Study War...

The highly intelligent David Bell gets his arrow into the target, but nowhere near the center. He writes:

Open University: The founders of [the modern social sciences]... believed that warfare was something fundamentally irrational and primitive that would disappear.... War was simply not something whose processes could be usefully elucidated....

As long as history remained as much an art as a science... it was not really affected.... The great nineteenth century historians--Michelet, Macaulay, Parkman, Ranke--all gave pride of place to war, and did a great deal of what would now be described as "operational" military history. But when historians embraced the social sciences... they took on the social sciences' assumptions and interests, and therefore turned away in large part from military questions....

Now, we can deplore all of this, and we should--the great narrative historians had a much better sense of the fundamental importance of military history than we do. But we can't simply ignore it. The fact is that "operational" military history remains separated by a large gulf from... our most important intellectual traditions in the social sciences and humanities, and to the questions.... On the whole, it tends to be more technical, less open to interdisciplinary dialogue, and less self-aware than most other areas of history. As Sir John Keegan, who is a very very good military historian, once complained: "Not even the beginnings of an attempt have been made by military historians to plot the intellectual landmarks and boundaries of their own field of operations." This is not a statement that could possibly be made about cultural history, social history, economic history or political history....

In short, yes, this is a question of liberalism. But the "liberals" who are really to blame here are not the familiar American "tenured radicals" whom the National Review so loves to hate. They are named Montesquieu, Condorcet, Benjamin Constant and Karl Marx.

Three points here:

First, simply no, there should not be more "operational" military history. "Operational" military history of the style beloved of the National Review tells us relatively little about war. If you want to know about the American Civil War, you need to hear something like this:

Not even the deep South was strongly for secession. Those voting for delegates to Georgia's secession convention, for example, were almost evenly split--and you can bet that the African-Americans who did not get to vote for delegates were overwhelmingly against secession. Because there was no Southern consensus for secession, Lincoln was able to hold the border--Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, western Virginia, eastern Tennessee--by making it a war for the Union. And the war began with a Confederacy of 5 million whites (and 4 million African-Americans) and a Union of 21 million whites (and 1 million African-Americans).

The Union mobilized 2.6 million soldiers--24% of its total male population. The Confederacy mobilized 900 thousand soldiers--36% of its white male population. Armies would march down secured railroad lines or navigable waterways until they ran into other armies. Because they could not function far from railhead or water-based supply depots, strategic outflanking moves were rare. When armies clashed, casualties were horrendous, but decisive victories impossible. The rifled musket was too good in defense, and the large size of the armies made them too clumsy in pursuit.

The result was that the armies fought, and soldiers died in battle, afterwards of wounds, and in camp of disease. By April 1865 300,000 Union soldiers were dead, 300,000 more were disabled by wounds, about 200,000 had deserted and returned home, and 400,000 had been discharged--leaving 1.4 million with the colors. By April 1865 300,000 Confederates were dead, 300,000 more were disabled by wounds, and 300,000 had deserted or returned home--leaving next to nobody with the colors to surrender to Grant and Sherman. The war was then over.

That's the history of the American Civil War wie es eigentlich gewesen. That's not the history you get by reading "operational" military historians like Shelby Foote or Bruce Catton. They do what they do excellently, but it is a distorted vision of the war.

Second, the current state of military history looks, to me, extremely good. I think that better military history is being written now than ever before. Why, from where I am sitting right now I can see six excellent recent books of military history: Robert Citino's The German Way of War, David Glantz and Jonathan House's When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler, Omer Bartov's Hitler's Army, Gordon and Trainor's Cobra II, Barbara Ehrenreich's Blood Rites, and Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain. It is much easier to get an education in military history than ever before. But I have a hunch that Miller would really disapprove of more than half of these--excellent, truly excellent--books.

