Learning the Wrong Lessons: Biases, the Rejection of History, and Single-Issue Zealotry in Modern Military Thought
Paul Barnes | 02.04.22
In 1904, war broke out between Tsarist Russia and Imperial Japan; Western nations sent observers to the seat of war to observe the effect of modern technology on the character of warfare. The British Indian Army’s lead observer was Lieutenant General Sir Ian Hamilton, an infantryman and veteran of several significant colonial wars, including the First and Second Boer Wars, and who would later command the forces of the British Empire at Gallipoli during World War I. Attached to the Imperial Japanese Army advancing from the Korean peninsula northward, Hamilton observed a succession of battles in which the modern, disciplined, and well-led Japanese forces defeated the poorly commanded Russian field army. Russian forces, using equipment, methods, and tactics largely unchanged since the Crimean War of half a century earlier, were simply outclassed by the Japanese. Incompetent Russian generalship flattered the attacking Japanese army, which nevertheless suffered grievous casualties and was often unable to exploit success as a result. The lesson Hamilton reported back to the British Indian Army was that, even on the early-twentieth-century battlefield, disciplined and determined infantry would always carry the day—even against entrenched positions. If Hamilton had been present at the Japanese army’s attempts to force its way through the modern defences of Port Arthur, far to the south, he would have seen a very different picture: piles of Japanese infantry hanging on barbed wire, stopped in their tracks by machine guns and artillery fire. Inevitably perhaps, Hamilton, a former commandant of the British Army’s School of Musketry, formed an analysis based on unconscious bias. Dr. Philip Towle quoted described it this way, in Richard Connaughton’s Rising Sun and Tumbling Bear:
The British armed forces tried harder to learn from the Russo-Japanese War than from any foreign war before or since, as the number of officers sent as observers and the number of official histories clearly demonstrated. But each observer tended to draw lessons which reinforced his own belief and the interests of his regiment or corps.
Only ten years later the results of his bias would be made clear to Hamilton at the Dardanelles. That bias is known as presentism—privileging the observed present over the experience of the past—and it is a growing trend in those whose job is to direct military strategy.
https://mwi.usma.edu/learning-the-wrong-lessons-biases-the-rejection-of-history-and-single-issue-zealotry-in-modern-military-thought/
