I envision the class as "U.S. military 101." The vast majority of Tufts students don't know there are five branches, can't describe the difference between officers and enlisted, or cite anything the military does without mentioning Iraq or Afghanistan. With that in mind, I'm thinking the course should include a basic history of our armed forces, an overview of how the American democratic process works in relation to our military, some eye-opening material on the breadth and scope of U.S. operations around the world (maybe some excerpts from "Imperials Grunts," "The Mission," "The Savage Wars of Peace"), and a look at the GWOT and future challenges.

Right now ALLIES is very small, and it's all undergraduates. None of us are veterans, although one of our members is in ROTC. We are building a relationship with the veteran community at the Fletcher School (Tufts' grad school of IR) and adding to our already strong relationship with the service academies. Hopefully that will go some way towards correcting for our personal lack of experience.

Although we will be teaching the class, that is only because we cannot find anyone better qualified. Eventually we hope the course will be adopted by the political science department and taught by a real professor. In no way are we setting ourselves up as experts or authorities; part of the reason we created ALLIES is to educate ourselves as well as our peers. That's certainly the reason why I came here.

Thanks for the replies, BTW. I was definitely thinking of "Imperial Grunts," or perhaps Kaplan's Atlantic Monthly article for a condensed version of the same material.