|
Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > General
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
Transformed over 15 years from the shy girl next-door in Neighbours
to the sensuous Princess of Pop, Kylie Minogue has grown up in
public, rarely shrinking from expressing candid opinions about her
life and career. Here, in her own words, are Kylies thoughts on
herself, her sexuality, her music, her men, being a gay icon and
everything else.
Albania's democratic transition - one of the longest and most
arduous of post-communist Europe - has failed to produce
consolidated institutions. Therefore, this book undertakes the
first comprehensive review of Albania's military and judicial
reform - from 1992 to 2009 - to ascertain why military reform
produced substantial institutionalisation and judicial reform did
not. The author analyses the different outcomes by outlining how
political elites constructed the interests that shaped their
subsequent political actions. Overall, this book presents a novel
theoretical account for institutionalisation in emerging
democracies and sheds light on two of Albania's most important
democratisation reforms. The book will appeal to practitioners
working on institutionalisation reforms, institutionalist and
democratisation researchers interested in post-authoritarian
transitions, and area study scholars focusing on Albania and the
Western Balkans.
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.
|
You may like...
Israel Alone
Bernard-Henri Levy
Paperback
R464
R394
Discovery Miles 3 940
|