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• Dancing with the Dushman: Command Imperatives for the Counter-Insurgency Fight in Afghanistan Canadian Defence Academy Press (Kingston, Ontario, Canada), 2008
• A Scientific Way of War: Antebellum Military Science, West Point, and the Origins of American Military Thought University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 2015
• Unity of Command in Afghanistan: A Forsaken Principle of War. War College Series 2015

1. A scientific way of war : antebellum military science, West Point, and the origins of American military thought LCCN 2015009354 Type of material Book Personal name Hope, Ian C. Main title A scientific way of war : antebellum military science, West Point, and the origins of American military thought / Ian C. Hope. Published/Produced Lincoln, NB : University of Nebraska Press, [2015] Description x, 334 pages ; 24 cm. ISBN 9780803276857 (cloth : alk. paper) Shelf Location FLM2015 194435 CALL NUMBER U43.U4 H66 2015 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 2. Dancing with the Dushman : command imperatives for the counter-insurgency fight in Afghanistan LCCN 2009366815 Type of material Book Personal name Hope, Ian C. Main title Dancing with the Dushman : command imperatives for the counter-insurgency fight in Afghanistan / by Ian Hope. Published/Created Kingston, Ont. : Canadian Defence Academy Press, c2008. Description ii, 162 p. : ill., maps (some col.) ; 21 cm. ISBN 9780662478171 (bound) 9780662478188 (pbk) Shelf Location FLS2016 006377 CALL NUMBER DS371.412 .H66 2008 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS2)

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• Global Model NATO Summit - https://www.globalmodelnato.org/colonel-ian-hope

  Colonel Ian Hope

  Colonel Ian Hope is now serving on faculty at the NATO Defense College in Rome. His previous assignments included Director of Canadian Army (Future) Concepts and Design, instructor at the US Army War College and associate professor at the Royal Military College of Canada. He is a graduate of the Canadian Forces Staff School, the Canadian Land Forces Command and Staff College, and the United States Army’s Command and General Staff College, School of Advanced Military Studies, and Army War College in Carlisle. He has a Bachelor of History (Honours) from Acadia University, a Masters of Military Arts and Science, a Masters of Strategic Studies, and a PhD in History from Queen’s University. He is the author of A Scientific Way of War (2015), Dancing with the Dushman (2008), three monographs and a dozen articles and chapters on military history and strategic studies.

  Colonel Hope has 36 years of service in uniform, involving 18 years in leadership roles with infantry battalions, including the West Nova Scotia Regiment, the 1st and 2nd Battalions Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, the Canadian Airborne Regiment, and the British Parachute Regiment. His operational experiences include the first Gulf War in 1991, multiple tours in the Balkans, Africa, and Afghanistan, and domestic operations. He has served tours as a strategic planner and liaison officer with United States European Command, United States Central Command and United States Africa Command. He was a lead planner developing the Trans-Sahel Counter-terrorism Initiative and personal strategic planner for General Rick Hillier when he commanded ISAF in Kabul in 2004. He commanded soldiers in Bosnia, and the 1st Battalion Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry Battle Group (Task Force Orion) in Kandahar in 2006, during which time the task force endured months of continuous combat engagement with Taliban forces, losing 100 killed and wounded in action. The success of Task Force Orion earned the Meritorious Service Cross. In 2012-2013 he commanded the Afghan National Army Collective Training (Fielding) Centre of NATO and Afghan troops in Kabul, earning the Meritorious Service Medal.

A Scientific Way of War: Antebellum Military Science, West Point, and the Origins of American Military Thought
Gordon Berg
America's Civil War. 29.3 (July 2016): p58.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 World History Group, LLC
http://www.historynet.com/magazines/americas_civil_war
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A Scientific Way of War: Antebellum Military Science, West Point, and the Origins of American Military Thought

By Ian C. Hope

University of Nebraska Press, 2015, $55

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

As a Canadian, Ian C. Hope brings an objective perspective to his analysis of how the American military tradition developed from its birth during the American Revolution, through its evolution during the antebellum years, to its fruition during the Civil War. He also demonstrates the pivotal role that the U.S. Military Academy at West Point played in forming the mindset of the graduates who would eventually serve for either the Union or the Confederacy, and takes issue with some widely held theories about how well the Academy prepared these men to handle unprecedented challenges.

