School of War or School of Battle? Educating for an Uncertain Future
War on the Rocks · global
In 1901, military analyst Jan Bloch declared that new military technologies had changed war so radically that the study of history had become useless. He castigated military officers who prepared for future war based on “musty precedents” and who failed to recognize that the past was as irrelevant to the future as the experiences of caterpillars were to butterflies. Some of his tactical predictions did prove prescient: He anticipated that modern firepower and entrenchments would make decisive battle impossible. But he was very wrong about the continued value of history. After all,
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