Horsefeathers

Thoughts sparked by the Powder Horn

N.C. Wyeth, David Gamut, circa 1919

I heartily dislike the word “bull@#$%.” This antipathy stems, in part, from my deep and abiding love for the English language. It also owes much to the time, when working as a farm hand at an agricultural college, I cleaned out several subterranean chambers, each of which held a winter’s worth of the droppings of a dozen or so creatures of the bovine persuasion.

Notwithstanding the aforementioned antipathy, I will recommend, without reservation, an essay in which the offending word plays a central role. Written by an officer of the Canadian Army with the nom de plume of Shady Maples, the article in question bemoans the tendency of military writers to produce prose that, to use a phrase I like as much as I hate bull@#$%, “is so bad that it’s not even wrong.”

At the root of this phenomenon, I think, is the paradoxical nature of the military profession. Unless involved in the guarding of a contested borderland (such as the Northwest Frontier of the Empire of India), military professionals spend most of their time preparing for service in an event that, in addition to being a fully paid-up member of the realm of uncertainty, will occur at a time and place of its own choosing, under conditions that no one this side of Paradise can predict.

To put things another way, military professionals spend most of their time engaged in various forms of speculation, simulation, and scenario-building. As none of these are falsifiable (Professor Popper … Professor Karl Popper, please call your answering service), they invariably find themselves on short rations where contact with reality is concerned.

The most powerful tool for minimizing this problem is the study of history, and, in particular, is participation in decision-forcing cases. That is, military professionals must not only study the past, but use the events of times gone by as the basis for problem-solving exercises that end, not with a school solution devised at leisure by someone well supplied with good coffee and central heating, but with the decision made by someone who was tired, hungry, scared out of his wits, and supplied with but a fraction of the information he would liked to have had.

In short, when it comes to preparing for the war we hope will never happen, there is no goddess but Clio, and Michael Howard is her prophet.

Paul Jacques Aimé Baudry, Clio, circa 1870