The explosive narrative of the life, captivity, and trial of Bowe Bergdahl, the soldier who was abducted by the Taliban and whose story has served as a symbol for America's foundering war in Afghanistan "An unsettling and riveting book filled with the mysteries of human nature." -Kirkus Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl left his platoon's base in eastern Afghanistan in the early hours of June 30, 2009. Since that day, easy answers to the many questions surrounding his case-why did he leave his post? What kinds of efforts were made to recover him from the Taliban? And why, facing a court martial, did he plead guilty to the serious charges against him?-have proved elusive. Taut in its pacing but sweeping in its scope, American Cipher is the riveting and deeply sourced account of the nearly decade-old Bergdahl quagmire-which, as journalists Matt Farwell and Michael Ames persuasively argue, is as illuminating an episode as we have as we seek the larger truths of how the United States lost its way in Afghanistan. The book tells the parallel stories of a young man's halting coming of age and a nation stalled in an unwinnable war, revealing the fallout that ensued when the two collided: a fumbling recovery effort that suppressed intelligence on Bergdahl's true location and bungled multiple opportunities to bring him back sooner; a homecoming that served to deepen the nation's already-vast political fissure; a trial that cast judgment on not only the defendant, but most everyone involved. The book's beating heart is Bergdahl himself-an idealistic, misguided soldier onto whom a nation projected the political and emotional complications of service. Based on years of exclusive reporting drawing on dozens of sources throughout the military, government, and Bergdahl's family, friends, and fellow soldiers, American Cipher is at once a meticulous investigation of government dysfunction and political posturing, a blistering commentary on America's presence in Afghanistan, and a heartbreaking story of a naive young man who thought he could fix the world and wound up the tool of forces far beyond his understanding.

"Breaking Ranks" brings a new and deeply personal perspective to the war in Iraq by looking into the lives of six veterans who turned against the war they helped to fight. Based on extensive interviews with each of the six, the book relates why they enlisted, their experiences in training and in early missions, their tours of combat, and what has happened to them since returning home. The compelling stories of this diverse cross section of the military recount how each journey to Iraq began with the sincere desire to do good. Matthew Gutmann and Catherine Anne Lutz show how each individual's experiences led to new moral and political understandings and ultimately to opposing the war.

Was the Iraq war really about oil? As a senior oil advisor for the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) and briefly as minister of oil, Gary Vogler thought he knew. But while doing research for a book about his experience in Iraq, Vogler discovered that what he knew was not the whole story-or even the true story. The Iraq war did have an oil agenda underlying it, one that Vogler had previously denied. This book is his attempt to set the record straight. Iraq and the Politics of Oil is a fascinating behind-the-scenes account of the role of the US government in the Iraqi oil sector since 2003. Vogler describes the prewar oil planning and the important decisions made during hostilities to get Iraqi oil flowing several months ahead of schedule. He reveals how, amid the instability of 2006 (largely fueled by the arrogance of early US decisions), the fixing of the Bayji Refinery contributed significantly to the success of the oil sector in the Sunni part of northern Iraq during and after the surge. Vogler gives us an expert insider's view of the largest oilfield auctions in the history of the international oil industry, and his account shows how US Forces' focus on a single Iraqi point of failure in 2007 was a primary factor in the record productions and exports of 2012 through 2017. But under the successes so deftly chronicled here, a darker political narrative finally emerges, one that reaches back to the decision to go to war with Iraq. Uncovering it, Vogler revises our understanding of what we were doing in Iraq, even as he gives us a critical, close-up view of that fraught enterprise.

Since the end of the draft in the United States, the nation's wars have been fought by all-volunteer forces, creating an enormous divide between the civilian public and its military. Recent wars have taken place during the information age, allowing cable news and the ""new media"" of the internet to change, sometimes on a daily or even hourly basis, the way wars are understood. As a result, a multitude of competing and often flawed narratives have emerged that, ultimately, merely explain events in terms of self-serving political and cultural perspectives. Author Caleb S. Cage, a veteran of the war in Iraq, brings a unique perspective to the understanding of how we talk about war. Why does the American public believe that those who served are somehow both heroes and victims, while the typical service member rarely embraces either identity? How does what happens on the front line get communicated to those back home, and what happens to that information as it travels? Is it possible that works of fiction are telling the most ""real"" versions of what is happening ""over there""? War Narratives is a tightly packed and provocative book containing a series of connected essays on the many competing narratives-both fiction and nonfiction-that are used to explain recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, how those narratives are perceived through preexisting social, political, and literary lenses, and how they often fall short. As Cage points out, narratives are not merely the stories shared or even how they are told; these expressions reflect choices.

