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For the US, the information age seemed to advantage the offense, with technologies and campaigns of long-range, fast, and overwhelming first strike advantage. But where did the US digital cult of the offensive come from? To answer this question, I examine the development of two key US warfighting concepts – the Army's field manual 100-5 and the 2012 Air Sea Battle. The exploration reveals a complicated relationship between civ-mil relations, an American and Army culture at a key domestic moment, and a geopolitical context which culminated to create a digital cult of the offensive in the information age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gendered construction of the term “soldier” within U.S. military discourse systematically denies female soldiers’ full access to this identity and places them outside membership in the fraternity of the “band of brothers”. Drawing on the concept of phallogocentrism – a linguistic framework privileging the masculine – this analysis demonstrates how everyday military discourse reinforces the male-centred view of the “soldier” as inherently masculine and marks women as the “other”. By examining first person prose and poetry by female soldiers the article examines the subtle and not so subtle ways in which female soldiers are linguistically marginalized and portrayed as exceptions or deviations from the normative “soldier” archetype. This exclusionary discourse not only undermines the legitimacy of women in combat roles but also makes them vulnerable to misogynist abuse and sexual assault. These first-person narratives draw attention to the contradictory position occupied by “woman warriors” as both the bearers of violence through guns, but also the potential subjects of violence from within the military itself.

Norovirus is the leading cause of acute gastroenteritis (AGE) worldwide. Norovirus outbreaks at military facilities can cause loss of training and working days and increased healthcare utilization, affecting force readiness. During 2013–2023, we enrolled 2,304 US military recruits from 4 basic training facilities to investigate AGE outbreaks among this population. Among enrollees, we detected norovirus in 433 (18.8%) AGE cases, and norovirus caused 49 AGE outbreaks during our longitudinal study. On average, each norovirus case-patient missed 1.2 training days due to illness, and 6.2% required infusion care. Whole-genome sequencing of selected samples from each outbreak produced full-length genomes (6,989–7,787 bp) for 39 samples. Norovirus GII.4 Sydney was the most (12/39, 30.8%) identified genotype over the study period. Phylogenetic and comparative genomic analyses revealed that several outbreak strains were responsible for causing >1 outbreak, even across different training sites. Our findings can inform infection control practices at military installations and overall norovirus vaccine development.

Introduction: In the aftermath of anthrax bioterrorism, the US military began its smallpox immunization program in 2002. Dryvax was superseded in 2008 by ACAM2000, a second-generation smallpox vaccine, after clinical trials demonstrated favorable outcomes. However, these trials focused on significant adverse effects and provided less specific classifications and descriptions of cutaneous eruptions. The purpose of this systematic review was to investigate the clinicopathological characteristics of skin lesions that emerged in US military personnel following the reinstatement of new smallpox immunizations. Methods: PubMed, ScienceDirect, and Google Scholar were searched. The search was performed in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines, using appropriate keywords. Results: Of the 467 studies initially identified, 5 (1%) were analyzed, with a sample size of 15. There were 10 men and 4 women. The mean age of presentation was 24.3 years. The interval between inoculation and eruption was 15 days. The length of the eruption until clearance was 36.26 days. Grossly, most skin lesions were described as having papules (n = 9). Histological examination revealed vesicles with spongiotic dermatitis and eosinophils (n = 5) and a dermal hypersensitivity reaction with lymphocytic vasculitis (capillaritis) (n = 2). Definitive diagnoses included acral and vesiculopustular dermatosis (n = 7), generalized vaccinia (GV) (n = 1), and progressive vaccinia (n = 1). Concurrent or near-concurrent vaccination was administered (n = 12). Conclusion: Although rare, clinically significant skin lesions can occur after ACAM2000 administration. A feared complication of progressive vaccinia has been reported; however, to determine its causal relationship, further clinical trials are required to provide universal guidelines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a little-known fight by African American veterans to desegregate the Pennsylvania National Guard from 1920 to 1948. This narrative follows the life of DeHaven Hinkson, a Philadelphia doctor, veteran, and one of the driving forces behind the movement. Building on scholarship of post–World War I activism and the Long Civil Rights Movement, this article demonstrates the need for scholars to consider not only widespread and national civil rights activism, but also the local and more traditional movements as influential in breaking the grip of Jim Crow on the United States. This article also suggests the need to examine conservative African American