Browsing by Subject "Military studies"

In this dissertation I analyze aspects of American civil-military relations and the political economy of national security policymaking. Specifically, I examine efforts to balance the military power necessary to secure American interests while considering the economic implications towards the national debt, veteran behavior in congressional resource allocation, and how civil-military relations relate to military effectiveness. I employ qualitative, quantitative, as well as mixed-methods research in examining policymaker rhetoric, voting records and bill sponsorship data, as well as a list of military use-of-force decisions. I find that policymakers deliberately consider the tradeoffs between debt and defense spending, that veterans demonstrate a small yet distinct behavior on military issues considered by Congress, and that operational outcomes were not more likely to be better when military authorities applied their preferences than when civilians asserted theirs. This dissertation helps fill important underexplored gaps in American civil-military relations and political economy of security studies.

Using Fort Bragg and Fayetteville, North Carolina, as a local case study, this dissertation examines the GI dissent movement during the Vietnam War and its profound impact on the ending of the draft and establishment of the All-Volunteer Force in 1973. I propose that the US military consciously and methodically shifted from a conscripted force to the All-Volunteer Force as a safeguard to ensure that dissent never arose again in the ranks as it had during the Vietnam War. This story speaks to profound questions regarding state power that are essential to making sense of our recent history. What becomes of state and military legitimacy when the soldier refuses to sanction or participate in the brutality of warfare? And perhaps more importantly, what happens to the foreign policy of a major power when soldiers no longer protest, and thereby hold in check, questionable military interventions? My dissertation strives to answer those questions by reintroducing the dissenting soldier into the narrative of the All-Volunteer Force.

Abstract

More than 300,000 soldiers have returned from Southwest Asia (i.e., Iraq and Afghanistan) with combat-related mild traumatic brain injuries (mTBIs) associated with exposure to improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Despite less visible physical injuries, these soldiers demonstrate varying levels of physical and cognitive symptoms that impact their post-mTBI family reintegration. The existing literature acknowledges post-mTBI changes in the injured individual affect family functioning; however, post-injury family functioning, such as coping and adaptation, has not been explored. The intent of this dissertation is to explore the problems and challenges of military family reintegration following mTBI.

Nine soldiers with mTBI and their spouses participated for a total of 27 interviews. Both joint and separate individual interviews were conducted to explore their post-mTBI family reintegration experiences. Participants included active duty soldiers with mTBI who were between 2 and 24 months post-deployment and their civilian spouses. Strauss and Corbin's grounded theory methodology was used to collect and analyze the data. This dissertation study consists of three papers, each of which explored experiences that surround family reintegration following mTBI.

The first paper is a comprehensive literature review, examining commonly reported mTBI signs/symptoms, and the impact of these symptoms on the injured individuals and their families. The findings also suggest that psychological distress symptoms such as depression and anxiety are common in injured individuals and their

families after mTBI. The second paper explores the family reintegration processes of post-mTBI soldiers and their spouses. The majority of participants interviewed, both soldiers and their spouses, indicated that symptoms such as irritability, memory loss, and cognitive deficit affected their family reintegration. Some participants reported they had accepted the changes and were working toward a new normal, whereas others indicated these changes were unacceptable and continued their efforts to resume pre-injury functioning.

The third paper examined the experiences of soldiers and their spouses about seeking treatment for mTBI-related symptoms. The majority of interviewed soldiers and their spouses indicated that a delayed diagnosis, difficulty accessing mental health care, and having to navigate an unfamiliar military healthcare system were their biggest challenges. Post-mTBI soldiers experienced significant disruption due to mismatched expectations among themselves and other family members concerning their post-injury capabilities. More research is needed in order to develop effective post-injury rehabilitation programs for soldiers with mTBI and their families.

This study seeks to determine how the Army institutionally selects its 3 and 4-star officers. The central focus, What patterns are evident in the output of the Army’s 3 and 4-star selection process? has three main findings: 1. The Army has institutional preferences, 2. Multiple paths are possible to the senior leader level, 3. The Army’s most preferred path is operational and command experience. These findings were the result of a comprehensive analysis of a database developed utilizing the standardized resumes of 3 and 4-star generals who have served or retired after 1985. The database, along with the results presented here can help determine if the Army is selecting the right senior leaders and meeting its senior leader development goals. In addition, by understanding the breadth of experience of the Army’s senior leaders, we can identify potential shortcomings in experience or skills required to meet current and future threats. The Army is tasked with defending the nation, we must therefore continually assess how it adapts and evolves with contemporary events and adversaries. The database, while extensive by itself, serves as a starting point for future researchers. The paper’s narrow lens will offer insight into the Army process of selecting senior leaders and provide a follow-on analysis template.

