John Hall has unusual insights into America’s military history, because Hall has had unusual access. The retired army officer isn’t just a graduate of — and former teacher at — the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. From 2017 until 2022, he served at the Pentagon and on the staff of the general in charge of U.S. Central Command, during some of the most consequential events of America’s involvement in the Middle East.
“I had, if not a front-row seat of a near-second-row seat to some of the most important events in a military sphere in recent history,” he says.
Hall came to the UW in 2009 as the first person to hold the Ambrose-Hesseltine Professorship in U.S. Military History, and his research focuses on civil-military relations in the United States. “I began my academic career [focusing on] the early republic, roughly from the American Revolution up to the Mexican-American War,” he says, “but I’ve grown outward, both in temporal scope and geographic scope. Right now, I consider myself a historian, broadly, of America’s hot-and-cold enthusiasm for war-making and military institutions over time. It’s a complicated and fascinating subject.”
On the April 21 UW Now Live program, Hall will join with fellow UW professor Nadav Shelef and economist Dana Peterson MS’02 to discuss the U.S.–Israel war againsst Iran, aiming to give viewers insight into the consequences of that conflict.
Tonight on the UW Now Live, I’ll Talk About:
I’d like to talk about how and why this administration carried the United States into this war, particularly given the pledges it made the first time that Donald Trump was president — about ending forever wars, not taking America into new conflicts. I want to try to understand why we have seen what is, on its face, such a remarkable shift on these pledges. And I will relate this to broader historical trends in America — what happens to administrations as they spend time in power and are subjected to different pressures. I’d be happy to talk as well about where I think that this is likely to go, based upon what is militarily feasible and what history demonstrates about conflicts such as this. I would also like to talk about debates over presidential war-making authority.
If Viewers Remember Just One Thing, It’s:
There’s absolutely nothing entirely new under the sun, and historical precedents are helpful for interpreting what is going on right now. At the same time, history does not offer any lessons learned. It does not offer answers to present challenges. [I want people to know] the utility and limits of history as a discipline for examining contemporary security challenges.
To Get Smart Fast, See:
If people want to know more about military operations against Iran — and for that matter, for the ongoing war in Ukraine — this site is free and open to the public, and one of my former colleagues at West Point is in charge. The people doing the analysis are historians, or many of them at least are, and they bring a historian’s appreciation for what is truly novel and what are age-old challenges. I also recommend what are regarded broadly as some of the standard sources, although unfortunately, many of these require subscriptions:
