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The substantial resources devoted to warfare in modern times might explain the increasing relevance that military spending has acquired in social sciences. In this regard, the so-called defence economics has extensively studied the main determinants of military spending and its main consequences in terms of economic performance and institutional transformations. However, one of the main problems for comparative analysis on the causes and effects of military spending is the lack of long-term homogeneous and comparable data in international panel datasets. This paper contributes to fill in this gap by providing new military spending data on Spain from 1850 to 2009 based on NATO methodological criterion. It provides total military spending estimates as well as economic and administrative disaggregated figures for most of the period. These data allow reliable international comparisons while also providing new quantitative evidence to better understand the military history of Spain in modern times.

Purpose – This chapter aims to contribute to the policy debate on private sector involvement in traditionally core defence activities through rigorous economic analysis. Punishment and correction in the US military prisons have traditionally been considered as a core activity that has been governed, regulated and managed by the military service personnel. It has been shown however, that military facilities such as stockades and brigs have often failed to meet their correctional objectives – a quality issue.

Methodology – The chapter constructs a case study to illustrate the method of analysis. Well-trained and motivated military custodial personnel play an important correctional role but are not available in sufficient numbers in military prisons. It is therefore proposed to source these services through the private sector. Specifically, the chapter proposes that private sector providers should provide custodial personnel for stockades and brigs. Traditionally the private sector has been employed to reduce costs, rather than improve quality. This chapter adapts and applies the framework developed by Hart, Shleifer and Vishny (1997) to study the governance model and incentive regime that could enable the use of the private sector, reduce the risk of excessive cost cutting and enable quality outcomes to be achieved.

Findings – This chapter argues that private sector involvement could effectively increase the contestability of supply.

Implications – The chapter demonstrates the scope for private sector involvement to increase quality, rather than just decrease costs. It follows that the private sector can contribute to core national security outcomes. However, this implication needs significantly more exploration for specific contexts.

Value – The adopted mode of analysis provides a template for rigorous analysis of similar proposals in the future.

Institutional structures of professional career paths often support breadwinner–homemaker families, with a stay at home wife available full time to support the professional (and children), so the professional can devote complete energy and time to developing a career. This research examines how two partners in the same narrowly structured, fast track occupational culture such as those occurring for dual military officer couples shape how women and men negotiate decision making and life events. Data from interviews with 23 dual U.S. Navy officer couples build upon Becker and Moen’s (1999) scaling back notions. With both spouses in these careers, placing limits on work is extremely difficult due to fast track cultures that demand higher status choices and structures that formally do not reliably consider collocations. Trading off occurs, but with distress due to the unique demands on two partners in the fast track culture, which means career death for some. Two partners in fast track careers may not yet have given up on two careers as many peers may have, but they lose a great deal, including time together and their desired number of children. But they ultimately posit individual choice rather than focusing on structural change. The pressured family life resulting is likely similar to that for partners in other narrowly structured, fast track cultures such as in law firms and academia.

Stress and the military go hand-in-hand, particularly in combat environments. While some personality traits or types weaken relationships between stress and performance, others, such as psychopathy, may strengthen them. In the present chapter, we consider the ramifications of individuals with high levels of psychopathy or psychopathic tendencies in the military with regard to both their own stress and performance and that of those around them. We discuss different reactions to psychological and physical stress, as well as the implications of psychopathic tendencies as they relate to current military issues, including gender, leadership, teamwork, turnover, post-traumatic stress disorder, and suicide. By juxtaposing relevant research findings on stress and psychopathy, we conclude that psychopathic tendencies should have neither uniformly negative nor positive effects on stress and performance in the military. Rather, effects on such individuals and the peripheral others with whom they interact will likely vary greatly depending on numerous factors.

This chapter focuses on military couples and factors that affect their experiences of work, stress, and health using a life course perspective. An introduction to the definition of military couples is provided followed by a brief review of previous research on marital quality and divorce among military couples. The core of the chapter describes the advantages of using a life course perspective to examine the military life course for couples, and two critical transitions of military life are more fully examined. Specifically, periodic relocation and deployment and their impacts on military couples are reviewed in detail. Future directions for research on military couples are provided, and the use of the Convoy Model of Social Relations as an integrative approach to examine military personnel and family members’ stress and health across the military life course is introduced.

The world of military uniforms has always attracted attention by the rest of society. The film and literary image of the military in the history lays stress on power, honour, discipline, privileges, high social position of warriors and also dependence of the social welfare on military power and military campaigns. Those images impose to our minds that the military was an important institution and also that it was something really special. How does the society see the military today? And how does the military regard itself and its functions? Since the development of military sociology in the middle of the 20th century, there have been two opposing views on civil-military relations: one that strictly differentiates the military and society and the other that seeks the similarities between them. The recent military-sociological debate in the United States has also been devoted to the issue of the relationship between the military and its parent society. The experts found important differences between the US military and US society (including cultural ones) and some are very concerned about a growing gap between them. The classical antagonism between Huntington's uniqueness of the military and Janowitz's convergence of the military and civil society is renewed in debates about a so-called civil-military gap (e.g., Ricks, 1997; Holsti, 1998; Cohn, 1999; Snider, 1999; Hillen, 1999; Feaver, Kohn, & Cohn, 2001).

The chapter examines regional differences in U.S. military participation. Participation in the U.S. all-volunteer military is persistently higher for youth from the South and West than from other regions. While raw numbers of recruits from the South and West have grown, much of the growth reflects broad demographic trends across the United States. In explaining broad differences among states as well as changes over time, the most important factors appear to be the prevalence of veterans in the state and regional differences in civilian pay levels. Remarkably, some characteristics that can disqualify individuals for military service are more pronounced in states that contribute more than their “fair share” of service members. Regional differences in military participation can have important implications for the relationship between armed forces and society. They also have consequences for communities: those that send more young people into the military may experience a disproportionate share of deaths and injuries during wartime; those that send fewer are less likely to enjoy the economic and training benefits associated with service.

In this research paper, the attitudes of youth, in transition from high school to college and the adult world of work, are compared by their plans for college and military service in order to better understand the impact of self-selection and anticipatory socialization on perceptions of opportunity and equality in military work. Data are drawn from a national survey of US high school seniors and from a sample of students entering their freshman year at the US Naval Academy. The results highlight the effects of both self-selection and anticipatory socialization on the attitudes youth express about the military work and have potential implications for military recruiting and personnel policy.

In recent years, a wide range of psychosocial health interventions have been implemented among military service members and their families. However, there are questions over the evaluative rigor of these interventions. We conducted a systematic review of this literature, rating each relevant study (k = 111) on five evaluative rigor scales (type of control group, approach to participant assignment, outcome quality, number of measurement time points, and follow-up distality). The most frequently coded values on three of the five scales (control group type, participant assignment, and follow-up distality) were those indicating the lowest level of operationally defined rigor. Logistic regression results indicate that the evaluative rigor of intervention studies has largely remained consistent over time, with exceptions indicating that rigor has decreased. Analyses among seven military sub-populations indicate that interventions conducted among soldiers completing basic training, soldiers returning from combat deployment, and combat veterans have had, on average, the greatest evaluative rigor. However, variability in mean scores across evaluative rigor scales within sub-populations highlights the unique methodological hurdles common to different military settings. Recommendations for better standardizing the intervention evaluation process are discussed.