This article examines the relationship between scandal and democracy through the case of sexual assault within the US military. Scandal is routinely seen as hostile to democracy. It signals either the corruption of prominent institutions or the decline of ethical journalism. But scandal may have a positive dimension in forcing tainted institutions to correct their course. To explore this thesis, we examine how the US military responded to news reports of sexual assault over a period of nearly four decades. During the first three decades of this period, news reports of sexual assault were widespread but largely ignored by military leaders. During the last decade, however, the fact that sexual assault was endemic but largely ignored by the armed forces triggered a scandal, one senior military figures were forced to address. In light of this case, the article concludes that scandal can function as a mechanism of democratic governance, where it compels social and ethical norms to be properly enforced.

Mediated responses to reports of abuse during the Global War on Terror are puzzling. Few of the many revelations of abuse prompted concerted reactions (e.g. scandals), and those that did were often very similar to reports that were ignored. This article draws from empirical research into responses to prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib to develop new concepts that help untangle the mediatization of American wars. Feedback helps to model the variety of polemical interventions that are adopted in public discussions as a result of a scandal. The concept of feedforward, introduced here, enables us to model polemical interventions that develop within an organization in response to such feedback. Together, these concepts encourage greater sensitivity to the cultural horizon of mediated events. Further, they point to a new theoretical focus for mediatization research, namely the cycles of feedback and feedforward that help shape new forms of understanding and behaving within organizations.

Over the past decade, the American armed services have witnessed a near-constant stream of so-called ethical lapses. Spanning rank, specialty, and service, these “lapses” have given rise to a flood of criticism by journalists and piercing calls for reform from politicians. In response, American military leaders have pointed to the paired concepts of profession and professionalism as the solution. In this article, we use classical conceptualizations of the military profession to resituate the problem of ethical lapses as instead one of the three fault lines of the contemporary American military profession, unfolding alongside crises in military expertise and identity. The three fault lines reveal at once the large scale of the challenges facing the American armed services and our very limited social scientific understanding of those problems. We end by emphasizing the need for future research to establish an updated empirical baseline for theories of the military profession in America.

Suzanne Nielsen and Hugh Liebert recently published “The Continuing Relevance of Morris Janowitz’s The Professional Soldier for the Education of Officers” in which they argued that officer education is too enamored with Samuel Huntington’s aging theory of civil–military relations from Soldier and the State. Huntington’s ideal of objective control grants senior military advisors autonomy within their professional sphere, and it best ensures that unvarnished military expertise survives politically charged national security decision making processes intact, regardless of which party controls the White House. While these features explain Huntington’s traditional popularity with the military, Nielsen and Liebert warn that Huntington’s separation between military and civilian matters in theory engenders wishful thinking in practice, so much so that officers neglect, to the detriment of national policy, Morris Janowitz, Huntington’s cofounder of the modern study of civil–military relations. However, the civil–military community should reconsider banishing Huntington in order to appreciate Janowitz.

From an obscure sector synonymous with mercenaryism, the private military and security industry has grown to become a significant complementing instrument in military operations. This rise has brought with it a considerable attention. Researchers have examined the role of private military and security companies in international relations as well as the history of these companies, and, above all, the legal implications of their use in the place of military organizations. As research progresses, a significant gap has become clear. Only a handful of studies have addressed the complex of issues associated with contractors’ demographics and lived experience. This article sheds some light over this lacuna, examining contractors’ demographics using descriptive statistics from an original data set of American and British contractors who died in Iraq between the years 2003 and 2016. The article augments our understanding of an important population of post-Fordist-contracted workforce, those peripheral workers supplementing military activity in high-risk occupations with uncertain long-term outcomes.