Tug of War

As I have observed in these pages before, military history in our universities is in terminal decline. Few military historians are being hired; fewer courses are being taught. And many faculty members, from Fredericton to Victoria, look on those who do teach and write military history as warmongers. But in both the United States and Canada, books on military history continue to sell.

Not everything is about guns and battles, of course. There are more and more books on women in war, on nurses, on children, on wartime executions, and on a war’s effect on the environment, to cite only a few areas. While there are also battle studies, they now tend to explore the traumatic impacts of combat and consider how commanders used, or tried to use, psychology to keep their men motivated. With Building the Army’s Backbone, Andrew L. Brown, an intelligence officer who teaches at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, has found and mastered a completely new area...