Analytic Paper: Innovation
Write a 5-page analytical essay (note: 5 double-spaced pages in 12-point Times New Roman font) with Formal citations (endnotes in Chicago style formatted 1,2,3 will be required and a formal bibliography), assess military innovation in the Interwar Period (1919-1939). Use the uploaded sources as primary material and the below supplemental sources for framing the essay, additional sources are permitted. Please email me if you have questions about the topic or thesis.
In the essay, answer the following question:
Assess military innovation in the Interwar Period. To do so, you must analyze either (1) a nation and its military establishment writ large (e.g., the United States or the United Kingdom) or (2) a single military service (e.g., US Marine Corps or US Army). In the process of doing so, evaluate how this one nation (and its military establishment) or military service innovated and changed their paradigm of how to undertake the conduct of warfare. In your analysis, you should consider (as appropriate) the influence of the following factors on innovation: (1) military culture, doctrine, theory and organization; (2) individual innovators; and (3) national policy. Your analysis should not focus on who “got it right” but rather on the factors that shaped their conception of what they thought “right” was and the process by which they innovated for the next war.
Primary Sources:
-Jonathan M. House, Toward Combined Arms Warfare: A Survey of 20th Century Tactics, Doctrine, and Organization (Ft. Leavenworth: Combat Studies Institute, 1984), 79-140.
-Christopher R. Gabel, The 4th Armored Division in the Encirclement of Nancy (Ft. Leavenworth: Combat Studies Institute, 1986), 1-26.
-David N. Spires, Air Power for Patton’s Army: The XIX Tactical Air Command in the Second World War (Washington, DC: Air Force History and Museums Program), 56-64.
Supplemental Sources:
-Hans Umbreit, “The German Victory in Western Europe,” Germany and the Second World War. Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 232-316.
-David M. Glantz, “Soviet Operational Art Since 1936: The Triumph of Maneuver
Warfare” in Historical Perspectives of the Operational Art. Michael D. Krause and R. Cody Phillips, eds. (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 2005), 247-266.
-Richard L. DiNardo, Germany’s Panzer Arm (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), 95-124.
-Ernest R. May, Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 448-464.
-David M. Glantz and Harold S. Orenstein, trans. Belorussia 1944: The Soviet General Staff Study (London: Frank Cass, 2001), 176-193
-Karl-Heinz Frieser, “Panzer Group Kleist and the Breakthrough in France, 1940” in Historical Perspectives of the Operational Art. Michael D. Krause and R. Cody Phillips, eds. (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 2005), 169-182.
