Dying to Learn: Wartime Lessons from the Western Front (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)
Dying to Learn: Wartime Lessons from the Western Front (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs) by Michael A. Hunzeker
English | ISBN: 1501758454 | 264 pages | EPUB | July 15, 2021 | 2.13 Mb
English | ISBN: 1501758454 | 264 pages | EPUB | July 15, 2021 | 2.13 Mb
In Dying to Learn, Michael Hunzeker develops a novel theory to explain how wartime militaries learn. He focuses on the Western Front, which witnessed three great-power armies struggle to cope with deadlock throughout the First World War, as the British, French, and German armies all pursued the same solutions-assault tactics, combined arms, and elastic defense in depth. By the end of the war, only the German army managed to develop and implement a set of revolutionary offensive, defensive, and combined arms doctrines that in hindsight represented the best way to fight.
Hunzeker identifies three organizational variables that determine how fighting militaries generate new ideas, distinguish good ones from bad ones, and implement the best of them across the entire organization. These factors are: the degree to which leadership delegates authority on the battlefield; how effectively the organization retains control over soldier and officer training; and whether or not the military possesses an independent doctrinal assessment mechanism.