Historical Perspectives on Developing and Maintaining Homefront Morale for the War on Terrorism

Abstract

The War on Terrorism will be vastly different than any previous U.S. military campaign. The war will span a wide range of geographic, economic and political boundaries. Terrorist organizations will rely on stealth and dispersion to evade the American military and international law enforcement agencies. The United States will therefore be required to engage the enemy in a wide variety of arenas and with a wide variety of tools. Thus, the War on Terrorism will require the skillful blending of many American and international capabilities in order to meet the challenge. One such challenge is to cultivate and sustain homefront morale for the War on Terrorism. This paper will offer recommendation's on how the United States should address their current homefront morale challenge through the analysis of two case studies. The first case study will examine how Great Britain was able to develop and sustain homefront morale during World War II. The second case study will examine the homefront morale issues concerning the United States involvement in the Vietnam War, specifically on their loss of public support for the war. Both case studies will address the applicability of the respective information campaign to the War on Terrorism, and will focus on generating a set of lessons learned that can be directly applied to today's homefront morale challenge.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 01, 2002
Accession Number
ADA406051

Entities

People

  • Christopher B. Snavely

Organizations

  • Naval Postgraduate School

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Human Systems
  • Space

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Governments
  • Intergovernmental Organizations
  • International Law
  • International Organizations
  • Law
  • Law Enforcement
  • Lessons Learned
  • Military Tactics
  • National Politics
  • National Security
  • Second World War
  • Terrorists
  • United States
  • United States Naval Academy
  • Vietnam War
  • War
  • Warfare

Readers

  • Military Science
  • Political Violence and Terrorism Studies.
  • Systems Analysis and Design