I opened this thread as a way of generally discussing how historians study small wars and the ways they can be lost in the shuffle of the larger picture.

For example, the Frontier period draws a great deal of attention, but in the military sphere it is typically focused on personalities (Crook, Custer, and Miles spring immediately to mind). Only in the past 20 years or so has there been good analysis of individual campaigns and techniques used by the forces in question.

Likewise, there are aspects of the American Civil War that could be fruitful for examination. I'm not an expert by any means in this area (not even a learned ignoramus, I'm sad to say... ), but operations in the Kansas-Missouri border area both before and during the War, as well as many operations in Kentucky and Tennessee might repay good examination.

Military historians tend to focus a good deal of their thinking on either personalities or campaigns. More recently there has been a change toward studying doctrine and the ways campaigns are framed and conducted. This is, to me, a boon for the Small Wars community, as many of these conflicts transcend personalities (or overlap many individuals) and cannot easily be sliced into campaigns. In my own study of the Indian Wars I've gotten away from personalities (although Ranald Mackenzie still remains a fascinating study for me) and into patterns of operations. When you do this you begin to see that techniques lauded as belonging to one individual were in fact developed over time by many hands, and the one last on the scene usually grabbed the credit.

Focusing on campaigns can lend an artificial "start" and "end" time to a conflict that may not be accurate, and the same peril lies in examining events from a strictly personality angle. By way of illustration, George Crook is often credited with being "the first" to effectively fight Apaches on their own ground, as well as being the first to use scouts. Both statements are false. Crook expanded on methods developed by Dragoons before the War, California Volunteers during the War, and two over-worked cavalry regiments after the War. He also took care to have one of his aides prepare a very readable account of his operations, something that his predecessors did not do. Scouts had been a fixture in Arizona operations for some years, and certain California regiments were providing arms to tribal enemies of the Apaches years before Crook came on the scene and did the same thing. It's only when you look at the conflict against the Apache in something close to a whole (1847 or so through the late 1880s) that you see the trends.

Just a bit of a ramble down my own pet rocks about history and the way it's studied.