'A required book for anyone who wishes to understand the Argentine situation before and after the Falklands War' GRAHAM GREENE Jimmy Burns was the only full-time British foreign correspondent to remain in Argentina covering the Falklands War. In The Land that Lost Its Heroes, he gives a detailed account of the military planning of the invasion, exposing not only the hidden motives and nature of Argentina's military regime, but also the pitifully inadequate reactions of both British diplomacy and intelligence. Burns exposes the duplicity of other Western nations and the international banking community and gives a vivid first-hand account of the end of the regime, the debt crisis and the return to democracy under Raul Alfonsin.

‘. . . it is nine months this evening since I last saw the light in my own house, when I had to tear myself away from all that is dear to me. And today is also my little son’s birthday. Oh, how I long for home.’

So wrote Michael Muller in 1901 as he gazed at the lights of Cape Town from a ship bound for Bermuda, after months of internment in a British POW camp in Simon’s Town. The camps were full, so Boer prisoners were being sent to other parts of the empire. Michael’s brothers, Chris and Pieter, were exiled to Ceylon, while Lool was held in the Green Point camp in Cape Town.

Remarkably, three of the brothers kept diaries – the only known instance of this happening in the Boer War. They recorded their intimate thoughts and turbulent emotions, and the diaries gave them agency. The scrawled notes of Chris on the evening after the legendary Magersfontein battle, the rain-dashed pages written by Lool in Colesberg, and the angry words penned by Michael about his treatment at Surrender Hill, have the urgency of men determined to go on record.

When Beverley Roos-Muller first began to explore writing about the Boer experience of the war, she read the tiny war diary of Michael, grandfather of her husband, Ampie Muller. It led her to the discovery of the other diaries and many more documents. She also records the brothers’ difficult return home and examines the consequences for South Africa of the bitterness this strife invoked.

This is a beautifully told account of the fellowship of four brothers in war, their capture and their eventual recovery.

The official origin story of the SAS is a myth. This is the real story of how the world's preeminent Special Forces came into existence. It's a fly-on-the-wall, character-driven story of the origins of a new means of warfare, forged from the wreckage of Dunkirk. It's the birth of subliminal methods - guerrilla Commando units that could inflict devastating 'mosquito stings' on larger, and better-armed opponents. It's a never-before-told account of how the shock of defeat propelled an unlikely group of renegades into the frontline of the war. An adventure that reaches back from the trenches of the Western Front, to high piracy in the deserts of North Africa, to the final assault on Germany. It's a concept that takes shape in the corridors of headquarters, on long nights at the long bar in Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo, and on the deadliest battlefields in history, around a cast of insubordinate mavericks who didn't fit into the tight hierarchy of the armed forces. Flashing between dramatic accounts from the field and back-channel power negotiations in Westminster, reeling in a cast of characters that includes Evelyn Waugh, Ernest Hemingway and Randolph Churchill, as well as a lot of alcohol, amphetamines and grenades, this is the real story of the SAS as you have never seen it before.

"Battle: A History of Combat and Culture" spans the globe and the centuries to explore the way ideas shape the conduct of warfare. Drawing its examples from Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, and America, John A. Lynn challenges the belief that technology has been the dominant influence on combat from ancient times to the present day. In battle, ideas can be more far more important than bullets or bombs. Carl von Clausewitz proclaimed that war is politics, but even more basically, war is culture. The hard reality of armed conflict is formed by - and, in turn, forms - a culture's values, assumptions, and expectations about fighting. The author examines the relationship between the real and the ideal, arguing that feedback between the two follows certain discernable paths. Battle rejects the currently fashionable notion of a "Western way of warfare" and replaces it with more nuanced concepts of varied and evolving cultural patterns of combat. After considering history, Lynn finally asks how the knowledge gained might illuminate our understanding of the war on terrorism.

