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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > Military life & institutions > General
The story of Netley in Southampton - its hospital, its people and the secret history of the 20th-century. Now with a new afterword uncovering astonishing evidence of Netley's links with Porton Down & experiments with LSD in the 1950s. It was the biggest hospital ever built. Stretching for a quarter of a mile along the banks of Southampton Water, the Royal Victoria Military Hospital at Netley was an expression of Victorian imperialism in a million red bricks, a sprawling behemoth so vast that when the Americans took it over in World War II, GIs drove their jeeps down its corridors. Born out of the bloody mess of the Crimean War, it would see the first women serving in the military, trained by Florence Nightingale; the first vaccine for typhoid; and the first purpos- built military asylum. Here Wilfred Owen would be brought along with countless other shell-shocked victims of World War I - captured on film, their tremulous ghosts still haunted the asylum a generation later. In Spike Island, Philip Hoare has written a biography of a building. In the process he deals with his own past, and his own relationship to its history.
"Fighters Over The Falklands" captures daily life using pictures taken during the author's tours of duty on the Islands. From the first detachments of Phantoms and Rapiers operating from a rapidly upgraded RAF Stanley airfield to life at RAF Mount Pleasant, see life from the author's perspective as the Commander of the Tornado F3 Flight defending the islands' airspace. Font-line fighter crews provided Quick Reaction Alert during day to day flying operations working with the Royal Navy, Army and other Air Force units to defend a remote, and sometimes forgotten, theatre of operations. It will also look at how the islanders interact with the forces based at Mount Pleasant and contrast high technology military operations with the lives of the original inhabitants; namely the wildlife.
Accounting is frequently portrayed as a value free mechanism for allocating resources and ensuring they are employed in the most efficient manner. Contrary to this popular opinion, the research presented in Accounting at War demonstrates that accounting for military forces is primarily a political practice. Throughout history, military force has been so pervasive that no community of any degree of complexity has succeeded in. Through to the present day, for all nation states, accounting for the military and its operations has primarily served broader political purposes. From the Crimean War to the War on Terror, accounting has been used to assert civilian control over the military, instill rational business practices on war, and create the visibilities and invisibilities necessary to legitimize the use of force. Accounting at War emphasizes the significant power that financial and accounting controls gave to political elites and the impact of these controls on military performance. Accounting at War examines the effects of these controls in wars such as the Crimean, South African and Vietnam wars. Accounting at War also emphasizes how accounting has provided the means to rationalize and normalize violence, which has often contributed to the acceleration and expansion of war. Aimed at researchers and academics in the fields of accounting, accounting history, political management and sociology, Accounting at War represents a unique and critical perspective to this cutting-edge research field.
This is the first comprehensive book on Military Cost-Benefit Analysis and provides novel approaches to structuring cost-benefit and affordability analysis amidst an uncertain defense environment and cloudy fiscal prospects. Lifting the veil on military Cost-Benefit Analysis, this volume offers several new practical tools designed to guide defense investments (and divestments), combined with a selection of real-world applications. The widespread employment of Cost-Benefit Analysis offers a unique opportunity to transform legacy defense forces into efficient, effective, and accountable 21st century organizations. A synthesis of economics, statistics and decision theory, CBA is currently used in a wide range of defense applications in countries around the world: i) to shape national security strategy, ii) to set acquisition policy, and iii) to inform critical investments in people, equipment, infrastructure, services and supplies. As sovereign debt challenges squeeze national budgets, and emerging threats disrupt traditional notions of security, this volume offers valuable tools to navigate the political landscape, meet calls for fiscal accountability, and boost the effectiveness of defense investments to help guarantee future peace and stability. A valuable resource for scholars, practitioners, novices and experts, this book offers a comprehensive overview of Military Cost-Benefit Analysis and will appeal to anyone interested or involved in improving national security, and will also be of general interest to those responsible for major government programs, projects or policies.
As provider networks on military bases are overwhelmed with new cases, civilian clinicians are increasingly likely to treat military families. However, these clinicians do not receive the same military mental-healthcare training as providers on military installations, adding strain to clinicians' workloads and creating gaps in levels of treatment. Families Under Fire fills these gaps with real-world examples, clear, concise prose, and nuts-and-bolts approaches for working with military families utilizing a systems-based practice that is effective regardless of branch of service or the practitioner's therapeutic preference. Any civilian mental-health practitioner who wants to understand the diverse needs of military personnel, their spouses, and their families will rely on this indispensable guidebook for years to come.
