Mahony Family Library director Philip Shackelford has accomplished much in his time at South Arkansas Community College. Soon, he’ll be able to add published author to that list.
“Rise of the Mavericks,” a historical study that explores the rise and Cold War history of the U.S. Air Force Security Service, will be released by the U.S. Naval Institute Press in April. Shackelford’s book is the first work of academic scholarship exclusively dedicated to exploring this little-known command and its history.
Established in 1948 as part of the emerging U.S. national security apparatus, this communications intelligence organization was meant to place the fledgling U.S. Air Force on a competitive footing with its Army and Navy counterparts. As World War II ended and the Cold War began, Air Force leaders understood that an effective cryptologic capability would be crucial for maintaining and enhancing the Air Force as a strategic and decisive component of America’s national defense. Communications intelligence would be a critical source of this information, and Air Force leaders were adamant that their service not remain dependent on other service structures for this capability.
“The Security Service was an important command, largely missing from the pages of history,” Shackelford said. “It was closely entangled with the transformative changes in the U.S. defense establishment following World War II, and played an important role in shaping the early U.S. Air Force.”
Shackelford said that “Rise of the Mavericks” fills a gap in military and intelligence history literature and complicates the literature surrounding the history of the National Security Agency, “which too often ignores or hastily addresses the contributions and role of service cryptologic agencies during the early Cold War period.”
The book explains how Security Service personnel were viewed as mavericks by other U.S. military and government organizations, and how they lived up to this characterization by developing an independent communications intelligence capability while persistently resisting the controlling efforts of the Armed Forces Security Agency and NSA.
“The history of the Security Service is not only fascinating,” Shackelford said, “but it’s also an incredible glimpse into the inner workings of American national security and intelligence gathering during the Cold War. This is a story that needed to be told.”
Shackelford is a former president of the Arkansas Library Association, a former secretary of ARKLink (a statewide consortium of academic libraries) and an associate editor for the Arkansas Libraries journal.
His academic research focuses on the U.S. Air Force, communications intelligence and national security during the Cold War. He has shared this research in multiple panel presentations at recent meetings of the Society for Military History, the 2022 annual conference of the North American Society for Intelligence History and an invited lecture for the faculty forum at the U.S. Air Force Air Command and Staff College. “Rise of the Mavericks” can be purchased by visiting the Naval Institute Press website at www.usni.org. Additional information about the author can be found at www.philipcshackelford.com.