Military, social and economic historians have long appreciated the significance of the conflict in Korea in shaping the post-war world. The policy of containment was formed, China was established as an important military power, and the US increased its military expenditure fourfold as a result of a conflict which killed over 33,000 Americans. What has been less appreciated is the role played by the United Nations and the British Commonwealth in influencing US strategy at this time of crisis: the Truman administration invested time and effort into gaining UN approval for the conflict in Korea, and the course of the war was adapted to keep UN allies, often holding crucial strategic positions in other Cold War theatres, in tow. Robert Barnes develops a fresh perspective on these fluctuating relationships, the tensions between Washington and its British Commonwealth allies and their impact on the direction of the conflict in order to challenge the common view that the United States was able to use its dominant position within the UN to pursue its Cold War ambitions with impunity. This important new interpretation is supported by evidence from a wealth of sources, from official government records to private papers and memoirs written by the most important American and Commonwealth personalities directly involved in shaping the UN's response to the conflict. This study presents a thorough deconstruction of the decision-making process behind US handling of the Korean War from the outbreak of conflict in 1950 to the Geneva Conference of 1954. This will be essential reading for students of International Relations, Cold War Studies and modern History.

Winner of the the National Book Critics Circle Award for Non-Fiction 'Spellbinding ... a magisterial account of the great tragedy of our age ... it is a classic' Evening Standard 'In the finest traditions of American investigative journalism' The Times 'Spectacular ... makes Bourne movies pale in comparison' Financial Times From the Pulitzer Prize winning of the acclaimed Ghost Wars, this is the full story of America's grim involvement in the affairs of Afghanistan from 2001 to 2016. In the wake of the terrible shock of 9/11, the C.I.A. scrambled to work out how to destroy Bin Laden and his associates. The C.I.A. had long familiarity with Afghanistan and had worked closely with the Taliban to defeat the Soviet Union there. A tangle of assumptions, old contacts, favours and animosities were now reactivated. Superficially the invasion was quick and efficient, but Bin Laden's successful escape, together with that of much of the Taliban leadership, and a catastrophic failure to define the limits of NATO's mission in a tough, impoverished country the size of Texas, created a quagmire which lasted many years. At the heart of the problem lay 'Directorate S', a highly secretive arm of the Pakistan state which had its own views on the Taliban and Afghanistan's place in a wider competition for influence between Pakistan, India and China, and which assumed that the U.S.A. and its allies would soon be leaving. Steve Coll's remarkable new book tells a powerful, bitter story of just how badly foreign policy decisions can go wrong and of many lives lost.

From the earliest days of his 34-year military career, Victor 'Brute' Krulak displayed a facility for applying creative ways of fighting to the Marine Corps. He went on daring spy missions during the Second Sino-Japanese War, pioneered the use of amphibious vehicles and masterminded the invasion of Okinawa. In Vietnam, his Marines were more successful than the Army and many think that Vietnam might have been different had all US forces employed Krulak's ideas. And yet it can be argued that all of his wartime accomplishments pale in comparison to what he did after World War II: he single-handedly stopped the U.S. government from abolishing the Marine Corps. Now the biographer Robert Coram presents us with a remarkably rounded and deeply intimate portrait of the legendary marine who receives much of the credit for America's victory in the Pacific, the successful D-Day landing and ultimately America's triumph in World War II. Coram gained unprecedented access to the man behind the military myth - and besides revealing the full extent of his achievements, reveals his deepest secret-one that he feared could have destroyed his career.

When the Korean War broke out in 1950, the Marine Corps was ordered to deploy an air-ground brigade in less than ten days, even though no such brigade existed at the time. Assembled from the woefully understrength 1st Marine Division and 1st Marine Air Wing units, the Brigade shipped out only six days after activation, sailed directly to Korea, was in combat within ninety-six hours of landing and, despite these enormous handicaps and numerically superior enemy forces, won every one of its engagements and helped secure the Pusan Perimeter.

