A worthy cause can stir the poet in some of us, or at least a quote from one. Perhaps that's the best initial measure of Strategika, the Hoover Institution's new online journal examining national security issues in the context of past policies and military history. For contributing scholar Josiah Bunting III, the project reflects a mindfulness lyricized by A.E. Housman as "The troubles of our proud and angry dust."
Bunting, an infantry officer in Vietnam and former superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute, believes most top-tier universities are disinterested in the kind of analysis Strategika is attempting to revitalize. "Military history and associated fields of strategy are studiously ignored by the academy," says Bunting, president of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, which supports research on violence and aggression.
Each edition of Strategika features a thought-provoking essay and two opinion pieces. Senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson, PhD '80, first brainstormed the concept with Hoover director John Raisian. They were impelled by a general interest in putting history in the limelight compared to, say, political science or economics. "After all," notes Hanson, "the theme of the institution is war, revolution and peace. And people had remarked that we really hadn't stressed war and peace, which was our original mission." But more specifically, the hot-button debates of the day—about Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea and Syria, to cite a few—seemed to be taking place without a historical framework.
To bring Strategika to fruition, Hoover created a working group on the role of military history in contemporary conflict. Hanson serves as chair for more than two dozen historians, policy researchers and intelligence analysts whose backgrounds hopscotch from doctorates in the classics to military combat to work for the National Security Council. Among them are Kimberly Kagan, founder and president of the Institute for the Study of War; retired Adm. Gary Roughead, former chief of naval operations; and Bing West, a Marine infantryman in Vietnam and former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration.
The group met twice last academic year to plan how Strategika would be structured, and Hanson, a prolific writer, worked on establishing an ethos for treating contributors professionally in everything from the editing process to prompt payment for their writing. He says the journal, which launched in May and has been publishing on a four-week cycle, already has three years of funding.
Topics have included "What do the jihadists want?" and "Should women serve in front line combat units?" When the subject was "Should the United States intervene in the Syrian civil war?"—with the introductory essay from Mark Moyar, senior fellow at the Joint Special Operations University—the two commentaries threw down just by headline: a pro-intervention argument by Kagan on "The Smart and Right Thing in Syria" and an anti-intervention view by former foreign service officer Angelo M. Codevilla titled "A Recipe for American Disaster."
The editions also offer links to related commentaries, suggestions for further reading, discussion guides for educators and poll questions for readers. In some cases, there are embedded podcasts, such as interviews with the essay authors.
