Fifty years ago this month, the New Left journal Ramparts broke a story that would reshape universities across the nation in ways both good and bad. In “The University on the Make [or how MSU helped arm Madame Nhu],” Warren Hinckle, Robert Scheer, and Sol Stern gave a detailed exposé of Michigan State University’s Vietnam Advisory Group — a $25-million taxpayer-funded program that sent advisers to arm and train South Vietnam’s police and paramilitary forces, all under the banal label of “technical assistance.” (The program, which ran from 1954 to 1962, was also a cover for the CIA.) The article closed with a question that laid bare how far the university had strayed from its educational mission during the Cold War: “What the hell is a university doing buying guns, anyway?”
Subsequent evidence of collaborations between the military and academe led to student strikes and violence across America. In 1968 students occupied Columbia’s Low Library after learning of the university’s partnership with the Institute for Defense Analysis, funded by the Defense Department. In 1970 student terrorists at the University of Wisconsin at Madison bombed the school’s Army Mathematics Research Center, killing a researcher and wounding three others. Elsewhere, protests on campuses led to soldiers; at Kent State University, National Guardsmen shot and killed four unarmed students and wounded nine.
These events, and the Vietnam War that produced them, led to a divorce between academe and the armed forces. ROTC programs disappeared from many campuses, in many cases for decades, because the military discriminated on the basis of sexual orientation — an argument that was sound on the merits but which increased the separation between the military and academe, denying colleges the perspectives of those students for whom ROTC was the only path to an education.
In retrospect, rejecting classified military cooperation and banning ROTC for discrimination were good decisions, but like many divorces, the one between the military and the academy went too far. In the years after Vietnam, most of the nation’s best universities also abandoned the scholarly study of military affairs, and military history in particular, even though student demand for the courses remained high. When the historian John A. Lynn surveyed the state of the field in 2008, he found that just four of the 91 top-ranked Ph.D.-granting history departments in America had programs in military history. His examination of 150 issues of the American Historical Review, flagship journal of the American Historical Association, revealed a similar neglect of military affairs. When a distinguished military historian retired from Purdue University in 1999, his department declined to hire another one, because (as recounted by Lynn) the department chair felt that “there was no social purpose to the study of military history.”
Like many divorces, the one between the military and the academy went too far.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Wars and militaries do far more than topple governments and redraw maps — though those actions are obviously important; after all, it was a war that finally ended chattel slavery in the American South. They also wreck and rescue economies, spur scientific discovery, and redefine labor relations. They alter the built environment and our day-to-day lives: Think of Levittown, the highway system, the Internet, and penicillin. They redefine race, class, and gender hierarchies and change the narratives we use to understand ourselves and our countries’ roles in the world. And wars erase as many narratives as they produce. If the first casualty of war is truth, then one of the few groups preventing such casualties, or at least naming them when they occur, are scholars who study the military.
As strategists are fond of saying, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” Universities should take note. There are permanent military facilities in all 50 states and in at least 41 foreign countries, and yet most Americans are largely unaware of how their armed forces operate at home and abroad. Even though the United States spends more on defense than the next seven countries combined (three of which are allies), less than half of all Americans think their military is the best in the world, and more than a third think it needs still more funding. Few professors know how many branches of the armed forces exist (five), the number of U.S. military bases overseas (between 500 and 800, depending on how you count), or the number of countries the United States is currently using violence in (five, that we know of).
Many politicians are equally ignorant of military affairs. When Republicans spent a year vituperating over the 2012 Benghazi attacks, they insisted repeatedly that the president should have deployed military power instantly, over a vast distance, to stop what was already in motion. Here was a teachable moment if ever there was one, but instead of getting informed analysis, the public heard from the tribalized media’s stables of “defense experts” — retired officers at best, cranks at worst — whose chief qualifications were their combat credentials rather than scholarly training. This continued until former Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates rebuked his own party for a “cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces” — a charge that could probably be leveled at many academics, and indeed, most of the country.
