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This sale only lasts for a month, so go and get some books. Welcome to the new Books Network. I'm Caleb Zackrin, Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. And you're listening to new Books and Military History.
Today I'm speaking of Jonathan Abel, Assistant Professor of Military History at the US Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. We're discussing a new translated and annotated edition of DeBair's General Essay on Tactics from Brill. Jean-Antoine-Fon, people like Comte du Guiber, was a French general and strategist. Jonathan illuminates his key contributions and contextualizes the General Essay on Tactics from modern readers.
One quick note before we begin, the views expressed in this podcast are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense or US Government. Jonathan, thank you for joining me today on the New Books Network. Yeah, thanks, glad to be here. Of course.
Yeah, I think before jumping into the book and to the life of the work of DeBair, I was wondering if you could just tell us a little about yourself and your background. Yeah, so I'm an Associate Professor of Military History at the US Army Command and General Staff College. As you said, I'm on a team of wonderful military historians, and we teach that what's known as the ILE kind of intermediate level professional military education to groups of US Army, senior captains, and majors, as well as some people from other countries and the other services of the US military. My academic background is in basically 18th and early 19th century French military history.
I attended the University of North Texas and I'm a graduate of the Military History Center there. I wrote my dissertation under Dr. Michael Legeri, who is one of the premier Napoleonists in the country, perhaps even in the world. And I finished that in 2014 and that actually became my first book.
So that is a biography of DeBair. And then I went on to recently translate and publish the work we're talking about today, which is his major work, the General Assembly on Tactics. So that's my professional academic background and I do a fair amount of work in the History Department here, running a lecture series with the Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas. I run a podcast network that includes the Confused Deep of Facts podcast, as well as a variety of other publication and community engagement enterprises, if you will.
I'm originally from Texas as well. And as far as this book is concerned, can you just tell us a little bit about who Geabair was for the audience who might not be familiar? Yeah, so one of the things we face is I consider myself a pre-modernist, but one of the things we face as pre-modernists is often people's knowledge of history goes back to a certain point and then just kind of stops. So Geabair was a military theorist and one of the reasons a lot of people don't know much about him is that he came before Closwitz.
And Closwitz is kind of the reigning modern military theorist in Western Europe and in America. And in most professional military education institutions, Closwitz is kind of the theorist. And sometimes he's presented in contrast with his contemporary Germany. Between the two of them, those are kind of the Western European American tradition of military theory.
But Geabair came a generation before that. In fact, you might argue these kind of two generations before it. So Geabair is born in the early half of the 18th century in France. He's actually born in southern France, kind of away from Paris.
He's a provincial noble, not really of any note. And it's normal for people like him to go into the military. So he follows his father into the military. His father is what we might call a staff officer, although they didn't use the term at the time.
He did a lot of planning, a lot of mapping, kind of the behind the scenes work that makes an army run. But his son had a little bit higher aspirations. So he goes to war in the seven years war and he's decorated for it at a very young age. I mean, he's still a teenager during the war.
And then he comes back in the 1760s and goes immediately to Corsica. In the French fight, this kind of counterinsurgency war in Corsica in the late 1760s or the 1770s. And he's actually in command of one of the units there. And it's during that campaign that he writes this, what's called the general essay on tactics, the essays general of the type of teak.
In many ways, it's kind of an epitome. It's kind of a summation of the military theory of his day. So it's very concerned with tactical issues. Remember the operational and strategic levels of war haven't really been talked about yet in the 1770s.
But he also begins to talk about those issues. I argue in my biography of him and in the text of the, you know, the front matter to the translation, that the general essay on tactics is important because debare is wrestling with what we will later identify as the operational and strategic levels of war. And he talks about a lot of issues in that book and in his later writings about, for example, civil military relations, the relationships between governments and people and militaries in a way that anticipates classmates. And I think it's too easy to say that classmates stole everything from gee bear was inspired by gee bear.
I think he bears just taking kind of this, like, a Geist of military enlightenment, France, and putting it on the page. But I also think that he did encapsulate a lot of the thought that goes into the later theorists, the ones we still read like class with. And so he writes several books, the generalist, the tactic being the most tactics being most important. He was elected to the French Academy in the 1780s.
He ran around with some of the leading people of his day was also playwright. He wrote a play that ran to Annette loved that she put on in 1775. It didn't go well. He was a better military theorist than he was a playwright.