efforts at obtaining civil rights and how that conservatism remained a part of civil rights activism beyond the 1940s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The US military presence in South Korea [hereby Korea] in the aftermath of the Korean War has been a politically sensitive and contentious issue for Korea. While the relationship between the US military and Korea has often been characterized in Korean popular and scholarly discourse as neocolonial, I argue that in recent years, Korean yeneung (television entertainment programs) have been reversing such power dynamics in how they depict US soldiers. They contest the image of Korea as a neocolonial nation-state and portray it as a powerful and aspirational one. Such nationalistic portrayals of the relationship between the two countries coincide with the nation’s rise in economic and cultural status. I build on theories derived from Media Studies and scholarship on national identity formation. I use the theoretical framework of “illusions of reality” to analyze the Korean popular media depictions of US soldiers stationed in Korea. I contend that yeneung mobilize illusions of reality to depict an aspirational future reality where the neocolonial power dynamics between the US military and Korea are reversed and where stereotypes that the US held of Korea are mirrored and projected back onto the US.

Militaries around the world are a major source of carbon emissions, yet very little is known about their carbon footprint. Reliable data around military resource use and environmental damage is highly variable. Researchers are dependent upon military transparency, the context of military operations, and broader emissions reporting. While studies are beginning to emerge on global militaries and their carbon footprints, less work has focused on wartime emissions. We examine one sliver of the hidden carbon emissions of late-modern warfare by focusing on the use of concrete "blast walls" by US forces in Baghdad over a five-year period (2003-2008). This study uses a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to study one of the world's largest military carbon footprints of concrete, an infrastructural weapon in late-modern urban counterinsurgencies. Moving beyond dominant discourses on climate-security and "greening", we present one of the first studies to expose direct and indirect military emissions resulting from combat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The representation of environmental injustice in Heinz Insu Fenkl's novel Memories of My Ghost Brother (1996) has yet to be examined. This neglect suggests a need to open up the dialogue between Fenkl's work, which is relatively invisible beyond Asian American and postcolonial studies, and ecocriticism. Memories of My Ghost Brother shows that the impoverished, noxious, and dangerous conditions and pervasive diseases in Korean camptowns are socially engineered by the United States-Republic of Korea neocolonial system that on the one hand disregards camptowns' infrastructural needs and on the other hand allows the US military to wreak environmental damage with impunity. Specifically, the novel portrays pervasive dust, flooding sewage, the noise from US military activities, and the dangerous live ammunition left by the US military after their training. Without reducing camptown residents to mere victims, the novel also depicts the survival strategies they have adopted. The novel further situates camptowns within the context of the ongoing environmental atrocities committed by the US military across Asia. Fenkl's depictions of the dire situation in camptowns and the toxic legacies from the atomic bomb and Agent Orange challenge the narrative of American benevolence in Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1970, the United States military was ordered to halt the use of herbicides in the Vietnam War. The suspension pre-empted a series of considerations by the military to determine what to do with the millions of gallons of surplus herbicides, such as Agent Orange, White, and Blue. In 1972, in response to a directive to return all Agent Orange stock to the continental United States for disposal, officials moved the herbicides to Johnston Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. In the 1980s, Johnston Atoll was slowly transformed into the site of the US military's first chemical munitions incineration facility. The military's use of the Atoll as a munitions waste site offers material and historical traces of the vast and continued global circulation of US military waste, how the military conceptualized the 'destruction' of such waste, and where it was deemed acceptable to house and carry out these attempts of waste removal. Drawing from primary sources including military scientific studies and correspondence, and situated within environmental justice and postcolonial science studies scholarship, I offer a reading of the Atoll as a place that was used to obscure, yet laid bare, several unattended histories and contemporalities of US empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the analytic of pharmacotic war can render visible a logic of ritual sacrifice in the US military's use of games to attract, produce, and recycle war-fighters. Identifying the ancient framing of the pharmakon – a substance or process that functions as at once drug, poison, and cure – it shows how games function paradoxically to draw in, produce, and rehabilitate military