<p> This paper examines the role of Major General Everett S. Hughes during World War II. While Hughes has often been quoted in biographies of Dwight D. Eisenhower or George S. Patton Jr. this is the first work to exclusively examine Hughes' contribution to the Allied victory in World War II. The paper argues that Hughes played an important part throughout the war, both in his ability to solve numerous problems and his influence with Eisenhower. It also examines topics such as Hughes' work with the Women's Army Corps, his friendship with Patton, the relationship between Eisenhower and his driver Kay Summersby, along with many other issues afflicting the Allied high command. Finally, this paper argues that Hughes' influence in Eisenhower's Headquarters needs to be taken seriously by those trying to understand the decisions of the U.S. military leadership in Europe during World War II.</p>

<p>In this comparative social history of the American Revolution, the stories of eight men recounted through the use of their biographies, journals, and memoirs. The lives of four enlisted soldiers and four officers are depicted to gain an understanding of how they became involved in the revolution. In order to do so, their early lives are scrutinized, as well as their post-war lives as they transitioned to peacetime. The main purpose, however, is to examine how each man became motivated to join the war for independence, whether socially, economically, and/or politically. As each man had different aspirations for their expectations before and after the war, one thing is certain: the enlisted soldiers were motivated for different reasons compared to the officers. </p><p> By examining their early lives, as well as post-war lives, one can gain a better understanding of whether their motivations came to fruition, in the end. The intention is not to disprove their patriotism or zeal for joining the war, but instead to prove there were other motivational factors that contributed to their decision. Their patriotism is undeniable, which was a crucial reason why they were able to win the war after eight long years. Even though they experienced deprivation for eight years, due to the lack of resources, the spirit of the men could not be deterred. Despite harrowing circumstances, the revolutionary soldiers were able to prevail over a superior enemy. With that, their motivations and expectations must be examined to shed light on how these men were able to win the war. </p>

Thèse (M.A.)--Université de Sherbrooke (Canada), 2008. / Titre de l'écran-titre (visionné le 1 février 2007). In ProQuest dissertations and theses. Publié aussi en version papier.

<p> What explains the tendency of counterinsurgents to adopt and retain ineffective strategies? Under what conditions do counterinsurgents replace ineffective strategies and what factors shape the strategies eventually adopted? While most studies explaining poor counterinsurgent performance focus on the preferences and pathologies of military organizations, I shift attention to civilian policymakers, explaining strategic choice as the product of their political preferences and the wider political and grand strategic pressures they face. By distinguishing between policymaking principals and bureaucratic agents tasked with implementing strategy, two challenges to successful adaptation can be identified: the challenge of decision, in which policymakers must overcome pressures to retain existing strategies, and implementation, in which policymakers must ensure agents tasked with implementing strategy comply with strategic directives. A solution to each is individually necessary, and together they are jointly sufficient for adaptation.</p><p> Counterinsurgency strategy is selected by policymaking principals who arbitrate between the competing recommendations of their bureaucratic agents and advisors. Because policymaker preferences are shaped by their wide responsibilities, an important determinant of counterinsurgency strategy is to be found in the way strategy impacts policymakers' core interests, notably their wider foreign policy objectives and their political security, both of which shape the objectives and strategies of a counterinsurgency campaign. As long as the political and geostrategic pressures that led counterinsurgents to select current strategies persist, counterinsurgents retain ineffective strategy. When domestic political or geostrategic changes lead policymakers to perceive that existing strategies have become liabilities for these higher priority issues, their preferences shift in favor of alternate strategies. Policymakers also face the challenge of ensuring all agents implement policymakers' preferred strategy rather than pursue their own preferred ends using their preferred means. The most effective solution is to empower a single agent, whose preferences most closely align with those of policymakers, to direct the campaign. </p><p> I combine comparative analysis and process tracing, drawing on case studies from the 20^th century British Empire. Beginning in the British Mandate for Palestine, I draw on a most similar comparison of two phases of the Palestinian Rebellion (1936, 1937-39) and the Jewish Rebellion (1945-1947), each demonstrating a different outcome: 1936 represents a case of successful decision but failed implementation; 1938 represents a case of successful decision and successful implementation; and 1946-7 represents a case of failed decision. Each is then matched to a most-different extension from Malaya and Ireland. </p><p>

