Real Soldiering

The US Army in the Aftermath of War, 1815–1980

By Brian McAllister Linn, and Reviewed by Charles R Bowey Jr

Article published on: September 1, 2025 in the Fall 2025 edition of Army History

Read Time: < 5 mins

University Press of Kansas, 2023 Pp. xx, 300. $49.95

Since the publication of his first book on the United States Army in the Pacific before World War II, Brian McAllister Linn has established himself as one of the foremost scholars of modern American military history, with a prolific list of publications that remain staples of both professional military education and university reading lists. His 2007 The Echo of Battle: The Army’s Way of War (Harvard University Press), a concise meditation on American debates over the nature of war and national defense, is consulted frequently and remains a favorite of instructors and senior military leaders. Much of Linn’s scholarship focuses on the Army, and Real Soldiering reflects Linn’s continuing fascination with how the Army as an institution reacts to the changing landscape in which it operates.

In this spirit, Real Soldiering focuses not on interwar periods, an intellectual framework that considers peacetime bookended by conflict, but on the so-called “aftermath armies” that followed each of America’s conflicts from the War of 1812 to Vietnam. Linn argues that rather than changing over time, America’s postwar armies have been remarkably similar in their reactions to conflict. In each postwar decade, the Army has spent approximately five years making deliberate reactions to the just-ended conflict, followed by another five years of implementing those changes with an eye toward the future. “Real soldiering,” in Linn’s thinking, happens in these times of peace—when the Army reckons with what it thinks just happened, and what might happen the next time.

Although historians generally prefer to eschew such rigid categorizations of the past, Linn makes a persuasive case for these continuities. What makes Real Soldiering truly effective is the author’s incisive, often contrarian, view of the past, and his grounding of the book’s argument in the lived experience of both officers and enlisted men (and women) through time—the people who had to implement plans and policies. Although the institutional army draws lessons, develops plans, and proceeds with those plans, the “real soldiering” happening in units usually takes place in an environment of scarce resources, national fatigue, and amnesia following conflict, and the demands of balancing a large bureaucracy with the needs of the people who inhabit it. How these postwar professionals sought to carry out the Army’s strategies has frequently led to victory or defeat in the next conflict. Real Soldiering is a crowning achievement for a historian renowned for more than four decades of scholarship. It manages to be at once both immensely authoritative, a demonstration of Linn’s absolute mastery of modern U.S. government records and personal histories, and deeply entertaining, owing to Linn’s acerbic wit and distinctive writing style. Serving soldiers and Army veterans will encounter their own experiences repeatedly in this book, scholars of modern American history will benefit from it, and serving senior leaders should make it mandatory reading. It is recommended most highly.