Collins, a retired Army Colonel and a former Deputy Asst. Secretary of Defense, directed the Center for Complex Operations at the National Defense University, where he has been on the faculty since So far, the West--so to speak--has fallen into every trap: The blogger Pundita has been talking about the early and uncertain science of the effects of the internet on the brain.
What are we training ourselves to become? I am talking here about even public officials tweeting, and so on, and so reinforcing the action-reaction paradigm, being reactionary and ADD, instead of calm and careful. More and more, I am beginning to think that language is a key problem, beyond even jargon or buzzwords:. You do it with unconventional capabilities.
What was needed after December was a greater emphasis on U. The failure to adjust U. More recent books and studies have questioned whether the initial destruction of the Taliban was quite so complete, so the question of jointness versus what type of warfare should dominate is a key question. Counterinsurgency, counter-unconventional warfare, does it matter what you call it?
From an intellectual point of view, not necessarily, as long as you have a correct understanding about motivation and what you are seeing on the ground. The biggest and initial mistake in the Afghan campaign, falling into the "Pashtun" trap and seeing the world through the eyes of the Pakistani security state, even as also empowered groups associated with the old Northern Alliance. Yet, armies need organizing principles to steal a phrase from HIllary Clinton and doctrine is the organizing principle. If you call it A, then B happens, if you call it C, then D happens, and so on.
We fell into a trap early on, I believe, in not understanding how concerns of Pashtun integration and the Taliban would be used by the Pakistani military leadership to create a sense that their narrative and their concerns should be paramount. As I've said many times before, this happened in Kashmir as well where Indian-occupied Kashmir became synonymous with all of Kashmir and the genuine concerns of a localized Muslim population in the Valley became a larger religious rallying cry for various groups, whether Pakistani, Saudi Arabia, Iranian, or various diaspora living in the West.
For all the talk of types of warfare and what is needed, the biggest problem seems to be understanding what is really happening, what kind of conflict we are in. This is made nearly impossible because of the way in which the American system looks at the world, through the needs of its various ideologies and ideologues, as well as those of vested interests. The initial planning period of the Afghan campaign with its creation of an emotional connection--or intensifying, really--between Centcom and Islamabad remains an area ripe for further study.
I find it so strange to continue to focus on the battle of American military ideology versus looking at the world and trying to understand what might be needed. This seems to be a problem for those invested in forever relationships and alliances, a problem exacerbating our policy in Iraq today. The domestic American system is changing, however.
Is the successful and enduring transformation -- more along modern western political, economic and social lines -- of outlying states and their societies. The present "Long War" much as was the case with the previous long war, to wit: To be understood as the conflict between those entities who are -- and those entities who are not and do not desire to be but we feel must be -- organized, organized and ordered more along modern western political, economic and social lines.
Per your suggestion, I listened to their podcast and found little of value. Early on it became clear the "offset strategy" is a PR attempt to rename AirSea Battle to avoid its controversies. Someone else stated jokingly that AirSea Battle was not a strategy to penetrate China but rather a strategy to penetrate Congress. Why is the "offset strategy" any different? Someone openly admitted that the traditional "thirds" allocation of the defense budget is not "strategic allocation.
LTG McMaster was mentioned claiming he sets up a false dichotomy between human and tech centric warfare. To some degree that is true because humans can and do use tech weapons to move, shoot, and communicate during warfare. As mentioned by the forum, the ground domain also has proven itself highly capable of defeating large ground forces using superior tech in both Desert Storm and OIF.
In contrast, many proposed "offset strategy" weapons would require a high degree of autonomy that avoids humans in-the-loop. In a decade of recent wars that proved the need to avoid human casualties, why would any think tank ignore that autonomous targeting could not begin to apply accurate judgment in the near future on whether attacking a mobile missile or package truck surrounded by civilians.
Speculation about where and when the next war will be fought at best involves no more than informed guesses. Conjecture about the unknowable time of an unknowable war is equally problematic. We have a poor record in predicting war, yet our ability to deter large wars has been much better. We cannot know with certainty what deterred wars never fought.
