JDB Communications, LLC is proud to announce the publication of Ruminations on History and Warfare: Musings of a Soldier/Scholar by John D. Beatty, a combination of Ruminations on War and On Future War previously only available as Kindle Editions. From the Author’s Introduction:
After reading, studying and thinking about history in general and military history in particular for going on half a century, I have come to believe that I have something to say about it…in general terms, anyway. These essays were initially produced in an academic environment, but they are being repurposed to express some of my thoughts and feelings on several subjects about the past and the future of war and warfare. If you’re looking for homework-solving pithiness, forget it: I took out the footnotes.
Some of these essays are an attempt to make some sense of the most fashionable trends, fads and fancies of American historians and soothsayers in the early 21st century.
Seers of the future are an especially special breed of thinkers, and they already know it. What makes them annoying, however, is their irritating propensity for mistaking wit for brilliance. Case in point is the famous Albert Einstein quote:
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
There’s several versions of this quotation that first appeared in Liberal Judaism in 1949, and it may indeed have not even been original then, or even original to Einstein. But what those who depend on this quotation as a cudgel for disarmament forget that even Einstein missed the ironic point: After humankind blows itself into the Stone Age, they will still be fighting.
Finally, there’s the constant refrain: War is not the answer. But that, of course, depends on what the question is.
Ruminations on History and Warfare is available from The Book Patch, paper $3.99, PDF $1.99.
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