars of attrition.
The Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) was a pivotal conflict between Russia and Japan over rival regional ambitions. Marked by modern weaponry, trench warfare, and industrialized logistics, it foreshadowed key aspects of World War I, including the deadly effectiveness of machine guns and artillery. Japan’s victory shocked the world and demonstrated the rise of non-Western powers in global affairs. The war also exposed the decline of tsarist Russia, contributing to domestic unrest and the 1905 Russian Revolution. It signaled (in retrospect) a transition from nineteenth-century limited wars to twentieth-century total wars, where technology, public opinion, and industrial capacity became increasingly significant factors in warfare.
In “Military History and the Pathology of Lessons Learned,” Bailey describes the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War, in which foreign military observers and journalists seemingly identified every applicable tactical lesson. These observers published their findings and, in many cases, lobbied their respective militaries to adapt accordingly. However, Bailey argues, observers viewed those lessons through “the distorting lenses of political intrigue, social attitude, military orthodoxy, and wishful thinking.” Additionally, “military organizations of the time often ignored the lessons identified,” and as a result, “clear auguries of the future of warfare (1914–18) generally went unheeded.”
The most catastrophic example of lessons unheeded revolved around the British use of artillery. In the aftermath of observing the devastating effects of a new technology—indirect fire—and how it necessitated a change in tactics, younger British officers fought in vain to have the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) embrace indirect fire in World War I. Senior officers, scornful of a less honorable way of fighting, overruled them. In a single paragraph that hits a little too close to home for modern officers (either experienced with toxic leaders or terrified of becoming one), Bailey describes the deadly effects of lessons merely observed:
Colonel John Headlam played a key [prewar] role in preventing its [indirect fire] adoption. On August 26, 1914, Brigadier General Headlam, commanding the artillery of 5th Division, deployed five brigades of guns in exposed positions at Le Cateau, between 50 and 200 meters from the infantry’s front line. Two battery commanders who believed their positions untenable moved their guns to covered positions. Headlam immediately ordered them to return to their forward position. . . . After eight hours of bombardment, the British had lost the battle. . . . The History of the Royal Artillery covering the period 1860–1914 does not examine the reasons for the failure to adopt indirect fire before 1914. It merely notes that prior to 1914, indirect fire was impractical. The author of the history was Major General John Headlam.
Headlam was not, however, an overtly malicious actor. He was a decorated officer who served with distinction in South Africa and was—perhaps with some karma—wounded at Le Cateau. Despite a lack of accountability in The History of the Royal Artillery, Headlam was part of the team that quickly updated artillery methods in 1915. The BEF’s prewar artillery failures were hardly the result of the hubris of a single senior officer.
Colonel E. S. May and a cadre of other senior officers fought vociferously against the younger generation of officers who were urging the BEF to adopt indirect fire. However, a deeper examination of history and prewar Britain reveals that these officers were operating in a context that left the BEF ill-prepared for the realities of World War I. It was not just Britain: “When war broke out in Europe in August 1914,” Sir Michael Howard (perhaps the most respected historian in military circles) wrote, “every major belligerent power at once took the offensive.” Militaries truly believed they had compensated for the changes in the character of war, and the spirit of the offensive remained paramount for victory, even if leaders expected severe losses.
At the risk of overemphasizing historical correlations, modern observers should note the political context Bailey provides regarding the events leading up to 1904. The turn of the century saw several thinkers convinced that a battle between the East and West was inevitable: Naval historian and strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan envisioned an unavoidable clash, and Japan wondered how racially based struggles would test nations. In a separate work, Bailey argued that the failure to understand the Russo-Japanese War and ensuing conflicts still results in miscalculations between the East and West today.
