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Why Military History?
- nickik 6y agoWonderful article, I totally agree. There is ungodly amount of garbage history military history out there, because people want to read it. However, that does not mean there is not a huge amount of great work done in that field. Its quite simply the case that for 1000s of years states major spending was on military and military matters, and the greatest transformation of society and economics happen during conflicts. Trying cut out military history from other fields is a fundamental mistake of the modern historians and more importantly universities. I often listen to lectures from military historians and they quite often have a 'black sheep' feel around them, making self-depreciating jokes about how they still exist, this often leads to good lectures because they are already not inhibited by the conventions and trends other historians tend to follow.
- ateng 6y agoBeing a professional technologist (which is probably as far away as one could get from being a historian), it baffles me that the academic military history discipline is treated as said in the article —- war is still being waged daily in the modern world, and in the very foreseeable future it will not end. Surely at least the military academies around the world would do serious studies on the past to predict the future wars, at bare minimum?
- NineStarPoint 6y agoIt’s also plausible that military institutions are less likely to want to share their findings than civilian ones though. If the US military thought it had found a unique predictive insight in history, it really wouldn’t want anyone else to know about it.
- smogcutter 6y agoOn the contrary: https://www.armyupress.army.mil/ https://www.armyupress.army.mil/
- anigbrowl 6y agoStrange. In Chrome this IP address can't be found, whereas it loads just fine in Firefox. This is the second time in a week I've come across a problem with a .mil domain, though the other one wasn't browser-specific.
- mcguire 6y agoI prefer https://www.usni.org/ https://www.usni.org/ :-) Also, there's https://history.army.mil/html/bookshelves/collect/collect.html https://history.army.mil/html/bookshelves/collect/collect.ht..., specifically the "U.S. Army in World War II Series".
- thoughtleader31 6y agoWell that's the thing the article touches, people tend to think that military history is not studied in a serious manner as far as an academic discipline goes. Military academies can do the bare minimum in rigor as far as they need to impart their military tradition and form effective officers, just like the author said about aristocrats learning how other aristocrats did their thing before smashing some peasants.
- icegreentea2 6y agoSerious studies are being done all the time. The "anti military history" positions expressed in the blog post are not reflective of the position some monolithic "board of academics" who control all the funding and classes. They are opinions that are sometimes held by some individuals in a diverse field, who sometimes are in positions to deny or attempt to deny funding in local situations. Serious research is being done, serious books and papers published, serious courses and lessons are taught. If you want a technologist analogy, there are some parallels to what I assume PHP or Perl communities might be like. Whenever you go out into the broader world, you need to acknowledge how everyone else likes to take potshots at your language, and then move on to explain why your language meets certain needs anyways. And in the end, all the pot shots taken at PHP or Perl don't remove any of the immediate needs.
- UncleMeat 6y ago> I often listen to lectures from military historians and they quite often have a 'black sheep' feel around them, making self-depreciating jokes about how they still exist, this often leads to good lectures because they are already not inhibited by the conventions and trends other historians tend to follow. Sort of. My wife is a historian, so I am friends with an unusually large number of history faculty. There is good military history that is widely respected by the community. The problem is that there are a lot of very old academics who refuse to acknowledge new ideas and methods, leading to a lot of continued publication of bad work. It isn't military historians being free from conventions that trap other historians. The available analysis methods of modern history are very wide and there isn't a trend trapping the field. If anybody is stubborn and stuck in conventions, it is the aging group of military historians who refuse to integrate new ideas.
- AlgorithmicTime 6y agoIt's not clear that "new techniques" would actually add anything. History's been around a long time, and it's not as though Gibbon's any less definitive today than he was in 1800.
- nickik 6y agoThere are some older military historians who do great work and don't get respect, because just doing military history is considered old fashioned. And some of the old methods are not necessary bad, just considered bad but I don't always agree with that assessment. And somewhat younger historians who are military historians but feel like they are kind of outsiders from their peers.
- UncleMeat 6y agoMany old methods are great! The point is that not all old methods are great. Fields move forward one funeral at a time, and there do remain a lot of aging researchers who are stuck in the past. This is not to say that every old researcher is doing a bad job or that every military historian is doing a bad job... it just seems to be the field that has resisted progress the most. I obviously don't have a full view of the field, but I do know a few military history faculty in their 30s and they don't view themselves as pariahs. They also scream at their laptops when terrible scholarship ends up flying off the bookshelves because bad military history sells like hotcakes.