life. The article makes this case by tracing the roots of Kenneth MacLeish's 'churn of mobilization and demobilization' beyond the military's instrumental calculations of institutional self-perpetuation, showing that this churn functions according to a logic of pharmacotic sacrifice that is not incidental to, but rather built into, their routine operation. It argues that (ex-)war-fighters function as a contemporary equivalent of the ancient pharmakoi, scapegoated and sacrificed figures into whom a polis poured its guilt and dysfunction in an act of ritual purification. Though rejecting any linear genealogy or transhistorical Western way of war, it identifies powerful resonances between the ancient pharmakoi and (ex-)war-fighters today. Drawing on extensive interviews with US military gamers and veterans, the article sheds light on the growing influence of games on the attraction, production, and recycling of (ex-)war-fighters in the 21st century. At the same time, by tracing the purificatory expulsion of war-fighters, it contributes a novel theorization of the pharmacotic logic of the US military's war-making apparatus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does militarism impact the natural environment? There is a growing body of scholarly work interrogating the intersection of environmental impacts and military activities from what can be referred to as a "footprint" perspective, which documents the tangible environmental impacts. Further, this paper introduces an alternative perspective on militarism's environmental impacts, which emphasizes Indigenous people's relationship to the environment, which this paper calls the relational perspective. This review paper argues that the emerging research concerning the environmental impacts of the US military bases in Okinawa employs the relational perspective, which echoes insights from Indigenous studies that see land as a field of the relationship of things to each other. Overall, this paper acknowledges that there is a reciprocal relationship that bridges humans and nonhuman subjectivity, including the natural environment, animals, and plants, and some places, like Okinawa, prioritize this perspective, which gives us a different angle on how we see the natural environment, the long‐lasting impacts of militarism, and countermeasures to the climate crisis. Military bases necessitate natural resources to exist. However, it is not only those material resources that get affected. Relationships with the natural environment, an essential aspect of Indigenous epistemology, are also impacted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2016, China has been conducting military flybys around Taiwan, while the US has approved arms sales to Taiwan on several occasions and sent warplanes and battleships through the Taiwan Strait. How does Taiwanese public opinion respond to the Chinese and US military presence in the Strait? Is the public likely to become less supportive of de jure independence for Taiwan on account of China's military deterrence or more supportive owing to a perceived likelihood of US military assistance? In this report, we provide answers to these questions based on evidence from a survey experiment conducted in Taiwan in October–November 2020. We find that Taiwanese are less sensitive to the Chinese military presence in the Taiwan Strait but have become more supportive of de jure independence after seeing the US aircraft in the area. Our findings contribute to studies of cross-Strait relations and US foreign policy on the Taiwan Strait. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Over 100 countries now have a military drone programme comprised of either armed or unarmed systems. These drones are used to project power, fulfil national security objectives and signal political interest in disputed regions. As the climate crisis transforms parts of the Arctic, considerable investment is taking place in remote systems that can both monitor for 'unwanted guests' and engage in military activity. In this context, drones, specifically unarmed military drones, are becoming the favoured technology of Arctic states. Denmark, Iceland, Canada, Russia and the United States are all now using drones to protect national interests, symbolise sovereignty and enable a watchful eye to be cast on neighbours and newcomers, such as China. This article argues that while the introduction of military drones may be seen as stabilising in the first instance, in the longer term these systems are likely to escalate tensions, leading to a new drone‐based security dilemma. Of particular note is the 'virtual' net of detection being built by Russia. This net is reliant on drones, in partnership with additional military infrastructure and hardware, and has been developed by Moscow to establish a military capacity to detect and respond to external actors across and perhaps beyond the Russian Arctic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessing the combat capability of the air equipment system is an important means for the US military to verify new combat concepts such as kill chain. This paper summarizes the necessary factors for the U.S. military to evaluate the combat capability of the air equipment system, analyzes its commonly used combat capability evaluation methods, and extracts and summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of each evaluation method. A case study of the combat capability assessment method was carried out.

