Historical perspectives on developing and maintaining homefront morale for the War on Terrorism

• Main Author: Snavely, Christopher B.
• Other Authors: Iatrou, Steven
• Published: Monterey, Calif. Naval Postgraduate School 2012
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10945/5840

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited === The War on Terrorism will be vastly different than any previous U.S. military campaign. The war will span a wide range of geographic, economic and political boundaries. Terrorist organizations will rely on stealth and dispersion to evade the American military and international law enforcement agencies. The United States will therefore be required to engage the enemy in a wide variety of arenas and with a wide variety of tools. Thus, the War on Terrorism will require the skillful blending of many American and international capabilities in order to meet the challenge. One such challenge is to cultivate and sustain homefront morale for the War on Terrorism. This paper will offer recommendations on how the United States should address their current homefront morale challenge through the analysis of two case studies. The first case study will examine how Great Britain was able to develop and sustain homefront morale during World War II. The second case study will examine the homefront morale issues concerning the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War, specifically on their loss of public support for the war. Both case studies will address the applicability of the respective information campaign to the War on Terrorism, and will focus on generating a set of lessons learned that can be directly applied to today's home front morale challenge. Once completed, the analysis of the two case studies will offer a solid historical basis to develop recommendations for building home front support for the War on Terrorism. These recommendations will be presented as answers to a set of questions, fundamental to the homefront morale problem. The answers to these questions, along with their rationale, will provide the backbone of the paper's recommendations for building and sustaining homefront morale for the War on Terrorism.