Research Guides: Military, naval, aerospace, and veterans studies: Essentials -- start here

Overviews of military, naval, and aerospace studies

Encyclopedia of Military Science by Kurt G. Piehler
ISBN: 9781412969338

Publication Date: 2013

Comprehensive, ready-reference on the organization, traditions, training, purpose, and functions of today's military. Entries include coverage of the duties, responsibilities, and authority of military personnel and an understanding of strategies and tactics of the modern military and how they interface with political, social, legal, economic, and technological factors. A large component is devoted to issues of leadership, group dynamics, motivation, problem-solving, and decision making in the military context. Finally, this work also covers recent American military history since the end of the Cold War with a special emphasis on peacekeeping and peacemaking operations, the First Persian Gulf War, the events surrounding 9/11, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and how the military has been changing in relation to these events.
Ashgate Research Companion to Military Ethics by James Turner Johnson and Eric D. Patterson, eds.
ISBN: 9781317042617

Publication Date: 2015

Military Professional Reading Lists
Directory of reading lists selected for the personal professional development of uniformed (and sometimes civilian) members of the US armed services. These lists typically include histories and roles of the respective services; biographies; strategy global politics, and security studies, and works of leadership and management. Some of these lists include non-book media.

more... less...
From the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies. Links to
- US Air Force Chief of Staff’s Professional Reading List
- US Army Chief of Staff Professional Reading List
- US Marine Corps Commandant’s Professional Reading List
- US Chief of Naval Operations Professional Reading Program
- US Coast Guard Commandant’s Reading List,
among other lists.

Find relevant articles, papers, etc

Military and Intelligence Database from Gale
Military and Intelligence Database indexes citations and full text from scholarly journals, magazines, and reports covering all aspects of the past and current state of military affairs. The database offers content in key subject areas including governmental policies, the socioeconomic effects of war, and the structure of the armed forces. 1980-present.
Military & Government Collection from EBSCOhost
The Military & Government Collection database indexes citations, abstracts, and full text from journals, news sources, primary source documents, legislative acts and proclamations, and other publications covering all aspects of the military. Full text presented in HTML and PDF. You can limit to peer-reviewed sources. 1975-present.
Air University Library's Index to Military Periodicals (AULIMP)
Alternate URL: https://fairchild-mil.libguides.com/AULIMP.
The USAF Air University Library Index to Military Periodicals provides citations to significant articles, news items, and editorials from English-language military and aeronautical periodicals, 1988-present. (Scans of early print version are available from Hathi Trust and Internet Archive.) To access articles themselves you may need to paste AULIMP citation information into VT's journal-title finder or Discovery Search.

NATO Research Guides
more... less...

When access is restricted to books and articles cited in NATO research guides, use the Article Linker function in Tech Libraries' Discovery Search (aka Primo) to find if they are available at VT.
Homeland Security Digital Library
more... less...

Make be offline in whole or part during Trump Administration content review of the CHDS.us website. Try Internet Archive's Wayback Machine (see, eg, its Jan 2, 2025 scrape).

Institute for National Strategic Studies
CSI Publications (Central Intelligence Agency)
Joint Electronic Library (US Joint Chiefs of Staff)
Combined Arms Research Library (CARL) Digital Library
Modern War Institute at West Point
more... less...

Some MWI content is indexed and discoverable in the Policy Commons database, for which access is VT-only.
Military Resources (compiled by US National Archives)
Military Legal Resources

Military Times newspapers

The library's Access World News database provides -- and archives -- many news sources, including these service-oriented papers from Military Times. Coverage is selective and in plain text: Content in the traditional print newspapers is published monthly: web edition articles are released daily .

Air Force Times: Print edition | Web edition articles
Army Times: Print edition | Web edition articles
Marine Corps Times: Print edition | Web edition articles
Navy Times: Print edition | Web edition articles

Access World News also provides a handful of newspapers published on US military bases.

For background information on international affairs

EIU Viewpoint
A key resource for area studies, political economy, and open-source intelligence, EIU Viewpoint integrates Economist Intelligence Unit Country Reports and other forecasts, analyses, news, and data at the global, regional, and country level for almost 200 countries. Some content updated daily. "Two-Year Forecasts" continue approach and format of the former Country Reports; "One-Click Reports" resemble the forecasts but conspicuously do not provide tabular data. Data tables can be exported to Excel.
- For country analyses covering 1952-1995, see Economist Intelligence Unit Country Reports Archive, from ProQuest.
Oxford Research Encyclopedias : International Studies

SAGE Knowledge: Politics & International Relations

Archives and primary sources

US Service Historical Programs
Facilities vary in their missions but typically make available official service historical studies, orders and regulations, field and technical manuals, and archival materials in several media. They often are located near affiliated museums and public programs.
- Air Force Historical Research Agency (including AirForceHistoryIndex.org; an archival finding aid that describes many documents held by AFHRA and describes how to order copies. Documents are not themselves online.)
- Army Heritage and Education Center and Army Center of Military History (What's the difference between USAHEC and CMH?)
- Coast Guard History Program
- Naval History & Heritage Command
- Marine Corps History Division

For further documents bearing on military history in broader contexts, see the Historical primary sources online topic guide, especially the cross-search tools in the first box.

Find out about federal government diplomatic & military information sources

Digital National Security Archive from ProQuest
The Digital National Security Archive provides primary documents on U.S. foreign and military policy since 1945. Subsets include the CIA Family Jewels Indexed information which reveals the CIA's most closely held secrets about their domestic intelligence activities they considered outside its charter, conducted at the height of the Cold War through 1973, and the Cuban Missile Crisis: 50th Anniversary Update which includes unpublished records from U.S. and Soviet archives.

Foreign Relations of the United States, 1861-
more... less...

The organization of FRUS is generally chronological, but the dates of the volumes do not necessarily reflect the dates of documentary history. For example, the volumes for 1900-1918 do not include the records dealing with World War I or the Russian Revolution. Each volume has a subject and author index.

Besides providing the text of important foreign policy documents, FRUS also includes source citations (printed either with the document or as footnotes) that indicate the location of the original documents. In this way, FRUS serves as a guide to the location of additional documents on the same and related subjects.