To ask one question of an historian commonly elicits another by way of response. So it is with the question as to what we can learn from history about the nature of strategy, to which academic historians of the general sort will in most cases reply: “What can we learn from history about anything?” Many, perhaps most, of them maintain that there are no “lessons” that one can distil from the past. While this is not the most helpful of standpoints for those in search of practical guidance, it is worth spending a moment on the drawbacks of history as a suggestive discipline both to understand history's limitations and appreciate what it might do in providing enlightenment about the military dimensions of the past and their relationships with the present.

The discipline of history shares some of the characteristics of science, but not those that would obviously be of most value when crossing the border between understanding the past and offering advice or guidance on the future. For the most part, strategists have presented their subject as a science, and history does share some of the foundations of science in that it, too, is a body of knowledge based on the facts of experience, so strategy and history might appear to enjoy a close degree of kinship.

At once, however, problems of which the scholar is all too well aware, but which some strategic writers of the past dismiss or disregard, begin to crowd in.