The Politics of Military Families

The Politics of Military Families PDF Author: René Moelker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429649088
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
This book examines the politics of military families in relation to the tensions between the state, military organization, and private life. It elaborates on the tensions between the advent of challenging worldwide deployment for the military and the prominence of the home front. The volume aims to understand the dynamics of conflict and change within triad figurations at the macro (society), meso (organizational), and micro (family) level and is guided by the following overarching research questions: What are the key issues in the three-party dynamics? What tensions exist in these dynamics? How do actors seek to arrive at a balance? What initiatives for change are made? With contributions from international scholars, who examine the workings of politics in military families at all three levels, the book argues that members within military families deal with shifting power balances and these are impacted by demands from organizations and the state. This book will be of much interest to students of military studies, sociology, organizational studies and politics.

The Politics of Military Families

The Politics of Military Families PDF Author: René Moelker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429649088
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 410

Get Book

Book Description
This book examines the politics of military families in relation to the tensions between the state, military organization, and private life. It elaborates on the tensions between the advent of challenging worldwide deployment for the military and the prominence of the home front. The volume aims to understand the dynamics of conflict and change within triad figurations at the macro (society), meso (organizational), and micro (family) level and is guided by the following overarching research questions: What are the key issues in the three-party dynamics? What tensions exist in these dynamics? How do actors seek to arrive at a balance? What initiatives for change are made? With contributions from international scholars, who examine the workings of politics in military families at all three levels, the book argues that members within military families deal with shifting power balances and these are impacted by demands from organizations and the state. This book will be of much interest to students of military studies, sociology, organizational studies and politics.

Military Families and War in the 21st Century

Military Families and War in the 21st Century PDF Author: Rene Moelker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135951985
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
This book focuses on the key issues that affect military families when soldiers are deployed overseas, focusing on the support given to military personnel and families before, during and after missions. Today’s postmodern armies are expected to provide social-psychological support both to their personnel in military operations abroad and to their families at home. Since the end of the Cold War and even more so after 9/11, separations between military personnel and their families have become more frequent as there has been a multitude of missions carried out by multinational task forces all over the world. The book focuses on three central questions affecting military families. First, how do changing missions and tasks of the military affect soldiers and families? Second, what is the effect of deployments on the ones left behind? Third, what is the national structure of family support systems and its evolution? The book employs a multidisciplinary approach, with contributions from psychology, sociology, history, anthropology and others. In addition, it covers all the services, Army, Navy/Marines, Air Force, spanning a wide range of countries, including UK, USA, Belgium, Turkey, Australia and Japan. At the same time it takes a multitude of perspectives such as the theoretical, empirical, reflective, life events (narrative) approach, national and the global, and uses approaches from different disciplines and perspectives, combining them to produce a volume that enhances our knowledge and understanding of military families. This book will be of much interest to students of military studies, sociology, war and conflict studies and IR/political science in general.

Mothers of the Military

Mothers of the Military PDF Author: Wendy M. Christensen
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538114240
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Mothers of the Military examines the distinctive kinds of support required during an increasingly privatized war, specifically material, moral and healthcare support. Mothers are a particularly key part of the current support system for service members, and Wendy Christensen follows the mothers of U.S. service members in the War on Terrorism through the stages of recruitment, deployment, and post-deployment. Bringing to light the experiences and stories of women who are largely invisible during war—the mothers of service members. Over 2.5 million members of the U.S. military have deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan during the now 16 year-long war. Each service member has loved ones—spouses, parents and children—who provide necessary emotional and physical support during deployment. This book has three goals. The first is to make mothers experiences during wartime visible. The second is to interrogate what support means during war. Finally, it examines the impact of war support on mothers’ political participation. Ideally, civilians provide moral approval of war, patriotism, and extend understanding and appreciation of the sacrifice enlistees and their families are making. But, in these long wars, public and political approval has plummeted. It is not surprising this narrow slice of Americans dealing with the daily realities of war feels increasingly separate from civilians. Military families are isolated from those Americans who are able to ignore the war or offer superficial expressions of patriotic gratitude. Mothers occupy a complex gendered location during wartime. Even though women are now serving in combat positions, women have historically held down the home front, where family labor is still assigned disproportionately to women. However, the military does not treat mothers and fathers equally. The military assumes fathers will be supportive of service, and calls on them to be proud of the courageous decision their child has made. They consider mothers, on the other hand, potential impediments to service, not wanting their child in harm’s way. Through each stage of service, mothers take on different kinds of support for their child, for the military, and for war policy. At each stage of war, mothers are prescribed a gendered support position. In recruitment material, the military assumes mothers will be emotional and worried about enlistment, so they appeal to mother’s love and need for their child to be safe. During deployment, mothers provide supplies and moral support. Declining enlistment numbers and a long war have led to multiple deployments and unprecedented burdens on military families. These mothers step in to help with childcare and finances. Furthermore, mothers are overwhelmingly, according to military studies, the ones providing mental and physical healthcare when veterans need it. As providers of critical systems of war support, mothers bear much of the burden of the current wars. War provides mothers a way to participate in the national project, but the uneven burden of being a constant “supporter” further marginalizes their citizenship. The gendered support role the military designs for mothers is not designed to facilitate active democratic citizenship but rather to make it seem natural that they, too, fall in line with the chain of command. Mothers of the Military, as a whole, asks how the acts of supplying material, moral, and medical support end up so often marginalizing mothers as citizens from the political process and under what conditions do mothers resist?

