Civil-military relations have changed over time with respect to changing demographics, new domestic and international responsibilities, Industry-Defence cooperation, women in the armed forces and contemporary veteran wellbeing.The New Australian Military Sociology aims to provide an antipodean view to theorising civil-military entanglements and uses Australia’s unique geographic, political and cultural context to serve as a case study for other countries.

Civil-military relations have changed over time with respect to changing demographics, new domestic and international responsibilities, Industry-Defence cooperation, women in the armed forces and contemporary veteran wellbeing.The New Australian Military Sociology aims to provide an antipodean view to theorising civil-military entanglements and uses Australia’s unique geographic, political and cultural context to serve as a case study for other countries.

Since the Second World War the Australian military has undergone remarkable transformations in the way it has treated lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex service members: it has shifted from persecuting, hunting and discharging LGBTI members to embracing them as valued members who enhance the Force's capabilities. LGBTI people have served in the Australian military since its very beginnings, yet Australian Defence Force histories have been very slow to recognise this. Pride in Defence confronts that silence. It charts the changing policies and practices of the ADF, illuminating the experiences of LGBTI members in what was often a hostile institution. Drawing on over 140 interviews and previously unexamined documents, Pride in Defence features accounts of secret romances, police surveillance and traumatic discharges. At its centre are the courageous LGBTI members who served their country in the face of systemic prejudice. In doing so, they showed the power of diversity and challenged the ADF to make it a far stronger institution.

This volume explores and develops new social-scientific tools for the analysis and understanding of contemporary military missions in theatre. Despite the advent of new types of armed conflict, the social-scientific study of militaries in action continues to focus on tools developed in the hey-day of conventional wars. These tools focus on such classic issues as cohesion and leadership, communication and unit dynamics, or discipline and motivation. While these issues continue to be important, most studies focus on organic units (up to and including brigades). By contrast, this volume suggests the utility of concepts related to mission formations – as opposed to ‘units’ or ‘components’ – to better capture the (ongoing) processual nature of the amalgamations and combinations that military involvement in conflicts necessitates. The study of these formations by the social sciences – sociology, social psychology, anthropology, political science and organization science – requires the introduction of new analytical tools to the study of militaries in theatre. As such, this volume utilizes new approaches to social life, organizational dynamics and to armed violence to understand the place of the armed forces in contemporary conflicts and the new tasks they are assigned. This book will be of much interest to students of military studies, sociology, security studies and International Relations in general.

This book surveys historical and emerging global air and space power issues and provides a multidisciplinary understanding of the application of air and space power in the past and present, while exploring potential future challenges that global air forces may face. Bringing together leading and emerging academics, professionals, and military personnel from Australia within the field of air and space power, this edited collection traces the evolution of technological innovations, as well as the ethical and cultural frameworks which have informed the development of air and space power in the 20th and 21st centuries, and contemplates the future. It covers topics such as the insurgents' use of drones, the ethics of air strikes, the privatisation of air power, the historical trajectory of air power strategy, and the sociological implications of an ‘air force’ identity. While many of the chapters use Australian-based case studies for their analysis, they have broader applicability to a global readership, and several chapters examine other nations’ experiences, including those of the United States and the United Kingdom. This accessible, illuminating book is an important addition to contemporary air and space power literature, and will be of great interest to students and scholars of air and space power, air warfare, military and international history, defence studies, and contemporary strategic studies, as well as military professionals.

This book focuses on the key issues that affect military families when soldiers are deployed overseas, focusing on the support given to military personnel and families before, during and after missions. Today’s postmodern armies are expected to provide social-psychological support both to their personnel in military operations abroad and to their families at home. Since the end of the Cold War and even more so after 9/11, separations between military personnel and their families have become more frequent as there has been a multitude of missions carried out by multinational task forces all over the world. The book focuses on three central questions affecting military families. First, how do changing missions and tasks of the military affect soldiers and families? Second, what is the effect of deployments on the ones left behind? Third, what is the national structure of family support systems and its evolution? The book employs a multidisciplinary approach, with contributions from psychology, sociology, history, anthropology and others. In addition, it covers all the services, Army, Navy/Marines, Air Force, spanning a wide range of countries, including UK, USA, Belgium, Turkey, Australia and Japan. At the same time it takes a multitude of perspectives such as the theoretical, empirical, reflective, life events (narrative) approach, national and the global, and uses approaches from different disciplines and perspectives, combining them to produce a volume that enhances our knowledge and understanding of military families. This book will be of much interest to students of military studies, sociology, war and conflict studies and IR/political science in general.

This edited book constitutes the first detailed attempt at a comparative international analysis of the transformations that are currently affecting the composition of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and their place in Israeli society. Focusing primarily on deviations from the traditional norm of universal military service, the book compares the emergence of a new type of "citizen army" in Israel with the formats that have in recent decades become evident in other western democracies. In addition, these essays correct the conventional tendency to concentrate almost exclusively on the influences stimulating military institutional change in the West, and thereby to overlook the equally important factors that retard its momentum. By contrast, this volume deliberately highlights the brakes as well as the accelerators in current processes, thereby presenting a far more faithful picture of their complexity. This book will be of much interest to students of Israeli politics, military studies, Middle Eastern politics, security studies and IR in general. Stuart Cohen is a senior research associate of the BESA (Begin-Sadat) Center for Strategic Studies and also teaches political studies at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. His most recent book is Israel and its Army: From Cohesion to Confusion (Routledge, 2008).