Navigating Dissertation and Career: Reflections on a Journey in History by Dave Lunger, Ph.D. 2024

I would categorize my approach to earning my Ph.D. as nonstandard at best, and it stems from my lifelong interest in Military History. During my military career, I read anything I could get my hands on that helped me draw parallels of military science across the spectrum of conflict. This started as an undergraduate when I read The Life of Reason, or The Phases of Human Progress, written by Spanish-American philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist George Santayana. In Volume I: Introduction and Reason in Common Sense, Santayana stated, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Winston Churchill repeated this phrase in a 1948 speech to the British House of Commons when he said, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Those words inspired me to learn as much as I could from others' past mistakes. I digested, absorbed, and analyzed major military conflicts across history and was keen to discover what separated history's greatest military leaders from everyone else.

After being commissioned in the United States Air Force, my reading covered a broad spectrum of military operations ranging from the bronze age to the modern age. I was fascinated with the history of Alexander’s Balkan, Persian, and Indian Campaigns; the Punic, Gallic, and Ceasar’s Civil Wars; the Norman Conquest; the Crusades; the Thirty Years War; English Civil Wars; the War of the Spanish Succession; the Seven Years’ War; The American Revolutionary War; the Napoleonic Wars; the American Civil War; the Franco-Prussian War; and World War I and II. My interests drove me to complete my M.A. in Military Science with a thesis on the Second Punic War in 2004. I used my understanding of Military History in various positions in the USAF to develop tactics and strategy while teaching in the United States Air Force Weapons School, and this sparked a desire to continue my education.

On Friday, 30 September 2016, I retired from the United States Air Force after twenty-seven years of service.  I felt it was time to do something else with my life as I was now half a century old. What I had always wanted to do but never had had the opportunity to do was to get my Ph.D. in military history. I was not driven by any grand design to enter academia; I was doing it for personal growth. I have always believed that modern strategic thought can trace its roots back to the Napoleonic Wars; every strategic planning course I took in the Air Force encouraged reading Clausewitz and Jomini, and I wanted to understand this genesis better, so I planned to pursue a Ph.D. in Napoleonic History. In a search for universities specializing in the period, Florida State University quickly vaulted to the top of the list of prospective schools. So, I applied, and after being accepted, I began pursuing a doctoral degree.

While pursuing my degree, I was offered a position at FSU as the Director of Project Management at the world-acclaimed National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. I direct the project management functions of the MagLab and facilitate the definition of project missions, goals, tasks, and resource requirements so that the lab can offer a suit of high powered magnets more than a million times more powerful than the Earth’s magnetic field to answer fundamental questions across scientific disciplines that impact our world. The high magnetic fields generated by our magnets are used to probe matter and uncover unique properties. The scientific research at the MagLab is leading to big discoveries in tomorrow’s quantum technologies, combatting climate change, protecting human health, enabling the magnet-based machines of the future, paving the way to new energy solutions, and solving the mysteries of the universe. It was an opportunity I could not turn down, and it meant that my academic pursuits took on a secondary priority.

One advantage I had was that I had completed my comprehensive exams before starting work for the MagLab. This meant I had already advanced to the dissertation phase as a doctoral candidate, so I only had to work on my dissertation which at this time was a study of Napoleonic heavy cavalry that compared Napoleon’s Imperial Guard Cavalry to England’s Household Brigade. Working full-time in a challenging setting made it difficult to focus on writing my dissertation, but I was determined to keep making progress. I used my time wisely and spent several years reading and researching until I had a coherent story to adapt to a research project. Once I started writing, I committed to writing one page a day until the dissertation was finished. This served me well until it became apparent that the scope of my dissertation would push the page total well over nine hundred pages. This forced me to scale back my original thesis. Downscaling my work was not all that difficult since I had taken the time to digest way more material than I could ever use. A completely different thesis emerged from this effort titled “Four Stuart Kings: Arbitrary Rule and The Origins of The Life Guards.” This new study traces the roots of the British Life Guards through the first four Stuart kings and illustrates that the Stuart interpretation of kingship, which emphasized the Divine Right of Kings, could only be implemented with the aid of a loyal contingent of Guards.

By committing myself to making progress over time made graduating a reality. Now that I have my degree, the question has been asked, “What do you plan to do with it?” I would be lying if I said I had no idea, but since I have already transitioned into a career field that I enjoy, it seems like there is little to do other than continue researching and writing about topics I like, but to what end? I was blessed in my Air Force career to be allowed to teach at the United States Air Force Weapons School, where I taught graduate-level instructor courses that provided our pilots with the world's most advanced training in weapons and tactics employment. This is where the teaching bug bit me, and I have always looked for teaching opportunities. At this stage of my career, I would be happy to continue in my current position and do some adjunct work to keep my mind in the game.

Completing my degree taught me a few lessons I would like to impart to anyone seeking an advanced degree while working. First and foremost, you need to stay committed. This was the most important thing for me as there were plenty of days that I had a full plate of activity, and writing one page of a dissertation just seemed like another task I could not get to in the limited time I had that day. Secondly, you must have a plan of action. While it is true that no plan survives first contact with the enemy, it should not keep you from making one. Having a plan allows you to make critical decisions when things don’t go your way, like I had to do when I descoped my research topic. Had I not invested the time and effort into reading and researching I would not have been able to pivot to a different thesis.