Military History

A great guest post at War Historian.org.

Why Military History Matters: Another Perspective

….Those unsympathetic to military history sometimes grumble that military historians simply posit the importance of military history as its own sub-discipline, with its own internal standards of scholarly value, depending in part on a mastery of distinct forms of military knowledge – defined around “operational” issues (i.e. historical topics that focus either directly on the fighting and violence that occurs in war, or issues closely related to that violence, as opposed to other topics such as the social composition of armies, gender views among combatants, etc.).  First off, military historians have in the past made attempts to argue for the importance of events such as battles – for example, James McPherson’s argument for important turning points during the American Civil War, which argue that certain battles could have turned out differently, leading to significantly different historical outcomes.  This is a classic counterfactual argument, and one also used by allied (and increasingly scarce) practitioners of political and diplomatic history.

While sympathetic to this argument, I would like to add another one to the mix.  Military history must by necessity remain a distinct sub-field, with its own distinctive body of knowledge and methods to master, because war itself represents a peculiar and distinctive form of human activity, focused above all else on a socially abnormal use of violence that larger societies both glorify and condemn