I feel slightly bad for the guy being quoted in that tweet - it was part of a feed of live tweets from a conference, and it apparently cut off the rather vital next line, which was "this is great, they can establish the facts."

The tweet gained a lot of traction because it confirmed, even if accidentally, many academic historians' prejudices towards military history. I have several friends who specialise in straight military history in the UK, and they all have horror stories about conferences dominated by retired officers who scoff at their upstart interventions, often with the (sometimes very overt) subtext of "how could you know what it was like, if you've never served." This, as numerous wits have pointed out on twitter, is simply not how any other field of history works, otherwise studying the history of contagious disease would suddenly become a whole lot more unattractive.

There is a sense too that military historians aren't asking the same sort of questions, either because they are too technical (which tank tanks the best?) or too subjective (which general generalled the best?). This is probably unfair, as ultimately all any historian is doing is trying to find out the answers to questions they find interesting, even if no one else thinks so. There's perhaps a peformative element of dismissal at work too, with many academics who work on war-related subjects being careful to distinguish themselves from those who are merely interested in the guns and explosions. I've certainly been guilty of that - I was shocked when I noticed that my flair here had been categorised as military history, a label I'd consciously avoided for years to make sure other historians knew I was serious. It's a fair label really given my specialty, but I'd always considered myself as doing something else, not least because I couldn't even begin to tell you which tank was which in Spain.

The good news is probably that things are changing, and there's a lot of new work happening that seeks to bridge the perceived gap between academic and military history. In the UK at least, there have been a whole bunch of new research groups, conferences and initiatives emerge even in the past couple of years. I doubt I'll ever be able to have a useful conversation about tanks with anyone, but maybe I'll be able to come to terms with kinda, sorta being a military historian anyway.

/u/crrpit has a good response, but I'd point you to this old thread too, which has a good discussion from several users, including /u/commiespaceinvader and myself.

I think it is more that is waining in history circles.

Im a history student at a top 50 uni, and we do not have a military historian in our faculty.

Faculty tends to slide into three categories in my experience: cultural, social, socio-cultural.

This seems to be the new trend of history. The questions that seem to arise are not so much about the facts of war but about the conditions that led to war, ie why do we have armed insurrections in the middle east by guerrilla fighters, or what factors led to the marginalization of Bosniaks, etc.