By: Brian McNamara

Dr. Aaron B. O'Connell is a historian, a musician, an author,and a marine. He holds a PhD in history and a master's degree in American studies from Yale University as well as a master's degree in American literature from Indiana University. Currently serving at the Director of Defense Policy and Strategy on the National Security Council, he was previously associate professor of history at the U.S. Naval Academy.

As a Marine reservist, he has served as a strategic analyst for the Commandant of the Marine Corps, a Special Assistant to General David H. Petraeus in Afghanistan, a Special Advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and as the Senior Defense Official and Defense Attaché to the U.S. Embassy in South Sudan. He is the author of Underdogs: The Making of the Modern Marine Corps (Harvard University Press, 2012). His writings on military culture have also appeared in the New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Daily Beast, and numerous other journals and publications. 

Coinciding with Veterans Day, O'Connell will be speaking at Temple University on Nov. 11. His lecture, co-sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts and the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy, will synthesize a recent article on military history published in the Chronicle of Higher Education and his forthcoming Our Latest Longest War: Losing Hearts and Minds in Afghanistan (Chicago University Press, 2017).

In conjunction with his upcoming talk, O'Connell sat down with Brian McNamara, a PhD student in Temple's Department of History who serves as the Thomas J. Davis Fellow at CENFAD to discuss the state of military history today, and its potential directions for the future.

[Note: Dr. O'Connell's views are his own and do not represent the policy of the Department of Defense or the United States Government.]

You wrote a piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education about the "divorce" between military history and the rest of the historical discipline. What do you mean by that? What happened?

There are really two reasons for the divorce: one is methodological and the other is socio-cultural. Both have their historical roots in the 1960s. In academia, the sixties was truly an exciting and revolutionary time because the humanities — including American history — finally began moving away from top-down elite approaches and started including previously-ignored voices in the story of America's past. This led to a long-overdue efflorescence of social and cultural history, and in American history and American Studies, we started seeing more of what Edward Said would call "counterpunctal narratives" of the American experience, which have really helped broaden the conversation about the stories Americans tell themselves about their country and its history.

Unfortunately, military historians were somewhat slow to take up these new methods; their subject matter kept them over-focused, in my opinion, on officer decision-making and those officers were almost exclusively white men. Making things worse was the fact that military historians themselves were mostly white men. The field just didn't represent the country or the student body of the post-WWII university. That's changing now, and we're finally seeing a concerted effort to incorporate race, class, gender, and culture into the study of the military, which is a good thing.

So that's how the rupture started, I think, but the more interesting story is why it has gone on for so long. And I think the answer to that question lies partly in social upheaval of the 1960s and the unproductive ways that military, social, and cultural historians have caricaturized other's scholarship ever since. In a way, the fight between military history and the rest of the discipline is really a proxy war in a larger struggle over the proper role of the military on university campuses and in academia more broadly. And the history here is important. The Cold War brought a lot of government funding into universities but it also militarized the academy — ROTC programs, DOD-funded research, and in some cases, classified research that universities hid from the public and from the students.

When the news broke about that classified research, students protested. When the war in Vietnam started and then escalated, students protested. And in some cases those protests turned violent. Everyone remembers Kent State when National Guardsmen shot and killed four students and wounded another nine in 1970, but just three months later, student protesters bombed Sterling Hall at the University of Madison, killing one and wounding three.

This low point in civil-military relations on the university campus led to a still-running debate on whether the military should have any place at all in academia. The loudest answer from faculty in the 1970s and 1980s was a resounding "no" and I think this explains why departments started hiring fewer military historians, even though the student demand for their expertise has always remained high.

Then the debate about the role of the military in academia became part of the culture wars of the 1990s — which was largely about the legacies of Vietnam in my opinion — and conservative pundits started branding leftist and left-leaning professors as "un-American" or anti-military partly because universities were taking the courageous and principled stance of rejecting the military's discrimination against the LGBT community. So all of that spilled over into the ways social and cultural historians have thought about military historians and vice versa. Somehow, studying the military got translated into supporting military operations overseas uncritically — which is ridiculous — and some military historians seemed to oppose cultural history and the study of race, class, and gender on principle, which is equally ridiculous. I've been trying to debunk the myths since I entered academia and I've found that they're still fairly powerful on both sides.

