At the risk of reaching outside the realm of what you really want to know, might I suggest that instead of looking at history programs, you might want to look at Political Science programs. Your research interests (i.e. defense policy) seem to line up a lot better with Political Science than with History. It is true that most PolSci's are not going to be as archival as perhaps you seem to want to be, but pretty much every academic spends hours pouring over dusty tomes. The main difference, IMHO, between history and PolSci is that history tries to explain individual events completely, whereas PolSci is looking for patterns which can mostly explain most things. Both of them, however, require a very extensive study of history. Indeed, there are many excellent studies of military history done by political scientists.

History may be where it is at for you, but it is something to consider.