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U.S. military and defense studies: Online Resources

C&RL News, December 2004
Vol. 65, No. 11

by Edward Metz

Search the Web for any sites related to a military topic and you are likely to find a formidable array of choices stretching out before you. It’s not always easy to immediately separate the truly authoritative content from that offered up by enthusiasts of one kind or another. To cope with the astounding proliferation of such Web sites, librarians at various military institutions and elsewhere have been working to promote gateways to quality links and to improve access to primary and secondary source material beyond the walls of their respective institutions.

In addition to featuring a handful of military gateway pages, this column highlights online sources and public databases providing full-text access to theses, monographs, articles, and research studies on military history or defense-related topics. Students and researchers will also be interested in exploring the ever-growing military digital library collections that, in addition to affording access to primary source documents, offer views of rare or important photographs and artifacts from our nation’s military past.

For the sake of brevity, this column has remained centered on .mil or .gov domain resources, though other libraries and institutions offer remarkable online resources, as well.

Gateway pages
• Air War College. Air War College maintains several subject directories to military information on its Gateway to Internet Resources. Included here in the category of Military History are links to such areas as Military Casualties, Military Operations from the Civil War to the War on Terrorism, links to various veteran Oral History projects, and history resources broken down by branch of service: Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. Access: http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/awc-hist.htm.

• Combined Arms Research Library. This library maintains more than 1,500 links to authoritative Web sites on a wide variety of military and defense-related topics, including its U.S. Military History Gateway page organized by period. Access: http://cgsc.leavenworth.army.mil/carl/gateway.

• Dudley Knox Library of the Naval Post-Graduate School. This library maintains, among many other useful directories, a “Where to Find Military Information” resources page organized by subject. The topical category of history includes links to Conflicts and Casualties, Lineages and Honors, Past Operations, and Exercises. Access: http://library.nps.navy.mil/home/militaryinfo.htm.

• The U.S. Army Medical Department Center and School. This metasite on the topic of military medical history features full-text books, articles, documents, and images as well as other related links on this highly diverse and rich topic. Access: http://www.cs.amedd.army.mil/history/.

Secondary source materials at military history institutes and think tanks
• Air Force Historical Research Agency. This agency maintains an online collection of historical reports, documents, and photos arranged by period and topic. The site offers links to other helpful Air Force-related sites. Access: http://www.au.af.mil/au/afhra.

• Center for Contemporary Conflict (CCC). CCC is a research institute at the Naval Post-graduate School (NPS) and is charged with providing analysis on emerging threats to U.S. national security. Access is available to the CCC’s monthly electronic journal “Strategic Insights” as well as to selected NPS student research papers and theses. Access: http://www.ccc.nps.navy.mil/publications/.

• Center of Military History (CMH). The U.S. Army’s Center of Military History is one of the largest publishers of military history in the world. CMH serves as the Army’s principal instrument for recording the official histories of U.S. Army operations. Their publications range from the Official Record of the Civil War to the benchmark “Green Series” of World War II, from Korea and Vietnam Army histories to Operation Desert Storm. CMH’s Online Bookshelves contains an extraordinary array of research and archival materials from the Colonial Era to the present as well as full-text access to CMH Studies, Official Histories, and a rich variety of other resources, such as selections from its Oral History collections and World War II Commemorative Brochures. Access: http://www.army.mil/cmh/.

• Combat Studies Institute (CSI). CSI is one of the academic departments of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College and is responsible for studying, instructing, and publishing on the development of the theory of war and nature of battle. CSI’s monograph-length Leavenworth Papers offers detailed original research and analysis on a variety of topics from World War II and the Cold War to the present. CSI Research Surveys, Bibliographies, and Special Studies provide valuable factual narrative and overviews on campaigns from all eras, the evolution of military thinking and doctrine, and developments in various arms and branches of service. Nearly all of the CSI publications since 1979 are available in HTML or PDF from its publications Web page. Access: http://cgsc.leavenworth.army.mil/carl/resources/csi/csi.asp.

• The Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) at Ft. Leavenworth. Originally established as the Soviet Army Studies Office in 1986, today FMSO examines the doctrine, strategy, and tactics of selected armed forces from around the world. Its publications are designed to advise Army leadership on regional security matters and to keep abreast of lessons to be learned from military developments abroad. FMSO publications are organized by regional or topical categories, such as International Peacekeeping, Special Warfare, or Conflict in Chechnya. Access: http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/fmsopubs/fmsopubs.htm.

• Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS). INSS does defense policy research for the Department of Defense and other U.S. government agencies. It also supports the National Defense University (NDU) in its role of educating military and government leaders on matters pertaining to defense and national security. INSS has an extensive publishing program in the areas of military history, national security studies, and regional studies among a host of others. Books, articles, essays, and papers published through INSS/NDU can be viewed in full text in HTML or PDF. Access: http://www.ndu.edu/inss/press/nduphp.html.

• Naval Historical Center (NHC). NHC maintains essentially a gateway page to U.S. Naval History on the Web.  The NHC site itself features several overviews of Naval History, as well some primary source documents and images from various periods in U.S. Naval History. It also provides external links to a wide variety of interesting Naval History resources. Access: http://www.history.navy.mil/.

