Interesting.
I wonder if anyone has ever a done a study of wars and resultant impact on public morality?
If families are disrupted, and men are thrown together away from their homes and relatives, does that create some kind of negative social impact later?
I think of WW2 and what happened with the Baby boomers, the kind of society which developed in the west after the Civil War, etc.
I cannot recall where I read it, but I have read that there were widespread concerns in society about fathers being forced to serve in the military and being away from their children, up to and including WWII. It was felt very strongly that families needed fathers/husbands present, not just as breadwinners (a military paycheck covers that) but as active leaders and a source of authority within the family.
As a result fathers tended to be exempted or ruled out from service through formal or informal measures. Hopefully others here can comment more knowledgeably on that, if you are interested. I also recall that there were proposals to rush back fathers ahead of non-fathers from serving overseas at the end of WWII.
If families are disrupted, and men are thrown together away from their homes and relatives, does that create some kind of negative social impact later?
I'm not sure if it has been studied in any "official" manner, but the presumption has long been that lengthy military deployments are morally challenging.
To use an example from the era of the Napoleonic Wars, I believe it was Admiral Lord Nelson who once remarked that "every sailor is a bachelor when beyond Gibraltar."
Excerpt of a short review from Publishers Weekly:
After two cataclysmic wars, argues Stanford historian Sheehan, Europe has been transformed from a place where the state was defined by its capacity to make war into a group of civilian states that have lost all interest in making war. Rather, they are marked by a focus on economic growth, prosperity and personal security. To explore this transformation, Sheehan examines the changes in modern warfare and in its infrastructure and the mobilization of national economies for war. Sheehan looks at the impact in the early 20th century of universal conscription, including its social consequences (such as bringing together different social classes), and its eventual decline; the peace movements marked by the 1899 and 1907 Hague conferences; the effects of the Cold War; the growth of the European Union; and the Euro-American split over the Iraq war.