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The Eye of Command
Published in 1976, Sir John Keegan's The Face of Battle was a groundbreaking work in military history studies, providing narrative techniques that served as a model for countless subsequent scholarly and popular military histories. Keegan's approach to understanding battles stressed the importance of small unit actions and personal heroism, an approach widely employed in the narratives produced by reporters embedded with American combat troops in Iraq.
Challenging Keegan's seminal work, The Eye of Command offers a new approach to studying and narrating battles, based upon an analysis of the works of the Roman military authors Julius Caesar and Ammianus Marcellinus. Kimberly Kagan argues that historians cannot explain a battle's outcome solely on the basis of soldiers' accounts of small-unit actions. A commander's view, exemplified in Caesar's narratives, helps explain the significance of a battle's major events, how they relate to one another and how they lead to a battle's outcome. The "eye of command" approach also answers fundamental questions about the way commanders perceive battles as they fight them-questions modern military historians have largely ignored.
" The Eye of Command is a remarkable book-smart, thoughtful, clear, vigorous, factual but creative, and grounded in the practical. It is at once scholarly and readable, combining classical scholarship and military theory. Rarely have I come across a book that makes two-thousand-year-old events seem so alive."
-Barry Strauss, Professor of History, Cornell University
"In a work well written, concisely presented, and convincingly argued, Kagan uses examples from Caesar's Gallic Wars to challenge John Keegan's focus on lower-echelon experiences of battle in favor of 'The eye of command': a narrative technique emphasizing decisions and events that shape a battle's outcome."
-Dennis Showalter, Professor of History, Colorado College
"To know whether a battle is won or lost is not enough. Kagan's deep analysis of theory and practice points to a new way of understanding complex army-commander and small-unit perspectives that can properly claim the status of history."
-Gordon Williams, Thacher Professor of Latin Emeritus, Yale University
Kimberly Kagan was an Assistant Professor of History at the United States Military Academy between 2000 and 2005. Since then, she has served as a lecturer in International Affairs, History, and the Humanities at Yale University and as an adjunct professor at Georgetown's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and at American University's Department of History. She received her Ph.D. in Ancient History from Yale University.
Challenging Keegan's seminal work, The Eye of Command offers a new approach to studying and narrating battles, based upon an analysis of the works of the Roman military authors Julius Caesar and Ammianus Marcellinus. Kimberly Kagan argues that historians cannot explain a battle's outcome solely on the basis of soldiers' accounts of small-unit actions. A commander's view, exemplified in Caesar's narratives, helps explain the significance of a battle's major events, how they relate to one another and how they lead to a battle's outcome. The "eye of command" approach also answers fundamental questions about the way commanders perceive battles as they fight them-questions modern military historians have largely ignored.
" The Eye of Command is a remarkable book-smart, thoughtful, clear, vigorous, factual but creative, and grounded in the practical. It is at once scholarly and readable, combining classical scholarship and military theory. Rarely have I come across a book that makes two-thousand-year-old events seem so alive."
-Barry Strauss, Professor of History, Cornell University
"In a work well written, concisely presented, and convincingly argued, Kagan uses examples from Caesar's Gallic Wars to challenge John Keegan's focus on lower-echelon experiences of battle in favor of 'The eye of command': a narrative technique emphasizing decisions and events that shape a battle's outcome."
-Dennis Showalter, Professor of History, Colorado College
"To know whether a battle is won or lost is not enough. Kagan's deep analysis of theory and practice points to a new way of understanding complex army-commander and small-unit perspectives that can properly claim the status of history."
-Gordon Williams, Thacher Professor of Latin Emeritus, Yale University
Kimberly Kagan was an Assistant Professor of History at the United States Military Academy between 2000 and 2005. Since then, she has served as a lecturer in International Affairs, History, and the Humanities at Yale University and as an adjunct professor at Georgetown's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and at American University's Department of History. She received her Ph.D. in Ancient History from Yale University.
