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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > Defence strategy, planning & research > General
History has tended to measure war's winners and losers in terms of its major engagements, battles in which the result was so clear-cut that they could be considered "decisive." Marathon, Cannae, Tours, Agincourt, Austerlitz, Sedan, Stalingrad-all resonate in the literature of war and in our imaginations as tide-turning. But were they? As Cathal J. Nolan demonstrates in this magisterial and sweeping work, victory in major wars usually has been determined in other ways. Even the most legendarily lopsided of battles did not necessarily decide their outcomes. Nolan also challenges the hoary concept of the military "genius," even of the Great Captains-from Alexander to Frederick and Napoleon-mapping instead the decent into total war. The Allure of Battle systematically recreates and analyzes the major campaigns among the Great Powers, from the Middle Ages through the 20th century, from the fall of Byzantium to the defeat of the Axis powers, tracing the illusion of "short-war thinking," the hope that victory might be swift and conflict brief. Such as almost never been the case. Even one-sided battles have mainly contributed to victory or defeat by accelerating erosion of the other side's defenses, resources, and will. Massive conflicts, the so-called "people's wars," beginning with Napoleon and continuing until the end of World War II, have been more fundamentally determined by prolonged stalemate and attrition, wars in which the determining factor was not tactical but industrial. Nolan's masterful book places battles squarely and mercilessly within the context of the wider conflict in which they took place. In the process it help corrects a distorted view of their role in war, replacing popular images of "decisive battles" with somber appreciation of the sacrifice and endurance necessary to victory. Accessible, provocative, exhaustive, and illuminating, The Allure of Battle will spark fresh debate about the history and conduct of warfare.
John Norris shows how logistics, though less glamorous than details of the fighting itself, played a decisive role in the outcome of every campaign and battle of World War Two. The author marshals some astounding facts and figures to convey the sheer scale of the task all belligerents faced to equip vast forces and supply them in the field. He also draws on first-hand accounts to illustrate what this meant for the men and women in the logistics chain and those depending on it at the sharp end. Many of the vehicles, from supply trucks to pack mules, and other relevant hardware are discussed and illustrated with numerous photographs. This first volume of two looks at the early years of the war, so we see, for example, how Hitlers panzer divisions were kept rolling in the Blitzkrieg (a German division in 1940 still had around 5000 horses, requiring hundreds of tonnes of fodder) and the British armys disastrous loss of equipment at Dunkirk. This is a fascinating and valuable study of a neglected aspect of World War Two.
The SIPRI Yearbook is an authoritative and independent source of data and analysis on armaments, disarmament and international security. It provides an overview of developments in international security, military expenditure, weapons and technology, arms production and the arms trade, armed conflict and conflict management, and efforts to control conventional, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. This 53rd edition of the SIPRI Yearbook covers developments during 2021, including: US BLArmed conflict and conflict management, with an overview of armed conflict and peace processes across the Americas, Asia and Oceania, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as a focus on global and regional trends in peace operationsBE UE US BLMilitary expenditure, international arms transfers and developments in arms productionBE UE US BLWorld nuclear forces, with an overview of each of the nine nuclear-armed states and their nuclear modernization programmesBE UE US BLNuclear arms control, featuring developments in the Russian-United States strategic dialogue, Iran's nuclear deal and the multilateral nuclear arms control and disarmament treaties, including the entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear WeaponsBE UE US BLChemical, biological and health security threats, including the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the investigation of allegations of chemical weapon use in Syria and developments in the international legal instruments against chemical and biological warfare BE UE US BLConventional arms control and regulation of new weapon technologies, with a focus on inhumane weapons and other conventional weapons of humanitarian concern, including efforts to regulate autonomous weapon systems, state behaviour in cyberspace and space, and developments in the Open Skies TreatyBE UE US BLDual use and arms trade controls, including developments in the Arms Trade Treaty, multilateral arms embargoes and export control regimes, and review processes in the legal framework of the European Union for such controls as well as annexes listing arms control and disarmament agreements, international security cooperation bodies, and key events in 2021.BE UE
This textbook provides a comprehensive introduction to modern strategy, covering the context, theory, and practice of military strategy in all its different forms. Covering all the main issues in the field, the book explores the major themes through a combination of classical and modern strategic theory, history, and current practice. It is split into three main sections: The first provides the context for contemporary strategy and includes discussions of the human, technological, intelligence, ethical, and grand strategic dimensions. The second part explores the theory and practice of strategy in different geographical domains, including land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace. The final part engages with three of the most challenging forms of strategy in the contemporary era: nuclear weapons, terrorism, and insurgency. This second edition brings the book up to date by including discussions of the rise and fall of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS); the emergence of robotics and artificial intelligence; major events in space and cyberspace; and the growing profile of nuclear weapons. Each chapter presents the reader with a succinct summary of the topic, provides a challenging analysis of current issues, and finishes with key points, questions for discussion, and further reading. This book will be essential reading for upper-level students of strategic studies, war studies, military history, and international security.
