Browsing by Author "Bönker, Dirk"

This dissertation explores the creation, structure, activities, and impact of the North Carolina Council of Defense during the First World War. Its story, while particular to a single state and its people, also illuminates and explains the dynamic and compelling regional and national events that drove a massive wartime mobilization. The North Carolina Council of Defense is also an entry point into understanding the decisions and pathways seen in the American mobilization, helping to illuminate how and why the mobilization occurred in the ways that it did. Perhaps most importantly, the story of this state Council provides insight into the nature of American governance during wartime. Positioned between the national government and the people of North Carolina, the Council mediated the activities of public, private, and individual efforts in support of mobilization activities. Because of this intermediary positioning, it was instrumental in expanding state capacity and capability for military and resource mobilization, and therefore supporting an increase in the nation’s ability to mobilize for the war. However, the Council’s intermediary role also allowed those managing the state mobilization to prevent any significant challenge to the state’s white supremacist and patriarchal socio-political system, despite the dynamic changes wrought by the need to mobilize the nation for war.

Drones may appear a recent technology whose future may have just barely started. But drone technology’s development and the rationales for their adoption extend back over a century ago to weapons called “pilotless airplanes” during World War I. Historians have examined the deployment of drones in military campaigns, the history of drones as technical systems, science fiction as a cultural inspiration for engineers, and the institutional machinations required to fund new war machines. Philosophers and jurists debate the ethics and legality of conducting violence through remote control. Peace activists, whistleblowing drone operators, and interfaith coalitions have formed a burgeoning anti-machine war movement. Yet, amongst the dynamic discussions surrounding drones, the fantasies and anxieties that animated the technology’s adoption during the twentieth century remain largely unexamined.

My dissertation offers a cultural history of U.S. drone warfare during the twentieth century. Cultural discourses and practices proved key to the policy formations, military planning, and political economy of the American way of war’s increasing turn to mechanization. I present the military use of drones as a key, yet understudied, part of the larger history of U.S. machine warfare that relied on superior productive power to overwhelm enemies with technological means. Airpower became central to U.S. war-making during the era of the world wars, the Cold War, and beyond. Drones, in turn, developed into an ever-more important “asset” in the U.S. aerial arsenal before reaching a central place in present day pursuits of war.

Drone technology’s ascent owes less to its utility in war than to the cultural projections and fears that surrounded pilots in air war. Technical bugs often rendered drones less than mechanically stellar. Despite functional flaws, replacing pilot with machine in war became attractive precisely because human agents consistently seemed limited instruments of war in popular and policy discourse. Soldiers always died in war. Many became security risks when captured and tortured for information. Some turned against the war they were supposed to fight. Grieving families politicized their personal loss. War made U.S. audiences anxious their men were not “man enough” to achieve victory. Remote-controllable drones seemed to solve these problems, by sparing American lives, by rendering war less visible, and by removing men deemed incapable of war from the site of combat, thereby ‘depoliticizing’ war and saving armed conflict as an instrument of policy.

The history of drone adoption is not a teleological story of linear technological progression, but rather a narrative of fits and starts, with differing actors operating in differing contexts imagining war machines to accomplish differing goals. Current claims to a “humane” form of war through “surgical strike” capabilities and effective surveillance do not sum up the history of the drone. The drone has long been used as a means of mass destruction including chemical war, nuclear war, and multitudes of missile strikes.

This dissertation explores the revitalization of the U.S. army during the two decades following the Vietnam War. It questions how the army went from a nearly broken institution in the early 1970s to, arguably, one of the nation’s most respected institutions after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Through an examination of collections of articles published in the extensive military press of the period, collections of personal papers from both senior and lower ranking army officers, and historical files from the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, this dissertation shows that the army’s revitalization was fundamentally a transformation in the institution’s culture and conceptions of professionalism. The military press articles and officers’ personal papers are used to show both how the army’s culture changed over time, and what ideas informed that cultural change. That exploration shows that the conservative turn shift in American political culture profoundly shaped the U.S. army. Members of the army appropriated many of the terms and languages of the conservative movement of the 1970s and 1980s, and applied those ideas to how they understood and described their institution. Ideals associated with the conservative movement not only shaped how members of the army understood their professional identities, but also how they idealized professional behavior and understood gender equality and race integration.

This dissertation excavates historical fragments, moments, and broader patterns of humanitarian connection between West Germany and the wider world, and specifically to Nigeria-Biafra and Ethiopia, from the 1960s to the 1980s. It brings them together under the sign of global humanitarianism, but it does not tally them to an uplifting account or cautionary tale about humanitarianism’s rise and fall. Engaging history transnationally, beyond the Cold War, and outside the bounds of former empires, each chapter works micro-historically outward from specific places and conjunctures in order, first, to analyze the logics and effects of humanitarian aid, activism, and intervention in concrete circumstances; second, to assert West Germany’s changing placement in the postcolonial world; and third, to show how humanitarian concerns were tied to and impacted some of the key political issues of European and African history in the later twentieth century, including nationalisms and civil wars, student activisms, refugee migrations, child malnutrition, capitalist-socialist economic development, novel media forms, Holocaust memories, and new African diasporas. To define and explain the interrelation of the humanitarian and the political, this dissertation uses the concept of “moral politics.” By examining archival, visual, and oral-historical sources that shed light on West German, Nigerian-Biafran, and Ethiopian pasts from oblique angles, this dissertation pushes the study of twentieth-century global history beyond masternarratives of the Cold War and colonial imperialism. It also highlights people, ideas, and processes that defined an era when the faint futures of our present and the distant echoes of an earlier age were in dynamic tension.