Copyright of Command Control & Simulation / Zhihui Kongzhi yu Fangzhen is the property of Command Control & Simulation Editorial Office and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The US military presence in South Korea [hereby Korea] in the aftermath of the Korean War has been a politically sensitive and contentious issue for Korea. While the relationship between the US military and Korea has often been characterized in Korean popular and scholarly discourse as neocolonial, I argue that in recent years, Korean yeneung (television entertainment programs) have been reversing such power dynamics in how they depict US soldiers. They contest the image of Korea as a neocolonial nation-state and portray it as a powerful and aspirational one. Such nationalistic portrayals of the relationship between the two countries coincide with the nation's rise in economic and cultural status. I build on theories derived from Media Studies and scholarship on national identity formation. I use the theoretical framework of "illusions of reality" to analyze the Korean popular media depictions of US soldiers stationed in Korea. I contend that yeneung mobilize illusions of reality to depict an aspirational future reality where the neocolonial power dynamics between the US military and Korea are reversed and where stereotypes that the US held of Korea are mirrored and projected back onto the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public and clinical interest in a condition called moral injury – psychological distress resembling posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but said to originate from shame, guilt, or transgression in war experience – explicitly links moral, psychological, and political dimensions of war-making in the context of the US's post-9/11 wars. This article critically analyzes moral injury's politics of psychological suffering, which tends to treat morality as a universal and apolitical terrain, by reading it against soldier narratives of combat experience. American soldiers' accounts of US military violence in Iraq and Afghanistan suggest that embodied, affective, and technical dimensions of military experience constitute their own moral worlds that do not necessarily conform to moral injury's narratives of individual transgression. These accounts show that the US's counterinsurgency techniques produce Orientalist framings of threat and violence but also volatile and ambivalent battlefield moralities that critically comment on the ostensibly liberal and humane techniques of US war-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does partisan identification shape the attitudes of US military officers toward the protection of civilians in war? Drawing on unique cross-cohort surveys of soon-to-be commissioned officers in 12 Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) training battalions, we find that Democratic-leaning cadets generally prioritize norms of civilian protection more than Republican-leaning cadets when confronted with competing values of military advantage and force protection as part of a 'combatant's trilemma'. This gap remains partially resilient after sustained exposure to military training and socialization, including in the norms of restraint embodied by principles of combat ethics and the law of war. We attribute these partisan differences to insights from Moral Foundations Theory (MFT), which suggests that the moral values of Democrats and Republicans guide their views toward the individual use of force in combat. Our findings have important implications for comprehending the impact of political ideology and military training and socialization on attitudes regarding restraint toward civilians in war. Given the widely recognized conservative composition of the US military's membership, these findings may help to further inform understanding of US military operations and the underlying causes of US adherence to – or violation of – the laws of armed conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The US Army Medical Research Directorate – Africa, also known as the "Walter Reed Project," is at the forefront of the US military's malaria research and surveillance practices. Since its establishment in Kenya in 1970, the Walter Reed Project's research capacity and infrastructure has significantly expanded, now placing it in a civilian‐led global health network. In this paper, I trace the development of the Walter Reed Project's malaria research and surveillance practices in Kenya from 1970 to today. I explore the geopolitical logics driving the Walter Reed Project's development, its growing infrastructure in Kenya, and its changing relationships with civilian institutes and global health networks. In doing so, I demonstrate the intersections between geopolitics and global health the Walter Reed Project reveals. The paper demonstrates how the Walter Reed Project brings geopolitical logics to bear on its collaborative global health research practices; how it reveals an often overlooked position of state power and geopolitics in mainstream global health networks; and how its health intervention sites in Kenya are points in a geopolitical topography of war‐making, connected to geographies of militarism, empire, and violence in disparate spaces. The paper reveals the attachments to war that underpin the military's global health engagement practices and that permeate mainstream global health networks and sites of health intervention. This paper traces the development of the US military's malaria research in Kenya from the establishment of