Following the Treaty of Paris, which formally ended the American Revolution, the United States faced the daunting task of transitioning from an alliance of rebellious colonies to a unified republican government. From the outset the United States struggled to integrate their revolutionary ideology into a functional system of governance. The country’s national defense establishment typified this struggle. Professional armies, eighteenth-century Americans believed, remained antithetical to republican principles. Such forces, they believed, were the tools authoritarian leaders wielded to promote tyranny and suppress individual liberties. Their ranks were filled with aristocratic officers and mindless mercenary soldiers drawn from the lowest rungs of society. To preserve their revolutionary ideals, the young nation chose to place their national defense in the hands of local militias. Filled with citizen-soldiers, militias provided security while avoiding the evils of professional armies.The nation’s militia system following the revolution, however, remained in disarray. Based in local communities across the nation, the militia remained poorly organized, ill-equipped, and poorly trained. Local citizens, state and federal policymakers, and military officials remained committed to fixing the only military system compatible with their idealized republican society. In the first decade following the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, the federal and state governments passed waves of legislation to try and reform the militia system. Despite these efforts, the militia, by the end of the federalist era, remained poorly organized, ill-equipped, and, in a single defining word, ineffective. The limited scholarly attention devoted to examining the militia during this period centers on the national political debate amongst elite politicians and the legislation they drafted to improve the militia. Such debates reveal how republican ideology, the same ideology which necessitated the militia, imposed constraints on the system. Historians, however, often remain less focused on actual militia organizations. Examining local militias illuminates the impact these republican constraints placed on the system. Exploring the thoughts and actions of local militiamen also reveals they too embraced republican principles. Their unique equalitarian conception of republicanism, however, contrasted with the conception most policymakers held. Militiamen resisted the militia system policymakers imposed, deeming it incompatible with true republican principles. Well-crafted legislation mattered little if militiamen refused to enact the system policymakers set forth. Instead of compromising, policymakers tried to rein in the unruly militias. These efforts provoked more resistance. Exhausted after years of failed reform, the government increasingly turned to the least republican option of all: a professional standing army. / History

Master of Science / Hospitality Management and Dietetics / Kevin R. Roberts / Many pathogenic microorganisms are spread by contaminated hands and may lead to foodborne illness. The use of hand sanitizers can significantly reduce bacterial contamination and is an efficient and inexpensive method to prevent infections and sickness. Previous researchers have found that the routine use of hand sanitizers allowed the U.S. Army to significantly reduce illness. However, few studies have been conducted within a U.S. Army dining facility, which is considered to be one of the primary sources of foodborne illness within the U.S. Army. Therefore, using the Theory of Planned Behavior, the purpose of this study was to identify the behavioral intention, attitudes, subjective norms, and perceptions of control of using hand sanitizer among military personnel. The study targeted soldiers using a written survey during their lunch hour on the U.S. Army base at Fort Riley, KS. A total of 201 surveys were collected. All data were screened and entered into IBM SPSS for analysis. Results indicated that attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control explained 64% of the variance in behavioral intention. Attitude and subjective norms were found to be significant predictors of behavioral intention, with attitude being the strongest predictor. In general, behavioral beliefs were positive among soldiers. Related to normative beliefs, soldiers did perceive negative social pressure from other soldiers not to use hand sanitizers. Analysis of control beliefs found soldiers perceived hand sanitizers were readily available, but disliked their smell and feel after application. Food production managers and Army commanders can use these results to implement hand sanitation behavioral interventions within military dining environments. Practical implications will likely translate to reduced healthcare costs, decreased absenteeism rates, and improved mission readiness. Some of the limitations include commonly perceived social psychology bias. Further, clustered samples were collected within one military installation in a relatively short amount of time.

In the post-Civil War Southwest, the United States Army utilized civilians and Indians as scouts. As the mainstay of the reconnaissance force, enlisted Indians excelled as trackers, guides, and fighters. General George Crook became the foremost advocate of this service. A little-known aspect of the era was the international controversy created by the activities of native trackers under the 1882 reciprocal hot pursuit agreement between Mexico and the United States. Providing valuable information on Army scouts are numerous government records which include the Annual Report of the Secretary of War from 1866 to 1896 and Foreign Relations of the United States for 1883 and 1886. Memoirs, biographies, and articles in regional and national historical journals supplement government documents.

During the ten years following the Spanish American War (1898 to 1908), Major General Leonard Wood served as the primary agent of American imperialism. Wood was not only a proconsul of the new American Empire; he was a symbol of the empire and the age in which he served. He had the distinction of directing civil and military government in Cuba and the Philippines where he implemented the imperial policies given to him by the administrations of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. In Cuba, he labored to rebuild a state and a civil society crippled by decades of revolutionary ferment and guided the administration's policy through the dangerous channels of Cuban politics in a way that satisfied – at least to the point of avoiding another revolution – both the Cubans and the United States. In the Philippines, Wood took control of the Moro Province and attempted to smash the tribal-religious leadership of Moro society in order to bring it under direct American rule. His personal ideology, the imperial policies he shepherded, and the guidance he provided to fellow military officers and the administrations he served in matters of colonial administration and defense shaped the American Empire and endowed it with his personal stamp.

