I would agree, with the observation that there are historians that are getting away from the single campaign model. My experience with military history has been that, if you're to do it well, you need to take a much broader focus than many of the sub-fields of history.

By way of explanation: wars are extensions of politics and policies (successful or failed), driven by social and scientific forces. If you don't understand how those aspects relate to each other, your analysis of a campaign in a broader context is going to be flawed in some way. A narrow focus also makes it difficult to see how changes in social structure, technology, and political science can and do influence war and warfighting. I feel this broad-based approach is even more important when studying small wars, since these often span many changes in all the above areas and bring in cultural history as well.

Military history, for good or ill, tends to be dominated in popular (and History Channel) culture by the "big wars," which are often presented as a series of campaigns to be dissected and evaluated over and over. I also feel this may take place due to mainstream academia's rejection of military history (on the whole, anyhow) as a legitimate area of study. Environmental history is fine, but military history somehow is not. This disconnect leads to the compartmentalization of military history and in some cases its focus on the act of conflict alone, divorced from outside concerns and forces.

There are also the sub-fields within military history that focus more on technology and campaigns or battles. These are, by nature, isolated from outside forces. When studying the implications of Jackson's turning movement during a particular battle, you don't necessarily need to understand the social forces that brought the armies to that field. I do not deny that they have an impact, but for that narrow focus it may not be necessary to add that dimension to the discussion. A larger study of the Valley Campaign certainly should (even must) examine those areas, but a single battle history may not require that broad a picture.

How does this relate to the study of small wars? My feeling is that for historians to get a good handle on the subject they need to be able to move with ease from the macro to the micro and back again without losing their focus. By this I mean you need to understand the wider issues and forces that brought Marines to Haiti, but it is also important to look at what they did on the ground, what worked and what did not, and then possibly approach the "whys" of those successes and failures. It's also necessary to examine it over the long term, not just a single year or single province within Haiti (although that narrow focus can yield valuable insight and lessons...one of the conundrums of military history... ). Social historians need to understand that military history has a role to play here, as cultural constructs of conflict play a role in any small war, and military historians are well-placed to evaluate the interaction of those constructs on the battlefield.

Another ramble, but Zenpundit raised some interesting points and got me thinking.