Lessons Never Learned: The US Army Disinterest in the 1912–13 Balkan Wars and Today’s Professional Military Discourse
Brian McAllister Linn | 08.06.24
Lessons Never Learned: The US Army Disinterest in the 1912–13 Balkan Wars and Today’s Professional Military Discourse
The ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have generated an extensive commentary seeking both to define the characteristics of modern war and to identify lessons applicable for future conflicts. Reflecting today’s proliferation of information (and opinions), students of modern war can quickly exhaust themselves listening to podcasts and seminars, watching videos, and reading everything from blogs to official documents. Given the vast—and often contradictory—amount of current analysis, a study of how the pre–information age US Army’s professional journals assimilated and disseminated lessons from ongoing conflicts may assist those seeking a path through today’s flood of commentary. It also confirms the Harding Project’s recognition of the importance of both the quality and influence of the service’s professional journals.
Much of the current professional military discussion revolves around the purported lessons from Ukraine and Gaza. But will those lessons be propagated across the Army and inform the way it prepares for tomorrow’s wars? To explore this question, we can turn to the past and examine how Army journals derived lessons from the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) and the Balkan Wars (1912–1913). Both conflicts were seen by contemporaries as examples of modern war, involving the rapid mobilization of mass armies, costly infantry assaults, intense artillery barrages, machine guns, trenches, and appalling numbers of casualties. But how the Army leadership and its intellectual community perceived these two conflicts was very different.
When the Russo-Japanese conflict broke out, the US Army sent teams to both armies. Not only were they among the largest observer contingents, these teams included such outstanding officers as Peyton C. March and John J. Pershing. The observers’ reports were printed by the War Department in 1907 and widely disseminated throughout the service’s school system. The Army’s primary intellectual forum, the Journal of the Military Service Institution, published both American and foreign analyses within months of the war’s outbreak. Certain topics quickly sparked intra-Army debate—the risks of infantry assaults, the relative merits of offense and defense, methods of employing artillery, the relevance of cavalry—that generated an informed, multibranch dialogue. Combined with a flood of newspaper accounts and several memoirs and campaign narratives, even at an isolated post an officer could assimilate a large amount of relevant data, draw his own analysis, and submit it for publication. Until the US entry into World War I, the Russo-Japanese War remained a perennial topic in all military journals. Although the lessons of the war were hotly debated, both the dissemination of information and the ensuing debates provided a common foundation for officers to appreciate and adapt to problems they would soon encounter on the battlefields of France.
https://mwi.westpoint.edu/lessons-never-learned-the-us-army-disinterest-in-the-1912-13-balkan-wars-and-todays-professional-military-discourse/
