War and society scholarship has changed how historians understand the Korean War, reinterpreting the concept of civil-military relations to broaden its reach, introduce new voices, and incorporate fresh perspectives. The traditional model of civil-military relations centers on the linear interactions between a policy maker, who outlines objectives, and the senior commander tasked with implementing military actions to achieve those desired ends. The clash between President Harry S. Truman and General Douglas MacArthur is the most iconic example of this conventional approach and has held sway over much of the literature. However, there are numerous more subtle instances of civil-military relations during the Korean War that illuminate the valuable contributions that war and society scholarship has made to our understanding of this conflict and that highlight the significant possibilities of expanding our conception of civil-military relations writ large. This chapter explores how unpreparedness for the Korean War collided with the structural racism inherent in the nation’s segregated military, producing significant consequences for both the U.S. military and American society.

Throughout U.S. history, women have served and participated in war efforts in both official and unofficial capacities, playing central roles in furthering U.S. war aims and achieving the mission at hand. At times, military authorities have acknowledged women’s unofficial contributions by offering payment for services and access to postwar benefits. Military leaders have also recognized the value of servicewomen when personnel needs required them. Since the end of the Vietnam War-era draft in 1973, the U.S. armed forces have gradually opened military occupation specialties, including combat positions, to women. Yet in the civilian world and within the military ranks, resistance to women’s service remained steady over the decades. Critics have cited unit cohesion and readiness as reasons to keep women out of the forces, and they have also made cultural arguments grounded in the links between gender, power, and military service to oppose the mobilization of women. Although U.S. military leaders have opened opportunities for women due to pragmatic needs for personnel, Americans have held on to the notion that soldiers are men, and women belong on the homefront.

It's soldiers who fight battles, rearrange landscapes, traumatize populations, reshape families, and build military institutions. Making sense of soldiers’ choices means exploring who soldiers were, how they got into the fighting, how they imagined war, what they experienced, and how they remembered it. This chapter divides the study of soldiers into five analytical lenses: compositional, experiential, motivational, behavioral, and memory, and introduces a new one: the soldiers' universes—a set of distinct but overlapping networks. They had their squad or “mess” (the primary group). The regiment added bureaucracy and a hierarchical officer corps. Further up lay the institution, and its universe of training, indoctrination, and so on. Outside the army there was both a soldier-enemy universe, and a soldier-civilian universe. Finally, links to home front and family remained, even at war. Each person-to-person link within these and other possible universes was shaped by infrastructure and interest. Ultimately history flows from soldiers' choices on battlefields, and those choices emerged from the universe of connections among soldiers, to their leaders, to their enemies, and back home.

Union veterans faced significant challenges returning to civilian life. The war had removed them from civil society, collected them into vast armies where new social norms prevailed, subjected them to hardship, introduced them to different geographies and climates, and often exposed them to combat trauma. Readjusting to civilian norms was difficult in a society that expected them to quietly resume their prewar lives. As a result, many veterans left their antebellum communities and moved west. Those who reinvented themselves on the frontier differed from the overall Union veteran population. They were more mobile both before and after the war, served longer enlistments, were more likely to have been wounded or have encountered wartime trauma, and often either consciously or unconsciously compensated for their exposure to trauma when choosing where to settle and with whom to interact. The frontier provided the mechanism they needed to reclaim their lives. The nuances of veteran migration to the frontier cannot be fully understood without accounting for both the war and its aftermath, blurring the line between “military history” and “war and society” as paradigms of analysis.

In lieu of a traditional introduction, the editors elected to invite leading scholars to open the volume with a roundtable, inviting discussion and debate over the value, limits, and contributions of war and society studies to understanding the American experience of war. In a robust conversation prompted by questions from the editors, these prominent scholars tackled the question at the very heart of the volume—what defines the study of war and society? Their conversation is followed by commentary from a scholar who offers a counterpoint from the vantage point of military history. The introduction closes with some concluding thoughts from the editors and a roadmap for the volume that follows. The volume’s subsequent essays grapple, explicitly or implicitly, with the ideas laid out in the opening roundtable. The authors collectively aim to help define and elevate the field of war and society by showcasing its approaches, its promise, its sensitivities, and its possibilities. The volume overall stands as a collaborative declaration of the ambitions, character, and future of the field of war and society.