Third, somehow none of the people writing at the New Republic--not David Bell, not Michael Kazin, not David Greenberg--tells us a word about John J. Miller of National Review, the guy who started this particular hare with his claim, which David Greenberg half agrees with, that

military historians [are] victims of political correctness.... Apart from devouring James McPherson's Battle Cry, Freedom and getting some Revolutionary War history through... History of New York City.... I made it through my requirements as both an undergraduate history major and a history PhD without touching the topic. I admit to sometimes feeling sheepish...

Bell's, Kazin's, and Greenberg's readers need to know more about John J. Miller--they need to know, for example, that this is a guy who begins a column with "the liberal blacklisting of an ABC miniseries on 9/11 has begun in earnest." They need to know that this is the kind of argument Miller makes:

NR / Digital Article: Consider the case of Steve Zdatny, a history professor at West Virginia University. On his webpage, he lists World War I as one of his "teaching fields." But he's no expert in trench warfare or aerial dogfights. Here's how he describes his latest scholarship: "Having recently finished a history of the French hairdressing profession . . . I am now in the opening stages of research on a history of public and personal hygiene, which will examine evolving practices and sensibilities of cleanliness in twentieth-century France." His body of work includes journal articles with titles such as "The Boyish Look and the Liberated Woman: The Politics and Aesthetics of Women's Hairstyles." Not that there's anything wrong with that. But when fashion history begins to crowd out military history, or even masquerade as it, the priorities of colleges and universities are clearly out of whack...

Here's a sample--part of a book review--of the kind of thing Professor Zdatny writes:

Zdatny: Review of Kaplan: What finally doomed the income tax proposal and forced Bourgeois to resign was the Senate's opposition.... The Senate's indirect vote of no confidence in April 1896... was the culmination of the general campaign against the impôt and an important victory for the haute bourgeoisie. Their reward was the Moderate ministry of Jules Meline, which had, according to Kaplan, no policy except to stand in the way of the income tax.

Shaken by such a near miss... [m]en of property held banquets and urged one another to paternalistic activities. They considered corporatist reforms to defuse the crisis threatening their interests. They attempted, through such institutions as the École libre des sciences politiques, to infiltrate the bureaucracy....

It is Kaplan's notion, however, that in the end the "crisis of democracy" was resolved... by way of the Dreyfus Affair.... Kaplan offers a radical reinterpretation of the nature and consequences of this most famous affaire. It is as follows: the Dreyfus Affair never presented any genuine threat to the Republic. Waldeck-Rousseau was not actually afraid of the anti-Dreyfusard forces.... By brandishing the threat of anti-Republican reaction, Waldeck-Rousseau succeeded in persuading Dreyfusard socialists, like Jean Jaures, to... trade in their social agenda for the greater and more pressing cause of [defense of the] Republic.... [Waldeck-Rousseau] duped the socialists... [and] bought off the Radicals with government patronage.... The energies of Republican Defense were subsequently diverted away from real issues of social reform and into the pseudo-policy of anti-clericalism....

Yet there is more, for Kaplan's tale has another theme that also reaches its climax in the Dreyfus Affair. Here, the author's interest shifts from the income tax as class war to the income tax as fiscal necessity. Recall Cavaignac's initial support for the impôt. He was driven by the recognition that France's military effort to confront Germany required sounder public finances. More particularly--although he certainly could say nothing about it in any public forum--Cavaignac wanted to fund the development of a rapid-fire artillery piece, what eventually became the celebrated "75" of the First World War. It is in the secret efforts to develop an effective rapid-fire artillery capability--and, as a critical corollary, to deceive the Germans about these operations--that the stories of the income tax and the Dreyfus Affair meet...

(Zdatny, in the end, dismisses Kaplan's argument.)

In 2005, Professor Zdatny was one of five WVU professors to win the outstanding teacher awards chosen by the students.

See also the articulate Mark Grimsley of Ohio State:

Blog Them Out of the Stone Age : More Nonsense from National Review Online: My new amigo, John J. Miller, is still grasping at straws to defend his misinformed -- to put it kindly -- article on the demise of academic military history...

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Note: it's James McPherson's Battle Cry *of* Freedom](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/019516895X/braddelong00).