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."
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."