Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Ingo Trauschweizer
Keyword(s):  
International Security ◽  
Executive Branch ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
White House ◽  
Joint Chiefs Of Staff ◽  
Vantage Points ◽  
Armed Services ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

In 1984 officials in Washington debated reforming the defense establishment and who should advise presidents on strategy in times of crisis. Maxwell Taylor, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), John F. Kennedy White House insider, and one of the architects of America’s war in Vietnam, told members of Congress that the JCS were divided by service interests and had never fulfilled their role as strategy advisors. He concluded the system should not be reformed—it should be torn down. The Goldwater-Nichols Act that resulted in October 1986 did not quite meet Taylor’s radical proposal of a complete restructuring even though it enhanced the powers of the JCS chairman. This book considers what shaped Taylor’s thinking. Through his career in the Cold War we can investigate critical questions from the vantage points of the military and the executive branch: What is the role of the armed services in national and international security strategies? Where do service interests and national interest intersect and what happens when there is less-than-complete overlap? What is the role of the JCS and their chairman? And how could the armed services prepare for vastly different challenges, ranging from nuclear war to conventional battle, counterinsurgency, and nation building?...

Maxwell Taylor's Cold War

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingo Trauschweizer
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Executive Branch ◽  
White House ◽  
Civil Military Relations ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
Vantage Points ◽  
Military Relations ◽  
Armed Services

Maxwell Taylor’s Cold Wartraces the Cold War career of Maxwell Taylor, a Kennedy White House insider and architect of American strategy in Vietnam. After 1945 Taylor led the U.S. Military Academy, commanded American forces in Berlin and Korea, guided the army through declining budget shares, emerged as a critic of President Eisenhower’s nuclear deterrence strategy, and, in the 1960s, served as military advisor at the White House, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, ambassador in South Vietnam, and advisor to Lyndon Johnson. Taylor remained a public critic of defense policy and civil-military relations into the 1980s. Through Taylor’s career we can investigate the evolution of the national security establishment from the vantage points of the military and the executive branch: what is the role of the armed services in national and international security strategies? Where do service interests and national interest intersect and what happens when there is less-than-complete overlap? What is the role of the JCS and their chairman? This has implications for historical and contemporary issues: civil-military relations, the question at what levels professional military advice needs to be heard, and the ramifications of the evolving challenges of war and balance of strategy and force structure for conventional warfare and counterinsurgency. These issues are linked in the hierarchies of a nationalsecurity state built for industrial wars of the twentieth century (between states), which now faces varied threats in the twenty-first century (from insurgents and terrorist groups) that were at least partly foreshadowed in the Vietnam War era.

The Clinton Administration and Africa: Role of Congress and the Africa Subcommittees

1998 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 14-16
Author(s):  
Daniel P. Volman
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Reagan Administration ◽  
Clinton Administration ◽  
Executive Branch ◽  
Predominant Role ◽  
Government Relations ◽  
Foreign Operations ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S

Studies of U.S. government relations with Africa have generally focused on the role of the executive branch, specifically by examining and analyzing the views and activities of administration officials and the members of executive branch bureaucracies. This is only natural, given the predominant role that the executive branch has historically played in the development and implementation of U.S. policy toward the continent. However, the U.S. Congress has always played an important role in determining U.S. policy toward Africa due to its constitutional authority over the appropriation and authorization of funding for all foreign operations conducted by the executive branch. Furthermore, Congress enacted legislation on several occasions during the Cold War period that directly affected U.S. policy. For example, Congress approved the Clark Amendment prohibiting U.S. intervention in Angola (although it later voted to repeal the amendment) and also passed the 1986 Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, which imposed sanctions on South Africa over the veto of the Reagan administration.

