San Antonio College Library

"Civilian control of the military is one of the cornerstones on which America is built, extending back even before the founding of the nation. In this volume, Charles A. Byler examines the development of civil-military relations from the end of the Civil War until the start of the First World War, looking at what happened and why." "The period covered in this volume was one during which an initially small, poorly funded, and often unpopular military...

Conventional wisdom holds that American military is overwhelmingly conservative and Republican, and extremely political. Our Army paints a more complex picture, demonstrating that while Army officers are more conservative, rank-and-file soldiers hold political views that mirror those of the American public, and Amy personnel are less partisan and politically engaged than most civilians. Assumptions about political attitudes in U.S. Army are based...

Discusses each conflict the United States has been engaged in (from Lexington at the start of the Revolutionary War to Somalia, Kosovo, and the end of the Cold War) using military policy of the time as well as events of the time to analysis each war.

"Is it possible and worthwhile to use the military in conjunction with humanitarian action to thwart violence and mitigate civilian suffering? This timely book seeks to answer this question by looking at the contemporary context and history of military-civilian interactions, developing a framework for assessing military costs and civilian benefits, and examining in depth the five most prominent cases -- Northern Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and...

Over the past decade, states and international organizations have shifted a surprising range of foreign policy functions to private contractors. But who is accountable when the employees of foreign private firms do violence or create harm? This book describes the services that are now delivered by private contractors and the threat this trend poses to core public values of human rights, democratic accountability, and transparency. The author offers...

"The Politics of Air Power examines the turbulent development of relations between U.S. Army aviation leaders and civilian officials during the 1920s and 1930s. In the early 1920s Brigadier General William "Billy" Mitchell and a group of Army Air Service officers tried to force the creation of an independent air force against presidential wishes. They forged political alliances, used propaganda to arouse public sentiment, and circumvented their superiors...

"Do Third World countries benefit from having large militaries, or does this impede their development? In the face of conflicting evidence from prior quantitative research and case studies, Kirk Bowman sets out to explore just what effect militarization has had on development in Latin America." "To illuminate the causal mechanisms at work - how agency and sequence operate in the relationship between militarization and these three areas of development...

"Starting in the early 1960s, there was fear in America about the proliferation of computer database and networking technologies. People worried that these systems were going to be used by both corporations and governments for surveillance and control. Indeed, the dominant cultural view at the time was that computers were tools of repression, not liberation -- and that included the ARPANET, the military research network that would grow into the Internet...