Despite its remarkable achievements, the Brigade's history has largely been lost amid accounts of the sweeping operations that followed. Its real history has been replaced by myths that attribute its success to tough training, great conditioning, unit cohesion, and combat-experienced officers. None of which were true. T. X. Hammes now reveals the real story of the Brigade's success, prominently citing the Corps' crucial ability to maintain its ethos, culture, and combat effectiveness during the period between World War II and Korea, when its very existence was being challenged.

By studying the Corps from 1945 to 1950, Hammes shows that it was indeed the culture of the Corps-a culture based on remembering its storied history and learning to face modern challenges-that was responsible for the Brigade's success. The Corps remembered the human factors that made it so successful in past wars, notably the ethos of never leaving another marine behind. At the same time, the Corps demonstrated commendable flexibility in adapting its doctrine and operations to evolutions in modern warfare. In particular, the Corps overcame the air-ground schism that marked the end of World War II to excel at close air support. Despite massive budget and manpower cuts, the Corps continued to experiment and learn even at it clung to its historical lodestones. This approach was validated during the Brigade's trial by fire.

More than a mere battle history, "Forgotten Warriors" gets to the heart of marine culture to show fighting forces have to both remember and learn. As today's armed forces face similar challenges, this book confirms that culture as much as technology prepares America's fighting men and women to answer their country's call.

War exposes the divide between who we think we are and how we behave in extreme situations. Sheri Snively, who served as a Quaker chaplain with the U.S. Navy, has crafted a vivid, unsettling, and ultimately hopeful personal account of the effects of the Iraq war on soldiers and civilians in Heaven in the Midst of Hell. As she served with the Marines working amid the boredom, ten-sion, and seemingly meaningless carnage at a trauma hospital between Ramadi and Fallujah, Commander Snively experienced first-hand the grim reality of combat. As she recounts the way she and the soldiers around her experience war, she negotiates a compassionate path to healing -- marked not by formulaic answers, but by an open and ques-tioning spirit. Illustrated with the author's own evocative photographs, this is a compelling and unforgettable journey into the human soul.

A gripping personal account of success and failure in Iraq during the crucial first year after the fall of the Ba'athist regime This compelling book presents an unparalleled record of what happened after U.S. forces seized Baghdad in the spring of 2003. Army Colonel Peter R. Mansoor, the on-the-ground commander of the 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division-the "Ready First Combat Team"-describes his brigade's first year in Iraq, from the sweltering, chaotic summer after the Ba'athists' defeat to the transfer of sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government a year later. Uniquely positioned to observe, record, and assess the events of that fateful year, Mansoor now explains what went right and wrong as the U.S. military confronted an insurgency of unexpected strength and tenacity. Drawing not only on his own daily combat journal but also on observations by embedded reporters, news reports, combat logs, archived e-mails, and many other sources, Mansoor offers a contemporary record of the valor, motivations, and resolve of the 1st Brigade and its attachments during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Yet this book has a deeper significance than a personal memoir or unit history. Baghdad at Sunrise provides a detailed, nuanced analysis of U.S. counterinsurgency operations in Iraq, and along with it critically important lessons for America's military and political leaders of the twenty-first century.

This book explores the culture of deference by the legislative branch to the executive branch on foreign policy issues, particularly regarding the George W. Bush administration's rush to war in Iraq in 2003. By authorizing President Bush to go to war in Iraq at his own discretion in its October 2002 resolution, the 107th Congress abdicated its constitutional responsibility and its members failed to honor their oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States. Although the «war powers are constitutionally those of Congress, historically presidents have engaged in war making and Congress has with limited success attempted to curb such war making. This book traces how this culture of deference to the chief executive on war making evolved and how, especially in the case of Iraq, it has adversely affected the interests of the nation, its constitutional framework, and its position in the world. This book will serve as an excellent text for courses on U.S. foreign policy, U.S. diplomatic history, and the role of Congress.

"Breaking Ranks" brings a new and deeply personal perspective to the war in Iraq by looking into the lives of six veterans who turned against the war they helped to fight. Based on extensive interviews with each of the six, the book relates why they enlisted, their experiences in training and in early missions, their tours of combat, and what has happened to them since returning home. The compelling stories of this diverse cross section of the military recount how each journey to Iraq began with the sincere desire to do good. Matthew Gutmann and Catherine Anne Lutz show how each individual's experiences led to new moral and political understandings and ultimately to opposing the war.

