Strategy and the Last Manager: The Case for Dissenting War Studies

Introduction: War and Burnham

James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution is not, at first glance, a foundational text of war studies. Written in 1941 amid the cataclysm of the Second World War, it is most often treated as a work of political theory and historical prognostication. And yet, buried within its pages is a theory of war’s evolving function within society—one that has profound implications for the study of war itself.

For Burnham, war was not a mere eruption of violence or a failure of diplomacy; it was a mechanism of revolutionary transformation. It served as the crucible through which one form of social organisation—the feudal, the capitalist—was broken and replaced by another. In Burnham’s account, the First World War marked the death knell of capitalist hegemony. The Second World War heralded the rise of a new ruling class: the managers. The age of aristocratic warriors and capitalist entrepreneurs gave way to an era in which technical experts, bureaucrats and policy planners would not merely run the machinery of government and war—they would become its rationale.

By ‘managerialism’, Burnham meant something precise.[1] It was not simply administration or expertise, but a whole mode of social organisation in which control is exercised less through ownership or charisma than through the command of specialised knowledge, procedures and institutions. The managerial class is defined by its capacity to administer systems—economic, military, political—through technical expertise, credentialed authority and bureaucratic process. Its social domination lies not in direct command or traditional property rights but in planning, optimising, coordinating and regulating. It rules by managing.

The value of Burnham to war studies, therefore, lies in his broader theory of how societies are structured and transformed—and how war is both a reflection of, and catalyst for, those transformations. Burnham compels us to ask: what kind of society fights a particular kind of war, and what kind of knowledge does it produce about it? More provocatively: what happens to the study of war when it becomes colonised by the class that manages rather than leads, that optimises in theory but ossifies in practice.

What happens, we suggest, is that war studies becomes a shadow play—an academic discipline that echoes official narratives, calibrates policy assumptions and mistakes methodological rigour for intellectual audacity. The field ceases to interrogate war’s meaning and begins instead to fine-tune its procedures, offering not challenge but compliance. Strategy becomes branding. Critique becomes consultancy. And what should be a domain of hard-won insight collapses into ‘impact’ metrics and access to power.

This article attempts to trace the genealogy of war studies in light of Burnham’s theory of managerial revolution. It does so not to indulge in historical determinism or academic taxonomy, but to lay the groundwork for a new kind of war studies—a dissenting war studies—that challenges the suffocating orthodoxy of managerialism and reorients the study of war back to the real politics it claims to serve.

Reading Burnham’s Theory into War Studies

If war studies has become a managerial shadow play, then the place to begin is with Burnham himself, whose theory shows how war and social order are never separable but mutually constitutive.

Although, The Managerial Revolution may not reside in the war studies canon, its analytical reach extends to a field that most needs perspective: the nexus between war and social transformation. For Burnham, war is not an anomaly in history—it is history’s mechanism. As he puts it bluntly, war is not some ‘special and peculiar’ event requiring qualifiers like ‘war economy’ rather, all economies are war economies.[2] Societies make war in the manner of their political and economic structure. Thus, a capitalist society fights its capitalist wars capitalistically—until, of course, it no longer can.[3]

Burnham argued that the First World War marked the end of capitalist war, while the Second announced the dawn of managerial war. The demands of total war required the transformation of state institutions in ways that made the managerial class—technocrats, administrators, planners—not just essential to the war effort, but central to society’s very survival. War became not simply another activity to be managed, but the accelerator of social revolution: from feudal to capitalist, and then to managerial.[4]

This recognition lends The Managerial Revolution a curiously prophetic character. It is not just about the Second World War, but about the structure of war itself—its embeddedness in the political economy of its age. Burnham’s holistic analysis avoids the modern trap of hyper-specialisation: his approach to war is not subdivided into disciplinary boxes but embraces history, economics, political theory and strategic logic as one continuous field.[5]

This leads us to the crucial question: why does war studies look the way it does? The answer is because it reflects the society that produces it. If war is an expression of social order, then the study of war is likewise a function of that order’s ideological, institutional and managerial imperatives. Burnham’s ‘cold analysis’ (to use his own words)—devoid of moralising or reformist fantasy—helps us see how war shapes and is shaped by the ruling class of its age.[6] And today, that ruling class is managerial.[7]

Applying Burnham’s Theory to War Studies

Burnham may not therefore, have written a war studies textbook, but he anticipated its future better than most. If his theory explains why wars change with societies, it also explains why the study of war mutates alongside it—particularly once the managerial class takes the helm.