A few pre–World War I theorists did conclude that war between great powers was becoming suicidal, but in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, military leaders continued to embrace attacks en masse and high morale as the keys to breaking defensive firepower. In Bailey’s opinion, the lessons of the Russo-Japanese War and its “tantalizing insights” should have resulted in “revolutionary change.” However, despite a French study that concluded that “it is almost impossible for a front protected by really powerful weapons and field defences to be broken through even by troops of undaunted courage willing to sacrifice any number of lives,” military leaders continued to believe in the decisiveness of the offensive.
Sir Michael concludes, however, that the “worst losses were those due not to faulty doctrine but to inefficiency, inexperience, and the sheer organizational problems of combining fire and movement on the requisite scale.” This claim might be a slight exaggeration; historian Elizabeth Greenhalgh, for example, explains how, during the Battle of the Somme, British soldiers adhered to close-rank attacks even though their French allies, fighting parallel to them in the same battle, had already adopted more effective tactics. Regardless, whether the Somme was another example of faulty doctrine due to lessons merely observed or a failure of coalition relations (or both), there was no avoiding attrition during World War I, just as there was not during the Battle of Normandy in World War II. The Allies had to attack, and the Germans were dug in. The Allies could replace their losses; the Germans could not.
Cumulatively, these readings teach us some troubling facts. First, mastering new technologies and acquiring the correct weapons is not enough; even if the BEF had mustered the proper number of long-range artillery pieces, their senior officers did not know how to use them effectively. Second, perfecting doctrine, even if it were possible, will likely do little to change the complex realities of a large-scale, peer-on-peer conflict. No military seeks attrition as a preferred method, but history implies it is a realistic outcome.
Perhaps the real lesson from Bailey and Sir Michael is that interwar periods are inherently challenging, and that acknowledging this reality implies that force design should encompass much more than a military deciding which new technologies to acquire. It should include difficult cultural conversations about whether the character of war is changing and whether innovative adjustments are necessary. Force design should also include a healthy dose of self-skepticism to recognize when personal biases may be interfering with decision-making.
Above all, force design must not assume a theoretical conflict is certain or that the military can quickly end a war without resorting to attrition. These are laudable goals, and a proper force design should make them feasible, but a military not prepared for escalation is one not prepared for war. Sir Michael points out that during World War I, “professional soldiers . . . were trying to adjust themselves to the new realities of the battlefield.” Bailey’s concept of “revolutionary change” did come, but only after the most painful of early-war lessons.
How then might planners, tacticians, and senior leaders approach force design and the inherent challenges of interwar periods? An unpacking of Bailey’s “Military History and the Pathology of Lessons Learned” reveals four main themes that militaries can consider when navigating interwar periods: technology, culture, tactical bias, and escalation.
Technology
Exciting new technologies, as Bailey makes painfully clear, are only as good as the operators willing to employ them (or the senior leaders who allow their use). He describes how, regarding cavalry:
There were larger problems than simply cost in the way of reform. The practical, informed, and prescient thinking of many junior commentators was far removed from the reality of the debate in the corridors of power, where institutional obstruction and vested interest predominated.
In 1907, two years after the well-documented lessons of the Russo-Japanese War, traditionalists in Britain reintroduced the lance, and (future commander of BEF forces) Douglas Haig believed that dismounting to use firearms would injure the morale of the cavalry. When World War I arrived, Headlam, Haig, and all belligerents rapidly adapted: Planes and tanks, for example, went from dismissed technologies to revolutionary tools. Pilots went from dropping bombs by hand to employing multiple weapons with relatively advanced bombing racks. And yet during the years ahead of the war, despite the growing movement to adapt to the changing character of war, these leaders and operators were serious about not reforming.
Technological changes resulting from lessons learned under fire are simple: Adapt or die. Minimizing the pain of those inevitable lessons in peacetime is far more difficult.
The US Air Force might be approaching a similar imperative for peacetime adaptation regarding the B-21. Perhaps the recent successes of the B-2 in Iran and the overwhelming number of B-21s will be sufficient to change how the United States uses airpower, or maybe it will be difficult for operators to accept bombers filling unprecedented roles in the suppression of enemy air and ground defenses. Similarly, if the establishment of the Space Force results in the weaponization of space, will leaders be ready to use it? Will those technologies replace or augment traditional airpower, and if it is the former, will operators embrace such a capability before sacrificing its direct fire artillery parallels?
