Captain Professor: A Life in War and Peace. Michael Howard. Continuum International Publishing Group. 221 pages; photographs; $39.95.
Reviewed by James Jay Carafano

Military education is in a sad state, and Michael Howard’s memoir, Captain Professor: A Life in War and Peace, stands as a reminder of how far it has fallen. No student of the military art should leave this book unread.

Michael Howard is an excellent military historian. In one school or another, every Army officer has encountered his translation of Clausewitz’s On War, his contribution on World War I in Peter Paret and Gordon Craig’s classic Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (which includes an essay on Soviet strategy by a young scholar named Condoleezza Rice) or his seminal War in European History.

Howard also created the War Studies Department at King’s College, London, pioneering research that looked at battle as more than a narrative of bugles and bullets, and examining the economic, social, technological and political forces that shape conflict. At the same time, he was a guiding light in modern strategic studies and one of the founding members of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a leading research center on international security and strategy. Much of what we think of as modern military history was pioneered by Howard, his students and their contemporaries.

Most important, Howard made his work accessible to people who were worried about the real world problems of conflict in the post-modern age. He recognized that military history and strategy are unique intellectual pursuits because they have immediate practical application. Civilians and soldiers use them to develop the critical thinking skills essential to sound decision making and creative and confident leadership. Throughout his career, Howard left the “ivory tower” to engage with generals and policymakers, tackling contemporary issues like nuclear deterrence and the professional training of young officers at Sandhurst. He made history relevant.

Captain Professor also reminds us that history cannot be separated from historians. Howard’s artfully written and evocative autobiography illustrates how his life shaped his work. The book falls into three parts: an idyllic upper-middle class English upbringing; infantry combat in North Africa and Italy; and an academic career that spanned the Cold War and beyond.

Howard’s memoirs are worth reading just for the honest and insightful telling of his war experiences. Awarded the Military Cross for valor, Howard describes, with equal vividness, both the harrowing moments of battle and the months of boredom and debilitation spent recovering from malaria and jaundice.

Wartime service made the peacetime scholar. Echoing Clausewitz’s famous dictum on war, Howard recalled writing history is simple. “First, find out what happened. Then, establish a chain of causation. Finally, apply critical judgment.” But war had taught the captain that finding out what happened was far from simple. “I realized how difficult this was,” he writes. “What I remembered, or thought that I remembered, did not fit with other people’s memories. Documentation was uneven; voluminous on administration and logistics, it thinned out when it came to operations. People were too busy to keep full and precise records. ‘War diaries’ were often written up days, sometimes weeks, after the event, when many vital witnesses were no longer available. The perceptions of participants in the frontline action were distorted by excitement and fatigue. I came to realize how many narratives could be constructed from the same evidence. … [B]attle was as difficult to describe as an act of love.” Such insight into war is evidence enough that writing good war history is such a profound challenge.

If there is a weakness in Captain Professor it is that there are not enough passages where Howard addresses his philosophies and theories on military art and strategy. Least satisfying is a cartoon-like criticism of the U.S. approach to the war on terrorism that rounds out the book. Howard objects to calling it a war, but his rationale is simplistic, echoing the typical Euro-skeptic line. Calling it a war, the critics argue, only antagonizes the peoples that produce terrorists, making it harder to address the root causes. Skeptics also fear that labeling the hunt for terrorists as a war gives America a “license to kill,” unleashing the Pentagon’s military power on the world.

Howard may take issue with how Americans are fighting the Long War; that debate, however, cannot be solved by simply banning the word war.

Others argue that denying we are at war with terrorists may actually encourage terrorism, that terrorists believe not wanting to fight a war shows a lack of honor—indeed cowardice. Howard may have an argument in challenging the wisdom of the Long War, but the balanced analysis, depth of research and careful analytical judgments that distinguish his other writings are missing.

Ultimately, however, Howard’s musings on the war on terrorism reflect the practice of a craft that is in sharp decline. We have lost the intellectual world described in Captain Professor. This freefall actually began at the time the War Studies Department, under Howard, was reaching its zenith. Part of the backlash of the Vietnam War was a wholesale rejection of military history and national security studies by many universities. War studies, where they continued, were supplanted by “new” military history, a notion that studies on race, ethnicity, culture, gender or social issues that related to military affairs had equal, if not more value than actually studying warfare.

Traditional military study flourished in the United States as part of officer professional development programs until the end of the Cold War, when funds started to dry up and the outbreak of the war on terrorism left professionals too busy to study their profession. As a result, today there are very few top-notch programs at civilian universities. Likewise, less and less time is devoted to these subjects at military schools, and there are fewer opportunities for advanced schooling. The foundation of intellectual study built by the Captain Professor and his contemporaries is crumbling.

There are few Michael Howards left, and it is not clear that there is a generation following the great scholars of the Cold War to replace them. Nor is it clear that civilian universities or the Pentagon are doing much to address this shortfall.

Soldiers and students should read Howard’s Captain Professor. They will do so wistfully, regretting that they may never have a mentor of his equal.