Just as the concepts of the European Enlightenment formed the intellectual building blocks of the Founding Fathers, Hope argues that military science, as it evolved in America, had similar roots, particularly its grounding in mathematics. For a model, the fledgling nation turned to France as the predominant source of scientific military expertise, espoused by Baron Antoine Henri de Jomini and other French military thinkers. Hope opines that antebellum American military thinking remained committed to the "discovery of the scientific components of war, with complete faith in the power of reason and with an unprecedented belief in the utility of mathematics as key to all scientific endeavors, which could grant a perfect knowledge of war."

While this faith in scientific perfectibility might sound naive to modern ears, it caught the imagination of two pivotal figures in the development of antebellum military thinking, as well as the arbiters of curriculum at West Point: Sylvanus Thayer and Dennis Hart Mahan. The Thayer System, according to Hope, "reinforced the rigor of the 'complete course' of military science delivered by the curriculum. The subjects and program of study were the same for every cadet." Mahan modified this system to include civil engineering because it met the needs of a growing country. Hope reminds us that "The U.S. Army of this era served the federal government.. .and their raison-d'etre was federal policy, not military planning independent of federal authority."

Hope analyzed each year's curriculum and found it "well rounded," though incredibly detailed. Still, the overall focus of instruction "was on organization and tactics and the practices necessary for mobilization and preparation of the nation for war." It would be put to a severe test in Mexico in 1846.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Rather than seeing the Mexican War as a laboratory where officers developed the skills they would use in the Civil War, Hope argues that "Graduates of West Point applied all aspects of their military science in the war with Mexico." The legacy of that conflict, he maintains, "was a renewed confidence among the officers regarding the professionalism of the soldier of the regular army and an appreciation for antebellum focus on la grande guerre."

In 1861 the United States split apart, and Army officers chose sides. During the war, "1,135 graduates of West Point served either the North or the South in some capacity." How well one thinks their military education served them is a matter of how one evaluates the effectiveness of what they learned. Some, like Carol Reardon, believe that "Jomini and the entire body of antebellum military thought he represented provided far less useful guidance than the Civil War generation required for the dimensions of the challenge they faced."

Hope doesn't refute these findings so much as sidestep them. While he understands that personal genius and the abundance of variables found on the battlefield and behind the lines affected how the war was fought, he maintains that "the paradigm of war shared by regular officers in i860 endured and at least somewhat shaped military events from Sumter to Appomattox." That tradition, Hope maintains, prevails today and defines the American scientific way of war.

--Gordon Berg

A Scientific Way of War: Antebellum Military Science, West Point, and the Origins of American Military Thought
Bradford Wineman
Journal of Southern History. 82.4 (Nov. 2016): p927.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
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A Scientific Way of War: Antebellum Military Science, West Point, and the Origins of American Military Thought. By Ian C. Hope. Studies in War, Society, and the Military. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Pp. xii, 334. $55.00, ISBN 978-0-8032-7685-7.)

Ian C. Hope's thought-provoking A Scientific Way of War: Antebellum Military Science, West Point, and the Origins of American Military Thought assertively calls for a reexamination of antebellum West Point and, by extension, the doctrine and strategy of the pre-Civil War U.S. Army. Hope examines the army's and the military academy's early republic origins; in doing so, he advances that both institutions found their identity in the establishment of the Third System of national defense (1817), which created a network of masonry forts and an interlocking infrastructure system to deter an invasion by a foreign military force. Consequently, West Point instructors shaped a curriculum to fit the needs of this national defense construct. Influenced by the French military, the army's professional officers became deeply immersed in mathematics and science as they increasingly perceived strategy and war as a science in itself.

This book is at its best when explaining the techniques of how this scientific approach and methodology were integrated into the West Point curriculum and into a wider conception of an American way of war. The military academy may not have taught strategy (movement of large armies and resources) specifically as part of its course of study, but it did inculcate in students a unique intellectual approach toward the use of military force; West Point catered the education of young officers accordingly. To wit, Hope introduces an insightful connection between European and American conceptualizations of war during this period. In essence, the military academy incorporated this imported scientific approach to war and fashioned it to American strategic realities, not only through giving its graduates the tools to make the Third System successful, but also by making all junior officers proficient in all of the army's branches (infantry, artillery, cavalry, engineering, quartermaster, and so on). The various demands on an American army officer forced a necessary flexibility in his respective skill set. He was often required to serve in a variety of different geographic locations in a career that tasked him with a range of changing professional responsibilities. Therefore, Hope intimates that this "scientific" approach to war, indoctrinated by the academy's curriculum, was as much about instilling a holistic approach to problem solving for young military professionals as it was about winning battles in a Napoleonic fashion.