For landpower services, it is comforting to see a wide range of ranks debating the future of tanks, but it is also discomforting to see arguments that Russian tank failures in Ukraine are to be blamed primarily on tactics, potentially mirroring those Russo-Japanese War observers who saw artillery’s effectiveness but also drew the wrong lessons from Japan’s offensives. Tank enthusiasts might well be correct, but whatever technology the US Army eventually adopts, acquisitions are only half of the battle.
The more obvious technological parallel that forces are struggling with is the use of drone technology. On one hand, drones have accounted for 70 percent of casualties in the Ukraine-Russia war; on the other, the conflict has settled into a brutal attritional fight with trench warfare, deep strategic strikes, and Russian bombing of civilians. Some theorists have argued that the US military’s late embrace of drones is akin to the US Army’s reticence to move on from the musket, while current officers have pushed back against the idea that small drones will replace the US Air Force.
Regardless of the role drones eventually play in a conflict, it seems undeniable that their advocates face an uphill battle in convincing their respective services to embrace them should they replace a treasured and proven weapon. Additionally, whatever form drone proponents expect their role to eventually take, they must avoid overpromising: Indirect fire was a revolutionary update for World War I, but it did not replace the role of the infantry any more than tanks or aircraft.
Culture
Perhaps the most striking section of Bailey’s work describes one way in which Western nations reacted to Japan’s victory in 1905: by denigrating their own societies as too weak for modern combat. Even before World War II’s greatest generation, President Theodore Roosevelt—who won the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the Russo-Japanese War’s end—maintained that “the nation that has trained itself to a career of unwarlike and isolated ease is bound, in the end, to go down before other nations which have not lost the manly and adventurous qualities.” French General Oscar de Négrier, who had served as an observer during the Russo-Japanese War, blamed education and upbringing for turning Frenchmen into “timid and poltroons,” the Russians saw wars as contests between nations, not armies, and the German Colonel Wilhelm Balck opined that urban degeneracies were undermining the human species. A British captain, Bailey notes, “described the British nation as being in a ‘wild debauch of so-called freedom’” in need of “a new discipline.” All told, it is a remarkable collection of these damn kids sentiments one could easily find on sensationalist programs today. These were not pundits, however: These were the sentiments of defense experts of their era.
Like anything, readers should consider these quotes in context. The pre–World War I era was politically tumultuous and polarized; the Progressive Era in the United States and the Dreyfus affair in France are just two examples of societies fragmenting amid rapid modernization. Bailey does not examine how the Progressive Era framed the responses of those concerned about youths. Still, considering the fractured state of modern politics, it is reasonable to assume that culture wars might come to affect force design. However it manifests, militaries are not immune to polarization. Officers might be wise to revisit how Congress addressed US veterans’ issues post–World War I, the French military’s role in Vichy France, or even how German militarism contributed to the outbreak of World War I.
Interwar decisions driven by threat and international assumptions are problematic enough. If militaries do not recognize that the intertwined phenomena of domestic politics and culture can affect even the future tactical level, they are not learning from the mistakes of pre–World War I experts.
High politics aside, service-specific cultural wars are ongoing as militaries modernize in tight fiscal environments. How well leaders and operators reconcile these arguments and employ new technologies will likely have a profound impact on how the next conflict unfolds. In the United States, the Marines have argued incessantly about force structure, new equipment, and the organization’s proper role in great power competition. The Army has struggled to define its role in the Pacific, while urging leaders to remember that Europe remains a significant theater. Meanwhile, the Air Force has canceled and restarted programs as it grapples with the future of air superiority. For every proponent of traditional naval power, an antagonist argues that aircraft carriers are a relic of the past, all while the Navy struggles to build submarines, a technology that few question.
