Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2015, History (Arts and Sciences)

The scholarship regarding US policy and military strategy in Vietnam is substantial, and by no means conclusive. To provide clear focus within the realms of national policy and military strategy, the analysis provided by this thesis is focused on the advice and actions taken by the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), and its commander General William Westmoreland from 1964 to 1968. Within the actions of MACV, this thesis seeks to determine the contribution of MACV in the decision to escalate US involvement in the Vietnam War. This thesis analyzes the US Army's doctrine, structure, and culture related to civil-military relations. Also, this thesis analyzes the military approach taken by MACV in fighting the Vietnam War at the operational level, and concludes with an analysis of a possible alternative to MACV's military strategy in the form of the Combined Action Program (CAP). This thesis concludes that MACV's operational approach was correct.

Committee: Ingo Trauschweizer (Advisor); John Brobst (Committee Member); Chester Pach (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; History; Military History; Military Studies; Modern History

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2009, Comparative Studies

The disciplinary technology of pacification works as a tool, embedded within the logistical assemblage of liberalism, which works to maintain lines of force necessary for reproducing liberalism's conditions for existence. Chapter One develops this conceptual framework, situating my approach in relation to Foucaultian scholarship on biopolitics and war. The proceeding chapters are an exploration of two different cases that demonstrate radically different contexts in which the pacification-assemblage-force assemblage is mobilized. In Chapter Two, I consider smart bombs as a disciplinary technology of pacification within the assemblage of ‘virtuous war', tracing effects of the affective force of the bombs. And Chapter Three is a criticism of the current national anti-war strategy and concludes with a brief suggestion on a new paradigm – affectivism – that recenters a politics of resistance on deploying minor knowledge to produce new potentialities. Each one of the three elements of the triad, the disciplinary technology of pacification, the form of the concrete assemblage, and schematically mapping the topography of lines of force, are crucial components to the political analytics.

Committee: Eugene W. Holland (Advisor); Philip Armstrong (Committee Member); Mathew Coleman (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies; Geography; Philosophy; Political Science