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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > General
There is no necessary relationship between fame and power, and
great influence is often wielded in willful obscurity. So it was
with the irascible, indomitable Eugene Fubini. A physics prodigy
who fled Italy when the fascists came to power, his searing
intelligence and relentless determination lifted him from obscurity
to the highest levels of the Pentagon. Indifferent to anything but
results, Fubini worked behind the scenes to shape the strategy and
substance of his adopted country's post-World War II defense. Along
the way he exerted enormous influence over the development of
radar, the rise of the military-industrial complex, the Space Race,
and many of the other signature events and movements of
mid-twentieth-century American geopolitics. But even as his
unbending determination to do things his way earned him the
admiration of his colleagues, it left him feared and isolated
within his own family. "Let Me Explain" is a portrait of a man
whose unwillingness and inability to compromise paid enormous
rewards, and extracted a heavy emotional price. David G. Fubini is
a director of McKinsey & Company, Inc. in Boston,
Massachusetts. For more than a decade he was the managing director
of the Boston office, and led the firm's activities in New England.
Prior to joining McKinsey, David was an initial member of a small
group that became the McNeil Consumer Products Company of Johnson
& Johnson. David received a degree in business administration
with honors from the University of Massachusetts, and a master's
degree in business administration, with distinction, from Harvard
University. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts with his wife,
Bertha Rivera, and their four children.
"Mr. Prime Minister, to achieve order in the casbah I have to act
brutally toward people free of crime, too. I feel humiliated by
this behavior. The situation has become a catastrophe. It's
breaking us." So spoke an Israeli soldier when Prime Minister
Shamir visited troops in the West Bank. Until Not Shooting and Not
Crying, few have addressed, from a psychological perspective, the
coping strategies and unconventional resolutions constructed by the
Israeli soldier in the face of overwhelming moral dilemmas, which
he traditionally solved by unselfishly risking his life, but not by
refusing to fight. In Israel, refusing to fight for one's country
is considered deviant behavior, but in the war in Lebanon
individuals adopted this unconventional mode of moral resolution
for the first time. Linn assesses the nature of the decision-making
process involved in this mode of selective conscientious objection
and attempts to define the moral meaning of such behavior, both to
the dedicated Israeli soldier and his society. This volume
investigates how and why the phenomenon of selective conscientious
objection emerged so dramatically during the war in Lebanon,
identifies the psychological characteristics of the soldiers who
chose this course of action, and considers the impact and future
consequences of this action on Israeli society. Linn summarizes the
military history of Israel from the 1967 Six-Day War to the
undeclared war currently being waged in the occupied territories.
The nine chapters, followed by references, tables, and appendixes,
address such areas as: the individual conscience at war--a search
for a theoretical framework; why the Lebanon war precipitated the
phenomenon of conscientious objection; the objectors' claims for
moral superiority and consistency; refusing soldiers compared to
striking physicians; and others. Scholars and students of military
affairs, psychologists, and those concerned with contemporary
ethical/moral issues will find Linn's work indispensable.
This book is the first about military-media relations to argue for
a fundamental restructuring of national journalism and the first to
document the failure of American journalism in the national
security field for the past thirty years. Press complaints of
excessive control by the military during the Persian Gulf War of
1990-91 were the inevitable result of the failure of American
journalism to train competent specialists in military reporting and
to provide an organizational structure that would assure
continuing, comprehensive coverage of national defense in peace and
war. This, in turn, is the result of retaining the "city-room"
concept as the basic organizational feature of the press, with
continuing reliance on the generalist in an age that demands
increasingly well-trained specialists. So long as the press fails
to modernize its basic methods of training to assure well-trained
defense specialists, the military will be required to closely
control reporters, as in the Persian Gulf War, as a basic
requirement of security for armed forces members and the national
interests. Permitting the military to control how the military
itself is reported is a grave danger to the democratic process.
Yet, so long as the press refuses to accept responsibility for
large-scale reform, the public will continue to support close
military control as an essential element of safety for its sons and
daughters in the armed forces, and out of concern for the success
of U.S. military operations. This book will be of interest to
students of the press, of the military, and of the media at large.
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.