Sir John Hackett’s The Profession of Arms provides a striking, if unintentional, bridge between classic military thought and Burnham’s political theory.[8] Hackett asked the essential question: What is the relationship between the military profession and the society it serves? His answer—that war is the effective ordering of ‘force in the resolution of social problems’[9]—mirrors Burnham’s fundamental claim: that war is the crucible through which ruling classes emerge, transform and entrench themselves.

After the Second World War, Hackett recognised a ‘big jump in the application of business techniques to military problems’, increased specialisation of functions and an expanded drive for rationalisation.[10] In short, strategy was no longer forged in the minds of warrior-statesmen but in the spreadsheets of systems analysts—what Hackett himself explicitly termed ‘the managerial revolution in the U.S. armed forces’.[11] In military terms, he confirmed what Burnham’s thesis posited: the managers had arrived, and they were here to stay.

This is not a coincidence—it is convergence. Just as managerial society restructured the political economy, it restructured war, and, inevitably, war studies. The question—why does war studies look the way it does?—becomes less academic and more forensic. Like the society it mirrors, the discipline now prizes metrics over meaning, conformity over curiosity, and policy alignment over independent thought. The managers did not merely assume control of the state—they redefined the very terms by which war is waged, studied and remembered.

And this is precisely the problem. Today, war studies reflects not the enduring logic of war, but the intellectual pathologies of its managerial custodians. It has absorbed their worldview wholesale—technocratic, ‘depoliticised’ and reflexively self-justifying. What was once a field concerned with the clash of arms has become so fragmented across disciplinary boundaries that its central premise—the application of organised violence in pursuit of political ends—has been obscured in an academic smog of competing agendas and specialist silos.

The problem is not confined to the margins. Even within ‘the world’s largest faculty devoted to the study of war’ the managerial malaise is evident.[12] One current scholar has observed that, in a faculty of more than a hundred academics, fewer than five could effectively analyse a contemporary or historical military campaign.[13] The figure is striking, not only because all are nominally committed to the study of war, but because it illustrates how far the discipline has drifted from its animating spirit. [14]

To understand this drift, Burnham’s theory offers a map. With this in mind, then, let us turn, via Burnham, to the evolution of war studies in the predominantly English-speaking world as it passed through distinct phases, each reflecting the dominant social logic of its time. [15]

From Feudal Lord to Staff Officer: The Early Evolution of War Studies

The earliest phase of war studies was not academic but aristocratic. In the medieval world, political power was radically decentralised—better described as politically atomised, even chaotic. Sovereignty was not centralised in a single ruler but fragmented among a vast hierarchy of landholding nobles: dukes, earls, barons, and even ecclesiastical figures such as bishops and abbots. Each exercised de facto authority over their territories, which waxed and waned with their personal power and willingness to wield it.

As Burnham stated, a vassal obeyed his suzerain ‘about as much as his weakness or his schemes made necessary, and little more’.[16] In such a world, military capability was not delegated—it was sovereign power itself. A monarch’s ability to make war was less a function of central command and more an extension of his holdings and his capacity to compel loyalty from a patchwork of semi-autonomous baronies.

War, in this setting, was the natural function—the natural right—of the noble class. It was not only tolerated but valorised, shaping the social order and sanctifying its hierarchies. Nobles did not merely command armies; they constituted them. Their legitimacy derived from their personal participation in battle, and their social standing was reinforced by it. So too, then, was the study of war: such as it existed, it was embedded within experience rather than abstracted through theory. To know war was to have fought it, and preferably to have inherited the land that came with the spoils.

The literature of the time reflects this ethos. Texts like Flavius Vegetius Renatus’ De Re Militari (c. 4th/5th century),[17] Emperor Maurice’s Strategikon (c. 6th century),[18] Ramon Llull’s Book of the Order of Chivalry (c.1275),[19] and Geoffroi de Charny’s Book of Chivalry (c. 1387)[20] were not treatises in the modern sense, but handbooks of aristocratic comportment—framed as moral instruction, tactical guidance and spiritual edification in equal measure.

