Society for Military History 2023 - Saturday/Sunday

 All views in this blog are my own and represent the views of no other person, organization, or institution.

More from the Society for Military History 2023 conference.

 For my Friday at the conference is here. 

Saturday

8:30 a.m.  13 panels to choose from.

Saturday morning began with more excellent panels, including panels on history & podcasting, the law of war, Vietnam, & war’s aftermath. I was intrigued by Beyond Belleau Wood: Three Cantankerous Marines Ponder the Great War chaired by my friend and former colleague, Annette Amerman but I’m not currently working on World War I, and I knew my colleague, Lisa, who is working on that period, would attend and let me know what I missed.

So, I was able to attend a panel on ancient military history, Making Sense of Ancient Strategy. Ancient history was one of my minor fields, and Ancient Roman/Byzantine military history the subject of my Master’s thesis, I have an abiding interest in the topic, but at SMH conferences I usually only manage to make one panel on the subject, since professional obligations usually send me to more modern topics.

This panel was attended by over 40 people. The first paper, “The Grand Strategy of the Achaemenid Empire” by Michael J. Taylor, SUNY-Albany, was an excellent look at one of the earliest military forces from which we have enough information to draw conclusions about their strategy and tactics. Popular movies like 300 have almost criminally inaccurate depictions of the Persian Empire, and of course this professional presentation based on solid ancient sources was nothing like that. Ancient empires had significant challenges concerning resources, distance, and communication. Taylor spoke of an “escalation ladder” in Persia’s response to rebellion or resistance, his analysis of this was well thought out, and he provided several examples. He included the Ionian revolt, but other examples as well. That really bolstered his argument – documentary and archaeological sources on the Persian Empire are dominated by the Greek periphery, which can make a solid understanding of the empire difficult.

The second paper was “Systems Theory and Strategic Sense-Making in the Peloponnesian War” by Paul A. Johstono, Air Command and Staff College. No ancient war has been studied as thoroughly by modern students of military science, and I don’t believe this presentation opened any new ground. However, it was professional and solidly backed by ancient sources. He argued that it studied strategy from a non-Empire point of view, but I would argue that Athens certainly fit the definition of empire during this period. He also spoke of communal mores, and that points to the more salient difference, IMO, i.e. group authority (democracy perhaps is too strong a word) versus autocracy.

The last paper was the one that most people anticipated, I believe. “Could the Romans do Strategy?” by James Lacey, U.S. Marine Corps University. This was essentially a preview of his new book, Rome: Strategy of Empire (Oxford University Press, 2022). I haven’t yet read Lacey’s book, though I think now that I will have to.

I found his presentation disappointing. It was very focused on the idea that modern scholars of ancient history have rejected the idea that the Romans thought or acted in strategic terms, especially in their rejection of Edward Luttwak’s The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire from the First Century AD to the Third (1976). Lacey himself admitted that he felt like he was constructing strawmen in his arguments, and it certainly felt that way to me. I studied Luttwak’s work in grad school, and still have my well-worn copy. The Ancient historians who taught me didn’t reject Luttwak or claim that the Romans could not “do” strategy, they criticized the work for some anachronisms and Luttwak’s assumptions that ancient Roman strategists thought in the same way as late 20^th century American strategists. I think that criticism is valid, and something that absolutely needs to be controlled for when studying the ancient world for lessons to apply to the modern world. It’s an inherent difference between military history and military science. Lacey’s work straddles that divide. Even when I think he’s getting things absolutely right and making good points, that anachronistic issue makes those lessons questionable and dangerous. 

But that’s all based on his 20-minute presentation, which may be seen almost as more of a sales pitch. It certainly worked on me. I had wavered on whether or not I should take the time to read his book before, given my other professional obligations (which are currently focused on the 19th century). Now I am absolutely going to read it this year.

10:30 14 panels to choose from

The second slot of morning panels was again excellent, with military suicide, counter-insurgency, and maritime strategy amongst the offered topics. I thought the panel Visualizing Empire in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the United States in the 1890s might be an excellent preview of the Marines in the Steam Navy book I hope to write next, but instead I decided to attend a panel with two historians of the Marine Corps whose work I respect and want to support.

That was Masculinity and its Discontents: The Effect of Masculine Identities on Service Culture in Elite Units. Too many Marines (and others) get their brains locked down when words like masculinity or toxic appear, but you cannot honestly understand the cultural and institutional history of the Corps without addressing them. The Corps is, after all, a self-created, self-maintained, and self-selecting (and self-centered?) “elite” in every sense of the term.

This was the only panel which had any tech issues, the slide projector not working properly. But all of the presenters handled this well, even those whose presentations were heavily dependent on images. The panel was standing room only, in one of the smaller rooms in the conference. Around 30 attendees, I believe.

The first paper was “The Few, the Proud, the (Relatively) Stagnant: 100+ Years of the Corps' Depicting Women Marines” by Heather Venable, Air Command and Staff College. Heather is the author of How the Few Became the Proud (2019) which is easily one of the top five histories ever written about the Marine Corps. Her presentation was entertaining and informative, showed how far behind the Corps still was in its presentation of Woman Marines. I should point out that Heather was the conference Chair, she organized all of SMH 2023.

The second paper was ““Semper Woke”: Race, Gender, Sexuality and the Ugly Side of the Marine Corps' Debate Over Force Design 2030” by Mark Folse, U.S. Army Center of Military History. In his past Mark served as an infantry Marine in Afghanistan, and his conclusions about Marine culture were both searing and highly accurate as a result. He is also one of History Division’s many success stories, since he was one of our interns and has gone on to teach at the Naval Academy and now write for the Army.

