The Us Military

"Integrating the US Military is an edited collection that examines the US Army's role and place in progressive social change through the lens of the military experience of African Americans, women, and gays since World War II. By making this long overdue comparison, the editors argue this anthology demonstrates how the challenges launched against the racial, gender, and sexual status quo in the years after World War II transformed overarching ideas about power, citizenship, and America's role in the world. This anthology's major contribution is synthesizing recent scholarly work on the history of minorities and women in the US military. It does so by examining connections between GIs and civilian society in the context of ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality. Given the militarization of American society since World War II, revealing the links between these legally marginalized groups within the Armed Services is historically significant in its own right. At the same time, this comparison also sheds new light on a broad range of issues that affected civilian society, such as affirmative action, integration, marriage laws, and sexual harassment. Integrating the US Military is a book designed for college students, military professionals, policy makers, and general readers. Allowing readers to view the history of several civil rights movements within the Armed Forces will prompt them to rethink the way they understand the history of social movements. It will also help them to better understand the relationship between the military and American society. Finally, readers will gain a historical perspective on recent debates about the rights of gays in the military and the implications of deploying women in combat."--Provided by publisher.

From the Publisher: This latest edition of an official U.S. Government military history classic provides an authoritative historical survey of the organization and accomplishments of the United States Army. This scholarly yet readable book is designed to inculcate an awareness of our nation's military past and to demonstrate that the study of military history is an essential ingredient in leadership development. It is also an essential addition to any personal military history library.

By the Cold War's end, U.S. military bases harbored nearly 20,000 toxic waste sites. All told, cleaning the approximately 27 million acres is projected to cost hundreds of billions of dollars. And yet while progress has been made, efforts to integrate environmental and national security concerns into the military's operations have proven a daunting and intrigue-filled task that has fallen short of professed goals in the post-Cold War era. In The Greening of the U.S. Military, Robert F. Durant delves into this too-little understood world of defense environmental policy to uncover the epic and ongoing struggle to build an environmentally sensitive culture within the post-Cold War military. Through over 100 interviews and thousands of pages of documents, reports, and trade newsletter accounts, he offers a telling tale of political, bureaucratic, and intergovernmental combat over the pace, scope, and methods of applying environmental and natural resource laws while ensuring military readiness. He then discerns from these clashes over principle, competing values, and narrow self-interest a theoretical framework for studying and understanding organizational change in public organizations. From Dick Cheney's days as Defense Secretary under President George H. W. Bush to William Cohen's Clinton-era-tenure and on to Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, the battle over "greening" the military has been one with high-stakes consequences for both national defense and public health, safety, and the environment. Durant's polity-centered perspective and arguments will evoke needed scrutiny, debate, and dialogue over these issues in environmental, military, policymaking, and academic circles.

In A People's History of the U.S. Military, historian Michael A. Bellesiles draws from three centuries of soldiers' personal encounters with combat—through fascinating excerpts from letters, diaries, and memoirs, as well as audio recordings, film, and blogs—to capture the essence of the American military experience firsthand, from the American Revolution to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Military service can shatter and give meaning to lives; it is rarely a neutral encounter, and has contributed to a rich outpouring of personal testimony from the men and women who have literally placed their lives on the line. The often dramatic and always richly textured first-person accounts collected in this book cover a wide range of perspectives, from ardent patriots to disillusioned cynics; barely literate farm boys to urbane college graduates; scions of founding families to recent immigrants, enthusiasts, and dissenters; women disguising themselves as men in order to serve their country to African Americans fighting for their freedom through military service. A work of great relevance and immediacy—as the nation grapples with the return of thousands of men and women from active military duty—A People's History of the U.S. Military will become a major new touchstone for our understanding of American military service.

Since the launch of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars—now the longest wars in American history—the US military has struggled to recruit troops. It has responded, as Matt Kennard’s explosive investigative report makes clear, by opening its doors to neo-Nazis, white supremacists, gang members, criminals of all stripes, the overweight, and the mentally ill. Based on several years of reporting, Irregular Army includes extensive interviews with extremist veterans and leaders of far-right hate groups—who spoke openly of their eagerness to have their followers acquire military training for a coming domestic race war. As a report commissioned by the Department of Defense itself put it, “Effectively, the military has a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy pertaining to extremism.” Irregular Army connects some of the War on Terror’s worst crimes to this opening-up of the US military. With millions of veterans now back in the US and domestic extremism on the rise, Kennard’s book is a stark warning about potential dangers facing Americans—from their own soldiers.

This book offers an accessible introduction to the U.S. military as an institution and provides insights into the military’s structure and norms. Designed for undergraduate students, the book offers an interdisciplinary overview of America’s armed forces through three critical lenses. First, it introduces the military’s constitutional and historical context. Second, it presents concise factual information chosen for its relevance to the military’s structures, procedures, norms, and varied activities. Finally, it intersperses these facts with debates, theories, and questions to spark student interest, class discussion, and further research. The text is written for the beginner but covers complex topics such as force structure and the defense budget. With contributions informed by both scholarly approaches and long military careers, the book will prepare students for further studies in international relations, civil-military relations, or U.S. foreign policy. It also encourages critical thinking, elucidating an institution that undergraduates and other civilians too often perceive as both baffling and above reproach. This book will be of much interest to students of the U.S. military, civil-military relations, U.S. politics, and public policy.

The US military is one of the largest employers in the country and is a relative microcosm of American society, bringing in people from diverse backgrounds and history to defend the nation from all enemies. Military and civilian leaders address the same challenges as those found in the civilian world, including diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging. The US military has both led and followed the nation in establishing policies of diversity and inclusion. In this second edition, the editors and contributors provide a revised, updated, and expanded overview of the ways in which diversity and inclusion are dispatched in the US military by providing information and knowledge about celebrated and contested social characteristics including race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexuality and three new groups comprising the military: the (dis)abled, civilians, and immigrants. Astute subject matter experts contribute contemporary, must have, go to chapters into a fresh, compelling, and insightful volume on the roles that each of these groups occupy in the US armed services as well as the laws, rules, and regulations regarding their participation. This new edition also provides eleven Lived Experiences that enliven and humanize each chapter and will assuredly inspire readers.

A collection of essays exploring the world-wide U.S. military base system and its interplay with social relations of gender and sexuality in the U.S. and foreign host nations.