Embattled Glory

Embattled Glory PDF Author: Neil J. Diamant
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 0742557685
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 478

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Book Description
This groundbreaking book examines the treatment of veterans of the People's Liberation Army and military families as an illuminating window into Chinese patriotism, citizenship, and legitimacy. Using a wealth of recently declassified archival documents and employing a wide comparative perspective, Neil J. Diamant presents the first large-scale study of these groups in comparison to similar populations in other parts of Asia and in the West. He offers an unprecedented look at the "everyday interactions" among veterans, military families, state officials, and ordinary citizens as they attempted to secure urban residence, jobs, spouses, medical care, and respect. Often celebrated by the government for their glorious and patriotic service, veterans and military families were the beneficiaries of many policies, such as affirmative action in hiring and access to political power. But, the author asks, if veteran and military families were heroic, why did many of them compare their situation to "donkeys slaughtered after grinding the wheat" and "tossed-away dirty socks?" And what explains the thousands of suicides among veterans, rampant discrimination, and ongoing protests against the government? By comparing veterans in China to their counterparts in the United States, the Soviet Union, Israel, and elsewhere, this book provides important answers to the larger question of what circumstances lead to better or worse treatment of veterans, and what this treatment tells us about patriotism, legitimacy, and respect for military service.

Standing by

Standing by PDF Author: Alison Buckholtz
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9781585426959
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
A Navy wife provides an unexpectedly honest and moving account of her family's experiences during her husband's deployment to the Middle East.

Our Army

Our Army PDF Author: Jason K. Dempsey
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400832179
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Conventional wisdom holds that the American military is overwhelmingly conservative and Republican, and extremely political. Our Army paints a more complex picture, demonstrating that while army officers are likely to be more conservative, rank-and-file soldiers hold political views that mirror those of the American public as a whole, and army personnel are less partisan and politically engaged than most civilians. Assumptions about political attitudes in the U.S. Army are based largely on studies focusing on the senior ranks, yet these senior officers comprise only about 6 percent of America's fighting force. Jason Dempsey provides the first random-sample survey that also covers the social and political attitudes held by enlisted men and women in the army. Uniting these findings with those from another unique survey he conducted among cadets at the United States Military Academy on the eve of the 2004 presidential election, Dempsey offers the most detailed look yet at how service members of all ranks approach politics. He shows that many West Point cadets view political conservatism as part of being an officer, raising important questions about how the army indoctrinates officers politically. But Dempsey reveals that the rank-and-file army is not nearly as homogeneous as we think--or as politically active--and that political attitudes across the ranks are undergoing a substantial shift. Our Army adds needed nuance to our understanding of a profession that seems increasingly distant from the average American.

Military Families and War in the 21st Century

Military Families and War in the 21st Century PDF Author: René Moelker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780203407530
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book focuses on the key issues that affect military families when soldiers are deployed overseas, focusing on the support given to military personnel and families before, during and after missions. Today's postmodern armies are expected to provide social-psychological support both to their personnel in military operations abroad and to their families at home. Since the end of the Cold War and even more so after 9/11, separations between military personnel and their families have become more frequent as there has been a multitude of missions carried out by multinational task forces all over the world. The book focuses on three central questions affecting military families. First, how do changing missions and tasks of the military affect soldiers and families? Second, what is the effect of deployments on the ones left behind? Third, what is the national structure of family support systems and its evolution? The book employs a multidisciplinary approach, with contributions from psychology, sociology, history, anthropology and others. In addition, it covers all the services, Army, Navy/Marines, Air Force, spanning a wide range of countries, including UK, USA, Belgium, Turkey, Australia and Japan. At the same time it takes a multitude of perspectives such as the theoretical, empirical, reflective, life events (narrative) approach, national and the global, and uses approaches from different disciplines and perspectives, combining them to produce a volume that enhances our knowledge and understanding of military families. This book will be of much interest to students of military studies, sociology, war and conflict studies and IR/political science in general.

A History of the U.S. Army's Residential Communities Initiative, 1995-2010

A History of the U.S. Army's Residential Communities Initiative, 1995-2010 PDF Author: Matthew C. Godfrey
Publisher: U.S. Government Printing Office
ISBN:
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
"Prepared for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army, Installations, Energy & Environment."

Over There

Over There PDF Author: Maria Hohn
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822348276
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 477

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Book Description
A collection of essays exploring the world-wide U.S. military base system and its interplay with social relations of gender and sexuality in the U.S. and foreign host nations.

Base Politics

Base Politics PDF Author: Alexander Cooley
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801458471
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
According to the Department of Defense's 2004 Base Structure Report, the United States officially maintains 860 overseas military installations and another 115 on noncontinental U.S. territories. Over the last fifteen years the Department of Defense has been moving from a few large-footprint bases to smaller and much more numerous bases across the globe. This so-called lily-pad strategy, designed to allow high-speed reactions to military emergencies anywhere in the world, has provoked significant debate in military circles and sometimes-fierce contention within the polity of the host countries. In Base Politics, Alexander Cooley examines how domestic politics in different host countries, especially in periods of democratic transition, affect the status of U.S. bases and the degree to which the U.S. military has become a part of their local and national landscapes. Drawing on exhaustive field research in different host nations across East Asia and Southern Europe, as well as the new postcommunist base hosts in the Black Sea and Central Asia, Cooley offers an original and provocative account of how and why politicians in host countries contest or accept the presence of the U.S. military on their territory. Overseas bases, Cooley shows, are not merely installations that serve a military purpose. For host governments and citizens, U.S. bases are also concrete institutions and embodiments of U.S. power, identity, and diplomacy. Analyzing the degree to which overseas bases become enmeshed in local political agendas and interests, Base Politics will be required reading for anyone interested in understanding the extent-and limits-of America's overseas military influence.