Role of Military History in the Education of Future Officers

摘要

Many of you will recognize that dramatization of General Douglas MacArthur'sfamous Duty, Honour Country' speech delivered at West Point on 12 May 1962 to an audience of officer cadets soon to become junior leaders in the Vietnam War. MacArthur belonged to a generation which produced a group of gifted American, European and British Commonwealth military officers all of whom began their military careers at the end of the nineteenth century in the era of the cavalry and ended their active service in the mid-twentieth century in the nuclear age. What might be styled as the MacArthur generation' presided over a revolution in warfare, but many of its members never forgot that military history was the laboratory of the professional soldier. Through knowledge of history, many of them learned that while military leadership is unique, countless numbers before them had endured on the lonely pinnacle of command. Through history, they recognized that modem warfare while changing all the time was, in its application, an extrapolation of the methods from past warfare. And, because of military history, many of the MacArthur generation knew the worth of their