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America's debate over whether and how to invade Iraq clustered into civilian versus military camps. Top military officials appeared reluctant to use force, the most hawkish voices in government were civilians who had not served in uniform, and everyone was worried that the American public would not tolerate casualties in war. This book shows that this civilian-military argument--which has characterized earlier debates over Bosnia, Somalia, and Kosovo--is typical, not exceptional. Indeed, the underlying pattern has shaped U.S. foreign policy at least since 1816. The new afterword by Peter Feaver and Christopher Gelpi traces these themes through the first two years of the current Iraq war, showing how civil-military debates and concerns about sensitivity to casualties continue to shape American foreign policy in profound ways.

Leaders around the globe have long turned to the armed forces as a \"school for the nation.\" Debates over who serves continue to arouse passion today because the military's participation policies are seen as shaping politics beyond the military, specifically the politics of identity and citizenship. Yet how and when do these policies transform patterns of citizenship? Military service, Ronald R. Krebs argues, can play a critical role in bolstering minorities' efforts to grasp full and unfettered rights. Minority groups have at times effectively contrasted their people's battlefield sacrifices to the reality of inequity, compelling state leaders to concede to their claims. At the same time, military service can shape when, for what, and how minorities have engaged in political activism in the quest for meaningful citizenship. Employing a range of rich primary materials, Krebs shows how the military's participation policies shaped Arab citizens' struggles for first-class citizenship in Israel from independence to the mid-1980s and African Americans' quest for civil rights, from World War I to the Korean War. Fighting for Rights helps us make sense of contemporary debates over gays in the military and over the virtues and dangers of liberal and communitarian visions for society. It suggests that rhetoric is more than just a weapon of the weak, that it is essential to political exchange, and that politics rests on a dual foundation of rationality and culture.

In Dwight D. Eisenhower's last speech as president, on January 17, 1961, he warned America about the \"military-industrial complex,\" a mutual dependency between the nation's industrial base and its military structure that had developed during World War II. After the conflict ended, the nation did not abandon its wartime economy but rather the opposite. Military spending has steadily increased, giving rise to one of the key ideas that continues to shape our country's political landscape. In this book, published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Eisenhower's farewell address, journalist James Ledbetter shows how the government, military contractors, and the nation's overall economy have become inseparable. Some of the effects are beneficial, such as cell phones, GPS systems, the Internet, and the Hubble Space Telescope, all of which emerged from technologies first developed for the military. But the military-industrial complex has also provoked agonizing questions. Does our massive military establishment-bigger than those of the next ten largest combined-really make us safer? How much of our perception of security threats is driven by the profit-making motives of military contractors? To what extent is our foreign policy influenced by contractors' financial interests? Ledbetter uncovers the surprising origins and the even more surprising afterlife of the military-industrial complex, an idea that arose as early as the 1930s, and shows how it gained traction during World War II, the Cold War, and the Vietnam era and continues even today.

When Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States in 1860, he came into office with practically no experience in military strategy and tactics.Consequently, at the start of the Civil War, he depended on leading military men to teach him how to manage warfare.

Why did American leaders work hard to secure multilateral approval from the United Nations or NATO for military interventions in Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, while making only limited efforts to gain such approval for the 2003 Iraq War? InReassuring the Reluctant Warriors, Stefano Recchia draws on declassified documents and about one hundred interviews with civilian and military leaders to illuminate little-known aspects of U.S. decision making in the run-up to those interventions. American leaders, he argues, seek UN or NATO approval to facilitate sustained military and financial burden sharing and ensure domestic support. However, the most assertive, hawkish, and influential civilian leaders in Washington tend to downplay the costs of intervention, and when confronted with hesitant international partners they often want to bypass multilateral bodies. In these circumstances, America's senior generals and admirals-as reluctant warriors who worry about Vietnam-style quagmires-can play an important restraining role, steering U.S. policy toward multilateralism. Senior military officers are well placed to debunk the civilian interventionists' optimistic assumptions regarding the costs of war, thereby undermining broader governmental support for intervention. Recchia demonstrates that when the military expresses strong concerns about the stabilization burden, even hawkish civilian leaders can be expected to work hard to secure multilateral support through the UN or NATO-if only to reassure the reluctant warriors about long-term burden sharing. By contrast, when the military stays silent, as it did in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War, the most hawkish civilians are empowered; consequently, the United States is more likely to bypass multilateral bodies and may end up shouldering a heavy stabilization burden largely by itself. Recchia's argument that the military has the ability to contribute not only to a more prudent but also to a more multilateralist U.S. intervention policy may be counterintuitive, but the evidence is compelling.

