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Deploy Globally, Train Locally: the U.S. Army and the Global Environment
Landsberg, Paul Colin
Landsberg, Paul Colin
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Abstract
To meet the demands of U.S. power during the Cold War, the U.S. Army needed sizeable standing forces ready to fight communist aggression across the globe. Under defense officials’ twin desires for budgetary efficiency and global efficacy, army leaders needed to transform the service so it could rapidly deploy soldiers to fight any enemy across the world. This project frames the army’s attempts to build this capability during the Cold War as an environmental problem: how should army leaders train and equip their forces to fight in any environment anywhere in the world, and in any season? To solve this problem of global environmental efficacy, army leaders tried to develop environmental knowledge to enhance military capabilities. This dissertation explores the ways the U.S. Army tried to develop an institutional mastery of world environments from the start of the Cold War to the end of the Vietnam War. It traces how the U.S. Army produced and managed environmental knowledge from different experts, including bureaucratic insiders, outside consultants and contractors, polar explorers, foreign soldiers, and academics. These experts sought to adapt their environmental knowledge to the army’s visions of future war through studies, simulations, and simplifications of global environments to enhance training and equipment testing. This dissertation argues that two factors limited army leaders’ understanding of global environments and the way they implemented environmental programs. First, the institutional logic of the U.S. Army—the way it defined its mission, history, culture, and organizing principles—limited the ability of environmental experts to implement programs to enhance global efficacy. Second, army leaders and environmental experts were limited by a fundamental logical problem of preparing to fight in global environments. Army leaders needed to train soldiers and design equipment that could simultaneously succeed at the intensely local tactical scale of individual environments and at the U.S. Army’s strategic, world scale in all environments—a problem of environmental preparation that vexes military leaders to this day.
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Date
2022-12-31
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University of Kansas
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Keywords
History, Military history, Environmental studies, Cold War, Environmental history, Global Environment, Military War and Society Studies, U.S. Army, Vietnam War