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The conclusion of the Cold War rivalry between the United States and former Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s created new areas of opportunity and concern for U.S. national security policy. No longer menaced by the threat of nuclear war from Soviet military might, the United States emerged from the Cold War as the world's preeminent military power. Successful developments such as this often produce elation in the pronouncements of U.S. officials as a recent Clinton administration declaration demonstrates:

In recent years, and especially with the war in Iraq, the U.S. military's reliance on private contractors as forces in the theater of war has grown and become increasingly clear. We critically evaluate some of the best literature on the emergence of this phenomenon – especially Ken Silverstein's Private Warriors and P. W. Singer's Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry – and find a neglect of the historical path-dependent character of the rise of the new corporate armed forces. In particular, we concentrate on American experience and two silences that are integral to understanding the path-dependent character of this process: (1) earlier historical reliance on private armed force to suppress the labor movement in America, the template for this new form of irregular armed force and (2) the ghost of Vietnam as a continuing political liability in the mobilization of sufficient troop levels under neo-imperialist aspirations and “the global war on terror,” as the main condition for the rise of the new private military form. Both elements suggest the theoretical importance of state strength/weakness in any explanation of private armed force. We discuss several important political implications of our findings.

The U.S. military is designed to take on a similarly constructed foreign military located across some line of demarcation. The goal of such conventional warfare is to incapacitate or annihilate the enemy military, whereupon victory is achieved – a task for which the U.S. military has no peer on the current world scene or the foreseeable future. However, the U.S.'s adversaries since the end of the Cold War have not been conventional forces, as evidenced most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. Consequently, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps recently have become volcanoes of change in order to adapt their operational styles to this reality. In the past, departures from the conventional mode in similar circumstances have been temporary. Currently, there is considerable discussion in the U.S. defense establishment about how persistent these types of nonconventional threats are likely to be in the future and whether it is necessary to change the configuration of the U.S. military accordingly. A centerpiece of this discussion is a new Counterinsurgency (COIN) Field Manual 3-24 addressing issues related to the postures the military and support establishments may take. This paper discusses some events prior to the writing of the new COIN Manual, comments on issues raised by the Manual and its doctrine, and offers some social science implications for thinking about and implementing the doctrine.

Historically, Panama has always been “a place of transit.” While technically the isthmus formed part of Colombia in the nineteenth century, it was linked geopolitically to the United States soon after the California gold rush, beginning in the late 1840s. The first attempt at building a canal ended in failure in 1893 when disease and poor management forced Ferdinand de Lesseps to abandon the project. The U.S. undertaking to build the canal could only begin after Panama declared itself free and broke away from Colombia in 1903, with the support of the United States.

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.

This chapter argues that aspiring hegemons face a wide array of complex and distinct military challenges. Managing scarce military resources requires a subtle and complex global strategy that is likely to generate cognitive overload for the political system. As a result of cognitive overload, aspiring hegemons are likely to flail around, rapidly shifting from one global strategy to another. Such strategic flailing will occur independently of whether or not the economy is in crisis, though clearly economic crisis will exacerbate the tendency towards strategic incoherence. The chapter examines U.S. global strategy since the end of the Cold War, looking at the focus on “rogue regimes,” a growing concern with “global chaos,” worry about the rise of a peer competitor (China), and the debates about the root causes of, and best strategies to mitigate, terrorism. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the role of culture and notions of national identity and their role in the formulation of grand strategy.

Machiavelli's dictums in The Prince (1977) instigated the modern discourse on power. Arguing that “there's such a difference between the way we really live and the way we ought to live that the man who neglects the real to study the ideal will learn to accomplish his ruin, not his salvation” (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 44), his approach is a realist one. In this text, Machiavelli (1977, p. 3) endeavors to “discuss the rule of princes” and to “lay down principles for them.” Taking his lead, Foucault (1978, p. 97) argued that “if it is true that Machiavelli was among the few…who conceived the power of the Prince in terms of force relationships, perhaps we need to go one step further, do without the persona of the Prince, and decipher mechanisms on the basis of a strategy that is immanent in force relationships.” He believed that we should “investigate…how mechanisms of power have been able to function…how these mechanisms…have begun to become economically advantageous and politically useful…in a given context for specific reasons,” and, therefore, “we should…base our analysis of power on the study of the techniques and tactics of domination” (Foucault, 1980, pp. 100–102). Conceptualizing such techniques and tactics as the “art of governance”, Foucault (1991), examined power as strategies geared toward managing civic populations through shaping people's dispositions and behaviors.

This chapter examines the role of stress and emotional well-being as critical antecedents of important outcomes in the military context. In it, we provide a framework for understanding the sources of stress among military personnel. Using this model, we review the risk factors associated with combat and deployment cycles in addition to protective factors, such as personality characteristics and social support, which mitigate the effects of stress on emotional well-being and performance. Finally, we evaluate efforts by military organizations to enhance the emotional well-being of service members through training programs designed to build resiliency.