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The thrilling untold story of Cold War submarine espionage and an inside look at the U.S. Navy's "Silent Service""

"Stalking the Red Bear"--for the first time ever--describes the action principally from the perspective of a commanding officer of a "Sturgeon"-class nuclear submarine during the Cold War, taking readers closer to the Soviet target than any work on submarine espionage has ever done before.

This is the untold true story of a covert submarine espionage operation against the Soviet Union. Few individuals outside the intelligence and submarine communities knew anything about these top-secret missions, and with good reason: the curtain of secrecy surrounding submarine operations, beginning in World War II, is nearly impenetrable.

Cloaking itself in virtual invisibility to avoid detection, this "Sturgeon"-class boat went sub versus sub deep within Soviet-controlled waters north of the Arctic Circle, where the risks were extraordinarily high and anything could happen. Readers will know what it was like to carry out a covert mission aboard a nuke and experience the sights, sounds, and dangers unique to submarining.

This book offers a lively and fascinating account--from the perspective of a young lieutenant--of the trials and tribulations of a soldier in the Third Turkish Brigade in Korea in 1952-53. Turkey was one of the first countries to support United Nations action against Communist aggression in Korea. Reaching Korea before the Chinese entered the conflict, the Turkish Brigades were soon situated at the front in a series of critical battles. Danisman recounts the details of these events in a fast-paced, uncompromising style.

1-Recce was die skerpste, veelsydigste en dodelikste spesialiseenheid in die ganse Suid-Afrikaanse weermag. Dié manne was superfiks, bomenslik taai en het vir niks gestuit nie. Hulle het telkens hul lewens op die spel geplaas in die uitvoering van hoogs geheime operasies agter vyandelike linies.

Dekades lank is oor al dié hoogs geheime sendings geswyg. Nou, vir die eerste keer, openbaar die Recce's se groot generaals (waaronder die legendariese kol Jan Breytenbach) hoe hulle gestuur is om verskeie polities sensitiewe operasies uit te voer.

Daar word onthul hoe hulle in die doodsnikke van die apartheidsera gestuur is, en op die laaste oomblik verhoed is, om sleutel ANC-figure op te blaas. Hulle vertel van 1-Recce se betrokkenheid by die omstrede Grensoorlog en die bestaan van 'n hoogsgeheime "Eskadron" in die destydse Rhodesiese Weermag.

Ná jare van mites en geheimhouding gee dié boek 'n totaal nuwe blik op die Recce's en die werk wat hulle onsigbaar agter die skerms gedoen het.

The author of the international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind looks at covert operations and assassination plots in the medieval period, matching anything to be found in our own era. Alongside the familiar pitched battles, regular sieges, and large-scale manoeuvres, medieval and early modern wars also involved assassination, abduction, treason and sabotage. These undercover operations were aimed chiefly against key individuals, mostly royalty or the leaders of the opposing army, and against key fortified places, including bridges, mills and dams. However, because of their clandestine nature, these deeds of "derring-do" have not been studied in any detail, a major gap which this book fills. It surveys a wide variety of special operations, from the eleventh to the sixteenth century. It then analyzes in greater depth six select and exciting operations: the betrayal of Antioch in 1098; the attempt to rescue King Baldwin II from the dungeon of Khartpert in 1123; the assassination of Conrad of Montferrat in 1192; the attempt to storm Calais in 1350; the "dirty war" waged by the rulers of France and Burgundy in the 1460s and 1470s; and the demolition of the flour mill of Auriol in 1536. "A portrait of espionage, covert operations, assassination squads, and the deep penetration of seemingly invulnerable fortresses or security systems matching anything to be found in the war stories of the modern era." MATTHEW BENNETT, SANDHURST. Professor YUVAL NOAH HARARI teaches at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and is the author of the international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.

