welcome to CSIS we're still waiting for a few folks to triple in but we're gonna get started here dr. Hansen has a busy a few days here in DC I'm mark Moore the director of the project on military and diplomatic history which was formed seventeen months ago owing mainly to the declining presence of military history military and diplomatic history in American public dialogue as many of you know military and diplomatic history have fallen out of fashion at our universities on military history in particular is nearly disappeared as a discipline in American history departments it's also I think largely absent from a lot of the think-tank and policy discussions and we think history is critical should and should be introduced in these not because it provides easy answers necessarily but provide provides familiarization and context that I think lead to better decisions we were not the first organization to take on this mission of using history and applying it to contemporary events before we started there were several several other groups that were already doing this and one of the pioneering efforts was led by today's speaker Victor Davis Hanson who in 2014 founded the Hoover Institution working group on the role of military history and contemporary conflict and they convened began convening military historians for private discussions and they commissioned them to write articles for its flagship publication strategic ax among other outlets and which I would encourage you if you haven't already to to go to the website and check them out and also one of the key moving parts in that and key leaders of that entity is here today David Birky who's seated over here fortune but we've got him here with Victor and over time this group has drawn an extraordinarily impressive group of people including quite a few that we have invited here for our project like Walter Russell Mead Williamson Murray andrew roberts max boot peter mansoor we have several more who are coming up soon being West Neil Ferguson for example several leading members of the current administration such as James Madison and Joe felter have also taken part in the group and it's still going strong today which is particularly impressive since most of the other Hoover working groups that were created are no longer functioning say it's one of the most influential groups that you may not have already heard about we sought to avoid duplicating what that terrific program was doing so when we started this program we focused on events in the Washington DC area aimed at the policy community and the public and we hold a mixture of public and private events many of them here at CSIS others at governmental facilities in the National Capital Region we just moved to CSIS this summer and it's been very helpful and we're starting to now build up a base here at CSIS as well and I'm delighted we've finally been able to get Victor here we've been trying from our inception and he's an extremely busy person and said we're very fortunate that we were able to get him to to come here on this Monday morning and I'd also encourage you to come to future events you can find on our website the next one we have will be November 17th with Sarah heap locky of Harvard who will be talking about his new book on the history of Russia if you're not already on our mailing list you can find us by going to the CSIS website click on programs and then project on military and diplomatic history you will find a button there to do so let me give you a short version of Victor's bio since if I were to go with a longer version we would not have much time left to hear about his new book Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Ellie Anderson senior fellow in residence in classics and military history at the Hoover Institution he is also the Wayne and Marsha busk distinguished fellow in history at Hillsdale College he taught previously at California State University Fresno where he is now professor classics emeritus before teaching at Fresno he ran his family's grape farm in California where he was a full-time orchard and vineyard grower from 1980 1984 he writes nationalistic in a syndicated column for Tribune media services and writes frequently in many other places so often that one must actually wonder how he has time to work on his books among the many awards he has received are the National Humanities medal the Bradley prize and the William F Buckley prize he's written or edited 24 books many of which I'm sure are familiar to those of you in this audience these books are noteworthy not just for their scholarly excellence but also for their willingness to challenge conventional wisdom even when they are politically unpopular and personally disadvantageous which I especially admire today he's going to talk about his latest book the second world wars how the first global conflict was fought in one and here's a image of it here the as you may be aware Victor is well best known for his works on the classical world so world war ii is something of a departure for him in terms of the subject matter but as he shows in the book those who write history I think benefit enormously by knowing the history of other times and places and the books already receiving rave reviews if you haven't seen them The Wall Street Journal caused calls it essential reading the New Criterion says that it is brilliant and very original Kirkus asserts the second world wars is ingenious and always provocative I'd ask you to make sure that to silence your cell phones pagers and so forth we have if you are technologically inclined we do have the capability to tweet questions so they'll also have Q&A after Victor speaks but you can tweet your questions to at CSIS PM dh4 program military diplomatic history please welcome me in joining Victor Davis Hanson [Applause] thank you very much for that kind introduction you know when you want to write a book about World War two the publisher says what could you possibly say when there's 7,000 books written every year and so well I I said well I'd like to reorganize it not by chronology but by theme fire water land and how it was fought in the air under the water on the surface of the water and what