![]() |
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
||
|
Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > Defence strategy, planning & research
Britain's Anti-Submarine Capability, 1919-1939 is the first unified study of the development of Britain's anti-submarine capability between the armistice in 1919 and the onset of the second world German submarine attack on Britain's maritime trade in 1939. Well researched and yet accessibly written, this book challenges the widespread belief that the Royal Navy failed to anticipate the threat of the U-boat in the Second World War.
In The Tank Debate, John Stone highlights the equivocal position
that armour has traditionally occupied in Anglo-American thought,
and explains why - despite frequent predictions to the contrary -
the tank has remained an important instrument of war. This book
provides a timely and provocative study of the tank's developmental
history, against the changing background of Anglo-American military
thought.
The proliferation of advanced militarily relevant technologies in the Asia-Pacific over the past few decades has been a significant, and perhaps even alarming, development. This volume addresses how such technologies may affect military capabilities and military advantage in the region.
All naval professionals--without exception--encounter, directly participate, or play a supporting role in naval cooperation. It is a key element in the U.S. defense strategy because military and naval operations today are usually conducted by international coalitions and fighting alongside foreign navies is an expected aspect of current and future naval warfare. Activities in support of mutual defense include bilateral and multilateral exercises, international programs such as cooperative acquisition and foreign military sales, combined training, and efforts towards increased interoperability. This volume is intended to provide a basic familiarization to all aspects of the subject and detailed understanding of relevant recent issues. Since there is no formal training offered on the subject for naval professionals--with the exception of certain specialized personnel--the book is designed to bridge the existing gap in knowledge about naval cooperation.
Taking its inspiration from Michel Foucault, this volume of essays integrates the analysis of security into the study of modern political and cultural theory. Explaining how both politics and security are differently problematised by changing accounts of time, the work shows how, during the course of the 17th century, the problematisation of government and rule became newly enframed by a novel account of time and human finitude, which it calls 'factical finitude'. The correlate of factical finitude is the infinite, and the book explains how the problematisation of politics and security became that of securing the infinite government of finite things. It then explains how concrete political form was given to factical finitude by a combination of geopolitics and biopolitics. Modern sovereignty required the services of biopolitics from the very beginning. The essays explain how these politics of security arose at the same time, changed together, and have remained closely allied ever since. In particular, the book explains how biopolitics of security changed in response to the molecularisation and digitalisation of Life, and demonstrates how this has given rise to the dangers and contradictions of 21st century security politics. This book will be of much interest to students of political and cultural theory, critical security studies and International Relations.
Since World War II, military intervention in developing world internal conflicts (DWIC) has become the primary form of U.S. military activity, and these interventions have proven unsuccessful in places like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. This book argues such failure was entirely predictable, even inevitable, due both to the nature and dynamics of foreign military intrusion in the affairs of other countries and especially the DWICs that provide the major contemporary form of potential U.S. military in the foreseeable future. Basing its analysis in both human nature (the adverse reaction to prolonged outsider intrusion) and historical analogy, the book argues strongly why military intervention should be avoided as a national security option and the implications of such a policy decision for national security strategy and policy.
Since World War II, military intervention in developing world internal conflicts (DWIC) has become the primary form of U.S. military activity, and these interventions have proven unsuccessful in places like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. This book argues such failure was entirely predictable, even inevitable, due both to the nature and dynamics of foreign military intrusion in the affairs of other countries and especially the DWICs that provide the major contemporary form of potential U.S. military in the foreseeable future. Basing its analysis in both human nature (the adverse reaction to prolonged outsider intrusion) and historical analogy, the book argues strongly why military intervention should be avoided as a national security option and the implications of such a policy decision for national security strategy and policy.
Taking its inspiration from Michel Foucault, this volume of essays integrates the analysis of security into the study of modern political and cultural theory. Explaining how both politics and security are differently problematised by changing accounts of time, the work shows how, during the course of the 17th century, the problematisation of government and rule became newly enframed by a novel account of time and human finitude, which it calls 'factical finitude'. The correlate of factical finitude is the infinite, and the book explains how the problematisation of politics and security became that of securing the infinite government of finite things. It then explains how concrete political form was given to factical finitude by a combination of geopolitics and biopolitics. Modern sovereignty required the services of biopolitics from the very beginning. The essays explain how these politics of security arose at the same time, changed together, and have remained closely allied ever since. In particular, the book explains how biopolitics of security changed in response to the molecularisation and digitalisation of Life, and demonstrates how this has given rise to the dangers and contradictions of 21st century security politics. This book will be of much interest to students of political and cultural theory, critical security studies and International Relations.
Are the relationships that the United States forged with North and Central Europe during the Cold War still viable today? As the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) declines and the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) emerges, can the United States and Europe bridge the transatlantic fissures that opened when the United States prepared to go to war with Iraq? In a post-9/11 world, North and Central Europe have had to adapt their national security policies and rethink their relationship with the United States. In an in-depth look at the security policies of the states in North and Central Europe, Andrew Michta highlights how historical legacies, regional geostrategic constraints, and individual capabilities have shaped their response to the new environment. Michta raises the broad question of whether traditional alliances and NATO are still viable ways to deal with new security concerns. The two key questions that arise from this discussion are to what extent NATO still matters to the United States, beyond its political utility, and whether the European Union as a whole can become a partner for the United States in a new security environment. The Limits of Alliance argues that, although NATO will continue to exist in the coming decade, the hollowing-out of the alliance will be accompanied by a shift in transatlantic security relations toward bilateralism determined by regional security considerations.
The origins of the First World War remain one of the greatest twentieth century historical controversies. In this debate the role of military planning in particular and of militarism in general, are a key focus of attention. Did the military wrest control from the civilians? Were the leaders of Europe eager for a conflict? What military commitments were made between the various alliance blocks? These questions are examined in detail here in eleven essays by distinguished historians and the editor's introduction provides a focus and draws out the comparative approach to the history of military policies and war plans of the great powers.
This book reconnects critical security studies approaches with traditional IR concerns about interstate relations, contributing an original understanding of the interplay between security politics and foreign affairs. Whether the object of concern is migrants, climate change, or the financial system, it has become popular practice in Europe to sketch a complete range of policy themes in terms of security. By the same token, many such novel security associations have also been used to describe a world composed of transnational dangers. In many places, it is often claimed that migration, climate change, financial instability, and other contemporary insecurities represent collective global - or at least regional European - policy challenges. Critical approaches to security in particular have played a vanguard role in analysing the association of policy themes with security logics, as well as the attendant effects of such conceptual linking. It is surprising, then, that these same critical approaches have not addressed the interplay between the formulation of security discourses and foreign affairs in more detail. While European policymakers are in strong agreement when it comes to the association of new dangers with collective insecurity, which supposedly calls for collaborative security strategies across borders, critical approaches to security tend to focus ever more closely on domestic aspects of the politics of security, be they distinct security assemblages such as body-scanners or the more general effects of securitization on political decision-making or public-private relations. Irrespective of critical scholarship s pioneering work on the politics of security discourses, it fails to provide conceptual tools to analyse the bearing that security politics has on the international. This book addresses this gap and formulates a distinct analytical framework focusing on the linkages and associations at play between the politics of security on the one hand and foreign affairs on the other. Essentially, this framework rests on the argument that when political communities recognise security concerns, they effectively endanger, order, and condition international relations. It is argued that in defining who threatens whom and how, notions of insecurity codify authoritative systematisations of the world in and for a political community, and that in doing so, they condition foreign politics. By developing security into a relational world-ordering concept, the book hence proposes a novel perspective on the politics of security, a critical perspective that squarely addresses the local making of the international. This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, European politics, foreign policy and IR, in general."
With the rise of religiously motivated violence and terrorism, governments around the world need to develop their religious and ideological capabilities in parallel with strengthening their law enforcement, military and intelligence capabilities. Terrorist Rehabilitation: A New Frontier in Counter-terrorism aims to provide an understanding of the importance of the approach and strategy of terrorist rehabilitation in countering this threat.Comprising of nine chapters, this book provides case study assessments of terrorist rehabilitation practices set against the backdrop of their unique operational and geopolitical milieu in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Indonesia and Sri Lanka. This will help the reader to form a foundational understanding of the concept of terrorist rehabilitation by combining the insights, successes and experience of senior government officials and counter-terrorism experts. In addition, the contributors provide discussions on religious concepts that have been manipulated by violent Islamists as a background to understanding religiously or ideologically motivated terrorism and the avenues open for countering it.
In the interwar period, Red Army commanders headed by Tukhachevskii developed a new doctrine of mobile warfare and "deep operations". The military requirements of armaments and industrial production in the event of war was a central parameter in Stalinist industrialization. Based on recently opened Russian archives, the book analyzes military dimensions of Soviet long term economic and military reconstruction plans from the mid 1920s until 1941. It presents a new framework for estimating the Soviet war economic preparations, drastically underestimated by contemporaries.
This is the most comprehensive bibliography to date on the vast English-language literature covering the myriad aspects of peace and security issues in the East Asia/Pacific region. McClean contacted 150 key research institutions and publishers around the world for information about the most significant books, articles, dissertations, and official documents on international and intra-state security, arms control, conflict-avoiding diplomacy, and militarization in the area. He has selectively annotated 12,645 cross-referenced entries and organized them into 27 sub-regional and country chapters including two particularly extensive chapters on Japan and China and two further chapters on relations between Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, and on U.S. and Soviet policy.
In the globalized Arctic there has been a transformation from military security to human security. Climate change, the utilization of Arctic resources and other global challenges have caused the Arctic 'paradox' and a need to redefine security.
The Warsaw Pact is generally regarded as a mere instrument of Soviet power. In the 1960s the alliance nevertheless evolved into a multilateral alliance, in which the non-Soviet Warsaw Pact members gained considerable scope for manoeuvre. This book examines to what extent the Warsaw Pact inadvertently provided its members with an opportunity to assert their own interests, emancipate themselves from the Soviet grip, and influence Soviet bloc policy. Laurien Crump traces this development through six thematic case studies, which deal with such well known events as the building of the Berlin Wall, the Sino-Soviet Split, the Vietnam War, the nuclear question, and the Prague Spring. By interpreting hitherto neglected archival evidence from archives in Berlin, Bucharest, and Rome, and approaching the Soviet alliance from a radically novel perspective, the book offers unexpected insights into international relations in Eastern Europe, while shedding new light on a pivotal period in the Cold War.
Shortly after the end of the First World War, General Sir George Macdonagh, wartime director of British Military Intelligence, revealed that Lord Allenby's victory in Palestine had never been in doubt because of the success of his intelligence service. Seventy-five years later this book explains Macdonagh's statement. Sheffy also adopts a novel approach to traditional heroes of the campaign such as T E Lawrence.
This volume brings together scholars from different fields to explore the power, consequences and everyday practices of security expertise. Expertise mediates between different forms of knowledge: scientific and technological, legal, economic and political knowledge. This book offers the first systematic study of security expertise and opens up a productive dialogue between science and technology studies and security studies to investigate the character and consequences of this expertise. In security theory, the study of expertise is crucial to understanding whose knowledge informs security making and to reflect on the impact and responsibility of security analysis. In science and technology studies, the study of security politics adds a challenging new case to the agenda of research on expertise and policy. The contributors investigate cases such as academic security studies, security think tanks, the collaboration between science, anthropology and the military, transnational terrorism, and the ethical consequences of security expertise. Together they challenge our understanding of how expertise works and what consequences it has for security politics and international relations. This book will be of particular interest to students of critical security studies, sociology, science and technology studies, and IR/security studies in general.
This book conducts a comprehensive study on China's maritime strategy. It discusses the lessons of maritime power history that must be learnt by Chinese today, the relations between China's maritime strategy and domestic developing problems of China, the status and influence of maritime strategy from China's overall development strategy perspective, and the geopolitical targets of Chinese navy in 2050.China's maritime strategy is one of the most important academic and realistic subjects in the present and future. This book is the first book to discuss China's maritime strategy comprehensively in and outside China. It will give readers a better sense of why China has to develop its sea power, why it lays so much emphasis on Taiwan and the South China sea, why the country can make friends with India but not Japan, and why China's maritime strategy will never challenge America but has to face the pressure from America's maritime hegemony, and so on.
The ideas of the Prussian military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) underlie most modern military thought. This intellectual history of the reception of Carl von Clausewitz's military theories in Britain and the United States thus provides an important and revealing examination of the evolution of military thinking in both countries. In the first comprehensive study of the literature, Christopher Bassford argues that the impact of Clausewitzian theory - particularly the classic On War, published in 1832 - has been widely misunderstood, and he follows the trail of Clausewitzian influence from early-Victorian Britain to 1945. He examines the attitudes and interpretations of a large array of commentators, ranging from soldiers like the Duke of Wellington, "Wully" Robertson, and Dwight Eisenhower to theorists like Julian Corbett, to journalists and historians like Spenser Wilkinson and Basil Liddell Hart, to a wide range of reformers, special pleaders, and propagandists. By exploring the changing ways in which Clausewitz's ideas have been received by these various groups of commentators, Bassford also offers some penetrating lessons concerning the manner in which ideas are ignored, acclaimed, rejected, distorted, or re-transmitted. In bringing this literature to light, Clausewitz in English makes a persuasive case for Clausewitzian theory having had a broad impact on the development of British and American military thinking. It will be of interest to a wide range of military and intellectual historians.