Others point to precision deep attack weapons of the late 70s and 80s, while maneuver arms ask what about close combat?
The Vietnam War: 5 things you might not know
Paying for these systems could require diversion of traditional land component and whole of government resources. Yet China struggles to design and build efficient, reliable jet engines, modern cars, or other products that are not counterfeits or stolen copies. Why claim China now is an innovator able to match the West?
Meanwhile, our abilities to disrupt such technologies across numerous kill chain areas are minimized by think tanks and threat-exaggerators. In addition, missile inertial navigation accuracy decreases with distance. Without satellite navigation updates or with U. Likewise, near peers and even terrorists could potentially disrupt our navigation making proposed U. Survival of both satellites and their surrogates are less than guaranteed. Excessive reliance on conceptual undeveloped autonomous targeting techniques are a nightmare of potential collateral damage and fratricide.
To assume we can build autonomous sensors that see under the ground and through buildings and trees to find tunnels and mobile vehicles from medium altitude through smog and clutter is foolhardy. It is as unlikely as many assumptions about Comanche, Future Combat Systems, and a variety of other failures where realistic near term technology did not match expectations. Yet that is the very thing many think tanks are asking us to accept.
They ask us to trust that research and development can solve the problem rapidly if only we divert funding from proven air, land, and sea systems with a human element. Reductions in Fs to finance "offset strategies" such as a high end UCLASS would be eliminating the bird in hand for highly-speculative and costly "better" autonomous birds in the bush. Rather than losing cost advantages inherent in larger Fs production buys by ourselves and coalition partners, consider creating an optionally-manned version during later block buys.
Add jettisonable conformal auxiliary fuel and we have every manned aircraft advantage and most unmanned capabilities. Proven data links, radars, and infrared sensors would permit manned-unmanned interfaces that keep a man in the loop while looking for and engaging targets. What can be hit can be killed. In contrast, an MQ-X and Naval UCLASS surrounded by nothing but medium altitude air lacks all aspect stealth because it remains visually visible as are satellites helping them navigate and employ weapons.
Greater autonomy would require low-cost GPS-navigation alternatives, foolproof artificial intelligence, stealth, and weapons systems able to survive J, J, and T shoot-downs over China and Russia. Decisions about future strategies require realistic expectations that include the land component and whole of government investments.
Thanks, I hadn't been aware of that resource. I thought I'd scoured the entire Internet for every last scrap on the conflict while writing my dissertation, but a number of sources have come out in the last year or two, and some greative search strings have revealed a number of items that I didn't see while I was writing initially. I spotted your reference to the Dhofar Rebellion as below , hopefully you area ware of the SW Forum thread on the Oman Campaign, in particular the post on a new resource on the OMANI contribution; most accounts I have read concentrate on the British role.
If you're interested in discussing these items more, let me know and I'd be pleased to engage with you offline'. They are doing a great job of teaching strategy at the National War College, I hope. All the best, jjc.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading your analysis of these four works. I have a few observations, many of which I've discussed elsewhere at SWJ, but will now attempt to truncate as a solicited response to your request for feedback on these issues. There are a lot of relevant lessons and observations to be reaped from the last decade and a half, really two or three decades, of the Long War, so these are some of the "wave tops" in which I've taken the most interest. Having read your treatment, I shall update my previous criticism of his book by noting that if the length of his book exceeds four hundred pages, then it's not even useful for leveling a table.
LTG Bolger seems to not even understand the strategic justification behind the invasion of Iraq. However, I'm rather confident that LTG Bolger is not competent to be discussing the issues on which he is trying to opine as a subject matter expert. Some here at SWJ would opine that COIN doctrine has been tested and found wanting; I maintain that it was not tested at all, at least not in Afghanistan and Iraq between and the present day.
As Colonel Outzen rightly asserts, there is no such thing as area expertise without language expertise, and by the end of I hope to submit an article to SWJ outlining a plan to train every recruit in a foreign language. It's a force multiplier, a key to building security relationships in both regular and irregular conflicts, with both allies and host nation personnel, and it would save the DoD billions annually by eliminating the need to lease language proficiency from contractors whose skills do not result in persistent capabilities once their contracts expire.