decisions were made that proved to be wise stupid etc but I caught that was the plan of the book but I really thought that I wouldn't stand back as a classicist or a comparative historian and look at certain things I didn't think had been accentuated the first thing is World War two was the most lethal event in history killed more than the four sentences 14th century plague more than the great famines of history 60 to 65 million people died in just about 6 years September 1st 1939 to September 2nd 1945 27,000 a day and it was even more peculiar in that it was one of the only big large wars in which the losers the Axis powers Japan Germany the major Axis powers and Italy suffered far fewer fatalities than did the winners so of that 60 to 65 million about 80 percent almost 50 million were the winners on the Allied side and that was largely attributable to two phenomenon and one was the Holocaust in Eastern Europe and the 27 million Russian dead on the Eastern Front and then we don't have accurate information about China but somewhere between 8 to 16 million people if you wanted to reduce World War two in terms of who died it was largely a story of Japanese and German soldiers killing on uniformed and on Russian Chinese and Eastern European civilians I called the book the wars for a couple of reasons one is it was a first real global war I know that we say it was World War one but nobody had conceived that World War one as a world war it was called the great war it was called the great war more or less until 1941 and by that I mean that Hitler's nine border wars between September 39 and the invasion of Soviet Union June and we're all successful the Blitz was a draw perhaps but you know we think of we don't even think anymore what did he call Poland or Norway or Luxembourg or Holland or Belgium or France or the slavi ugly seas were just individual wars and so and he won them but something radically happened in the year 1941 to change those individual Wars into one war and so I want to get to that in a second but the other reason I used the plural is World War one as I said really there were battles in the Middle East and there were battles in the on the Atlantic and there were battles in parts of Africa but they were very small and mostly irrelevant to the ultimate outcome in Europe but World War two I mean there was nothing in common that a Bulgarian had with a Japanese soldier in Manchuria even though they were ostensibly on the same side if you look at it in terms of the battle experience what did the u-boat commander off the coast of Miami 200 feet under the surface have in common with Rommel in North Africa go headed toward El Alamein there were just so many different landscapes and so many different methods of fighting that people really were had were hard-pressed to see this as a holistic war in some ways the only thing the Alliance had in common was they could all claim that they had either surprised to attack somebody else or had been surprised attacked so Russia was surprised attacked we were surprised attacked and Britain was the only country remember that went to war without being surprised attack our surprise attacking someone went to war in the principal Poland and the axis actually had an ideological affinity fascism in Italy and Nazism and Japanese militarism but there was not a hardcore ideological bond between the allies so what changed all of these border wars into a central war and that was 1941 it would happen because of three reasons the Soviet Union inexplicably we think went into excuse me the Third Reich went into the Soviet Union and Japan attacked Singapore in Malaya and the United States on December 7th and 8th and then inexplicably Italy in Germany declared war on the United States on December 11th and at that point the axis Alliance found themselves with a population of about a hundred and sixty versus four hundred million and they found themselves with a pre-war GDP of one-sixth of this new alliance that they had created against them so it sort of begs the question why after being so successful and really the war was more or less over and it wasn't even known as a world war yet why would they start a world war against these this new coalition and it's easy now to see how stupid it was because it was probably the worst military decision in the history of conflict the invasion of the Soviet Union but at the time we had this sort of colloquialism it seemed like a good idea at the time Hitler who didn't really discuss it general bellomont on okw called it and said is he really going to go into the Soviet Union and this was sort of characteristics of the axis when Mussolini went into Greece Hitler was shocked he asked after December 8th where is Pearl Harbor Japanese were very angry that he went into the Soviet Union because that he had still and the Ribbentrop Molotov non-aggression pact of August 23rd 1939 the Japanese were actively at war with the Soviet Union when he cut the legs out from on earth and then they had just cut a deal with the Soviet Union and April their own non-aggression pact of 1941 the next thing they know Hitler's fighting their non-aggression pact and by the way that pact was so successful that as late as 1945 freighters were still leaving Portland and Seattle under Russian flags and going right through the areas around where Americans were fighting Japanese and were completely untouched with by the Japanese an imperial navy as they unloaded cargo and blood of stalin and so it didn't make sense why did he do it then why did Hitler change these border wars into World War two and by the way it was in this year that World War one came to be known as a Great War was renamed and the answer that Hitler gave to people in Tabletalk his transcriptions of what he said and what he said at the time were actually pretty convincing he said that the Soviet Union had a dismal record of fighting outside their own territory they had gone into Finland in November 1939 and they had not been able to win until April and they may have lost 500 thousand casualties they had not met their demarcation points in Poland in 1939 when they invited from the east that the Vera mark was much more efficient than