Understanding war: It's a slow march

In his popular course - Weapons, Strategy, and War - Prof. Warner Schilling not only lectures on the history of warfare, he also shows students what fighting is like - with a gun.

Each year, under the watchful eye of a Columbia University security officer, Dr. Schilling shows students what a World War I rifle looks like and how it would load and fire if they used ammunition. Students dutifully line up to take their turn aiming the unloaded rifle at the wall, imagining what it must have been like at the Battle of the Somme.

Schilling is a professor of international relations at Columbia, where he was formerly director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies. He is the author of "Strategy, Politics, and Defense Budgets" and "American Arms and a Changing Europe." The book he is currently researching deals with individualized warfare - terrorism, assassinations, and the like.

North Manhattan's bustling energy contrasts with the shelves and shelves of books on defense planning, strategic analyses, and atlases in his office, where Schilling recently spoke with the Monitor about changes he has seen in both the student body and the body politic.

On how students have changed:

The people I went through graduate school with were right after the World War II, so international relations looked like deadly serious business to us, and we were all, in one way or another, party to the war. We thought that by studying international politics and foreign policy we might have a part in moving the world in happier directions.

If I was to contrast that with students today, I think that they are more taken up with the academic life than we were. Now, that doesn't mean they are less interested in the interrelationship of academic work and public policy, but they are more self-conscious of the needs and the role of a budding academic than we were.

On what war means to students today:

When war means that a bunch of professionals go off and earn their pay, the implications, the concerns with the consequences, are very different from when war meant that you or your friends might be drafted to participate.

[On campus during the] Vietnam War, when a lot of undergraduates found a way to avoid the draft, they certainly saw it as something that might impinge upon their life. So they were attentive to the war and where it was going. Today, the only thing students might think is, "Gee, terrorists might do something to New York or Boston."

The other thing is that our most recent engagements, the Gulf War and Serbia, have been relatively bloodless [in terms of American casualties], so this particular age cohort does not have as part of its own knowledge how deadly wars can be. It's all like a video game, almost.

On the importance of understanding history:

There are a whole host of questions that, even if you are only interested in the here and now, can best be answered by looking backward.

It requires a greater leap of faith than I am willing to undertake to think that people are brighter in the year 2003 than they were in 1903 or 1803 or 1703. There are some things which have changed, but I don't think there have been any major new innovations in human intelligence or human emotions.

If you are interested in the human animal and how the human animal behaves in different circumstances, a study of past behavior, or in this case, history, is one very useful way of building up your working capital, insight, and knowledge.

On how the roles of an academic and a politician differ:

The skills, the interests, the life, and the activity are different.

Page: 1 | 2