Since the Spanish-American War, the United States has had a significant military presence in the Pacific World. The environmental consequences of the U.S. military presence in the Pacific, including the outbreak of disease in the Philippines, the dropping of nuclear bombs on two cities in Japan, the testing of even more powerful nuclear weapons in South Pacific islands during the Cold War, and the use of chemical defoliants in Vietnam, have been profound. Those consequences transcended the Pacific World: in the U.S., East Asia, Australasia, and Europe, the use of nuclear weapons and chemical defoliants sparked concerns about the environment. By the time of the Vietnam War, emerging concerns about the global environment resonated with critiques of the war, encouraging some to perceive the war in Vietnam as more destructive to the environment than previous wars, and others to infuse environmentalism with the urgency of the global anti-war movement.

How did U.S. military leaders understand the extent and significance of the morale "crisis" so widely reported in the American press from 1968 on—the stories of malaise and desertion, drug use, racial conflict, combat refusal and challenges to legitimate authority? And then, given their own analyses, what did they do? How did they attempt to manage the problems they confronted?

This full-day symposium brought together scholars of the U.S. war in Vietnam for conversations about how the U.S. military defined this "crisis" and wrestled with solutions that ranged from the mundane and predictable to the unexpectedly creative.

The U.S. military is a massive institution, and its policies on sex, gender, and sexuality have shaped the experiences of tens of millions of Americans, sometimes in life-altering fashion. Currently, as an institution, the U.S. military is struggling with a massive and intractable epidemic of sexual assault; it is whipsawed between externally mandated requirements that may conflict with internally driven initiatives such as the conflicting directives to allow and then to ban transgendered servicemembers; it is analyzing the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell; it is attempting to deal with the impact of extended war on servicemembers’ families, and it is beginning to allow women to serve in the combat arms. Each of these is a critical issue to the military, but also ties to ongoing questions about sex, gender, and sexuality in American society and to broader issues of civil-military relations. And—most essentially to us—each of these contemporary issues ties to a longer history within the military and to a broader historical context.

To commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and other American and British possessions on December 7/8 1941, some of the leading historians of the World War II era convened at the Center for Military, War, and Society Studies (MWSS) on December 2nd and 3rd to discuss the attacks and the ways they affected the Pacific War, imperialism and colonialism in Asia and the Pacific, and the political cultures, societies, and life experiences of people throughout the interconnected Pacific world.

When the United States ended the draft and moved to an all-volunteer military in 1973, most political and military leaders assumed that if the United States again fought a major, long-lasting war the nation would reactivate the draft. But that didn’t happen: the U.S. fought the long and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with an all-volunteer force (AVF), even as service members were deployed for multiple tours of duty. This symposium, in the wake of those wars, evaluates the AVF. How well has it worked? Will it work in the future?