<p> In 2016, the Secretary of Defense opened all ground combat jobs in the military to women, permitting work in a field that had been off limits to them since the inception of the Women&rsquo;s Army Corps in 1948. Yet little is understood about female soldiers&rsquo; journey to attain these roles. This dissertation shows how the 2016 decision did not emerge out of nowhere; earlier generations had laid the foundation. That foundation reflected both advocacy and achievement on the part of military women to gain access to a range of noncombat jobs on the battlefield. Women&rsquo;s integration into these positions changed the meaning of combat from a geographic space exposing soldiers to hostile action, to a soldier&rsquo;s specific direct ground combat role attacking the enemy.</p><p> Women&rsquo;s integration fundamentally transformed the Army workplace. Between 1964 and 1994, their presence in the Army increased from one percent to thirteen percent. As their numbers grew, they increasingly infiltrated the leadership ranks; by 2016, over seventeen percent of Generals were women. Having women in these leadership positions meant they commanded men, established plans for war and led troops in battle. Many ordinary soldiers pushed for policies that enabled mothers to serve, allowed women access to professional military education, and they consistently forced the military to confront the problem of sexual violence. Lesbian soldiers consistently pushed the Army for inclusion, by 2010 their efforts resulted in the right of all homosexuals to serve openly. Women&rsquo;s opportunities visible in the Army today are the result of female soldier&rsquo;s consistent push for equal treatment as soldiers.</p>

<p> Dissent has always existed in American civil-military relations since General George Washington and his staff dissented to the Continental Congress over funding the Continental Army. More recently, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates called for more understanding of dissent, but how dissent occurs is little understood in civil-military contexts. Organizational theorists are convinced dissent is ultimately healthy to all organizations, even civil-military ones. </p><p> This study asked how dissent occurs within the civil-military relationship in positive, historical dissent events. A historiographical approach examined the chronology of dissent over desegregation of the U.S. Army before, during, and after President Truman issued Executive Order 9981, declaring &ldquo;equality of treatment and equal opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin&rdquo; (13 Fed. Reg. 4313, July 28, 1948). The U.S. Army continued to dissent 2 years after the order came out. </p><p> Conflict theory holds conflict as influential in dissent (Coser, 1957). Hierarchy and power play important roles in dissent (Kassing, 1997, 1998, 2012, 2013). Lamb&rsquo;s (2013) historical discourse analysis offered a high-level dissent analysis in civil-military relations from 1945 to 1950. </p><p> The study found that dissent occurred because of conflict, yet conflict also resulted from dissent. Previous dissent research has concerned itself with dissent up the hierarchy, but this research discovered that upward, lateral, and outward dissent occurred simultaneously. Power patterns emerged as groups in dissent displayed, battled for, and consolidated power before a weakened, final engagement marked the terminus of open dissent. Dissent reverberated outward from political and military groups in conflict, embroiling the social group. </p><p> This study contributes to dissent theory, demonstrating the influence of hierarchies and power and supporting theoretical research that dissent happens over time. Previous dissent research focused on why dissent happens. This study provided additional insight into how dissent happens, advancing civil-military theory and concluding that civil-military relations are composed of not just civilian and military authority, but a tripartite genus of political, military, and social groups. The research supports dissent as healthy to U.S. civil-military relations.</p><p>

<p> The dissertation explores the phenomenon of long-running border wars, which are believed to have been ubiquitous in Archaic Greece. Two most famous confrontations are examined in depth: the war between Eretria and Chalcis over the Lelantine Plain, and the struggle between Sparta and Argos over the territory of Thyreatis. It is suggested that in the Archaic period these disputed territories were contested in recurrent ritual battles. The battles took place in the framework of peace agreement between the neighboring cities, so that the disputed territory constituted a sacred common space for the opposing cities. The participants in ritual battles belonged to the social class of <i> hippeis,</i> for whom the battles both expressed their local identity and reaffirmed the Panhellenic values, underlying aristocratic inter-<i> polis</i> ties. The ritual battles reenacted mythical destructive confrontations, which were imagined to result in death of all combatants; however, the ritual battle themselves, which were normally non-lethal, were led according to strict rules and represented the enactment of the hoplite ideal. The tradition of the aristocratic ritual battles began to break down in the middle of the sixth century, when, following the adoption of a more aggressive style of warfare, the border territories that had been ritually contested became annexed by one city-state. However, the myths of confrontations between neighboring cities did not lose their ideological power. In the Classical period, these myths constituted a contested ideological territory in the inter- and intra-<i>polis</i> struggles between democratic and oligarchic political camps. In particular, the myths about the confrontation between neighboring cities were adopted by democratic regimes as their foundational narratives. </p>

