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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > General
Volume one of Ney's early career
Antoine Bulos was commissioned by Marshal Ney's family to write a
comprehensive memoir of his life. All students of the Napoleonic
age have visions of Ney at his most iconic-standing with a small
rearguard in the snow fighting off Cossacks during the disastrous
retreat from Moscow or charging bareheaded, his red hair a rallying
point for all, up slopes crowned with red-coated infantry at
Waterloo. These two volumes paint an entirely different portrait,
concentrating as they do on Ney's early career. In volume one-Ney:
General of Cavalry-we see Ney in his formative years as the
consummate commander of light cavalry. This volume, culminating in
1799, reveals how the soldier won his deserved reputation for
courage. Perhaps more surprisingly it shows how Ney was far from
the headstrong but shallow thinker many have portrayed him to be.
Here is a man of both principle and no small capacity for
administration. These essential volumes for those interested in the
Napoleonic epoch are available in soft back and hard cover with
dust jacket for collectors.
Focusing on 45 military leaders from four continents and 13
countries, spread across four centuries, this study paints, for the
first time, a collective, comparative portrait of high-ranking
military officers. The authors develop an interactional theory of
military leaders, stressing the interplay between sociodemographic
variables, psychological dynamics, and situational factors. They
examine age and birthplace, socioeconomic status, family life,
ethnicity and religion, education and occupation, activities and
experiences, and ideologies and attitudes. They find military
leaders to be a remarkably coherent and homogeneous group of men
propelled toward the military by a combination of nationalism,
imperialism, relative deprivation, love deprivation, marginality,
and vanity.
I wanted to change my life so I joined the military during a time
when gays were not welcomed. While joining the military brought me
out of a challenging situation, it was the beginning of a difficult
journey. A journey I was able to navigate, but so many others were
not so fortunate.
"Serving with Honor: Under a Cloak of Silence" depicts the life of
Dr. Lorenzo McFarland, along with three close friends, who served
before and during the time of Don t Ask Don t Tell (DADT). This
book answers that most interesting question of what it was like for
gays in the military under DADT. In our own words we bare our souls
and answer some of the tough questions not asked or answered before
now. Questions like: Why join in the fi rst place? What was basic
training like? How did we protect our careers? Would we serve
again?
We talk about exhaustive efforts creating elaborate webs to
protect our secret. This book also depicts our patriotism and
commitment to the military mission and this great country. Despite
DADT, we served with honor and found great success.
This book presents a radical reappraisal of British policy towards
West German rearmament until the Federal Republic's incorporation
into NATO and contains a series of major new theses on British
attitudes towards European integration, Anglo-Soviet relations and
the 'Special Relationship'. It places policy in the context of
Anglo-German distrust, American demands for a German contribution
and British fears of antagonising the Soviets. It clarifies
numerous controversial issues by demonstrating British willingness
to compromise with the Soviets over German unification, the British
military's desire to reduce the continental commitment and Eden's
enthusiasm for a European Army.
Vietnam POWs came home heroes, but twenty years earlier their
predecessors returned from Korea to shame and suspicion. In the
Korean War (1950-1953) American prisoners were used in propaganda
twice, first during the conflict, then at home. While in Chinese
custody in North Korea, they were pressured to praise their
treatment and criticize the war. When they came back, the
Department of the Army and cooperative pundits said too many were
weaklings who did not resist communist indoctrination or
"brainwashing." Ex-prisoners were featured in a publicity campaign
scolding the nation to raise tougher sons for the Cold War. This
propaganda was based on feverish exaggerations that ignored the
convoluted circumstances POWs were put in, which decisions in
Washington helped create. POWs became pivotal to the Korean War
after peace talks began in summer 1951. Since fighting had
stalemated, both sides raced to win propaganda victories. The
Chinese publicized American airmen who confessed to alleged germ
warfare atrocities. American commanders worked to discredit
communism by encouraging thousands of North Korean and Chinese
prisoners to defect. Clandestine agents and a fraternity of
anticommunist prisoners launched a violent campaign to inflate the
number of POWs refusing repatriation after the war. Armistice
negotiations floundered while China and North Korea demanded their
soldiers back. United States delegates held out for what they
called "voluntary repatriation," but in reality, thousands of
prisoners were terrorized into renouncing their right of return.
American POWs remained captive for eighteen more months of fighting
over the terms of a compromised prisoner exchange. In the United
States, details of the voluntary repatriation policy were
suppressed. Name, Rank, and Serial Number explains how this
provides new insight into why Korea became "the forgotten war."
If there was one man, other than Napoleon himself, who determined
the course of the Napoleonic Wars, it was
Jacques-Antoine-Hippolyte, comte de Guibert, the foremost military
theorist in France from 1770 to his death in 1790. Taking in the
full scope of the times, from the ideas of the Enlightenment to the
passions of the French Revolution, Jonathan Abel's Guibert is the
first book in English to tell the remarkable story of the man who,
through his pen and political activity, truly earned the title of
Father of the Grande Armee. In his Essai general de tactique,
published in 1771, Guibert set forth the definitive institutional
doctrine for the French army of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic
Wars. But unlike many other martial theorists, Guibert, who served
in the French Ministry of War from 1775 to 1777 and again from 1787
to 1789, was able to put his ideas into practice. Drawing on a
wealth of primary source documents - including Guibert's own papers
and the letters and memoirs of his friends and associates -
Jonathan Abel re-creates the temper of an era of great turbulence
and remarkable creativity. More than a military theorist, Guibert
was very much a man of his day; he attended salons, wrote poetry
and plays, and was inducted into the Academie francaise. A fiery
figure, he rose and fell from power, lived and loved fiercely, and
died swearing that he would ""find justice."" In Abel's account,
Guibert does at last receive a measure of justice: a thorough,
painstakingly documented picture of this complex man in the thick
of extraordinary times, building the foundation for Napoleon's
success between 1796 and 1807 - and in significant ways, changing
the course of European history.
