Interrogating the Project of Military History

April 21 addendum- Actually, several times in the past I employed exactly this suggested approach, most notably New Frontiers in Military History, taught in spring of 1996.  Many grad students declined to take the course.  One told me that the readings seemed too widely spread around to be of much use in preparation for the PhD general exam (usually called comprehensive or preliminary exams elsewhere).  I thought such an attitude was short-sighted and indeed, I believe that the student never completed a degree here.  But in retrospect I think the basic critique was sound.  Readings courses really should focus upon the general exam, not an open-ended discussion of the future of the field.  Though, come to think of it, we ask a mandatory question on the general exam that requires discussion of the field's historiography and purpose.  Here's my response to that question, from my own general exam in May 1990:

MILITARY HISTORIOGRAPHY

At the turn of the century, military history had not yet become part of the budding system of academic scholarship. Most military history was written by amateurs (some gifted, some not), tended to be military-utilitarian or policy prescriptive in nature, and was dominated by the notion of the decisive battle. To be sure, certain attempts to frame military history within a larger theoretical framework had already occurred. One thinks in particular of the work of [Carl von] Clausewitz and Hans Delbruck. In addition, policy prescriptive works such as [Alfred Thayer] Mahan's The Influence of Seapower Upon History (1890) or [Emory] Upton's The Military Policy of the United States (written much earlier but posthumously published in 1904) enjoyed respectability among scholars. Mahan, for instance, was even elected president of the AHA. So too was another sometime military historian, Theodore Roosevelt.

Despite an 1899 plea from AHA President Charles Francis Adams for scholars to do more military history, academics by and large rejected his counsel, a state of affairs that generally obtained until the post-World War II era. John Higham, in History: Professional Scholarship in America suggests that this rejection may have been due to the fact that historians were discovering (and were enamored by) new currents in historical scholarship: social, economic, history of science, etc., and that military history, with its traditional power political agenda, seemed a backward step. Then too, one cannot discount the liberal tradition endemic in modern scholarship, with its assumption (brilliantly examined by Michael Howard in War and the Liberal Conscience) that war was an aberration lying outside the main currents of history. The liberal tradition bequeathed one further legacy of relevance: by asserting a dichotomy between war and peace, it helped assure the eventual development of military and diplomatic history into separate fields.

World War I did not substantially alter matters. Indeed, if anything, academic historians shied even further away from the study of military history. Writers like [Basil H.] Liddell Hart and J. F. C. Fuller did considerable work, some of it quite good, but as David Trask has pointed out [in a talk he gave at the Mershon Center], amateurs of whatever stripe seem to be driven by an idée fixe -- in the case of Liddell Hart, the notorious "indirect approach." Most major belligerent nations published official histories after the war, which were supposed to be military-utilitarian in nature, but which were frequently marred by self-serving distortion. One thinks in particular of the British official histories (although in their better moments these too remain valuable.)

The real watershed in military history occurred only in the post-World War II period, and appears to have been driven by emerging trends in the United States. First, the conclusion of the war, the specter of the A-bomb, and the commencement of the Cold War ended the American era of "free security" (although this era actually began its demise as early as 1898 and certainly by 1914). This had the effect of placing national security issues -- and hence military history -- on the national agenda in a way that it had not been before. Secondly, the Cold War, by its very nature, eroded the perceived dichotomy between war and peace and made scholars more aware of how one frequently bled into the other. Third, the post-war American official histories -- especially the ambitious Army "Green Book" series -- produced a generation of military historians (e.g., [Martin] Blumenson, [Harry] Coles) who were products of the academic community and who carried an interest in military history with them when they returned to that community. Fourth, the problem of the A-bomb and the emergence of "strategy intellectuals" (e.g., [Bernard] Brodie, [Herman] Kahn, [Robert] Osgood, the two Wohlstetters, etc.) lent new academic respectability to military studies, notwithstanding the fact that most of these were social scientists and even mathematicians and physicists, not historians.

Finally, the expansion of American universities in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, driven by the G. I. Bill and "baby boom," coupled with the multiplication of berths for military historians in think tanks and in government, produced a market for dozens, perhaps hundreds, of historians who were keenly interested in military history.

What sort of military history has this explosion of academic interest produced? The most obvious response is: "new" military history, loosely defined as anything that is not "old" (i.e., battle-oriented "drums & trumpets" military history) but really focusing on the institutional aspects of military organizations and the way in which they both interract with and reflect the societies that produced them. The Macmillan Wars of the United States series affords a particularly good example of this institutional history, although not all its volumes are institutionally focused: [Russell F. Weigley's History of the United States Army, [John] Mahon's History of the Militia and National Guard, [Allan R.] Millett's Semper Fidelis, to name a few. One thinks also of Williamson Murray's study of the German Luftwaffe. Samuel Huntington in the United States and Gerhard Ritter in Germany have produced provocative studies of civil-military relations (The Soldier and the State and Sword and Scepter, respectively) while a number of works have also appeared on the various aspects of the "war and society" theme. Gerald Linderman's The Mirror of War, Marcus Cunliffe's Soldiers and Civilians, and Charles Royster's A Revolutionary People at War form three examples of efforts to use attitudes toward war and the military as a way of getting a handle on significant elements in national character. In a different connection, John U. Nef's War and Human Progress offers an assessment of the impact of war on economic and technological advancement. Geoffrey Parker's The Military Revolution discusses the impact of changes in warfare on the early modern era, while Carlo Cipolla explores the connection between warfare technology and the start of age of European expansion and hegemony ("the Vasco da Gama era") in Guns, Sails and Empires. John Dower's War Without Mercy examines how racism affected the conduct of the 1941-45 Pacific War.

