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.

Scholars of war and society should consider Native nations not simply as the sorry targets of U.S. conquest, but as sovereign, war-making societies themselves. This essay reconsiders the era of the U.S.-Mexican War as a case study in how Indigenous war-making affected state-organized societies in North America. Beginning in the 1830s, Comanches, Kiowas, Apaches, and Navajos abandoned fragile peace agreements with Mexico and launched raids across ten states. By the mid-1840s, raids and counterraids had killed thousands, wrecked local economies, depopulated rural areas, and fractured Mexican political unity. When the U.S. army invaded in 1846, northern Mexico—exhausted and divided after 15 years of Indigenous warfare—was unable to effectively resist.These conflicts also conditioned how Anglo-Americans and Mexicans perceived each other. Neither acknowledged Native nations as strategic actors, blaming one another for Indigenous violence instead. Ultimately, U.S. officials portrayed the dismemberment of Mexico as an act of salvation. Native war-making shaped 19th-century North American geopolitics in enduring ways and it should be integral to the study of war and society in America.

This essay asks if the war and society approach needs reinforcement to fully capture the history of the Cold War. Both within the United States and around the globe, the Cold War was many wars: a theoretical war of nuclear threats; an armed and active conflict; a covert war; and a domestic crusade. Is a war and society framework adequate to describe a conflict of such dimensions? This essay probes the interpretive possibilities of adding a war as society frame to buttress the war and society approach. Focusing on the American Cold War’s geographies (where was it fought?), its warriors (who fought it?), and its timelines (when did it begin, and did it actually end?), I explore the myriad ways in which Americans experienced a multi-front and seemingly permanent war. Policymakers wanted everyone to be drafted into some kind of service for the Cold War, but Americans ultimately rejected that call. They could support a national security state to conduct the war, but they ultimately wanted a healthy distance from the battles. They sought coexistence–war and society–not fusion–war as society.

This essay compares disparate responses of African Americans to “brown babies”—children of African American servicemen and German women born because of WWII—and Black Amerasians, offspring of African American servicemen and Vietnamese women born during the Vietnam War. It argues that African American assertions of transnational racial kinship with Germany’s brown babies and rejection of Black Amerasians from Vietnam informed how both groups of children grappled with illegitimacy, race, and identity. It situates the Black response to brown babies within the civil rights era and the reaction to Black Amerasians amidst the aftermath of Vietnam. Each moment forced African Americans, brown babies, and Black Amerasians to confront questions of race and responsibility for illegitimate children born abroad. African American efforts to “save” brown babies from Germany and to rescue Black Amerasians from Vietnam forced child welfare professionals in each country to reconsider transnational and transracial adoption processes. By juxtaposing African American perceptions with children’s lived experiences, the essay reveals challenges posed to notions of race and nation when war creates life.

Since the 19th century, the U.S. military has grown increasingly adept at saving the lives of troops injured in combat. Yet rising survivability rates, coupled with social attitudes linking disability to diminished manhood and economic dependency, contributed to a perceived national crisis about what came to be known as the “problem of the disabled veteran” (PDV). What is U.S. federal policy toward disabled veterans? What is its aim—to keep veterans alive or to help them reintegrate into postwar society? And how might the U.S. military curb disability in future conflicts? Drawing upon works in disability studies, military history, and war and society studies, this chapter surveys the evolution of U.S. efforts to solve the PDV, from the colonial era to the present. In World War I, when the term originated, anxieties about war disability prompted the federal government to embrace the policy of veterans’ rehabilitation. In later years, the military would explore other ways to limit U.S. wartime casualties, disabled or otherwise. Ultimately, this chapter argues that the PDV stems from the United States’ failure to come to terms with the violence and trauma of military conflict.

The American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the smaller conflicts in between helped to define who Americans became. They pursued Indian lands and freedom from impressment and British trade restrictions. These wars altered political boundaries, brought social hierarchies into sharp relief, and disoriented people’s sense of identity. Their wartime experiences shaped fighting men as well as civilians. New scholarship on war and society during the Revolutionary Era takes the actions of marginalized groups seriously, attempting to understand the experiences and allegiances of women, Black people, and Indigenous people as well as internal conflicts among whites. Recent work also explores the harshness of wartime conduct, from destruction of homes to the treatment of prisoners and civilians. These wars transformed society by forcing questions of national inclusion, cultural interaction, and racial exclusion; gendered violence and gendered upheavals; the ennobling and degradation of rank-and-file soldiers, deserters, and prisoners of war. Unmistakably an era of brutality, dispossession, and enslavement, these wars etched enduring patterns for the future of the United States.