War is hell and the battlefield is no playground. But can war
change a boy into a man, and more than that, a leader of men?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps the most famous and admired soldier to fight in World War
II was Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who achieved immortality as the
Desert Fox. Rommel's first field command during the war was the 7th
Panzer Division-also known as the Ghost Division-which he led in
France in 1940. During this campaign, the 7th Panzer suffered more
casualties than any other division in the German Army. During the
process, it inflicted a disporoportionate amount of casualties upon
the enemy. It took 97,486 prisoners, captured 458 tanks and armored
vehicles, 277 field guns, 64 anti-tank guns and 4,000 to 5,000
trucks. It captured or destroyed hundreds of tons of other military
equipment, shot down 52 aircraft, destroyed 15 more aircraft on the
ground, and captured 12 additional planes. It destroyed the French
1st Armored Division and the 4th North African Division, punched
through the Maginot Line extension near sSivry, and checked the
largest Allied counteroffensive of the campaign at Arras. When
France surrendered, the Ghost Division was within 200 miles of the
Spanish border. No doubt about it-Rommel had proven himself a great
military leader who was capable of greater things. His next
command, in fact, would be the Afrika Korps, where the legend of
the Desert Fox was born. Rommel had a great deal of help in
France-and much more than his published papers suggest. His staff
officers and company, battalion and regimental commanders were an
extremely capable collection of military leaders, which included 12
future generals (two of them SS), and two colonels who briefly
commanded panzer divisions but never reached general rank. They
also included Colonel Erich von Unger, who would no doubt have
become a general had he not been killed in action while commanding
a motorized rifle brigade on the Eastern Front in 1941, as well as
Kark Hanke, a Nazi gauleiter who later succeeded Heinrich Himmler
as the last Reichsfuehrer-SS. No historian has ever recognized the
talented cast of characters who supported the Desert Fox in 1940.
No one has ever attempted to tell their stories. This book remedies
this deficiency. In the weeks prior to D-Day, Rommel analyzed
Allied bombing patterns and concluded that they were trying to make
Normandy a strategic island in order to isolate the battlefield.
Rommel also noticed that the Allies had mined the entire Channel
coast, while the naval approaches to Normandy were clear. Realizing
that Normandy would be the likely site of the invasion, he replaced
the poorly-equipped 716th Infantry Division with the
battle-hardened 352nd Infantry Division on the coastal sector. But
his request for additional troops was denied by Hitler. Mitcham
offers a remarkable theory of why Allied intelligence failed to
learn of this critical troop movement, and why they were not
prepared for the heavier resistance they met on Omaha Beach. He
uses a number of little-known primary sources which contradict
previously published accounts of Rommel, his officers, and the last
days of the Third Reich. These sources provide amazing insight into
the invasion of Normandy from the German point of view. They
include German personnel records, unpublished papers, and the
manuscripts of top German officers like general of Panzer Troops
Baron Leo Geys von Schweppenburg, the commander of Panzer Group
West. This book also contains a thorough examination of the
virtually ignored battles of the Luftwaffe in France in 1944.
At the age of fifteen, Earl Russell's life was ripped out from
under him. His uncle, the only father he ever knew, banished Earl
from the only home the boy had ever known. Earl found himself a
teen outcast in a state of despair that sent him spinning without
direction or hope for years. His vision and dreams blurred by
tears, he walked blindly through life.
Desperate, he turned to the military for salvation and
structure. When he was eighteen, he earned the distinction of being
one of the youngest platoon sergeants in the Korean War. During his
service, he traveled to thirty-six countries. In this memoir, he
now shares some of the highlights and heartbreaks of a young man
thrown into war and travel, including his time served in a Libyan
prison for the crime of holding a woman's hand in public.
For Earl the world was a dazzling adventure. This collection of
true tales of one man's journeys is, at times, humorous, amorous,
and poignant. Often, the world traveler and soldier felt like a dog
chasing his own tail. In the end, his travels brought him back to
the hills and mountains of his childhood home in Georgia. He left
as an unsettled boy and returned a wiser man. These are his
stories.
They were young, and they were fighting a war no one wanted to
fight. They chose to serve their country despite these challenges.
In "In Our Duffel Bags ," authors Richard Geschke and Robert A.
Toto narrate the stories and the experiences of what junior army
officers faced as citizen soldiers during pre-voluntary military
service from 1969 to 1972. This memoir provides an inside view of
the military on the training fields of the Cold War in West Germany
and on the combat fields of Vietnam. It presents a poignant and
detailed drawing of what junior officers contended with during
these turbulent times in American history. From the training
grounds in Fort Benning, Georgia; to the jungle warfare school in
Panama; to the streets of West Germany; and to the rice paddies of
Vietnam, "In Our Duffel Bags " intimately describes the sights,
sounds, and smells of life in the military Much more than a
historical account, " In Our Duffel Bags " interweaves Geschke's
and Toto's individual experiences and perspectives, ties them back
to their families, and sets it all within the volatile historical
and political setting of the 1960s and 1970s. It shows how these
times affected history as well as impact current politics.
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.
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