the Russians they had backed the long side wrong side in 1938 and 9 in the Spanish Civil War and their equipment was considered by the Germans to be very poor that were supplied it to the Spanish loyalties Hitler also said well you know what they gave up in 1918 and the Treaty of brest-litovsk and they were basically beat by November of 1917 they being the Russians and we could never go more than 70 miles further into Belgium and France so when France fell when they invaded in May 10th and it was basically gone by June 23rd they were thinking my gosh in six weeks we destroyed the great French army which we couldn't do it more one and under that World War one formula six weeks will be three weeks the easiest thing is always the Eastern Front just like it was in World War one and they had gotten within a hundred miles of st. Petersburg they docu pied 50 million Russians we sometimes forget at the end of World War one they annex much of Eastern Europe much of the Ukraine and they thought this is going to be right for the plucking they had no information about Russian factories being moved beyond the Urals or the actual productions of t-34s Hitler said in 1945 but they had told me there was such a thing as a t-34 I would have never gone into Russia my point is at the time it seemed like a good idea once he went in even though he had the largest invasion force in history three point seven or eight million people we always talk about multilateralism and unilateralism that was probably the most multilateral invasion force the world had ever seen there were Spaniards they were Italian there were Hungarians there were finns there were Romanians there were volunteer European contingents and there were Germans was a huge force the problem with it was it was based on the precepts of what the West called blitzkrieg although Hitler didn't use that term himself and that meant that for all of the drama of spear spear heads by Armour eighty percent of the transportation of the invading army was horse driven and was a very primitive army in terms of logistics and they had never fought more than about two hundred miles from the German border are on roads that were not European this was not Belgium wasn't even Western Poland and they did not have enough troops to have three spirited attacks on st. Petersburg Leningrad Moscow and into the Ukraine and all the way supposedly to the Caucasus so almost immediately they their strategic ambitions were not were way beyond their tactical means to achieve them and it required almost perfect calibration anything that went wrong and a lot of went wrong and at that point they found themselves into what Hitler said he would never do a truly Trufant war the final reason he said he went in is that he realized that his Navy had not been honest with him admiral dönitz and writer that he could not land in britain the Blitz had failed and he found himself unable to do much about Britain he had counted on Russian collusion American isolationism and British appeasement and now he found out that he thought by invading the Soviet Union knocking them out in three or four weeks he would put a applied pressure on Britain and stopped the final obstacle to his plans of European conquest the next thing that happened is the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and they attacked but why did they do that that seemed to be one of the stupidest things in the world because had when they looked at what they needed resource-wise they was all there in the Pacific Malaysian rubber all he had to do is take Singapore which they did and Britain was completely unable didn't have the resources to fight by itself the Japanese Imperial naval Navy in the Pacific had the world's largest fleet in 1939 but and its Pacific its specific resources were much more smaller than the Japanese the Dutch East Indies in shale oil was right there for the taking Holland didn't exist in 1941 have been occupied for almost a year by the Germans and of course Southeast Asia had already been occupied it was Vichy France in Java Japan just took it all they had to do was his sidestep the philippines and hawaii and i don't think we would have done a thing had they attacked singapore and people in the united states i think i've read that we hadn't done anything when the Germans bombed London in a sense of declaring war why would we declare suddenly war because they took an outpost like Singapore and yet they attacked the United States one of the things that comes up you know when you read about the Japanese strategy they really did believe that if they hit they tried to get the three carriers there and there were shortly b5 they really did believe if they hit this blow and it was not it was not Admiral Yamamoto I can cause havoc for six months and I can't guarantee he was for the attack from the first he would be offered to resign he insisted he was Ryan if he didn't get permission to do it and he was a number of Japanese diplomats Matt Sokka Tojo had gone on a train to the United States and you Yamamoto had been in the United States and contrary to popular belief the more Japanese people in government and the military had seen the United States in the 1920s and 30s the more are the more that they had to stain for us Yamamoto said I was at Harvard they had nothing but spats and fast cars they don't want to fight and nothing that we had done in 39 40 and 41 a to convince them that we would retaliate wipe out the fleet very quickly and as Yamamoto said how in the world can an army go a navy go 3,000 miles in the dead of winter and high seas refuel under complete radio silence silence what kind of enemy can allow that to happen even in 1942 and we tried it in Reverse by going across the seas not in the dead of winter but in April we couldn't do it and the Doolittle Raid without them detecting us so it was an amazing feat and only led to this idea of hubris that they were gonna be undefeatable and in the next as you know until the Battle of Midway they went wild I think they lost to capital ships and they destroyed about 45 Australian and British and American vessels they destroyed everything from American battleships to American carriers and even