I would give them a solid B grade in this respect. I am more concerned the U. Army and Marine Corps will abandon the doctrine, training and education wrapped up in preparing for counterinsurgency and stability operations. Much of my research was based upon the instructor-provided topic of one a project on which I collaborated with a former SOF-supporting intelligence officer from another NATO nation. Our topic was something to the effect of "assess the requirements for success in modern counterinsurgency".
In my dissertation, I expanded upon our initial six requirements, and found it useful to divide these requirements into three categories: My goal, probably to begin later this year or this time in , is to use this rubric to expand my dissertation into a comprehensive discussion of the COIN and grand strategic lessons of the Dhofar Rebellion, with comparisons to mistakes and successes in Afghanistan and Iraq. If you're interested in discussing these items more, let me know and I'd be pleased to engage with you offline.
On occasion, you'll hear one officer or another discussing the link between political objectives and the use of force, but most officers seem echo LTG Bolger's flawed vision of "strategy", which is actually campaign planning. This was further demonstrated by the revelation of just how flimsy the requirements for Senator Walsh's "master's degree" in Strategic Studies actually were; while I've used plenty of Army War College and Naval Postgraduate School theses as sources in my own research, the idea that Senator Walsh's plagiarism or the low standard for graduation that allowed him to receive a degree were in anyway unique strikes me as entirely naive.
These problems are compounded by Washington's "strategic planning process", which produces the Quadrennial Defense Review, the National Security Strategy, the National Military Strategy, the National Defense Strategy, and very occasionally a Nuclear Posture Review in the UK, if memory serves, this is accomplished by a single Strategic Defence and Security Review which isn't appreciably better than the American versions. None of these are comprehensible, especially in the context of its peer documents; none of them are particularly strategic; and all of them do a regrettable job of synchronizing means, ways, and ends.
The bottom line, though, is that American strategic success in the long remainder of the twenty-first century will be contingent upon Washington understanding, composing, and implementing actual strategies aimed at actual strategic e. This, in turn, will be contingent upon streamlining the current process into something that actually synchronizes ways, means, and political ends. Absent this, I fear that America will continue to find itself engaged in a series of conflicts potentially even conventional ones in which American troops win battles, only for senior military and civilian leaders to fail to consolidate them in order to accomplish actual strategic goals.
Land swaps could be organized to relocate ethnicities to new territories from refugee camps. Barriers could divide disputed cities ala Berlin for decades. Perhaps it will take years of failed operations against ISIS and Syria to convince Joint leaders that a heavy ground footprint remains essential as part of most Joint efforts. Otherwise we will see repeat performances a few years later. The sole recent examples that brought lasting decades without open conflict were the Cold War in Europe and Korea using heavy coalition forces for deterrence and border separations to let each side choose their own path even if misguided.
Airpower leaders correctly cite a need for multi-mission aircraft to justify other fighters used in CAS. However, they appear to change their tune when applied to bombers. Build 50 full stealth, and 50 multi-mission LRS. That simply requires adaptable bomber pilots just as fighter pilots adapt to a number of different missions.
Army aircraft temporarily would employ these and other ships as lily pads vs. Temporary AFS-MLP employment as en route lily pads would allow larger numbers of Army aircraft to get from point A to B without permanently tying up limited space on these ships or risking cargo planes too close to short-range missile threats. The lines of effort are similar for all three. FID works when existing militaries and quality governments are present. An early surge could transition sooner while simultaneously clearing and holding terrain.
Only 35, ANSF were trained by despite four years of a light coalition footprint in Afghanistan. Should we expect infantrymen to be diplomats?
In addition, the Abbottabad raid and RPA attacks against the Haqqanis likely would have faced failure launched from the distant sea. Deployment frequency clearly indicates which services have too little manpower. Frequency and duration of deployment probably lead to mental health and family problems, as well. A shorter war with an upfront surge can limit repeat deployments, family disruptions, and expedite the transition and exit strategy.
