One of the characteristic aspects of a life that has been spent as a student of military history is that one tends to find conflicts under rock. Military history is closely related to other disciplines of history, such as diplomatic history and political history in particular, and while one would think that a world as full as conflict as our own would be a goldmine for military history, it often tends to be far more fertile for efforts at shaping history rather than studying it. The study of military history itself often involves some sort of leisure, with time to reflect and sources that one can uncover, field studies that one can engage in to look for the aftereffects of battle, and the like. Conflict-ridden times, though they give rise to the raw materials which keep military historians working for centuries, are not in themselves the times when it is best to engage in those studies.

Let us explore why. The first of the reasons is that it is not always clear which of the conflicts that one witnesses or pays attention to will actually become a war. Some friends and acquaintances of mine, for example, found themselves visiting Israel over the Feast of Tabernacles a couple of months ago and found themselves in the beginning of a renewed period of war between Israel and Hamas that included the experience of huddling in a bunker of the hotel where they were staying and also, temporarily at last, being stranded and having their travel plans thrown into chaos. From what I can gather, at least, many of them were not excited as budding students of military history to be in the action, so to speak, as an eyewitness to the outbreak of war. Similarly, there are other people who I may know at least somewhat personally who found themselves to be blockaded and dealing with food shortages while traveling to a part of Guatemala that was undergoing a time of civil conflict between pro-government and anti-government forces, at the same time. The reality of there being political instability within a country or there being conflicts between a country and its neighbors are realities that are always with us, but it is never entirely clear to us, until something happens, that what is a potential war will break out into something more active in nature. The historian is a student of what happens who seeks to gain insights, but is not necessarily a prophet in the sense of being able to tell exactly how the near-future is going to go.

The amount of potential conflicts that could turn into wars around the world is immense. Reports regularly reach me about updates on the civil war in Burma (Myanmar) that has been going on for eighty years now, since just after World War II ended, in a complex situation where pro-military leaders are in opposition to Burmese pro-democracy leaders as well as a dizzying array of complex ethnic militias which seek autonomy or independence from the nation. Similarly, I get regular messages about the potential for another war breaking out between Ethiopia and Eritrea as Ethiopia seeks a reliable outlet to the sea, to say nothing about the internal situation in Ethiopia, which is also in a frequent state of civil turmoil given its own ethnic mess. Similarly, despite a shared ethnicity, I regularly receive updates on the potential of war breaking out between North and South Korea and also between Venezuela (itself a failed state) and neighboring Guyana over claims going at least to the 19th century, where America famously mediated between the two parties in the Guilded Age under President Grover Cleveland. Even if one keeps an eye out on various conflicts that look like they could heat up, one can still always be surprised by an international war or civil conflict that springs up from the well of discontent that exists in this world. Hostility to the French approach to profiting from its formal colonies had led to international trouble in areas like Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Gabon, and even one of France’s own departments in the Indian Ocean (I am not sure if it is either Reunion or Mayotte). And that is not even taking into consideration the spread of wars or the start of wars because of the geopolitical dealings of nations like Russia, China, or the United States, or the possibility that dormant conflicts in places like Catalonia could heat up if the political situation goes south as it sometimes has in the past.

In the aftermath of military conflict, the military historian can piece together a coherent narrative from a variety of sources, can examine the ground on which a war occurs, and can figure out at least some of the decisive factors that led to victory for one side over the other. If the conflict is exciting enough or important enough, historians for generations and even centuries can make a living writing about it (think about, for example, the American Civil War, or the Wars of Roman conquest, or the Crusades, among others). Paradoxically, though, war is best written about in times of peace, when it is easy to obtain sources from multiple perspectives and travel the ground on which the war was fought and to examine the records of the nations involved in the war and determine what diplomatic blunder or what inciting incident led to warfare. Military history is very difficult to do in the lead-up to a conflict, when we don’t know for sure that a disagreement or crisis will turn into a hot war, or when a war is ongoing and much of the “information” that we have about it is dubious government propaganda meant to shape how people are feeling about the ongoing conflict or is undisclosed in archives that have not been opened to the public and will not for decades, and when the places where conflicts are going are still an active war zone where the journalist or historian that sought to visit there might end up being a casualty of war. Though people often think of military historians as a particularly combative sort of scholar, the ironic fact of the matter is that their work is easiest and best in times of peace rather than in the times of conflict that call them forth as reluctant experts in the history of hostility and conflict.