as late as 1942 the United States at one point after the Guadalcanal sea battles I think only had the enterprise actually floating there were 27 Essex carriers on order but they hadn't come so the third thing that change changes into a World War of course was why did Italy in Germany declare war the United States it made no sense we would not have declared war I think everybody agrees on Germany we would have fought Japan and one of the reasons that they had because they were so weak themselves and they had this inferiority complex about navies and because Hitler was even in prep why was Hitler so impressed with Mussolini when his army was so unimpressive it was the Italian Navy it had six big battleships it had about 17 cruisers the French Navy had disappeared he thought Mussolini would control the better Turanian he would shut off Suez the Japanese would join the Italians and they would control the Mediterranean in the Indian Ocean and cut off India so he had a dis disproportionate respect for the Japanese Navy which would just sink the American Navy entire America down America would never be able to come over to the United to Germany the other idea that he thought it was a good idea is that Admiral Rader said that the u-boat war had almost 14 million tons in 1941 had almost shut down Britain but the reason it had not is these freighters were leaving American shores which were not under blackout and you could see them off the coast of Miami or Newark and you and he was going to sink them Admiral Raider that he didn't tell Hitler that he only had about 15 u-boats that were capable of going all the way to the East Coast and stopping them even though they were very successful in early 1942 so what I'm getting out is out of those decisions that seemed rational at the time a very irrational thing happened Hitler found himself fishko Joe and Mussolini did with a coalition of the most adept military industrial powers in the world 1 billion people would finally in some way participate of the 2 billion in this war and one of the things you don't do when you wage a strategic existential war you don't go to war without an ability to harm the homeland of the enemy that you declared war on so in Japanese in German and Italian circles there were people who warned their supreme leadership you have no ability to hit Detroit you have no ability even get Seattle and by 1944 and the Kaiser shipyards they were building a Liberty Ship every three days he had no ability to bomb it you had no ability after the Blitz to go in and bomb Liverpool or Manchester you had no ability to reach Russian industry beyond the Urals in late and yet you declared war without a single four-engine bomber that was operative in the in the German Italian or Japanese air force and only one of the three Axis countries produced aircraft carriers that could could deploy in a forward manner such as a Pearl Harbor German didn't Germany didn't have one either did Italy both were never finished and so it was a very strange thing to do to get yourself in an existential war when you had no ability to reach the homeland and the reverse was not true the United States had had fielded a b-17 as early as 1938 somewhat flew in 1937 there were Handley pages and Sterling short bombers that were evolved into the Lancaster bomber by the end of the war the Allies produced about 12,000 four-engine bombers and America alone produced about a hundred and thirty-five fleet light and escort carrier and the United States Navy would be larger than all of the navies put together in the world by 1944 an American GDP was larger in 1945 by August than all of the axis and Allied powers combined and so the warm then broke down to really one thing after they had one central question and that was given the head start and armament from 1936 on and given the superiority of the German and Japanese soldier and even during the darkest days of 1944 and 45 one German soldier in the Eastern Front killed three Russian soldiers and through the whole war you could say it would be seven to one there'd never been an army like the German army given their head start and rearmament and given the ferocity of their land could they win the war quickly before the Allies latent potential kicked in and they mobilized and for a brief period just to finish it looked like they could if we were to look at the map of the world let's say in June or July of 1942 there was a it was an axis world from the Norwegian Arctic Circle all the way down 260 miles outside of Alexandria it was axis and from the English at English Channel to the Volga River it was axis and from Alaska all the way to the Indian Ocean and from Wake Island all the way to Manchuria it was axis and at that point the Japanese had landed in Guadalcanal in July of 1942 they were just about ready to cut off all supply to Australia Rommel as I said was heading toward the Second Battle of El Alamein he was 6070 miles from Alexandria and he said he could cut off the Suez and he even dreamed of linking up with Army Group South in Russia German a small platoon of Germans had climbed Mountain rebus the highest point on the Caucasus Mountains and the German army was only about 70 miles outside of Grozny and threatening to cut off ninety percent of the oil and then just almost overnight it changed that was the full extension of axis power it was a hollow shell industrial industrially in Japan Italy and Germany they could not support that extension of troops and they had no logistical superiority to run to run the world protect it so to speak and then almost overnight Bernard Montgomery stop stop Rommel at El Alamein and started a 500 mile pursuit in November the Americans very quickly after Pearl Harbor less than a year have already landed in Morocco and Algeria and the Russians of course at Stalingrad destroyed the six army 300,000 fatalities including a hundred thousand captives and would roll back with trouble but began rolling the high-water mark of the German army and of course Japan I mean Italy would be invaded within six months in July of 1943 and the mussolini government removed and then it was just simply a question in world war two was one final question one