I've recently found a nice paper by Lieutenant Colonel Steven A Pomeroy entitled "The Idea of a Strategist's Education." In it Mr. Pomeroy explores the question of the proper basis for political and military education. One of the central problems in strategic education, according to Pomeroy, is the tension between the sciences and the humanities. Like many western intellectual-academic institutions, the United States military has chosen to heavily (perhaps disproportionately) invest itself in the hard sciences. West Point, after all, was founded by a corps of engineers.
Pomeroy argues, however, that American strategic thinking has come to rely too heavily on scientific and technological solutions. He notes a trend in which strategic thinkers began to believe that "the quality of national scientific and technological development deeply affected strategy" (4). Pomeroy thus argues that "American strategy neglected conflict's human terrain" (5).
Pomeroy's argument is not that the humanities ought simply to replace science in the realm of strategic education, but that a humane education is essential to a balanced strategic education. He points to Alexander the Great as a past thinker who was able to seamlessly integrate technical (scientific) knowledge with less formal (humanities) judgement. It was Alexander's "balanced perspective that has served him well through the ages." Pomeroy thus goes on to say that his "claim is not that a humanisitic approach to strategy is necessarily superior to that rooted in formal reasoning; rather, it is at least equally important. Given the reality of the historical record and the employment of such thinking to successful strategy, it behooves young strategists to cultivate the humanistic approach of an Alexander" (8). Pomeroy is therefore calling for a balance between the sciences and the humanities. Clearly, it is the humanities that need to be given their proper emphasis.
Much to my delight, Pomeroy ties this imbalance in American military education to an imbalance that belongs to American society as a whole. He cites C.P. Snow's landmark lecture on the 'two cultures', in which Snow argued that American intellectual life was becoming ever more divided into the sciences and the humanities. "American society," Pomeroy goes on to write, "has developed a technocratic state and culture. As this occurred, systems analysts and social scientists rose to positions of political and social power." (4). Pomeroy is right to acknowledge this larger intellectual tension that exists within American society.
Indeed, Western society has been remarkably good at dealing with matter and has often shied away from reflection on mind. Mind, however, is the fundamental stuff of our social and political lives. If we are to engage intelligently with the human world we have to grapple above all with thoughts: "Historians, social scientists, and strategists," Pomeroy argues, "seek to understand the interior of an event. The interior represents the universe of thought that determined what occurred or what one hopes will occur. The exterior is simply what happened " (11). I think it is fair to say that we are a society focused on the exterior of events: we favor material or mechanical explanations of simply what happened, rather than mental, immaterial explanations.
Clausewitz, for one, recognized this tendency to favor material explanations. In Book II of On War he criticizes his contemporary theorists for restricting their analyses to material, calculable factors, whereas the most important things in war are governed by mental, immaterial, unquantifiable factors. Creating a theory of war that can deal with these immaterial factors was of the utmost importance to Clausewitz.
R.G. Collingwood shared a similar desire. Indeed, Pomeroy points to both Collingwood and Clausewitz as thinkers that showed us the best way to go about strategic education: through the study of history. As Pomeroy so aptly observes, "History and strategy therefore interpret human thought and activity. The former explains what one thought and acted. The latter explains what to do in the present and after a time becomes the subject of study by those interested in such things. Strategy is therefore history in the making, further cementing its relation with the humanities" (10). Indeed, this is precisely why Collingwood and Clausewitz advocated history as a form of military-political education: they believed it trained the mind to observe and grapple with the kinds of problems that one must deal with in politics and war.
Clausewitz and Collingwood, moreover, shared the view that history was fundamentally a form of mental simulation in which we rethought past thoughts for ourselves. It is this question of history as mental simulation as political education that I will be returning to soon.
For now I simply wanted to check in on my reading of Pomeroy and report that I will soon be working on an essay connecting Clausewitz and Collingwood. I've seen them connected in several places (Gallie, Sumida, Pomeroy), and I believe I can push the connection further. I may even spice it up with a little Bergson.
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