Teetering on the Brink of Respectability

Abstract

Forty-five years ago, Walter Millis, respected military analyst and historian, wrote short treatment of military for the American Historical Association's Service Center for Teachers of Of all the distinguished authors who have contributed those guides over the years, Millis may well be the only one who advised his readers not bother. study of military history had two functions, Millis declared, to train professional military men in the exercise of their profession and on the other hand educate governments and peoples in the military requirements of today. The advent of nuclear weapons, however, had rendered those traditional roles irrelevant. Indeed, what soldiers charged with the command and control of nuclear weapons might learn from the generalship of the past could well be more deleterious than effective.1 Millis's piece was the first in succession of articles published over the following de cades announcing that military was nearing extinction. Yet it has proven have an unusually long half-life. Ten years after Millis's obituary of the field, Allan R. Millett described the surprisingly numerous, robust, and vigorous contributions that younger scholars, mostly based in colleges and universities, were making all aspects of American military history. The interest of the new generation of military historians, wrote Millett, was study America's wars and the development of its military institutions within the unique political, economic, social ideological context which shaped them. The object was not learn lessons but reach a fuller understanding of America.2 During the 1980s, military historians established their own scholarly and professional society, trans forming the old American Military Institute, congenial but slightly antiquarian organi zation, into the academically oriented Society for Military Then, in 1997, just when I had begun feel it was safe get out my lecture notes on the battle of the Philippine Sea, another article appeared, this one by the eminent historian John A. Lynn, with the subtitle Embattled Future of Academic Military History. Lynn concluded that military still occupied marginal position in most departments?those in which it was taught at all?and that the handful of mili tary historians at research universities were seldom replaced when they retired. One year before, Mark Grimsley had posted piece on the World Wide Web with the evocative title Why Military History Sucks. Grimsley suggested that the marginalization of mili