[Sigaba]

Sir Michael Howard’s 1961 seminal essay ....

The essay mentioned in the OP is:

Michael Howard, "The Use and Abuse of Military History," Royal United Services Institute Journal, 107:625 (1962). This version is behind a paywall and is available here.

The essay was originally given as a lecture of that same title at the RUSI on 18 October 1961. AFAIK, it has been reprinted twice. First, in the March 1981 issue of Parameters. This version is available here. Second, in Michael Howard, The Causes of Wars and other essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 188-197.

An aside. While MG McMaster uses the last several pages of Professor Howard's essay as the spring board to his own piece, I think the preceeding sections of the essay are of equal, if not greater, importance. The earlier portions of Howard's essay address the continuing tension among (a) the study of professional academic history, (b) the study of military history, and (c) the practice of the art of warfare. While (b) and (c) push towards a utilitarian approach to the past that allows for "lessons learned," historiographical developments in (a) raise enduring questions about the sustainability of a "lessons of history" approach to the past.

Originally Posted by Streck-Fu

The idea of integrating politics with the military strikes an image of Soviet political officers in military units. I don't see integrating politics into the military as a good thing at all.

I would suggest that the integration of politics with military operations is unavoidable in the era of modern warfare. Countries simply cannot consider the military effectiveness of a proposed course of action without balancing the political consequences of that path. This consideration is necessary because modern warfare requires significant contributions from the combatants' civilian populations. If these populations do not endorse a proposed course of action and political and military leaders insist, disaster may follow.

Perhaps the danger from an intermixing of political calculations with military decision making does not stem from the practice itself, but rather the ideology of the practioners. For example, the Confederate States of America could not put into place plans to emanicpate and to arm enslaved Americas because a critical mass of Southerners believed that such a policy would undermine the central war aim: the preservation and perpetuation of slavery in North America.

Governor, Zebulon Vance (D-N.C.)--apparently unaware of the forthcoming decades of apologistic and revisionstic claims that the Civil War was simply about states' rights--clearly stated this commitment to slavery in his message to the General Assembly at the beginning of the 1864-1865 session.

Under no circumstances would I consent to see them [slaves] armed, which I would regard not only dangerous in the extreme, but as less degrading only than their employment in this capacity by our enemies. . . . This course would, it seems to me, surrender the entire question which has ever seperated the North from the South, would stultify ourselves in the eyes of the world, and render our whole revolution nugatory. . . . Our independence I imagine is chiefly desirable for the preservation of our great political institutions the principal of which, is slavery; and it is only to be won by the blood of white freemen.*

In part because of CSA's commitment to a despotic caste system centered around race and gender, its manpower disadvantage became increasingly pronounced as the war progressed. Conversely, while the United States remained a slave society throughout the war, its leadership and a critical mass of Americans (free and unfree, in the North and in the South) could find ways to link the GOP's political goals to military strategy and operations.


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* Zebulon Vance, Governor's Message, n.d., document number 1, Session 1864-65, North Carolina Executive and Legislative Documents, 1864, 1865, 1866 (Raleigh: n.p., n.d.), page 12.