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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > General
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.
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."
Just War scholarship has adapted to contemporary crises and
situations. But its adaptation has spurned debate and
conversation--a method and means of pushing its thinking forward.
Now the Just War tradition risks becoming marginalized. This
concern may seem out of place as Just War literature is
proliferating, yet this literature remains welded to traditional
conceptualizations of Just War. Caron E. Gentry and Amy E. Eckert
argue that the tradition needs to be updated to deal with substate
actors within the realm of legitimate authority, private military
companies, and the questionable moral difference between the use of
conventional and nuclear weapons. Additionally, as recent policy
makers and scholars have tried to make the Just War criteria
legalistic, they have weakened the tradition's ability to draw from
and adjust to its contemporaneous setting.
The essays in "The Future of Just War" seek to reorient the
tradition around its core concerns of preventing the unjust use of
force by states and limiting the harm inflicted on vulnerable
populations such as civilian noncombatants. The pursuit of these
challenges involves both a reclaiming of traditional Just War
principles from those who would push it toward greater
permissiveness with respect to war, as well as the application of
Just War principles to emerging issues, such as the growing use of
robotics in war or the privatization of force. These essays share a
commitment to the idea that the tradition is more about a rigorous
application of Just War principles than the satisfaction of a
checklist of criteria to be met before waging "just" war in the
service of national interest.
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.
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.
This is the compelling story of a. man who learned to fly before
WWII. He soon joined the regular army air corps as a private. As
war became inevitable he completed flight training as a staff
sergeant and had the wings of a military pilot. He flew bombers,
fighters and transport aircraft before being sent to the Pacific
area. Flying i54's loaded with priority cargo and personnel in and
the wounded out. It was one bloody island after another from the
East Indies to Tokyo Not flying as a group but as a single sitting
duck for the enemy and friendly fire. As a single plane he landed
at Atsugi airport to bring out the first loads of decimated allied
prisoners. This was followed by flying "the hump" to help Chang
Kia-chek against the communists. Discharged as a captain, he flew
for up-start airlines that went bankrupt one after another. Two
major carriers did no better. He was called to active duty during
the Korean War to drop a weather station in northeast Greenland.
Again a civilian, he was a chief pilot, operations director, a
student of design and aeronautical engineering while running an
aircraft conversion shop. From Peru to the Artic wastelands and
places around the world were his work area. This was followed by
being a personal pilot and aviation consultant for powerful
executives.
Polls show that a sizeable portion of the American population
believes that troops found WMD in Iraq and that Saddam Hussein was
somehow responsible for the attacks of September 11. Even after the
9/11 Commission Report and numerous other reports have concluded
that our intelligence was flawed, people in the freest nation on
earth continue to be misinformed about something that could not be
more vital to understand—the reasons for sending troops into
harm's way. This insightful analysis argues that the media should
have done a better job of performing its traditional role of
skeptic and watchdog, and it examines what went wrong. There are,
of course, many people whose support for going to war in Iraq was
not contingent on the existence of WMD or a connection to al-Qaeda.
But many others based their support for the war on misinformation.
Dadge explores why the media did not aggressively investigate the
claims made by the administration and intelligence agencies; in
short, why they did not do their job: to fully inform the citizenry
to the best of their ability. He examines pressures from the Bush
administration, pressures from corporate consolidation of media
ownership, patriotism and self-censorship, and other factors. He
concludes with recommendations for ways in which the media can
improve their reporting on government.
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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