final mystery and that would be to what degree were the Allies going to follow the paradigm or one and insist on an armed assist or allow an armistice they should say or would they demand unconditional surrender as they did to the surprise of Stalin at the Casablanca conference Churchill and Roosevelt said they wanted unconditional surrender that was a different problem because although they had the largest military in the history of conflict the so a human is 12.5 million people America with about 50 million fewer people in Russia almost matched that with 12.2 million people in uniform and the British around 6 million but that poor still had to deal with 15 million axis soldiers mostly Japanese in German a few of their Eastern European allies and it meant that you had to physically go into Rome and to Berlin and a Tokyo and you had to destroy the government you had to destroy the economy and you had to capture wound kill about 15 million combatants and the idea was that ideologically the axis were not like the Central Powers of World War one and they would not surrender voluntarily or they would not surrender honor and armistice and that meant that there was going to be a level of carnage and death and destruction so when you look at the fatality rates of the great world war two and you look at 39-foot the big killing period is mid 44 to 45 and it represents the effort on the Allies power to occupy and to destroy the Third Reich Imperial of Japan and Italy and with that else is Sir let me just finish by remarking about the winners and losers of this war on the Allied side we forget about Britain we often think it was the weak link of the three nothing could be further from the truth during the Blitz just to take one example British Supermarine Spitfire production while the country was being bombed exceeded BF 109 under occupied Europe Britain was the only country of the six major belligerents we don't count China seven that we do that fought the first day of the war and fought the last till the end of the war the only country for the entire war it was the only country that ever faced this Third Reich all by itself in the fall of France - the invasion of Soviet Union as I said it was the only country that went to war for the principle of helping an ally rather than being attacked or attacking somebody and in terms of Technology whether it was sonar or radar or putting a Merlin engine in a p-51 or a 17 pounder gun on a Sherman tank they were invaluable allies and we forget that sometime the Soviet Union won and lost the war they had by far the largest number of dead partly because of Stalin disastrous no step backward policies of 1941 but and they also were the most immoral of the six in the sense that they made an agreement formal or otherwise with all six belligerents are all the other five religions they cut a deal with Hitler in 1939 and along with him with Mussolini they cut a deal with the Japanese at April 1941 they cut a deal with us and the British the odd thing was they kept all their word - all of their access partners much better than they did to their ally saviors but out of the war as George Patton said we went to war to free Eastern Europe from totalitarianism we ended up guaranteeing under another name so there was a lot of apprehension that we had empowered the Soviet Union which was really on the teetering on bankruptcy they've gone through the great terror the purges the show trials they'd lost international respectability and World War two gave them earned deservedly so the heroes of Stalingrad that saved the act of the Allied cause so to speak and they did pretty well in this sense of geo-strategically at the end of the war they ended up far stronger than they were at the front first the United States of course of the twelve point three million we only lost 250,000 and only I'm named after somebody victor hansen was killed in okinawa so i don't want to be cavalier about that and four hundred and fifty total deaths accident illness the smallest percentage of any of the combatants by far about point zero three percent of those who served and that was largely due because the united states was absolutely brilliant in logistics air power and naval power and that really reduced casualties so when we landed on the island we had battleships which had become obsolete in almost every fleet we found a new way to use them for onshore or purely support we had close air support for ground troops so if we didn't have the armor as good as a panther didn't know good it didn't the germans no good to have a panther when you only had one panther 450 Sherman's and you had close air support so we waged a brilliant more and the result was we found ourselves in a position after world war ii that nobody had ever envisioned that there was no chinese miracle yet there was no south korean miracle japan was destroyed germany he destroyed france had been occupied it british unfortunately with the world market up before them nationalized their steel their coal their transportation their power or their health industries and the united states was really the only game in town for twenty years so we had an enormous psychological economical economic advantage over everybody and then we had we had fought on the poor freedoms the principles of the fort the update of Wilson's fourteen points and yet we were in some ways an apartheid society women had played in a very great war role so after this war was over these chits were had to be redeemed as they should and so it also ushered in a huge social cultural revolution in the united states as far as the germans and the losers Germany had come out very well for under Versailles if you think about it had not been trisected or divided into fours it lost 30 percent but it had not been occupied its cities had not been bombed its armies had surrendered on the offensive in different kind not this time around it lost 30% of its territory there were 80 million Germans today still today and nobody's talking about Levin's room NATO was formed in 1952 52 on the principle of Russia out American and Germany down which translated into a split Germany between the Allied sectors that combined into western