27 October 2017

History & The Military Professional

by James Torrence

Henry David Thoreau argued that “the old have no very important advice to give the young” and that he never “heard the first syllable of value or even earnest advice from [his] seniors.”[i] Thoreau thought people could learn more from personal experience than from history.[ii] Nassim Nicholas Taleb does not go as far as Thoreau in his distrust of history, but cautions that “history is opaque.”

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