
The Battle Over U.S. Military History - samclemens
https://warisboring.com/the-battle-over-u-s-military-history-94dc2c82c3d6#.w6aa6lv3j
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keiferski
It would seem to me that this is just a consequence of specialization and the
fracturing of large fields into smaller fields. "War" is a vague term that
encompasses a lot of specific contemporary subfields that didn't exist /
didn't have institutional academic recognition 100 years ago.

You can sort of observe the same phenomenon in philosophy (less interest by
non-experts). As science, economics, and other fields "grew up," branched off
from philosophy, and became their own fields, the old "broad" field grew less
popular.

(and I say this as someone with a philosophy degree, still extremely
interested in philosophy, and still a firm believer in its importance)

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DanielBMarkham
As a layman, I love history. I love hearing the stories of people in
extraordinary circumstances. I get the same feeling from fiction, but with
history? I know these things really happened. It's not all just in some
author's mind.

Having said that, I get tired of military history, and I understand how many
people view it as a gun-nut, testosterone-fueled endeavor. It's a bad rap, but
it can look that way from the outside.

I think the problem here is drama. So much of human drama revolves around one
bunch of people being violent to another. That sucks, but if you want
incredible stories that make you question your values and wonder what you
would do, most of the time you're listening to some kind of story involving
battles.

Assuming no danger, I'd love to have been with Edison at times, or Teller. I
would love to have listened to Jefferson giving the first State of the Union
speech, in person. Anne Frank still makes me shiver.

But in terms of over-the-top, how-the-hell-would-you-handle-those-emotions,
can you imagine being on the first boats ashore on D-Day, as we saw in "Saving
Private Ryan"? Watching a fully-equipped Roman legion go into battle, as was
in "Gladiator"? Being in Constantinople and seeing the First Crusade approach?
Seeing the Mongols raise the flag outside your city? Being part of Pickett's
Charge?

In a lot of ways I like the other stories much better. They make for great
long-form novels. But the military and battle stories can punch you in the gut
without any prep. If you love history, it's extremely difficult to stay away
from them.

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gaur
> The so-called “drums and trumpet school” of examining battles and generals
> isn’t the only game in town.

Might be nice if someone propagated this information to Wikipedia. Seemingly
on every military-related article there is an attempt to shoehorn the conflict
into a neat table listing "belligerents" and "casualties and losses", complete
with little flags as if it's an 1800s-style cavalry battle [0]. As far as I
can tell, the purpose of these tables is not really about providing an
accurate summary of the conflict; it's about providing material so that war
nuts can get their rocks off thinking about the violence.

[0] See, for example, the attempt to condense the Troubles into such a table:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles)

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jessriedel
This article points out that military history used to dominate the field, but
now is almost entirely absent from the top universities. But the article
really doesn't make any progress explaining why. What's the conventional
wisdom on this? (Politically neutral description preferred.)

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huffmsa
As a degree carrying "historian" I'd offer to you that there are 2 factors.

1) The way wars are fought has dramatically changed since WW2. Study of
late-20th century warfare cannot be contained to "bullets, battles and
biographies." Rather warfare has become intelligence and technology based,
with the 3 B's only coming to play in breif flare-ups. The actors managing the
new tech and intel tools are part of the intelligence community, who's main
tenant is secrecy, meaning figuring out the who, what and why is that much
harder to uncover. Then once you do, you need to be computer and infosys
literate to understand what happened and how. This turns off a lot of people
who can't manage reconciling the skills needed for pre-1950 history with
post-1950 history.

2) Social and geopolitical climate has changes since 1950. 3Bs warfare is no
longer accepted in the international community. Russia's annexation of Crimea
is so shocking because territory has rarely been taken by force since the end
of WW2. So while the United States has invaded many nations recently, the
territory was not annexed like it would have been in the past. On a national
scale, academia --and the officer corps of modern military -- are no longer
the exclusive playgrounds of the first and second sons, respectively, of the
wealthy/aristocratic families of a nation.

TL;Dr New military history is dichotomous with old and academia is no longer
dominated by people who have a vested interest in military history.

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vacri
Supporting your 1), it's a lot easier to read about stuff where your side had
a clear victory. "Bob moved his units into position, they defeated Bill's
units, Bob claimed the flag" is a clear victory story for Bobians, and set-
piece battles are something they can visualise. "Bob's units moved off into
the jungle, and they never really found the enemy, and never really won, and
we didn't really understand why we were there in the first place" is a hard
story to feel reflected glory from.

I was told once that on the European continent, they're a bit puzzled over the
Anglo obsession with WWII history. For the Anglos, it was almost a complete
success story - a defensive war against a difficult (and demonic in hindsight)
foe where we united unquestionably on the side of right and prevailed, and
were never occupied. On the continent, the story was more about occupation,
resistance, informants, people disappearing in the streets, secret police with
frightening powers, so on and so forth. It was a much more painful experience,
where people often couldn't even trust their neighbours they grew up
alongside. And even after it ended, the continent was split in twain between
two foreign superpowers bristling at each other. That kind of story is also
hard to feel reflected glory from...

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PaulHoule
I think a lot of good stuff has been written about conflicts that were not so
clearly victorious, such as the Vietnam war, "Black Hawk Down", the Soviet
incursion into Afghanistan, the botched air-raid at dawn after the 1983 Beirut
bombings, etc. (See "Supercarrier" by George C. Wilson)

On top of that background the story of how the U.S. rebuilt the force in the
1970s-1990s time period is all the more interesting. (See "Mud Soldiers" by
Wilson.) Serious military accounts of Gulf War I also reveal a lot you did not
see on CNN at the time.

And as you say, accounts of WWII from the perspective of the losing sides
("Japan's Imperial Conspiracy", "Adolph Hitler" by John Toland, etc.) are
deeply interesting too. I am a yankee and no fan of the Confederacy, but the
Civil War too takes on a lot more life when you understand the impact it had
on the South.