Germany that had not happened in World War 1 and the anomaly I think that still keeps a piece in some strange bizarre way that the to a weaker European powers Britain and France were nuclear and Germany was not allowed to become nuclear Italy got off pretty easy they lost 500,000 but they didn't they were not occupied by the Soviets or there was not a threat of Soviet occupation and so the American occupation was much milder there was a large italian-american force in American politics the Vatican carried great moral and ethical weight in the United States and most importantly it was the only of the Excite Axis powers that had surrendered or really voluntarily got rid of their own leader in 1943 and then claim that they flipped over and then the final thing when you look at what Allied commanders and diplomats said after the war they said well you know Italy we fought in Italy longer than any other of the Axis countries we were only in Germany from May and excuse me from March until May 1945 but we were there in Italy from from September of 43 all the way and we never finished in Italy we never got to Austria so the country saw civil war kalian versus Italian German versus Italian Italian versus British Italian versus American it was just it was a very horrific scene it was sort of a monte cassino image in the Italian countryside so we felt they'd suffered enough and finally the Japanese they were never invaded and I think that made a little bit of difference how they looked at the war visa vie the Italians and the Germans they were less transparent and owning up to what they'd done in China for example where they waged a genocide that was almost comparable or in some ways worse than what they'd done in Eastern Europe and Russia I think I just like to dispel one myth and then I open up to questions this idea that Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved a an invasion that that was probably true but I don't think that we would invade it anyway had we not dropped those two bombs because I'll tell you why we had 2200 b-29s that from March 9th of 1945 to August 11th had burned down 65% of the urban core of Japan the most deadly day in the history of human conflict was March 9th 10th in which we killed somewhere around a hundred to one hundred and fifty thousand Japanese and the fire raids over Tokyo and the problem with the conducting those fire rates were that they were taking place on the Mariana Islands 1,600 miles each way 3,200 miles at the very extent of a b-29 range Okinawa was declared finally secure on July 2nd in fact there were already 7,000 foot on runways under construction and the Allies had a almost a nefarious plan 2,000 b-29s were on order rather than doing three missions to four missions a week twice the hours of flying for b-29 crews and b-17 crews they were almost worn out but the next 2,000 planes were going to be stationed in Okinawa and the idea was that you'd still run from Marianas three to four times a week but you could have a b-29 mission only 370 miles each way into Japan 1-1 a day and then of course we had 10,000 b-17s b-24s that we were going to redeploy to Okinawa and the British were willing to chip in 5000 Lancaster's so curtis lemay had a vision of having somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand planes the great majority of them with a distance that was about a third of the Marianas bombing Japan 24/7 with napalm in some ways the the atomic bomb saved a great carnage but it wasn't the carnage of invading it was calling off the conventional napalm rage which I think would have an in association with the blockades and the submarine and destruction of the merchant fleet would have ended Japan within about a month and would that open up for questions thank you thank you thank you very much that was a great may I ask a question about military history yes I've had a career in the Marine Corps in the CIA and at my stage in life I've decided to become a graduate student at Norwich in military history and the rationale for your organization and at Hoover and marks here in DC is very apparent to me and it's very sad because I'm a great believer that the past informs not only the present but the future so where do we go to turn this trajectory around how do we do this well I think after the 60s I mean military history was history history was created by Herodotus and Thucydides and Xenophon polybius is a history of war Persian Wars Peloponnesian wars Punic Wars etc and unfortunate I think mostly after Vietnam we kind of associated the military historian to war in the sense that as if we were to believe that and somebody enters oncology because they like cancer by that I mean we think that the Margaret out would wrote a really great poem that loneliness of the military story that you know people who study military history are either ex-military people like to kill or their vicarious nerds that would dream about it rather than the real purpose of military history is a corrective for what I would think was Peace Studies in other words it suggests in a very pessimistic tone this is what people are capable of and this is what they will do sort of paraphrase through cities however military history offers you a lesson that deterrence and balance of power and military preparedness can detour aggressors and therefore keep the peace and so in that that in the sense that military history besides this essential role as pure history to preserve the past its didactic it can offer you and we're up straight we're fighting against a culture that's in a therapeutic phase right now due to our affluence and leisure and we really do believe that if everybody would just take a deep breath we don't have any existential differences with North Korea Iran has no problem it's miscommunication I can't think of very many Wars and histories that were caused by miscommunication when Trump says something reckless stupid like rocket man that's not going to cause a war that's that's mild what Churchill was calling Hitler by 1939 as a backbencher before he was first Lawrence what causes war or sober and judicious measured statements that convince your aggressor that you're not going to do anything