Military History as a Model for History Writing, Essay Example

Ferling’s Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence is a military history of the Revolution, which as the author notes, serves as a “companion”[1] to the “political history of the Revolution”[2] as presented in his A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic. In my previous evaluative essay of the latter text, I suggested that Ferling’s historiographical approach was grounded in the synthesis of a form of realism (i.e., notions of self-interest) and concepts of chance, contingency and chaos that disrupt any teleological views of historical inevitability. Accordingly, my immediate approach to the “companion” piece of military history was to seek out if affinities in conceptual approaches between the two works were present. Concomitantly, I also approached the work with what I had felt was a possible shortcoming in Ferling’s first tome: insofar as Ferling’s realism is initiated by his break from idealism,[3] I thought that it was insufficient to ignore the chaos and contingency of ideas themselves, such that, paraphrasing my previous piece, intellectual history joins the flux of chaotic and contingent historical events.

The potential of developing the latter approach appears to me especially compelling within the context military history, with its conceptual binary of strategy and tactics, which at first glance appears to mirror the binaries of realism-idealism and theory-practice. While the definition of these two concepts in military thought are certainly fluent, Vigh’s definition appears appropriate as a starting point. Based upon a reading of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, Vigh suggests that “strategy is action directed at defining, actualizing or consolidating rules: tactics are actions directed at making the best of them, using and bending them.”[4] In other words, this is an appropriate conceptual apparatus with which to approach Ferling’s text, because strategy and tactics seems to both prima facie re-iterate the split between idealism and realism (once again, a split relevant to Ferling’s historiography, as I have mentioned in my review of A Leap in the Dark) and also subvert it. In the case of the re-iteration of the split, strategy intimates the intellectual work of what Vigh terms “defining”, whereas tactics is a physical movement according to these “definitions.” Concomitantly, to the extent that I considered one of the weaknesses of Ferling’s approach to be precisely the stringent separation between realism and idealism, this is why Vigh’s definition of strategy and tactics seems appropriate: there is a certain inter-play at stake between strategy and tactics, as the boundary between them becomes heterogeneous and unstable. Vigh notes that tactics can “use and bend” strategy; at the same time strategy itself is a process of “actualizing”, having very real effects. This picture accurately provides the supplement to the contingency of ideas that I thought was missing in Ferling’s account in A Leap in the Dark. Thus, I approached the work using the strategy and tactics relationship to perhaps see if what I had termed in my previous review “the historiographical promise of Ferling’s book” now becomes realized, such that “thinking itself becomes an event.” Strategy-tactics, I believe, is a possible example of precisely this notion.

Accordingly, the desired destruction of the idealism and realism binary that Ferling ignores in his previous work is perhaps realized in this work. This is because there is a subtle, almost unconscious manner within military history in which strategy represents the ideal; yet, following strategy’s close affinity to the vivid physicality of the battlefield, it is not viewed as an explicit intellectual activity, for example, when questions of ideology are surfaced. Strategy provides, in other words, a corrective to this binary. Hence, if ideology provides a certain social structure, strategy provides a structure also according to its own unique context. In this regard, it is no less intellectual than ideology. At the same time because of its close and direct relationship to real “events” and to the successes or failures of tactics vis-à-vis strategy one sees that strategy is effectively determined by tactics. If strategy-tactics can be mapped onto idealism-realism or theory-practice, the split identified by Farrell in his first tome is unconsciously subverted by the author in this work, insofar as his picture of strategy presents precisely such a dynamic picture as alluded to in Vigh’s definition. Hence, Ferling continually throughout the work refers to the instability of strategy, and its susceptibility to contingency. In a discussion of American strategy he writes that American strategists would wait to “see if British strategy changed”[5] or in Greene’s discussions with Washington, for example, the heterogeneity of the idea is shown in the debate about whether “strategy should be planned around the “General Interest of America,” not merely that of New Yorkers.”[6]

Although Ferling does not make these notions explicit in his work, I feel that one of the historiographical values of the book lies in its subtextual demonstration that traditionally military history does not suffer from some of the binary oppositions present in other forms of historical writing. Hence, if Ferling will explicitly abjure in A Leap in the Dark from an idea-informed account in regards to an intellectual history of the United States (i.e., viewing ideas as a realm of subjectivity un-determined by the world and thus insufficient to his project), such delineations disappear in Almost a Miracle. However, this is not a result of the author’s conscious decision. Rather, I feel it is the residue of the specific content of military writing and the blur it creates according to its foundational categories of strategy and tactics. In this regard, military history writing would serve as a paradigm for how to abandon the realism-idealism distinction in other forms of history writing and thereby understand the close connection between thought and reality, theory and practice, precisely because in military history such a connection becomes explicit. In military history writing, ideas and intellectual histories are opened up to the chaotic flux of the “outside”, thus showing the interior-exterior delineation to be a fallacy.

Certainly, the initial identification within martial thought of strategy and tactics did involve a bifurcation. The classic military thinker Joly de Maizeroy thereby defined tactics as “the respective position of men who make up a troop in relation to that of the different troops that make up an army, their movements and their actions, their relations with one another”[7], whereas strategy constituted “the most sublime faculty of mind…reason.”[8] Yet a work such as Ferling’s challenges this rigid separation. The author demonstrates how strategy and tactics are mutually affective, as tactics can further radicalize and alter, following Vigh, the possibilities of strategy, such that no distinction of a “sublime faculty of mind” is made. Accordingly, similarly to my identification of Ferling’s A Leap in the Dark as offering a promise, although unfulfilled, of the introduction of chaos and contingency into intellectual history, so too does this work offer, although unconsciously, the notion that military history already presents a paradigm (in its strategy-tactics delineation) that breaks down rigid distinctions that may be present in other forms of historical writing.

Works Cited

Ferling, John. A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Ferling, John. Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Guha, Manabrata. Reimagining War in the 21st Century: From Clausewitz to Network-Centric Warfare. New York: Routledge, 2011.

Vigh, Henrik. Navigating Terrains of War: Youth and Soldiering in Guinea-Bissau. Oxford, UK: Berghahn Books, 2006.

[1] John Ferling. Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. xi.

[2] Ibid., p. xi.

[3] John Ferling. A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic. (Oxford,

UK: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. xii.

[4] Henrik Vigh. Navigating Terrains of War: Youth and Soldiering in Guinea-Bissau. (Oxford, UK: Berghahn Books, 2006) p. 135.

[5] John Ferling. Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence. p. 323.

[6] Ibid., p. 142.

[7] Cited in: Manabrata Guha, Reimagining War in the 21st Century: From Clausewitz to Network-Centric Warfare. (New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 26.

[8] Ibid., p. 26.