Lessons learned.

The Past as Prologue: The Importance of History to the Military Profession, edited by Williamson Murray and Richard Hart Sinnreich (Cambridge, 298 pp., $23.99)

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DOES the study of history have anything to offer today's makers of defense policy? This is the question that lies at the heart of The Past as Prologue, a set of remarkable essays produced as part of an Anglo-American scholarly collaboration that took place in 2003. Edited by Williamson Murray, an eminent military historian, and Richard Hart Sinnreich, a retired U.S. Army colonel who has become one of America's most insightful military commentators, The Past as Prologue offers observations on the utility of history by both renowned academics (including Murray himself, Sir Michael Howard, and Colin Gray) and professional military officers, both British and American.

All of the essays support the conclusion that the study of history is useful, indeed necessary, to the military professional. They are united in opposition to the school of thought that took hold around the time of the first Gulf War, which argued that accelerating technological change has "transformed the very nature of war." Advocates of that school contended that emerging technologies and "information dominance" would eliminate "friction" and the "fog of war," providing the commander and his subordinates near-perfect "situational awareness," thereby promising "the capacity to use military force without the same risks as before." For instance, a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. William Owens, on more than one occasion made the extraordinary claim that "technology could enable U.S. military forces in the future to lift the 'fog of war,'" and that "battlefield dominant awareness--the ability to see and understand everything on the battlefield--might be possible."

But this is nonsense. The worst of the military-transformation literature--the assertions that information technology has changed the nature of war--is an example of historically undisciplined theorizing. Theory is important to the study of war, but not in the absence of historical context. Technology may have changed the character of war, but not its nature. History teaches, and the experiences of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan confirm, that the nature of war includes chance, uncertainty, ambiguity, contingency, and danger arising from the complex interplay of decisions, actions, and events; that since causes interact in ways unforeseeable by even the historically sophisticated, similar causes do not always produce similar effects; that initial conditions offer only a glimpse of the possible outcomes; and that, accordingly, as long as war is a human undertaking, such phenomena as "friction" will persist.

But The Past as Prologue also rejects the simplistic view of history that informs the yearning of too many military professionals for didactic guidance. They seek a source of reliable maxims upon which to base future action--but history becomes useful only if it is studied, not merely read. Only in the former case can it become a true means of diagnosis and understanding; the alternative is merely to "raid" history in an effort to cherry-pick historical examples that support one's pet theory. Unfortunately, this practice is all too frequent among military writers today, whether they are pushing transformation, "network-centric warfare," or "fourth-generation warfare."

The fact is that history, properly studied, raises more questions than it answers. It confronts us with unpleasant possibilities and demolishes beliefs. As Murray observes, for those who believe that technological advances have made it possible to achieve predictability about war, history is at best an inconvenience and at worst an outright embarrassment.

As one might expect from serious students of military affairs, many of the book's authors take Carl von Clausewitz, the 19th-century Prussian "philosopher of war," as their guide. Clausewitz saw theory and history as inseparable in educating the mind of the soldier. He rejected history as a way to derive prescriptive rules of action; he saw it, instead, as a way to hone judgment before the battle or campaign, to educate "the mind of the commander, or, more accurately, to guide him in his self-education, not accompanying him to the battlefield."

The question of the utility of history is inextricably linked to the content of professional military education. This connection is the focus of two very important essays in the collection: one, by retired Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, an autobiographical look at the role of historical study in his own professional development; the other by Sinnreich, who traces the evolution of military education in the U.S. These two essays map out the ebb and flow of historical study in professional military education since the founding of my own institution, the Naval War College, in 1884, and post some warnings about the future.

As Sinnreich observes, military history and military education have been "awkward partners." In his classic study of American civil-military relations, The Soldier and the State, Samuel Huntington suggested a possible reason for this: the role of "technicism"--concentration on a technical specialty--in American military culture. Thus, until the early part of the 20th century, the U.S. Army was engineering-minded, not military-minded; and even today, it can be argued that the U.S. Navy is more seamanship-minded than naval-minded (i.e., concerned with geopolitics and strategy).

Accordingly, Stephen B. Luce had to overcome serious cultural barriers to establish the Naval War College in the first place, and even after the institution achieved worldwide renown because of the writings of its most famous faculty member, Alfred Thayer Mahan, the Navy sought to shut it down. The Navy's thinking was that a naval officer ought to be at sea rather than wasting his time studying strategy at Newport.

For Van Riper, his year at Newport was a watershed in his appreciation for the study of history. When he entered the Marine Corps in the 1950s, the nuclear revolution had convinced the military that "all was now new" and the past was irrelevant. Military education came to be dominated by political science and management studies, the sterility of which contributed to the U.S. defeat in Vietnam.

Then came the "Turner Revolution" at Newport. In the early 1970s, Adm. Stansfield Turner reorganized the basic curriculum of the Naval War College into three blocks, one of which "deliberately resurrected the intensive Luce-Mahan foundation in theory and history that had declined in the intervening years." As director of the Marine Corps Command and Staff College and later first president of Marine Corps University, Van Riper was able to extend the Turner Revolution to the Marine Corps. A similar flowering of historical study occurred at the other war colleges and command and staff schools as well.

Van Riper worries, however, that "the erroneous ideas on military education held by post-World War II military leaders are again creeping back into the system." He contends that the alleged promise of information technology in "revolutionizing" war adumbrates a return to the sort of shallow thinking that characterized the McNamara Pentagon in the 1960s and led to America's undoing in Vietnam. Now, instead of McNamara's systems-engineering approach to military decision-making, we have methodical planning techniques, such as "effects-based operations" and "operational net assessment."

Van Riper is right to be worried. At Newport, I have heard too many Navy officers gloat about the "end of the Turner Revolution." The new mantra has become "teaching to competencies," which suggests that the purpose of professional military education--to broaden the intellectual and military horizons of officers to encompass the larger strategic and operational issues that will confront them in the future--has been abandoned for mere training.

This is a step backward. The Turner Revolution was based on the idea that educating the mind through historical inquiry is good in itself, that absolute prediction of the future is impossible but that patterns emerge from the study of the past, patterns that permit us to make educated guesses in light of a range of potential outcomes. One studies Thucydides, for example, not for antiquarian purposes, but because such study enables the military leader to make informed judgments about the future.

Officers preparing to fight future wars must, of course, be able to exploit emerging technologies; and they must possess cultural awareness of both our enemies and our friends. The Past as Prologue makes it clear why, important as these factors may be, they are sterile unless grounded in a careful and thorough examination of the past.

Mr. Owens is an associate dean of academics and a professor of national-security affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. He is writing a history of U.S. civil-military relations.