A Teaching Moment...

I normally have a post each semester about what I'm teaching. This semester I've let events get away from me a bit, but no time like the present. The courses I'm teaching this semester are Diplomacy 750: Defense Statecraft, and Diplomacy 600: History of Strategic Thought (DIP 600 is a catch all for courses that don't have their own number).

This is the fourth time I've taught Defense Statecraft, and the course has changed a bit each time. I think I revised the list a bit more this last time than previously, in part because I shifted some readings to other courses, and in part just because I wanted to update. For example, I moved Clausewitz from Defense Statecraft to History of Strategic Thought, mainly because I didn't think the students (about 10 are taking both courses) needed to read Clausewitz twice in the same semester. This has gone okay so far; I've noticed several times now that I find references to Clausewitz as I revise and prepare DIP 750 lectures. I exchanged Stephen Biddle's treatment of the Afghan War for his treatment of the 2006 Lebanon War, which worked out pretty well; both are outstanding, and both make essentially the same point, but the latter is more up to date. I'm using three new texts for the airpower week (including one by Charles Dunlap), and I added a separate week for chemical and biological warfare. I kept the structure of the last five weeks (all of which concern the bureaucratic and industrial components of the defense complex) the same, but changed out most of the readings, in part because I got bored of them and in part because they had become outdated. We're in week 6 right now, and I haven't really had the opportunity to regret any of those decisions thus far. We'll see how the absence of Clausewitz works out for the rest of the course.

History of Strategic Thought is a new course, developed from the concept of an old "Great Books" course that hadn't been taught at Patterson for many years. This course is reading heavy and lecture light, and I've been conducting it as a graduate seminar, which is unusual at Patterson. Thus far, things have worked out pretty well; Thucydides and Sun Tzu were big hits, although Delbruck didn't work out quite so well. While much of the course focuses on original source material, not all of it does; in a couple of cases I relied on contemporary works (Trachtenberg's History and Strategy, for example) that did a good job of summarizing a particular body of thought. History of Strategic Thought is a very nice change of pace from Defense Statecraft, and I've generally been pleased with the course of the course thus far.