The 9/11 attacks fundamentally transformed how the U.S. approached terrorism, and led to the unprecedented expansion of counterterrorism strategies, policies, and practices. While the analysis of these developments is rich and vast, there remains a significant void. The diverse actors contributing to counterterrorism increasingly consider, engage and impact women as agents, partners, and targets of their work. Yet, flawed assumptions and stereotypes remain prevalent, and it remains undocumented and unclear how and why counterterrorism efforts evolved as they did in relation to women. Drawing on extensive primary source interviews and documents, A Woman's Place traces the evolution of women's place in U.S. counterterrorism efforts through the administrations of Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump, examining key agencies like the U.S. Department of Defense, the Department of State, and USAID. In their own words, Joana Cook investigates how and why women have developed the roles they have, and interrogates U.S. counterterrorism practices in key countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Analysing conceptions of and responses to terrorists, she also considers how the roles of women in Al-Qaeda and ISIS have evolved and impacted on U.S. counterterrorism considerations.

Five months after being deployed to Iraq, Lima Company's 1st Platoon, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, found itself in Fallujah, embroiled in some of the most intense house-to-house, hand-to-hand urban combat since World War II. In the city's bloody streets, they came face-to-face with the enemy-radical insurgents high on adrenaline, fighting to a martyr's death, and suicide bombers approaching from every corner. award-winning author and historian Patrick O'Donnell stood shoulder to shoulder with this modern band of brothers as they marched and fought through the streets of Fallujah, and he stayed with them as the casualties mounted.

The inside story of Ukraine's bravery and defiance in the face of Russian aggression, from the conflict's leading journalist. When President Putin ordered Russian troops to invade Ukraine, he unleashed a terror which struck at the very heart of Europe and broke the world order that had been in place since the fall of the Soviet Union. Financial Times reporter Christopher Miller has been embedded in Ukraine for 13 years and is one of the few journalists who knows Ukraine inside out, who was at the frontline in Crimea and who reported from bombed out Mariupol. This book takes the reader from the coal-dusted, sunflower-covered steppe of the Donbas to the heart of the Euromaidan revolution camp in Kyiv; from the Black Sea shores of Crimea where Russian troops stealthily annexed Ukraine’s peninsula to the bloody battlefields where warlords ruled with iron fists; to the destruction and terror wrought by Russian bombs in Bucha, Kharkiv, Mariupol, and beyond. This is the story of modern Ukraine and its transformation, as told through the lives of Ukrainians, their fears and struggles. It is Ukraine in all its glory: vast, weird, exhilarating, defiant, resilient, trying to escape the long shadow of its former imperial ruler while fighting to build a new future.

Cybersecurity is a complex and contested issue in international politics. By focusing on the 'great powers'--the US, the EU, Russia and China--studies in the field often fail to capture the specific politics of cybersecurity in the Middle East, especially in Egypt and the GCC states. For these countries, cybersecurity policies and practices are entangled with those of long-standing allies in the US and Europe, and are built on reciprocal flows of data, capital, technology and expertise. At the same time, these states have authoritarian systems of governance more reminiscent of Russia or China, including approaches to digital technologies centred on sovereignty and surveillance. This book is a pioneering examination of the politics of cybersecurity in the Middle East. Drawing on new interviews and original fieldwork, James Shires shows how the label of cybersecurity is repurposed by states, companies and other organisations to encompass a variety of concepts, including state conflict, targeted spyware, domestic information controls, and foreign interference through leaks and disinformation. These shifting meanings shape key technological systems as well as the social relations underpinning digital development. But however the term is interpreted, it is clear that cybersecurity is an integral aspect of the region's contemporary politics.

