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Since the beginning of the twentieth century, historians and doctors have claimed that the ‘army disease’ of both the Union and the Confederate armies was morphine addiction. But since drug addiction was not yet fully understood in medical texts of the mid-1860s, addiction as the army disease could have been perceived only in hindsight. Whether addiction was prevalent among veteran troops or not, one thing can be firmly ascertained: after the Civil War, every other war in American history has brought with it a drug problem, whether real or imagined. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that during the 1990s, military professionals and civilian defense experts in the US used concepts and metaphors from nonlinear science to translate tenets of 1980s battlefield strategy and tactics into theories of international politics and foreign policy that posited the necessity of speed and offense in the face of a supposedly more chaotic and dangerous post-Cold War world. Ultimately, the most militaristic of the lessons supposedly learned from and justified by the ‘new sciences’ made their way to the highest reaches of the US Department of Defense under President G.W. Bush, and served as a foundation for acting quickly and preventively against ‘gathering threats’. In addition to allowing us to understand better the origins of the ‘Bush Doctrine’, this paper improves our understanding of the relationship between the sciences and the state/military in the post-Cold War US — in particular the role of scientific metaphor in national security discourses that have focused on the challenges and opportunities of new information and communication technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The figure of the marine is not only the embodiment of US militarism, but also a major icon of popular culture. The Marine Corps was prominently deployed in the invasion of Iraq, as it has been in all major US military enterprises. But while there has been much and ongoing discussion about that war, less attention has been paid to its increasing impact on mainstream American culture. In this groundbreaking account, the author reviews and analyses the ever-growing body of literature produced by marines themselves. The article reveals a disturbing picture of pornographic violence, certainty in US military right and, crucially, an increasing turn to rightwing Christian fundamentalism as both imperative and justification for the war. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent years, the military establishments of the US and the UK have produced a series of reports that attempt to 'think the unthinkable' in imagining future threats to the security of the West. A new genre of military futurology has emerged which owes as much to apocalyptic Hollywood movies as it does to the cold war tradition of 'scenario planning'. Often outlandish and bizarre in its prophecies, and always dystopian, this new military futurism sees threats to the western way of life emanating not only from rogue states, weapons of mass destruction and terrorism but also from resurgent nationalism, conflicts over dwindling resources, migration, disease, organised crime, abrupt climate change and the emergence of 'failed cities' where social disorder is rife. This article provides a survey of the genre, showing how the grim predictions of the military futurists provide a justification for endless global war against enemies that may never exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few presidential initiatives have attracted more public ridicule from scientists and engineers than `Star Wars', Ronald Reagan's 1983 proposal to build a missile defense system that would render the Soviet nuclear arsenal `impotent and obsolete'. Scientists found multiple ways of critiquing what Reagan's vision became: not a working weapons system, but a dramatically escalated research and development program known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which stalled arms-control negotiations near the end of the Cold War. This paper examines how scientists crossed discursive boundaries between science and politics as they staged a social movement against SDI: a nationwide boycott of Star Wars research funds. It argues that scientists made discursive choices that furthered their immediate challenge to practices of military-academic research, while still shaping emergent identities in line with existing institutions. Significantly, this account cannot be simply incorporated into existing traditions of research in lay-expert communication. Whereas these traditions suggest that communicative practices either enable or constrain actors, this account shows they simultaneously did both. It advances the notion of 'discursive choices' as a concept that may help mediate between structure and agency in studies of public communication with technical experts. This account suggests that an examination of discursive choices may contribute to understanding how expertise is maintained and reconfigured within a particular political culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]