Women are eligible to serve in virtually all roles in the Australian Defence Force and the Canadian Armed Forces. The contributions of women at home and abroad reach back to the establishment of women’s services during the Second World War, and to nursing services during the First World War and other conflicts such as the Korean and Vietnam wars. More recently women have served in numerous conflict zones, including on the battlefields of Afghanistan. While there are notable differences in the historical journey, there are also important similarities that have shaped the experiences of women in the militaries of Australia and Canada.

After the Second World War, ambitions to develop a collective security arrangement among Western allies for the defence of the South-East Asia region started to emerge from many quarters. Australia and New Zealand began planning for a security alliance that would include regional nations as well as foreign powers, and Britain’s attention returned to supporting the defence of its colonial possessions. Australia and New Zealand did not achieve a security alliance initially, and defence planning in the immediate postwar years rested on a negotiated agreement focused on the British Commonwealth.

We are currently in the era of great power competition, and many states are grappling with how the future may unfold. Coalition warfare will be a key consideration in any flare-up. This chapter analyses the complexity of coalition warfare in the twenty-first century through the prism of the British Army’s experiences in the United Kingdom–led Multi-National Division (South East) and in Basra in the Iraq War. Any future wars in which Australia participates will most likely be as part of a coalition effort. Australia is unlikely to be the leading partner and will need to assess how best it will serve as a supporting participant in future coalitions.

In the intervening 54 years between the end of the Second World War and the Australian-led international intervention in East Timor, much about the way soldiering was conducted in Australia had changed. National service had ebbed and flowed in various guises and an Australian Regular Army had emerged as the lead force, a ready deployment force. But it was nothing like the large land force that could be mustered at its peak in early 1943. At the end of the first post-Cold War decadethe Australian Army was at best what could be described as a boutique force with limited experience on peacekeeping operations, limited deployable strength and a larger but considerably hollowed out Reserve. This chapter examines a part of the journey there.

What can be said about the operational performance of the Australian Defence Force when federal governments ordered selective mobilisations and projections of land force contingents overseas? This chapter examines force projection functions for six selected overseas ADF operations during the period 1987–2003. It applies a grading matrix to each function to produce an audit report. It then compares the reports to derive observations relating to evident systemic problems with operational performance and mitigation of risk.

This chapter considers the concurrency pressures faced by the Australian Army, particularly in the middle years of this century’s first decade. As the 2020s portend not just localised regional crises or disasters but also a greater range of environmental challenges coupled with a surge in governance challenges and great power contestation, the Army needs to reflect on concurrency pressures of the recent past to prepare for what the future holds. In contemplating contingencies the Army can expect to face in coming years in Australia’s region, reflecting on the experience from 2003 to 2010 is a good place to start.

The First World War was the first large-scale industrial war which saw its belligerents grapple with modernity. By the beginning of 1918 the British were faced with a particularly challenging strategic picture. Their Russian partners had withdrawn from the war and were negotiating a settlement with the Central Powers. The French were recovering from a series of strikes which fuelled British concern over how worn out the French Army might be. The Italians were regrouping after a devastating attack by the Central Powers at Caporetto. While the United States had entered the war on the side of the Entente, they were arriving too slowly to reassure their partners that they could tip the balance of the war in the Entente’s favour in the near term.

This chapter examines the redefinition of “youth” that occurred during World War II as a result of young men’s conscription and the rise of the United States as the global superpower, as well as its consequences for young Americans. It specifically looks at the creation and implementation of federal educational programs for soldiers, such as the Army Specialized Training Program and the educational provisions of the 1944 G. I. Bill of Rights. The chapter also demonstrates how these programs built upon the framework that had been developed in earlier decades, which categorized youth according to their value for national security and established military service as a “democratic” educational opportunity.

This final chapter summarizes the key points discussed in the previous chapters. It illuminates how diverse adults in the United States helped to build the link between youth, education, and national security from World War I to World War II. The chapter also discusses how this connection both changed and influenced developments in the second half of the twentieth century, when the Cold War changed American ideas about who should serve militarily. Nonetheless, the relationship between youth, education, and national security has remained powerful and continues to influence young Americans today.

This chapter provides readers with an overview of the book, as well as its major argument. It argues that, while historians have traditionally treated war and military issues as temporary issues that affected American society only during wartime and had little impact on society during peacetime, the issues were, in fact, fundamental to political and cultural changes in American society during the first half of the twentieth century. The chapter also outlines how the remainder of the book will support this argument by focusing on how the relationship formed during this time between national security, education, and the cultural conception of “youth” strongly influenced young people’s educational experiences and had significant social consequences that still exist today.

Although military issues are not often included in accounts of American society in the 1920s and 1930s, this chapter shows how they influenced young Americans’ access to education by examining debates surrounding mandatory military training that male students in certain secondary schools and colleges that were part of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program had to undergo. These debates illuminate the tensions that existed and grew between access to education and national security throughout these years, as well as the strengthening of the relationship between educational institutions and the military. The ultimate defeat of ROTC’s opponents by the end of the 1930s demonstrates that American society had come to accept the teaching of military subjects in civilian educational institutions.