Why wars are important

Not all of the history of the U. Military is positive. But the institution works to learn from the errors of the past. Military informs us of the trials and tribulations that we have faced as a nation. It is a record of the sacrifices made to advance the concepts of freedom found within Enlightenment philosophy and is an important touchstone for all citizens. Too Fond of War. I write this paper today on the centennial of the end of the Great War.

The death toll of this war exceeded 9 million. With such extreme human costs, the true cost of these wars almost exceeds human comprehension when the financial costs are added. Even if we could calculate the cost of every bullet or artillery shell fired, how could we ever imagine calculating the losses of a generation of service members that could have lived to be great artists, inventors, businessmen, or civic leaders.

Confederate General Robert E. In the modern era with the ever-shrinking size of the U. Military, and a noticeable gap between the military and civilian cultures, it is now more important than ever to teach about the horrors of war. As citizens of the Republic it should be considered a duty to learn the personal costs of war.

Which one of the following do you think made the most important contribution to European expansion: Renaissance thought, the search for new trade routes, or new developments in technology?

Explain your choice. What lessons do you think English colonists learned from their early Jamestown experience? Focus on matters of fulfilling expectations, financial support, leadership skills, and relations with the.

There were two groups of allies. German, Italy, and Austria, Hungary were one alliance. Great Britain, France, and Russia was the other. The reason the war started was that Austria, Hungary next ruler was assassinated by a Serbian assassin.

When Austria, Hungary wanted. In hope for fighting hard for their country, the soldiers have forgotten all the fears that their family faces. There are many reasons why World War One occurred in , many are complex and remain controversial which is why the matter has been disputed to this day by historians all over the world. My theory is that a lot of those reasons and the trigger factor all links to one thing; the alliance system. The alliance system is what made countries oppose each other and become rivals making it the most significant factor.

It had an impact on who supported who when Duke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated. Berlin Wall in His 36, policemen and green army recruits faced nearly French and Belgian divisions, who did not fire a shot.

Two years later, England and France abandoned their ally Czechoslovakia, and Germany absorbed this strategically critical country. But this was the wrong place and time to draw that particular red line. The occupation of Czechoslovakia had strengthened Germany and put the Wehrmacht on the southern border of Poland, beyond the state-of-the-art fortifications the Czechs had built in their mountainous western region. And Germany now possessed the military hardware of the Czechs and the Skoda works, one of the largest arms manufacturers in Europe.

In fact, the Panzer 35 t and 38 t tanks used in the invasion of Poland were actually Czech tanks produced by Skoda. This means that often a nation cannot merely wait to react to aggression, but must anticipate where the blow will fall.

He neither knows nor cares how to parry a blow or how to watch his adversary. Auden called the thirties, is that success in war depends on morale, not material superiority. Long before , England and France had lost their nerve, and simply did not have the will to fight. Instead they had bought into the illusions of internationalism and collective security, pacifism and disarmament, which had merely fed the alligator of Nazism, to paraphrase Churchill, in the vain hope that they would be eaten last.

And this brings us to the philosophical lessons the study of war teaches. Contrary to our modern therapeutic utopianism, the history of war shows us the unchanging, tragic reality of human nature and its irrational passions and interests that will spark state aggression and violence. The modern world, in contrast, rejects the notion that human nature comprises destructive passions and selfish interests that will start wars only force can stop.

Writing Women into the History of the War The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women the right to vote, guarantees the World War I era a prominent place in historical works devoted to the suffrage movement. Yet the most innovative recent histories focus less on the national suffrage movement and more on incorporating the story of female leadership into the main narrative of the war.

This scholarship makes it impossible to disentangle the history of the war from women's history: one cannot be understood without the other. Capozzola and Lentz-Smith, for instance, discuss how middle-class women who belonged to an array of social clubs became essential grassroots organizers, mobilizing white and black communities across the nation to support the war.

Irwin details a different sort of political awakening among women by focusing on their humanitarian relief work, often initiated to help women overseas. Moderate-leaning suffragists found multiple ways to use the war to their advantage. The service of women on federal wartime committees organized by the Food Administration, the Department of the Treasury, and the War Department helped normalize the sight of women exercising political power.

On the local level, suffragists blended calls for the vote into their voluntary patriotic activities, as they promoted victory gardens and recruited volunteers for the Red Cross. In Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War , Kimberly Jensen offers a less sanguine vision of female advancement during the war, exploring how violence against women became accepted as a legitimate method of controlling unruly women who protested loudly and directly such as striking female workers and radical suffragists who picketed the White House.

Military officials often looked the other way when U. Jensen recovers that history of violence against women, seeing the fight for full-fledged citizenship as a struggle to both protect the female body and acquire the right to vote. Her portrait of gendered violence within the armed forces is especially timely given the recent revelations that rape and sexual harassment are too often experienced by female service members.

A New Look at the Battlefield Violence was a defining characteristic of the World War I experience for civilian and soldier, male and female, black and white. New studies of the battlefield underscore the brutality of combat, while simultaneously investigating the learning curve that the U. The fighting man's experience forms the center of these new approaches, which all seek to better understand the mindset and actions of those sent into battle.

Rather than focusing on generals and their staffs, Mark E. Lengel's To Conquer Hell: The Meuse-Argonne, argue that the most substantial and effective learning on the battlefield occurred from the bottom up.

The authors contend that improved decision and war-making capacities within companies and divisions enabled the entire army to improve its combat effectiveness against the German army. Byerly considers a different foe, the influenza virus, which killed nearly as many American soldiers as enemy weapons.

Byerly challenges the conventional narrative that traffic congestion and straggling during the Meuse-Argonne battle revealed ineptness and a reluctance to fight. Reinterpreting those events through the prism of the epidemic, she suggests that the onslaught of the flu sent a stream of victims to the rear to seek care.

Learning to cooperate with allies and one another served as another important adjustment to modern warfare for both generals and enlisted men.

In Doughboys, The Great War, and the Remaking of America , I argue that discipline was often negotiated, rather than coerced, and thus gave enlisted men the power to shape the disciplinary structure of the military. Collecting and evaluating enlisted men's opinions became standard practice in the military during World War I.

To this day, the military employs large numbers of sociologists and psychologists who administer survey after survey to devise manpower policies that the enlisted population will accept. Conclusion The World War I era is a rich and vibrant field of study.

Challenging old paradigms, the new scholarship underscores how the war permanently transformed individuals, social movements, politics, foreign policy, culture, and the military. The historical scholarship connects the war to key issues in twentieth-century American history: the rise of the United States as a world power, the success of social justice movements, and the growth of federal power. Collectively, historians of the war make a compelling case for why the war matters in American history.

The experiences of Americans during World War I also offer important insights into our own times. Today we wonder about the ongoing relevance of Wilsonian ideals in guiding U. Keeping Americans "safe from terror" still goes hand in hand with making "the world safe for democracy.