To celebrate this year's Veteran's Day, CISS invites you to a conversation with Professor Michael Hunzeker, Assistant Professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, where he is also the associate director of the Center for Security Policy Studies.

He will share his findings from his book, Dying to Learn: Wartime Lessons from the Western Front, in which he theorizes and explains how various 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.

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.
 
Professor Michael Hunzeker is a Marine Corps veteran and holds an A.B. from the University of California, Berkeley as well as a Ph.D., M.P.A., and M.A. from Princeton University. His research on conventional deterrence, war termination, military adaptation and simulation design has appeared or is forthcoming in Security Studies, the Journal of Strategic Studies, PS: Politics and Political Science, Parameters, the RUSI Journal and the Strategic Studies Institute.

Selected chapters from Dying to Learn can be found here.

To visit Professor Hunzeker during his office hours, please use WASE.  

This event will be held in person. To ensure the safety of this event, mandatory pre-registration with a Princeton email address and face covering are required for in-person attendance.