He had his famous affair with a with a salini heir named Julie D'Less Van Ness before he gets married. And perhaps after, he may have also had an affair with a young Jermaine Nectar who later marry and be known as Jermaine de Chael. So he's involved in this literary world. And that's part of why his theory gets the cache that it does, because he knows the right people to transmit it to and through.
And so it transcends being a kind of esoteric military treatise like so many of his other contemporaries. And then he goes on into the early revolution and he tries to be a revolutionary, but he's seen as too noble. And then he kind of tragically dies in 1790, right before the revolution starts to turn really violent. And one of his friends said in a biography of him that he supposedly said on his deathbed that he will be known and he will have justice for his ideas.
So I think whether or not that's a true story, it's certainly a good one. I think it kind of describes his personality in some ways he saw himself as a frustrated genius. That's fascinating. That background is useful.
And as far as what he's known for, can you provide just a very brief before getting into more specific, but just a brief overview of what the general essay on tactics is about, what it looks like, how it's outlined, and it's just significant in military theory. Yeah, so it is his magnum opus. He wrote many things. Basically, his collected life writings filled 10 volumes.
There's five volumes in military writings, and then there's another set of theatrical writings that can be divided in different ways. Plus, he wrote some poems and kind of normal things for French Enlightenment figure. But the general essay on tactics transcends all of it. It is better written, and it is more impactful than all of those other writings combined, with one possible exception, an essay he wrote late in his life, but it never really caught on.
So the general essay on tactics kind of has three different themes. One of those takes up the bulk of the text, and it's about 250,000 words. So this is not a short book. And you know, having translated it, it's definitely not a short book.
But the bulk of those words are very kind of in the weeds details of tactics. And this was the debate that was current at the time. The French Army was debating what kind of tactics it wanted to use, how it wanted to fight, what fights would look like in the future, coming out of the Seven Years' War, where it's been defeated by Prussia. So there's an impetus, think of Germany after World War I, that they have this impetus to reform themselves.
And a lot of it can be even esoteric in terms of the degree of detail, particularly for a modern reader, because of course, armies don't fight the same way they did in the 1770s. We're not lining men up in block formations and marching them forward. As I said, it's only one of the three themes. The two that I think are more useful and probably more interesting for readers, one of them is he's painting around the corners of what we will much later recognize as the operational level of warfare.
And for people who aren't familiar with that distinction, tactics is what happens in battles, you know, men shooting at each other. Strategy is generals and politicians deciding where armies are going to move, or what, you know, what part of the war to focus their efforts on. Operations is the level between. Operations is how you get the armies from home to the battles.
And that's not identified until the 1930s by a series of Soviet authors. So it makes sense that somebody like Yever living 160 years before that wouldn't use those terms nor recognize the nuances of operational warfare. But if you look at the way he describes how he thinks armies should move, how they should march, he is laying the groundwork for operational level warfare in these arguments he makes in the general essay on tactics. And that's really important.
And we can get into the details of how he does that. And then finally, the piece that made the general essay on tactics appealing for people who were not military junkies, basically, was this piece called the preliminary discourse. And in that preliminary discourse, he talks about the relationship between armies, people, and societies, and what kind of governments produce good militaries and vice versa. It's a pretty damning indictment of current governments, which was which was in Vogue at the time, a lot of enlightenment writers, you know, think of Voltaire or Rousseau, you know, they're interested in contrasting, you know, maybe mythical or historical governments that are good with current governments that are bad or irrational, or even tyrannical, Montesquieu does that.
So it's in that vein. But as I mentioned earlier, in that preliminary discourse is when he really digs into a lot of the topics and themes that Clausewitz will later develop on the relationship between what is often today referred to as his paradoxical trinity of, you know, the passion, the chance and the reason, and how those are how those relate to the people, the army and the state. So there's kind of three themes to this work. And like I said, we can dive into those more deeply if we want.
Yeah, I think, you know, picking up on the first theme you talk about the kind of laying groundwork for an operational approach. Can you get into some of those arguments and ideas that he that you bear puts forth? Yeah, so one of the things that we have to understand to get why this book matters so much is understand how armies fought wars at the time. Now, there's a Prussian army tradition that's different from the rest of Europe.
Prussia has its own models. And what you bear would say in his writings, what he does say in his writings is all he's doing is adapting the Prussian methodology for France. He's not doing anything new. And so the way armies fight, again, accepting the Prussian army because they do things their own way.
But the way armies at the time and especially the French army fight is that they fight in these big block formations. And part of that has to do with the weapons. So a musket at the time has an effective range, meaning it'll hit it'll target half the time of about 200 yards. That's kind of the maximum range you want to be fighting at.
So because of that, you don't you don't aim for the most part. You want to fire volleys, you want large numbers of men firing at the same time. So you have to put them in these big, unwieldy block formations, you know, generally 3d on a battlefield, and you might have 8,000 to 100,000 men in these big blocks. The problem was how you move 80 to 100,000 men in block formations.
It's relatively easy with 20,000, but it's a lot harder when you start to quadruple or quintuple that number. So what what you bear is looking at is how you solve that problem. And there's a lot of proposed solutions. One of the main proposed solutions is to kind of almost fetishize a Prussian model and to draw these geometric lines over the battlefield and have soldiers march on on perfect squares to get where they need to be.
There's another model that was often referred to as the French school that says, well, you know, we don't need any of these, you know, tactics. Let's just put them in together and give them, you know, basically spears and have them go run at the enemy. And what Giber says basically is that both of those are silly. What instead we need to do is we need to break these big armies into smaller chunks the way the Prussians do.
These chunks that we'll refer to as brigades divisions that eventually core. And instead of having them march on these kind of perfect squares, let's just have them march however works best for the situation. Now that sounds like a really obvious solution, but nobody else had thought of it. Everybody else assumed that soldiers had to be commanded very strictly, very rigidly, but they couldn't, you know, the soldiers and the officers couldn't be given the ability to decide how to do things best on their own or else it would lead to chaos.
And not unjustly, you know, prior to this period, they had experimented with fighting like this and it generally didn't work very well. So what Giber does is he makes a lot of very small technical suggestions in the general essay on tactics. In particular, he says that armies need to not march how they fight. They don't need to line up in these two giant blocks of men.
Imagine 40,000 men in a line, two lines of 40,000 next to each other, marching onto a battlefield, turning left, and then you have your first and second line of your battle. Imagine how long that took. I mean, you can tell you how long it took because they did it at Rosebock in 1757 and it took five hours. So Giber said instead of lining men up in the order that we're going to put them on the battlefield, let's line them up in the march in the way that makes the march easiest.
And then when we get to the battlefield, we'll break them apart into these smaller units and they can go wherever they need to to fill the line in. And he called this a system of march maneuvers. And there's a very technical parts of this that he gets into that we don't need to. But what he did was he basically liberated the old, very formalistic way of fighting, he liberated warfare from that.
And in doing that, he laid the groundwork for what we recognize as the science and arts of the operational level of war, to where we don't need to be locked into these formations days before a battle happens, and odds are the battles not going to happen. Instead, we can allow people to make decisions because they have more flexible armies. And once he and other people around him, and you know, there are lots of people working in this problem, it's not just him. Once they start to see that there are solutions possible, they start to move in this direction.
It's pretty unanimous that Giber system works. He develops this formation called the Giber column that makes moving in a battlefield much easier and makes moving men from march order into a battle much easier. And in doing that, he allows commanders to begin to develop higher echeplands, to be able to turn a division into a core, which is the big thing Napoleon will do a few decades later. And once we have core, once we have all arms formations that are able to fight, then we start to build towards operational warfare, where you have multiple core and multiple armies all maneuvering together in the campaign to try to defeat an enemy, rather than these kind of petty tactical battles of these blocks of men all fighting and marching in the same order.
So it's a very long-winded explanation for how Giber starts to lay the groundwork for the operational level of war. Although, of course, he's at the very beginning of it, so it's not necessarily obvious to a modern reader why that might be the case, which is why it worked like this needs a lot of annotation and footnoting. What are some examples and case studies that Giber drew on to his ideas? Was he inspired by any of the writers or particular battles that he felt were good models to look at?
Yeah, that's a good question. One of the things that's striking about reading early modern literature on war is that there is a cannon, and that's not the shooting thing, that's canon as a CANON. So anybody educated in Western Europe in the 17th or 18th centuries understood and learned about a set of battles and commanders, and those reached back to the classical period. So they all read Xenophon and Xenophon's adventure of the 10,000, they all definitely read Julius Caesar and not just his Galak Wars, but they also, Giber references his African war, which Caesar may or may not have written, but Giber believed he did.
So you have lots of examples from the classics, the classical period. I mentioned Xenophon, Caesar, Hannibal, Fabius, kind of the great campaigns and commanders of the classical era, and sometimes they can be lesser known figures. Sometimes they can be people who are not as well known today, so someone like a Flaminius, you might see Giber reference. So that's one set of people, and then he skips over the medieval period for the most part, and he goes to recent history.
So for him, recent history is going to be the French campaigns of the 17th century, and then the campaigns of the 18th century, some of which he participated in. So he knows, in addition to the classical commanders and campaigns, he also knows and is dexterous with people like Turin, who is his great hero. Turin is the commander Par excellence, Condé, another commander he loves, Luxembourg. And then when we move into the 18th century, we get into people he knows and probably encountered in his life, someone like Maurice DeSachs.
He is a huge fan of Friedrich II of Prussia. Your listeners may know as Friedrich the Great. And he also uses a lot of negative examples. He is fond of kind of dunking on the generals of Louis XIV, especially later in his reign, people like Teyr and Burgundy, who were not good commanders, and so he uses them as negative case studies and examples.
And he's fond of doing that, which is very much of the time, this kind of enlightenment, cynicism is the wrong word because the enlightenment is a positivist movement, but there's definitely an edge to it. So if someone has read Voltaire, they'll understand where he bears kind of, negative is and might come from. So those are his stated influences. And again, he says that the person who inspires his work is free to the second of Prussia.
Now, there are other influences that maybe are less obvious. So he states some of his theoretical influences. Again, a lot of classical authors, a lot of contemporary or near contemporary authors, so like a Plutarch or Polybius or a Livy, he'll cite. He is also fond of quoting from, it's kind of the first, it's not a military treatise, but it's a book about warfare.
And it's really the first early modern French version of a book on war. It's by Rohan published in the 1630s. It's called the Perfect Captain. And it's almost a, it's almost like a page, a court page training manual, as much as it is a work in military theory.
But he quotes from that a lot. He quotes a lot from a lot of the campaign chroniclers, like Fouchere, very common, loves to quote from him, loves to quote from contemporary historians. In particular, he likes David Hume. He likes a few French historians whose names we've largely forgotten who are current in his day.
He also draws a lot of inspiration from his opponents in this theoretical fight, in particular, a theorist named Manuel Dujal, who his second book is dedicated entirely to refuting Manuel Dujal's work. So he bears kind of bouncing his ideas off of those. I'm going to, of course, he's inspired by the milieu of the time, right? You can tell he's reading Montesquieu, he's reading Voltaire.
I don't know you can tell he's reading Rousseau because Rousseau's pretty radical for the period. Rousseau hadn't really published his big works by the time he bears writing. But he's definitely inspired by the people who are around him. He was friends with Gallimair and Diderot, who's good friends with Gallimair, actually.
So you see that part of the Enlightenment. You see that more skeptical, more rational aspect of the Enlightenment in his first book. And he actually apologized us for this later, interestingly enough. He goes back and says, you know, I was, I was young, I was a little out over my skis in this first book, and maybe some of the more radical indictments of current political systems are a little bit overboard.
But you can definitely see that influence of what Jonathan Israel has referred to as the radical Enlightenment as well, not nearly as radical as, you know, as a banosis, as a Baron Holbach. But you see that, you know, you see kind of the Diderot aspect of it, and especially in that preliminary discourse. And so there's lots of other minor influences people. Basically, he has a product of his time.
So if you read the footnotes that explain what his influences are and the references he's making, you can get a pretty good idea of what he read when he went through school, when he was being educated, and you know, where he's drawing his inspiration from. And I would be remiss as well, if I didn't mention, finally, the great Roman military writer, Vigetius, who the recently departed and dearly missed Christopher Duffy referred to as an almost 18th century military theorist, Bugetius wrote this Roman military manual probably in the late fourth century. And every work of military theory that follows from Western Europe in some ways based on Bugetius. And there are parts of Gibert that are clearly influenced by Bugetius.