Martin van Creveld noted, such writings ‘seldom rise above the specifics of time and place’,[21] because they addressed the concerns of a caste; their goal was not universal strategic insight but the cultivation of honour, obligation and martial virtue.[22] Hence, why very little of this literature features in war studies today. Hackett captures the logic succinctly: ‘armies were dominated by the principle that officers were gentlemen and non-officers were not’—a principle that did no more than project the social architecture of the day onto the field of battle.[23]

Capitalism and the Professionalisation of War

The collapse of the feudal order brought not peace but consolidation of states, armies, and, crucially, the means of war. As kings and capitalists made common cause, forging stronger states and centralised economies, war, too, was brought to heel. The days of patrician amateurism gave way to the industrial age of arms.[24] War became a national enterprise, waged not by noble right but by bureaucratic decree involving the mobilisation of the ‘whole manpower of the nation’.[25] From the cavalry charge to the conscripted column, the battlefield was reorganised in the image of the factory.

In this context, war ceased to be a vocation of honour and became a profession of merit. The Prussian military reforms of the early 19th century, most notably Gerhard von Scharnhorst’s creation of the Kriegsakademie, lowered the drawbridge of class exclusivity.[26] Now, military command was available to those who could pass an exam rather than inherit a title. The officer corps became educated, systematised and increasingly technocratic—a premonition of the managerialism to come.

Alongside this institutional evolution, war studies began to emerge in a recognisably modern form. Canonical figures such as Carl von Clausewitz, Antoine Henri Jomini, Edward Bruce Hamley and Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote not as disinterested scholars but as officers analysing their own craft.[27] Theorists of a different persuasion—Norman Angell, Jan Bloch, H.N. Brailsford, William James[28]—warned of war’s growing irrationality in a world supposedly governed by rationality. The resulting corpus was divided but revealing: some sought to teach war’s principles of conduct; others to show that those principles, when applied, might prove suicidal.

War, as Hamley noted, had become a matter of operations—planned, repeatable, calculable. This was now machinery at scale, requiring systematic thinking about logistics and supply, in which operations were part of a large complex system.[29] There was now no room for ‘romantic interest’, ‘prescience’ or ‘intuitive divination’ given to ‘heaven born’ generals.[30]

But for all its logistical brilliance, this new era of military-industrial warfare could not mask an emerging truth: that modern victory often came at a cost so total as to make the term itself suspect.[31] The capitalist era had professionalised war, but it had also made it far more destructive.

That destructiveness was not just material but structural, exposing the limits of capitalist war-making and clearing the way for a new form of social and military organisation: managerialism.

Capitalism Begets Managerialism

The First World War did not simply bury an older generation of officers—it laid to rest the social order they represented. The aristocratic honour culture of the past, already diluted by the professional militaries of the capitalist age, now gave way to something altogether new: the rise of the war manager. Victory, it turned out, required less gallantry than planning. The chaos of markets and the dithering of parliaments proved ill-suited to total war.[32] In their place arose the apparatus of mass mobilisation, bureaucratic control and industrial coordination—the hallmarks of what Burnham would identify as the new managerial society.[33]

This transition was not lost on contemporary thinkers. Bloch and Angell had argued, with admirable, if premature, logic, that war had become economically unsustainable—so ruinous as to render it obsolete.[34] But if war could not be abolished by rationality, it could at least be administered. Hence, a paradox emerged: war was no longer a political duel, but a logistical problem. Victory became a matter of throughput and escalation management. As Burnham argued, capitalist societies might start wars, but managerial societies would be the ones to finish them.

Amid this shift, war studies itself began to bifurcate. On one side stood traditional military thinkers preoccupied with manoeuvre and matériel; on the other, writers who treated war as a civilisational pathology. Between J.F.C Fuller, Basil Liddell Hart, Guilio Douhet, Ernst Jünger, Heinz Guderian, Alfred Vagts, Bertrand Russell and Erich Ludendorff, one finds both the apostles of technological triumph and the prophets of its doom.[35] But whatever their differences, these figures shared a new orientation: war was not simply a contest of wills, but a problem to be solved by systems.

And who better to solve problems, than managers?

