Reviews: Lawrence A. Yates, The US Military Intervention in Panama: Origins, Planning, and Crisis Management June 1987-December 1989, Washington, DC: Center of Military History, United States Army, 2008; 330 pp; $36.00 pbk. ISBN 9780160794193

2011 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 235-237
Author(s):  
Thomas L. Pearcy
Author(s):  
Patrick Cullen

The United States' diplomatic security apparatus that operates today from Washington DC to Iraq and Afghanistan is uniquely massive. It is incomparable in its size, budget, degree of institutionalization, and level of sophistication when set against both other nations as well as its own humble origins in WWI. To understand why this is so, the first half of this chapter historically maps and causally explains how, and why, US diplomatic security has been transformed over the course of its modern hundred-year history. The second half provides an empirically rich study of the various roles and functions of the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security and the US military units that protect the US diplomatic mission.


This chapter charts the infrastructure of intelligence created by the US military on the ground in southern Korea and positions this project within a larger story of Korea's position relative to the global shifts of sovereignty, recognition, and warfare through the twentieth century. Language is an especially pivotal realm for power in this chapter, as close readings of diplomatic memoranda and military government ordinances show how US agents and officials attempted to fashion and control a Korean subject suitable for their project of military occupation. But the Korean populace were neither passive readers nor silent listeners, and Korean political organizations distributed their own pamphlets and lined walls with posters. In front of the Koreans' undeniable demands and harvest uprisings, the United States Army Military Government in Korea depended on the Counterintelligence Corps to provide certainty and knowledge about the Korean individual subject.


Paper Trails ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 53-74
Author(s):  
Cameron Blevins

During the 1860s and 1870s the US Post underwent a period of breakneck, unstable expansion in the western United States. Chapter 3 details the efforts of postal administrators to track all of these changes through a new mapmaking initiative under a cartographer named Walter Nicholson. The Topographer’s Office offers a window into the efforts of government officials in Washington, DC, to administer the nation’s western periphery. Nicholson’s postal maps were highly sought after across the federal government, offering valuable spatial information about the region that was often in short supply. Yet the struggles of Nicholson and his employees to keep pace with the never-ending flurry of changes to the region’s postal network is a testament to the ongoing barriers to centralized oversight imposed by the geography of the American West.


2020 ◽  
pp. 39-68
Author(s):  
Brian Taylor

This chapter looks at the first two years of the Civil War, when black men were barred from serving in the US Army. It follows the debate that black Northerners conducted about the proper response to the call to serve in the US military, which they were sure would come at some point. Immediate enlistment advocates sparred with those who counseled withholding enlistment until African Americans’ demands had been met. Black Northerners began to articulate the terms under which they would serve the Union, among which citizenship emerged as central, as well as the changes necessary to bring lived reality in the United States in line with the founding principle of equality.


Author(s):  
Jon B. Mikolashek

The chapter covers the early history of what will become known as the tank and the creation of the United States Tank Corps. Patton is the first “tanker” in American military history. After leaving the staff of John J. Pershing, Patton embarks on an educational journey to learn about tanks. He attends tank school in France and tours the Renault tank factory. It is here that he learns to drive a tank and selects the Renault light tank for use by the United States Army. The Renault tank is covered in detail, and Patton prepares to establish the American light tank school in France.


The Drone Age ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 96-130
Author(s):  
Michael J. Boyle

Chapter 4 argues that drones accelerate the trend toward information-rich warfare and place enormous pressure on the military to learn ever more about the battlefields that it faces. Today, for the United States, war is increasingly a contest for information about any future battlespace. This has had an organizational effect as the ability for the United States to know more through drone imagery has turned into a necessity to know more. The US military is becoming so enamored of its ability to know more through drone surveillance that it is overlooking the operational and organizational costs of “collecting the whole haystack.” Using drones for a vast surveillance apparatus, as the United States and now other countries have been doing, has underappreciated implications for the workload, organizational structures, and culture of the military itself.


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