A great read, really gets at both what military history can be, and the way that it can be reductively criticized. The roots of military history within the education systems of the elites is important, it promoted so much focus on military history as a way to teach future military leaders how to win future wars, not to understand the past.
Unfortunately, I don't know if it can, as a discipline, break away from some of the problems that it has been saddled with. There is a lot of bad military history out there, and specifically a lot of REALLY popular bad military history.
A lot of people don't want critical and expansive (beyond the battlefield) military history. They want either good guys vs bad guys narratives or deep rivet-counting/platoon-chasing level histories that ignore anything beyond a very narrow focus on specific actions on the battlefield.
The author makes a distinction between the "drums and trumpets" / "cult of the badass" following and the actual academic discipline, so I think this field is doing fine. It has a similar problem as the "pop sci" fluff resulting from badly copied university press releases which were inaccurate in the first place. The enthusiasts which then pick up from there are just a lot more, because to them war is just too interesting and emotionally satisfying. This then has an effect on the society as a whole, something for maybe military sociologists to research? But nothing the field itself can be blamed for, if anything without it the situation might be a lot worse.
I found this quote fitting: "[..] military historians study conflict in the same way that doctors study disease; no one assumes that doctors like diseases, quite the opposite."
Edit: Also thought provoking and reflecting on the fascination of war, in the comments the user TomBombadil quotes musings of a sentient machine from Iain M. Banks Culture novel Excession:
"It was a warship, after all. It was built, designed to glory in destruction, when it was considered appropriate. It found, as it was rightly and properly supposed to, an awful beauty in both the weaponry of war and the violence and devastation which that weaponry was capable of inflicting, and yet it knew that attractiveness stemmed from a kind of insecurity, a sort of childishness. It could see that—by some criteria—a warship, just by the perfectly articulated purity of its purpose, was the most beautiful single artifact the Culture was capable of producing, and at the same time understand the paucity of moral vision such a judgment implied. To fully appreciate the beauty of the weapon was to admit to a kind of shortsightedness close to blindness, to confess to a sort of stupidity. The weapon was not itself; nothing was solely itself. The weapon, like anything else, could only finally be judged by the effect it had on others, by the consequences it produced in some outside context, by its place in the rest of the universe. By this measure the love, or just the appreciation, of weapons was a kind of tragedy."
Not arguing, but just want to throw in the rivet-counting can have its place. For example Shattered Sword, one of the examples he gives of a “campaign” history that has deeper value, uses a ton of technical detail to show the tactical options that were available to the Japanese fleet, and ultimately puncture a lot of myths about Midway.
The important point in this case is that the rivet-counting has a purpose, it isn’t just for forum warriors to obsess over gun weights or which battleship was the most badass. Shattered Sword uses it to show that a lot of the popular account of the battle is factually impossible.
Another example would be Jutland: An Analysis of the Fighting by J.M. Campbell. As far as analysis goes, it's fairly weak. On the other hand, it's a good and extremely detailed base collection of who did what, when, and with what result. It is therefore a excellent reference to start from for more actual analysis.
That is a product of bad education, not anything subjectively limited to military history. I took a military history class in college and it was all about second and third order consequences on technology innovation, politics, and evolution of leadership. It was one of the best and most remembered classes I ever took.
History in general has had (and has) that same problem; see the Great Man Theory. But the better classes of professional (and amateur) historians now regard that as poor analysis and try to produce and promote better things.
Ultimately, narrative history---and that includes a lot of good-guys-vs-bad-guys and rivet-counting---isn't going to go away. In fact, it can't, because that is some of the base data for critical history.
Unfortunately, I don't know if it can, as a discipline, break away from some of the problems that it has been saddled with. There is a lot of bad military history out there, and specifically a lot of REALLY popular bad military history.
A lot of people don't want critical and expansive (beyond the battlefield) military history. They want either good guys vs bad guys narratives or deep rivet-counting/platoon-chasing level histories that ignore anything beyond a very narrow focus on specific actions on the battlefield.