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Ted Warren's avatar

I'm working towards a PhD in military history on a part time basis at one of the few schools in America that still even offer such a degree program. I think Prof. MacMillan's article is spot on. Even at a school with a military history program I have always gotten the distinct impression that it is considered a second class historical field. One of the military history professors even admitted that she wasn't really all that interested in military history, but rather it served as a useful avenue to get to social history through the back door. It seems inconceivable that war, which has had such an outsized effect on so many aspects of society for millennia, is so disregarded by so much of academia. I first studied history at the college level in the mid 1990s, and while it was bad then it appears that the decline in military history is accelerating. Perhaps I'm overstating it a bit, but I think the only prerequisite for national political leadership should be a firm grounding of military history. If you don't understand why conflicts begin, how they are fought, and, most importantly, how they end and in what manner is peace best secured than we should not be surprised when out political leaders struggle with those questions.

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Wayne Karol's avatar

You'd think that people who want to prevent war would want to understand it. But no, we're seeing the same thing on the Left that we saw on the Right after 9/11: Don't know your enemy. Anything less than "They're evil, period, end of story" means you're siding with them.

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