Bellum

I've always like Fred Thompson. I didn't know anything about  him until I started watching him in some of my favorite movies, like The Hunt for Red October  (“This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we will be lucky to live through it.”)

Then, the next time I hear anything about old Fred, he campaigns for and becomes a senator from Tennessee. These days, he's been considering a run for President. From what I've seen, read, and heard from him, the man's a lock for my vote.

In yesterday's The Fred Thompson Report, he discusses the study of history, specifically military history. Or rather, the non-study of military history in our universities. He attributes this deplorable state to the ideological shift in university faculties over the past decades since (especially) Vietnam.

For as long as I can remember, war and the study of war has fascinated me. In time, I came to realize that the study of warfare is the study of human interaction. I picked up and devoured Sun Tzu's The Art of War, and eagerly sought and read other classics, like Von Clausewitz,  Peter The Great, Napoleon, and B. H. Liddell-Hart (the captain who taught generals, it's said).

In this brilliant precis, Fred accurately describes the pertinent reasons for turning America's best minds on to the dissection and thorough analysis of military history and war. The article's title, Those Who Cannot Remember the Past, is half of the oft-quoted aphorism by Santayana.

If present-day America doesn't remember its past, especially its military past, we will be doomed to continue repeating our mistakes. Like Fred says in several sections of the article,

“Some of those folks think war can be avoided by refusing to have anything to do with it.”