whether it's April glass be telling Saddam that we don't have an interest in border wars or backbenchers in the British Parliament saying it's time to use the word Malvinas rather than Falklands and get that Mine Sweeper out of the Falklands to reassure them that we have no hostile intent or Dean Acheson saying right over here in the Press Club on 14th or whatever it is say in 1950 I think it was in March we really don't consider South Korea within the American defensive sphere when you start doing that or what a lot of things Obama did I think then you incrementally and insidiously lose deterrence and that's what military history I think tries to teach people but it's a hard sell reminds me of the terrible propaganda we had after World War two because suddenly we were the guys that liberated and wanted constitutional government and yet we we had the albatrosses of Italy Japan and Germany around our neck boy the Soviet Union and China were telling everybody we're still the Allies we're liberating people from colonialism and imperialism and unfortunately America and the British they sold out there on the side of the axis now so that's the kind of bad rap military history does it's too bad but part of it is our own problem that we get so much into operational history that it becomes techie or nerdy and then of these 7,000 books that are published each year if you start to look at some of them they're they're almost so glorification of gears and gadgets and stuff rather than the larger picture but we have wonderful historians that one of the things that was so entertaining for me is to read books by you know Richard Evans or Andrew Roberts or even John Keegan who I think did a lot by innard by making them feel entertaining and bringing the idea of given like prose and scope to more to the history that's a poor answer any other question I'm not sure how much of this is really a question but my name is Stewart Ailee I majored in classics in in college and wanted to become a historian kind of along the lines of what you're talking about but by the time I was ready to start that that I was told that PhDs from from Berkeley were driving cabs so I went to law school became a lawyer and I I see some parallels between what you're talking about I would like to add one thing to your list of ancient authors Homer yes clearly and my my perspective about this is that military conflict is one of the more dramatic and significant things that happens in human society and that there's a kind of a natural drawing to that as you are doing trying to explain the the development of our society you would think so I once had this discussion I think it was in 1994 I asked the California State University if I could ask teach a class in military history history of war and they didn't want to do it the department did in the university didn't I it said if you go down to Barnes and Noble look at the military history then look at Gender Studies and I made all these arguments that you're making and they said we'll let you do it I had it was a seminar for 25 people had 95 people signed up it wasn't because of me it was the topic and it was very successful but it turned displeasure by colleagues because they said you're undermining this new Peace Studies program so I once in a study I think there's seven Bachelor degree programs in military history and there's three two or three PhD programs and last I counted there was 250 Peace Studies program and that's built on I think a flawed premise about human nature that if you just give it have enough communication and dialogue which are helpful in times of crisis but that can always solve a crisis through mediation or negotiation and that that's a reflection that that's what our culture values even though these classes are completely under enrolled people feel that they're not empirical or inductive but deductive and preachy and so they're not were they're not well received from my experience in the university but most university administrators when they look at their campus faculty profile they think if I have seven Peace Studies professors they're going to give me a lot less trouble than a military historian let me make one sort of superficial observation based on my experience every leader at some point in his or her life should be a second lieutenant it's a very very wait a very good way to learn the the other thing that I want to I wanted to really ask you to comment on is through the scope of all of this one of the big things that military has done and war has done is technology the increase in aviation you know the Wright brothers that's fine but where would we be if we hadn't had the the need to develop and the same kind of thing I think would apply in other areas do you have any well I I've written a lot about technology and war and I've used it twice too many times but I always go back to the anecdote when I was telling my grandfather that he didn't know what he was 87 when he died in our farm and he was in his 60s and I was a college student and I said you don't really know how to farm this stuff I there's this new thing called drip irrigation you know I have no clue about and so he said I want you to come with me so we went in the yard and we did the hand pump and his great grandfather had put in and we had he said we have about four gallons a minute I said okay then we went over to the 15 horsepower well and he turned on the electric pump and he said that's about 1,200 gallons a minute and he said no and he he said you tasted the water does it taste any different and his point was that water is water as water the delivery system changes but the essence of water and irrigation doesn't and so I think what happens to us in Washington and in the US military we get infatuated with these operational avenues and horizons brought on by new technology and we don't ask fundamental questions why do you want to go to war what do you want to achieve by war what are your strategic ends will it justify the means available to you do you have public support and most importantly I know that it was very frustrating during the Iraq war when a couple of times some people administration would have historians come in and