Toward Strategic Cohesion: A Reply to King’s Criticism of the Call for a Broader View of Cohesion

In October 2018, Armed Forces & Society published a special issue that called for a theoretical and methodological broadening of the study of cohesion. In a response, King accuses me of ignoring his 2013 book The Combat Soldier, which he feels had already made this call redundant. This answer explains why this is not the case. The Combat Soldier ticks the three boxes of modern, Western, and state military that have dominated the study of cohesion. The resulting narrow vantage point affirms problematic assumptions of Western concepts as absolutes with universal validity with little room for other models of sociopolitical interaction. This becomes especially problematic when King defines cohesion as tactical-level combat performance, the be-all and end-all of what makes, and decides, war. The answer concludes with an appeal for truly interdisciplinary future studies of war that a broader understanding of cohesion, among other things, depends on.

From Idiophylaxis to Inner Armor: Imagining the Self-Armoring Soldier in the United States Military from the 1960s to Today

All militaries try to develop a “winning edge” in warfare. More often than not these attempts focus on new weapons systems and weapons platforms, on new ways of maximizing the offensive capabilities of a military through firepower. These attempts can also involve the training and development of soldiers, including performance enhancements to make them fight better, longer, and smarter than the enemy and to counter human frailty on the battlefield. These concerns and problems have long held the interest of the U.S. military. This article traces the development, rationale, and legacy of one such attempt to deal with human frailty and the “body problem,” a kind of military futurism devised at the peak of the Cold War. Dr. Marion Sulzberger envisioned creating soldiers who had their own kind of special “biological armor,” or what he termed “idiophylaxis.” In 1962, he presented a paper at the Army Science Conference at West Point titled “Progress and Prospects in Idiophylaxis (Built-In Individual Self-Protection of the Combat Soldier).” Sulzberger's call was for a radical rethinking of the combat soldier and the ways in which soldiers were imagined, designed, and developed. His goal was to “armor” the individual soldier both internally and psychologically through new forms of biomedicine and biotechnology. The interventions he detailed in 1962 live on today in the U.S. military's soldier performance enhancement research programs, including DARPA's recent “Inner Armor” program and desire to make “kill-proof” soldiers.

Tenets of Public Management and the World War II Mot ion Picture Genre

The motion picture as an artistic medium amplifies emotions through the combination of imagery and sound. This medium has proven ideal for chronicling the American World War II experience. The World War II film genre has portrayed the American combat soldier as heroic and resourceful (Suid 2002). These portrayals of actions and leadership on the battlefield are, to some measure, applicable to contemporary public management. This paper examines select World War II motion pictures in the context of the following questions: (1) what tenets do these motion pictures convey and (2) to what extent do these tenets apply topublic management? Patton (1970), Saving Private Ryan (1998), and The Great Escape (1963) are examined

Army Camps

Kentucky had four military camps during the war: Fort Thomas in northern Kentucky, Camp Stanley in Lexington, Camp Taylor in Louisville, and Camp Knox between Louisville and Elizabethtown. Camps Thomas and Stanley dealt primarily with the Kentucky National Guard, while Camps Taylor and Knox became facilities to train draftees. US entry into the war prompted the federal government to establish new cantonments to train millions of men for the military. A rivalry to get one of these camps developed between Louisville and Lexington, exacerbated by newspaper coverage in the Louisville Courier-Journal and Lexington Herald. Louisville received the new cantonment: Camp Zachary Taylor. The camp processed men primarily from Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, many of whom were formed into the Eighty-Fourth Division, known as the “Lincoln Division.” Other training consisted of a Field Artillery Central Officers Training School (FACOTS) and a school for chaplains. Segregated divisions comprised of African Americans were created and officered by white men. At times, the number of men in the camp reached nearly 60,000. Several organizations provided services, including the YMCA, Red Cross, Knights of Columbus, and Young Men’s Hebrew Association. Libraries and “Moonlight Schools” helped combat soldier illiteracy. Toward the end of the war, Camp Knox was developed to provide better artillery range facilities. The new camps vastly boosted the local economies.