In particular, he lionizes the past at the expense of the present. That's something Bugetius does a great deal. So I would say that's, you know, many other influences we could talk about, but that's probably the last important one. And then as far as Gibert's influence, the influence that he had on subsequent military thinking, and also, you know, just the sort of role that he played as a thinker of his day and age, if you could get into that, so sort of following from who influenced him to who Gibert influenced from there.
Yeah, that's something that's always difficult to pin down. I remember having a conversation about this exact question when I was writing my dissertation with Dr. Rafe Laufarb, who was at Florida and he made the point, which I think is a good one, which is we always want to look for a smoking gun. You know, we always want an Napoleon letter that says, Hey, I read this book by Gibert and I've inspired everything I did.
But we never actually find those. So I think with Gibert, it's a subtle influence. Like I said, it's a lot of technical changes that he's working with. And he helps to develop the beginnings of the operational arts.
And it's definitely worth saying, I am far from the first person to talk about these. So they have been talked about, they were talked about in Gibert's day in a very different language. They were talked about in the early part of the 20th century by people like R.R. Palmer, who was really the first kind of modern historian to look at Gibert.
They were talked about a great deal by the soldier historians of the French staff who wrote lots of great books around the turn of the century. And then unfortunately, I'll die in World War I. And then there's there's a whole corpus of Gibert historiography by people like Klaus Thelp or Julie Osman, who's a Mississippi State. She's written a great couple of articles on Gibert.
So there's kind of a, you know, there's a corpus of literature that talks about his influences. And a lot of them draw on the work of one of those French soldier historians, a French officer named Jean Cola. And Cola was the one who really kind of wrote the book on the late 18th century and how it influenced affairs going forwards. So he wrote a book about Napoleon's military kind of childhood and what influenced Napoleon.
And in these books, Cola very melodramatically, but I would say very accurately said that Napoleon is the god of war and Gibert is his prophet. And he meant a couple of things by that one. He meant all the technical changes that Gibert was involved in. And I didn't mention it, but Gibert also worked in the War Department in the 1770s and 1780s.
And so he's involved in some of the changes that take place as the French army is modernizing along the lines that he wanted. In particular in 1787 and 1788, he is involved in creating the first French divisions. And I wrote a piece on that that was in a Féchiré for Christopher Duffy. So he's involved in the kind of the implementation of the stuff.
But Cola also mentioned that Napoleon helped to foresee what is sometimes referred to, I think memorably recently, by David Bell as kind of the age of total war. And there are problems with looking at military history that way. There are problems of looking at the 18th century as an age of where war is limited, and nearly 19th century as an age of war is less limited or more total. But Gibert talks about, by talking about the relationship between society and militaries, between people, governments, and armies, he gets at some of the problems of modern warfare, which are, you know, if you can't defeat an enemy country on a battlefield, if you can't defeat their army and they immediately surrender, how do you defeat them?
What happens when a country leverages its resources in a major way into a war, which is one of the accepted definitions of total war. And there's this memorable passage in the preliminary discourse, it's the two sentences that always gets excerpted, where he talks about how if a people could be properly motivated and led and motivating themselves instead of being led by these old, you know, corrupt feudal aristocrats, then they would overrun these old decrepit systems. Now, there's two ways to look at that. The most common way of looking at it, and kind of the main thread in Gibert historiography, is that he was the prophet of the revolution.
That's what Colon was getting at, that he foresaw the French Revolution when the French government mobilized the people, you know, it stokes their patriotism and France and later Napoleon overran a good chunk of Europe. The other way to look at it is our pulmers way of looking at it, and Palmer says that Gibert basically got lucky here, that he was kind of tossing off this russoian, you know, proto-republican argument that he didn't really believe in. And as I pointed out earlier, he later apologized for for being too radical. And I don't think there's a right answer here.
I think you can read Gibert either way. He adapted to the early years of the revolution. He seemed to be in line in his very late writings right before he died with some of the principles of the revolution. So it's hard to say, it's hard to say if he would have gotten caught up in the whirlwind of the revolution and the terror and the wars that followed.
But those ideas, those kind of twin tracks that Colon talks about, the technical reforms, you know, laying the groundwork for the division, for the operational art, as we talked about. But then also this political social side, where he is recognizing that war is more than an activity that takes place on a battlefield away from people, away from people who are not soldiers. And in so doing, as I said, he anticipates classmates, and you could see a lot of those influences later. I will not say that Colossewitz even was inspired by Gibert, but I think it's clear that he read Gibert.