Based entirely on unpublished primary sources, Tsering Shakya's groundbreaking history of modern Tibet shatters the popular conception of the country as an isolated Shangri-la unaffected by broader international developments. Shakya gives a balanced, blow-by-blow account of Tibet's ongoing struggle to maintain its independence and safeguard its cultural identity while being sandwiched between the heavyweights of Asian geopolitics: Britain, India, China, and the United States. With thorough documentation, Shakya details the Chinese depredations of Tibet, and reveals the failures of the Tibetan leadership's divided strategies. Rising above the simplistic dualism so often found in accounts of Tibet's contested recent history, The Dragon in the Land of Snows lucidly depicts the tragedy that has befallen Tibet and identifies the conflicting forces that continue to shape the aspirations of the Tibetan people today.

Here you sit at dinner with charming people in a dining room like any other. Yet you know that your hostess has lost a son, that her sister lost children in the 1973 war...in the domestic ceremony of passed dishes and filled glasses the thoughts of a destructive enemy are hard to grasp. What you do know is that there is one fact of Jewish life left unchanged by the creation of a Jewish State: 'You cannot take your right to love for granted...'

This volume presents the best scholarly thinking about why the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, a pivotal event in modern US foreign policy and international politics. The years since the announcement of the invasion of Iraq by George W. Bush in 2003 have revealed that the WMD threat was not the urgent threat the administration declared and that Saddam Hussein was not involved with Al Qaeda or 9/11. At least in part because of these revelations a majority of Americans (not to mention a majority of people globally) now believe that invading Iraq was a mistake and that the Bush administration misled the public to build support for war. Lending credibility to public doubts is a growing number of critical scholarly analyses and in-depth journalistic investigations about the invasion, which mostly suggests that the administration was not fully candid about its reasons for wanting to move against Iraq when it did. Thus the question remains: Why did the United States invade Iraq? The central purpose of this volume is to spur and inform the debate by organizing the best recent thinking of foreign policy and international relations experts about why the U.S. invaded Iraq. Taking a broad range of arguments -- about the role of ideas, Israel, and oil, in partcular - and organizing them around a coherent structure, the book highlights current areas of agreement and disagreement, and allows scholars directly to talk to each other. The volume will be of much interest to students of the Iraq War, US foreign and security policy, strategic studies, Middle Eastern politics and IR/Security Studies in general.

Approximately 2.5 million men and women have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan in the service of the U.S. War on Terror. Marian Eide and Michael Gibler have collected and compiled personal combat accounts from some of these war veterans. In modern warfare no deployment meets the expectations laid down by stories of Appomattox, Ypres, Iwo Jima, or Tet. Stuck behind a desk or the wheel of a truck, many of today's veterans feel they haven't even been to war though they may have listened to mortars in the night or dodged improvised explosive devices during the day. When a drone is needed to verify a target's death or bullets are sprayed like grass seed, military offensives can lack the immediacy that comes with direct contact. After Combat bridges the gap between sensationalized media and reality by telling war's unvarnished stories. Participating soldiers, sailors, marines, and air force personnel (retired, on leave, or at the beginning of military careers) describe combat in the ways they believe it should be understood. In this collection of interviews, veterans speak anonymously with pride about their own strengths and accomplishments, with gratitude for friendships and adventures, and also with shame, regret, and grief, while braving controversy, misunderstanding, and sanction. In the accounts of these veterans, Eide and Gibler seek to present what Vietnam veteran and writer Tim O'Brien calls a "true war story" - one without obvious purpose or moral imputation and independent of civilian logic, propaganda goals, and even peacetime convention.

How can the current civil wars in the Middle East be resolved? This volume brings together academics, experts, and practitioners to explore this question. The book covers the history of civil wars in the region during the 20th century, and then examines the specific causes, drivers, and dynamics of the ongoing civil wars in Syria, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Updated for a second edition, the book argues that while these are very different cases of civil war, there are patterns that are important to point out at the outset. First, while each of the conflicts appears to be a relatively recent phenomenon, each has a long historical tail. Second, each of the civil wars had deep and complex domestic drivers and dynamics over issues of governance, political identity, and resources; at the same time, all of the conflicts have had deep regional and international components. Finally, all of these civil wars have been affected by the presence or entrance of armed transnational non-state actors, which have had far greater involvement in the Middle Eastern civil wars compared to other regions. The book concludes that these conflicts will require a mixture of local, regional, and international interventions to bring them to an end, but that none of the conflicts are likely to end cleanly through either a negotiated settlement or a clear victory by one party or the other. Despite this pessimistic overall assessment, the book emphasizes that policymakers should use knowledge of civil wars in the Middle East to develop and pursue specific national, regional and global policies. These should be built around mitigating the worst effects of the conflicts and towards ultimate resolution.

