"A hell of a gift, an opportunity." "Magnanimous." "One of the greatest advantages I ever experienced." These are the voices of World War II veterans, lavishing praise on their beloved G.I. Bill. Transcending boundaries of class and race, the Bill enabled a sizable portion of the hallowed "greatest generation" to gain vocational training or to attend college or graduate school at government expense. Its beneficiaries had grown up during the Depression, living in tenements and cold-water flats, on farms and in small towns across the nation, most of them expecting that they would one day work in the same kinds of jobs as their fathers. Then the G.I. Bill came along, and changed everything. They experienced its provisions as inclusive, fair, and tremendously effective in providing the deeply held American value of social opportunity, the chance to improve one's circumstances. They become chefs and custom builders, teachers and electricians, engineers and college professors. But the G.I. Bill fueled not only the development of the middle class: it also revitalized American democracy. Americans who came of age during World War II joined fraternal groups and neighborhood and community organizations and took part in politics at rates that made the postwar era the twentieth century's civic "golden age." Drawing on extensive interviews and surveys with hundreds of members of the "greatest generation," Suzanne Mettler finds that by treating veterans as first-class citizens and in granting advanced education, the Bill inspired them to become the active participants thanks to whom memberships in civic organizations soared and levels of political activity peaked. Mettler probes how this landmark law produced such a civic renaissance. Most fundamentally, she discovers, it communicated to veterans that government was for and about people like them, and they responded in turn. In our current age of rising inequality and declining civic engagement, Soldiers to Citizens offers critical lessons about how public programs can make a difference.

From Stephen E. Ambrose, bestselling author of Band of Brothers and D-Day, the inspiring story of the ordinary men of the U.S. army in northwest Europe from the day after D-Day until the end of the bitterest days of World War II. In this riveting account, historian Stephen E. Ambrose continues where he left off in his #1 bestseller D-Day. Citizen Soldiers opens at 0001 hours, June 7, 1944, on the Normandy beaches, and ends at 0245 hours, May 7, 1945, with the allied victory. It is biography of the US Army in the European Theater of Operations, and Ambrose again follows the individual characters of this noble, brutal, and tragic war. From the high command down to the ordinary soldier, Ambrose draws on hundreds of interviews to re-create the war experience with startling clarity and immediacy. From the hedgerows of Normandy to the overrunning of Germany, Ambrose tells the real story of World War II from the perspective of the men and women who fought it.

A diverse group of contributors offer different perspectives on whether or not the different experiences of our military and the broader society amounts to a "gap"—and if the American public is losing connection to its military. They analyze extensive polling information to identify those gaps between civilian and military attitudes on issues central to the military profession and the professionalism of our military, determine which if any of these gaps are problematic for sustaining the traditionally strong bonds between the American military and its broader public, analyze whether any problematic gaps are amenable to remediation by policy means, and assess potential solutions. The contributors also explore public disengagement and the effect of high levels of public support for the military combined with very low levels of trust in elected political leaders—both recurring themes in their research. And they reflect on whether American society is becoming so divorced from the requirements for success on the battlefield that not only will we fail to comprehend our military, but we also will be unwilling to endure a military so constituted to protect us. Contributors: Rosa Brooks, Matthew Colford,Thomas Donnelly, Peter Feaver, Jim Golby, Jim Hake, Tod Lindberg, Mackubin Thomas Owens, Cody Poplin, Nadia Schadlow, A. J. Sugarman, Lindsay Cohn Warrior, Benjamin Wittes

Demilitarization of conflict and society is crucial to building sustainable peace in countries emerging from the scourge of civil war. As longstanding conflicts come to an end, processes which facilitate the potentially volatile transition from formal peace to social peace are critically important. At the heart of the exercise is the necessity of transforming the culture and the instruments of war - demilitarization - including disarming, demobilizing and reintegrating (DDR) former combatants into society. This volume represents the first in-depth and comprehensive discussion of reintegration of former combatants in war to peace transitions. In addition to a systematic reflection and review of existing literature on DDR, the authors devised and applied a field research methodology to studying the reintegration of former combatants in Angola with potentially significant implications on the design and implementation of DDR programmes. The volume is written for academics, students and practitioners focusing on war to peace transitions and post-conflict issues.

Why has the United States, unlike every other 20th-century world power, failed to settle on a durable system of military service? In this lucid book, Eliot Cohen studies the enduring problems of America's methods of raising an army.

A blistering critique of the gulf between America's soldiers and the society that sends them off to war. As war has become normalized, armed conflict has become an "abstraction" and military service "something for other people to do." Bacevich takes stock of a nation with an abiding appetite for war waged at enormous expense by a standing army demonstrably unable to achieve victory.

The U.S. military invests heavily in time and resources to train its officers to be leaders in the broadest sense – forming them not only in military art and science (strategy, tactics, command, etc.), but also in humanistic knowledge, character, and values, as well as how to apply this education on a lightning-fast battlefield or within an inertially slow bureaucracy. The military develops its leaders, at the service academies and in ROTC programs, through very specific but also broad and deep education – a way of thinking that also has wide application in the civilian world, not only in various professional fields that need leaders and thinkers, but also among military history enthusiasts who want to understand how officers have thought across time and among American citizens who want – and, really, need – to understand how our military leaders think, how they advise presidents, how they lead on the battlefield. In a genre-busting book that spans Stackpole’s two longstanding military programs – reference and history – Reed Bonadonna describes how officers think, how they ought to think, how they develop their skills, and how they can improve these skills, as well as how average civilians and citizens can learn from the example of military officers and their program of education. Bonadonna draws from military history, from military arts and science, from literature and science and more, to show how officers develop their critical-thinking and problem-solving skills. A military officer is often called upon to be not only fighter and leader, but also negotiator, organizer, planner and preparer, teacher, writer, scientist, and advisor, and needs broad learning. This is a deeply learned and insightful book, one that cites Lincoln, Grant, Patton, Eisenhower, Marshall, and Churchill as easily as Sun Tzu and Clausewitz, not to mention Homer, Plato, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, George Orwell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Joseph Heller, Phil Klay, and even Jane Austen. The book is descriptive as well as prescriptive and should find eager readers inside the military (where officers take seriously their professional education and their professional reading lists) as well as outside, where many look to the military, to military reading lists, and to military history, to glean lessons for life and work.