Military Strategy in the 21st Century explores military strategy and the new challenges facing Western democracies in the twenty- first century, including strategy in cyber operations and peacekeeping, challenges for civil-military relations, and the strategic choices of great powers and small states. The volume contributes to a better understanding of military strategy in the twenty- first century, through exploring strategy from three perspectives: first, the study of strategy, and how our understanding of strategy has changed over time; second, new areas for strategic theory, such as peacekeeping and cyberspace; and third, the makers of strategy, and why states choose suboptimal strategies. With the increasing number of threats challenging strategy makers, such as great power rivalry, terrorism, intrastate wars, and transnational criminal organisations, Military Strategy in the 21st Century will be of great value to scholars of IR, Security Studies, Strategic Studies, and War Studies as well as policymakers and practitioners working with military strategy in particular and international security and war in general. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Strategic Studies.
Defence Planning as Strategic Fact provides and elaborates on an "upstream" focus on the variegated organizational, political and conceptual practices of military, civilian administrative and political leaderships involved in defence planning, offering an important security and strategic studies supplement to the traditional "downstream" focus on the use of force. The book enables the reader to engage with the role of ideas in defence planning, of organizational processes and biases, path dependencies and administrative dynamics under the pressures of continuously changing domestic and international constraints. The chapters show how defence planning must be seen as a constitutive element of defence and strategic studies - that it is a strategic fact of its own which merits particular practical and scholarly attention. As defence planning creates the conditions behind every peace upheld or broken and every war won or lost, Defence Planning as Strategic Fact will be of great use to scholars of defence studies, strategic studies, and military studies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Defence Studies.
The first work to lay out Roman strategic thinking from its start under Augustus until its final demise in 476 CE From Octavian's victory at Actium (31 bc) to its traditional endpoint in the West (476), the Roman Empire lasted a solid 500 years-an impressive number by any standard, and fully one-fifth of all recorded history. In fact, the decline and final collapse of the Roman Empire took longer than most other empires even existed. Any historian trying to unearth the grand strategy of the Roman Empire must, therefore, always remain cognizant of the time scale, in which she is dealing. Although the pace of change in the Roman era never approached that of the modern era, it was not an empire in stasis. While the visible trappings may have changed little, the challenges Rome faced at its end were vastly different than those faced by Augustus and the Julio-Claudians. Over the centuries, the Empire's underlying economy, political arrangements, military affairs, and, most importantly, the myriad of external threats it faced were in constant flux, making adaptability to changing circumstances as important to Roman strategists as it is to strategists of the modern era. Yet the very idea of Rome having a grand strategy, or what it might be, had not concerned historians until Edward Luttwak's The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire appeared forty years ago. Although this pioneering work generated much debate, it failed to win over many ancient historians, in part because of its heavy emphasis on military force and its neglect of considerations of diplomacy, economics, politics, culture, and the changing nature of the threats that confronted Rome. By employing an expansive definition of strategy and by focusing much of the narrative on crucial historical moments and the personalities involved, James Lacey provides a comprehensive, persuasive, and engaging account of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. It assimilates the most recent work of classical historians and archaeologists to correct the flaws and omissions of previous accounts, thus presenting the most complete and nuanced narrative of Roman strategic thinking and execution ever published.
