This book investigates the origins of the North Korean garrison state by examining the development of the Korean People's Army and the legacies of the Korean War. Despite its significance, there are very few books on the Korean People's Army with North Korean primary sources being difficult to access. This book, however, draws on North Korean documents and North Korean veterans' testimonies, and demonstrates how the Korean People's Army and the Korean War shaped North Korea into a closed, militarized and xenophobic garrison state and made North Korea seek Juche (Self Reliance) ideology and weapons of mass destruction. This book maintains that the youth and lower classes in North Korea considered the Korean People's Army as a positive opportunity for upward social mobility. As a result, the North Korean regime secured its legitimacy by establishing a new class of social elites wherein they offered career advancements for persons who had little standing and few opportunities under the preceding Japanese dominated regime. These new elites from poor working and peasant families became the core supporters of the North Korean regime today. In addition, this book argues that, in the aftermath of the Korean War, a culture of victimization was established among North Koreans which allowed Kim Il Sung to use this culture of fear to build and maintain the garrison state. Thus, this work illustrates how the North Korean regime has garnered popular support for the continuation of a militarized state, despite the great hardships the people are suffering. This book will be of much interest to students of North Korea, the Korean War, Asian politics, Cold War Studies, military and strategic studies, and international history.

When the war in Iraq began in 2003, the issue of the special status accorded to journalists covering the military operations arose quite naturally. Promising innovation, the Pentagon's announcement that they would integrate hundreds of journalists into combat units-what has been known as embedding-attracted the attention of the international media and other observers. How would this be different from previous interactions between the military and the media? The Embedding Apparatus explains the functioning of the informational control apparatus at work during the Iraq War and the relationships between embedded journalists and the military in the American army's area of operations. The concept of the apparatus guides this case study, one that brings together the experiences of almost forty participants, journalists and military personnel. The study borrows Michel Foucault's modern surveillance mechanisms of the disciplinary apparatus and the panoptic apparatus, bringing embedded journalism into close contact with the ubiquitous and flexible surveillance that characterizes the "control society." The author exposes a new embedding apparatus where the power relations between journalists and the military are at play, an apparatus operating within a circumscribed space where all of a journalist's movements, reporting, behavior and communications are surveilled. This book offers a fresh insight into this important issue and will certainly be of interest worldwide to scholars and students as well as media and military practitioners interested in this topic. Embedded journalism is studied from a new angle, one related to the broader context of surveillance in contemporary society.

By every principle of war, every shred of military logic, logistics support to Canada's Task Force Orion in Afghanistan should have collapsed in July 2006. There are few countries that offer a greater challenge to logistics than Afghanistan, and yet Canadian soldiers lived through an enormous test on this deadly international stage - a monumental accomplishment. Canadian combat operations were widespread across southern Afghanistan in 2006, and logistics soldiers worked in quiet desperation to keep the battle group moving. Only now is it appreciated how precarious the logistics operations of Task Force Orion in Kandahar really were.

What the Thunder Said is an honest, raw recollection of incidents and impressions of Canadian warfighting from a logistics perspective. It offers solid insight into the history of military logistics in Canada and explores in some detail the dramatic erosion of a once-proud corner of the army from the perspective of a battalion commander.

This classic history of the Korean War-from its origins through the armistice-is now available in a paperback edition including a substantive introduction that considers the heightened danger of a new Northeast Asian war as Trump and Kim Jung-un escalate their rhetoric. Wada Haruki, one of the world's leading scholars of the war, draws on archival and other primary sources in Russia, China, the United States, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan to provide the first full understanding of the Korean War as an international conflict from the perspective of all the actors involved. Wada traces the North Korean invasion of South Korea in riveting detail, providing new insights into the behavior of Kim Il Sung and Syngman Rhee. He also provides new insights into the behavior of Communist leaders in Korea, China, Russia, Eastern Europe, and their rivals in other nations. He traces the course of the war from its origins in the North and South Korean leaders' failed attempts to unify their country by force, ultimately escalating into a Sino-American war on the Korean Peninsula. Although sixty-five years have passed since the armistice, the Korean conflict has never really ended. Tensions remain high on the peninsula as Washington and Pyongyang, as well as Seoul and Pyongyang, continue to face off. It is even more timely now to address the origins of the Korean War, the nature of the confrontation, and the ways in which it affects the geopolitical landscape of Northeast Asia and the Pacific region. With his unmatched ability to draw on sources from every country involved, Wada paints a rich and full portrait of a conflict that continues to generate controversy.

