Mobilizing for Modern War

Mobilizing for Modern War PDF Author: Paul A. C. Koistinen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
In this volume, Koistinen examines war planning and mobilizing in an era of rapid industrialization and reveals how economic mobilization for defense and war is shaped at the national level by the interaction of political, economic, and military institutions and by increasingly powerful and expensive weaponry.

Mobilizing for Modern War

Mobilizing for Modern War PDF Author: Paul A. C. Koistinen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
In this volume, Koistinen examines war planning and mobilizing in an era of rapid industrialization and reveals how economic mobilization for defense and war is shaped at the national level by the interaction of political, economic, and military institutions and by increasingly powerful and expensive weaponry.

Planning War, Pursuing Peace

Planning War, Pursuing Peace PDF Author: Paul A. C. Koistinen
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700621156
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
In the years following World War I, America's armed services, industry, and government took lessons from that conflict to enhance the country's ability to mobilize for war. Paul Koistinen examines how today's military-industrial state emerged during that period-a time when the army and navy embraced their increasing reliance on industry, and business accelerated its efforts to prepare the country for future wars. Planning War, Pursuing Peace is the third of an extraordinary five-volume study on the political economy of American warfare. It differs from preceding volumes by examining the planning and investigation of war mobilization rather than the actual harnessing of the economy for hostilities; and it is also the first book to treat all phases of the political economy of wartime during those crucial interwar years. Koistinen first describes and analyzes the War and Navy Departments' procurement and economic mobilization planning-never before examined in its entirety-and conveys the enormity of the task faced by the military in establishing ties with many sectors of the economy. He tells how the War Department created commodity committees to carry on the work of World War I's War Industries Board, and how both military and industrial powers strove to protect their mutual interests against those seeking to avoid war and to reform society. Koistinen then describes the American public's struggle to come to terms with modern warfare through the in-depth explorations of the work of the House Select Committee on Expenditures in the War Department, the War Policies Commission, and the Senate Special Committee Investigating the Munitions Industry. He tells how these investigations alarmed pacifists, isolationists, and neo-Jeffersonians, and how they led Senator Gerald Nye and others to warn against the creation of "unhealthy alliances" between the armed services and industry. Planning War, Pursuing Peace clearly shows how the U.S. economy was both directly and indirectly planned based on knowledge gained from World War I. By revealing vital and previously unexplored links between America's World Wars, it further illuminates the political economy of twentieth-century warfare as a complex and continually evolving process.

State of War

State of War PDF Author: Paul A. C. Koistinen
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700618740
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
In his farewell speech, President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned us of the dangers of a military-industrial complex (MIC). In Paul Koistinen's sobering new book, that warning appears to have been both prophetic and largely ignored. As the final volume in his magisterial study of the political economy of American warfare, State of War describes the bipolar world that developed from the rivalry between the U.S. and USSR, showing how seventy years of defense spending have bred a monster that has sunk its claws into the very fabric of American life. Koistinen underscores how during the second half of the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first, the United States for the first time in its history began to maintain large military structures during peacetime. Many factors led to that result: the American economy stood practically alone in a war-ravaged world; the federal government, especially executive authority, was at the pinnacle of its powers; the military accumulated unprecedented influence over national security; and weaponry became much more sophisticated following World War II. Koistinen describes how the rise of the MIC was preceded by a gradual process of institutional adaptation and then supported and reinforced by the willing participation of Big Science and its industrial partners, the broader academic world, and a proliferation of think tanks. He also evaluates the effects of ongoing defense budgets within the context of the nation's economy since the 1950s. Over time, the MIC effectively blocked efforts to reduce expenditures, control the arms race, improve relations with adversaries, or adopt more enlightened policies toward the developing world-all the while manipulating the public on behalf of national security to sustain the warfare state. Now twenty years after the Soviet Union's demise, defense budgets are higher than at any time during the Cold War. As Koistinen observes, more than six decades of militaristic mobilization for stabilizing a turbulent world have firmly entrenched the state of war as a state of mind for our nation. Collectively, his five-volume opus provides an unparalleled analysis of the economics of America's wars from the colonial period to the present, illuminating its impact upon the nation's military campaigns, foreign policy, and domestic life.

Arsenal of World War II

Arsenal of World War II PDF Author: Paul A. C. Koistinen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 678

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Book Description
Prolific munitions production keyed America's triumph in World War II but so did the complex economic controls needed to sustain that production. Artillery, tanks, planes, ships, trucks, and weaponry of every kind were constantly demanded by the military and readily supplied by American business. While that relationship was remarkably successful in helping the U.S. win the war, it also raised troubling issues about wartime economies that have never been fully resolved. Paul Koistinen's fourth installment of a monumental five-volume series on the political economy of American warfare focuses on the mobilization of national resources for a truly global war. Koistinen comprehensively analyzes all relevant aspects of the World War II economy from 1940 through 1945, describing the nation's struggle to establish effective control over industrial supply and military demand—and revealing the growing partnership between the corporate community and the armed services. Koistinen traces the evolution of federal agencies mobilizing for war—including the National Defense Advisory Commission, the Office of Production Management, and the Supply Priorities and Allocation Board-and then focuses on the work of the War Production Board from 1942-1945. As the war progressed, the WPB and related agencies oversaw the military's supply and procurement systems; stabilized the economy while financing the war; closely monitored labor relations; and controlled the shipping and rationing of fuel and food. In chronicling American mobilization, Koistinen reveals how representatives of industry and the armed services expanded upon their growing prewar ties to shape policies for harnessing the economy, and how federal agencies were subsequently riven with dissension as New Deal reformers and anti-New Deal corporate elements battled for control over mobilization itself. As the armed services emerged as the principal customers of a command economy, the military-industrial nexus consolidated its power and ultimately succeeded in bending the reformers to its will. The product of exhaustive archival research, Arsenal of World War II shows that mobilization meant more than simply harnessing the economy for war-it also involved struggles for power and position among a great many interest groups and ideologies. Nearly two decades in the making, it provides an ambitious and enormously insightful overview of the emergence of the military-industrial economy, one that still resonates today as America continues to wage wars around the globe.