The astonishing true story of how the CIA, MI6 and a Soviet defector saved the world in 1962, as told in the new film, The Courier, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. In August 1960, a Soviet colonel called Oleg Penkovsky tried to make contact with the West. His first attempt was to approach two young American students in Moscow. He handed them a bulky envelope and pleaded with them to deliver it to the American embassy. MI6 and the CIA came to believe Penkovsky was genuine and so the two agencies decided to run the operation jointly. It ran right through the Berlin crisis - in an astonishing near-miss, Penkovsky learned that the Wall was going to be built four days before it happened but was unable to contact his handlers - and the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which rocket manuals Penkovsky had handed over were crucial in determining what President Khrushchev was doing, and helped President John F. Kennedy and his team end the crisis and avert a nuclear war. Penkovsky, codenamed HERO, is widely seen as the most important spy of the Cold War, and the CIA-MI6 joint operation to run him has never been bettered. But had the KGB already 'turned' Penkovsky and were the Russians making sure he saw the information they wanted him to see? If so, it may even have been possible that the whole Cuban Missile Crisis might have been a Russian deception operation. Thrilling, evocative and hugely controversial, Dead Drop blows apart some of the myths about one of the Cold War's most well-known operations as the world stood on the brink of nuclear destruction.

Prominent military historian Victor Davis Hanson explores the nature of leadership with his usual depth and vivid prose in "The Savior Generals," a set of brilliantly executed pocket biographies of five generals (Themistocles, Belisarius, William Tecumseh Sherman, Matthew Ridgway, and David Petraeus)who single-handedly saved their nations from defeat in war. War is rarely a predictable enterprise--it is a mess of luck, chance, and incalculable variables. Today's sure winner can easily become tomorrow's doomed loser. Sudden, sharp changes in fortune can reverse the course of war.These intractable circumstances are sometimes mastered by leaders of genius--asked at the eleventh hour to save a hopeless conflict, one created by others and frequently unpopular politically and with the public. The savior generals often come from outside the established power structure, employ radical strategies, and flame out quickly. Their careers regularly end in controversy. But their dramatic feats of leadership are vital slices of history--not merely as stirring military narrative, but as lessons on the dynamic nature of consensus, leadership, and destiny.

This book analyzes the strategic implications of the shift in focus for the US Armed Forces from regular to irregular war.
Lawrence Freedman closely examines the difficulty the US Armed Forces face in shifting their focus from preparing for regular wars, in which combat is separated from civil society, to irregular wars, in which combat is integrated with civil society. He argues that the political context of contemporary irregular wars requires that the purpose and practice of western forces be governed by liberal values, showing that this is also the case with regular wars, to the extent they occur, but it is the integration with civil society that makes the application of liberal values so challenging.
"The Transformation of Strategic Affairs" suggests that this challenge becomes easier to meet when military operations are understood to contribute to the development of a compelling narrative about the likely course and consequence of a conflict, in which these values are shown to be respected. At the same time, however, while it is vital that the employment of armed force remains sensitive at all times to the underlying political context, and sensitive to the role of narratives in shaping this context, the book shows that a key test of success will always be the defeat of the opposing forces. The "war on terror" has highlighted these issues, and this "Adelphi Paper" concludes with much-needed suggestions for a strategic response.
This book will be of great interest to students of the US Armed Forces, politics, strategic studies and military history.

'More compelling and more inspiring than the versions we've previously heard' - JOHN NICHOL 'Gripping and fascinating... unforgettable characters and thrilling adventures' - WILL IREDALE The official origin story of the SAS is a myth. This is the real story of how the world's preeminent Special Forces was born. It's a fly-on-the-wall, character-driven story of the origins of a new means of warfare, forged from the wreckage of Dunkirk. It's the birth of subliminal methods - guerrilla Commando units that could inflict devastating 'mosquito stings' on larger, and better-armed opponents. It's a never-before-told account of how the shock of defeat propelled an unlikely group of renegades into the frontline of the war. An adventure that reaches back from the trenches of the Western Front, to high piracy in the deserts of North Africa, to the final assault on Germany. It's a concept that takes shape in the corridors of headquarters, on long nights at the long bar in Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo, and on the deadliest battlefields in history, around a cast of insubordinate mavericks who didn't fit into the tight hierarchy of the armed forces. Flashing between dramatic accounts from the field and back-channel power negotiations in Westminster, reeling in a cast of characters that includes Evelyn Waugh, Ernest Hemingway and Randolph Churchill, as well as a lot of alcohol, amphetamines and grenades, this is the real story of the SAS as you have never seen it before.

