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9 August 2024

Lessons Never Learned: The US Army Disinterest in the 1912–13 Balkan Wars and Today’s Professional Military Discourse

Brian McAllister Linn

The ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have generated an extensive commentary seeking both to define the characteristics of modern war and to identify lessons applicable for future conflicts. Reflecting today’s proliferation of information (and opinions), students of modern war can quickly exhaust themselves listening to podcasts and seminars, watching videos, and reading everything from blogs to official documents. Given the vast—and often contradictory—amount of current analysis, a study of how the pre–information age US Army’s professional journals assimilated and disseminated lessons from ongoing conflicts may assist those seeking a path through today’s flood of commentary. It also confirms the Harding Project’s recognition of the importance of both the quality and influence of the service’s professional journals.

Much of the current professional military discussion revolves around the purported lessons from Ukraine and Gaza. But will those lessons be propagated across the Army and inform the way it prepares for tomorrow’s wars? To explore this question, we can turn to the past and examine how Army journals derived lessons from the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) and the Balkan Wars (1912–1913). Both conflicts were seen by contemporaries as examples of modern war, involving the rapid mobilization of mass armies, costly infantry assaults, intense artillery barrages, machine guns, trenches, and appalling numbers of casualties. But how the Army leadership and its intellectual community perceived these two conflicts was very different.

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