Sexual violence was a widespread reality during the war and the occupation in the Soviet Union: Wehrmacht soldiers and SS men made women and girls victims of sexual torture, committed rape and sexual enslavement. They also visited both 'secret' prostitutes and official military brothels, and had encounters with women who were forced to trade sex for protection or food. In some areas, they engaged in consensual relations, which sometimes led to applications for marriage permits. This book dispels the myth that military leaders, in adhering to the Nazi ideology of 'race defilement', strictly repressed soldiers' sexuality. Regina Muhlhauser opens up new perspectives on the complexity of wartime sexual practices beyond the Nazi case by looking at the whole spectrum of heterosexual encounters--forced and consensual, violent and non-violent, commercial and non-commercial. In doing so, she develops a more nuanced understanding of soldiers' sexual behavior and the ways in which military commands assess soldierly sexuality and integrate it into their strategic thinking.
Colonel Samuel Ryan Curtis, engineer, lawyer, and graduate of West Point, arrived in Mexico in July of 1846 as commander of the 3rd Ohio Volunteer Regiment to find a volatile and chaotic situation in occupied towns along the Rio Grande. American civilians of the lowest sort - men and women - mingled with Mexican townspeople, robbing, murdering, and raping. Neither civil nor military law made provisions for governing municipalities under such conditions. Nor was the U.S. military prepared for a struggle against Mexican guerrilla forces and desperate bandits. Colonel Curtis was a diary keeper, and this record of his experiences in Mexico gives a clear picture of his efforts to restore and maintain order under nearly impossible conditions: of death and suffering in his regiment from disease, not fighting, and of the tedium of army camp life. A reflective man as well as an educated one, Curtis was a keen observer. He documented social and economic circumstances, flora and fauna, and the weather, even as he chronicled political conditions and martial unrest. The resulting diary is a major contribution to studies of the Mexican War.
Exploring efforts to integrate women into combat forces in the military, we investigate how resistance to equity becomes entrenched, ultimately excluding women from being full participants in the workplace. Based on focus groups and surveys with members of Special Operations, we found most of the resistance is rooted in traditional gender stereotypes that are often bolstered through organizational policies and practices. The subtlety of these practices often renders them invisible. We refer to this invisibility as organizational obliviousness. Obliviousness exists at the individual level, it becomes reinforced at the cultural level, and, in turn, cultural practices are entrenched institutionally by policies. Organizational obliviousness may not be malicious or done to actively exclude or harm, but the end result is that it does both. Throughout this Element we trace the ways that organizational obliviousness shapes individuals, culture, and institutional practices throughout the organization.
The period between World Wars I and II was a time of turbulent political change, with suffragists, labor radicals, demagogues, and other voices clamoring to be heard. One group of activists that has yet to be closely examined by historians is World War I veterans. Mining the papers of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and the American Legion (AL), Stephen R. Ortiz reveals that veterans actively organized in the years following the war to claim state benefits (such as pensions and bonuses), and strove to articulate a role for themselves as a distinct political bloc during the New Deal era. Beyond the Bonus March and GI Bill is unique in its treatment of World War I veterans as significant political actors during the interwar period. Ortiz's study reinterprets the political origins of the "Second" New Deal and Roosevelt's electoral triumph of 1936, adding depth not only to our understanding of these events and the political climate surrounding them, but to common perceptions of veterans and their organizations. In describing veteran politics and the competitive dynamics between the AL and the VFW, Ortiz details the rise of organized veterans as a powerful interest group in modern American politics.
In this astonishing new history of wartime Britain, historian Stephen Bourne unearths the fascinating stories of the gay men who served in the armed forces and at home, and brings to light the great unheralded contribution they made to the war effort. Fighting Proud weaves together the remarkable lives of these men, from RAF hero Ian Gleed - a Flying Ace twice honoured for bravery by King George VI - to the infantry officers serving in the trenches on the Western Front in WWI - many of whom led the charges into machine-gun fire only to find themselves court-martialled after the war for indecent behaviour. Behind the lines, Alan Turing's work on breaking the `enigma machine' and subsequent persecution contrasts with the many stories of love and courage in Blitzed-out London, with new wartime diaries and letters unearthed for the first time. Bourne tells the bitterly sad story of Ivor Novello, who wrote the WWI anthem `Keep the Home Fires Burning', and the crucial work of Noel Coward - who was hated by Hitler for his work entertaining the troops. Fighting Proud also includes a wealth of long-suppressed wartime photography subsequently ignored by mainstream historians. This book is a monument to the bravery, sacrifice and honour shown by a persecuted minority, who contributed during Britain's hour of need.