Strategic Studies and the Cold Logic of the Managerial Mind

For Burnham, the Second World War was not merely another great-power conflict—it was the accelerant that propelled societies into the managerial age. In the furnace of total war, state ownership, centralised command and the indispensability of technically trained elites fused into a new and durable social order. The managers emerged from the war not as auxiliary staff to the state, but as its principal proprietors—ruling in all but name. Whether under the banners of Stalinism, Nazism, New Deal liberalism, or wartime technocracy, the governing ethos was the same: the ascendancy of those who planned, optimised and administered.[36]

The intellectual life of war followed suit. The publication of Makers of Modern Strategy (1943) signalled the legitimisation of strategy as an academic pursuit. War was now studied as an indispensable instrument of statecraft, its theories merging with the disciplines of geopolitics, deterrence, and increasingly, the formal modelling of human behaviour.[37] Clausewitz, was now read alongside game theory, nuclear physics and systems analysis.

By the early Cold War, the field’s luminaries—Bernard Brodie, Thomas Schelling, Herman Kahn—had translated strategic thought into a language of control variables, escalation ladders and cost–benefit equations.[38] Thermonuclear rivalry was reframed as a management problem to be solved by the judicious balancing of capabilities and intentions. The emphasis shifted from how to win wars to how best to avoid them—preferably under conditions dictated by the managerial overseers of the age.

It was within this expanding managerialised climate that the academy made its own tentative incursions into war’s study. King’s College London, which had nurtured a modest military studies programme since the 1920s, gradually grew into the Department of War Studies.[39] Yet even then, as it evolved through the post-Second World War epoch into the 1960s and 1970s, it remained semi-detached from the university’s mainstream disciplines—a polite annex to the staff college tradition, now recast in the language of strategic analysis, but above all ostensibly concerned—as nearly all contemporaneous equivalent centres of learning were—with the theoretics of nuclear deterrence and the management of state orientated defence policies and their associated civil-military relations.[40]

In this emerging worldview, the very mission of the military was redefined. As Bernard Brodie remarked with lapidary clarity in The Absolute Weapon (1946): ‘Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them’.[41] It was a vision of peace, certainly—but peace under new management.

Vietnam and the Lament of the Technocrats

And then came Vietnam—a war so thoroughly misread, mismanaged and misunderstood by the architects of modern strategy that it collapsed the entire edifice of confidence in the rational war manager.

No figure personified this hubris more completely than Robert McNamara, the former Ford Motor executive turned US Secretary of Defense. For McNamara, war could be budgeted, predicted and won through systems analysis.[42] With an arsenal of IBM machines, ‘people sniffers’, defoliants, electronic fences, and baroque metrics like ‘pacified hamlets’, he reduced military strategy to a quarterly progress report.[43]

Vietnam was not just a military defeat—it was an epistemic humiliation. It revealed the brutal limits of a worldview that believed escalation could be micromanaged, that culture could be coded, and that war could be won without understanding what it was for.[44] As Burnham warned in The War We Are In (1967), managerial elites had become so beholden to abstractions ‘Humanity’, ‘Peace’, ‘World Government’—that they no longer recognised the enemy, let alone understood the war.[45]

One of Burnham’s most neglected predictions from his 1941 book concerned the consolidation of the managerial revolution. He anticipated it would be complete by the mid-1960s, half a century after the outbreak of the First World War. [46] The Vietnam War, reaching its height in that very period, stands as testimony to his timeline. Here was the ‘dialectic of wills’ in action: a contest not merely of armies but of political resolve.[47] The managerial instinct, he argued, was to sanitise war into a technical problem, constrained by ‘zones of peace’ in which certain enemies were untouchable—not for strategic reasons, but out of ideological squeamishness.[48] The result was a policy posture that was, in practical effect, pro-defeat—a refusal to recognise Vietnam as part of a global showdown, and a willingness to lose so long as it could be done politely.[49]

Indeed, for Burnham, the managerial class had not merely stumbled—they had embraced failure. Their ‘strange lemming instinct’ led them to treat every defeat as an opportunity for deeper entrenchment, every setback as a crisis in method—an error of process rather than a failure of vision.[50] Vietnam should have discredited the entire paradigm. Instead, it refined it.

What followed was a solidification, not a retreat. The Cold War military was increasingly redefined not as a fighting force, but in Hackett’s view, as a ‘constabulary’ one.[51] The aim was no longer victory, but stability; no longer Clausewitzian purpose, but a process of the ‘management of violence’.[52] The officer class was re-trained not to command through charisma or courage, but to manage through planning cycles, procurement systems and choreographed defence diplomacy.