talk and they kept talking about this particular weapon or this particular strategy and you would just say like Al David just win and I finally said to a very high-ranking official people are no damn good I said when the 49ers are 0 and 13 nobody goes when they're 13 to know everybody's a life-long 49 or if you just have a perception of winning and that means you know so how do you define winning I said it means you're killing far more the enemy then they're killing the view and in an American society in a postmodern that means very few Americans are dying and that you have stable areas that people can walk and shop in that's pretty much what you want and if you want to have a constitutional government than you have to have a parliament meeting but I said that's that's a project in Italy and Germany and Japan that took 30 years and in Korea took 30 years but no people had not talked like that it was knock Saddam out and we're done and the same thing we did in Libya and I don't know what we're doing in Syria or Afghanistan but we I think now maybe in Afghanistan we're starting to articulate what do we want it Afghanistan to look like how much support and blood and treasure or do we think the public is willing to use and and are the strategic ends justified by the means and that's an age-old lucidity in question and why do countries why do we have these and we keep thinking I don't know why we keep thinking they're accidental if a Canadian armoured regiment gets lost and comes across the washing board we're not gonna go to war with Canada that's not that accident has no one no significance but accidents happen that cause wars between countries that wanted to go to war anyway usually and so and same thing about Trump's inarticulate word here or inflammatory phrase there that can maybe exacerbate a pre-existing condition but well we'll get us in a war with North Korea if somebody says under no circumstances were or are we ever going to retaliate or though nuclear weapons are off the table or we don't want to have the sponsors left so that's what I think is frightening and I think that's sort of what leads to things like Syria and when you keep saying that these are jayvees or we have to pull out everybody or you the more assurances you give an aggressor and finally throughout history aggressors have a special contempt for stronger military powers that they attack or they they push around Hitler said that after Chamberlain gave him almost everything at Munich he said if I see that guy I'm gonna jump on his chest and break the umbrella and Goering was later said why was he so mad and Ribbentrop said because they gave us everything and it's that prudent old Punjabi wisdom I have a neighbor and I said what is that guy hate me so much he said what what good favor have you done him recently and the point he that we're making is that aggressors have contempt for stronger people who don't seem to be who we seem to be afraid to use their power or cannot articulate that they're going to do something that's and that's a fundamental human question of the human conditioning but it requires in some knowledge of human nature and I think in some ways a pessimistic view rather than a Sermon on the Mount hi captain Nicholas Romero US Air Force thank you so much for your talk my question is you may you made the comment that and I think rightly so that Britain fought for ideological reasons with the exception perhaps being the Far East and I was wondering if you could maybe comment about what the Allies maybe did rightly or wrongly in the China Burma India theater and and how that might have precipitated things that we saw later on in the communist takeover of China we had a very strange relationship with Britain that we in the East that we didn't have in Europe and the in the European campaign we coordinated the d-day the Normandy campaign campaign we gave Montgomery the prize position on the north to go right to into the roar the short route Hodges and Patton had the longer week but my point is we coordinated very closely in the Pacific partly because the personalities Halsey and MacArthur and Nimitz were much different than some of our army commanders and in the in Europe the idea was that the British is trying to protect their empire and that means there have to the two concerns India and Burma and Burma to protect India we have a different concern we want to get to Tokyo as quick as possible at least get basis as quick so we bifurcated British per day million people into China and it was to protect India and our idea was we had a lot of good feeling in the 1930s for China it was to open a route if you look at that occupation map we had - it was after the Japanese cut access into China through Burma our idea was China China China China let's supply China and we had this very humanik view of of the Chinese are going to have we can we're gonna have b-29 bases which was a toll failure when we base them there but we're going to have a nationalist army uprising it's going to it did tie down that the Japanese but we were very idealistic and British interests were very different their idea was not so much to liberate China or to cede Chiang kai-shek and democracy it was to make a nice shoulder and keep Burma as part of the Indian project and that difference created a lot of bitterness and so even though smaller British carriers had armored decks we we weren't able we weren't able to integrate them we kind of poo-pooed the british contribution we didn't really invite them in on the island hopping in the way until okinawa that we could have so there was a lot of hostility that we were there as idealistic Americans and the British were there as nineteenth-century imperialist and in Burma Britain sent as I said they sent over a million people we forget that ended up going to Burma and we just didn't invest the resources on the land still welded was not temporarily capable of working with the British we didn't appreciate that somebody like General Slim was probably an authentic military genius so there was a lot of anger and rancor about what our strategic aims were and they the means necessary to accomplish them thank you very much [Applause] [Music]