Victory in Irregular Wars is rarely a question of military capability alone. History and recent events offer examples of established governments who were defeated by insurgencies or rebels who, on paper, had far less military firepower and resources. Understanding this apparent paradox requires exploring the political dimensions of Irregular Wars. This study is an effort to generate a politically focused analytical tool which can help academics and practitioners understand how to best campaign plan for insurgencies and counter-insurgencies. This requires reducing a wide variety of political requirements into as few analytical categories as possible. This is done by framing insurgent/counter-insurgent policy decisions in terms of how well political leaders maximize a discrete set of organizational functions. The analytical tool is premised on the idea that the group, insurgent or counter-insurgent, who best optimizes this set of functions is best postured to win the Irregular War. To flesh out this analytical tool, I interviewed long serving members of the US Special Operations community. I chose this community because they are the only body of professionals with common training and doctrine focused on Irregular Warfare (the support or opposition of rebel groups). I asked these soldiers to provide qualitative feedback on nine proposed political factors and to then use these factors to grade the participants in multiple Irregular Wars. The results of this study suggest that these factors are interrelated and that the context of the Irregular War, i.e. the nature of each of the participants, determines how political leaders can best optimize their political capital to win the Irregular War.

In the past two decades there has been a significant interest in the ethical and legal concerns surrounding the development of Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems (LAWS). These arguments are principally based on a killer robot conception of future autonomy - that is that futuristic LAWS are capable of near-human like moral reasoning and judgement. My argument is twofold – first, I argue that this conception of future weapon autonomy might be flawed, and future LAWS technology might be better understood as existing on a continuum of weapons autonomy. Machine guns, precision guided missiles, remote piloted drones, and the Aegis Combat System, among others, represent this continuum. While successive technological development might introduce greater levels of autonomy to the battlefield, critical human functions of moral reasoning and judgement are still a necessary and critical component of their design. In this framework, LAWS can be reduced to just another weapon ultimately put to use by human soldiers and commanders. Understood in this way it becomes difficult for critical arguments to hold much force as they must define at what point on this continuum that autonomy meaningfully represents a paradigm shift in warfare to the point that it violates just war norms and international law. Second, I will argue that even if we do assume a killer robot level of autonomy, the utilitarian arguments against LAWS might still be flawed. The arguments rely on the notion that a LAWS could potentially make a mistake and cause unnecessary harm on the battlefield. This notion is flawed because it fails to articulate how that is meaningfully different than a battlefield characterized by human warfare. Humans are also subject to mistakes and error in judgement that could result in unnecessary harm. With that in mind, I will specifically address four of the most prominent utilitarian arguments against LAWS – responsibility gap, proportionality, distinction, and the idea of ‘riskless warfare’.

How do people rebuild their lives, livelihoods, and community in the same location where brutal conflict has occurred? My research in San Carlos, Colombia--a rural community emerging from a decade of violence--investigates how conflict targets the built and natural environments of people's lives. Roads, bridges, buildings, and land have all been sites of violence, illustrating the blurred lines between military and civilian space. The meanings of these locations change after war. Yet, for those returning after a decade of internal displacement, these are exactly the building blocks that must be used to remake home, livelihoods, and community. I use the concept of forensic infrastructure to explore the materiality of memory and politics in war, the immediate aftermath, and long-term reconstruction.

A forensic approach to infrastructure involves understanding materials as text and tools in which politics and memory are embedded and enacted. Forms of infrastructure serve as archives of the past and stages for the practice and performance of awesome and everyday life. As both material and metaphor for interdependence, infrastructure is the physical embodiment of complex concepts such as development, modernity, progress, citizenship, and stability.

Nowhere are these concepts more contested in Colombia than San Carlos. Between 1998-2005, the FARC and ELN guerrillas, the Bloque Metro and Cacique Nutibara paramilitaries, and the armed forces fought in San Carlos over control of the country's largest hydroelectric complex and the Bogotá-Medellín highway connecting Colombia's two biggest cities. Eighty percent of the population fled. Beginning in 2005, however, after paramilitary demobilization and military victories over the FARC, people started returning to their homes. Since 2010, San Carlos has been host to innovative initiatives facilitating return. It is often portrayed in the national media as a model for return, reconstruction, and reconciliation.

While internal displacement has been a crisis in Colombia for decades, large-scale return is a new phenomenon. Little has been written about return, especially based on sustained ethnographic fieldwork. This dissertation, based on seven research trips between 2008-2015, including fifteen months of fieldwork in San Carlos and Medellín in 2011-2012, sheds light on the everyday experiences and difficulties of return--both for those who were displaced and those who remained. Rebuilding the physical spaces of connection, containment, and circulation necessary for community to function in San Carlos embodies a larger struggle over the nature of development, progress, and reparation in Colombia. I suggest return is possible in San Carlos because the fight was over mobility instead of the land itself. The same model of return will be difficult to impossible to apply in areas where monoculture agriculture or mining play a major role in conflict.