As General Hackett discerned, modern war had become something increasingly managed by nine-to-five types who viewed combat experience as a vague historical embarrassment.[53] The ideal military leader was no longer a Patton but a project manager—with a security clearance.[54]

Burnham’s insight remains: the structure of society, in this instance managerialism, does not simply change the study of war—it transforms war itself, reshaping its purpose, practice and meaning. As strategic studies grew ever more removed from the realities of political conflict, it created a simulacrum of strategy—one where the form endured but the substance had quietly vanished.

The End of War Studies and the Last Manager

The Vietnam debacle marked not the end of managerialism, but its adaptation. Its failures were carried forward, institutionalised and ultimately rebranded in the post–Cold War order.

With the Cold War over and liberal internationalism triumphant, the study of war was not abolished—but it was, in a sense, dissolved. What had once been a field concerned with the violent resolution of political disputes found itself reinvented as a sprawling intellectual holding company: part international relations, part development studies, part self-flattering moral theatre, with a few electives on military history thrown in for nostalgic flair.

The collapse of the Soviet Union gave war studies new horizons—complex emergencies, ‘new’ wars, smart power, network centric warfare, humanitarian intervention, peacekeeping, post-conflict reconstruction, the global war on terror, counter-insurgency—but also blurred its defining identity. In place of understanding war in its hard elemental form, students were nudged towards a polite avoidance of it—through a kind of policy-adjacent busywork that dignified an interest in war without confronting it directly. The result was a discipline that spun off into diplomacy, intelligence, global governance, and other orbiting constellations, all the while losing sight of its own gravitational centre.

With universities remodelling themselves as retail outlets for credentialisation, the employability gospel is sold to fee-paying aspirants.[55] Students are promised career pathways into foreign ministries, think tanks, intelligence agencies, NGOs and policy analysis. Pick up any elite university’s prospectus, and it will boast of its proven track record of graduate success across the alphabet soup of international and public service organisations.[56] Degrees proliferate, producing graduates well versed in the technical and progressive jargon that smooths entry into these worlds, yet ill-equipped to explain why wars happen in the first place.

What has emerged is less a discipline than a franchise: flexible, marketable and always ready to meet ‘stakeholder’ needs. Its final metamorphosis came with the rise of the policy ‘expert’—defined less by critical insight than by the ability to repeat the right-sounding platitudes, frame deliverables, and, above all, never stray from the institutional consensus.[57]

War has been refashioned along the lines Burnham envisioned into a form of managerial utility. In the post-Cold War age, war studies no longer asks what war is for, but how the degree can be parlayed into a desk, an allyship lanyard and a career in PowerPoint presentations—where the only bullets you will ever encounter are bullet points, and the only campaign you will ever fight will be the battle with the online expenses form.

Thus, we move from Fukuyama’s End of History and the Last Man to: The End of War Studies and the Last Manager—a figure better equipped to navigate a funding call than a battlefield.[58]

From Managerial Dominance to Intellectual Erosion

In Burnham’s theory, the transition from capitalist to managerial society brought not merely a new elite, but a new mode of control—one that redefined the very nature of strategic thought. Within war studies, this has not simply reshaped the curriculum or the funding landscape; it has rewritten the field’s intellectual DNA.

Where earlier military thinkers—from Clausewitz to Fuller—confronted the essence of war head-on, the managerial turn has replaced these agonistic problems with the language of access. Debates about strategy within war studies now means not so much thinking about war as demonstrating one’s fluency in the in-group rhetoric of whatever is currently fashionable: whole-of-government, the rules-based international order, hybrid warfare, grey zone threats, climate-security, or cyber-resilience. Political will—the animating force behind any decision to wage war—is discounted, if recognised at all.

The result is a form of intellectual neutering: dissenting or radical insights are invariably excluded because they cannot be plotted on a graph but usually because they jar with the consensus mood music. Why a war is fought is less interesting than how it is managed; contingency planning trumps political clarity, narrative management replaces national resolve, and the only real battle left is to keep pace with the latest orthodoxy—until yesterday’s certainty becomes tomorrow’s awkward silence.

