Brian McAllister Linn, The Echo of Battle: The Army’s Way of War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007)
A scathing review of the U.S. Army’s capacity to learn, Brian Linn’s The Echo of Battle uses a paradigm of three distinct internal Army traditions to explore how peacetime intellectuals shaped Army innovation or lack thereof, which often resulted in insufficient preparation for the next war. Linn, a professor of history at Texas A&M University and former president of the Society for Military History, received his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in 1985. Primarily a scholar of the early 20th century U.S. Army, Linn endeavored to explore the many missed opportunities in the Army’s history to offer context for significant institutional learning.
Linn’s thesis is that peacetime debate shaped the Army’s war of war more than its wartime service. To demonstrate his point, Linn identifies three distinct traditions in the United States Army—Guardians, Heroes, and Managers—that interpret the lessons of war through distinct thought processes. These schools of thought have conspired to shape the Army’s vision for future war, often resulting in a force unprepared for its next fight. The inability of any of the traditions to learn from wars, but rather to focus on those lessons most applicable to advancing their agendas, ensured every subsequent armed conflict the United States entered required a robust learning curve. Therefore, as Linn maintains, peacetime intellectuals shaped U.S. Army doctrine more so than the lessons of war. The army would draw from the past “only those lessons which confirmed their cherished beliefs.” (p. 115)
The Guardian tradition viewed deterrence as the Army’s primary mission and viewed war as both an art and a science. The Guardians are a byproduct of nineteenth-century emphasis on engineering born after the War of 1812 and burning of Washington. Linn shows that the Guardian tradition manifested itself through coastal fortifications to deter great powers from attacking the United States, rather than the near-constant frontier wars with Native Americans.
In direct contrast to the Guardians are the Heroes who, as Linn identifies, see war as fundamentally human—as a contest of wills. Because of their conservative anti-intellectualism, many of the lessons of fighting insurgencies in the American West and the Philippines, for example, were never codified into written Army doctrine, forcing the Army to reinvent counterinsurgency and other doctrine with each new irregular conflict.
A product of the Army’s emphasis on service colleges at the turn of the century, Linn argues that the Managers saw that the nature of industrial nation-state conflict required massive armies of citizen-soldiers and the total mobilization of the nation’s resources—a careful and deliberate process requiring their advanced managerial skills. Preferring to manage strategic wars in a business-like fashion, the Managers often overlooked the smaller unconventional wars with which the United States routinely found itself embroiled.
The author uses carefully chosen primary sources to relate the narrative over two centuries of American history. Especially relevant to this are period student papers from the War College and Command and Staff General College. These combine with oral histories, transcripts of speeches, personal correspondence, operational and training records, professional journals, and the requisite doctrinal publications to give the reader a clear view of the evolution of military thought in the United States during peacetime. Chronologically organized from the period after the War of 1812 through the post-Gulf War era, this book uses seven chapters to explore how each school of thought interpreted and implemented the lessons from their generation into the Army’s vision for the future.
This book challenges the notion that the United States Army has a coherent strategic culture. Linn argues, instead, that all three traditions cherry-pick from history to offer a comfortable vision of war. His three traditions offer a digestible reflection on the US Army’s seeming inability to glean the information necessary for future war. Linn convincingly demonstrates that the army’s peacetime thinking, when the sound of battle becomes an echo, is as critical as its ability to adapt during wartime. The author shows the reader that the never-ending battle for roles and missions can sometimes manifest itself as an internal problem between differing schools of thought in addition to a fight between services. In that regard, this book should serve as an excellent reflection for army officers as it continues to grapple with its most recent conflicts. Furthermore, it ought to foster discourse on how to rectify this trinity of traditions to serve better the institution moving forward. This book is very readable and should be required reading in army professional military education.