While Hope does examine some of the national political dynamics that shaped West Point's intellectual identity, he is less attentive to the social and cultural aspects that played a role as well. The U.S. Army's contribution to internal improvements was influenced as much by the economics of Henry Clay's American System and the market revolution (Robert P. Wettemann Jr.'s work on this topic is surprisingly absent from the bibliography) as by national defense requirements. Hope also only tangentially addresses the role of a growing identity of professionalism among the antebellum officer corps and its effect in shaping the army's approach to war. And while Baron Antoine Henri de Jomini is clearly the bogeyman of this monograph, there is not much background offered on him, his ideas, or his broader influence on military thought in America, Europe, and around the world. Indeed, Jomini is only referenced in passing, not identifying what he actually thought, but only where his work was wrong or misused.

Regardless, this book is remarkably researched and cogently written, and it will make itself invaluable in the understanding of both the antebellum army and its officers' education. Moreover, Hope's final chapter, which examines West Point graduates applying their education during the Civil War, reopens the door to a much-needed conversation, and possible reevaluation, of the intellectual framework of the conflict's military leadership.

BRADFORD WINEMAN

Marine Corps University

Wineman, Bradford

West point and the War
Civil War Times. 56.1 (Feb. 2017): p20.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 World History Group, LLC
http://www.historynet.com/magazines/civil_war_times
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CANADIAN MILITARY OFFICER and historian Ian C. Hope combed through the records of West Point graduates and turned up 1,135 who served the North or the South. He began studying their education and how it influenced the Civil War. He found that about one-third of West Point graduates had prewar military experience, almost one-third served as general officers, and they also commanded most military departments. He gathers his results and how they fit into the history of American military doctrine in A Scientific Way of War: Antebellum Military Science, West Point, and the Origins of American Military Thought (2015).

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

CWT: Is the West Point education uniquely American?

ICH: Selection into the academy and class ranking within the institution was based strictly upon merit, and not social class or accidents of birth, or birth right. The second unique practice was the requirement that every cadet become competent in all tactical branches; mastering the basics of infantry, artillery, engineering and, eventually, cavalry tactics. The curriculum also provided every cadet with a body of knowledge of ordnance and logistics, military engineering and fortifications, and the science of military movement--or strategy. The last distinct practice was the inculcation in cadets of a sense of duty to federal political masters, and not to the office of a commanding general. This was a very important distinction. West Pointers on both sides understood that their military power served political purpose.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

CWT: What advantage does that give? ICH: Cadets left the academy equally capable of mustering, training and fighting an infantry battalion, an artillery regiment, or a cavalry squadron, and could also perform ordnance functions and duties of a military engineer or topographical engineer. The West Point graduate was a true generalist, useful in the vast variety of circumstances that existed across the United States in the antebellum period.

CWT: What is military science? ICH: Antebellum military science included three specific branches of learning that each relied upon mathematics. These were--artillery applications, fortifications and engineering, and logistics--the organizing, supplying, encampment and administration of armies. In addition, military science included something called "the science of war" (or what some referred to as "strategy"). This was a common theory used to understand and to plan military campaigns, using common terms such as depots, lines of communication, bases of operation, lines of operation, strategic points, and objective points. Thinking in terms of these elements required knowledge of the particular topography of the region of a campaign, called the "theater of war." The doctrine of military science used geometric models to portray a variety of options for campaign planning.

CWT: What are some outstanding examples?

ICH: Where it becomes really interesting is the point at which the commanders become aware of the advantage of having an alternative base of operations, allowing an army to cut its line of communications to a base, maneuver free and reattach to a separate base--this allowed superb maneuvers for some armies, Grant at Vicksburg, Sherman in Georgia. But Grant's Overland Campaign demonstrates this best. Grant in Virginia did what Sherman could not in Georgia: switch bases of operation and swivel around the enemy's flank with great dexterity. Historians later called his operation the Overland Campaign; the fact is that his overland movement was facilitated only because of his use of maritime lines of communication and shoreside bases of operation, just as he had done in Mississippi.

CWT: How do you see this kind of strategy influencing the outcome?

ICH: If the Union did not have Grant and Sherman, with their appreciation of how to maneuver large armies across great distances using alternate bases of operation to outmaneuver Confederate forces, the South might well have won. And in conducting these maneuvering campaigns Grant and Sherman were applying military science that they had first learned at West Point in the antebellum period. Their campaigns became examples for instruction at West Point after the war, perpetuating the doctrine of military science well into the 20th century.

CWT: Which side benefited more from well-prepared officers?

ICH: Both benefited. It is hard to imagine the South lasting so long without the knowledge of Lee, Jackson, and other West Pointers. Generals Jackson, Beauregard, Sherman, etc., were experienced artillery officers of the antebellum Army, who rose to command infantry formations and armies. Grant had served as a regimental quartermaster, so in the Civil War he understood logistics. Sherman had the same experience from California, and Stuart from his days as quartermaster and commissary. Lee--an engineer--had comprehensive knowledge of artillery, infantry, and cavalry tactics because he was inculcated in military science--a "complete system" of knowledge.

CWT: What was surprising to you?

ICH: The clear influence of doctrine and training of officers was not uncovered before. Too many histories are written using the assumption that performance on the battlefield or in command or armies, was based strictly on innate powers of genius and character. It is also surprising how historians have debated whether the Civil War was the last Napoleonic war or the first modern war. My research tells me that the Civil War was really part of a continuum; and that military science explains better the place of the Civil War in military history.

CWT: Talk about how the military campaigns influenced industrialization. ICH: In the North, a national logistics system emerged in early 1862 that militarized the Union's economy in a manner never before experienced or contemplated. It gave enormous powers to the federal government. The quartermaster general became the single biggest employer in the Union, paying over 100,000 employees to make clothing, equipment, and wagons, to purchase horses and mules, and to move large quantities of men and material throughout the North. The long term impact was profound and changed the constitutional relationship between the United States military and the national industry. The centralization that occurred in the North never really went away after the Civil War.

Interview conducted by Senior Editor Sarah Richardson

with Ian C. Hope

Berg, Gordon. "A Scientific Way of War: Antebellum Military Science, West Point, and the Origins of American Military Thought." America's Civil War, July 2016, p. 58+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA451531819&it=r&asid=11635fd8ff319c16859a4053b2db2e4b. Accessed 9 July 2017. Wineman, Bradford. "A Scientific Way of War: Antebellum Military Science, West Point, and the Origins of American Military Thought." Journal of Southern History, vol. 82, no. 4, 2016, p. 927+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA470867685&it=r&asid=f20ed88751eca000ffe2838c95fc2f47. Accessed 9 July 2017. "West point and the War." Civil War Times, vol. 56, no. 1, 2017, p. 20+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472149702&it=r&asid=e6da58346a17585d306050a503fca799. Accessed 9 July 2017.

• Civil War Book Review
  http://www.cwbr.com/civilwarbookreview/index.php?q=6290&field=ID&browse=yes&record=full&searching=yes&Submit=Search
  Word count: 1451

  A Scientific Way of War: Antebellum Military Science, West Point, and the Origins of American Military Thought

  by Hope, Ian C.
  Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
  Retail Price: $55.00
  Issue: Summer 2016
  ISBN: 9780803276857
  By Scientific Means: A Fresh Perspective on the Origins of American Military Thought

  The historiography of the American Civil War tends to hold the conflict apart from the wider military history of the nineteenth-century world, perhaps because of the mass citizen armies that fought the war on both sides, and the proportionately small presence of career- and professional-soldier leaders on both sides. The related debate, over whether the Civil War was the last pre-industrial war or the first “modern” or “total” war—both terms that obscure more than they illuminate—(blank)also tends to work against attempts to contextualize the American Iliad. Several historians, including Jay Luvaas, Edward C. Hagerman, Brian Holden Reid, Wayne Hsieh, and Carol Reardon, have attempted to analyze the war’s conduct within a wider global context, but despite the quality and depth of these studies, a conceptual wall seems to separate these works from the seminal cultural history of the antebellum American army, Edward M. Coffman’s 1986 study, The Old Army: A Portrait of the American Army in Peacetime, 1784-1898. Coffman and Russell Weigley, author of another foundational work of American military history, The American Way of War (1973), analyzes the American conduct of war separately from its intellectual underpinnings, created in peacetime and in various educational settings, the most important of which is naturally the United States Military Academy at West Point. In spite of considerable evidence to the contrary, we still tend to view the Civil War in an intellectual vacuum.

