Military history is the study of armed conflict in the history of humanity, and its impact on the societies, cultures, and economies thereof, as well as the resulting changes to local and international relationships. The essential subjects of military history study are the causes of war, the social and cultural foundations, military doctrine on each side, the logistics, leadership, technology, strategy, and tactics used, and how these changed over time. On the other hand, just war theory explores the moral dimensions of warfare and, to limit the destructive reality of war, seeks to establish a doctrine of military ethics. As an applied field, military history has been studied at academies and service schools because the military command seeks not to repeat past mistakes, and to improve upon its current performance by instilling an ability in commanders to perceive historical parallels during a battle, to capitalize on the lessons learned from the past. When certifying military history instructors the Combat Studies Institute deemphasizes rote detail memorization and focuses on themes and context in relation to current and future conflict, using the motto "Past is Prologue." The discipline of military history is dynamic, changing with developments in the subject area as much as in the societies and organisations that make use of it. The dynamic nature of the discipline of military history is largely due to the rapid change of military forces. The art and science of managing them, as well as the frenetic pace of technological development that had taken place during the period known as the Industrial Revolution, and more recently in the nuclear and information ages. An important recent concept is the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), which attempts to explain how emerging technologies, such as gunpowder, have shaped warfare. It highlights the short outbursts of rapid change followed by periods of relative stability.
Popular versus academic military history In the history profession across major countries, military history is an orphan, despite its enormous popularity with the general public. William H. McNeill points out:
This branch of our discipline flourishes in an intellectual ghetto. The 144 books in question [published in 1968-78] fall into two distinct classes: works aimed at a popular readership, written by journalists and men of letters outside academic circles, and professional work nearly always produced within the military establishment.... The study of military history in universities remains seriously underdeveloped. Indeed, lack of interest in and disdain for military history probably constitute one of the strangest prejudices of the profession. In recent decades, university-level courses in military history have remained popular; often, they use films to humanize the combat experience. For example, Eugene P. A. Scleh, history professor at the University of Maine, has explored the advantages and problems of teaching a course on "Modern War and Its Images" entirely through films. Students said they found the documentaries more valuable than the dramas. However, military historians are frustrated by their marginal status in major history departments. Academic historians concerned with military topics have their own scholarly organization, Society for Military History. Since 1937, it has published The Journal of Military History. Its four issues a year include scholarly articles, reviews of new books, and a bibliography of new publications and dissertations. The Society has 2,300 members, holds an annual convention, and awards prizes for the best scholarship.
Historiography of military history Historiography is the study of the history and method of the discipline of history or the study of a specialised topic. In this case, military history is used to obtain an accurate assessment of conflicts by drawing on all available sources. For this reason, military history is periodised, creating overlapping boundaries of study and analysis, in which descriptions of battles by leaders may be unreliable due to an inclination to minimize mention of failure and exaggerate success. Military historians use Historiographical analysis to provide an unbiased, contemporary view of records. One military historian, Jeremy Black, outlined problems 21st-century military historians face as an inheritance of their predecessors: Eurocentricity, a technological bias, a focus on leading military powers and dominant military systems, the separation of land from sea and recently air conflicts, the focus on state-to-state conflict, and a lack of focus on political "tasking" in how forces are used. If these challenges were not sufficient for military historians, the limits of method are further complicated by the lack of records, either destroyed or never recorded because of their value as a military secret. Scholars still do not know the exact nature of Greek fire, for instance. Researching Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, for example, has presented unique challenges for historians due to the destruction of records to protect classified military information, among other reasons. Historians use their knowledge of government regulation and military organization, and employ a targeted and systematic research strategy to piece together war histories. Despite these limits, wars are some of the most studied and detailed periods of human history. Military historians have often compared the organizational, tactical, and strategic ideas, leadership, and national support of different nations' militaries. In the early 1980s, historian Jeffrey Kimball studied how a historian's political stance on current events affects interpretive disagreements about the causes of 20th-century wars. He surveyed the ideological preferences of 109 active diplomatic historians in the United States and 54 active military historians. He finds that their current political views are moderately correlated with their historiographical interpretations. A clear position on the left-right continuum regarding capitalism was apparent in most cases. All groups agreed with the proposition, "historically, Americans have tended to view questions of their national security in terms of such extremes as good vs. evil." Though the Socialists were split, the other groups agreed that "miscalculation and/or misunderstanding of the situation" had caused U.S. interventionism." Kimball reports that:
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