Response to Linn and Showalter

Any discussion of the current status of military history, whether by intent or not, inevitably evolves into a wide-ranging critique of the Western university. Both Professors Linn and Showalter, for example, agree on what now has become a generally recognized paradox. In uncanny fashion, the more military history seems to recede in the academy by traditional standards of importance (whether measured by publication in academic journals, formally recognized professorships, or general attitudes about the dispassionate study of the history of war among the faculty), the more it thrives in both popular culture and in new and dynamic outlets associated with higher education. I wish Linn and Showalter had speculated more about the cause and effect. That is, does military history bloom because of, rather than despite, university neglect? And if so, how exactly does that transpire?¹

Linn is right that military history is more widely read than what is written by most of its critics on campus, who themselves are increasingly fossilized in their thinking and marginalized in their writing. And too often, even the nation’s few military historians who hold titled professorships at distinguished universities deny the general academic decline in military history by pointing to the success of their own programs, graduate students, popular classes, and numerous publications—without recognizing that in most other places the field is moribund on campus. I do not think there has been any convincing refutation of military historian Edward Coffman’s casual point that within the nation’s top twenty-five history departments (as ranked by U.S. News and World Report), only twenty-one of the 1,000 history professors employed listed a specialty in military history.

Linn points out that war studies have a hold on the popular interest and imagination, which ensures robust book sales and resonance within popular culture. Unlike historians of other fields, military historians of varying sorts, in and outside the university, are quite influential as public intellectuals, and help adjudicate current defense policy. Officers themselves often are military historians, and they serve as rich conduits between theory and practice. Linn is to be commended for reminding us again how “warrior-scholars such as H. R. McMaster, Peter Mansoor, John Nagl, James H. Powell, and David Petraeus, conceptualized and then helped execute the shift to a counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq.”

I wish I could say that few scholarly disciplines have shown such relevance to contemporary politics and government policy-making. But remember that the obsession on campus with postmodern theorizing has perniciously rippled out into film, television, primary and secondary education, and politics at large. Two decades ago I used to laugh that my six-year-old’s first-grade reading books seemed to mimic exactly the nonsensical themes taught across the hall at the university’s School of Education.

Linn is confident that military history archives, some sympathetic foundations, military history bloggers and Web sites, and a variety of privately and publicly supported seminars, workshops, conferences, lectures, and other venues of intellectual commerce all seem to offer recompense of sorts for the absence of major military history billets at both research and teaching universities and colleges. Moreover, unlike many disciplines within formal academic history, the study of war offers the newly minted Ph.D. opportunities in public archives, think tanks, and private companies where they can continue to conduct research, lecture, and write. Linn offers a comprehensive list of examples, and suggests that the trend is spreading. Indeed, the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University is creating a new program on “Military History and Contemporary Conflict.” The center will seek to integrate its current educational partnership with the military, bring to campus war correspondents, conduct military history symposia, offer weekly commentary on ongoing conflicts, invite scholars and students of military history for periodic billets and visiting posts, and in time establish permanent positions.

Yet there are insidious effects that follow from the academy’s neglect of military history. The scholarly rigor of academic military history is of value as a blueprint and model for those who write about war outside the university without graduate training. And the relative dearth...