Want to improve civil-military relations? Teach military history

General Charles Q. Brown will have no shortage of challenges waiting for him when he becomes the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff later this year. In addition to Russia’s escalating war on Ukraine, rising tensions in the Indo-Pacific, and civil war in Africa, Brown takes the reins at a time when the joint force is experiencing some of its worst recruitment shortfalls. Meanwhile, controversies related to the supposed politicization of the military continue to shape public opinion. 

The latter two challenges are connected to the notion of civil-military relations, a long-standing charter rooted in civilian control of the military and the relationship between society and its service members. French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville was one of the first to explore this relationship in his observations of American democracy two centuries ago, but the concept faced particular scrutiny under President Donald Trump’s administration.

Friction between leaders in Washington sparked debates on the role of active and retired defense officials in the political process and a decrease in elected leaders with military experience. Some see a crisis emerging as common ground between the two groups recedes. In response to these challenges, President Joe Biden reiterated the importance of maintaining civilian control of the military in the 2022 National Security Strategy. The U.S. Army War College even established a civil-military relations center earlier this year.

Carrie Lee, codirector of the new center, sees America “at the cross section of a deterioration of norms across the force that have been in the making for several decades.” While the perspectives on this challenge differ vastly, most experts agree that the problem is fundamentally one of cultural division and poor civic education. At a time when the average young American knows more about TikTok trends than the role of the United States in World War II, it is not shocking that some see a widening civil-military divide.

Retired Air Force Brigadier General Paula Thornhill published “Demystifying the American Military” in 2019 as a clarion call to inject a rudimentary understanding of the military into America’s education system. Policymakers such as Sen. Chuck Grassley and scholars who study civil-military relations believe the concept must be rooted in mutual understanding, but the last three decades have made such reciprocity more complex.

The number of veterans in Congress plummeted after the Cold War, from 118 in 1991 to 64 in 1997, and it continues to decline. Even after two decades of post-9/11 wars, the number of veterans in the current Congress remains near an all-time low of 35. This increases the risk of military officials becoming overly involved in the political process and creates opportunities for unrealistic expectations of what the military can achieve.

Bringing military history back into civic education is thus essential to bridging the civil-military gap by connecting the experiences of service members to the American people. Such efforts would also help empower less-experienced civilian leaders to push back against potentially risky or wishful military advice.

Military history, though, is of marginal interest on most college campuses — especially at the top private universities that produce a disproportionate number of policymakers. According to the late military historian Edward M. Coffman, in 2011, even after a decade of war, only five percent of America’s 14,000 history professors were interested in military history. There was certainly no shortage of lectures on history repeating itself after America’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. Yet interest in the formal study of that history remained negligible. According to the Society for Military History, out of the roughly 1,400 Ph.D. awarding institutions in the United States, only 21 of them offer Ph.D. programs with a focus in military history — less than two percent.

This scarcity says less about the quality of scholarship at schools that teach military history — some of which are world class — and more about high-performing civilians who hail from schools where they were less likely to encounter military literature in their studies. Charged with oversight of the world’s most well-funded and powerful joint force, public officials must be exposed to the complexities of military history in order to include its valuable lessons on civil-military relations.

Some scholars challenge the significance of this data, citing courses and faculty that brush up against military issues in other fields, such as social history, international relations and political science. This is true to an extent, but the above numbers are worth reflecting on because they speak to the state of the field and its broader scope of influence on policy and American culture.

War has disrupted and restructured the world in ways that nothing else has. Failing to study it drives deeper wedges between civilian leaders, the military, and the people they serve, which further complicates civil-military relations and by extension defense policy. Perhaps more troubling, it guarantees that the disease of war will continue to spread and appear in anachronistic forms that shock the conscience of a future-focused world.

Western civilization paid for its lessons in military history with the blood of millions. Those lessons came at too high of a price to be treated like footnotes in the tome of human experience. Passing that history onto the next generation is the best way to ensure civilian and military leaders alike peer into the future with clear eyes.

Capt. Michael P. Ferguson is a U.S. Army officer with twenty years of combat, staff and security cooperation experience on four continents. He is co-author of the forthcoming “The Military Legacy of Alexander the Great: Lessons for the Information Age.” The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not reflect the policies or positions of the U.S. Army, U.S. Department of Defense, or U.S. government.