The emergence of modern officership and the nature of the military profession itself has also come under scrutiny. Here Huntington again is a major figure, although one also thinks of Allan R. Millett's The General, Peter Karsten's The Naval Aristocracy, Ronald Spector's study of the naval war college, Professors of War, James L. Morrison's history of the early years of West Point, "The Best School in the World", Hew Strachan's work on British military reforms, 1830-1854, and Holger H. Herwig's work on the officer corps of the Wilhelminian Navy. Military sociologists such as Morris Janowitz and Bengt Abrahamsson have also contributed substantially to our grasp of officership, particularly in terms of providing frameworks of analysis. An older but still valuable work on militarism is Alfred Vagts' A History of Militarism.
 
Military institutions, of course, ultimately exist in order to fight, and although much of the "new" military history edged away from combat--one suspects at least partly in an attempt to distance itself from the "drums and trumpets" school--much new work has centered on understanding the "sharp end" of war. Frequently this has involved looking at traditional things in novel ways. [Geoffrey] Parker's The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, for instance, examines primarily how the army of Philip II managed to get to, and sustain itself in, the Low Countries during the Dutch Revolt. John F. Guilmartin's Gunpowder and Galleys offers a remarkably original attempt to peer into the Mediterranean system of naval warfare--a system in which Mahanian notions of seapower do not apply. Russell F. Weigley has examined the history of U.S. strategy as a means a unique American Way of War. And John Keegan, in a number of works, but most particularly the seminal Face of Battle, essayed new ways of examining the human realm of combat.

Military history and diplomatic history have too long been detached, and a number of new studies emphasize the relationship between the two. Paul Kennedy's Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism achieves this reunion, as does his tendentious but valuable book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Williamson Murray shows how Anglo-French diplomatic failures helped alter the military and strategic balance in The Change in the European Balance of Power, 1938-1939. One might add that diplomatic historians too are working from their end toward a fusion of military and diplomatic history: e.g., Michael Schaller, George C. Herring, Melvyn Leffler, and Michael Sherry.

One could multiply examples indefinitely: military biographies, studies of net assessment and intelligence, recent histories of wars, campaigns, and battles. To what extent, however, does the "new" military history fit into the larger schemata of academic historiography? The answer is, not all that much. One sees little evidence of well-articulated schools of thought, replete with "star" scholars and bevies of disciples, although for a time Weigley promised (or threatened) to create such a school. There are really few examples of military history that betray, for example, an obvious New Left slant -- although Peter Karsten in The Naval Aristocracy seems rather enamored of Gabriel Kolko and William A. Williams.  Why is this?  [That is, why doesn't military history work like other academic fields?]

Three main reasons suggest themselves. First, not all military historians are academicians. Some are amateurs pure and simple, others are officers. Perhaps more importantly, the audience for military history is not dominated by academicians, but includes general readers, military men of all stripes, and policy-makers. This has worked against the sort of intellectual in-breeding that tends to foster finely-articulated schools of thought. Secondly, military historians have typically exhibited a sense of the freedom to appropriate from other disciplines whatever intellectual tool fits their needs: hence the use, as appropriate, of economic history, political science, organizational theory, psychology, etc. This eclecticism works against the development of a single methodology or framework of interpretation. Social history is probably the most prevalent single attribute of modern historiography to find a significant niche in military history.

But finally, military historians by and large share a similar world-view. Obviously there are exceptions, but by and large military historians seem to kick off of what a diplomatic historian would call the "realist school" (or perhaps neo-revisionism; i.e., traditionalism with footnotes). My sense is that military historians tend to regard the pursuit of power as the fundamental underpinning of human history (as opposed to the most obvious alternative, economics); and more than this, that they find the locus of this pursuit, not in a defective international system, but ultimately in human nature itself. I think most military historians would agree with the novelist John Knowles [in his novel A Separate Peace]  that ultimately, "there is something twisted in the human heart." This common set of foundational assumptions also works against the development of really different schools of thought. Parenthetically, I would like to see more historians pay extended attention to these foundational assumptions. Barrie Paskins has suggested the idea of a "philosophy of war" and W. B. Gallie has written of several philosophers of war, but much more work could be done, particularly of a less "long-hair" variety that has more immediate relevance to the work of military historians.

Finally, what should be the purpose of military history? I am all in favor of continued military-utilitarian or policy-prescriptive efforts, and I particularly admire studies along the lines of Military Effectiveness. I even have a sneaking affection for traditional "drums and trumpets" history, although historiographically speaking, much of this remains mired in the Whig interpretation of history or else the Rankeian/Acton school of "scientific history;" i.e., the facts will interpret themselves. But ultimately, academic military historians ought to concentrate on illuminating the military dimension of larger historical problems. This, too frequently, they have not really done, and it is no accident that a number of the historians I've mentioned above would not consider themselves military historians (e.g., [Geoffrey] Parker, [Charles] Royster). Finally, I like David Trask's idea of a "fusionist" approach to military history -- one that would involve a closer working-together of military and diplomatic history and blend it into "national security history." Such an approach would not have universal applications, but would be useful for a great many issues.

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