It also would limit PTSD and brain injury exposure. Other services proved able to perform CAS with many types of units and aircraft. Again this depended on Pakistan, Afghan, and Iraqi airspace access and airbases vs. Cruise missiles did not work in nor will they work in the future against enemies that do not readily present themselves as targets. In effect, they created mini-warlords that worked for the government in theory only. Even if cooperative, without funding and supply of such small militias, their viability is limited and competition resulted with local national police and security forces for resources and territorial control.
These may not be locally available or supportable over a wide area with a light footprint. Why do Marines require a man squad? Is that a potential joint active duty billpayer? Could Marine reservists fill in one of the fire teams? Active Marines are being cut far less proportionally than active Soldiers. However, given the success of a single heavy BCT in OIF, do future threats truly dictate a balanced combine arms battalion particularly when adding a third battalion to the armored BCTs? Tanks are fuel intensive and deployment challenges, tear up roads, and require hefty bridges.
Why not one armor company per battalion with 17 tanks and 3-tank platoons. That is still 51 tanks in the future armored BCT vs. That retains the HHC and one tank company to offer armor officer command opportunities equaling the two infantry companies, plus a reconnaissance troop or two in the BCT. Give armor control of unmanned ground and air vehicles controlled by the tank loader.
A proven winner in these wars. The aviation restructuring initiative is sensible given planned reductions in active combat aviation brigades from 13 to In the future, satellite data links will be increasingly vulnerable and MQ-1C offers lower cost non-satellite data link alternatives.
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Israel's military doctrine is formed by its small size and lack of strategic depth. To compensate, it relies on deterrence , including through a presumed nuclear weapons arsenal. It tries to overcome its quantitative disadvantage by staying qualitatively superior. Israel maintains a heightened state of readiness, advanced early warning systems, and a robust military intelligence capability to ensure attackers cannot take advantage of Israel's lack of strategic depth.
Israel's emphasis on operational offense was espoused by its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion , as early as during Israel's war of Independence:. If [the Arabs] attack us as they did this time, we shall transfer the war to the gates of their country. We do not intend to conduct If they attack us again, in the future, we want the war to be waged not in our country, but in the enemy's country, and we want to be not on the defensive but on the attack.
The basic philosophy of Israel was not to initiate war, unless an act of war was carried out against us. We then lived within the lines prior to the Six-Day War, lines that gave no depth to Israel—and therefore, Israel was in a need, whenever there would be a war, to go immediately on the offensive —to carry the war to the enemy's land.
IDF command has been decentralized since the early days of the state, with junior commanders receiving broad authority within the context of mission-type orders. The Soviet meaning of military doctrine was very different from U. Soviet Minister of Defence Marshal Grechko defined it in as "a system of views on the nature of war and methods of waging it, and on the preparation of the country and army for war, officially adopted in a given state and its armed forces. In Soviet times, theorists emphasised both the political and "military-technical" sides of military doctrine, while from the Soviet point of view, Westerners ignored the political side.
However, the political side of Soviet military doctrine, Western commentators Harriet F Scott and William Scott said, "best explained Soviet moves in the international arena". Soviet and contemporary Russian doctrine emphasizes combined-arms warfare as well as operational warfare. It emphasizes the initiation of military hostilities at a time, date, and location of its choosing on terms of its choosing and the extensive preparation of the battlespace for operations. The Soviet response to problems of nuclear strategy began with classified publications. However, by , with the publication in the Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Sokolovsky 's volume, Military Strategy , the Soviets laid out their officially endorsed thoughts on the matter, and their ideas on how to cope with nuclear conflict.
In the s and early s, the Moderate Party —led governments transformed the Swedish Armed Forces from a Cold War posture of defence to one of participation in international operations. The assumption was that Sweden's homeland would face minimal external threats. For some years the British Army achieved considerable success without having any formal 'Military Doctrine', although a huge number of publications dealing with tactics, operations and administration had been produced.
Military doctrine
NATO underpins the defence of the UK and its Allies, while also providing deployable expeditionary capabilities to support and defend UK interests further afield. However, the British Army had formal publications for a long time, and these amounted to its doctrine. They required each arm and service to produce their own specific publications to give effect to FSR. After the Second World War FSR were replaced by various series of manuals, again with specific training pamphlets for each arm and service. These deal with operational and tactical matters.