In a time where US deployments are uncertain, this book shows how US service members can either build the necessary support to sustain their presence or create added animosity towards the military presence. The United States stands at a crossroads in international security. The backbone of its international position for the last 70 years has been the massive network of overseas military deployments. However, the US now faces pressures to limit its overseas presence and spending. In Beyond the Wire, Michael Allen, Michael Flynn, Carla Martinez Machain, and Andrew Stravers argue that the US has entered into a "Domain of Competitive Consent" where the longevity of overseas deployments relies upon the buy-in from host-state populations and what other major powers offer in security guarantees. Drawing from three years of surveys and interviews across fourteen countries, they demonstrate that a key component of building support for the US mission is the service members themselves as they interact with local community members. Highlighting both the positive contact and economic benefits that flow from military deployments and the negative interactions like crime and anti-base protests, this book shows in the most rigorous and concrete way possible how US policy on the ground shapes its ability to advance its foreign policy goals.
This book explores citizens' perceptions and experiences of security threats in contemporary Britain, based on twenty focus groups and a large sample survey conducted between April and September 2012. The data is used to investigate the extent to which a diverse public shares government framings of the most pressing security threats, to assess the origins of perceptions of security threats, to investigate what makes some people feel more threatened than others, to examine the effects of threats on other areas of politics and to evaluate the effectiveness of government messages about security threats. We demonstrate widespread heterogeneity in perceptions of issues as security threats and in their origins, with implications for the extent to which shared understandings of threats are an attainable goal. While this study focuses on the British case, it seeks to make broader theoretical and methodological contributions to Political Science, International Relations, Political Psychology, and Security Studies. -- .
The Western Front evokes images of mud-spattered men in waterlogged trenches, shielded from artillery blasts and machine-gun fire by a few feet of dirt. This iconic setting was the most critical arena of the Great War, a 400-mile combat zone stretching from Belgium to Switzerland where more than three million Allied and German soldiers struggled during four years of almost continuous combat. It has persisted in our collective memory as a tragic waste of human life and a symbol of the horrors of industrialized warfare. In this epic narrative history, the first volume in a groundbreaking trilogy on the Great War, acclaimed military historian Nick Lloyd captures the horrific fighting on the Western Front beginning with the surprise German invasion of Belgium in August 1914 and taking us to the Armistice of November 1918. Drawing on French, British, German, and American sources, Lloyd weaves a kaleidoscopic chronicle of the Marne, Passchendaele, the Meuse-Argonne, and other critical battles, which reverberated across Europe and the wider war. From the trenches where men as young as 17 suffered and died, to the headquarters behind the lines where Generals Haig, Joffre, Hindenburg, and Pershing developed their plans for battle, Lloyd gives us a view of the war both intimate and strategic, putting us amid the mud and smoke while at the same time depicting the larger stakes of every encounter. He shows us a dejected Kaiser Wilhelm II-soon to be eclipsed in power by his own generals-lamenting the botched Schlieffen Plan; French soldiers piling atop one another in the trenches of Verdun; British infantryman wandering through the frozen wilderness in the days after the Battle of the Somme; and General Erich Ludendorff pursuing a ruthless policy of total war, leading an eleventh-hour attack on Reims even as his men succumbed to the Spanish Flu. As Lloyd reveals, far from a site of attrition and stalemate, the Western Front was a simmering, dynamic "cauldron of war" defined by extraordinary scientific and tactical innovation. It was on the Western Front that the modern technologies-machine guns, mortars, grenades, and howitzers-were refined and developed into effective killing machines. It was on the Western Front that chemical warfare, in the form of poison gas, was first unleashed. And it was on the Western Front that tanks and aircraft were introduced, causing a dramatic shift away from nineteenth-century bayonet tactics toward modern combined arms, reinforced by heavy artillery, that forever changed the face of war. Brimming with vivid detail and insight, The Western Front is a work in the tradition of Barbara Tuchman and John Keegan, Rick Atkinson and Antony Beevor: an authoritative portrait of modern warfare and its far-reaching human and historical consequences.