This dissertation is an epigraphic study of the Roman auxiliary units raised on the Iberian Peninsula based on a corpus of over 750 inscriptions. It presents the literary and epigraphic evidence for late Republican allied and auxiliary forces and for the structure of imperial auxiliary units. It then examines the recruiting practices of the auxilia, the settlement of veterans, and the evidence for the personal relationships of the soldiers enlisted in these units as they are recorded in the epigraphic record, including inscriptions on stone and military diplomas.

The evidence presented here reveals that recruitment from the units' home territories persisted throughout the Julio-Claudian period and coexisted with local, provincial and regional recruitment into the Flavian period. The findspots of inscriptions and diplomas related to veterans of these units indicate that only about half of these veterans remained within military communities after their discharge, while many retired to civilian communities, some of which were also the soldiers' places of birth. Finally, the evidence for personal relationships of men enrolled in these units demonstrates the relative importance of relationships between soldiers in the first century and the decline of recorded inter-soldier relationships in the second and third centuries, while evidence for relationships between soldiers and civilians is more frequent after the first century. These arguments lead to the conclusion that, throughout their service, individual soldiers were influenced by members of their home communities, fellow soldiers, and the native populations among which they served in varying degrees and that these soldiers had corresponding influence upon those communities.

Scholars have long recognized and debated the effects of the "security dilemma," where efforts by states to enhance their security can decrease the security of others. The severity of a security dilemma, and the prospects for cooperation under the dilemma, are greatly affected by military technology. In this article, I apply the security dilemma framework to a revolutionary new form of conflict: cyberwarfare. I argue that cooperation over cyberwarfare is made challenging due to the security dilemma, and that the unique characteristics of cyberwarfare make it difficult to break out of this dilemma. The reluctance and failure of states to achieve cooperation over cyberwarfare likely reflects, in part, the constraints of this "cybersecurity dilemma." Some states have strong incentives, however, to promote limitations on offensive cyberwarfare. Thus, I propose ways in which cooperation may eventually be achieved despite these challenges.

Foreign military bases are anomalies in a world of sovereign states. Why do major powers station their finite military forces to protect other countries and how does the distribution of these bases relate to a country’s grand strategy? Why do host-nations give up their sovereignty and allow foreign forces, capable of existential violence, to deploy within their borders? This dissertation takes a mixed method approach to each of these questions. For the first, I combine descriptive case studies relating the basing postures of five major powers and to their respective grand strategies with a quantitative analysis of the correlates of the US military basing network. To answer the second, I test the role of host-nation security conditions on US military access and then conduct an in-depth process tracing of US-Philippine basing relations. I find that foreign military bases are essential for super-power status and are an arena for great power competition. I conclude that the US foreign basing posture is strongly aligned with American trade relationships and against US enemies. For host-nation motivations, I conclude that security threats to the host-nation matter, but not uniformly. External threats have the greatest influence in increasing foreign military access, but low-intensity revolutionary threats actually tend to decrease a host-nation’s willingness to accommodate foreign forces.

“War Worlds” reads twentieth-century British and Anglophone literature to examine the social practices of marginal groups (pacifists, strangers, traitors, anticolonial rebels, queer soldiers) during the world wars. This dissertation shows that these diverse “enemies within” England and its colonies—those often deemed expendable for, but nonetheless threatening to, British state and imperial projects—provided writers with alternative visions of collective life in periods of escalated violence and social control. By focusing on the social and political activities of those who were not loyal citizens or productive laborers within the British Empire, “War Worlds” foregrounds the small group, a form of collectivity frequently portrayed in the literature of the war years but typically overlooked in literary critical studies. I argue that this shift of focus from grand politics to small groups not only illuminates surprising social fissures within England and its colonies but provides a new vantage from which to view twentieth-century experiments in literary form.

Since the end of the Cold War, the US Government’s difficulties in implementing policies requiring integrated responses from multiple agencies have led to a number of calls to reform USG inter-agency policy-implementation; similar to how the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act improved the “jointness” of the various military services. All of these major studies and reports, most prominent being the 2008 “Project on National Security Reform”, similarly recommended adopting a Unity of Command approach that authorizes a single manager to synchronize the operations of all departments and agencies in time, space, and purpose. All of these studies directly or indirectly base their recommendations off a single case study from the Vietnam War that implemented the policy of pacification (counter-insurgency)- CORDS (Civil Operations Revolutionary Development Support). However, the causal relationship between single management and effective pacification has never been established as a fact; it is a rather a widely-held, but untested, assumption. This project will supplement archival research from the US and Communist perspectives with current qualitative and quantitative research on counter-insurgency (COIN) and CORDS in Vietnam to test the assumption that single management made CORDS effective. By generating a detailed list of alternative explanations for improved pacification in Vietnam in addition to CORDS, it will use three different political science methods (comparative, congruence, and process-tracing) to eliminate the infeasible hypotheses and rank order the remaining feasible hypotheses. The triangulation of this research question shows that, while the causal connection between single management and effective pacification in Vietnam is not an absolute fact, it is an extremely strong and likely assumption.