• The Strategic Studies Institute (SSI). SSI, the Army’s think tank for the analysis of national security policy and military strategy, produces research studies that can be browsed either chronologically or by topic. SSI Studies are available in full text in PDF. Topic categories include Regional Studies, Terrorism, National Security and Military Strategy, Defense Transformation, and Strategic Futures and Emerging Concepts. Access: http://www.carlisle.army.mil/ssi/pubs/.

Specialized military public access databases
Search these sites for theses, monographs, research papers, and articles.

• Air University Library’s Index to Military Periodicals (AULIMP). AULIMP is the Defence Technical Information Center’s version of Air University Library’s citation index, which allows you to search and browse the citations of articles published in more than 80 military and aeronautical journals indexed by AUL. This is a continuation of the print index prepared by AUL since 1949. The online version has coverage of these principal military magazines going back to about 1988. Articles published in Military Review, Naval War College Review, Parameters, Marine Corps Gazette and the Journal of Air and Space Power, among others, can be viewed in full text by following the link to the publication’s Web site. Searching in AULIMP is limited to title, author, periodical, date, journal, and subject indexes. Access: http://www.dtic.mil/search97doc/aulimp/main.htm.

• Air University’s Research Web. This site affords access to more than 2,500 Research Studies prepared by students and scholars attending the Air Force’s graduate schools. Enter keywords/phrases in the simple search field. Additionally the Air University Library hosts a superb collection of nearly 300 bibliographies on military and defense topics organized alphabetically, including one on military history. Each bibliography, at http://www.au.af.mil/au/aul/bibs/bib97.htm contains sections on books, government documents, articles, and Internet resources. Military campaigns, battles, leaders, and theory comprise a large portion of the current and archival bibliographies. Bibliographies on hot current topics include Afghanistan and Peacekeeping. Be sure to check out a very useful bibliography featuring military history resources at http://www.maxwell.af.mil/au/aul/wsites/milhistory.htm. Access: https://research.au.af.mil/.

• Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL). CALL has the mission of capturing and recording Army lessons learned from past exercises, deployments, and combat operations and disseminating these to military commanders, their staffs, and soldiers. As part of the Web site, CALL maintains a public access database, which provides the full text to archived issues of Military Review magazine going back to 1920, to digitized materials from the Military History Institute, and to student papers and monographs from the Command and General Staff College as far back as 1964. Of special interest on the CALL Web site is the newly published history of the United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom entitled “On Point.” It can be read in its entirety online at onpoint.leavenworth.army.mil. Access: http://call.army.mil/.

• DTIC Fulltext Online Collection.  The Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) collects and disseminates scientific and technical information produced by all agencies within the Department of Defense. Its Fulltext Collection database, just one of its 15 hosted online databases, is especially significant for students of military history and national security. It provides full-text access to monographs and papers written by senior military officers at the Army War College, Army Command and General Staff College, Naval War College, Air War College, Marine Corps University, Naval Post-Graduate School, and Joint Forces Staff College. These papers cover contemporary thinking on joint and combined operations, peacekeeping, homeland security, military transformation, and asymmetric warfare, while many more examine battles and campaigns from the past. Full-text coverage (PDF) for most papers extends back to 1993, and advanced search and sorting options are available. Access: http://stinet.dtic.mil/str/index.html.

Primary source material/digital collections
• Combined Arms Research Library. In the interest of preserving rare documents and materials for future generations and for assuring a wider dissemination of Army knowledge beyond the walls of the library, the Combined Arms Research Library has established six digital collections. Recent monographs and theses produced by the graduates of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College  (CGSC) are available here, and extensive retrospective digitization of past CGSC publications is ongoing. Its collection of World War II operational documents, featuring original operational plans and orders from the Pacific and European theaters, will continue to grow. Another collection is entitled “Stability Operations and Support Operations,” which focuses on today’s contemporary operating environment and the diverse nature of the missions the armed forces are called upon to participate in around the world. Simple and advanced search options as well as browsing are available. Access: http://cgsc.leavenworth.army.mil/carl/contentdm/home.htm.

• Donovan Research Library’s Digitized Monograph Collection. This collection (located in Ft. Benning, Georgia) contains after-action reports, command diaries, and battle accounts from both World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Desert Storm, and Somalia. Their online collection is currently modest but will continue to grow and may one day encompass more than 10,000 monographs. Access: http://www.infantry.army.mil/donovan/content/monograph.htm.

• U.S. Army Military History Institute (MHI). MHI has the mission of preserving primary source materials documenting the Army’s past and ensuring their accessibility to future generations of students and scholars. You can browse MHI’s chronological list of historical periods to find your area of interest. You’ll find there a veritable treasure trove of personal accounts, after-action reports, interviews, official bulletins, and rare publications from nearly every era of U.S. military history. MHI’s parent organization, the Army Heritage and Education Center, has recently launched its online Army Heritage Collection, featuring some of its many digitized images of historical artifacts, photographs, and documents that tell the story of the Army’s past. Just select the Research Catalogs tab from the main page. Access: http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usamhi/.

• U.S. Military Academy. The academy has begun an ambitious project of digitizing its rich resources, which cover the history of the academy and of its many illustrious alumni. Included are multimedia recordings about Douglas MacArthur and the West Point  Honor Code, maps from the Revolutionary era, as well as books, photos, and manuscripts documenting and preserving the history of West Point. Access: http://digital-library.usma.edu/collections/. 

About the Author
Edward Metz is acquisitions librarian at the Combined Arms Research Library in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, e-mail: edward.metz@us.army.mil

© 2004 Edward Metz