In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Post-Cold War
  • Frank N. Schubert
Post-Cold War. By Stephen A. Bourque. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-313-33290-6. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xxii, 191. $65.00.

Post-Cold War is part of a series called “Daily Life through History,” edited by David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler. Overall, the book is an adequate survey of American military operations and soldier life since 1989. The book depends mostly on secondary sources, augmented by recourse to military websites and interviews. The printed sources are usefully gathered in a bibliography organized by chapters. As has sometimes been the case with Greenwood Press books, Post-Cold War shows no professional editorial involvement.

The first three chapters deal with the Cold War army and its operations since the end of that conflict. The narrative covers global conflicts and deployments, leaving out only the marginal face-saving engagement in the aftermath of the Rwanda genocide. Preoccupations with “mission creep” and casualty avoidance are not discussed, and the systemic emphasis on force protection instead of actual operations is wrongly laid at the door of Major General David Meade, commander of forces in Haiti, rather than the politicians who were in charge. The increasingly important involvement of representatives of civilian non-governmental organizations is omitted. No maps accompany this worldwide operational overview. Mainly Bourque views the period--accurately--as complicated, messy, and diffuse.

Chapters four through six concern the army’s organization and approaches to recruiting and training. In the chapter on recruiting, there is some confusion. The author characterizes the 1989 force as “a white man’s army,” albeit 31% black (p. 68); then four pages later he claims it was 26% black and more racially integrated than any other sector of American society. Bourque also notes the apparent underrepresentation of Latinos among soldiers. The training portion covers enlisted and officer programs, from basic training to senior service schools.

The final four chapters deal with the soldiers themselves. He covers their status in American society, the changing demography of the military, improvement in pay over the last generation, and the grinding effects of multiple deployments on soldiers and families. The expanding roles of minorities and women and the army’s efforts to deal with homosexuals in the service are also surveyed. He does not mention the issue of military suicide, which came to the fore in the mid-1990s. Overall, although the treatment of minorities and women is adequate, there is no apparent appreciation of the military’s long-standing historical role as an agent of social change, frequently in the vanguard, with civilian society lagging behind.

In this last section the most interesting portion concerns the implications of readily available modern communications technology to individual soldiers. While the military tries to control the homeward flow of information, succeeding in part by “embedding” reporters and controlling their output, soldiers send back text and pictures that undermine this effort, notably in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. The chapter on post-Cold War veterans highlights their medical problems, the bureaucratic obstacles to recognition and treatment, and signs of estrangement of soldiers and recent veterans from the civilian society, with the disappearance of the citizen-soldier from the American scene.

The writing and editorial problems in this book are not trivial. It is hard to focus on a text marked by poor writing and slovenly editing. There is, to use one of the author’s favorite phrases, an “amazing array” of jarring editorial blemishes. Among my favorites, are “gravityfed water”, “a coups”, “Ronald Regan”, “substance allowance”, and “understrengthed” units. In addition, the reader encounters frequent shifts in mood and tense and the use of pronouns without antecedents. In a book with a list price of $65 this is outrageous. [End Page 1336]

Frank N. Schubert
Mt. Vernon, Virginia
...

pdf

Share