Everything but the kitchen sink - some reflections on undergrad history

I recently completed my undergraduate history course - while I have yet to officially graduate, finals exams are behind me.

During the past three years, I had the chance to choose from a menu of papers to read, and when picking them I had an eye towards whether they offered the potential for studying warfare and the military - such as on the US Civil War, or one paper that promised the chance to examine the Wars of the Roses. I also had the opportunity to write an undergrad thesis, which I did on the Singaporean military.

Unfortunately for me, I tended to come away particularly unsatisfied from most of them - it seemed that tutors were ready to cover everything about the war save the war itself. Most inquiry and eventual exam questions, even in papers ostensibly about a conflict, concerned themselves about the origins and effects of conflict itself, rather than studying battle or militaries. At its worst, some authors treated actual war as something akin to a natural disaster that served only to remove territory and important historical figures from the scene. While we might seek to consider the role war played in gender or the economy, the fighting itself sometimes came divorced from our study. In short - it seemed like everything regarding conflict was worth studying, except how to fight and win.

Now, I'll have to admit that I ought to have been more assertive in requesting to cover explicitly military-related aspects, and some papers handled that deftly. I will never forget Dr Gregory from Pembroke, who physically demonstrated the importance of convoying in the First World War with the use of scattered coins. In general I was honestly impressed at the quality of the First World War teaching. Still, I was told once that military history was sort of an 'intellectual dead end', and most discussion on combat and warfare quickly fell off the rails thanks to a general lack of knowledge. I didn't take this to heart, but that genuinely got me thinking about why it was.

Historians write of course based on their own interests, but also with an eye to wider publication, or to aid in solving serious historical questions. The study of war and combat proper seems to me to have acquired a cachet of 'popular history' for the casual reader, or for selected generals to read in Staff colleges.

Why would it not be popular? After all, armed clashes are riveting stuff for good reason, with the lives and stakes involved -  I daresay case-studies of conflict are certainly easier to relate to than most sub-fields of history. In addition, I'd suggest that the hard-science and engineering background of the modern Western and US military establishment has tinged anglophone academic study of the military in rather technical terms, a la Zaloga and other Security Studies works.

Hopefully I'll get to meet more military historians proper in the future and read what I can.