Master of Arts / Department of History / Mark P. Parillo / The United States Army faced a dire challenge when conscription was phased out in favor of the All-Volunteer Force (AVF) in 1973. The Army was confronted with pressing manning requirements while suffering from the American public’s disapproval over the war in Vietnam. The end of the draft in favor of an all-volunteer force did not offer a great deal of promise for filling Army manpower requirements. Army leadership realized that it needed new methods that could recruit quality volunteers while simultaneously reforming the Army’s public image. Paid television advertising, able to reach a wide and diverse viewing audience, was pursued as a way to achieve both of those objectives. This study examines Army television advertisements since the creation of the AVF and analyzes their imagery and messages. Surprisingly consistent themes and messages have persisted in the Army’s television advertising for over thirty-five years of the AVF’s existence. During that same time, American attitudes toward the military were increasingly characterized by an interesting paradox. The American public overwhelmingly supported the military but grew less inclined to volunteer for military service. The public’s good feelings toward the Army and its “support for the troops” were not borne out with strong recruitment numbers during the years of the AVF. This work will argue that the messages in Army television advertising helped change the Army from a vital national institution into just another employer making a basic job offer in the audience’s mind while doing little to reform the Army’s public image. The ads did not appeal to America’s youth to commit themselves to national service. Rather, the ads promised to help individuals realize their wishes and dreams by focusing on the economic and educational advantages that the Army could deliver. Consequently, the ads cast the Army as a sort of trade school willing to provide young people with marketable skills, educational opportunities and enlistment bonuses in return for a short stint in the service. Public service and duty to the nation were rarely mentioned. The ads portrayed the Army as willing to strike deals with recruits to advance their personal goals and enrichment while demanding little in return.

The U.S. Army has undergone extreme transformation to meet new national security needs of the nation due to the Global War on Terror (GWOT). In order to meet the needs of Soldiers and families exposed to increased stressors, the Army behavioral health system has undergone much transformation as well. The Army Social Work Care Manger Program (CMP) is one program recently developed to enhance Army behavioral health services to this population. It provides care for Soldiers and their families who experience psychological or interpersonal difficulties throughout the deployment cycle. This study investigates the ability of this new program to create effective services throughout several locations across the Army. More specifically, the study evaluates the extent to which the CMP has been implemented as intended, reaches the target population and accomplishes the intended tasks. Soldier survey data, multiple Care Manager (CM) activity reports, interviews and focus groups were analyzed in a triangulated methodology. CMPs studied were found to reach the target population and address target issues across installations; however, senior enlisted as well as white male Soldiers appeared to be exposed to trauma at higher rates than they received treatment. Burnout, lowered health benefits, overtasking, and recommendations for program formalization through manuals were identified as areas of program development.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

In contrast to the relatively rapid changes occurring in the modern American army, the period between the end of the War of 1812 and the beginning of the Mexican War offers a definite period for a study of military life when reform came slowly.

The dissertation argues that the United States Army was a slaveholding institution. It explains how the military, the central instrument of statecraft in the 19th century, evolved as a national establishment while condoning and promoting slavery in its ranks. An empirical study of often ignored military pay records reveals that from the army’s foundation to the abolition of slavery, thousands of enslaved people served as officers’ servants and became integral to the military. In 1816, Congress authorized allowances, rations, and clothing for officers’ private servants while prohibiting the former custom of taking soldiers as servants. By reimbursing officers who held or hired enslaved servants, Congress not only sanctioned slavery but also subsidized and created incentives for officers to own, utilize and trade enslaved people. The dissertation shows that over three-quarters of officers, southerners and northerners alike, held slaves as servants during their military careers. Over 9,000 enslaved people were forced into the army, nearly three times more than the number of officers. The dissertation investigates the origins and scope of slavery within the army, the legal, fiscal, and violent mechanisms that sustained it, and the profound impact slavery had on the American military establishment. By analyzing the U.S. Army, the most dominant national establishment, as a slaveholding institution, this project adds to the expanding literature on the “slaveholding republic.” The dissertation goes beyond merely illustrating “slave power” in the federal army by offering a ground-level investigation into how slavery got its foothold in an important national organization. Virtually unnoticed by prior historians, some 180,000 payrolls in the National Archives reveal the mundane realities of enslaved military servants and their enslavers. Each document included servants’ names, physical descriptions, locations, and allowances paid for their subsistence. The dissertation utilizes an original database of thousands of payrolls identified, sampled, and digitized, particularly for this project. The database has over two million data points, which enable grasping the phenomena of military slavery and tracking down individual servants’ and enslavers’ trajectories. The data shows that officers carried enslaved servants wherever they went, regardless of local laws forbidding it – even in so-called “free states” in the continental United States, Mexico, and Europe. Nearly 13% of all officers’ pay expenses went directly to subsidize slavery. Ratio analysis demonstrates that the bureaucracy and funding mechanisms that evolved before 1816 kept enslaved servitude stable. Thus, until the Civil War (1861-1865) and the unmaking of slavery, the army – which expanded and protected the frontiers of an empire in the making – not only benefited from the slave market but was a significant force in its expansion. Moreover, permitting and subsidizing slavery in the army made the U.S. government complicit in its brutalities, including forced removals, human trafficking, and the separation of families. Military slavery developed gradually with the foundation, bureaucratization, and professionalization of an American military peace establishment. It evolved from 1797 to 1816 through competing policy objectives, resulting in an enduring bureaucratic (and euphemistic) workaround: “servants not soldiers.” Facing public criticism over officers’ abuse of soldiers’ labor, the army gradually “outsourced” officers’ servants through a dual process of privatization and racialization of military labor, differentiating between “public” and “private” service; between free, white soldiers and enslaved, black servants. Though serving slaveholders’ interests, the adopted solution of “Servants not soldiers” was a product of bureaucratic contingencies and ad-hoc decision-making and not a top-down policy orchestrated by a cabal of enslavers. Interestingly, a simple, basic question of reimbursement led somewhere perhaps unanticipated, ending in government-sponsored enslaved servitude. To add this level of contingency is not to make excuses, not to pose something akin to an “unthinking decision,” but to make us aware of the degree to which “the problem of slavery” was most frequently “solved” by accommodating it institutionally, rather than contesting it politically or morally. Thus, the dissertation illuminates an often-ignored aspect of the United States as a “slaveholding republic.”

No description available.