its "Walter Reed Project" in 1970 to today. It explores the geopolitical logics driving its development, its growing infrastructure in Kenya, and its changing relationship with global health networks. In doing so, the paper demonstrates how the Walter Reed Project brings geopolitical logics to bear on global health research agendas; how it reveals an often overlooked position of geopolitical power in mainstream global health networks; and how its health intervention sites in Kenya are connected to geographies of war, empire, and violence across the US military's global footprint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agent Orange, a dioxin-containing toxin, was used as a herbicide during the Vietnam War Agent Orange exposure was initially linked to congenital disabilities among Vietnamese civilians residing near aerially sprayed regions Years later, returning South Korean and United States (US) Veterans exposed to Agent Orange exhibited increased rates of malignancy, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and congenital disabilities in their offspring Growing evidence that herbicides and pesticides contribute to chronic diseases, including neurodegeneration, raises concern that Agent Orange exposures may have increased the risk for later development of peripheral or central nervous system (CNS) degeneration This article reviews published data on the main systemic effects and the prevalence rates, relative risks, characteristics and correlates of Agent Orange-associated peripheral neuropathy and CNS dementia-associated diseases The critical findings demonstrated that relatively high levels of Agent Orange exposure increased the risk of developing peripheral neuropathy, either alone or as a cofactor complication of diabetes mellitus, and likely contributed to the pathogenesis of CNS degenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and vascular dementias Given the protracted interval between Agent Orange exposure and disease emergence, additional research is needed to identify mechanistic correlations of related neurological disorders, including lifestyle cofactors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can armed groups socialize combatants to norms of restraint – in essence, train soldiers to adopt norms of international humanitarian law on the battlefield? How can social scientists accurately measure such socialization? Despite being the central focus of organizational and ideational theories of conflict, studies to date have not engaged in systematic, survey-based examination of this central socialization mechanism theorized to influence military conduct. This study advances scholarly understanding by providing the first comparative, survey-based examination of combatant socialization to norms of restraint, using surveys and interviews with US Army cadets at the US Military Academy (USMA), Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC), and active duty Army combatants. Additionally, to better understand 'restraint' from combatants' perspective, this study introduces the concept of the 'combatant's trilemma' under which combatants conceptualize civilian protection as part of a costly trade-off with the values of military advantage and force protection. Survey results hold both positive and negative implications for socialization to law of war norms: military socialization can shift combatants' preferences for battlefield conduct. However, intensive norm socialization may be required to shift combatants' preferences from force protection to civilian protection norms. Study findings hold significant implications for understanding violence against civilians in conflict and for policies to disseminate civilian protection norms in armed groups worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller, codirectors of the Project for Operative Spatial Technologies (POST) research centre at Texas Tech University College of Architecture, describe the city in all its newfound multispectral complexity and how their architectural interventions reveal a world determined by scopic regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suzanne Cotter is Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Here she explains some of the artistic installations and performances she curated while Director of the Alvaro Siza‐designed Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal. She reflects on exhibitions she curated with three individual artists whose work engages with concepts of architecture as an aesthetic and social language of agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sexual violence is a serious problem within armed services. This article explores intra-service rape in branches of the U.S. military from the 1990s to the present. The article begins by establishing the parameters of the crisis of sexual abuse within the U.S. armed services. Second, it explores systematic failures to recognize forms of suffering. Victim-survivors in the military are vulnerable to military-specific obstacles to reporting their abuse and being believed. Attention is paid to differences by gender and sexual orientation. Third, it analyses the medicalization of suffering in the modern military and its effects. What meanings are assigned to 'military sexual trauma' (MST) and how has that label affected victim-survivors of rape or sexual assault? The article concludes by arguing that the concept of 'trauma' as it is applied to victims of sexual abuse does a formidable amount of political and ideological work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]