| This dissertation analyzes the meaning of crime and patterns of prosecution under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), a legal reform adopted in the aftermath of World War II and implemented during the Korean War. From 1951 to 1973, when the draft ended and a new era of volunteer military force began, the UCMJ operated within a military culture that defined crime broadly, treasured its traditions of hierarchy and obedience, and sought to remain distinctive from civilian society. This study places courts martial into the larger history of American criminal justice while stressing the distinctive atmosphere of courts-martial and the special valence of criminality within an institution that legitimized violence and celebrated aggressive masculinity. Prosecutions for military crime reveal a host of contradictions between the procedural values embraced by the UCMJ and the values that motivated military institutions. The Cold War military was under great strain, struggling to cope with resistance to racial and gender integration, a loss of public prestige, changing missions, and increasingly sophisticated weapons and strategies. By analyzing the overall pattern of military criminal prosecution and several key subsets of courts-martial (criminal absence, political dissent, crimes related to heterosexual and homosexual intimacy, and crimes of war), this dissertation reveals that the burden of criminal sanction fell disproportionately on servicemen who lacked class, racial, and heterosexual privilege.; The UCMJ made criminal justice a scarce resource, to be used only when servicemembers' transgressions warranted expensive, public, confrontational The many disciplinary incidents that did not lead to court-martial but rather to some other type of censure could not be punished as harshly as those prosecuted as military crimes, but through the shift to administrative action the armed forces managed to eliminate “undesirables” while minimizing the threat of political, sexual, and cultural disobedience to the military's structure and image. As the military narrowed the criminal part of its disciplinary apparatus, courts-martial became markers of the boundaries that separated military from civilian, the violence of war from the violence of crime, and the accepted license of the soldier from criminal exploitation. |
