Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2023, History (Arts and Sciences)

After the Vietnam War, the US Army pivoted from counter-insurgency in Southeast Asia towards the renewed possibility of war with the USSR in Central Germany. This shift in perspective coincided with dramatic shifts in Army policy, most importantly the transition from conscription to the All-Volunteer Force, as well as the introduction of new battlefield technologies which transformed the battlespace. This dissertation analyzes the complicated military relationship between the US Army and an important European ally. It argues that during this period of intense reform, the US Army and the West German Bundeswehr used both new and preexisting institutions to engage in a period of intense, sympathetic, and mutually inspired reforms which developed significant new concepts in land warfare. This is significant because this period of cooperation helped to reaffirm a special relationship between the US and West Germany, which transformed to become the most significant within NATO and Western Europe. The focus of this dissertation is on the mechanics of the transatlantic exchange and how this shaped both forces through the last decades of the Cold War.

Committee: Ingo Trauschweizer (Advisor); Mirna Zakic (Committee Member); Paul Milazzo (Committee Member); Nukhet Sandal (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; European History; History; Military History

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2018, History (Arts and Sciences)

This dissertation focuses on U.S. Army forces in Berlin from 1945 to 1994 and on broader issues of U.S. and NATO policy and strategy for the Cold War. It seeks to answer two primary questions: Why did U.S. officials risk war over a location everyone agreed was militarily untenable, and how did they construct strategies to defend it? Much of the Berlin literature looks at the city only during the two crises there, the Soviet blockade in 1948 and 1949 and Moscow's periodic ultimatum between 1958 and 1962 that the Americans, British, and French leave the city. These works maintain that leaders conceived of Berlin's worth as only a beacon of democracy in the war against communism, or a trip wire in the event that the Soviet Union invaded Western Europe. This dissertation looks beyond the crises, and contends that a long view of the city reveals U.S. officials saw Berlin as more than a liability. By combining military, diplomatic, political, and international history to analyze the evolution of U.S. diplomacy, NATO strategy and policy, and joint military planning, it suggests that U.S. officials, realizing they could not retreat, devised ways to defend Berlin and, when possible, use it as a means to achieve strategic and political ends in the larger Cold War, with both enemy and friend alike. This research is broadly concerned with national security, civil-military relations, and alliance politics. It focuses on the intersection of the military and political worlds, and tries to answer how governments analyze risk and form strategy, and then how militaries secure political and military objectives. Ultimately, it is a study of deterrence in modern war, an examination of how leaders can obtain objectives without harming friendships or instigating war.

Committee: Ingo Trauschweizer (Advisor); Steven Miner (Committee Member); Chester Pach (Committee Member); James Mosher (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; Armed Forces; European History; History

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, History

The Army of the Potomac remains the most meticulously-studied field force of the American Civil War, yet remarkably little work has sought to connect the army's familiar narrative with wider scholarly debates about Union soldier ideology and northern political culture. This dissertation examines the process by which citizen-soldiers gained awareness of the key partisan issues of the day while serving at the front. In particular, it argues active Republican junior officers worked vigorously with party officials and newspaper editors to fight political opponents in their own units and undermine conservative Democratic generals at corps and army headquarters. In doing so, these Republican (or “radical”) officers educated politically-naive enlisted men on the tenets of “hard war” policy, radicalizing the army and priming the ranks to vote for Lincoln over former general George B. McClellan in 1864. The most potent cultural value in the army was loyalty, and Republicans and Democrats disagreed sharply over how to define it for the men under their command. Republicans emphasized obedience to the sitting administration as a wartime imperative, meaning truly loyal soldiers would proclaim fealty to Lincoln's policies in the face of opposition from Confederates and northern anti-war Democrats. The army's Democrats, in contrast, defined loyalty as obedience to a strict conservative conception of the Constitution, one which restrained the administration and left antebellum institutions largely untouched. Loyalty, in other words, was to “the Constitution as it is; the Union as it was.” The Republican view of loyalty resonated more readily with the average men of the Army of the Potomac who were enduring hardship and witnessing the realities of wartime Virginia. The failures of the 1862 Peninsula Campaign drained many soldiers of the initial rage militaire which had excited them to enlist, and they implicitly placed trust in commanding general McClellan as their bes (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Christopher Mark Grimsley (Advisor); John Brooke (Committee Member); Paula Baker (Committee Member); Allen Guelzo (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; Armed Forces; History; Military History; Military Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2016, History

This dissertation analyzes secret military cooperation between the Soviet Union and Germany from 1920 until 1933. Both states found themselves internationally isolated after World War I. Unable to meet their own security needs – despite immense ideological differences – they turned to each other in an unlikely partnership. Together, they established a network of secret military bases, testing grounds and laboratories inside Russia, where they jointly developed new aircraft, armored vehicles, and chemical weapons. Their work together provided a dark glimpse of the future: Soviet military intelligence reports chronicled the rise of pro-Nazi sentiment among the German officers. German intelligence in turn described the growing cult of Stalin and the scenes of mass starvation unfolding right outside the gates of their facilities in the wake of collectivization. And both sides practiced human experimentation in their joint chemical weapons facilities. But cooperation between the two states was more than just a harbinger of what was to come: the new ideas, technologies, and factories developed in this period of cooperation would serve a vital role in the course and conduct of the coming war. At its core, the interwar exchange of Russian space for German technology was a wager upon which the Second World War depended.

Committee: Jennifer Siegel (Advisor); Peter Mansoor (Committee Member); David Hoffmann (Committee Member); Alan Beyerchen (Committee Member) Subjects: History; Technology

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2014, History

Since the late 1980s, historians of American Civil War soldiers have struggled to understand the nature, character, and social order of the volunteer Union Army. Debates over individual motivations to enlist and serve, the success or failure of the institution to instill proper military discipline, and the peculiar requirements of leading volunteer citizen-soldiers have remained salient elements of Civil War soldier studies historiography. This thesis offers a new methodology for addressing these questions by examining the antebellum worldview of men from a single regiment -- the 55th Illinois Volunteer Infantry -- in order to create a lens through which to view their wartime behavior in uniform. This allows for an examination of how the antebellum voluntarist social order of Illinois towns continued to structure life in the ranks. Leaders who were aware of this cultural factor were often more successful in enlisting the support and cooperation of their subordinates than those who sought to breakdown their men and force them into the traditional mold of military subordination. Finally, the decision to enlist, cooperate, and remain in the volunteer force was governed by the same personal calculus of individual self-interest that governed men before entering into military service.

Committee: Brian Schoen (Advisor) Subjects: American History; History; Military History