“Military Oratory” 150 Years Later: the Need For Rhetoric in Contemporary Military Education

Exactly 150 years ago, Major Jovan Dragašević, a professor at the Artillery School in Belgrade, published Military Oratory, the first book in Serbia devoted to military public speaking. Dragašević laid the foundations of military oratory in Serbia by outlining the characteristics of the military speaker, the forms and occasions in which military oratory is practiced, as well as the means through which it is expressed. From that time to the present, rhetoric in Serbian military educational institutions, and military oratory more generally, has experienced periods of both advancement and decline. Rhetoric, like few other subjects taught at the Military Academy in Belgrade, has periodically appeared and disappeared from curricula and syllabi. The uneven status of rhetoric in military education therefore provides an additional reason to raise the question of the justification for its study and the importance of oratory for the contemporary officer profession.
Answering this question is the central aim of this paper. Its theoretical and methodological framework is grounded in leadership theory, the theory of military morale, and the dialectical theory of the military. The central hypothesis that the authors seek to demonstrate is that rhetoric is needed by contemporary officers primarily as a practical instrument that assists them in performing their roles within command relationships and in creating and sustaining military morale, while also enabling the development of leadership capacities and the effectiveness of leadership.
The paper describes the development of military oratory and explains its significance from a broader socio-historical perspective. It then offers an outline of the historical development of rhetoric instruction at the Military Academy in Belgrade, with particular attention to the needs that motivated its inclusion and the effects it produced. Finally, it provides an answer to the question of whether contemporary officers require rhetorical knowledge and skills.