This dissertation presents the U.S. Army Asymmetric Warfare Group (AWG) as an example of that service implementing successful change in wartime. It argues that creating the AWG required senior leaders to adopt a vision differing from the Army’s self-conceptualization, change bureaucratic processes to permit that vision to produce an actual military unit, and then place the new unit in the hands of uniquely qualified leaders able to build and sustain it. In the process, the dissertation will consider forces that influence change within the Army, arguing that the two most significant are its self-conceptualization and institutional bureaucracy. Only determined senior leaders can overcome these barriers, and then only by deep personal engagement. Such engagement extends to manipulating the bureaucracy by placing like-minded subordinates in positions where they can sustain the tenets of change long after the visionaries retire. The dissertation also posits effective leadership as critical to building and sustaining organizations able to consistently meet their founders’ vision. To effectively tell the story, the dissertation explores three major subject areas that provide historical context. The first is the Army’s institutional history from the early 1950s through 2001. This period begins with the Army seeking to validate its place in America’s national security strategy and ends with the Army trying to chart a path into the post-Cold War future. That section includes the major bureaucratic changes brought about by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in the early 1960s as these changes created processes the service still uses. It also addresses the Army’s post-Vietnam War focus on re-establishing itself as a technologically sophisticated force optimized to defeat similar opponents. This dissertation also looks at several episodes further in the past. Prior to World War I, the Army’s history is largely one of asymmetric warfare. The dissertation thus examines several campaigns that offered lessons for subsequent wars. Some lessons the Army took to heart, others it ignored. Finally, the dissertation chronicles the AWG’s creation in 2006. The AWG was a direct outgrowth of the failures and frustrations that the Army experienced in Afghanistan and Iraq. The dissertation examines these campaigns and identifies the specific problems that led senior Army leaders to create the AWG. It also chronicles the organizations growth and re-assignment from the Army staff to a fully-fledged organization subordinate to the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command in 2011. This reassignment placed a now mature AWG in the Army’s standard force structure, a place it held until its 2021 deactivation. This deactivation did not result not from the unit’s failure to adapt to a post-insurgency Army focusing on technical modernization. Rather, it resulted from the Army’s inability to realize that while the AWG originated as a response to counterinsurgency, it provided a capability to support the Army during a period of great strategic and institutional uncertainty. / History

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At the time of its construction (1971-1985), the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway was a highly scrutinized public works project, but the years after its construction have remained largely unexplored. Research in the John C. Stennis Collection, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway Development Authority archives, and local newspapers, revealed that despite developers’ promise the waterway’s economic impact failed to live up to expectations, while its environmental influence more than exceeded them. Though rural southerners failed to benefit economically from the waterway, they embraced the environmental changes forced upon the project by the National Environmental Policy Act. Built as a promise of economic development, the Tenn-Tom offers a model of how economics and environmental forces intersected within the rural South. The waterway’s history as an economic and environmental force demands a reconsideration of the role of public works projects in southern environmental history.

For civilization and citizenship: emancipation, empire, and the creation of the black citizen-soldier tradition examines the origins and evolution of black military service and its relation to how black and white Americans understood citizenship from the Civil War Era to the First World War. This dissertation analyzes how different generations of black soldiers pursued full, civic citizenship through their military service and formed their own vision of citizenship rooted in military service and how the War Department sought to deal with the tensions created by a biracial Army. While it asserts that a separate, black citizen-soldier tradition linking service and citizenship emerged over the course of the nineteenth century, this dissertation argues that this tradition was informed by and rooted in American military culture and traditions. Concentrating on the nexus of American racial ideologies, War Department policies, and black aspirations for citizenship, this dissertation not only reveals the early, firm connection between military service and citizenship among African Americans, but also reveals the ironic nature of the black citizen-soldier tradition. Far from simply examining black soldier’s failures to translate their service into fuller, civil status, For civilization and citizenship analyzes the unique ways in which black soldiers resisted American racial ideologies and the rise of Jim Crow as well as the overall Americanness of black efforts to attain citizenship. In contrast to other studies’ emphasis on either direct, nonviolent or armed resistance to white supremacy, this dissertation proposes that the black citizen-soldier tradition represented a distinct, powerful form of black resistance that manifested as accommodation to American civilization’s institutions and imperial agendas while seeking to fundamentally change their meaning and ethos. As black soldiers served in the armies of the Union in the American Civil War, those of the western frontier in the postbellum era, and those of overseas empire at the end of the nineteenth century, they confirmed their status as Americans while countering the dominant racial tropes of American civilization. For citizenship and civilization reveals the links between emancipation, empire, and changing meanings of citizenship in the U.S. through the black citizen-soldier tradition.

No description available.

Thesis (M. En.)--Miami University, Institute of Environmental Sciences, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 35 [1st set of paginations]).