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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > War & defence operations > General
This book investigates, and explains, the extent to which different liberal democracies have resorted to the use of force since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The responses of democratic states throughout the world to the September 2001 terrorist attacks have varied greatly. This book analyses the various factors that had an impact on decisions on the use of force by governments of liberal democratic states. It seeks to explain differences in the security policies and practices of Australia, Canada, France, Germany and the UK regarding the war in Afghanistan, domestic counterterrorism measures and the Iraq War. To this end, the book combines the concepts of strategic culture and securitisation into a theoretical model that disentangles the individual structural and agential causes of the use of force by the state and sequentially analyses the impact of each causal component on the other. It argues that the norms of a strategic culture shape securitisation processes of different expressions, which then bring about distinct modes of the use of force in individual security policy decisions. While governments can also deviate from the constraints of a strategic culture, this is likely to encounter a strong reaction from large parts of the population which in turn can lead to a long-term change in strategic culture. This book will be of much interest to students of strategic culture, securitisation, European politics, security studies and IR in general.
In this study Brian Bosworth looks at the critical period between 329 and 325 BC, when Alexander the Great was active in Central Asia and what is now Pakistan. He documents Alexander's relations with the peoples he conquered, and addresses the question of what it meant to be on the receiving end of the conquest, drawing a bleak picture of massacre and repression. At the same time Alexander's views of empire are investigated, his attitude to his subjects, and the development of his concepts of personal divinity and universal monarchy. Analogies are thus drawn with the Spanish conquest of Mexico, which has a comparable historiographical tradition and parallels many of Alexander's dealings with his subjects. Although of concern to the specialist, this book is equally directed at the general reader interested in the history of Alexander and the morality of empire.
This book looks at the development of Israeli-Arab relations during the formative years 1949 to 1956, focusing on Arab infiltration into Israel and Israeli retaliation. Palestinian refugee raiding and cross-border attacks by Egyptian-controlled irregulars and commandos were a core phenomenon during this period and one of the chief causes of Israel's invasion of Sinai and the Gaza strip in 1956. Morris deepens our understanding of the current situation in the Middle East and of the prospects for a lasting peace there.
This is a carefully researched and illuminating study of siege warfare in the twelfth century. The siege was an integral part of medieval military experience, and was particularly significant in the Mediterranean region. Dr Rogers explores siege warfare and the role it played in the First Crusade and the establishment of the Crusader States, in Italy, Spain, and Portugal, and in the seaborne expeditions of the Italian maritime states. Dr Rogers sets out to discover how it was that crusading forces handicapped by rudimentary organisation and logistical support were able to conduct some of the most dramatic siege operations of the pre-gunpowder period. He traces the development and diffusion of techniques; and analyses the experience of siege warfare in every aspect, from the question of supplies of component parts for siege engines to the often complex political situations of besieger and besieged. This is a book which contributes not only to the military history of the twelfth century but also to its political and cultural history. `excellent work, written by a scholar who has a thorough grasp of the subject and who presents it in a lucid manner.' Speculum `an excellent work ... a fine study, full of intriguing ideas for readers interested in crusading, municipalities, and the role of warfare.' The Historian `Rogers's book is an excellent look at the medieval world's most bellicose century.' American Historical Review
This is a collection of vignettes written by Soviet junior officers describing their experiences fighting the Mujahideen guerillas. The material was originally collected and published - for internal use only - by the Frunze Combined Arms Staff College to serve as a text on combat against a guerilla force in mountain-desert terrain. It provides examples of good and bad military practice. The lessons are not specific to the Russian forces, and the knowledge gained could apply to future conflicts.
Sheds light on the skills and techniques of the medieval military engineer, over a thousand year sweep. The results of medieval engineering still surround us - cathedrals, castles, stone bridges, irrigation systems. However, the siege artillery, siege towers, temporary bridges, earthwork emplacements and underground mines used for war have left little trace behind them; and there is even less of the engineers themselves: the people behind the military engineering achievements. The evidence for this neglected group is studied here. The author begins byconsidering the evolution of military technology across centuries, and the impact of new technologies in the context of the economic and social developments which made them possible. He looks at how military engineers obtained their skills, and the possible link with scholastic scientific awareness. With the increased survival of government records from the middle ages, engineers acquire names and individuals can be identified. And the fifteenth century -the age of polymaths such as Leonardo da Vinci - saw a new type of literate military engineer, part of a recognized profession, but with its roots in a thousand years of historical development. PETER PURTON, D Phil (Oxon), FSA, has written extensively on medieval fortifications and siege warfare; his publications include the comprehensive two-volume history of the medieval siege (Boydell, 2010).