The Process of Westernization of the Balkans after WWII: The Cases of Greece and Bulgaria

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-34
Author(s):  
Alla Kondrasheva ◽  
Stavris Parastatov
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Short Interval ◽  
Western Country ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Spheres Of Influence ◽  
Western Influence ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military ◽  
Of Greece

The high significance of the Balkan geopolitical knot was clearly expressed in the bipolar era when the main frontier between the two warring blocks passed through the Balkans. Due to the secret ‘Percentages Agreement’ between Great Britain and the USSR in 1944, the Balkans were divided into spheres of influence of the two great powers. Subsequently, London ceded the role of the main source of Western influence in the region to Washington.Of particular interest are the cases of Greece and Bulgaria as border countries that found themselves in different ‘worlds’ and, given the geostrategic importance of their territories, which were the main ideological instruments and conductors of ideas in the Cold war of the hegemons that stood behind. The Truman Doctrine in 1947 and NATO membership in 1952 strengthened and institutionalized Western influence in Greece. Westernization of Greek society in the form of liberalization and democratiza-tion of social relations and consequently its political system proceeded rapidly with a relatively short interval of the military dictatorship.Greece was assigned the role of a model for the rapid and successful develop-ment of a western country, a bridgehead for the dissemination of anti–communist ide-as in other countries of the Balkan region, primarily Bulgaria. Besides, due to the establishment of a strict pro–Soviet regime in Sofia, the westernization of Bulgarian society was carried out including through intelligence agencies, and after a certain thaw in relations through economic cooperation.

Depth in Staff

2021 ◽  
pp. 65-75
Author(s):  
Stephen Skowronek ◽  
John A. Dearborn ◽  
Desmond King
Keyword(s):  
Executive Branch ◽  
House Staff ◽  
First Year ◽  
White House ◽  
Flow Of Information ◽  
Trump Administration ◽  
At Will

This chapter considers depth in staff, exploring the role of White House officials tasked to bridge the president’s personal direction with the institutional presidency and the executive branch at large. These staffers are normally part of the presidential party, collectively representing the different wings of the president’s electoral coalition. In the Trump administration, the White House staff jostled for influence and favor throughout the president’s first year. Trump bristled at their efforts to establish regular processes and to control the flow of information. The president saw management of that sort as an impingement on his authority to act on his own instincts and to direct his subordinates at will. Differences over the issue of trade afford a brief, but sharp, illustration of the tension between an institutional presidency and the personal direction of a unitary executive.

Puget Sound's Security Codependencyand Western Cold War Histories, 1950–1984

2011 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 268-293
Author(s):  
Brian G. Casserly
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
Puget Sound ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nuclear Movement ◽  
The Public ◽  
War Experience ◽  
Armed Services ◽  
The Military

Puget Sound provides a case study of significant changes in the West's Cold War experience and illustrates that this era can be understood in terms of two distinct phases, with a turning point in the late 1960s/early 1970s. This transition saw shifts in relationships between Puget Sound residents and the military, from a traditional, almost unanimous support for the military's presence in the region, to the development of a much more hostile attitude among some segments of the public. This change reflected growing concerns about the environment and skepticism about military-related economic growth. It was also shaped by concerns about nuclear weapons and the role of the armed services in U.S. foreign relations, the result of the rebirth of the anti-nuclear movement across the United States in the 1970s.

Monsters in the Machine

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steffen Hantke
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Social History ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Science Fiction Films ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

During the 1950s and early 1960s, the American film industry produced a distinct cycle of films situated on the boundary between horror and science fiction. Using the familiar imagery of science fiction, the vast majority of these films subscribed to the effects and aesthetics of horror film, anticipating the dystopian turn of many science fiction films to come. These films often evinced paranoia, unease, fear, shock, and disgust. Not only did these movies address technophobia and its psychological, social, and cultural corollaries, they also returned persistently to the military as a source of character, setting, and conflict. Commensurate with a state of perpetual mobilization, the US military comes across as an inescapable presence in American life. Regardless of their genre, this book argues that these films have long been understood as allegories of the Cold War. They register anxieties about two major issues of the time: atomic technologies, especially the testing and use of nuclear weapons, as well as communist aggression and/or subversion. Setting out to question, expand, and correct this critical argument, the book follows shifts and adjustments prompted by recent scholarly work into the technological, political, and social history of America in the 1950s. Based on this revised historical understanding, science fiction films appear in a new light as they reflect on the troubled memories of World War II, the emergence of the military-industrial complex, the postwar rewriting of the American landscape, and the relative insignificance of catastrophic nuclear war compared to America's involvement in postcolonial conflicts around the globe.

