Dying to Learn

Wartime Lessons from the Western Front

By: Michael A. Hunzeker

Narrated by: John Burlinson

In Dying to Learn, Michael Hunzeker develops a novel theory to explain how wartime militaries learn. He focuses on the Western Front, which witnessed three great-power armies struggle to cope with deadlock throughout the First World War, as the British, French, and German armies all pursued the same solutions—assault tactics, combined arms, and elastic defense in-depth. By the end of the war, only the German army managed to develop and implement a set of revolutionary offensive, defensive, and combined arms doctrines that, in hindsight, represented the best way to fight.

Hunzeker identifies three organizational variables that determine how fighting militaries generate new ideas, distinguish good ones from bad ones, and implement the best of them across the entire organization. These factors are the degree to which leadership delegates authority on the battlefield, how effectively the organization retains control over soldier and officer training, and whether or not the military possesses an independent doctrinal assessment mechanism.

Through careful study of the British, French, and German experiences in the First World War, Dying to Learn provides a model that shows how a resolute focus on analysis, command, and training can help prepare modern militaries for adapting amidst high-intensity warfare in an age of revolutionary technological change.

The book is published by Cornell University Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.

©2021 Cornell University (P)2022 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"A major contribution to the field, providing fresh insight into the important question of how military organizations learn in wartime." (Thomas G. Mahnken, author of Technology and the American Way of War since 1945)