A global account of military strategy, which examines the practices, rather than the theories, of the most significant military figures of the past 400 years  Strategy has existed as long as there has been organised conflict. In this ground-breaking account, Jeremy Black explores the ever-changing relationship between purpose, force, implementation and effectiveness in military strategy and its dramatic impact on the development of the global power system.  Taking a “total†view of strategy, Black looks at leading powers—notably the United States, China, Britain, and Russia—in the wider context of their competition and their domestic and international strengths. Ranging from France’s ancien régime and Britain’s empire building to present-day conflicts in the Middle East, Black devotes particular attention to the strategic practice and decisions of the Kangxi Emperor, Clausewitz, Napoleon, and Hitler.
On the 75th anniversary of D-Day, a new history of the momentous Normandy campaign with fresh insights from award-winning historian James Holland D-Day, June 6, 1944, and the seventy-six days of bitter fighting in Normandy that followed the Allied landing, have become the defining episode of World War II in the west--the object of books, films, television series, and documentaries. Yet as familiar as it is, as James Holland makes clear in his definitive history, many parts of the OVERLORD campaign, as it was known, are still shrouded in myth and assumed knowledge. Drawing freshly on widespread archives and on the testimonies of eye-witnesses, Holland relates the extraordinary planning that made Allied victory in France possible; indeed, the story of how hundreds of thousands of men, and mountains of materiel, were transported across the English Channel, is as dramatic a human achievement as any battlefield exploit. The brutal landings on the five beaches and subsequent battles across the plains and through the lanes and hedgerows of Normandy--a campaign that, in terms of daily casualties, was worse than any in World War I--come vividly to life in conferences where the strategic decisions of Eisenhower, Rommel, Montgomery, and other commanders were made, and through the memories of paratrooper Lieutenant Dick Winters of Easy Company, British corporal and tanker Reg Spittles, Thunderbolt pilot Archie Maltbie, German ordnance officer Hans Heinze, French resistance leader Robert Leblanc, and many others. For both sides, the challenges were enormous. The Allies confronted a disciplined German army stretched to its limit, which nonetheless caused tactics to be adjusted on the fly. Ultimately ingenuity, determination, and immense materiel strength--delivered with operational brilliance--made the difference. A stirring narrative by a pre-eminent historian, Normandy '44 offers important new perspective on one of history's most dramatic military engagements and is an invaluable addition to the literature of war.
Ever since Thucydides pondered reasons for the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, writers, philosophers, and social scientists have all tried to identify and catalog factors that promote conflict escalation. Historians emphasize path-dependencies: the future grows out of the past, hence tomorrow's wars are rooted in yesterday's conflicts. Political scientists attend to changes in power balance or domestic political forces. All of these causes, however, are constructed by human beings and involve the memories, emotions, and motives of both the leaders and the led. In July 1914, the long peace of the great European powers was shattered when the Sarajevo assassinations quickly escalated to a world war that few ever anticipated. In contrast, at the height of the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis could have easily plunged us into a thermonuclear world war, but was ultimately peacefully resolved. Why? In Roots of War: Wanting Power, Seeing Threat, Justifying Force, author David G. Winter identifies the three psychological factors that contributed to the differences in these historical outcomes: the desire for power (power motivation), exaggerated perception of the opponent's threat, and justification for using military power and force. As Winter illustrates, several different lines of research establish how these three factors lead to escalation and war: the role of power motivation is demonstrated by comparative content analysis of documents (i.e. diplomatic communications, leaders' speeches, and media coverage) from crises that escalated to war versus similar events that did not; case studies of several American and British wars; and analysis of "new wars" (i.e. civil unrest, state-sponsored violence, and terrorism). Drawing on this research, Roots of War is a powerful testament to the roles of power and the preservation of peace, and demonstrates their enormous influence in diplomatic interventions in the past and present-day.