Creating a “Home Away from Home”: Korean Women’s Performances of the Imaginary American Home at US Military Clubs in South Korea, 1955–64

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 203-236
Author(s):  
Yu Jung Lee
Keyword(s):  
United States Army ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Us Military ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military ◽  
Occupied Zone

Abstract This article considers the proliferation of Korean native camp shows and the roles of Korean women entertainers at the military service clubs of the Eighth United States Army in Korea in the 1950s and the 1960s. The role of the “American sweethearts” in USO camp shows—to create a “home away from home” and boost the morale of the American troops during wartime—was carried out by female Korean entertainers in the occupied zone at a critical moment in US-ROK relations during the Cold War. The article argues that Korean entertainers at military clubs were meant to perform the entertainment of “home” and evoke nostalgia for American soldiers by imitating well-known American singers and songs. However, what they performed as America was not simply the reproduction of American entertainment but often a manifestation of their imagination; they were constructing their own version of the American home. Their hybrid styles of American performance were indicative of how the discourse of the American home itself was constructed around ambivalence, the very site where women entertainers were enabled to exceed the rigid boundaries of race and gender, transcend their roles as imitators, and exercise their agency by productively negotiating this ambivalence.

The Changing Role of the Military in Argentina

1961 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 571-578 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Potash
Keyword(s):  
Air Force ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Substantial Part ◽  
Political Force ◽  
Enlisted Men ◽  
Armed Services ◽  
The Military ◽  
Changing Role

The Argentine military emerged as a major political force with its overthrow of the Irigoyen government in September, 1930. It remains an active political force to this day. The role the military has played during this period has varied in terms of the specific objectives sought, the methods used, and the intensity of its action, but at no time did it cease to be a political force, at no time have the governing authorities whether military or civilian been able to discount its desires or demands. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the nature of the role the military played between 1930 and 1958 and to attempt an assessment of its more recent activities. As used in this paper, the term “military” will refer to the officers, active and retired, of the three armed services. The oneyear conscripts who have comprised the bulk of the enlisted men in the army and a substantial part of those of the navy and air force have never been initiators of political action.

The Cold War Origins of the U.S. Central Command

2006 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 52-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
William E. Odom
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Reagan Administration ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Far East ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Command ◽  
Jimmy Carter ◽  
Joint Chiefs Of Staff ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

During the Carter administration the Middle East and Southwest Asia became a third major theater in the Cold War struggle along with Europe and the Far East. Initially, President Jimmy Carter tried to remove this region from the Cold War competition, but the collapse of the shah's regime in Iran prompted Carter to reverse course and to build a “Persian Gulf security framework” that later allowed the United States to deal with three wars and many smaller clashes. The interagency process implementing this dramatic change was rent with clashes of departmental interests. The State Department and the military services resisted the structural changes they would later need to confront not only the Soviet threat but also intraregional conflicts. Moreover, the Reagan administration, after forcing the Joint Chiefs of Staff to make the Central Command formal, actually slowed the process of its growth, leaving it far from ready to embark on the Gulf War in 1990–1991.

Imagining Nuclear War in the British Army, 1945-1989

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon J. Moody
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Dissonance ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
British Army ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
The Will ◽  
Nuclear Warfare ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Primary Mission ◽  
Comprehensive Study

The primary mission assigned to the British Army from the 1950s until the end of the Cold War was deterring Soviet aggression in Europe by demonstrating the will and capability to fight with nuclear weapons in defence of NATO territory. This ‘surreal’ mission was unlike any other in history, and raised a number of conceptual and practical difficulties. This book provides the first comprehensive study on how the British Army imagined the character of a future nuclear land warfare, and how it planned to fight it. Based on new archival evidence, the book analyses British thinking about the political and military utility of tactical nuclear weapons, the role of land forces within NATO strategy, the development of theories of tactical nuclear warfare, how nuclear war was taught at the Staff College, the Army’s use of operational research, and the evolution of the Army’s nuclear war-fighting doctrine. The book argues that the British Army was largely successful in adapting to its new nuclear mission in Germany, but that it displayed a cognitive dissonance when faced with some of the more uncomfortable realities of nuclear war.

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