Armed Forces & Society

On numerous occasions in the past fifteen years, U.N. peacekeepers have been accused of sexually assaulting or abusing the populations they serve. A Comprehensive Review of peacekeeper misconduct completed in 2005 identified significant problems and recommended numerous changes to address them. The U.S. Army and NATO, in a response to the possibility that their deployed troops will be engaged in or facilitate human trafficking, have enacted new policies intended to remove their troops from the demand for women trafficked for sexual services. The Department of Defense and NATO initiatives are similar to those being considered by the United Nations for preventing sexual misconduct by its peacekeepers. Because the United States, NATO, and the United Nations are all addressing the problems of sexual misconduct by deployed troops, their efforts should be mutually reinforcing. The examples of American and NATO armed forces offer hope that the United Nations will also enact strong measures to prevent future misconduct by its peacekeepers.

From a military standpoint, the European Union’s Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) defies logic. Why would the European allies seek to create a competing military force outside NATO when worried about American isolationism and when unable and unwilling to dedicate the necessary resources? This article suggests an alternative motive behind the European Union’s establishment of a defense program—the development and enhancement of a “European identity.” In short, the ESDP is designed in no small part to further the project of nation-building in a broadening European Union. This article proposes a social-constructivist framework for analyzing this development.

Adopting M. Segal’s framework, we focused on examining four military lifestyle demands—(1) risk of service member injury or death, (2) frequent relocations, (3) periodic separations, and (4) foreign residence—and their relationships to psychological and physical well-being, satisfaction with the Army, and marital satisfaction. Questionnaire results from 346 spouses living overseas indicated that the impact of separations was negatively related to all four outcomes, while foreign residence was negatively related to physical and psychological well-being, fear for soldier safety was negatively related to physical well-being, and the impact of moving was negatively related to satisfaction with the Army. The results further indicated that perceptions of moving and separations were more important in determining outcomes than were the actual number of moves or separations.

The United States armed-forces-and-society intersection is explored comparing attitudes toward the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan among West Point, Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), and civilian undergraduates. A survey was administered in January and February 2003 to determine if military affiliation is associated with attitudes toward sending troops into Afghanistan after the war started and Iraq before sending troops. Majorities of all students supported both war efforts, though United States Military Academy at West Point and ROTC cadets are somewhat more supportive of both wars compared to civilian students. However, most differences are explained by students’ gender and political affiliation, suggesting that differences between groups result from selection effects rather than cultural differences. The authors contend a fourth wave in civil-military affairs potentially has emerged in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 through a civil-military attitude fusion complicated by a gender-politics gap.

This article examines a generally unnoticed chapter of the Vietnam War: the use of former Vietcong combatants as scouts in the United States military forces during the war. The name of the program was the Kit Carson Scout Program. The article will deal with all the aspects of the program, including the training program, the process of stationing the scouts in the United States Army and Marines units, and the significance contribution to the war efforts.

Between 1973 and 1993, over 30 of the 591 American ex-POWs from the Vietnam War (1973) published autobiographies; on the Israeli side, a book was written by only 1 of the 314 ex-POWs from the Yom Kippur War (1973). In the United States, their return transformed the POWs into national heroes. Alternatively, in Israel, the ex-POWs put on a thick cover of silence, to disappear from the public eye and the public discourse for almost twenty-five years. This article attempts to delve into the meaning of the voluntary reticence of Yom Kippur War ex-POWs. An examination of the complex relationship between their personal stories and Israel’s cultural code of captivity helps explain that silence. The article contributes to our understanding of the influence of cultural codes in the construction of military history, military autobiography, and military values and myths.

Recent research on U.S. civil-military relations has applied principal-agent logic to analyze the post-cold war friction between civilian authorities and top military commanders. This article proposes a greater emphasis on bargaining to focus on the effects of new monitoring technologies available to the civilian principal in the information age. As monitoring capabilities increase and military agents perceive their autonomy disappearing, tacit bargaining over the president’s level of resource commitment to a crisis should become more prevalent. This idea receives support from a comparison across case studies of the limited use of force taken from different technological eras. A new style of civil-military bargaining presents both challenges and opportunities to the traditional conception of military professionalism.