What happens when a career Marine officer stops believing in the doctrine of the Corps and the official pretexts for war? In 2006, Winston Tierney deployed to Iraq's Anbar Province with the Fourth Reconnaissance Battalion, excited and proud to serve his country in the fight against international terrorism. After several trips to Iraq over the next nine years he returned depleted by hatred, mendacity, alcohol abuse and PTSD, he felt he had "seen behind the curtain"-and didn't like what he saw. This hard-hitting memoir depicts the brutal realities of the conflict in Iraq at street level, while giving a clear-eyed treatise on the immorality of war and the catastrophe of America's failures in the Middle East.

Afghanistan was an unwinnable war. As British and American troops withdraw, discover this definitive account that explains why. It could have been a very different story. British forces could have successfully withdrawn from Afghanistan in 2002, having done the job they set out to do: to defeat al-Qaeda. Instead, in the years that followed, Britain paid a devastating price for their presence in Helmand province. So why did Britain enter, and remain, in an ill-fated war? Why did it fail so dramatically, and was this expedition doomed from the beginning? Drawing on unprecedented access to military reports, government documents and senior individuals, Professor Theo Farrell provides an extraordinary work of scholarship. He explains the origins of the war, details the campaigns over the subsequent years, and examines the West's failure to understand the dynamics of local conflict and learn the lessons of history that ultimately led to devastating costs and repercussions still relevant today. 'The best book so far on Britain's...war in Afghanistan' International Affairs 'Masterful, irrefutable... Farrell records all these military encounters with the irresistible pace of a novelist' Sunday Times

Dwight D. Eisenhower once quipped, 'You will not find it difficult to prove that battles, campaigns, and even wars have been won or lost primarily because of logistics'. Military acquisition and procurement - that is, how a nation manages investments, technologies, programs, and support - is critical to wartime success or failure. When unexpected battlefield problems arise, how do the government, the military, and industry work together to ensure effective solutions?During the American counterinsurgent campaign in Iraq, the improvised explosive device emerged as a disruptive and devastating threat. As Humvees, and their occupants, were ripped apart by IEDs, it was clear that new solutions had to be found. These solutions already existed but had not been procured, highlighting the need for more effective marketing to the military by industry. The ultimate successful response - the mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicle, or MRAP - required years of entrepreneurial marketing by the defense industry. In Securing theMRAP, James Hasik explores how these vehicles, which the American military mostly rejected despite the great need for them, eventually came to be adopted as the Pentagon's top procurement priority. Hasik traces the story of the MRAP from the early 1970s to the future of mine-resistant vehicles on the battlefields of tomorrow. An important contribution to the seemingly disparate fields of marketing and defence policy, Securing the MRAP is an eye-opening revelation to defence industrialists, military officers, and government officials who want to understand how to avoid another IED-Humvee debacle.

It is August 1990, and Iraq has just invaded Kuwait, setting off a chain reaction of events leading up to the first Gulf War. Vicki Cody's husband, the commander of an elite Apache helicopter battalion, is deployed to Saudi Arabia-and for the next nine months they have to rely on written letters in order to stay connected. From Vicki's narrative and journal entries, the reader gets a very realistic glimpse of what it is like for the spouses and families back home during a war, in particular what it was like at a time when most people did not own a personal computer and there was no Internet-no iPhones, no texting, no tweeting, no Facetime. Her writing also illuminates the roller coaster of stress, loneliness, sleepless nights, humor, joys, and, eventually, resilience, that make up her life while her husband is away. Meanwhile, Dick's letters to her give the reader a front row seat to the unfolding of history, the adrenaline rush of flying helicopters in combat, his commitment to his country, and his devotion to his family back home. Together, these three components weave a clear, insightful, and intimate story of love and its power to sustain us.