  Ian C. Hope, a serving Canadian Army officer and associate professor of history at the Royal Military College, seeks to merge these lines of inquiry with A Scientific Way of War. Hope posits that the military doctrine developed and taught at West Point, defined here as “military science,” formed the basis for a uniquely American brand of military thought that hundreds of West Point graduates used in the service of both the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War. American military science, Hope asserts, had its beginnings in the military science of the European Enlightenment, translated for American use in the early years of the Republic. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies made France the model for all things military in nineteenth-century America. U.S. military science developed along four lines of instruction: tactics and strategy, artillery and cavalry, civil engineering and fortifications, and topographical engineering.

  The book begins with a comprehensive review of the sources of American military thought, through a useful survey of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century European developments. The author then surveys the West Point curriculum as it developed during the nineteenth century. This portion of the book will provide the military historian with few new insights, but the author’s rigorous demonstration of the intellectual roots of the West Point curriculum will make this volume a regularly consulted reference. Other historians continue to develop the institutional history of America’s military academy, but Hope grounds its development in a broader context that is really useful.

  After describing the West Point program of instruction and its intellectual underpinnings, the book places the evolving curriculum into a national context. American national security policy in the early decades of the nineteenth century focused on the Third System of fortifications and depots, reflecting American concerns over European developments and the possibility of a third war with Great Britain. This subject is ably covered by Mark A. Smith in Engineering Security: The Corps of Engineers and Third System Defense Policy, 1815-1861 (2009), and Hope’s treatment of West Point’s education of engineers complements it nicely. Few Americans questioned West Point’s focus on engineering and mathematics during this time. With the European peace that followed the Congress of Vienna, the Jacksonian era saw a more inward focus in the United States, with a shift in military policy to complement westward expansion and Indian removals. At West Point, this new focus manifested itself in a new emphasis on topographical engineering, cavalry, and engineering skill adapted for growing internal improvements in roads and infrastructure. During the antebellum period, America went to war with Mexico and engaged in large-scale unconventional warfare in the West, demonstrating the value of a West Point education, but also the need for increased focus on the liberal arts— languages and history. On the eve of the Civil War, U.S. Army Commanding General Winfield Scott directed an expansion of the West Point curriculum to five years to incorporate these additional subjects while maintaining the academy’s traditional focus on the sciences. This gradual development in the West Point program faced constant opposition in Congress and in some sectors of the American populace, and the academy’s leaders worked hard to justify its continued existence even as its graduates shaped national development in a number of critical ways.

  The book’s final chapter, in which the author surveys the role of American military science in the conduct of the Civil War, is of greatest interest to the readership of this review. A total of 1,135 West Point graduates served in the Civil War on both sides. Over 370 of them possessed some antebellum military experience, and a quarter had prewar staff, engineer, or instructor experience. Almost one-third rose to general-officer rank. West Point graduates “shared a military language and an understanding of standard processes.” A “commonality of thinking about la grande guerre amongst West Pointers formed the basis for large-scale staff planning that gave the Civil War something more than what the vagaries of individual personality would have provided.” West Point-trained officers shared “a mindset about how to raise, organize, train, supply, move, encamp, feed, and fight armies of volunteers and conscripts- all of the elements of military science they had learned at West Point.” (216) There is nothing groundbreaking in this idea, and indeed Hsieh and Reardon have addressed it in their works, but the clarity with which Hope connects the Civil War to the wider nineteenth century, to Western military thought, and to the institutional development of West Point and the U.S. Army makes this book different from those on similar topics.