<p> The purpose of this paper is to explore medieval gender roles through the discourse and conduct of warfare. Some modern historians such as John Keegan have maintained that medieval warfare was a masculine activity that precluded female participation in all but the most exceptional cases. Megan McLaughlin asserted that the change from a domestic to public model of warfare resulted in a disenfranchisement of women after the eleventh century. This paper shows that medieval warfare was not male exclusive, and women's active participation throughout the period was often integral to a combat's outcome. By analyzing both the military activities of female combatants and changes in academic dialogues over war in the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, an ongoing disparity unfolds between the ideological gendering of warfare and its actual practice. </p><p> This disparity informed an accepted norm in which women were seen as inherently weak and unfit for combat, requiring a "masculinization" of women who successfully engaged in battle. This in turn led to the establishment of the <i>virago</i> image of female warriors; paradoxically, women who therefore defied the normative expectation of feminine behavior could be held in high regard for their masculine virtues. At the same time, the contributions of individual women to warfare are often left with minimal mention or treated as anomalous by some later chroniclers. </p><p> The paper is divided into seven sections. Part I explores the eleventh century military career of Matilda of Canossa, and subsequent treatment of her activities by apologists and canonical reformers. Part II discusses the means by which women had access to military activity in a changing climate of gendered social roles, through marriage, inheritance, and the influence of the <i>Pax Dei</i> movement. Part III discusses the military activity of women during the Crusades, and the differences in how that activity was noted in Western versus Islamic sources. </p><p> Parts IV - VI discuss the thirteenth century academic dialogues over women's participation in combat in the wake of the Crusades, through the work of Giles of Rome and Ptolemy of Lucca. As well, it analyzes the enfolding of knighthood as a construct of feudal vassalage into the noble class, and the changing access to military orders granted to women as armies became professionalized. Part VII looks at the formation of a new kind of war rhetoric and an attempt to resolve the disparity between the theory and practice of warfare in regards to women through the fifteenth century work of Christine de Pizan. </p><p> The conclusions of this work are that war may be understood to be a masculine activity, yet is not male exclusive. Writers and war chroniclers were forced to complicate gendered social norms in order to justify or refute women engaging in combat. This only resulted in a continued re-evaluation of the proper ideological place of women in war, and was not necessarily reflective of a change in the actual circumstances or frequency with which women took part.</p>

Inaug.-Diss.--Marburg. / Vita. Bibliography: p. iii-xvi.

This project explores the military and political mobilization of rural and urban working sectors of Puerto Rican society as the Island transitioned from Spanish to U.S. imperial rule. In particular, my research is interested in examining how this shift occurs via patterns of inclusion-exclusion within the military and the various forms of citizenship that are subsequently transformed into socio-economic and political enfranchisement. Analyzing the armed forces as a culture-homogenizing agent helps to explain the formation and evolution of Puerto Rican national identities from 1868 to 1952, and how these evolving identities affected the political choices of the Island. This phenomenon, I argue, led to the creation of the Estado Libre Asociado in 1952. The role played by the tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans in the metropolitan military in the final creation of a populist project taking place under colonial rule in the Island was threefold. Firstly, these soldiers served as political leverage during WWII to speed up the decolonization process. Secondly, they incarnated the commonwealth ideology by fighting and dying in the Korean War. Finally, the Puerto Rican soldiers filled the ranks of the army of technicians and technocrats attempting to fulfill the promises of a modern industrial Puerto Rico after the returned from the wars. ^ In contrast to Puerto Rican popular national mythology and mainstream academic discourse that has marginalized the agency of subaltern groups; I argue that the Puerto Rican soldier was neither cannon fodder for the metropolis nor the pawn of the Creole political elites. Regaining their masculinity, upward mobility, and political enfranchisement were among some of the incentives enticing the Puerto Rican peasant into military service. The enfranchisement of subaltern sectors via military service ultimately created a very liberal, popular, and broad definition of Puerto Rico’s national identity. When the Puerto Rican peasant/soldier became the embodiment of the Commonwealth formula, the political leaders involved in its design were in fact responding to these soldiers’ complex identities, which among other things compelled them to defend the “American Nation” to show their Puertorriqueñidad . ^