The current capstone publication for the army is Army Doctrine Publication Operations alongside maritime and air-power equivalents and joint warfare publications all under the umbrella of BDD. The four layers constituting "land doctrine" are summarised as:. BDD is divided into two parts: Defence Context deals with two matters. First, the relationship between Defence policy and military strategy, and—while highlighting the utility of force — emphasizes the importance of addressing security issues through a comprehensive, rather than an exclusively military, approach.
Second it expounds the Nature of and the Principles of War , the three Levels of Warfare Strategic, Operational and Tactical and its evolving character. The part deals with three matters. First it describes the likely employment of the British Armed Forces in pursuit of Defence policy aims and objectives.
Next it explains the three components of fighting power conceptual, physical and moral components and the criticality of the operating context to its effective application. Finally it describes the British approach to the conduct of military operations—"the British way of war". This includes mission command, the manoeuvrist approach and a warfighting ethos that requires accepting risks. The United States Constitution invests Congress with the powers to provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States and to raise and support armies. Title 10 of the United States Code states what Congress expects the Army, in conjunction with the other Services, to accomplish.
Preserve the peace and security and provide for the defense of the United States, its territories and possessions, and any areas it occupies; Support national policies; Implement national objectives; Overcome any nations responsible for aggressive acts that imperil the peace and security of the United States. Most modern US doctrine is based around the concept of full spectrum operations , which combine offensive, defensive, and stability or civil support operations simultaneously as part of an interdependent joint or combined force to seize, retain, and exploit the initiative.
They employ synchronized action—lethal and nonlethal—proportional to the mission and informed by a thorough understanding of all dimensions of the operational environment. Offensive operations defeat and destroy enemy forces, and seize terrain, resources, and population centers. They impose the commander's will on the enemy.
Defensive operations defeat an enemy attack, gain time, economize forces, and develop conditions favorable for offensive or stability operations. Stability operations encompass various military missions, tasks, and activities conducted abroad to maintain or reestablish a safe and secure environment, provide essential governmental services, emergency infrastructure reconstruction, and humanitarian relief. Civil support operations are support tasks and missions to homeland civil authorities for domestic emergencies, and for designated law enforcement and other activities.
This includes operations dealing with the consequences of natural or manmade disasters, accidents, and incidents within the homeland. Under President Lyndon Johnson it was stated that the US armed forces should be able to fight two —at one point, two-and-a-half—wars at the same time. This was defined to mean a war in Europe against the Soviet Union, a war in Asia against China or North Korea, and a "half-war" as well—in other words, a "small" war in the Third World.
When Richard Nixon took office in , he altered the formula to state that the United States should be able to fight one-and-a-half wars simultaneously. This doctrine remained in place until —90, when President George H. Bush ordered the "Base Force" study which forecast a substantial cut in the military budget, an end to the Soviet Union's global threat, and the possible beginning of new regional threats.
In , President Bill Clinton ordered a "Bottom-Up Review," based on which a strategy called "win-hold-win" was declared—enough forces to win one war while holding off the enemy in another conflict, then moving on to win it after the first war is over. The final draft was changed to read that the United States must be able to win two "major regional conflicts" simultaneously. The first 1 refers to defending the US homeland. The 4 refers to deterring hostilities in four key regions of the world. Stars Screen Binge Culture Media.
Tech Innovate Gadget Mission: Chat with us in Facebook Messenger. Find out what's happening in the world as it unfolds. Iconic photos of the Vietnam War. Jeremiah Purdie, center, reaching toward a stricken soldier after a firefight south of the Demilitarized Zone in Vietnam in Commonly known as Reaching Out, Burrows shows us tenderness and terror all in one frame. According to LIFE, the magazine did not publish the picture until five years later to commemorate Burrows, who was killed with AP photographer Henri Huet and three other photographers in Laos.
