| The Vietnam war initiated an examination of the American military unparalleled in American history. Scholars thoroughly, rigorously, and analytically examined the nature of military leadership; the relationships between civilian and military leaders; the role of force in advancing U.S. interests; the internal structure of the military; and the implications of the nuclear arsenal.;This thesis attempts to identify the congruences between the scholarly and the military perceptions and, more importantly, those areas where military professionals see themselves in a light quite different from that articulated by the academic thinkers.;What was largely missing from this analysis, however, was the perception of those same issues by the American military itself. This thesis addresses those issues through a distillation of the critical concerns, voiced over the last twenty years, into a series of thirty-seven questions. Those questions were addressed, in turn, to six generals, selected to represent American military leadership from the end of World War II to the present. Their responses are weighed against one another and against the conventional wisdom permeating American military scholarship. |
