A profession is a field of work that has been successfully professionalized. It can be defined as a disciplined group of individuals, professionals, who adhere to ethical standards and who hold themselves out as, and are accepted by the public as possessing special knowledge and skills in a widely recognised body of learning derived from research, education and training at a high level, and who are prepared to apply this knowledge and exercise these skills in the interest of others.
Samuel Phillips Huntington was an American political scientist, adviser, and academic. He spent more than half a century at Harvard University, where he was director of Harvard's Center for International Affairs and the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor.
Militarism is the belief or the desire of a government or a people that a state should maintain a strong military capability and to use it aggressively to expand national interests and/or values. It may also imply the glorification of the military and of the ideals of a professional military class and the "predominance of the armed forces in the administration or policy of the state".
Fraternization is the act of establishing intimate relations between people or groups. It is generally used to refer to establishing relations that are considered unethical, controversial, or problematic.
A standing army is a permanent, often professional, army. It is composed of full-time soldiers who may be either career soldiers or conscripts. It differs from army reserves, who are enrolled for the long term, but activated only during wars or natural disasters, and temporary armies, which are raised from the civilian population only during a war or threat of war, and disbanded once the war or threat is over. Standing armies tend to be better equipped, better trained, and better prepared for emergencies, defensive deterrence, and particularly, wars. The term dates from approximately 1600 AD, although the phenomenon it describes is much older.
Civil Affairs (CA) is a term used by both the United Nations and by military institutions, but for different purposes in each case.
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.
Civilian control of the military is a doctrine in military and political science that places ultimate responsibility for a country's strategic decision-making in the hands of the civilian political leadership, rather than professional military officers.
The military history of Mexico encompasses armed conflicts within that nation's territory, dating from before the arrival of Europeans in 1519 to the present era. Mexican military history is replete with small-scale revolts, foreign invasions, civil wars, indigenous uprisings, and coups d'état by disgruntled military leaders. Mexico's colonial-era military was not established until the eighteenth century. After the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire in the early sixteenth century, the Spanish crown did not establish on a standing military, but the crown responded to the external threat of a British invasion by creating a standing military for the first time following the Seven Years' War (1756–63). The regular army units and militias had a short history when in the early 19th century, the unstable situation in Spain with the Napoleonic invasion gave rise to an insurgency for independence, propelled by militarily untrained, darker complected men fighting for the independence of Mexico. The Mexican War of Independence (1810–21) saw royalist and insurgent armies battling to a stalemate in 1820. That stalemate ended with the royalist military officer turned insurgent, Agustín de Iturbide persuading the guerrilla leader of the insurgency, Vicente Guerrero, to join in a unified movement for independence, forming the Army of the Three Guarantees. The royalist military had to decide whether to support newly independent Mexico. With the collapse of the Spanish state and the establishment of first a monarchy under Iturbide and then a republic, the state was a weak institution. The Roman Catholic Church and the military weathered independence better. Military men dominated Mexico's nineteenth-century history, most particularly General Antonio López de Santa Anna, under whom the Mexican military were defeated by Texas insurgents for independence in 1836 and then the U.S. invasion of Mexico (1846–48). With the overthrow of Santa Anna in 1855 and the installation of a government of political liberals, Mexico briefly had civilian heads of state. The Liberal Reforms that were instituted by Benito Juárez sought to curtail the power of the military and the church and wrote a new constitution in 1857 enshrining these principles. Conservatives comprised large landowners, the Catholic Church, and most of the regular army revolted against the Liberals, fighting a civil war. The Conservative military lost on the battlefield. But Conservatives sought another solution, supporting the French intervention in Mexico (1862–65). The Mexican army loyal to the liberal republic were unable to stop the French army's invasion, briefly halting it in with a victory at Puebla on 5 May 1862. Mexican Conservatives supported the installation of Maximilian Hapsburg as Emperor of Mexico, propped up by the French and Mexican armies. With the military aid of the U.S. flowing to the republican government in exile of Juárez, the French withdrew its military supporting the monarchy and Maximilian was caught and executed. The Mexican army that emerged in the wake of the French Intervention was young and battle tested, not part of the military tradition dating to the colonial and early independence eras.
The cyclical theory refers to a model used by historians Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. to explain the fluctuations in politics throughout American history. In this theory, the United States's national mood alternates between liberalism and conservatism. Each phase has characteristic features, and each phase is self-limiting, generating the other phase. This alternation has repeated itself several times over the history of the United States.
The Royal Prussian Army served as the army of the Kingdom of Prussia. It became vital to the development of Prussia as a European power.
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.
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.
The Mexican Armed Forces are the military forces of the United Mexican States. The Spanish crown established a standing military in colonial Mexico in the eighteenth century. After Mexican independence in 1821, the military played an important political role, with army generals serving as heads of state. Following the collapse of the Federal Army during the 1910-1920 Mexican Revolution, former revolutionary generals systematically downsized the size and power of the military. Currently the Mexican military forces are composed of two independent entities: the Mexican Army and the Mexican Navy. The Mexican Army includes the Mexican Air Force, while the Mexican Navy includes the Naval Infantry Force and the Naval Aviation (FAN). The Army and Navy are controlled by two separate government departments, the National Defense Secretariat and the Naval Secretariat, and maintain two independent chains of command, with no joint command except the President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
To reinforce the Army profession and its Ethic, the Army Chief of Staff (CSA) established the Army Center of Excellence for the Professional Military Ethic (ACPME) in May 2008. Located at West Point, New York, the wellspring of professional soldier values for more than 200 years, the ACPME was re-designated as the Center for the Army Profession and Ethic (CAPE) and realigned to fall under the command and control of the United States Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) and its Combined Arms Center (CAC) in August 2010. CAPE's objectives were to assess the state of Army as a profession and its members as professionals; to study and define through doctrine and strategic messaging the Army Profession; capture and promulgate the moral principles of the Army Ethic, Army culture, and organizational climates; inspire trusted Army professionals to live up to their sacred oaths, increase Army members’ understanding and internalization of what it means for Soldiers and Army Civilians to be members of an honored profession; accelerate professional and character development in individuals, units, and Army culture through training, education, and leader development. AR 600-100 Army Profession and Leadership specified 12 tasks for CAPE to serve the Army in leader development, critical thinking and ethical decision making based upon the moral principles of the Army Ethic. Army Doctrine Publication (ADP) 1 and Army Doctrine Reference Publication (ADRP) 1. CAPE, as the AR 5-22 Army Force Modernization Proponent for the Army Profession, Character Development, and the Army Ethic was the US Army and lead responsible for Doctrine, Organization, Training, Materiel, Leadership and Education, Personnel and Facilities (DOTMLPF) initiatives to reinforce the Army Profession of Arms, Army Ethic, and culture. In September 2019, CAPE was merged with the Center for Army Leadership at Fort Leavenworth, KS to form the Center for the Army Profession and Leadership.
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.
Liberalism is a school of thought within international relations theory which revolves around three interrelated principles:
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.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to politics and political science:
War from the Ground Up: Twenty-First Century Combat as Politics is a 2012 book on war and military strategy written by Emile Simpson, a former British Army officer. The book analyzes the War in Afghanistan (2001–present) in terms of Carl von Clausewitz's theory of war, arguing that modern counter-insurgencies have more in common with domestic political struggles than the traditional state-on-state conflicts described by Clausewitz. The book was favorably reviewed by Michael Howard, a prominent military historian, among others.