The third paper was “A “Rough” And “Proud” Group Of Men: Marine Corps Masculinity In The Late Twentieth Century” by Thomas Scovel, United States Naval Academy.  A professional paper that reinforced the findings of the previous two papers, in my opinion. 

The final paper was the only non-Marine Corps paper for the panel, ““Our Problem Children”: Constructing Paratrooper Masculinity in World War II and its Modern Legacy” by Robert F. Williams, Ohio State University. He deftly combined evidence and personal experience in his presentation.

Overall, I thought this was a critical but important set of panels on a difficult issue. I never got to ask the question the panel inspired in me, unfortunately. I wonder if the extremely performative masculinity of the Marines and the paratroopers today comes, in part, from the sense that both may feel sidelined or marginalized in modern strategic calculations. Airborne assault has arguably been identified as of only marginal use since World War II, and the many have claimed that first nuclear weapons and then anti-ship missiles and drones have made amphibious assaults obsolete as well.

3:30 14 panels to choose from

Saturday finished with another outstanding set of panels covering a diverse set of topics, commemoration, masculinity, gender, ethnicity, ancient and medieval history, and operational warfare topics. And an excellent roundtable, “War in Afghanistan Oral History Roundtable.”

Keynote Address

The keynote address was given by Dr. Craig L. Symonds, Professor Emeritus of History at the United States Naval Academy. Symonds is the author of many excellent works on naval history, most notably the Civil War and the Second World War. His most recent book was a biography of Admiral Nimitz, and I was frankly hoping that his keynote would primarily talk about Nimitz, or at least would speak specifically about naval history. Instead, it was a fairly short talk (maybe 20 minutes?) on the importance and value of military history broadly. Symonds is a gifted speaker, and the presentation was convincing and enjoyable. But I could not help being just a touch disappointed since I was hoping for a more in-depth discussion.

Sunday

Sunday panels are traditionally poorly attended, as many attendees leave early on Sunday.

8:30 a.m.  14 panels to choose from.

The Sunday panels this year were actually pretty good, however. They covered fascinating topics like courage in antiquity, expert language as means of controlling access in modern militaries, medicine in warfare, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Gulf War. Of especial note for official historians were two roundtables: “Light at the End of the Tunnel”: The Army’s Official History of the Vietnam War Nears Completion and Pervasive Myths in U.S. Naval History.

10:30 a.m.  13 panels to choose from.

The final batch of panels was as varied as the others. A naval panel with papers from ancient Greece to Vietnam, operational World War II and Global War on Terror panels, as well as panels on science and ethnicity.

The final panel I attended was Fulfilling our Nation’s Promise to those in the Forgotten War: Research into Locating and Identifying the Korean War’s Missing. The panels three papers were ““Operation Pickup”: Recovering War Dead from the Korean Demilitarized Zone, 1953-54” by Kyle Bracken, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, “Accounting for UNC (and ROK?) prisoner of wars (POWs) during and after the Korean War” from Anna Rindfleisch, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, and “Seventy Years Later: Attempting to Account for Those Still Missing from the Chosin Reservoir, North Korea” by Abraham Shragge, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. The panel’s chair and commentator was Annette Amerman, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.

Annette is a former History division colleague and a good friend. This panel was not the normal sort of topic I am interested in and it really brought home to me the diversity of the papers, presenters, and attendees at SMH meetings.  Yes, as I mentioned earlier, the Society is split between “academic” historians and government historians, but there are several subgroups there as well. Government historians include the “Title 10” types - historians who teach at the various service academies or war colleges, such as Marine Corps University as well as the service history office historians who produce official histories, who work for place like my own employer, the Marine Corps History Division or the U.S. Army’s Center for Military History. But there are also the museum curators from places like the Smithsonian or the National Museum of the Marine Corps, National Park Service rangers manning the nations preserved battlefields, forts, and other military history sites like Gettysburg, and the historians like my friend Annette, working to find and identify every one of America’s lost war dead.

“Academic” historians include university professors, and their students, from large research institutions like Ohio State University, but also professors from smaller liberal arts schools and community colleges. It also includes, in my estimation, historians working in private sector think tanks and contractors like RAND. And there are many “independent” scholars in the Society as well, doing work in the field on the side while they are either retired or working in another field for their primary means of support but producing books and articles furthering the study of military history nonetheless.

On Sunday, the conference concluded at noon. Myself and a couple fellow historians went to the USS Midway Museum (https://www.midway.org/) for the afternoon, which offered free admission to all SMH attendees with their badges. The Midway tour was excellent, illustrating living conditions typical to large Navy vessels in the 1970s and 1980s. The deck was covered with Navy aircraft from the 1950s on, and the since we visited on a Sunday, there were many volunteers, many former naval aviators, giving excellent talks and presentations on the ship and its aircraft. It completely brought me back to my days as a young Marine on the USS Belleau Wood and USS Guadalcanal. 

A personal highlight was the very first display seen when boarding, the three major WWII naval aircraft that were employed in the Battle of Midway – F4F Wildcat, SBD-3 Dauntless, and TBD-1 Devastator. The only negative was the film shown about the Battle of Midway, which was jingoistic and a little inaccurate. It also did a poor job covering the battle, or even just the story of the naval aviators in the battle, during the time allotted.

Overall, though, the museum was excellent.

An excellent conclusion to a memorable, if a bit exhausting, annual meeting for the Society for Military History. I look forward to next year’s conference, though having the conference in Arlington, Virginia will be a mixed blessing. It’s actually less convenient, since I’ll need to travel up from Fredericksburg every day (2 hours or so each way, whether I drive or take the train). Much easier when I can just stay in the conference hotel. But no long flights or clock changes, at least, and I'll be able to see my family every night.   

All views in this blog are my own and represent the views of no other person, organization, or institution.