Routledge Library Editions: Revolution in England examines the
turbulent times that led to the English revolution and civil war as
new political and religious ideas led to the overthrow of the king
and establishment of a republic. Modern ideas of democracy were
established then, and are analysed here in a series of books that
look at the various radical sects such as the Nonjurors and
Levellers that espoused new political thought and ways of living.
The Armed Conflict Survey provides yearly data on fatalities,
refugees and internally displaced people for all major armed
conflicts, alongside in-depth analysis of their political, military
and humanitarian dimensions. This edition covers the key
developments and context of more than 40 conflicts worldwide. It
features essays by the world's leading authorities on armed
conflict, covering the development of jihadism after 9/11, hybrid
warfare, refugees and internally displaced people, criminality and
conflict and the evolution of peacekeeping operations. It includes
maps, infographics and the IISS Chart of Conflict.
Key to developing national security strategy is figuring out what
other countries want. What are their national interests? How do
they perceive them? How do they project them onto the world stage?
Understanding all of this helps us to predict their behavior. In
developing a national security strategy for Asia, the United States
must take into account the desires of two emerging giants of the
21st century: China and India. We would be mistaken, Lal argues, if
we lumped China and India together in one Asian policy, because
these two countries differ greatly from one another. Based on over
120 in-depth interviews with government officials and scholars in
Beijing and New Delhi, the author's research yields some surprising
news about the differences between China and India. Chinese leaders
define their national interest as preservation of the state and
territorial unity, whereas Indian decision makers define their
national interests in relation to forces beyond India, such as the
forces of globalization and their geopolitical status. One factor
that accounts for these differences, among the many explored in
this book, is the influence of one-party rule in China and
parliamentary democracy in India. Another important finding is that
China and India are unlikely to pursue hostility with each other.
The U.S. approach to Asia will need to take these differences into
account.
An important contribution to the international relations and
military studies literature, this study considers the problem of
conflict termination in Europe--an area of immense strategic
importance to both the United States and the Soviet Union. The
author argues that a well-thought-out policy for conflict
termination is lacking within the NATO alliance, which currently
relies almost exclusively on policies that emphasize the prevention
of war. This lack of a conflict termination strategy, Cimbala
asserts, leaves nations open to the danger of a quickly escalating
nuclear conflict, should prevention policies fail and a war in
Europe actually occur. In developing his arguments, Cimbala
considers the relationship between war and politics as perceived by
Soviet and Western planners; compares the superpowers' likely views
on the process of escalation; and assesses the command, control,
and communications perspectives implicit in Soviet and American
writings and deployments and their implications for war
termination.
Cimbala begins with an overview of the problems and choices
involved in ending war in Europe under contemporary conditions.
Subsequent chapters examine such topics as the philosophical and
practical issues related to the problem of preemption; the problem
of military stability and its specific applications to modern
Europe; and Western and Soviet approaches to the escalation and
limitation of war. Soviet perspectives on command and control as
well as the Soviet view of war termination receive extended
treatment in two chapters. Finally, Cimbala contrasts the orthodox
view of mutual assured destruction with the strategic revisionism
of defense dominance or mutual assured survival. He concludes that
policymakers and military planners must recognize that nuclear
weapons will almost certainly be a part of any war in Europe and
that termination must focus on limiting the use of these weapons
before the pressures of in the field escalation tendencies begin to
work against the early conclusion of a conflict. Students and
scholars of military policy will find Cimbala's work enlightening
and provocative reading.
From 1702 to 1714, the War of the Spanish Succession affected most
of Europe and significant parts of the New World, with battles
ranging from the Hungarian plains to the harbors of Rio de Janeiro.
The death of the last Hapsburg King of Spain unleashed a struggle
for his empire. This book includes entries analyzing the
individuals who determined the course of the war, who played a
diplomatic, economic, or military role, as well as entries
analyzing the pivotal battles influencing the outcome. The
provisions of the final treaties, known as the Pacification of
Utrecht, are examined in detail, as is the significance of those
provisions. The diplomats at Utrecht followed the principles of
balance of power, compensation, and legitimacy to mold the peace.
The peace set the boundaries of Western Europe until the convulsion
of the French Revolution. The book opens with an introduction
pointing to the significance of the treaties provisions. The
alphabetical arrangement of the entries, the numerous
cross-references, the bibliographies at the end of the entries, a
genealogical table, a chronology, and the index make this work easy
to use.
Just before the dawn of the Global War on Terror, Kieran Michael
Lalor left his career as a high school social studies teacher,
endeavoring to fulfill his lifelong dream. Lalor followed his
father and brother's footsteps into the United States Marine Corps.
This Recruit presents Lalor's nightly journal entries, beginning
with the uneasy trip to the recruiter's office and the eerily quiet
midnight bus ride to Parris Island. Lalor describes the wicked
combination of fatigue, nerves, disorientation, misery, loneliness,
and homesickness that conspire to keep him from his goal-along with
the hours of close order drill, push-ups, hand-to-hand combat
training, the pit, and the unrelenting mind games.
Witness the nasty recruit-on-recruit infighting that results
when young men struggle to survive while being pushed past their
limits physically, mentally, and emotionally. Gaze at the target
from the five hundred yard line on Qualification Day, when failure
means at least an extra two weeks on the island and the added
humiliation of failing the quintessential test of a Marine.
Experience the rappel tower, night firing, the infiltration
courses, and long, back-crushing humps. Struggle with Lalor and his
platoon as they try to overcome the Crucible, the final obstacle
before claiming the title of United States Marine.
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