Between 1961 and 1967 the United States Air Force buried 1,000 Minuteman Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles in pastures across the Great Plains. "The Missile Next Door" tells the story of how rural Americans of all political stripes were drafted to fight the Cold War by living with nuclear missiles in their backyards and what that story tells us about enduring political divides and the persistence of defense spending. By scattering the missiles in out-of-the-way places, the Defense Department kept the chilling calculus of Cold War nuclear strategy out of view. This subterfuge was necessary, Gretchen Heefner argues, in order for Americans to accept a costly nuclear buildup and the resulting threat of Armageddon. As for the ranchers, farmers, and other civilians in the Plains states who were first seduced by the economics of war and then forced to live in the Soviet crosshairs, their sense of citizenship was forever changed. Some were stirred to dissent. Others consented but found their proud Plains individualism giving way to a growing dependence on the military-industrial complex. Even today, some communities express reluctance to let the Minutemen go, though the Air Force no longer wants them buried in the heartland. Complicating a red state/blue state reading of American politics, Heefner s account helps to explain the deep distrust of government found in many western regions, and also an addiction to defense spending which, for many local economies, seems inescapable."
This book examines the normative debates around the American use of targeted killings. It questions whether the Obama administration's defence of its use of targeted killings is cohesive or hypocritical. In doing so, the book departs from the disciplinary purpose of international law, constitutional law and the just war tradition and instead examines discipline-specific defences of targeted killings to identify their requisite normative principles in order to compare these norms across disciplines. The methodology used in this book means that it argues that targeted killings are only defensible as acts of war, but it also highlights the normative role of accountability and responsibility in this defence. In doing so, it offers an argument that the use of 'pattern of life' killings by the CIA falls outside the defence offered by the Obama administration, but that this same type of targeting could be used by the military due to differing standards/mechanisms of responsibility assignment in these organisations. The book thus provides a way of investigating contemporary wars where the conduct of war lacks the traditional hallmarks of conventional warfare. Furthermore, by drawing attention to differing normative concepts that underpin competing interpretations of law and morality, it provides a way of analysing contemporary political violence in an interdisciplinary fashion without seeking to displace single disciplinary study. This book will be of much interest to students of military studies, ethics of war, foreign policy, international security and IR.
This volume brings together some of Professor Azar Gat's most significant articles on the evolution of strategic doctrines and the transformation of war during the 20th and early 21st centuries. It sheds new light on the rise of the German Panzer arm and the doctrine of Blitzkrieg between the two world wars; explores the factors behind the formation of strategic policy and military doctrine in the world war era and during the cold war; and explains why counterinsurgency has become such a problem. The book concludes with the spread of peace in the developed world, challenged as it is by the rise of the authoritarian-capitalist great powers - China and Russia - and by the chilling prospect of unconventional terrorism. This last essay summarizes the author's latest research and has not previously been published in article form. This collection will be of much interest to students of strategic studies, military history, and international relations.
Knowledge is the basic output of the defense technology
establishment in the United States; it is what enables the
development of weapon systems. From this premise, this volume
explores the process of knowledge production in defense technology
from the beginnings of the Cold War to the present time. Produced
through the process of research and development (R&D),
technical knowledge for defense is an economic commodity. It is
"fundable" in the sense of having future value. Like other
commodities in the futures market, it is purchased before it is
produced. But unlike those other commodities, this knowledge is
typically produced through the joint efforts of the customer and
the vendor.
Do you know that house-to-house fighting is the finest sport on earth? Do you know that is it just the sort of close-quarter scrapping the British excel in? Do you know that once you get going you will love it? Do you want to come with me down our street and play hell with some bloody Huns? You do? Right, we'll carry on! House to House Fighting is one of a series of training books written in 1942 by Colonel G. A. Wade for the newly-recruited Home Guard. This reproduction from the Royal Armouries' archive shows how Second World War trainees learnt to defend themselves amidst the threat of enemy invasion.