Gibert was recognized in his day in 1770s and 1780s as an important person. People understood his theories. They generally bought into at least the technical side of them. And he was a celebrity in his own day.
He was honored afterwards. So the main collection of his books, I actually have one of them, was published by Napoleon. Gibert's widow managed to get his papers collected very oddly. They were edited by Bertrand Bechair, who is one of the terrorists, one of the members of the Committee for Public Safety.
And they're published in the early decade of the 1800s. And there's some ambiguity about what Napoleon thought of Gibert. Napoleon was notoriously disdainful of military theory. He said all you need to do is read the campaigns of Caesar and Turin.
But he clearly cared enough about these books to make sure that they were published with his Fiat in this kind of prestige edition. And I think when you look past Class Fits, and this is where I think Gibert's real influence is important, when you go past Class Fits, both in terms of theory and in terms of time, what you discover is before Class Fits and Joe Mani, there are generations of theorists like Gibert who are wrestling with these problems. And I don't think Class Fits gives readers a lot of solutions, but I think Class Fits, oddly because his major book on war was not a finished book, but I think Class Fits gives readers a very mature theory. And it's based on the generations of his predecessors, people like Gibert.
And I think there's a great value in going back to some of those predecessor books, but one because we have beaten Class Fits to death. He has been endlessly studied for the last few decades and we need to go beyond that. But also because change and transition and new ideas are rarely sourced from a single place. And I think studying people like Gibert, reading their works, helps us to appreciate how that process was, in some ways, tortuous, took a lot of time and had lots of false starts and cul-de-sacs.
Whereas if we just read, again, I'm using the term ironically, the finished product of somebody like Class Fits, it looks easy. And I think that's a microcosm for the way we look at history. We look at small slices of history and we assume that these just kind of dropped out of a box somewhere and we don't see the strings and the process that went into creating them. And so Gibert is somebody who's a very important string attached to more modern military theory and practice.
And that's why that's, I think, ultimately what his legacy is, is that his legacy and the legacy of his general essay on tactics is Vagamopus. They really open that door for us. They open a door into a wider world. And for readers who can only read English, a great deal of this work has not been translated.
A lot of it is still only in a lot of in French, a great deal of an Italian or Spanish or German. And so I think that there's a value in bringing that to an Anglophone audience as well. Just sort of continuing on the modern legacy of Gibert. Are there other ways that you see his ideas influencing thought?
Do you find yourself ever as an observer of the present moment thinking about Gibert and thinking, oh, Gibert would have had said this about the Russian invasion, or Gibert would have thought this about North Korea's nuclear weapon capacity, obviously, very counterfactual. But... Oh, no, I think that's a fun question. And one of the things I love about Gibert, you can go into a project that turns into a biography and you find out the person that you're writing about is important, but they're boring.
Gibert is the opposite of that. He is an important person, but man, is he wildly interesting. What I could tell you right away is no matter what the situation Gibert would have had something to say about it. And judging by his corpus of writing, he would have written a two volume account of it.
So pick a modern affair in the world, and he'd have something to say about it. And one of the things that's interesting about reading his works, and again, the generalist and tactics, he's very young when he writes it. He's in his 30s, which is very young for kind of a senior strategist, a senior thinker, even at the time. You see his thinking evolve as he gets a little older, and it's a misfortune that he died when he did, because if we had had a couple more decades of him, if he'd survived the terror, I think we would have gotten some great work out of him.
And I think it's possible to work to people like Joni and classmates are different as a result. I would love to see him comment on the words of the French Revolution and Napoleon. The flip side of that is he probably would have gotten himself in trouble. He frequently got himself into trouble.
He was kind of a firebrand, not to the level of a Voltaire or a Rousseau where he had to leave the kingdom. But the generalist and tactics wasn't published in France. It was published outside of France and smuggled in, like so many books had to be. So what I would see him doing, one, is just raising his voice, because he's one of those people.
He's always got an opinion, and sometimes more than one opinion. And that would have been fun. It's fun to imagine him opining at length about what's happening in Russia or pick any other current affair, because he definitely would have. But I also think, again, the bulk of the book is dedicated to Manousha.
