This month marks the 100th consecutive issue of Strategika, the online publication that appears approximately every six weeks from the Hoover Institution’s “Military History Working Group” (MHWG), based on the Stanford University campus. The journal currently enjoys over 20,000 subscribers and is often consulted by diplomats, military officers, government officials, and journalists, both here in the U.S. and abroad.

Some thirteen years ago in 2012, the MHWG was tasked by then Hoover Institution Director John Raisian to explore formally “the role of military history in contemporary conflict.” Over the last decade, the group has become an integral part of a wider Hoover Institution initiative—spearheaded by current Director Dr. Condoleezza Rice—to promote traditional and narrative history, especially within academia and the confines of the university.

In that specific context, the MHWG—along with allied Hoover Institution research programs such as the Hoover History Lab, the Applied History Working Group, the Global Policy and Strategy Initiative, and the Middle East and the Islamic World Working Group—reflects Hoover’s rising historical profile. These groups are in part an informal response to the quite different aims and agendas of most university academic departments and professional organizations. Many of these custodians of history have lost interest in preserving the grand Western tradition of narrative history and historiography—and military history in particular, which was synonymous with the birth of history itself by Herodotus and Thucydides.

In contrast, university history departments currently believe that history cannot be empirical and disinterested. But by nature, it is ideological and thus best explored through contemporary theoretical approaches presented via an arcane academic vocabulary and style that reflect the views of mostly university intellectuals, the needs of campus promotion and tenure, and too often are of little general public interest.

The MWHG, however, is composed of an ideologically, politically, academically, and professionally diverse group of military analysts, current officers, retired generals and admirals, diplomats, and government officials. We embrace no ideological consensus, except perhaps a general agreement that across time and space, human nature is largely unchanging—and thus predictable within general parameters.

One of the directives, among the many I received some thirteen years ago, as the founder and chair of the MHWG, from then current director John Raisian, was to “make it simple.” He meant to seek balance between the past and the modern world, and to reflect the Hoover Institution’s efforts to inform the wider public about its traditions, values, and beliefs that made the country unique and so often preeminent.

He advised me not to........

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