The work of history is to generate narratives about the past that help us understand cause and effect and that link events link together through time.

You've written that wars can "wreck and rescue economies, spur scientific discoveries, re-organize and disorganize labor relations," as well as "redefine race, class, and gender hierarchies and change the narratives we use to understand ourselves and our countries' roles in the world." What are some of the most interesting areas of military history to you today?

I really enjoy thinking about the ways that military influence and infrastructure have affected American society and the world in the 20th century. If you think about it, before 1898, the U.S. had a contested culture of isolationism, no real military bases beyond the continent, and nothing approaching a national security state. This isn't to say the U.S. wasn't in the empire-building business — indeed, it engaged in near-constant military conquest to colonize the continent — but in world affairs, it was comparatively uninvolved outside its immediate sphere of influence.

After the frontier closes in 1894, the U.S. takes its empire building overseas. It creates the most powerful and globally distributed military in the history of the world and spreads military influence and infrastructure into almost every corner of domestic life as well. By the end of the twentieth century — ostensibly a time of peace — the Department of Defense's 543 military installations around the world supported a global logistics system for delivering troops, ships, missiles or military assistance to any foreign shore in a matter of hours. U.S. defense spending accounted for more than a third of the world's total. Over 900 military installations existed in all 50 states. Obviously, those developments have had effects on nearly every element of the American experience — the economy, race relations, police departments, the built environment, the aviation industry, immigration flows, and so on — but most non-military historians still miss many of the connections between their subjects and the U.S. military.

You're an Afghanistan veteran and have spent a fair amount of time in government.  How did your academic training help in your other career as a military strategist and in the White House?

I think there's significant overlap in the skillsets needed for all three of the careers you've mentioned. The work of history is to generate narratives about the past that help us understand cause and effect and that link events link together through time. That's also the first step in policy work and strategy: understanding what happened on the ground, explaining how you know what you know, and separating essential events from trivial ones. Frankly, historical training is about the best training you can have for big-picture policy work, in my opinion. The other key skill is strong writing, which obviously, anyone who hopes to make it through a history PhD program needs to have. And here, I'm not talking about avoiding grammar errors or failing to link topic sentences to follow-on arguments — that's just the starting point.  I'm talking about economy of language:  learning to use succinct, powerful, nuanced phrasing to capture complex ideas in as few as words as possible. We rarely write anything longer than 6-7 pages in government, even when laying out a major policy approach to an entire country. There's no room for any word that doesn't matter. Now, you don't need to write history that way — sometimes there's good reason to build an idea slowly and with a looser style — but it's still a useful skill to practice. I've found it has made me a much better editor and writer in general.

You also write for several newspapers and magazines about gun culture, the movie Red Dawn, military displays at sporting events, and if I'm not mistaken, you even had a piece in The Daily Beast on military sexual assault and the Disney film Frozen.  How do you think historians should use their training to engage in public conversations? How do you try to contribute to the public discourse?

I think it differs with the subject. When I write about warfare, I'm usually trying to inject historical context into the conversation in order to deepen policymakers' and the public's perspectives and to point out long-term trends that I think will probably govern—or at least shape — present and future events. When I write about culture, I'm usually trying to describe the unspoken narratives that operate in the background of common sense or point out how careful framing can obscure hard truths with discursive sleights of hand. 

The Red Dawn piece came about when I learned that MGM was remaking the film and had made a number of changes to the original in order to feature the Marine Corps quite prominently. For example, in the 1984 version, the lead character is a high school football star, and in the 2012 version, he's a Marine home from Iraq. Also, there are several other Marines in the film too, which I thought was interesting because the 1984 version had only one military member in it — a downed Air Force pilot. 