Mission Creep: The Militarization of US Foreign Policy?examines the question of whether the US Department of Defense (DOD) has assumed too large a role in influencing and implementing US foreign policy. After the Cold War, and accelerating after September 11, the United States has drawn upon the enormous resources of DOD in adjusting to the new global environment and challenges arising from terrorism, Islamic radicalism, insurgencies, ethnic conflicts, and failed states.Contributors investigate and provide different perspectives on the extent to which military leaders and DOD have increased their influence and involvement in areas such as foreign aid, development, diplomacy, policy debates, and covert operations. These developments are set in historical and institutional context, as contributors explore the various causes for this institutional imbalance. The book concludes that there has been a militarization of US foreign policy while it explores the institutional and political causes and their implications.\"Militarization\" as it is used in this book does not mean that generals directly challenge civilian control over policy; rather it entails a subtle phenomenon wherein the military increasingly becomes the primary actor and face of US policy abroad.Mission Creep's assessment and policy recommendations about how to rebalance the role of civilian agencies in foreign policy decision making and implementation will interest scholars and students of US foreign policy, defense policy, and security studies, as well as policy practitioners interested in the limits and extents of militarization.

The U.S. military has historically believed itself to be the institution best suited to develop the character, spiritual values, and patriotism of American youth. InStrategy for Survival,Lori Bogle investigates how the armed forces assigned itself the role of guardian and interpreter of national values and why it sought to create \"ideologically sound Americans capable of defeating communism and assuring the victory of democracy at home and abroad.\" Bogle shows that a tendency by some in the armed forces to diffuse their view of America's civil religion among the general population predated tension with the Soviet Union. Bogle traces this trend from the Progressive Era though the early Cold War, when the Truman and Eisenhower administrations took seriously the battle of ideologies of that era and formulated plans that promised not only to meet the armed forces' manpower needs but also to prepare the American public morally and spiritually for confrontation with the evils of communism. Both Truman's plan for Universal Military Training and Eisenhower's psychological warfare programs promoted an evangelical democracy and sought to inculcate a secular civil-military religion in the general public. During the early 1960s, joint military-civilian anticommunist conferences, organized by the authority of the Department of Defense, were exploited by ultra-conservative civilians advancing their own political and religious agendas. Bogle's analysis suggests that cooperation among evangelicals, the military, and government was considered both necessary and normal. The Boy Scouts pushed a narrow vision of American democracy, and Joe McCarthy's chauvinism was less an aberration than a particularly noxious manifestation of a widespread attitude. To combat communism, American society and its armed forces embraced brainwashing-narrow moral education that attacked everyone and everything not consonant with their view of the world and how it ought to be ordered. Exposure of this alliance ultimately dissolved it. However, the cult of toughness and the blinkered view of reality that characterized the armed forces and American society during the Cold War are still valued by many, and are thus still worthy of consideration.

In the first book to focus on civil-military tensions after American wars, Thomas Langston challenges conventional theory by arguing that neither civilian nor military elites deserve victory in this perennial struggle. What is needed instead, he concludes, is balance. In America's worst postwar episodes, those that followed the Civil War and the Vietnam War, balance was conspicuously absent. In the late 1860s and into the 1870s, the military became the tool of a divisive partisan program. As a result, when Reconstruction ended, so did popular support of the military. After the Vietnam War, military leaders were too successful in defending their institution against civilian commanders, leading some observers to declare a crisis in civil-military relations even before Bill Clinton became commander-in-chief. Is American military policy balanced today? No, but it may well be headed in that direction. At the end of the 1990s there was still no clear direction in military policy. The officer corps stubbornly clung to a Cold War force structure. A civilian-minded commander-in-chief, meanwhile, stretched a shrinking force across the globe. With the shocking events of September 11, 2001, clarifying the seriousness of the post-Cold War military policy, we may at last be moving toward a true realignment of civilian and military imperatives.

No detailed description available for \"Armed Servants\".

The U.S. military spends more than 14 countries combined and possesses state-of-the art weapons and equipment, yet after 13 years of effort, $1.4 trillion, and some 6,000 casualties, it still has been unable to defeat its enemies in Afghanistan and Iraq. The book explains why and how it can be remedied. It first demonstrates the negative effects of four factors that are prerequisites for military success and that have undermined U.S. military performance since the end of the Cold War. These include uneven civil-military relations; an inability to formulate and execute sound campaign plans; a mistaken approach to counter-insurgency, irregular warfare, and stability operations; and inattention to military options other than regime change. It also acknowledges that other factors often also intervene, and that the enemy plays a decisive role in military outcomes. Still, if the United States is to preserve the use of military force as a reasonable (albeit last resort) policy option, it must develop the means to maintain healthy, reliable civil-military relations, design and execute sound campaign plans appropriate to the adversary in question and the threat it poses to U.S. interests, conduct effective counter-insurgency and irregular warfare campaigns suitable given the size and capabilities of today's all volunteer armed forces, and develop a menu of military options beyond regime change. The intent is to bring attention to the under-performance of the U.S. armed forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere and prescribe remedies. These solutions cannot be left solely in the hands of the Department of Defense and congressional action and oversight will be essential to favorable outcomes. This is a timely survey as the military is facing downsizing in response to budget pressure that will constrain defense and counter-terrorism spending.