  Hope also makes the useful distinction between military education and experience, and the “character traits necessary for high command,” characteristics such as decision making, courage, determination, and resilience. Most of the historiography of Civil War generalship defaults to the latter set of characteristics, and they frequently defy nuanced analysis. The result is a body of scholarship that actively denies the role of education and experience, highlighting instead the role of personality in generalship. A Scientific Way of War adds to our understanding of the conduct of the Civil War because Hope evaluates the war through the lens of military science, as opposed to the personality-based approach that has dominated Civil War historiography to this point. This approach supports a number of younger Civil War scholars, including Ethan S. Rafuse and Christopher S. Stowe, who have moved in recent years toward a more rational and wide-ranging analysis of Union and Confederate generalship, incorporating political and social history, gender studies, and the study of military organizations and change over time. Hope admits that an analysis of every Civil War battle and campaign through this method is beyond the scope of the book, but he does offer numerous avenues for further scholarship. One under-studied area concerns the role of staff officers in numerous capacities during the Civil War, especially within geographic departments and staff bureaus. The chapter’s concluding statement, that “The legacy of the Civil War in the U.S. Army was of continued faith in staff planning, logistics, engineering, artillery competency, and integration of the means for industrial warfare and a reliance on volunteers,” (244) is difficult to dispute.

  A Scientific Way of War is an excellent book. It is deeply researched, thoughtful, and engagingly written, and supported with a number of useful tables. Hope engages some of the giants of the American historical profession in spirited debate, but in a collegial way. The end notes alone will be of great use to scholars or graduate students, and the book will make an excellent addition to graduate courses in military history. It is highly recommended.

  Colonel (Retired) Charles R. Bowery, Jr., is Executive Director of the U.S. Army Center of Military History in Washington, D.C., and is the author or co-author of three books on the American Civil War, including Richmond-Petersburg 1864-65, published by Praeger in 2014.

• Michigan War Studies Review
  http://www.miwsr.com/2016-121.aspx
  Word count: 1311

  2016-12129 Dec. 2016
  Review by Richard Swain, Lexington, KY
  A Scientific Way of War: Antebellum Military Science, West Point, and the Origins of American Military Thought
  By Ian C. Hope
  Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2015. Pp. x, 334. ISBN 978–0–8032–7685–7.
  Descriptors: Volume 2016, 19th Century, 20th Century, Military Science Print Version
  In A Scientific Way of War, Ian Hope, a Canadian military officer, combat commander (Afghanistan), and teacher discusses the source and the influence of a particular mentalitée (10; sic) that emerged in the US Army in the nineteenth century:

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  I attempt here to demonstrate that the doctrine inculcated at West Point in the antebellum period, called military science, containing an enduring and coherent military theory, was the foundation for broader American military thought … applied in the Civil War. The doctrine came not from any particular strategy or ideas of policy choices but from a prevailing—perhaps obsessive—intellectual movement that sought mathematical and scientific explanation for the phenomenon of war…. [Dennis Hart Mahan and others taught a] "system of tactics" … at West Point, based on a theory of war as a science…. [It] was maintained deliberately as the dominant antebellum military doctrine, which, by the end of the Civil War, became foundational in American thought. This paradigm maintained faith not in natural individual genius but in collective acceptance of an educated, and therefore scientific way of war. (10–11, 16)
  Hope's book[1] combines intellectual and institutional history in a perceptive, well documented study of the sociology of evolving military professions.[2] Its structure is forecast in the elements listed in its subtitle. The author outlines a formal theory of war that differs sharply from the familiar Clausewitzian phenomenology. He parses in detail the meaning of "Military Science" in the pre-Civil War US Military Academy,[3] when the term encompassed concepts of strategic movements or campaigning; the effects and manipulation of topography; the "arithmetic" functions of artillery, fortification, and practical engineering; and the organization, supply, and encampment of armies, that is, logistics and administration (5–6). Concentration of forces and celerity of movement were dominant principles (100–101). Hope traces this stress on the empirical to European, particularly French Enlightenment thought, quoting, for example, Pascal on the distinction between the mathematical and the intuitive mind (7). The so-called mathematical approach contrasted with European romanticism and the post-Napoleonic fascination with the nature of genius.

  The author notes that Frederick II and Napoleon appreciated the value of calculation and study (8). An educated mind would ensure a practical grounding for the application of genius when it appeared, and an acceptable standard of performance when it did not (70–71). He also stresses the importance of an evolving lexicon of strategic thought (6, 228), noting, incidentally, that strategy was defined at West Point not à la Clausewitz, but according to Prussian theorist Heinrich von Bülow among others (43–44).[4]

  Hope's masterful survey of the relevant French primary sources and their American interpreters is notable for his contention that the thought of Antoine-Henri Jomini did not shape the USMA curriculum as much a many have claimed. He admits that Gen. Henry Halleck, for a time Abraham Lincoln's General-in-Chief, was a strict Jominian, but downplays his influence on the Academy and Army compared to Dennis Hart Mahan's.