Too frequently, however, advocates center these arguments around new technologies and threats instead of culture. As Bailey and other historians remind us, interwar periods are challenging and often marked by a division between those who believe the past is a prologue and those eager to transition to the next great thing. The BEF struggled in the opening days of World War I because even though a new technology—indirect artillery fire—was ascendant, the British military culture had not resolved its internal issues.
How exactly militaries should address the cultural aspects of their force design is a difficult question. In the Air Force, one approach to addressing interwar cultural struggles might be to embrace questioning whether new technologies can provide effective mass, but that is a relatively niche acquisition concept that will not address the issues Bailey identifies. Insisting on chasing air superiority, for example, might to some call to mind a cult of the offensive and reliance on elan that doomed the BEF; clearly, there needs to be a balance between the cultural desire to win—not just compete—and a recognition that wars might turn attritional, and the embrace of new enabling technologies. The BEF certainly had the spirit, but did not pair it with the necessary tools and tactics.
Tactical Bias
Even in the most obvious of observations, Europeans struggled to reconcile the tactical lessons of 1904 with their preconceived biases. Few battles are simple, but in the context of militaries still unaware of the massive shift in the character of war, the Russo-Japanese battles were challenging to comprehend. The Japanese, after all, won the war primarily through offensive charges, having learned about the “Banzai” charge from German military instructors. However, as Bailey describes, this was a superficial reading of the war:
The Japanese were only successful where the Russians suffered a moral rather than material collapse. This led some observers to note the power of defense, while others reported that the defense was doomed to succumb eventually to the will of the attacker. Here lay the seed of postwar controversies that set the offensive style in which European armies would go to war in 1914.
Observers, echoing Robert Jervis’s research on perception, saw what they wanted to; in truth, the Russo-Japanese War proved that a strong defense, indirect fire, and morale were all important variables in the new character of war. The Japanese did not simply rush the Russians to death; they learned, in the hardest way possible, to adopt offensive tactics “more akin to German stormtroop tactics of 1917 rather than those of 1914.”
Adopting what has always worked is a reasonable human response, but how do military leaders and operators find the proper balance between lessons learned and recognizing that the character of war has changed? Bailey emphasizes cultural biases, but it is troublesome how little personal and team biases factor into decision-making, whether in acquisitions or at the tactical level. Jervis understood that it was “difficult or impossible to explain states’ policy choices and associated outcomes without making reference to decision-makers’ beliefs about the world and their images of others,” but those making significant choices are rarely, if ever, challenged to prove their bias. Bailey’s work on the pathology of lessons learned is replete with examples of Jervis’s cognitive consistency concept, in which leaders often interpret information in a way that confirms existing beliefs, even if, to a more neutral observer, such an interpretation is highly contradictory.
Drones are an interesting case study in this regard because, given the war in Ukraine, the military ecosphere has seen a whiplash of opinions ranging from drones change everything to drones are already obsolete. The rhetoric will continue to rage, even though a seemingly infinite number of drones have failed to drastically reshape the battlefield or, at most, have neutralized ground forces into a static war of attrition.
In the recent Middle Eastern conflict, Iran relied on standoff weapons, while Israel dominated the skies and struck targets at will. That conflict might be troublesome to those in the US Air Force pursuing long-range kill chains and standoff-centric forces, but such an observation discounts how limited Iran’s options were after Israel spent over a year decimating the proxy forces that might have stood to make Iran’s ballistic missiles more effective. While the US Air Force is currently pursuing a mixed stand-in/standoff force, those decisions must withstand potential budget issues and avoid creating a service biased toward either tactic (or both), depending on the conflict. If the late 2030s bring a fleet of 145 or more B-21s or an armada of AI collaborative combat aircraft, that does not mean operators must use stand-in tactics, or conversely, that standoff weapons controlled postlaunch by air battle managers will be sufficient.