Today the Korean War of 1950-1953 is overshadowed by later twentieth-century conflicts in Vietnam and the Middle East, yet at the time it was the focus of international attention. It threatened to lead to a third world war, and although fought on a limited scale, it still involved over a million men under UN command and even more on the Communist side. It left the American and British troops who took part with a range of intense recollections that often marked them for the rest of their lives, and it is these experiences that James Goulty draws on in this eyewitness history of the conflict. He uses official documents, letters, diaries, regimental histories, memoirs, oral histories and correspondence to show what the war was like for those who took part. Their accounts vividly contrast the American and British experience as seen through the eyes of individual servicemen, and they throw fresh light on the relations between the UN forces on their different attitudes, tactics, training and equipment, and on the tensions that developed between them.
The blow to British pride and confidence caused by the crushing defeat of their army in Afghanistan during the winter of 1841/2 compares in its impact to the disaster in New York on 11 September 2001. The British had replaced a popular and effective monarch with a weak one in the mistaken belief that he would keep the Russians at bay. Two years later, nearly all the British and Indian soldiers in the region were killed in a popular uprising. Margaret Kekewichs perceptive new study of the conflict describes the British defeat, their re-occupation of Afghanistan in the spring of 1842, then their final withdrawal at the end of the year. Her account, which is based on the graphic diaries written by two British eyewitnesses, gives a fascinating insight into the conflict in Afghanistan 150 years ago. The story is told by, first, Lady Sale who together with over 100 women, children and soldiers was captured and imprisoned by the Afghans. The second account comes from the Reverend Allen, a young chaplain to the army that invaded Afghanistan in April 1842 to avenge British humiliation and rescue the prisoners. Both these eyewitnesses deplored the follies that had led to war and defeat and also the suffering that was inflicted on many innocent Afghans. At a time when British forces are deeply engaged in another war in Afghanistan, Margaret Kekewich offers a balanced and thought-provoking new perspective on a previous conflict in the region.
`Careful, original and wide-ranging study of many different aspects of late medieval military history.' HISTORY The Hundred Years War embraced warfare in all aspects, from the grand set pieces of Crecy and Agincourt to the pillaged lands of the dispossessed population. What makes this book different from previous studies emphasising the great battles is its use of less familiar evidence, such as administrative records and landscape archaeology, to gain a truer picture of the realities of medieval warfare. From a general review of battle tactics, the book turns to examine (at points enlisting computer analysis) a number of issues: the composition of the English army, the management of affairs in Aquitaine, the response in England at large to the war and the consequent propaganda and hardship,and the impact of warfare on local communities. Close study of surviving artefacts - weapons, fortifications - also allows realistic assessments of military and naval experiences. Contributors: ANDREW AYTON, MATTHEW BENNETT,ANNE CURRY, IAN FRIEL, ROBERT HARDY, MICHAEL HUGHES, MICHAEL JONES, BRIAN KEMP, JOHN KENYON, MARK ORMROD, ROBERT SMITH, MALCOLM VALE.
This work represents a collective effort by ten social scientists with experience in the Horn of Africa to portray the marginalization and deprivation of the pastoralist population in that region. It includes case studies from the Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia and Kenya, as well as a case study from Mali, included for purposes of comparison with another region of Africa. The central issue addressed by the contributors is the political consequence of the decline of pastoralism in a region ravaged by conflict.
Erwin Rommel is the arguably the most well-known German general of the Second World War. Revered by his troops and applauded by his enemies, the so-called Desert Fox achieved legendary status for his daring exploits and bold manoeuvres during the North African campaign. In this book, richly illustrated with over 400 images, the author examines the privations and challenges Rommel faced in leading his coalition force. Endeavouring to reach the Nile Delta, we find Rommel's Axis soldiers poorly-prepared to undertake such an audacious operation. Much-admired by his men in the front lines, we discover a demanding and intolerant leader, censured by subordinate officers and mistrusted by his superiors in Berlin. Certainly no diplomat, we observe posed interactions with Italian and junior German officers through an official lens. We note Rommels readiness to take advantage of his enemys weakness and study his extraordinary instinct for waging mobile warfare. We consider his disregard for the decisive factor of supply and view his armys reliance on captured equipment. We learn how this brave and ambitious commander was celebrated by German propaganda when the Wehrmachts fortunes in the East were waning. Conversely, analyse why Winston Churchill honoured him as a daring and skillful opponent. Finally, we picture this energetic, ambitious, at times reckless, commander as he roamed the vast Western Desert battlefield. This is the story of Rommel in North Africa.
