Military science is the study of military processes, institutions, and behavior, along with the study of warfare, and the theory and application of organized coercive force. It is mainly focused on theory, method, and practice of producing military capability in a manner consistent with national defense policy. Military science serves to identify the strategic, political, economic, psychological, social, operational, technological, and tactical elements necessary to sustain relative advantage of military force; and to increase the likelihood and favorable outcomes of victory in peace or during a war. Military scientists include theorists, researchers, experimental scientists, applied scientists, designers, engineers, test technicians, and other military personnel.
William Isaac Thomas was an American sociologist, understood today as a key figure behind the theory of symbolic interactionism.
Morris Janowitz was an American sociologist and professor who made major contributions to sociological theory, the study of prejudice, urban issues, and patriotism. He was one of the founders of military sociology and made major contributions, along with Samuel P. Huntington, to the establishment of contemporary civil-military relations. He was a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago and held a five-year chairmanship of the Sociology Department at University of Chicago. He was the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. Janowitz was the vice-president of the American Sociological Association, receiving their Career of Distinguished Scholarship award, and a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Association. Janowitz also founded the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society, as well as the journal Armed Forces & Society. He was an early founder of the field of military sociology. His students, such as David R. Segal, Mady Segal, and James Burk are prominent and influential military sociologists.
The American Bar Foundation (ABF) is an independent, nonprofit national research institute established in 1952 and located in Chicago, United States. Its mission is to expand knowledge and advance justice by supporting innovative, interdisciplinary and rigorous empirical research on law, legal processes and legal institutions. This program of sociolegal research is conducted by an interdisciplinary staff of Research Faculty trained in such diverse fields as law, sociology, psychology, political science, philosophy, economics, history, and anthropology.
Military recruitment refers to the activity of attracting people to, and selecting them for, military training and employment.
Charles Constantine Moskos, Jr. was a sociologist of the United States military and a professor at Northwestern University. Described as the nation's "most influential military sociologist" by The Wall Street Journal, Moskos was often a source for reporters from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, and other periodicals. He was the author of the "don't ask, don't tell" (DADT) policy, the compromise which allowed homosexual service members to serve, but prohibited them from acknowledging their sexual orientation from 1994 to 2011.
Christoph Beat Graber (*1960) is a Swiss legal scholar and professor of legal sociology with particular focus on media law at the University of Zurich since 2015. He was previously a founding member of the Faculty of Law at the University of Lucerne and a consultant to various Swiss federal offices and the OECD on communication, cultural and copyright law issues.
Armed Forces & Society is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic publication that publishes articles and book reviews on a wide variety of topics including civil–military relations, military sociology, veterans, military psychology, military institutions, conflict management, peacekeeping, conflict resolution, military contracting, terrorism, gender related issues, military families and military ethics. It is the official publication of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society and published by SAGE Publications. The current editor-in-chief is Patricia M. Shields.
James Barrett Jacobs was the Warren E. Burger Professor of Constitutional Law and the Courts at New York University School of Law, where he was a faculty member since 1982. He was a specialist in criminal law, criminal procedure, and criminal justice.
Military sociology is a subfield within sociology. It corresponds closely to C. Wright Mills's summons to connect the individual world to broader social structures. Military sociology aims toward the systematic study of the military as a social group rather than as a military organization. This highly specialized sub-discipline examines issues related to service personnel as a distinct group with coerced collective action based on shared interests linked to survival in vocation and combat, with purposes and values that are more defined and narrow than within civil society. Military sociology also concerns civil-military relations and interactions between other groups or governmental agencies.
The American Evaluation Association (AEA) is a professional association for evaluators and those with a professional interest in the field of evaluation, including practitioners, faculty, students, funders, managers, and government decision-makers. As of 2014, AEA has approximately 7057 members from all 50 US states and over 60 other countries.
Civil–military relations describes the relationship between military organizations and civil society, military organizations and other government bureaucracies, and leaders and the military. CMR incorporates a diverse, often normative field, which moves within and across management, social science and policy scales. More narrowly, it describes the relationship between the civil authority of a given society and its military authority. "The goal of any state is to harness military professional power to serve vital national security interests, while guarding against the misuse of power that can threaten the well-being of its people." Studies of civil-military relations often rest on a normative assumption that it is preferable to have the ultimate responsibility for a country's strategic decision-making to lie in the hands of the civilian political leadership rather than a military.
Reuven Gal is an Israeli social and clinical psychologist, a social activist and entrepreneur, researcher, author and consultant in the field of behavioural, communal and social sciences.
Unit cohesion is a military concept, defined by one former United States Chief of staff in the early 1980s as "the bonding together of soldiers in such a way as to sustain their will and commitment to each other, the unit, and mission accomplishment, despite combat or mission stress". This concept lacks a consensus definition among military analysts, sociologists and psychologists, however.
Patricia M. Shields is a Regents' Professor in the Political Science Department at Texas State University. Since 2001 she has been Editor-in-Chief of the international and interdisciplinary journal Armed Forces & Society. She is also a Contributing Editor to Parameters: The US Army War College Quarterly and the Section Editor of the Military and Society section to the Handbook of Military Sciences. Shields is notable for her publications focusing on research methods, civil military relations, gender issues, pragmatism in public administration, peace studies, and the contributions of Jane Addams to public administration and peace theory. She received a BA in Economics from the University of Maryland - College Park, an MA in Economics and a PhD in Public Administration from The Ohio State University.
John Allen Williams, also known as Jay Williams, is a professor emeritus of political science at Loyola University Chicago and is the former chair and president of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society (2003–2013). He serves on the editorial board of the National Strategy Forum in Chicago, is editor of the National Strategy Forum Review, and is on the board of directors for the Pritzker Military Museum & Library.
Sam Charles Sarkesian was a prominent scholar of civil-military relations and national security, who published numerous books and articles concerning various topics in these areas. He was also a member of the military, serving in Korea and Vietnam. He retired from the U.S. Army as a Lieutenant Colonel. He was also a professor emeritus of political science at Loyola University Chicago, where he was the chair of the political science department and influenced many new scholars in the field. He also served as the second president of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces & Society (IUS). His memory is strong in the IUS, as many of its fellows were his students.
David R. Segal is an American sociologist who specializes in civil-military relations, military sociology, and military organization, in the tradition of Morris Janowitz. He is a distinguished scholar-teacher and professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Maryland. He is the founding director of the Center for Research on Military Organization, and is a former president of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society, as well as a former editor of the journal Armed Forces & Society. He has also served as president of the District of Columbia Sociological Society and of the Section on Armed Forces and Conflict Resolution of the International Sociological Association, and chair of the Section on Peace, War, and Social Conflict of the American Sociological Association. He attended public school in Brooklyn, New York, and earned his B.A. from Harpur College, Binghamton University. He earned a PhD in sociology at University of Chicago. He began his academic career in the sociology department at the University of Michigan in 1966, and served as director of graduate studies, associate chair of the department, and director of the Center for Research on Social Organization. in 1973, he took a leave of absence from Michigan to direct the sociology program at the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences.
James S. Burk is an American sociologist and professor at Texas A&M University. He is most notable as a scholar of military sociology, political sociology, and the history of sociology. He is a central figure in the study of civil-military relations in democratic societies.