  Hope argues that critics of antebellum theory are guilty of anachronism, ignoring the circumstances and policies the Academy and the theory were intended to support. He quotes Matthew Moten to the effect that historians have concluded that "When the profession needed men to concentrate on high-level problems of military policy and strategy, few were equal to the task."[5] Hope responds that:

  What is meant by this is that America missed the opportunity to create a Prussian-style general staff, a larger standing army, elite military colleges, conscripted reserves, and elaborate war plans for la grande guerre that could re-create Cannae against any foe. The West Point academy is here judged against the "high-level problems of military policy and strategy" of Europe, not the United States. (142)
  The heart of the book concerns the evolution of key concepts and their diffusion within the Army by West Point graduates, specifically in the context of post-War of 1812 defense policies; Hope highlights President James Madison and Secretary of War James Monroe's "Third System of defense" and succeeding Secretary of War John C. Calhoun's notion of an "expansible army" (51–59). These were predicated on defending major Atlantic ports against attacks by sea through a network of sophisticated forts, built by military engineers, manned by coastal artillery, and reinforced by mobile regular forces or, in the event of a prolonged conflict, state militias and federal and state volunteers.

  The author astutely explores the paradox that a small army in a relatively isolated, hence secure, nation, preoccupied with internal expansion, fortress construction, and constabulary operations against indigenes, nonetheless studied and planned intensively for a most unlikely continental war. He shows that this, on the face of it, counterintuitive focus paid off during the Mexican War (1846–46) and, ironically, after the Union descended into a long civil war.

  Tracing "military science" to the Enlightenment and particularly French precedents explains much about the history of instruction at the USMA that historians often gloss over. Older Academy graduates like myself will appreciate Hope's meticulous explication of the "Thayer system,"[6] much of which survived into the 1960s. The same may be said of his treatment of the Academy's practical programmatic stress on the basic tactics of the various arms and branches, French language facility (to enable reading of French military texts), mathematics, and engineering (77–105).

  Hope posits that the Academy had such strong influence because it constituted the US Army's primary professional institution and the principal source of the officer corps of a small regular force. Its instructors and graduates wrote practical and theoretical works for cadet instruction but also a wider audience of civilian readers who were likely to be mobilized in times of crisis.

  Academy-trained officers quickly became prominent in regular Army units of the line, as well as the professional staff (Bureau System) of the Secretary of War. Cadets had to master the basic principles and operations of all service branches, and graduates were regularly seconded to arms other than their own, notably the engineering corps and several bureaus. Hope's statistical analysis of the careers of West Point graduates shows that, at the outbreak of the Civil War, they already had considerable experience in higher administration and large-scale operations. The expertise of topographical engineers in operational planning is a case in point (136–38).

  A Scientific Way of War will appeal to both professionals and lay persons with a serious interest in the US Army, its premier professional Academy, nineteenth-century American defense policy, the nature of a particular national approach to military theory and doctrine, and the professionalization of the American armed forces. Ian Hope makes the case for the importance of the study of the calculable part of war in pre-Civil War officer education and, implicitly, for its continued significance in professional education.

  [1] Orig. dissertation Queen's Univ. (2011).

  [2] The idea that the military was a model profession can be found as early as "Lectures of Chancellor [James] Kent," Atlantic Magazine 1.2 (1824) 148–49.

  [3] Hereafter "USMA," "Academy," or "West Point."

  [4] Von Bülow was the target of a withering 1805 review by Clausewitz: see Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the State (NY: Oxford U Pr, 1976) 91–92. On the question of the possible influence of Clausewitz's ideas during the period, see Christopher Bassford, Clausewitz in English: The Reception of Clausewitz in Britain and America 1815–1945 (NY: Oxford U Pr, 1994) 50–55.

  [5] The Delafield Commission and the American Military Profession (College Station: Texas A&M U Pr, 2000) 55.

  [6] Col. Sylvanus Thayer, superintendent of the USMA from 1817 to 1833, is often called "the Father of West Point."

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