Joshua E. Kastenberg. To Raise and Discipline an Army

In recent years, scholars of U.S. and legal history have increasingly turned to the study of military justice and made it central to the analysis of the military and its relation to civilian society, culture, and politics. In the fine monograph To Raise and Discipline an Army, Joshua E. Kastenberg participates in this scholarly endeavor by offering a panoramic study of the activities of Major General Enoch Crowder and the officers of the Judge Advocate General’s Office in the era of World War I. Crowder and his fellow judge advocates made, Kastenberg claims, an important contribution to the victorious U.S. pursuit of war and military force as they helped to create and maintain a disciplined, conscription-based mass army as an effective “instrument of war” (vii). In so doing, they also oversaw a profound alteration in what Kastenberg refers to as “the nation’s civil-military construct” (9), drastically extending the reach of the military into civilian society and its ability to police the nation’s population.

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