All but forgotten
The classicist VDH describes the resistance to his study of warfare:
I naively began writing about war for a Stanford classics dissertation that explored the effects of agricultural devastation in ancient Greece, especially the Spartan ravaging of the Athenian countryside during the Peloponnesian War. The topic fascinated me. Was the strategy effective? Why assume that ancient armies with primitive tools could easily burn or cut trees, vines, and grain on thousands of acres of enemy farms…
my advisor was skeptical. Agrarian wars, indeed wars of any kind, weren’t popular in classics Ph.D. programs, even though farming and fighting were the ancient Greeks’ two most common pursuits, the sources of anecdote, allusion, and metaphor in almost every Greek philosophical, historical, and literary text. Few classicists seemed to care any more that most notable Greek writers, thinkers, and statesmen — from Aeschylus to Pericles to Xenophon — had served in the phalanx or on a trireme at sea.
Dozens of nineteenth-century dissertations and monographs on ancient warfare — on the organization of the Spartan army, the birth of Greek tactics, the strategic thinking of Greek generals, and much more — went largely unread. Nor was the discipline of military history, once central to a liberal education, in vogue on campuses in the seventies. It was as if the university had forgotten that history itself had begun with Herodotus and Thucydides as the story of armed conflicts.
This is a self-correcting problem. Our dainty times will also end in some way. It’s more a question of whose history of warfare future generations might learn.