Military illiteracy also affects how our students see the world — and not for the better. One of my graduate-school mentors, the historian Paul Kennedy, loves to tell a story of an otherwise brilliant Yale undergraduate, reasonably well versed in international affairs, who innocently suggested sending an aircraft carrier up the Dnieper River to deter Russian aggression in the Ukraine — an impossible feat, given the river’s hydrography, not to mention the myriad bridges and dams.
It’s easy to forgive undergraduates for bold but foolish proposals, but the larger point is important: Where, in today’s academy, do students learn where aircraft carriers can and cannot go? What courses investigate how the military affects domestic culture, poverty, foreign relations, science, civil rights, or the environment? At most of our elite universities, those topics go unexplored.
This is an abdication of the university’s mission to educate. Ignoring these subjects not only impoverishes our understanding of the past and present but also makes it easier for the government to conduct military operations overseas without so much as a polite “Why?” from its citizens.
Some argue that the issue isn’t military history per se, but its focus on elite decision makers, a lack of diversity, bad writing, and a penchant for hagiography — dead white men’s history written by live white men who are telling only the victor’s tale. Those criticisms are still fair in some cases, but the field is changing. Skeptics should peruse the dissertations coming out of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Ohio State University, or the military-history offerings of the university presses at Harvard, North Carolina, and Oxford. They will find first-rate scholarship; attention to race, class, gender, and culture; and little of the triumphalism that was common in years past.
If methodology isn’t the real issue with military history, what is? Students want it; the public needs it; politicians misuse it; and yet universities mostly ignore it. What’s really going on?
I believe the fight over military history’s place in the academy is a proxy battle in the continuing culture wars begotten by Vietnam and reinvigorated by the inaptly named “Global War on Terror.” The academic combatants in this culture war line up behind the same groups that once squared off against each other in the 1960s: The military and military historians on one side; antiwar and civil-rights activists joining with social and cultural historians on the other. Military historians rightfully point out that studying the military does not equate to supporting it or its use; their opponents, rightly concerned with the broader militarization of American politics and culture, still seem to disagree.
The stakes for understanding military affairs in America couldn’t be higher.
There’s an old joke that academe’s politics are so intense because the stakes are so low. If that’s true, then academics should be able to put politics aside regarding military history, because the stakes for understanding military affairs in America couldn’t be higher. The United States has been at war for the past 15 years, and at something just short of war with Communists and drugs since before many of us were born. We need a better understanding of America’s military past.
Historians must come down off the ramparts and build bridges among their subfields, bridges that support and defend the very principle that rightfully kept ROTC off campus for so long: diversity. Both sides need to stop criticizing each other’s scholarship as radical or conservative, adjectives that tell us little about the quality of the work but quite a bit about the priorities of the critic. Both sides should also abandon the politics of authenticity, which are mostly irrelevant to the writing of good history. It’s all well and good to be a Navy SEAL, or gay, or a combat veteran, or working class, but none of that has much to do with the job of understanding and explaining the past on its own terms.
Michigan State found itself doing classified work in Vietnam not because of too much military history; rather, as one the program’s first coordinators explained in Ramparts, historical awareness was exactly what was missing. The reason that no one questioned the ethics of the university’s Vietnam project, the economist Stanley K. Sheinbaum explained at the time, was that its professors “lack historical perspective … we possess neither the inclination nor the means with which to question and judge our foreign policy. We have only the capacity to be experts and technicians to serve that policy. This is the tragedy of the Michigan State professors: we were all automatic cold warriors.”
Thankfully, there are very few “automatic cold warriors” left in today’s academy. But historical perspective on military affairs remains unacceptably absent. The folk singer and activist Pete Seeger was always fond of urging students to “study war no more,” and as a cultural historian and a folk singer myself, I can appreciate the song but not the advice. Students, citizens, and especially public intellectuals all need to understand military affairs and to speak about them knowledgeably. Bringing military history back to the academy is an important step in that process, and one that is long overdue.
Aaron B. O’Connell is a cultural historian of the military at the United States Naval Academy. His second book, Our Latest Longest War: Losing Hearts and Minds in Afghanistan, will be published next year by the University of Chicago Press.
