Rorotoko

In a nutshell

America’s Army is military history of a different kind: it uses the story of the making of the all-volunteer army as a window into the history of American society over the past forty or so years.

Today’s all-volunteer military was born in crisis. It grew out of turmoil over the Vietnam War, and its first decade is a chronicle of struggle and frustration. In the wake of a war gone badly wrong, an unpopular institution wracked by internal crisis faced the challenge of recruiting large numbers of young men from a racially, culturally, and politically divided society. Despite a dreadful civilian job market and the Army’s attempts to “sell” soldiering, all signs were bad. Many of the convulsive struggles of 1970s America–over race, over the proper roles of women, over the meaning of democracy and citizenship and patriotism–also exploded within the ranks of the Army.

The overall “quality” of recruits was poor; the notion that the all-volunteer force (AVF) would draw “motivated men . . . with the higher level of technical and professional skill” necessary to operate the “complex weapons of modern war” seemed increasingly implausible. Many thought the AVF would fail; a renewed draft seemed more than possible. But in the 1980s and 1990s–a period of more limited deployments and relative peace—the volunteer force created believers both within and outside the military.

In ending conscription, the United States discarded the understanding that military service is an obligation of (male) citizenship. That move had serious implications, some of them unforeseen. All-volunteer status pushed the army into the marketplace–not only into the labor market, where it had to compete with other “employers,” but into the consumer marketplace as well. Trying to fill its ranks, the Army adopted the most sophisticated tools of consumer capitalism. It turned to market research and high-budget advertising and worked hard to portray military service not as obligation, but as opportunity.

The end of the draft also gave the military less control over who joined. The Army turned increasingly to women, accepted a vastly disproportionate number of African Americans, and worried greatly–for different reasons—about both of these decisions. I argue that the US military, out of necessity and not always happily, was the American institution that most directly confronted the impact and legacies of the nation’s struggles over civil rights and social justice.

The wide angle

I meant this book to change some conversations. Military history draws a lot of people who read serious non-fiction, but it occupies a complicated place in the academic discipline of history. Military history has spent a lot of time on the academic “outs,” often ignored by more mainstream US historians who have been most concerned, for decades, about the experiences and struggles of those marginalized and oppressed and quick to dismiss military history as an endorsement of war, violence, conflict, and militarism.

I’m trying to challenge that understanding and that relationship. I would insist that anyone who wants to understand the history of the United States over the past half-century must pay attention to its military. That’s not only because the military is a key instrument of US power, but because it is a critically important institution within US society.

If we want to understand struggles for social justice and questions of equality, we can’t ignore the role that the military has played–and continues to play–in these struggles. If we want to understand the meaning of citizenship, we have to think more about the ways that the rights and obligations of citizenship have been negotiated around questions of military service. If we want to engage current discussions of consumer citizenship, we can’t avoid the implications of military advertising. If we care about the shape of the modern family, the construction of military benefits are crucial. And the very creation of the AVF speaks volumes about American struggles to balance its core values of liberty and equality.

At the same time, I also believe that the army must be taken seriously on its own terms. It is not simply a site for social struggles or a reflection of ideological debates. The army has longstanding history and traditions, practices and beliefs. The significant role it plays within American society does not change the fact that its primary mission is national defense. My goal in this book was to begin to understand and explain the institution in its complexity, to show people with human motivations and powerful loyalties confronting the problems of their age, and to analyze the results of their actions.

This book was quite a change for me; my most recent (non-edited) book was on the sexual revolution (Sex in the Heartland), and I’d bet that my 1988 history of dating, From Front Porch to Back Seat, has been read more than anything else I’ve written. But as a cultural historian I’m interested in the construction of meaning, and I became fascinated, back in the late 1990s, with a series of television commercials that portrayed the army as a form of social good, picturing young men who could be seen as potentially at risk or potentially dangerous, depending on the position of the viewer, and presenting army service as redemption and salvation.

I began with a desire to study the ways the army attempted to shape its public image through commercial advertising—and soon understood that such an approach would yield a very shallow book. So I threw myself into the study of army institutional history and recruiting statistics and policy debates and arguments about doctrine and training, never, despite it all, losing hope that I could transcend the deadeningly bureaucratic language of the documents that eventually stacked thirteen feet high. I had no idea, in the beginning, that this project would require me to learn so very much about the army, but I’m very glad it did.

In ending conscription, the United States discarded the understanding that military service is an obligation of (male) citizenship. All-volunteer status pushed the army into the marketplace–not only into the labor market, where it had to compete with other “employers,” but into the consumer marketplace as well.