A timely and searing account of the American war in Afghanistan In Bravo Company, journalist and combat veteran Ben Kesling tells the story of the war in Afghanistan through the eyes of the men of one unit, part of a combat-hardened parachute infantry regiment in the 82nd Airborne Division. A decade ago, the soldiers of Bravo Company deployed to Afghanistan for a tour in Kandahar's notorious Arghandab Valley. By the time they made it home, three soldiers had been killed in action, a dozen more had lost limbs, and an astonishing half of the company had Purple Hearts.In the decade since, two of the soldiers have died by suicide, more than a dozen have tried, and others admit they've considered it. Declared at "extraordinary risk" by the Department of Veterans Affairs, Bravo Company was chosen as test subjects for a new approach to the veteran crisis, focusing less on isolated individuals and more on the group. Written with an insider's eye and ear, and drawing on extensive interviews and original reporting, Bravo Company follows the men from their initial enlistment and training, through their deployment and a major shift in their mission, and then on to what has happened in the decade since; as they returned to combat in other units or moved on with their lives as civilians, or struggled to. This is a powerful, insightful, and memorable account of a war that didn't end for these soldiers just because Bravo Company came home.
This book develops a new approach to the analysis of civil-military
relations by focusing on the effectiveness of the armed forces in
fulfilling roles & missions, and on their efficiency in terms
of cost. The approach is applied to the United States using
official documents and interviews with policy-makers. In addition
to analyzing the impact of defense reform initiatives over the past
thirty years, the book includes the recent phenomenon of
"contracting-out" security that has resulted in greater numbers of
contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan than uniformed military
personnel.
A memoir of astonishing power, savagery, and ashen lyricism, Storm of Steel illuminates not only the horrors but also the fascination of total war, seen through the eyes of an ordinary German soldier. Young, tough, patriotic, but also disturbingly self-aware, Junger exulted in the Great War, which he saw not just as a great national conflict but--more importantly--as a unique personal struggle. Leading raiding parties, defending trenches against murderous British incursions, simply enduring as shells tore his comrades apart, Junger kept testing himself, braced for the death that will mark his failure. Published shortly after the war's end, Storm of Steel was a worldwide bestseller and can now be rediscovered through Michael Hofmann's brilliant new translation.First time in Penguin ClassicsAcclaimed new translation based on a new authoritative textWidely viewed as the best account ever written of fighting in World War I
"Lands of Lost Borders carried me up into a state of openness and excitement I haven't felt for years. It's a modern classic."-Pico Iyer A brilliant, fierce writer, and winner of the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize, makes her debut with this enthralling travelogue and memoir of her journey by bicycle along the Silk Road-an illuminating and thought-provoking fusion of The Places in Between, Lab Girl, and Wild that dares us to challenge the limits we place on ourselves and the natural world. As a teenager, Kate Harris realized that the career she craved-to be an explorer, equal parts swashbuckler and metaphysician-had gone extinct. From what she could tell of the world from small-town Ontario, the likes of Marco Polo and Magellan had mapped the whole earth; there was nothing left to be discovered. Looking beyond this planet, she decided to become a scientist and go to Mars. In between studying at Oxford and MIT, Harris set off by bicycle down the fabled Silk Road with her childhood friend Mel. Pedaling mile upon mile in some of the remotest places on earth, she realized that an explorer, in any day and age, is the kind of person who refuses to live between the lines. Forget charting maps, naming peaks: what she yearned for was the feeling of soaring completely out of bounds. The farther she traveled, the closer she came to a world as wild as she felt within. Lands of Lost Borders, winner of the 2018 Banff Adventure Travel Award and a 2018 Nautilus Award, is the chronicle of Harris's odyssey and an exploration of the importance of breaking the boundaries we set ourselves; an examination of the stories borders tell, and the restrictions they place on nature and humanity; and a meditation on the existential need to explore-the essential longing to discover what in the universe we are doing here. Like Rebecca Solnit and Pico Iyer, Kate Harris offers a travel account at once exuberant and reflective, wry and rapturous. Lands of Lost Borders explores the nature of limits and the wildness of the self that can never fully be mapped. Weaving adventure and philosophy with the history of science and exploration, Lands of Lost Borders celebrates our connection as humans to the natural world, and ultimately to each other-a belonging that transcends any fences or stories that may divide us.