283 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
18 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 8, 2024
The Wilde Amazone
A dreadful and opinionated waste of time except for professional historians
4/10
Unless you are a professional historian interested in the disputes within the profession, this book is an almost total waste of your time.
The author, a young history professor, takes one book out of the huge opus of John Keegan as if
(1) this one book was all Keegan wrote and
(2) Keegan tried to pass it off as his central work, not merely as one view on history and
(3) as if this view of history was somehow counter-productive and damaging to the study of history.
In 'Face of Battle' Keegan attempts to describe many battles from the perspective of a common soldier, blood, death, excrement, vomit, and terror. In the span of his entire opus he most definitely does not ignore the role of commanders (see Mask of Command), the role of infrastructure, or anything else relevant to the outcome of military conflict.
In Face of Battle he does focus more on small unit interactions, not on tactics, and surely not on strategy, but this does not imply that he ignores them in his work or has sought to induce others to ignore them either.
With selective quotes and what seems almost like childish and unprofessional vitriol, Kagan suggests that Keegan misses the role of military history.
That's like taking his one book on naval history, Price of Admiralty, and suggesting somehow that he ignores the role of land forces. Absolute nonsense.
In time, if Kagan every achieves Keegan's status, some junior faculty member somewhere may attack Eye of Command as if it represents the totality of Professor Kagan's work. And this would be equally unfair.
I am not attacking Kagan's work in general. But I found the misrepresentation of Keegan distracted me from her treatment of battles about which I did hope to learn something. I originally gave this review a 1 star because of how distracting the sniping at Keegan was. But the content is not without value if you have the patience to read it.
/////
Author is a Neocon cunsultant to the Pentagon
4/10
Author is a Neocon consultant to the Pentagon...so, "to a hammer evertything looks like a nail" and she has a neocon thinktank which the Pentagon uses to legitimate certain positions and actions. It's worrisome that the Pentagon can't think for itself.
David L. Parnell
A dreadful and opinionated waste of time except for professional historians
4/10
Unless you are a professional historian interested in the disputes within the profession, this book is an almost total waste of your time.
The author, a young history professor, takes one book out of the huge opus of John Keegan as if
(1) this one book was all Keegan wrote and
(2) Keegan tried to pass it off as his central work, not merely as one view on history and
(3) as if this view of history was somehow counter-productive and damaging to the study of history.
In 'Face of Battle' Keegan attempts to describe many battles from the perspective of a common soldier, blood, death, excrement, vomit, and terror. In the span of his entire opus he most definitely does not ignore the role of commanders (see Mask of Command), the role of infrastructure, or anything else relevant to the outcome of military conflict.
In Face of Battle he does focus more on small unit interactions, not on tactics, and surely not on strategy, but this does not imply that he ignores them in his work or has sought to induce others to ignore them either.
With selective quotes and what seems almost like childish and unprofessional vitriol, Kagan suggests that Keegan misses the role of military history.
That's like taking his one book on naval history, Price of Admiralty, and suggesting somehow that he ignores the role of land forces. Absolute nonsense.
In time, if Kagan every achieves Keegan's status, some junior faculty member somewhere may attack Eye of Command as if it represents the totality of Professor Kagan's work. And this would be equally unfair.
I am not attacking Kagan's work in general. But I found the misrepresentation of Keegan distracted me from her treatment of battles about which I did hope to learn something. I originally gave this review a 1 star because of how distracting the sniping at Keegan was. But the content is not without value if you have the patience to read it.
/////
Author is a Neocon cunsultant to the Pentagon
4/10
Author is a Neocon consultant to the Pentagon...so, "to a hammer evertything looks like a nail" and she has a neocon thinktank which the Pentagon uses to legitimate certain positions and actions. It's worrisome that the Pentagon can't think for itself.
David L. Parnell
August 20, 2012
This book is a critique of the "Face of Battle" method of military history and advocates an "Eye of Command" style of narration as having more utility, since it facilitates critique.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews