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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > General
In a period that began with Britain controlling a world-wide empire
and included two world wars, followed by the Cold War and massive
expenditure on nuclear armaments, the relationship between the
politicians and the generals has been central to British history.
While it is correctly assumed that the Armed Forces have never
threatened British political stability in modern times, the
relationship between the military and their political masters is a
major, if under-emphasised, theme of British history. While in
theory the politicians decided strategy and the military
implemented it, in practice decisions often depended on the
personalities and experience of those involved. Asquith, the
epitome of the civilian, left major strategic decisions in the
hands of the military; while Churchill, an ex-soldier and ex-First
Lord of the Admiralty, rode roughshod over professional military
advice. In a period when arms before ever more technologically
sophisticated, there was also the problem of how far politicians
could decide on strategies proposed by the military other than by
the crude yardstick of cost. The essays in Government and the Armed
Forces in Britain, 1856--1990 provide a coherent account not only
of the major decision-making of warfare but also of the changes in
the organisation and control of the Armed Forces.
Ideal for student research, this book provides a reference guide
to the war as well as seven essays analyzing a variety of aspects
of the war and its consequences. The essays address questions such
as: How did Saddam Hussein become such a major threat and how has
he survived the war? How critical was George Bush in driving U.S.
and global foreign policy during the crisis? How were key decisions
made? Did the war fail or succeed in retrospect? What were its
long-run political, economic, strategic and cultural effects? Can
collective security work? Is the United Nations likely to be
effective in future crises? What lessons can be learned from the
crisis? Yetiv draws on primary documents and extensive interviews
with many key players such as Colin Powell, James Baker, and Brent
Scowcroft, and Arab and European leaders which cast new light on
the event.
Following a list of key players and a complete chronology of
events, seven essays offer a contemporary perspective on the war:
Drama in the Desert; War Erupts in a Storm: The Continuation of
Diplomacy by Air and on the Ground; From Truman to Desert Storm:
The Rising Eagle in the Persian Gulf; President Bush and Saddam
Hussein: A Classic Case of Individuals Driving History; The West
Arms a Brutal Dictator: Can Proliferation Be Controlled in the
Post-Cold War World?; The United Nations and Collective Security:
Was the Gulf War a Model for the Future?; The Impact of the Persian
Gulf War. Reference components include a narrative historical
overview of the war and biographical profiles of each of the major
players in the war. Twelve primary documents include speeches and
UN resolutions. A glossary of terms particular to the war and an
annotated bibliography complete the work. A selection of photos
complements the text. This readable guide is a one-stop source for
reference material and in-depth analysis of the key foreign policy
event of the 1990s, and should appeal to a broad readership.
Conflict, Cultural Heritage, and Peace offers a series of
conceptual and applied frameworks to help understand the role
cultural heritage plays within conflict and the potential it has to
contribute to positive peacebuilding and sustainable development in
post-conflict societies. Designed as a resource guide, this general
volume introduces the multiple roles cultural heritage plays
through the conflict cycle from its onset, subsequent escalation
and through to resolution and recovery. In its broadest sense it
questions what role cultural heritage plays within conflict, how
cultural heritage is used in the construction and justification of
conflict narratives and how are these narratives framed and often
manipulated to support particular perspectives, and how we can
develop better understandings of cultural heritage and work towards
the better protection of cultural heritage resources during
conflict. It moves beyond the protection paradigm and recognises
that cultural heritage can contribute to building peace and
reconciliation in post-conflict environments. The study offers a
conceptual and operational framework to understand the roles
cultural heritage plays within conflict cycles, how it can be
targeted during war, and the potential cultural heritage has in
positive peacebuilding across the conflict lifecycle. Conflict,
Cultural Heritage, and Peace offers an invaluable introduction to
cultural heritage at all stages in conflict scenarios which will
benefit students, researchers and practitioners in the field of
heritage, environment, peace and conflict studies.
NL ARMS 2016 offers a collection of studies on the interrelatedness
of safety and security in military organizations so as to
anticipate or even prepare for dire situations. The volume contains
a wide spectrum of contributions on organizing for safety and
security in a military context that are theoretically as well as
empirically relevant. Theoretically, the contributions draw upon
international security studies, safety science and organizational
studies. Empirically, case studies address the reality of safety
and security in national crisis management, logistics and
unconventional warfare, focusing, amongst others, on rule of law
during missions in which expeditionary military forces are involved
in policing tasks to restore and reinforce safety and security and
on the impact of rule of law on societal security. The result is a
truly unique volume that may serve practitioners, policymakers and
academics in gaining a better understanding of organizing for the
security-safety nexus.
A study of operational warfare in the Habsburg old regime,
1683-1740, which recreates everyday warfare and the lives of the
generals conducting it, this book goes beyond the battlefield to
examine the practical skills of war needed in an agricultural
landscape of pastures, woods, and water. Although sieges, forages,
marches, and raids are universally considered crucial aspects of
old regime warfare, no study of operational or maneuver warfare in
this period has ever been published. Early modern warfare had an
operational component which required that soldiers possess or learn
many skills grounded in the agricultural economy, and this
requirement led to an "economy of knowledge" in which the civil and
military sectors exchanged skilled labor. Many features of
"scientific warfare" thought to be initiated by Enlightenment
reformers were actually implicit in the informal structures of
armies of the late 1680-1740 period. In this period, the Habsburg
dynasty maintained an army of more than 100,000 men, and hundreds
of generals. This book might be called a "labor history" of these
generals, revealing their regional, social, and educational
backgrounds. It also details the careerist dimensions of another
neglected aspect of the early modern general's work, the creation
of "military theory." Theory arose naturally from staff work and
commanded wide interest among both high-ranking officers for
professional reasons, and for its significant impact on service
politics.
An in-depth assessment of innovations in military information
technology informs hypothetical outcomes for artificial
intelligence adaptations In the coming decades, artificial
intelligence (AI) could revolutionize the way humans wage war. The
military organizations that best innovate and adapt to this AI
revolution will likely gain significant advantages over their
rivals. To this end, great powers such as the United States, China,
and Russia are already investing in novel sensing, reasoning, and
learning technologies that will alter how militaries plan and
fight. The resulting transformation could fundamentally change the
character of war. In Information in War, Benjamin Jensen,
Christopher Whyte, and Scott Cuomo provide a deeper understanding
of the AI revolution by exploring the relationship between
information, organizational dynamics, and military power. The
authors analyze how militaries adjust to new information
communication technology historically to identify opportunities,
risks, and obstacles that will almost certainly confront modern
defense organizations as they pursue AI pathways to the future.
Information in War builds on these historical cases to frame four
alternative future scenarios exploring what the AI revolution could
look like in the US military by 2040.
This book explains the history and development of the military
design movement, featuring case studies from key modern militaries.
Written by a practitioner, the work shows how modern militaries
think and arrange actions in time and space for security affairs,
and why designers are disrupting, challenging, and
reconceptualizing everything previously upheld as sacred on the
battlefield. It is the first book to thoroughly explain what
military design is, where it came from, and how it works at deep,
philosophically grounded levels, and why it is potentially the most
controversial development in generations of war fighters. The work
explains the tangled origins of commercial design and that of
designing modern warfare, the rise of various design movements, and
how today's military forces largely hold to a Newtonian stylization
built upon mimicry of natural science infused with earlier medieval
and religious inspirations. Why does our species conceptualize war
as such, and how do military institutions erect barriers that
become so powerful that efforts to design further innovation
require entirely novel constructs outside the orthodoxy? The book
explains design stories from the Israel Defense Force, the US Army,
the US Marine Corps, the Canadian Armed Forces, and the Australian
Defence Force for the first time, and includes the theory,
doctrine, organizational culture, and key actors involved.
Ultimately, this book is about how small communities of practice
are challenging the foundations of modern defence thinking. This
book will be of much interest to students of military and strategic
studies, defence studies, and security studies, as well as design
educators and military professionals.
How does the Taliban wage war? How has its war changed over time?
Firstly, the movement's extraordinary military operation relies on
financial backing. This volume analyses such funding. The Taliban's
external sources of support include foreign governments and
non-state groups, both of which have affected the Taliban's
military campaigns and internal politics. Secondly, this is the
first full-length study of the Taliban to acknowledge and discuss
in detail the movement's polycentric character. Here not only the
Quetta Shura, but also the Haqqani Network and the Taliban's other
centres of power, are afforded the attention they deserve. The
Taliban at War is based on extensive field research, including
hundreds of interviews with Taliban members at all levels of the
organisation, community elders in Taliban-controlled areas, and
other sources. It covers the Taliban insurgency from its first
manifestations in 2002 up to the end of 2015. The five-month Battle
of Kunduz epitomised the ongoing transition of the Taliban from an
insurgent group to a more conventional military force, intent on
fighting a protracted civil war. In this latest book, renowned
Afghanistan expert Antonio Giustozzi rounds off his twenty years of
studying the Taliban with an authoritative study detailing the
evolution of its formidable military machine.
This book offers a detailed examination of the effectiveness of the
peacekeeping operations of the African Union. Despite its growing
reputation in peacekeeping and its status as the oldest continental
peacekeeper, the performance of the African Union (AU) has hitherto
not been assessed. This book fills that gap and analyses six case
studies: Burundi, Comoros, Somalia, Mali, Darfur and the Central
African Republic. From a methodological perspective it takes a
problem-solving approach and utilises process tracing in its
analysis, with its standard for success resting on achieving
negative peace (the cessation of violence and provision of
security). Theoretically, this study offers a comprehensive list of
factors drawn from peace literature and field experience which
influence the outcome of peacekeeping. Beyond the major issues,
such as funding, international collaboration and mandate, this work
also examines the impact of largely ignored factors such as force
integrity and territory size. The book modifies the claim of peace
literature on what matters for success and advocates the
indispensability of domestic elite cooperation, local initiative
and international political will. It recognises the necessity of
factors such as lead state and force integrity for certain peace
operations. In bringing these factors together, this study expands
the peacekeeping debate on what matters for stability in conflict
areas. This book will be of much interest to students of
peacekeeping, African politics, war and conflict studies, and
International Relations in general.
The long cultural moment that arose in the wake of 9/11 and the
conflict in the Middle East has fostered a global wave of
surveillance and counterinsurgency. Performance in a Militarized
Culture explores the ways in which we experience this new status
quo. Addressing the most commonplace of everyday interactions, from
mobile phone calls to traffic cameras, this edited collection
considers: How militarization appropriates and deploys performance
techniques How performing arts practices can confront
militarization The long and complex history of militarization How
the war on terror has transformed into a values system that
prioritizes the military The ways in which performance can be used
to secure and maintain power across social strata Performance in a
Militarized Culture draws on performances from North, Central, and
South America; Europe; the Middle East; and Asia to chronicle a
range of experience: from those who live under a daily threat of
terrorism, to others who live with a distant, imagined fear of such
danger.
The existence of a national style of warfare, an American Way of
War, has been used to characterize fundamental elements of American
military strategy. During his tenure as Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell became the proponent for a
strategic framework to guide the consideration of how military
forces should be used to support national policy objectives. His
framework was reflected in the Chairman's National Military
Strategy published in early 1992 after Desert Storm under a concept
titled Decisive Force. This book traces the development and
evaluates the merits of a New American Way of War embodied in the
Decisive Force concept. Military attitudes and lessons about the
utility of force are drawn from four recent conflicts.
This book offers a detailed examination of the counter-insurgency
operations undertaken by the Nigerian military against Boko Haram
between 2011 and 2017. Based on extensive fieldwork conducted with
military units in Nigeria, Counter-Insurgency in Nigeria has two
main aims. First, it seeks to provide an understanding of the
Nigerian military's internal role - a role that today, as a result
of internal threats, pivots towards counter-insurgency. The book
illustrates how organizational culture, historical experience,
institutions, and doctrine, are critical to understanding the
Nigerian military and its attitudes and actions against the threat
of civil disobedience, today and in the past. The second aim of the
book is to examine the Nigerian military campaign against Boko
Haram insurgents - specifically, plans and operations between June
2011 and April 2017. Within this second theme, emphasis is placed
on the idea of battlefield innovation and the reorganization within
the Nigerian military since 2013, as the Nigerian Army and Air
Force recalibrated themselves for COIN warfare. A certain mystique
has surrounded the technicalities of COIN operations by the Army
against Boko Haram, and this book aims to disperse that veil of
secrecy. Furthermore, the work's analysis of the air force's role
in counter-insurgency is unprecedented within the literature on
military warfare in Nigeria. This book will be of great interest to
students of military studies, counter-insurgency,
counter-terrorism, African politics and security studies in
general.
This book contributes to an increasingly important branch of
critical security studies that combines insights from critical
geopolitics and postcolonial critique by making an argument about
the geographies of violence and their differential impact in
contemporary security practices, including but not limited to
military intervention. The book explores military intervention in
Libya through the categories of space and time, to provide a robust
ethico-political critique of the intervention. Much of the
mainstream international relations scholarship on humanitarian
intervention frames the ethical, moral and legal debate over
intervention in terms of a binary, between human rights and state
sovereignty. In response, O'Sullivan questions the ways in which
military violence was produced as a rational and reasonable
response to the crisis in Libya, outlining and destabilising this
false binary between the human and the state. The book offers
methodological tools for questioning the violent institutions at
the heart of humanitarian intervention and asking how intervention
has been produced as a rational response to crisis. Contributing to
the ongoing academic conversation in the critical literature on
spatiality, militarism and resistance, the book draws upon
postcolonial and poststructural approaches to critical security
studies, and will be of great interest to scholars and graduates of
critical security studies and international relations.
This book offers an accessible examination of the human rights of
migrants in the context of the UN's negotiations in 2018. This
volume has two main contributions. Firstly, it is designed to
inform the negotiations on the UN's Global Compact for Safe,
Orderly and Regular Migration announced by the New York Declaration
of the UN General Assembly on 19 September 2016. Second, it intends
to assist officials, lawyers and academics to ensure that the human
rights of migrants are fully respected by state authorities and
international organisations and safeguarded by national and
supranational courts across the globe. The overall objective of
this book is to clarify problem areas which migrants encounter as
non-citizens of the state where they are and how international
human rights obligations of those states provide solutions. It
defines the existing international human rights of migrants and
provides the source of States' obligations. In order to provide a
clear and useful guide to the existing human rights of migrants,
the volume examines these rights from the perspective of the
migrant: what situations do people encounter as their status
changes from citizen (in their own country) to migrant (in a
foreign state), and how do human rights provide legal entitlements
regarding their treatment by a foreign state? This book will be of
much interest to students of migration, human rights, international
law and international relations.
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