The Gulf War of 1991 heralded a new type of warfare - one dominated by speed and high technology, that yielded a remarkably low level of casualties among the Allied forces. Just under a million Allied troops were deployed to the Gulf region, where they faced not only the extreme heat, but also biological, chemical and suspected nuclear threats. This book assesses both Operation Desert Storm and Operation Desert Shield, examining each forces strategies, and the political and military figures who were involved on both sides. The operational side of Desert Shield is also detailed in full.

Widespread media interest into the Chechen conflict reflects an ongoing concern about the evolution of federal Russia. Why did the Russian leadership initiate military action against Chechnya in December 1994 but against no other constituent part of the Federation? This study demonstrates that the Russian invasion represented the culmination of a crisis that was perceived to have become an increasing threat not only to the stability of the North Caucasus region, but also to the very foundations of Russian security. It looks closely at the Russian Federation in transition, following the collapse of the communist Soviet Union, and the implications of the 1991 Chechen Declaration of Independence in the context of Russia's democratisation project.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203417763

This updated edition of Professor Paul Moorcraft s timely and controversial book examines the international and domestic threats to the West from Jihadism. It joins the dots in the Middle East, Asia and Africa and explains what it means for the home front, mainly Britain but also continental Europe and the USA. More Brits are trying to join the Islamic State than the reserve forces. Why? It puts the whole complex jigsaw together without pulling any punches. After briefly tracing the origins of Jihadism from the time of the Prophet, The Jihadist Threat analyses the fall-out from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and how far these fuelled the rise of the self-styled Islamic State and other terror groups and the extent these pose to European society. Finally, the Author offers suggestions for defeating this existential threat to the Western way of life. This well-illustrated book is written from the inside. Professor Moorcraft, currently the Director of the Centre for Foreign Policy Analysis, London, has long worked at the heart of the British security establishment and has operated as a war correspondent in over thirty conflict zones since Afghanistan in the 1980s, often alongside frontline Jihadists. Arguably no-one is better qualified to write on this subject and his knowledge coupled with forthright views cannot be ignored. This claim is borne out by his predictions in the original edition which have proved prescient. This is an important work that fully deserves the acclaim it has attracted.

The French Army's war in Algeria has always aroused passions. This book does not whitewash the atrocities committed by both sides; rather it shifts the focus to the conflict itself, a perspective assisted by the French republic's belated official admission in 1999 that what happened in Algeria was indeed a war. Each contributor made use of the increasingly liberalised French archives of the war since the early 1990s. The book re-evaluates counter-terrorism in the cities; the methods used in the "battle for hearts and minds" in the villages of the interior; the hitherto neglected roles of French air and naval power in supporting the army's counter-insurgency offensives against the Armee de Liberation Nationale; and the battles that France decisively lost for both world opinion and for support from her major Western allies.
For years, with few exceptions, writers have overwhelmingly examined the Algerian crisis through the prism of French party politics, personal testimony and more recently, memory. But, far from being "a war with no name" the fighting in Algeria was on a massive scale involving some two million French soldiers. This collection, published for the 40th anniversary of the war's end, firmly situates the battles they fought in strategy, operations and diplomacy.

This book sets out to open up the space for interpretation of history and politics in Aceh which is now in a state of armed rebellion against the Indonesian government. It lays out a groundwork for analysing how female agency is constituted in Aceh, in a complex interplay of indigenous matrifocality, Islamic belief and practices, state terror, and political violence. Analysts of the current conflict in Aceh have tended to focus on present events. Siapno provides a historical analysis of power, co-optation, and resistance in Aceh and links it to broader comparative studies of gender, Islam, and the state in Muslim communities throughout the world.