Mobilizing the imagination : Army advertising and the politics of culture in post-Vietnam America

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Dept. of History, 2010.This dissertation is a cultural history of U.S. Army advertising since the end of the Vietnam War. It traces the emergence and evolution of the army image-making system, and the origins and establishment of the army brand. Placing army image-making within the context of wider cultural and political events since the late 1960s, it considers army advertising as marketing and branding devices, cultural representations of war and the military, as an ever-evolving form of mass cultural communication, and as sites where image-makers worked out cultural anxieties about the role of the nation and its army after the Vietnam War. In the wake of that war, army leadership, experts, and advertisers became acute cultural and social analysts in order to sell the army to a community of American consumers. Army image-makers initiated a long-term public image project aimed at dramatically recasting and continually reshaping the army’s image. They utilized the techniques of consumer product marketing, while drawing on existing war and military symbols, cultural representations of war, and American mythology. As image-makers engaged in a permanent public image project, they also undertook an ideological project that aimed to reconstitute American power in international affairs after the nation’s defeat in Vietnam. Using archival materials, government documents, company newsletters, industry and government journals, marketing studies, films, television programs, as well as army print advertisements, television commercials, video games, and web content, my project illustrates the continuing importance of the role of culture in preparing, recruiting, and mobilizing for war during periods of war, and peace. It demonstrates that there was more to army advertising than image-makers responding to market demographics in order to fill the army’s ranks, and suggests that although the state is less likely to frame military service as a responsibility or obligation of citizenship, it has framed military service as an obligation to family, friends, comrades, and to previous generations of Americans and soldiers