Tactical controversies are nothing new to the Army, particularly in the context of maneuver warfare. As former US Marines Frank Hoffman and Pat Garrett recently stated: “Maneuver warfare is a fraud, and maneuver as a warfighting function is dead. At least, that is what some scholars and military analysts claim. We disagree.” The contentions continue, budgets evolve, and tactical biases remain problematic. Throughout force design and training, leaders and operators must avoid becoming overly biased toward the tactics they intend to use. Otherwise, a repeat of Headlam’s sins is likely.
Where these various arguments conclude before an ensuing conflict, if Bailey’s work is any indication, will determine how militaries will fight, unless leaders and operators account for their biases toward a given tactic. This concept applies to force design when making acquisition choices, but also to operators once a conflict begins, who must choose between being beholden to decisions made years earlier or rapidly adapting to a changing character of war. It is a humbling calculus, particularly when history suggests that conflicts are often difficult to anticipate.
Tactical Escalation
Questions of cultural biases and the struggles of interwar periods closely relate to a separate issue critical for planners to consider: unexpected conflicts. Force design aims to account for the most likely or severe strategic conflicts; however, overly restrictive parameters will limit how much a force can account for unforeseen circumstances and compounding risks. There also continues to be an unrealistic expectation in the military that the Huntingtonian model, reinforced by doctrinal wishcasting, will result in a linear process in which static political ends drive predictable military means. The US military, in the eyes of several commentators, learned the wrong lessons from Operation Desert Storm: Some hold up the first war with Iraq as an example of doctrine done well, but a deeper reading reveals a stunning amount of internal political and military chaos. This is not a criticism, but merely an acknowledgment of war’s inherent difficulties, even against a subpar opponent.
Anecdotally, US military officers seem reluctant to acknowledge that in all the major twentieth-century conflicts, the United States was initially against becoming involved until events forced its hand. President Woodrow Wilson campaigned on keeping the United States out of World War I, just as President Franklin D. Roosevelt did for World War II (with significant qualifiers). Korea was explicitly not included in containment, and Vietnam slowly evolved into a severe conflict that President Lyndon B. Johnson felt he could not extricate himself from, even though he desperately wanted to focus on domestic issues.
Those are, however, strategic-level observations, and whole fields of game theory and international relations exist to explain how those conflicts evolved. They are valuable lessons for planners trying to anticipate the next conflict and design a force, but at a more tactical level, a theater’s circumstances can drive events without the presence of a clear strategic purpose or guidance. If force design does not account for this type of escalation, the ramifications could be dire.
Recent events in the Middle East emphasize how tactical escalation can drive events. The same month that a Pentagon memo known as the Interim National Defense Strategic Guidance reportedly declared a significant pivot to the Indo-Pacific, the United States was launching a “decisive and powerful” effort against the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen. One might argue that ensuring the safety of shipping through the Red Sea was a strategic motive, but in the months after the height of the campaign, shipping has failed to return to levels seen prior to the increased Houthi strikes targeting commercial vessels, and the group has launched additional attacks against shipping and Israel.
That pivot, however, was hardly the first effort to shift US priorities to the Pacific, and according to recent reports, the Pentagon memo’s focus on deterring China was seemingly superseded by a draft National Defense Strategy placing more emphasis on homeland defense. Strategic focuses routinely shift dramatically, even within months, and regardless, international events driving US military action are not beholden to a document like the National Defense Strategy.
Even more significantly, the US effort against the Houthis, anecdotally, included tactical considerations that suddenly required the use of B-2 strategic bombers. Employing the B-2—a limited and strategic asset—against nontraditional threats is not unprecedented, but no combat sortie is without risk, especially when the Houthis had proven some limited surface-to-air capabilities. There was no strategic demand for risking the B-2; however, at the tactical level, the pertinacious Houthi threat was driving commanders to accept more risk to be effective.
