The Study of War

War has been apart of humanity since man first delineated an "us" which in turn created a "them." Despite the yearnings of pacifists and those that feel we should by now be able to transcend war and all live together on a higher plane of harmonious consciousness, war remains as real as its ever been. Unfortunately, most people's understanding is limited to images on CNN or sensationalized stories read in the newspaper. In other words, it doesn't go very deep. It's not a pleasant subject, so one can be forgiven for not wanting to think too much about it. Because ours is an all-volunteer military, it is not even necessary for the average citizen to acknowledge a change in their lifestyle or make any sort of day to day sacrifice when war rears its ugly head.

Victor Davis Hanson has an outstanding piece in the City Journal this month titled, "Why Study War?"

It’s no surprise that civilian Americans tend to lack a basic understanding of military matters. Even when I was a graduate student, 30-some years ago, military history—understood broadly as the investigation of why one side wins and another loses a war, and encompassing reflections on magisterial or foolish generalship, technological stagnation or breakthrough, and the roles of discipline, bravery, national will, and culture in determining a conflict’s outcome and its consequences—had already become unfashionable on campus. Today, universities are even less receptive to the subject.

This state of affairs is profoundly troubling, for democratic citizenship requires knowledge of war—and now, in the age of weapons of mass annihilation, more than ever.

It's a shame that more people do not take an interest in military history. It goes a long way towards explaining the present. Recently it occurred to me that the leftist group think that paralyzes many fine academic institutions takes great pride in its general ignorance of all things military. Of course, that does not stop the hard left from vociferously speaking out as though they were experts.

VDH seems to agree:

The academic neglect of war is even more acute today. Military history as a discipline has atrophied, with very few professorships, journal articles, or degree programs. In 2004, Edward Coffman, a retired military history professor who taught at the University of Wisconsin, reviewed the faculties of the top 25 history departments, as ranked by U.S. News and World Report. He found that of over 1,000 professors, only 21 identified war as a specialty. When war does show up on university syllabi, it’s often about the race, class, and gender of combatants and wartime civilians. So a class on the Civil War will focus on the Underground Railroad and Reconstruction, not on Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. One on World War II might emphasize Japanese internment, Rosie the Riveter, and the horror of Hiroshima, not Guadalcanal and Midway. A survey of the Vietnam War will devote lots of time to the inequities of the draft, media coverage, and the antiwar movement at home, and scant the air and artillery barrages at Khe Sanh.

Winston Churchill said, "If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future".

Unfortunately, this is what I feel happens every time I hear Iraq compared to Vietnam by people who frame all of history as though it started in the 1960's.