- platz 6y agoJust in time for the latest Hardcore History episode now out today
- jeanlucas 6y agoExactly my thoughts. Even if it's audience is definitely amateur, it's incredible how Dan Carlin gives all the points me ruined in the post throughout all of his series. Especially, to me, ww1 and supernova in the East.
- WesleyLivesay 6y agoA great read, really gets at both what military history can be, and the way that it can be reductively criticized. The roots of military history within the education systems of the elites is important, it promoted so much focus on military history as a way to teach future military leaders how to win future wars, not to understand the past. Unfortunately, I don't know if it can, as a discipline, break away from some of the problems that it has been saddled with. There is a lot of bad military history out there, and specifically a lot of REALLY popular bad military history. A lot of people don't want critical and expansive (beyond the battlefield) military history. They want either good guys vs bad guys narratives or deep rivet-counting/platoon-chasing level histories that ignore anything beyond a very narrow focus on specific actions on the battlefield.
- zeotroph 6y agoThe author makes a distinction between the "drums and trumpets" / "cult of the badass" following and the actual academic discipline, so I think this field is doing fine. It has a similar problem as the "pop sci" fluff resulting from badly copied university press releases which were inaccurate in the first place. The enthusiasts which then pick up from there are just a lot more, because to them war is just too interesting and emotionally satisfying. This then has an effect on the society as a whole, something for maybe military sociologists to research? But nothing the field itself can be blamed for, if anything without it the situation might be a lot worse. I found this quote fitting: "[..] military historians study conflict in the same way that doctors study disease; no one assumes that doctors like diseases, quite the opposite." Edit: Also thought provoking and reflecting on the fascination of war, in the comments the user TomBombadil quotes musings of a sentient machine from Iain M. Banks Culture novel Excession: "It was a warship, after all. It was built, designed to glory in destruction, when it was considered appropriate. It found, as it was rightly and properly supposed to, an awful beauty in both the weaponry of war and the violence and devastation which that weaponry was capable of inflicting, and yet it knew that attractiveness stemmed from a kind of insecurity, a sort of childishness. It could see that—by some criteria—a warship, just by the perfectly articulated purity of its purpose, was the most beautiful single artifact the Culture was capable of producing, and at the same time understand the paucity of moral vision such a judgment implied. To fully appreciate the beauty of the weapon was to admit to a kind of shortsightedness close to blindness, to confess to a sort of stupidity. The weapon was not itself; nothing was solely itself. The weapon, like anything else, could only finally be judged by the effect it had on others, by the consequences it produced in some outside context, by its place in the rest of the universe. By this measure the love, or just the appreciation, of weapons was a kind of tragedy."
- barce 6y agoWhich historians is he referring to here? It is no real secret that as a discipline, military history is sometimes held in low regard by other historians. The crux of his argument is that military history needs to be studied so that we can have less wars. He throws shade at other historians for looking down on military history. But as a total outside to this debate, who am I to trust?
- scarmig 6y agoIt's the red-headed stepchild of historian specialties, in significant part because popular military histories rarely even qualify as histories, except insofar as they refer to particular dates and historical figures. See https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6br8ck/why_do_so_many_academic_historians_look_down_on/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6br8ck/why_d... for some context, and a useful example: > As Peter Paret summarised in 1966 (!?), "Is there another field of historical research (military history) whose practitioners are equally parochial, are as poorly informed on the work of their foreign colleagues...and show as little concern about the theoretical innovations and disputes that today are transforming the study and writing of history?"
- nickik 6y agoBut this is also simply a value judgment by historians. The argument that its all about 'culture', like in so many other fields is a very questionable approach. Similar arguments are often made about Political Scicne that we must study 'political culture' and that this will give us information about why things happen. In both cases I think this is very questionable assumption being made. Individual choice in one battle or one political move can and does change things, and if you want to understanding what happens is absolutely relevant. Also, things like doctrine that has been studied for a long time, are very related to culture so I don't even fully agree that military historians have ignored culture.
- UncleMeat 6y ago> The argument that its all about 'culture', like in so many other fields is a very questionable approach. That isn't the argument. Cultural history is indeed trendy, but the bulk of new writing is not cultural history.
- d23 6y agoI know nothing about this field, nor its criticisms. Can anyone point me to some good reading that describes the detailed strategy and nuances that led to wars being won or lost? Things like not planning for muddy terrain contributing to a battle being lost -- that sort of thing. I don't know if this is what the author is for or against, but it's definitely something I'd be interested in reading.
- krimpenrik 6y agoSun Tzu - Art of war
- mercurial 6y agoHardly. This is in no way a historical treaty.