Mere days after an alleged pivot, tactical-level realities had influenced a relatively severe escalation. The complex web of security challenges in the Middle East then cascaded into a conflict between Iran and Israel, where once again, in the service of a laudable strategic goal—not allowing Iran to have a nuclear bomb—B-2s and other US assets struck Iranian nuclear facilities.
These observations are not a criticism of US actions; they are just evidence of a reality in which prewar planners build a force amid yet another pivot to the Pacific (or homeland defense), only for events in the Middle East to drive decision-maker actions. History and recent events should remind us that when considering force design, one must plan for both the war you expect and the one you do not, at both the strategic and tactical levels.
Dismissing the realities of escalation is problematic for force designers, as inevitably, we will never be allowed to do that types of statements begin to emerge during difficult discussions about which programs to retain and which to eliminate. The B-2 strikes on Iran are a perfect example: In no small part because of the doubt that a president would ever accept such a risk, the massive ordnance penetrator funding was not always secure. If mission effectiveness requires higher risk, operators will have to bear that burden. The weight of that penalty depends on how well militaries design forces and ensure their cultures properly utilize those decisions.
Ultimately, the realities of escalation and inherent interwar struggles reveal a buried lede within this paper: namely, that despite the good work militaries and leaders do to prepare for future conflicts, an inevitable hubris creeps into force design, which could affect an ensuing conflict. This author, borrowing heavily from the works of historians such as Dan Marston and Sir Hew Strachan, has taken a potentially extreme stance in the past by arguing that strategy truly begins only when a conflict turns violent. Whether that is an accurate stance depends on one’s perspective, but the core point remains that force design should, at a minimum, have a healthy sense of skepticism regarding its expectations for conflict.
Returning to the cultural fights within the services, are the Marines prepared to storm beaches in a major conflict against a peer adversary? Is the Army equipped to invade and occupy large swaths of enemy territory? Can the Navy destroy a peer fleet and break hostile blockades? Can the Air Force win a war of attrition and establish air superiority in a contested environment? These might not be the wars that the United States wants to fight, but should escalation occur in a historically consistent manner, is its military prepared?
If nothing else, Bailey’s piece should be a reminder of Alexander Pope’s warning that a little bit of learning can do more harm than none at all. In examining the Russo-Japanese War in full, Bailey provides a thirty-five-year perspective to explain a conflict that lasted less than two years.
Lessons often comprise an agreed historical perspective, the current received wisdom, the addition of some recent experiences, predictions about technological development, and an extrapolation about a possible future. These contend with mandated lessons foretold, the prescribed view discussed previously, because military leaders often distort and contort new evidence to sustain their views of the future as they wish it to be.
Force designers, leaders, and operators at all levels should, if they wish to mitigate the most painful lessons history implies are inevitable, consider consistently examining themselves against the antagonists Bailey identifies. Particularly during an interwar period and amid controversial modernizations, who is committing the same prewar sins as Major General John Headlam?
Bailey’s examination of the pathology of lessons learned provides valuable insights for force design. The process of making accurate acquisition choices is fraught with challenges, including resisting biases, accepting ambiguity, understanding escalation, and anticipating changes in the character of war. Furthermore, making the proper decisions in force design is only half the battle: To ensure that inevitable failures are as limited as possible, military cultures must also accept changes and ensure that tactical biases do not limit operator flexibility. These are nigh impossible standards, but the humility to understand Bailey’s analysis and the difference between lessons learned and lessons observed is a laudable start.
Lieutenant Colonel Shane “Axl” Praiswater, USAF, PhD, is a graduate of the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Strategic Thinkers Program at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, and earned his doctorate through Pepperdine University. He is currently a B-21 Initial Cadre command pilot with over two thousand hours in multiple platforms, including during Operation Inherent Resolve, where he led mission planning for all bomber sorties and flew combat missions. His most recent peer-reviewed publications can be found in the Royal United Services Institute Journal, the Journal for Deradicalization, and ThePalgrave Encyclopedia of Leadership and Change.
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, Department of the Air Force, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Giancarlo Casem