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"In Real Soldiering, Brian Linn demonstrates that each conflict has produced a distinct aftermath army that shares many characteristics with its predecessors. These aftermath armies follow similar patterns of creation and evolution. In the first three to four years after the termination of hostilities, political and military policymakers reform the service based on the perceived lessons of the last conflict. All too often the army, and its historians, have assumed these initial high-level directives, particularly in easily identifiable issues such as doctrine or organization, were soon implemented in the field. But it takes much longer for many of these changes to percolate down to the rank and file. Some never do. For a variety of reasons, among them that politicians seldom fund the changes they impose, organizational inertia, personnel turbulence, and institutional resistance, the aftermath army a decade after a conflict seldom resembles what its creators envisioned."

"What kind of army wants the king of rock-n-roll? Elvis's Army explores the great military and social experiment that was the Cold War atomic army. Militarily, the US Army transformed for the revolution in warfare initiated by the nuclear weapons. Traumatized by Cold War reductions and Korea, it seized on the vision of a great atomic land war against the Soviet Union. It not only adapted a radically new way of fighting, but fundamental changes in its equipment, concepts, and training. Socially, the 1950s the service underwent even more of a transformation. In large part due to the draft, the Fifties Army became the nation's most racially and economically egalitarian institution, the only place where black and white, college graduates and illiterates, rich and poor, urban and rural had to live, work, and, if necessary, fight together. In return for their service, the army was expected to provide young males not only with military skills, but also education, technical training, entertainment, and moral instruction. This social transformation was nowhere more evident than with Elvis Presley. He entered the service a notorious musical rebel hated by adult society; he emerged two years later a clean-cut young all-American boy in the movie G.I. Blues. Elvis's Army is the first history of the US Army's transformation for the atomic battlefield. But it also reveals the cultural importance of the US Army in Fifties America, from draft calls to ROTC, from basic training to overseas service, from Madison Avenue to Hollywood, and from atomic maneuvers to rock-n-roll."--

The guardians arrive -- The savage wars of peace -- The Pacific army -- The dilemmas of Pacific defense -- The Pacific army and the community -- Manpower and internal security -- Orange to rainbow, 1919-1940 -- The Pacific army in the 1920s -- Army aviation and Pacific defense -- The last years of the Pacific army -- App. U.S. Army manpower, 1902-1941

Drawing on Samuel P. Huntington's three phases of self-regulation used to determine if an occupation qualifies as a profession, this article focuses on the third phase of policing and removing those who fail to uphold the standards set forth in the first two phases. It reviews how the US Army implemented this phase following the Civil War through the post–Vietnam War years and the implications for the officer corps.

This commentary responds to David M. Finkelstein's article, "The US Army and the Pacific: Challenges and Legacies," published in the Autumn 2020 issue of Parameters (vol. 50, no. 3).