How the Empire Struck Back Starting with Jimmy Carter

Jeremy Kuzmarov teaches at the University of Tulsa and is author of "Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century"(Massachusetts, 2012) and "The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs" (Massachusetts, 2009). He is currently working on a book on the revolution in military affairs and American techno-war from the Korean War to the Endless War on Terror. -


Jimmy Carter’s illness has prompted an array of retrospectives of the man and his presidency both positive and negative. Missing from many of these commentaries is the fact that his presidency was crucial to the revival of American militarism after Vietnam even though Carter wants to be remembered as a peace president and spoke out against ill-considered military interventions later on.

Following the end of the Vietnam War, the Pentagon had embarked on a crash-program to revitalize its fighting forces and to incorporate new technologies fit for the information age to ensure greater military efficiency while transitioning to an all-volunteer force. Proponents of the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), including prominent defense intellectuals like Albert Wohlstetter and Andrew Marshall, believed that new precision guided weapons and a reinvigoration of air power supremacy could help the United States to maintain its global hegemony after Vietnam by decisively defeating its enemies with reduced manpower expenditure and limited “collateral damage.”


- See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/160450#sthash.Ah6Tvq7y.dpuf


Have a good evening people