The Political Economy of Grand Strategy

The Political Economy of Grand Strategy PDF Author: Kevin Narizny
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801445088
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
A nation's grand strategy rarely serves the best interests of all its citizens. Instead, every strategic choice benefits some domestic groups at the expense of others. When groups with different interests separate into opposing coalitions, societal debates over foreign policy become polarized along party lines. Parties then select leaders who share the priorities of their principal electoral and financial backers. As a result, the overarching goals and guiding principles of grand strategy, as formulated at the highest levels of government, derive from domestic coalitional interests. In The Political Economy of Grand Strategy, Kevin Narizny develops these insights into a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding the dynamics of security policy.The focus of this analysis is the puzzle of partisanship. The conventional view of grand strategy, in which state leaders act as neutral arbiters of the "national interest," cannot explain why political turnover in the executive office often leads to dramatic shifts in state behavior. Narizny, in contrast, shows how domestic politics structured foreign policymaking in the United States and Great Britain from 1865 to 1941. In so doing, he sheds light on long-standing debates over the revival of British imperialism, the rise of American expansionism, the creation of the League of Nations, American isolationism in the interwar period, British appeasement in the 1930s, and both countries' decisions to enter World War I and World War II.

John M. Schofield and the Politics of Generalship

John M. Schofield and the Politics of Generalship PDF Author: Donald B. Connelly
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807877085
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
In the first full biography of Lieutenant General John McAllister Schofield (1831-1906), Donald B. Connelly examines the career of one of the leading commanders in the western theater during the Civil War. In doing so, Connelly illuminates the role of politics in the formulation of military policy, during both war and peace, in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Connelly relates how Schofield, as a department commander during the war, had to cope with contending political factions that sought to shape military and civil policies. Following the war, Schofield occupied every senior position in the army--including secretary of war and commanding general of the army--and became a leading champion of army reform and professionalism. He was the first senior officer to recognize that professionalism would come not from the separation of politics and the military but from the army's accommodation of politics and the often contentious American constitutional system. Seen through the lens of Schofield's extensive military career, the history of American civil-military relations has seldom involved conflict between the military and civil authority, Connelly argues. The central question has never been whether to have civilian control but rather which civilians have a say in the formulation and execution of policy.

Air University Library Index to Military Periodicals

Air University Library Index to Military Periodicals PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Aeronautics
Languages : en
Pages : 502

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Book Description


The Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War

The Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War PDF Author: Hew Strachan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198743122
Category : World War, 1914-1918
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
Originally published: 1998. New edition published in hardcover in 2014.

At War

At War PDF Author: David Kieran
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813584337
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
The country’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, its interventions around the world, and its global military presence make war, the military, and militarism defining features of contemporary American life. The armed services and the wars they fight shape all aspects of life—from the formation of racial and gendered identities to debates over environmental and immigration policy. Warfare and the military are ubiquitous in popular culture. At War offers short, accessible essays addressing the central issues in the new military history—ranging from diplomacy and the history of imperialism to the environmental issues that war raises and the ways that war shapes and is shaped by discourses of identity, to questions of who serves in the U.S. military and why and how U.S. wars have been represented in the media and in popular culture.

Burdens of War

Burdens of War PDF Author: Jessica L. Adler
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421422883
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
How have Americans grappled with the moral and financial issues of veterans’ health care? In the World War I era, veterans fought for a unique right: access to government-sponsored health care. In the process, they built a pillar of American social policy. Burdens of War explores how the establishment of the veterans’ health system marked a reimagining of modern veterans’ benefits and signaled a pathbreaking validation of the power of professionalized institutional medical care. Adler reveals that a veterans’ health system came about incrementally, amid skepticism from legislators, doctors, and army officials concerned about the burden of long-term obligations, monetary or otherwise, to ex-service members. She shows how veterans’ welfare shifted from centering on pension and domicile care programs rooted in the nineteenth century to direct access to health services. She also traces the way that fluctuating ideals about hospitals and medical care influenced policy at the dusk of the Progressive Era; how race, class, and gender affected the health-related experiences of soldiers, veterans, and caregivers; and how interest groups capitalized on a tense political and social climate to bring about change. The book moves from the 1910s—when service members requested better treatment, Congress approved new facilities and increased funding, and elected officials expressed misgivings about who should have access to care—to the 1930s, when the economic crash prompted veterans to increasingly turn to hospitals for support while bureaucrats, politicians, and doctors attempted to rein in the system. By the eve of World War II, the roots of what would become the country’s largest integrated health care system were firmly planted and primed for growth. Drawing readers into a critical debate about the level of responsibility America bears for wounded service members, Burdens of War is a unique and moving case study.