Beyond The Battlefield

Beyond the Battlefield: The New Military Professionalism presents the nature and character of military professionalism. This book describes the increasing tendency for the military to view professionalism mainly in terms of military skills. Organized into five parts encompassing 13 chapters, this book begins with an overview of the various concepts and definitions of military professionalism. This text then reexamines military professionalism in the post-Vietnam era with regard to perspectives on value convergence and empathy between military and society. Other chapters consider the changes in the international security environment and the complexity of national security policy. This book discusses as well the demands on the profession as a result of the changed security environment. The final chapter deals with the essential factors that establish the military mindset and world view, as well as determine the quality of civil–military relations. This book is a valuable resource for military professionals and sociologists.

In an effort to make sense of war beyond the battlefield in studying the wars that were captured under the rubric of the "War on Terror", this special issue book seeks to explore the complex spatial relationships between war and the spaces that one is not used to thinking of as the battlefield. It focuses on the conflicts that still animate the spaces and places where violence has been launched and that the war has not left untouched. In focusing on war beyond the battlefield, it is not that the battlefield as the place where war is waged has gone in smoke or has borne out of importance, it is rather the case that the battlefield has been dis-placed, re-designed, re-shaped and rethought through new spatializing practices of warfare. These new spaces of war – new in the sense that they are not traditionally thought of as spaces where war takes place or is brought to – are television screens, cellular phones and bandwidth, George W. Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, videogames, popular culture sites, news media, blogs, and so on. These spaces of war beyond the battlefield are crucial to understanding what goes on the battlefield, in Iraq, Afghanistan, or in other fronts of the War on Terror (such as the homeland) – to understand how terror has globally been waged beyond the battlefield. This book was originally published as a special issue of Geopolitics.

"The book demonstrates how African American soldiers used military service as a tool to challenge white notions of second-class citizenry"--

Bringing together 12 essays and lectures spanning a period of fifteen years, Blight (history and black studies, Amherst College) explores three primary concerns: the meaning of the American Civil War, the nature of African American history and the significance of race in American history generally, and the character and purpose of the study of historical memory. Along the way, he touches upon such topics as the tangled relationship between the memory of the Civil war and the memory of black emancipation, the leadership and relationship of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois's contribution to historical memory, Ken Burn's treatment of the Civil War, and controversies over battlefield remembrances and memorial constructions. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

In an effort to make sense of war beyond the battlefield in studying the wars that were captured under the rubric of the "War on Terror", this special issue book seeks to explore the complex spatial relationships between war and the spaces that one is not used to thinking of as the battlefield. It focuses on the conflicts that still animate the spaces and places where violence has been launched and that the war has not left untouched. In focusing on war beyond the battlefield, it is not that the battlefield as the place where war is waged has gone in smoke or has borne out of importance, it is rather the case that the battlefield has been dis-placed, re-designed, re-shaped and rethought through new spatializing practices of warfare. These new spaces of war – new in the sense that they are not traditionally thought of as spaces where war takes place or is brought to – are television screens, cellular phones and bandwidth, George W. Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, videogames, popular culture sites, news media, blogs, and so on. These spaces of war beyond the battlefield are crucial to understanding what goes on the battlefield, in Iraq, Afghanistan, or in other fronts of the War on Terror (such as the homeland) – to understand how terror has globally been waged beyond the battlefield. This book was originally published as a special issue of Geopolitics.

This volume draws together an international team of scholars to explore the experience and significance of early modern European continental warfare from an interdisciplinary perspective. Individual essays add to the lively fields of War and Society and the New Military History by combining the history of war with political and diplomatic history, the history of religion, social history, economic history, the history of ideas, the history of emotions, environmental history, art history, musicology, and the history of science and medicine. The contributors address how warfare was entwined with European learning, culture, and the arts, but also examine the ties between warfare and ideas or ideologies, and offer new ways of thinking about the costs and consequences of war. In addition to its interdisciplinarity, the volume is distinctive in including chapters focused not only on Western and Central Europe but also the often-ignored European peripheries, such as the Baltics and the Russian frontier, Scandinavia, and the Habsburg-Ottoman borderlands of Southeastern Europe. As a whole, the volume offers readers interesting alternatives and threads for reconsidering the place and meaning of warfare within the larger history of early modern continental Europe. This book will be valuable for general readers, undergraduate and graduate students, and scholars interested in military, early modern, and European history.

The Army goes to great lengths to capture lessons learned and preserve these lessons for current practitioners and future generations. Though the Army is one of the most self-critical organizations found in American society, a well-deserved reputation has also been earned for failing to inculcate those lessons by transforming the institutional Army. Change is achieved through a continuous cycle of adaptive innovation, experimentation, and experience. In Iraq, out of necessity while in contact with a dynamic enemy, the Army transformed on the battlefield with radical changes in doctrine, organization, training, and material, which significantly enabled battlefield success. As a result of the withdrawal of troops from Iraq at the end of 2011, this paper analyzes the success of the military's counterinsurgency strategy and nation-building efforts, examines the future of combat which the Army may face in order to recommend a suitable force posture, and makes recommendations for future competencies and capabilities utilizing the problem-solving construct of DOTMLPF in order to ensure future victories in this relevant component of the full spectrum of conflict.

World Wars I and II changed the globe on a scale never seen before or since, and from these terrible conflicts came an abundance of photographs, drawings, and other artworks attempting to make sense of the turbulent era. In this generously illustrated book, Catherine Speck provides a fascinating account of women artists during wartime in America, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and their visual responses to war, both at the front lines and on the home front. In addition to following high-profile artists such as American photographer Lee Miller, Speck recounts the experiences of nurses, voluntary aides, and ambulance drivers who found the time to create astonishing artworks in the midst of war zones. She also describes the feelings of disempowerment revealed in the work done by women distant from the conflict. As Speck shows, women artists created highly charged emotional responses to the threats, sufferings, and horrors of war—the constant fear of attack, the sorrow of innocent lives destroyed, the mass murders of people in concentration camps, and the unimaginable aftermath of the atomic bombs. The first book to explore female creativity during these periods, Beyond the Battlefield delivers an insightful and meditative examination of this art that will appeal to readers of art history, war history, and cultural studies.