And I think that it's important for what it is, but I think the more important part of it is these connections between the societies, the militaries, and the political leadership, and how those interact with each other. So I can absolutely see him looking at the Russian invasion of Ukraine and looking at Russia and seeing a political leadership unwilling to mobilize its citizenry, and equally perhaps, as a speculation, a citizenry unwilling to actively support a war effort, whether or not they actually support it, they may not show up in the in the conscription camps. And as a result, the Russian war effort kind of floundering. And on the flip side, I could see him looking at Ukraine and saying, oh, I understand what's happening here.
I understand that this is a people that has risen in defense of its homeland. And he would have used that term, the term petri, of fatherland, was very common at the time. And you read it all throughout his writing. And so I think you see those ties.
Now, it's important to know he's not unique in that. There are lots of his contemporaries who would recognize the same thing and write about them. But I don't know that there are many who would write with the same spirit, Mickey Bearwood. If nothing else, he's always an enthusiastic commentator.
My final question is just about this general project that you embarked on here, and of translating the general essay, and then also heavily annotating it. And just the experience as a historian, going through this project, if there was anything that you feel just helped you understand more about this particular time period that was written in, or just in general about how people might think about military history. Yeah, I think it's worth noting that this project was a COVID project. You know, we all got sent home once COVID started.
I was kind of sitting around working from home when I wasn't teaching and looking for a project, because it's, you know, all my books were in my office at work. And, you know, I didn't have access to a lot of the historiography. And this idea had kind of been in the back of my mind for a while. So I just went ahead and took a plunge.
And it basically took the work from home time that we all had during COVID. And I don't think I could have done it prior to that, not because of COVID, but because of the experiences of where I work and what I do and what I've researched. Working in professional military education, working with people who actually practice the military art and science has helped me understand a lot of what he's talking about, because I was never in uniform. So in some ways, it's I'm kind of an outsider to this world.
But doing the job I do and being around the people I am helps me understand a lot of the aspects of what he's talking about. And there's also from the historian side, there's a story we tell ourselves as historians that that we are never smarter than we are in the day we do our doctoral comps. And the older I get, the more I realize that's just simply not true. During our doctoral comps, we memorize lots of historiography.
But the older we get and the more we read, the more we're able to contextualize. I mean, so much of this project, but you know, aside from the actual technical translation part, and I also have a background in English, so I was able to use that part of my academic background for that. But but so much of it is about contextualizing. It's about explaining who he's talking about, why this example works, what the layers are, what he's talking about here are.
And to be able to do that just simply has required the years of study and reading that all historians do. And I suspect there's a lot of historians who will listen to this will kind of nod their way along and say, yeah, I've been there. And it's also worth pointing out, you know, these projects are never are never complete. If that's the right way to word it.
You know, there are layers to be bear that, you know, he's making references to books that I, you know, are obscure and that I haven't read or not familiar with. So none of these projects is ever perfect. And I think that's the beauty of history of historiography. There's always more to uncover.
And for me, this was a this was kind of a lark that turned into a very interesting and fulfilling project. And I also think it's a very useful one, as I mentioned earlier, so many of the foundational texts of military theory are not accessible to people who can only read English. And you know, it's one thing to say, oh, well, they just need to learn another language. But to understand the nuance and to understand the technical aspects of these requires a fair amount of work.
And that's that's how the contextualization can help. And I spent a lot of time buried in a in a French English military dictionary to understand some of that nuance myself. So I think that there's I think that there's definitely a market for that. I think there's definitely, for example, I've mentioned Germany several times.
Very few people work on Germany now. Everybody wants to work on classmates. There's a great market for translating and annotating and studying Germany, not to mention other more obscure military theorists, you know, people who aren't still taught at professional military institutions. And so I think this project has helped me understand the value of being able to do that and to see how these authors worked and how their minds worked and how, you know, I don't want to draw two direct connections, but you know, there's a lot of similarities to the way the modern military mind works.
And I think there's a great value in that. Yeah, well, Jonathan, thank you so much for being a guest in the new books network. I'm sure listening to you know, just like I did find that very fascinating and impressive just your unbelievable command of the subject. Well, thank you so much.
Yeah, thank you. This has been a good experience and thank you for having me.