Savant Singh (1694-1764), the Rajput prince of Kishangarh-Rupnagar, is famous for commissioning beautiful works of miniature painting and composing devotional (bhakti) poetry to Krishna under the nom de plume Nagaridas. After his throne was usurped by his younger brother, while Savant Singh was on the road seeking military alliances to regain his kingdom, he composed an autobiographical pilgrimage account, "The Pilgrim's Bliss" (Tirthananda); a hagiographic anthology, "Garland of Anecdotes about Songs" (Pad-Prasang-mala); and a reworking of the story of Rama, "Garland of Rama's Story" (Ram-Carit-Mala). Through an examination of Savant Singh's life and works, Heidi Pauwels explores the circulation of ideas and culture in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries in north India, revealing how Singh mobilized soldiers but also used myths, songs, and stories about saints in order to cope with his personal and political crisis. Mobilizing Krishna's World allows us a peek behind the dreamlike paintings and refined poetry to glimpse a world of intrigue involving political and religious reform movements.
Adopting a multidisciplinary perspective, this book explores the key challenges associated with the proliferation of cyber capabilities. Over the past two decades, a new man-made domain of conflict has materialized. Alongside armed conflict in the domains of land, sea, air, and space, hostilities between different types of political actors are now taking place in cyberspace. This volume addresses the challenges posed by cyberspace hostility from theoretical, political, strategic and legal perspectives. In doing so, and in contrast to current literature, cyber-security is analysed through a multidimensional lens, as opposed to being treated solely as a military or criminal issues, for example. The individual chapters map out the different scholarly and political positions associated with various key aspects of cyber conflict and seek to answer the following questions: do existing theories provide sufficient answers to the current challenges posed by conflict in cyberspace, and, if not, could alternative approaches be developed?; how do states and non-state actors make use of cyber-weapons when pursuing strategic and political aims?; and, how does the advent of conflict in cyberspace challenge our established legal framework? By asking important strategic questions on the theoretical, strategic, ethical and legal implications and challenges of the proliferation of cyber warfare capabilities, the book seeks to stimulate research into an area that has hitherto been neglected. This book will be of much interest to students of cyber-conflict and cyber-warfare, war and conflict studies, international relations, and security studies.
The People's Republic of China (PRC) is India's powerful neighbor since the first year of 1950's. Before that, without prejudice to the issue of its status of sovereignty or Chinese suzerainty, Tibet had de facto fulfilled the role. That fact of past unfamiliarity with Chinese way of politico-diplomatic expressions, aided by China's unilaterally adopted adversarial posture towards India, makes it imperative for India's strategic community to study China's moves very carefully, and draw conclusions for the purpose of managing the strained relationship. This book is a compilation of such observations, analyses and inferences. Study of PRC's various initiatives which have direct or indirect bearing on India and the methods adopted to implement those is a tough call. This is so because in dealing with inter-state relations, the Chinese leadership arrogate the right of defining the issues according to their partisan perceptions and exclusive stratagem. To that extent, papers contained in this book narrate the factual and honest impressions which China's policies and actions, as these relate to India's concerns, depict. The purpose of this book would be served if these impressions are taken note of in PRC's future bilateral discourse in true spirit of mutuality.
This new Handbook examines the issues, challenges, and debates surrounding the problem of security in Africa.
"NEW YORK TIMES "BESTSELLER "From the Hardcover edition."
In strategic studies and international relations, grand strategy is a frequently-invoked concept. Yet, despite its popularity, it is not well understood and it has many definitions, some of which are even mutually contradictory. This state of affairs undermines its usefulness for scholars and practitioners alike. Lukas Milevski aims to remedy this situation by offering a conceptual history of grand strategy in the English language, analysing its evolution from 1805 to the present day in the writings of its major proponents. In doing so, he seeks to clarify the meaning and role of the concept, both theoretically and practically, and shed light on its continuing utility today. |
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