Powers Boothe! And his character is also turned into a Marine in the remake.

Yes, Powers Boothe. Best name ever for an 80s movie actor. But while I was thinking about that, 20 kids and six adults became the victims of a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School just 25 miles from my hometown. Afterward, the piece went in a different direction. I started thinking about how the studio was going to deal with a film that depicts children with guns in the immediate aftermath of a real school shooting.  Then I learned that just 30 days before the original Red Dawn came out in 1984, the same thing had happened: there was a mass shooting at a McDonald's in San Ysidro, California, and the studio had to recall a bunch of Red Dawn film posters that depicted Russian soldiers standing outside of a bombed-out McDonalds.

So I guess I wanted to talk about how Americans talk about guns and the military and insurgencies and counter-insurgencies. Plus, there's a bunch of other weird things about that film that need interrogating: the guy who wrote and directed the original film, John Milius, was a central figure in the National Rifle Association. So, I wanted to talk about those things too.

What about the piece about sexual assault and Frozen?

That came about when I saw a video of a bunch of Marines getting a little too excited while watching Frozen, and I thought it was a good way to start a conversation about sex and violence in the military. No one liked that piece, though — not the Marine Corps, not The Daily Beast readers, not the Naval Academy. No one. I still like it though. I think I had some good things to say about how Americans think too simplistically about gender relations in the military. Richard Immerman once gave me a good piece of advice about online publishing.  He said, "Don't ever read the comments section."  I should have followed that advice. One commenter just wrote "Aaron - what's wrong with you?"

For perhaps the first time in the history of American warfare, in Iraq and Afghanistan we found ourselves with a number of military tasks that were essential to the mission and that only women could do. If that isn't an argument for removing all gender-based barriers to military service, I don't know what is.

Your latest project is a collection of essays on the War in Afghanistan.  How do you think historians should write about that war in the future and the war in Iraq as well?

Well, there are a lot of ways to do so, I think. We'll get a lot of the operational history of Iraq and Afghanistan from the services and from the traditional military historians, but I hope scholars from a range of subfields will investigate the social, political, economic and cultural effects of these wars as well. The gender relations of the wars are really interesting. Because of the conservative nature of Muslim societies, only female service members could interact safely with Iraqi and Afghan women and talking to civilians is an essential component of counter-insurgency. So, for perhaps the first time in the history of American warfare, in Iraq and Afghanistan we found ourselves with a number of military tasks that were essential to the mission and that only women could do. If that isn't an argument for removing all gender-based barriers to military service, I don't know what is. 

But that's just actions on the battlefield, which is just one part of military history. And while those topics require a certain amount of technical expertise in military tactics and hardware, the broader study of the military's effects in society and the world do not. Iraq and Afghanistan have affected so many elements of American life. We need cultural histories of the post-9/11 America — how have these wars changed our stories about what constitutes America's role in the world, or Muslims, or torture, or the right to privacy? How have they changed or challenged or undermined the post-WWII grand strategy of building and expanding an international rule-based liberal order? How have they affected the economy? I think the history of the military's effects on the economy and the rise of the military-industrial complex is really under-studied. There is some excellent work on it -- Andrew Friedman's Covert Capital, Kate Epstein's Torpedo, Jim Sparrow's Warfare State, to name just three - but we still need a lot more.

Any other angle on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that we should pay attention in the years ahead?

Well, I think historians of technology are really going to have some interesting topics to write about in the next two decades. The technological advances that have occurred in the last 20 years are truly astounding, particular in the areas of artificial intelligence, big data, data mining, prosthetics, and robotics. Some portion of that work has been driven by the military or by warfare-related factors. So, when Skynet arrives on June 16th, 2027 and cyborgs take over the world, future cyborg historians will probably celebrate this period as the golden years when the silly humans invented robotic limbs and artificially intelligent weapon systems and had no idea what they were unleashing on the world. 

Please tell me you're kidding.

I am. Sort of. Resistance is futile.