The human dimension of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) implies an alternative vision of security and co-operation in Europe, based on respect for human rights, democracy, the rule of law, minority rights and human contacts. Until recently the human dimension has been the main claim to perpetuity of the CSCE. It has been through the years the main point of controversy among its participating states, and has played an important role in the revolutionary events of 1989 which transformed Europe.
This is a study of the British military intelligence operations during the Crimean War. It details the beginnings of the intelligence operations as a result of the British Commander, Lord Raglan's, need for information on the enemy, and traces the subsequent development of the system.
This book scrutinises how political actors in the Israeli parliament (the Knesset) have articulated the security-democracy nexus in their discourses. Security crises expose political leaders to an uncomfortable dilemma: guaranteeing the safety of citizens while at the same time preserving democratic principles, basic rights and liberties. In this respect, Israel represents an archetypical case. Defining itself as a democracy, the state of Israel has been in quasi-constant conflict with its neighbouring countries while facing terror attacks repeatedly. This situation has resulted in the upholding of the state of emergency since the establishment of the state in 1948 and in the enactment of security measures that are often in conflict with democratic values. The tension between security and democracy is not a new question: it has been at the centre of political thought from Rousseau and Locke to Lasswell and Dahl and stood at the core of political debates after 9/11 and the 2005 terror attacks in London. Many studies have questioned how political actors manage this tension or how they could - properly - balance security and democracy. Yet, in spite of the abundant literature on the issue, the manner in which political actors conceptualise and frame this tension has been rarely explored. Even less has been said on the effects of this conceptualisation on the democratic regime. Drawing on discourse theory and on an innovative narrative analysis, the book examines 40 debates held in the Knesset on security-oriented laws enacted in two different contexts: the period of relative calm preceding the first Palestinian intifada (1987) and the period following the eruption of the second intifada (2000). More specifically, three types of laws and discussions are examined: laws establishing a relation between freedom of expression and security; laws linking the category of 'the enemy' to democracy; and finally those connecting the right to family unification and residence of Palestinians with terrorism. Through a comparative analysis of the political actors' discourses in 1985 and between 2000 and 2011, the study demonstrates that two main narratives have constantly competed: on the one hand a marginal narrative anchored in basic rights and on the other a defensive democracy narrative, which has become dominant. The latter has legitimised the restriction of freedom of expression, freedom to participate in elections, freedom of movement or the right to citizenship. The book shows how the increasing dominance of the defensive democracy narrative has had a fundamental impact in reshaping the polity and the identity of Israel's democratic regime. The analysis ultimately opens the possibility to rethink the conventional approach of the security-democracy dilemma and to reflect on processes in other states, such as the United Kingdom or the United States during different security crises. This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, Israeli politics, democracy studies, political theory and IR in general.
This new Handbook brings together key experts on European security from the academic and policy worlds to examine the European Union (EU) as an international security actor. In the two decades since the end of the Cold War, the EU has gradually emerged as an autonomous actor in the field of security, aiming to safeguard European security by improving global security. However, the EU's development as a security actor has certainly not remained uncontested, either by academics or by policy-makers, some of whom see the rise of the EU as a threat to their national and/or transatlantic policy outlook. While the focus of this volume is on the politico-military dimension, security will also be put into the context of the holistic approach advocated by the EU. The book is organised into four key sections: Part I - The EU as an International Security Actor Part II - Institutions, Instruments and Means Part III - Policies Part IV - Partners This Handbook will be essential reading for all students of European Security, the EU, European Politics, security studies and IR in general.
This book uses cross-cultural analysis across Eurasia and Afro-Asia to trace the roots of contemporary border disputes and insurgencies in South Asia. It discusses the way frontiers of British India, and consequently the modern states of India and Pakistan, were drafted through negotiations backed up by organized violence, showing how this concept found its fruition in present-day counter-insurgency measures. |
You may like...
Sustainable Security - Rethinking…
Jeremi Suri, Benjamin Valentino
Hardcover
R3,762
Discovery Miles 37 620
Cuito Cuanavale - 12 Months Of War That…
Fred Bridgland
Paperback
(4)
|