A cut-and-dry definition of military history certainly isn’t easy to nail down. Sure, military history involves strategy and tactics but at the margins, the line begins to blur. Because the new form of military history has invited scholars outside the discipline to explore topics related to warfare, we saw a great deal of cross-pollination with other subjects but also confusion and concern as to its direction.
As you noted, the social history of war won’t completely supplant the study of the hard, practice of war because the former will always require the latter. But to what extent the social history of warfare will overshadow traditional military history–I argue, not much. The Society for Military History’s 2009 Distinguished Book Awards:
- Ingo Trauschweizer, The Cold War U.S. Army: Building Deterrence for Limited War.
- Jamel Ostwald, Vauban Under Siege: Engineering Efficiency and Martial Vigor in the War of the Spanish Succession.
- Andy Wiest, Vietnam’s Forgotten Army: Heroism and Betrayal in the ARVN.
- Philip Sabin, Hans van Wees, and Michael Whitby, ed. The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare.
All of these books deal heavily in the conduct of war, even Trauschweizer’s book which is about armed operations of the Cold War. And as Eastern Michigan University professor Robert Citino said “The truth is, as deeply as [military historians] probe the culture of war, they will still want to ground themselves in the event itself, as opposed to to its later interpretation, its memory, or its instrumentalization.”
The bottom line: military history will still be primarily concerned with the conduct of war, as it should. Though today’s military history is not your grandfathers’ military history, the inclusion of subjects formerly outside the scope of the discipline, and with international conflict continuing to intensify, military history’s stock in academia will continue to rise.