The Cult of Failure without Consequence

This technocratic overreach might be tolerable if it delivered results. However, it does not. As recent experience shows, managerial strategy has presided over repeated—catastrophic—blunders. From Iraq to Afghanistan, Libya to Ukraine, the West’s strategic managers have created a perverse cycle of failure.[59] The ‘permanent war economy’ compounds the problem, rewarding each calamity with more funding and analysis, turning fiasco into a self-sustaining growth industry.[60]

We are thus caught in what might be called the ‘Doomed Expertise Paradox’: the worse the record, the greater the demand for strategic managers. The institutions that preside over disaster do not collapse—they metastasise. The result is a field emptied of insight, leaving only job security for those who got it wrong last time and a proliferating cadre of ‘experts’ whose numbers swell in step with their misjudgements.

Here, Burnham’s thesis reaches its ultimate expression. The strategic managers do not merely misjudge—they redefine success to suit their own continuity. Strategy becomes a self-licking ice cream cone: it generates its own purpose, feeds on its own failures, and—most crucially—never questions its own authority.[61]

The final hallmark of this descent is the rise of the ‘insider’. As the journalist Tom Stevenson notes, today’s strategic analyst is often less an independent mind than a carefully curated appendage of power. Think tanks, defence consultancies, university departments—all orbit the same gravitational pull: access to influence: what he calls the Defence-Intellectual Complex.[62] Platforms like War on the Rocks cheerfully admit this: ‘For Insiders. By Insiders’ is its motto.[63] And once inside, dissent is a reputational liability.[64]

This managerial capture hollows out the discipline from within. The field no longer speaks truth to power; it speaks PowerPoint to policy. And what it defends is not national security, nor intellectual clarity, but the interests of a managerial class—those who rule not by virtue of strategic wisdom, but by procedural mastery and bureaucratic permanence.

This is what Dissenting War Studies resists, the way war is studied, justified and managed—on behalf of those who neither fight it nor understand it.

Conclusion: Against the Drift

Burnham was clear-eyed in his analysis: the managerial class would not merely administer modern society—they would come to embody the accepted model of reason itself.[65] War, under their stewardship, would cease to be the violent resolution of political will and instead become a managed process, insulated by expertise and shielded by jargon. The tragedy, of course, is not that Burnham overstated his case—but that so much of it now feels unremarkable.

Today, war studies has lost much of its sharpness. Once a crucible of hard political reflection, it has become something far safer: an instrument of institutional continuity. Its idioms are polished, its privileges preserved, its conferences well-catered. Yet its real-world influence has dwindled. The field has not vanished—but its raison d’être has thinned into abstraction.

This need not be the final word. While Burnham traced a powerful logic of elite consolidation, we are not required to share his determinism—nor the Marxist teleology it was fashioned by.[66] History, however rationalised in retrospect, is never inevitable in advance. And so we resist not merely the managerial system, but the fatalism that accompanies it.

To break free from this impasse, a few modest proposals may serve as signposts:

• Resist the seductions of insider status, which too often reward proximity over principle.
• Cultivate scepticism toward official consensus, particularly where consensus begins to resemble inertia.
• Reclaim the power of question-framing, rather than endlessly optimising flawed solutions.
• Rediscover strategic humility, and remember that even dissenting voices are not immune to error.
• Reinvigorate war studies as a pluralist discipline, open to moral, cultural and political perspectives—not just material capabilities or intellectual fashions.
• Encourage lived experience, not to fetishise the veteran, but to temper theory with reality.
• Foster real public engagement, without which strategy becomes a language spoken only among elites, about interests that no longer belong to the public.
• Retain a core focus on what war is, the application of violent force to achieve political objectives and resolve social problems.

These are not revolutionary proposals. They are, in fact, reminders of what the study of war can aspire to be as an endeavour to expand the boundaries of knowledge and understanding. A field necessarily grounded in hard truths, open dispute and political judgement. That it has become a domain of sterile, even bogus, ‘expertise’ and euphemistic failure is not an argument for despair—but a call for recalibration.

We dissent, then, not from war studies, but from its managerialist mutation—domesticated, technocratised, stripped of its essential political character and all too often diluted into a miasma of highly specialised sub-fields that either have little to say about, or actively negate any serious study of, war. Burnham may have predicted the managers’ ascent, but we are not obliged to write their reports.

If war is too important to be left to the generals, then war studies is far too important to be left to the academic managers.