Historical experience : burden or bonus in today’s wars? : the British army and the Bundeswehr in Afghanistan

Abstract

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the British military pointed to its colonial experience as a useful resource to perform its various missions in complex and difficult environments. For the Bundeswehr, lacking any institutional experience with counterinsurgency warfare, the participation in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) became the first combat mission abroad at all. The book explores in which way the British and German Armies have relied on historical experience in the making and adaptation of operational strategy. Eric Sangar defines »historical experience« as a body of useful knowledge that is constructed through the institutional analyses of past military campaigns with the aim of producing normative lessons for military operations in the present. In other words, Eric Sangar deals with the fundamental question if and how Armed Forces can learn from history, or if experience from the past is rather an obstacle to adaptation in the present. Dr. Eric Sangar is a research fellow at the Department of International Relations of the University of Stuttgart. He is a member of the interdisciplinary project »Corpus-based Analysis of News Coverage on Wars and Interventions« and teaches courses on conflict analysis, strategic studies, and IR theory. This study is based on his Ph.D. project, which he realized at the European University Institute in Florence (Italy) between 2008 and 2012.