The Art of Maneuver is an important theoretical study of an issue that is currently the subject of much discussion in professional military journals and symposia. The author takes a fresh, unbiased look at what soldiers consider the maneuver-oriented American army and finds that we do not understand the importance of maneuver as classical writers on the subject going back to Sun Tzu have understood it. In fact, we are culturally conditioned to see war as an attritional phenomenon--think of the emphasis on body count and the use of over-whelming firepower in Vietnam. A similar mind-set was operative as recently as Operation Just Cause, the U.S. invasion of Panama. On the other hand, General Schwarzkopf found maneuver warfare extremely effective in Operation Desert Storm. Leonhard shows how true maneuver-warfare theory has been applied in campaigns throughout history. With a genius for apt analogy he shows how our obsession with fighting and winning set-piece battles causes us to overlook an enemy's true vulnerabilities. But as low-intensity conflicts promise to become the dominant warfare of the future, the importance of maneuver in attacking an enemy's critical vulnerability will render attrition approaches to warfighting ever more obsolete.
On August 25 1886, the Apache chief, Geronimo, surrendered to the US army, ending a long and bloody struggle. This fascinating book draws on fresh evidence to examine the ironies, dangers, and vicissitudes of that campaign. Based on the papers collected by Lt. Charles B. Gatewood - the one white man Geronimo trusted - including depositions from old soldiers and scouts, official documents, articles, letters, and photographs, the book shows that it was essentially a war no one won - the Apaches (like the Sioux, Comanche, and Nez Perce before them), losing their land and lifestyle, the Americans losing all that the tribes might have contributed to the union and more than a measure of national self-respect.
An exciting trip back in time to the American Revolution, "a reminder of what history can be when written by a master."--Publishers Weekly
The book focuses on peacekeeping as a device for maintaining international stability, and for remedying situations in which states are in conflict with each other. Alan James examines around fifty cases, explaining the background to each one, and analysing its political significance. There is also a detailed examination of the concept of peacemaking, and a look into its increasing importance in international affairs, emphasised by the fact that the United Nations won the Nobel Peace Prize for its peacekeeping activities.
An assessment of the prospects for building down the NATO/Warsaw Pact military confrontation in Europe by negotiated and unilateral measures. The book also gives a far-sighted view of an organization of defence in Europe that will be set up to replace the existing security organizations.
The seventh edition of this highly successful textbook analyzes the history, evolution, and processes of national security policies. It examines national security from two fundamental fault lines - the end of the Cold War and the evolution of contemporary terrorism dating from the 9/11 terrorist attacks - and traces their path up to ISIS and beyond. The book considers how the resulting era of globalization and geopolitics guides policy. Placing these trends in conceptual and historical context and following them through military, semimilitary, and nonmilitary concerns, National Security treats its subject as a nuanced and subtle phenomenon that encompasses everything from the global to the individual with the nation at its core. New to the Seventh Edition An assessment of the impact of the Trump presidency on national security and relevant domestic policies, including border security and energy security matters. The continuing impact and evolution of terrorism as a security problem, with notable emphasis on the decline of the Islamic State (IS) and what terrorist threats are likely to succeed it. A description of the cyber security problem with an emphasis on Russian efforts to interfere with the 2016 US presidential election and beyond. A revised delineation of the geographic and substantive challenges facing the United States in the form of a chapter on "lethal landscapes," emphasizing the rise of China as a global rival and opponent in Asia and an attempt to deal with state aspirants like the Kurds. This book will continue to be highly beneficial to students and scholars working and studying in security studies, military and strategic studies, defense studies, foreign policy, US politics and international relations.
A comprehensive analysis of the relationship between political judgement, bureaucratic advice and military intelligence in the mismanagement of Britain's Falklands policy. The author argues that the Junta's responsibility for the invasion does not exonerate British decision-makers.
For the romantic generation of Americans in the mid-nineteenth century, the Mexican war was a grand exercise in self-identity: it legitimized the young republic's convictions of mission and destiny to a doubting world. This book examines the war's place in the popular imagination of the era. The Mexican War was the first American conflict to be widely reported in the press, as well as the first to be waged against an alien in a distant, strange, and exotic land. For mid-century Americans, the author shows, the war provided a window onto the outside world, promoting an awareness - if not an understanding - of a people and a land unlike any they had known before. Drawing on military and travel accounts, newspaper dispatches, and a host of other sources, the author recreates the mood and feeling of the period - its unbounded optimism and its patriotic pride.