Simulations are widely used in the military for training personnel, analyzing proposed equipment, and rehearsing missions, and these simulations need realistic models of human behavior. This book draws together a wide variety of theoretical and applied research in human behavior modeling that can be considered for use in those simulations. It covers behavior at the individual, unit, and command level. At the individual soldier level, the topics covered include attention, learning, memory, decisionmaking, perception, situation awareness, and planning. At the unit level, the focus is on command and control. The book provides short-, medium-, and long-term goals for research and development of more realistic models of human behavior. Table of Contents Front Matter Executive Summary 1 Introduction 2 Human Behavior Representation: Military Requirements and Current Models 3 Integrative Architectures for Modeling the Individual Combatant 4 Attention and Multitasking 5 Memory and Learning 6 Human Decision Making 7 Situation Awareness 8 Planning 9 Behavior Moderators 10 Modeling of Behavior at the Unit Level 11 Information Warfare: A Structural Perspective 12 Methodological Issues and Approaches 13 Conclusions and Recommendations References Appendix: Biographical Sketches Index
The First World War tore apart the early twentieth century. Both terrible and terrifying, it banished misplaced optimism that war on such an unconscionable scale could never occur. A century after the guns fell silent on the Western Front, its scars continue to shape our modern idea of remembrance. As the national museum of arms and armour, the Royal Armouries brings a unique perspective to studies of the Great War. Stumbling Towards Victory contains photographs – many previously unpublished – from the museum archives, all of which were taken in the final twelve months of the war. Amidst the haunting emptiness of broken ground and shattered trees, these images convey the horror, and hope, of that final cataclysmic year. Published to coincide with the First World War centenary commemorations, Stumbling Towards Victory illustrates the final months of a global conflagration that was nothing less than an armageddon for the ages.
This is the first comprehensive book on Military Cost-Benefit Analysis and provides novel approaches to structuring cost-benefit and affordability analysis amidst an uncertain defense environment and cloudy fiscal prospects. Lifting the veil on military Cost-Benefit Analysis, this volume offers several new practical tools designed to guide defense investments (and divestments), combined with a selection of real-world applications. The widespread employment of Cost-Benefit Analysis offers a unique opportunity to transform legacy defense forces into efficient, effective, and accountable 21st century organizations. A synthesis of economics, statistics and decision theory, CBA is currently used in a wide range of defense applications in countries around the world: i) to shape national security strategy, ii) to set acquisition policy, and iii) to inform critical investments in people, equipment, infrastructure, services and supplies. As sovereign debt challenges squeeze national budgets, and emerging threats disrupt traditional notions of security, this volume offers valuable tools to navigate the political landscape, meet calls for fiscal accountability, and boost the effectiveness of defense investments to help guarantee future peace and stability. A valuable resource for scholars, practitioners, novices and experts, this book offers a comprehensive overview of Military Cost-Benefit Analysis and will appeal to anyone interested or involved in improving national security, and will also be of general interest to those responsible for major government programs, projects or policies.
From 1947 to 1963 some 2.3 million men were conscripted to do national service. For some it was to prove the most exciting and terrifying time of their lives, as many were sent to the Korean War or to countries such as Palestine and Kenya where the terrorist threat was ever-present. They faced death and learned about sex. For others, it was a frustrating interference in their lives, made all the more ridiculous by endless hours of square-bashing or painting coal white. Tom Hickman shows just how varied were the experiences of the recruits. By talking to over 80 veterans, he recalls the hilarious and moving stories from those times, and seeks to explain why the subject still causes debate more than 40 years on. Above all, The Call-Up is a portrait of a vanished era that many still feel has something to teach us today.
Soldier Magazine's Book of the Month Fascinating... Incredibly dangerous. The Times Gripping. Adrenalin fuelled true-life account with all the makings of a military thriller. The action unfolds like a Le Carre novel. Soldier Magazine 'If there are young women with children trapped in that hell and we can get them out, don't we have a duty to do so?' Hearing terrifying stories first-hand from naive young girls who'd been tricked, abused and enslaved by ISIS, ex-British Army soldier John Carney set up a high-risk operation to rescue as many as he could. This is the breath-taking true story of how he repeatedly led his men behind enemy lines into the Syrian lead storm to liberate women and children, delivering them to de-radicalization programmes and fair trials. Believing that 'every person we can bring back is living proof that ISIS is a failure', Carney tackles the complex issue of Jihadi Brides head on, as he and his men endanger their lives, not always returning safely home.
This book describes the wartime experiences of Reverend David Railton, MC, who was a chaplain on the Western Front during WWI. As a chaplain, Railton supported soldiers in their worst moments, he buried the fallen, comforted the wounded, wrote to the families of the missing and killed, and helped the survivors to remember and mark the loss of their comrades so that they were able to move on and do their job. He was present at many battles, and received the Military Cross for rescuing an officer and two men under heavy fire on the Somme. It was Railton's idea to bring home the body of a fallen comrade, whose identity was unknown, from the battlefields of Belgium and France to be buried in Westminster Abbey. Although suffering from what was obviously Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, after the war he carried out his duties as the vicar of Margate and took on many philanthropic works on behalf of the poor, especially supporting ex-servicemen who came home and had to deal with the aftermath of a terrible war and crippling unemployment. The story of the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior has been told several times, including the part played by the Reverend David Railton, M.C. However, this book - based on hundreds of Railton's original letters, notes, and writings - is the first book to tell the story of the man himself and his flag, which he used as an altar cloth and shroud throughout the war, was consecrated a year after the burial of the Unknown Warrior, and now hangs in Westminster Abbey. |
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