Associated Press photographer Nick Ut photographed terrified children running from the site of a Vietnam napalm attack in A South Vietnamese plane accidentally dropped napalm on its own troops and civilians. Nine-year-old Kim Phuc, center, ripped off her burning clothes while she ran. The image communicated the horrors of the war and contributed to growing U. After taking the photograph, Ut took the children to a Saigon hospital.
Eddie Adams photographed South Vietnamese police chief Gen. Adams later regretted the impact of the Pulitzer Prize-winning image, apologizing to Gen. Nguyen and his family. A helicopter raises the body of an American paratrooper killed in action in the jungle near the Cambodian border in Henri Huet, a French war photographer covering the war for the Associated Press, captured some of the most influential images of the war.
Huet died along with LIFE photographer Larry Burrows and three other photographers when their helicopter was shot down over Laos in Furthermore, removed from their traditional value system, they could be prepared for imposition of consumerism. This "restructuring" of society suffered a setback when, in , death rained down on the urban enclaves. In Griffiths published "Vietnam Inc. This photo by Horst Faas shows U. Oliver Noonan, a former photographer with the Boston Globe, captured this image of American soldiers listening to a radio broadcast in Vietnam in Noonan took leave from Boston to work in Vietnam for the Associated Press.
The Vietnam War: 5 things you might not know - CNN
He died when his helicopter was shot down near Da Nang in August In June , photographer Malcolm Browne showed the world a shocking display of protest. A Buddhist monk named Thich Quang Duc burned himself to death on a street in Saigon to protest alleged persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government.
Tim Page photographed a U. Wounded soldiers crouch in the dust of the departing helicopter. The military convoy was on its way to relieve the camp when it was ambushed. Frenchman Marc Riboud captured one of the most well-known anti-war images in The photo helped turn public opinion against the war.
Chapelle was covering a U. Marine unit near Chu Lai for the National Observer when a mine seriously wounded her and four Marines. Chappelle died en route to a hospital, the first American woman correspondent ever killed in action. Mary Ann Vecchio screams as she kneels over Jeffrey Miller's body during the deadly anti-war demonstration at Kent State University in Student photographer John Filo captured the Pulitzer Prize-winning image after Ohio National Guardsmen fired into a crowd of protesters, killing four students and wounding nine others.
An editor manipulated a version of the image to remove the fence post above Vecchio's head, sparking controversy. This photo from Kennerly's award-winning portfolio shows an American GI, his weapon drawn, cautiously moving over a devastated hill near Firebase Gladiator. It became one of the best known images of the U. Van Es never received royalties for the UPI-owned photo.
The rights are owned by Bill Gates through his company, Corbis. Associated Press photographer Art Greenspon captured this photo of soldiers aiding wounded comrades. The first sergeant of A Company, st Airborne Division, guided a medevac helicopter through the jungle to retrieve casualties near Hue in April The Vietnam War began in the decade before, but the conflict, and especially U.
For the first time, Americans witnessed the horrors of war, played out on television screens in their living rooms. This week's episode of "The Sixties" explores the war and its impact on American culture, then and now. Here are five facts from the episode that may surprise those too young to remember the Vietnam War:. In the late s, during the Eisenhower administration, Vietnam had split into North Vietnam, which was communist, and South Vietnam. Cold War anxieties dictated that if the North Vietnamese communists prevailed, the rest of Southeast Asia would fall like dominoes.
When he took office in , President John F. Kennedy vowed not to allow South Vietnam fall to communism. How music shaped a decade. How music shaped a decade The War in Vietnam trailer. The War in Vietnam trailer Is Iraq War today's Vietnam? Chuck Hagel reflects on Vietnam service By the early s, South Vietnam's conventionally trained army was no match for the Vietcong's guerrilla-style tactics.
They saw the Catholic ruler as a tyrant. The Western-educated Diem, however, wielded absolute power and rose to dictator level by the summer of The CIA discussed toppling the regime. Kennedy immediately regretted Diem's death and U. Less than three weeks later, on November 22, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson took the oath of office aboard Air Force One later that day. Soon after, Johnson told a grieving nation, "John Kennedy's death commands what his life conveyed, that America must move forward.