Detailed survey of the continued development of the siege in the later middle ages, showing the effects of new technology and armaments. The siege dominated warfare during the medieval period. Contemporary evidence - from both accounts of sieges, and records of government - survives in relatively large quantites for the later medieval period; together with archaeological evidence, it is used here to offer a full and comprehensive picture of siege warfare. The book shows how similar methods were practised everywhere, with knowledge of new technologies spreading quickly, and experts selling their skills to any willing employer: it also looks at how the erection of defences capable of withstanding increasingly sophisticated attack became an expensive proposition. The question of whether some of the immense surviving monuments of this age really had a military function at all is also addressed. The book begins with the Mongol conquests in Asia and Europe and the thirteenth-century apogee of pre-gunpowder siege warfare, before examining theslow impact of guns and the cumulatively massive changes in attack and defence of the fifteenth century. The companion volume, A History of the Early Medieval Siege, covers the period from around 450 until 1200.
Over the last decade (and indeed ever since the Cold War), the rise of insurgents and non-state actors in war, and their readiness to use terror and other irregular methods of fighting, have led commentators to speak of 'new wars'. They have assumed that the 'old wars' were waged solely between states, and were accordingly fought between comparable and 'symmetrical' armed forces. Much of this commentary has lacked context or sophistication. It has been bounded by norms and theories more than the messiness of reality. Fed by the impact of the 9/11 attacks, it has privileged some wars and certain trends over others. Most obviously it has been historically unaware. But it has also failed to consider many of the other dimensions which help us to define what war is - legal, ethical, religious, and social. The Changing Character of War, the fruit of a five-year interdisciplinary programme at Oxford of the same name, draws together all these themes, in order to distinguish between what is really changing about war and what only seems to be changing. Self-evidently, as the product of its own times, the character of each war is always changing. But if war's character is in flux, its underlying nature contains its own internal consistency. Each war is an adversarial business, capable of generating its own dynamic, and therefore of spiralling in directions that are never totally predictable. War is both utilitarian, the tool of policy, and dysfunctional. This book brings together scholars with world-wide reputations, drawn from a clutch of different disciplines, but united by a common intellectual goal: that of understanding a problem of extraordinary importance for our times. This book is a project of the Oxford Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War.
The memoirs of the legendary Skorzeny appear here in its first unabridged English edition. Skorzeny's fame began with the successful raid to free Benito Mussolini from the Gran Sasso, Italy in 1943. His elite commandos surprised Italian guards in a daring daytime raid. Hitler presented Skorzeny with the Knight's Cross for this operation. Not only is this raid explained in minute detail, many of Skorzeny's previously unknown operations in all European and Russian theatres of World War II are given in detailed accounts. Operation Griffin - the innovative use of German Kommandos dressed as American soldiers working behind enemy lines - during the Ardennes Offensive in 1944 is given in-depth coverage, as is Skorzeny's rememberances on the Malmedy massacre. Skorzeny also offers his insights into the mysterious Rudolf Hess mission to England in May 1941, and offers a behind the scenes look at German and Russian secret military intelligence, and the workings of Canaris and Gehlen.
Only three short years after the end of the Japanese occupation, war came again to Malaya. The Chinese-backed guerrillas called it the War of the Running Dogs - their contemptuous term for those in Malaya who remained loyal to the British. The British Government referred to this bloody and costly struggle as the 'Malayan Emergency'. Yet it was a war that lasted twelve years and cost thousands of lives. By the time it was over Malaya had obtained its independence - but on British, not on Chinese or Communist terms. Here is the war as it was. Here are the planters and their wives on their remote rubber estates, the policemen, the generals and the soldiers, the Malays, Chinese and Indians of a polyglot country, all fighting an astute, ruthless, and well organized enemy.
We are at a time when international law and the law of war are particularly important. The testing of nuclear weapons that is being used in the rhetoric surrounding threats of war is creating new fears and heightening current tensions. Richard Falk has for decades been an outspoken authority calling for nuclear disarmament and the enforcement of non-proliferation treaties. In this collection of essays, Falk examines the global threats to all humanity posed by nuclear weapons. He is not satisfied with accepting arms control measures as a managerial stopgap to these threats and seeks no less than to move the world back from the nuclear precipice and towards denuclearization. Falk's essays reflect the wisdom and innovative thinking he has brought to his long career as a scholar and activist, as he reminds nuclear weapons states of their obligation under international law and moral imperative to seek nuclear disarmament. |
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