Popular knowledge of military affairs can be inculcated by elementary and higher education, the media, and public rituals and commemorations, as well as by members of the military themselves. Only that way, in the modern era of all-volunteer armed forces, can voting citizens—over 90 percent of whom have never served in the military—know something about what wars are and how and why they start, are fought, and end. Yet since World War II, a series of popular ideologies and historical events have discouraged informed civilian oversight of American war-making.
Five years after the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were dropped, and with theories of ending conventional armed forces coming into vogue, the United States was shocked by the North Korean invasion of the south. We quickly rediscovered the need to rearm and rebuild conventional forces and to revisit classical military strategy that was not made obsolete even by terrible new weapons.
In part, the contrast of a prior clear-cut American success in World War II, the indisputable moral need to stop global Nazism, fascism, and militarism, and the dispatch with which the United States helped win the war left as their legacy a nearly impossible ideal for all subsequent American wars, even in the decolonial nuclear age when the rules of intervention and expeditions abroad had vastly changed.
In part, the Vietnam decade of 1965–75—fifty-eight thousand American combat troops dead, massive anti-war protests, draft resistance, and eventual defeat—birthed a widespread antipathy to the idea of any war in general, and in particular to the U.S. military.
As military history struggled in the university throughout the late 1970s, conflict-resolution and peace-studies curricula spread on campuses. By 2022, there were over eighty-seven colleges and universities offering peace-studies and conflict-resolution degrees. (About 1,200 such degrees were completed per year.) In contrast, there were less than half that number of schools that offered either a BA, MA, or Ph.D. in military history. The British military historian Max Hastings recently summed up the scarcity of military history on university and college campuses. “The revulsion from war history may derive not so much from students’ unwillingness to explore the violent past,” he suggested, “but from academics’ reluctance to teach, or even allow their universities to host, such courses.”
Stubborn historians of war and their students naturally became dubious of all conflict. The general anxiety is akin to the suspicion that oncologists who study cancer are ipso facto fond of malignancy, or those who insist on fixed human nature across time and space are faith-based denialists of modern neuroscience, biology, or social science.