It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Despite a stunning victory over Iraq during Operation DESERT STORM, the U.S. Army of the 1990s was beset by doubts about its post-Cold War mission, the challenges of deployment quite different than what it had trained for, and the need to adapt to changing societal norms. David Fitzgerald has written about all of this and more in his recent book Uncertain Warriors: The United States Army between the Cold War and the War on Terror.. He joins guest host Carrie Lee in the studio for the next installment in our special series supporting the U.S. Army War College’s Civil-Military Relations Center.
If you are a military servicemember in the 1990s your deployment was most likely a peacekeeping mission—Haiti, to Bosnia, to Kosovo, to Somalia. And those missions require something a bit different They require service members to behave differently. They require a little bit of a different ethos and there is an interesting debate within the military about that.
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David Fitzgerald is a Senior Lecturer in the School of History, University College Cork, Ireland. His research focuses on modern American military history and foreign policy. More specifically, he works on the history of American counterinsurgency, questions of military intervention, and on the intersections between the U.S. military and broader American society and culture. He is the author of Learning to Forget: U.S. Army Counterinsurgency Doctrine from Vietnam to Iraq (Stanford, 2013), Militarization and the American Century: War, the United States and the World since 1941 (Bloomsbury, 2022) and Uncertain Warriors: The United States Army between the Cold War and the War on Terror (Cambridge, 2023).
Carrie A. Lee is an associate professor at the U.S. Army War College, where she serves as the chair of the Department of National Security and Strategy and director of the USAWC Center on Civil-Military Relations. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University and a B.S. from MIT.
The views expressed in this presentation are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Army War College, U.S. Army, or Department of Defense.
Photo Description: President William Jefferson Clinton speaks to the troops at Warrior Base camp in Port-au-Prince. President Clinton flew to Haiti to address and meet with troops of the Joint Task Force and attend the United Nations transition ceremony, March 31, 1995.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the National Archives, photographer unspecified.