- mercurial 6y agoWars are rarely won by single battles. That said, it really depends what period of history you are interested in. If you want to stick to the XXth century, Anthony Beevor regularly produces very readable books on WWII or the period immediately before (mostly concerned with the European theater). If you are interested in more ancient history, I can warmly recommend Keagan's Peloponnesian War (which mostly draws on Thucydides eponymous masterwork).
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- rg2004 6y agoIn my opinion your links are hard to differentiate.
- AaronNewcomer 6y agoI recently picked up the 1834-1842 issues of Journal Des Armes Spéciales which was a French technical journal about arms and armament. ( https://aaronnewcomer.com/document/journal-des-armes-speciales-and-the-battle-of-robert-vs-lefaucheux/ https://aaronnewcomer.com/document/journal-des-armes-special... ). An article introducing it gives a pretty good reasoning for the importance of studying military history, translated: “Let the lessons of history not be lost for us, that the progress of military art is marching in concert with those of the industrial arts. If we are richer and more enlightened, let us also be stronger and more valiant. Let us not let this sword rust in our hands that Brennus and Clovis left us, that Charlemagne and Napoleon walked all over Europe; then all the tyrants and all the barbarians of the earth will not prevail never against a nation that can present a compact mass of eight million men, ready to pay their blood for the defense of the fatherland. It is for the purpose of contributing to such a glorious result that we are undertaking today the publication of the Journal Des Armes Spéciales. Happy if we can contribute to maintain among the French, the sacred fire, the taste for arms that have always distinguished our ancestors; if we can root out these alluring doctrines, but disastrous, which tend to effeminate one whose people will always be passionate about war, and who will always support or the terror of Europe. The more the sweets of peace take root in the heart of our statesmen, the more the taste for peaceful pleasures tends to spread, the more gold finally gains consideration among us, the more urgent it is to return the honors due to it to the iron. Then the French people, drenched by the revolution, will again travel fourteen centuries of existence; if he conquers, they will be peaceful: he will have allies, friends and no subjects; it will use force only to resist an unjust aggression, to defend its allies, to avenge the injury done to only one of its citizens, and if some reckless enemy were to challenge in combat the great people, one would see reappear the great army more numerous and more formidable than ever.”
- ksdale 6y agoI daresay this sounds a lot like the drums and trumpets history that the author isn't particularly fond of.
- AaronNewcomer 6y agoNo yeah, I wrote in my article that this thing is “amazingly intense, aggressive, rooted in French military pride and filled with the glories of warmongering.” But the gist is that they look into it to make sure they don’t repeat mistakes and so that they understand their past so they can better appreciate how good life is now.
- WalterBright 6y agoI've heard it said that the reason Pizzaro was able to conquer the Inca Empire with so few men is because of writing, meaning Pizzaro had access to a thousand years of military history on what worked and what didn't. (While the Incas did have writing, there's no evidence they had a written military history.) The Roman army could beat a barbarian army that was 10 times larger and better armed, again due to studying military history. Knowledge of military history also appeared to play a decisive role again and again in the battles between the Colonial/US armies and the Native Americans. Either study war, or get beaten badly by the army that did.
- ycombonator 6y ago'Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.'
- smogcutter 6y agoI don’t know, did the Chinese study less military history than the Mongols? For someone like Pizzaro, where’s the line between studying military history and being the recipient of a body of institutional knowledge and practice? Is the claim that the Inca didn’t have a body of institutional knowledge and practice that was effective within their own context and material culture? Saying this as a fan of military history, this sounds awfully reductive. I suppose you could argue that printing, or at least an extensive written record, makes it easier to retain and transmit knowledge, but that’s not quite the same claim. Worth noting that in 18th c France, the artillery officers were essentially the only ones with any formal military education.
- WalterBright 6y ago> did the Chinese study less military history than the Mongols? I know next to nothing about the wars between the Chinese and the Mongols. I could read a book about it, and why one or the other won, which is precisely my point :-) > For someone like Pizzaro, where’s the line between studying military history and being the recipient of a body of institutional knowledge and practice? Not much of one. Institutional knowledge and practice is transmitted via writing, far more than being carried around in one's head. > Is the claim that the Inca didn’t have a body of institutional knowledge and practice that was effective within their own context and material culture? Military techniques that work transcend culture. For example, attempting to decapitate the command structure is a well-known technique used by the west, and the command structure is designed to be tolerant of that. The Incas apparently never thought of that, and fell apart when Pizarro disrupted their command structure. Just my own personal library has probably far more than 1000 times as much information as any person could carry in their head, let alone transmit to the next generation. When that's military knowledge, that is a tremendous advantage.