David Horner

Researching History at SDSC

The Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (SDSC) now has the largest number of academic staff working in the field of military and defence history in Australia, and this should not be surprising, because history has always been critical to the study of strategy. This was particularly the case when in earlier times strategy was seen as ‘the art of the general’, but continued to be the case when strategy became the concern of politicians and, with the advent of atomic weapons after 1945, nuclear scientists as well. The introduction of nuclear weapons led to a new academic discipline, namely strategic studies, the imperative of which was exemplified by Bernard Brodie’s famous 1946 statement: ‘Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose.’1 But history remained central to the new discipline. It was no coincidence that the distinguished military historian, Sir Michael Howard, played an important role in the founding of the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) in 1958. As the historian Brian Holden Reid explained, Howard ‘consistently argued that those who wrote about nuclear strategy and studied history “talked more sense” than those