As casualties rose, the country increasingly turned against the war. The official line was that Americans were winning in Vietnam, but the evening news told a different story. Reporter Morley Safer recalled the shock of witnessing Marines burn down houses on the outskirts of the village of Cam Ne. An officer told the newsman that he had been ordered to level the area.
Three women were wounded in the attack, one baby was killed, and four people were taken prisoner. Safer asked a soldier if he had regrets about leaving people homeless, and the soldier replied, "You can't expect to do your job and feel pity for these people. Another soldier told Safer, "I think it's sad in a way, but I don't think there's any other way you can get around it in this kind of a war. Some Americans resorted to self-mutilation to avoid the draft.
But the decade was also a time of pivotal change — politically, socially and technologically. Check out 60 of the most iconic moments of the decade. The 'Greensboro Four' — On February 1, , four African-American college students made history just by sitting down at a whites-only lunch counter at a Woolworth's in Greensboro, North Carolina. Service never came for the "Greensboro Four," as they came to be known, and their peaceful demonstration drew national attention and sparked more "sit-ins" in Southern cities.
Elvis discharged from the military — Elvis Presley's musical heyday was in the s, but he remained a major star in the s. Here, Presley, 25, is pictured with his future wife, Priscilla, shortly before his discharge from the U. Presley served two years in the Army.
Sharpeville massacre in South Africa — Wounded people in South Africa's Sharpeville township lie in the street on March 21, , after police opened fire on black demonstrators marching against the country's segregation system known as apartheid. At least black Africans, most of them women and children, were injured and 69 were killed in the Sharpeville massacre that signaled the start of armed resistance against apartheid.
The laser is born — Theodore Maiman pours liquid nitrogen into a cooling unit around one of the first experimental lasers in his laboratory in Santa Monica, California. Maiman's ruby laser, created on May 16, , is considered to be one of the top technological achievements of the 20th century. Food and Drug Administration approved Enovid, the first birth-control pill for women. Nixon-Kennedy debate — The first televised presidential debate was on September 26, , and it involved U.
Vice President Richard Nixon, left, and Sen. The debate is largely credited with helping to make a star out of Kennedy, who won the election later that year. It was a complete disaster for President John F. The book helped spark the sexual revolution and popularize the notion that the modern woman could "have it all," including a successful career and a fulfilling sex life.
Dueling players fired at each other's spaceships using early versions of joysticks. This photo shows the three "Spacewar! Food and Drug Administration to designate it an experimental drug in Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary, pictured here, became an advocate for the drug, coining the phrase, "Turn on, tune in, drop out.
With the most recent Bond film released in "Skyfall" , the James Bond series is the longest running film series of all time. Marilyn Monroe dies — Actress Marilyn Monroe was found dead in her apartment on August 5, , at the age of Officials ruled her death as probable suicide from sleeping pill overdose, but to this day there remain many conspiracy theories.
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Spider-Man arrives — The No. The issue is one of the most valuable comics of all time. They retired from the late-night talk show 30 years later. Cuban missile crisis — U. Kennedy delivers a nationally televised address about the Cuban missile crisis on October 22, After learning that the Soviet Union had begun shipping missiles to Cuba, Kennedy announced a strategic blockade of Cuba and warned the Soviet Union that the U.
Boeing debuts — Crowds in Seattle gather for the first viewing of the Boeing jet in December The aircraft's first flight would take place on February 9, The is credited with opening the door to domestic travel for millions of everyday Americans. Polaroid adds color — Inventor Edwin Land, president and co-founder of the Polaroid Corporation, demonstrates his company's new instant-color film in The country music star and three others were killed in a plane crash March 5, , near Camden, Tennessee. Here, the band is honored on November 18, , for the massive sales of albums "Please Please Me" and "With the Beatles.
Wallace is standing in the doorway to prevent two African-American students from entering despite a presidential order. Wallace, who was pro-segregation, later stood aside. Medgar Evers assassinated — Myrlie Evers, widow of civil rights activist Medgar Evers, comforts their son Darrell while their daughter, Reena, wipes her tears during Evers' funeral on June 18, Evers was assassinated days earlier at his home in Jackson, Mississippi. JFK's Berlin speech — U.