This book explores the use of deadly force by private security companies during the Iraq War. The work focuses on and compares the activities of the US companies Blackwater and Dyncorp. Despite sharing several important characteristics, such as working for the same client (the US State Department) during the same time period, the employees of Blackwater fired their weapons far more often, and killed and seriously injured far more people in Iraq than their counterparts in DynCorp. In order to explain this disparity, the book undertakes the most comprehensive analysis ever attempted on the use of violence by the employees of these firms. Based on extensive empirical research, it offers a credible explanation for this difference: Blackwater maintained a relatively bellicose military culture that placed strong emphasis on norms encouraging its personnel to exercise personal initiative, proactive use of force, and an exclusive approach to security, which, together, motivated its personnel to use violence quite freely against anyone they suspected of posing a threat. Specifically, Blackwater's military culture motivated its personnel to fire upon suspected threats more quickly, at greater distances, and with a greater quantity of bullets, and to more readily abandon the people they shot at when compared to DynCorp's personnel, who maintained a military culture that encouraged far less violent behaviour. Utilizing the Private Security Company Violent Incident Dataset (PSCVID), created by the author in 2012, the book draws upon data on hundreds of violent incidents involving private security personnel in Iraq to identify trends in the behaviour exhibited by the employees of different firms. Based on this rich and original empirical data, the book provides the definitive study of contemporary private security personnel in the Iraq War. This book will be of much interest to students of the Iraq War, Private Security Companies, Military Studies, War and Conflict Studies and IR in general.

From September 1990 to June 1991, the UK deployed 53,462 military personnel in the Gulf War. After the end of the conflict anecdotal reports of various disorders affecting troops who fought in the Gulf began to surface. This mysterious illness was given the name "Gulf War Syndrome" (GWS). This book is an investigation into this recently emergent illness, particularly relevant given ongoing UK deployments to Iraq, describing how the illness became a potent symbol for a plethora of issues, anxieties, and concerns. At present, the debate about GWS is polarized along two lines: there are those who think it is a unique, organic condition caused by Gulf War toxins and those who argue that it is probably a psychological condition that can be seen as part of a larger group of illnesses. Using the methods and perspective of anthropology, with its focus on nuances and subtleties, the author provides a new approach to understanding GWS, one that makes sense of the cultural circumstances, specific and general, which gave rise to the illness.

Dozens of books about the Iraq War have been written by politicians, generals, snipers, and Special Forces operatives. This war journal of an enlisted U.S. Marine reservist provides an un-glamorized narrative of a common soldier's deployment to Iraq, from notification of mobilization to final trip home. The visceral experiences of combat are described in candid detail, along with the hazards of homesickness, boredom and loss. In light of the Islamic State's continuing operations in the region described in the book, the author's story presents a poignant account of the failures so far of the War on Terror.

This volume explores the way governments endeavoured to build and maintain public support for the war in Afghanistan, combining new insights on the effects of strategic narratives with an exhaustive series of case studies. In contemporary wars, with public opinion impacting heavily on outcomes, strategic narratives provide a grid for interpreting the why, what and how of the conflict. This book asks how public support for the deployment of military troops to Afghanistan was garnered, sustained or lost in thirteen contributing nations. Public attitudes in the US, Canada, Australia and Europe towards the use of military force were greatly shaped by the cohesiveness and content of the strategic narratives employed by national policy-makers. Assessing the ability of countries to craft a successful strategic narrative, the book addresses the following key areas: 1) how governments employ strategic narratives to gain public support; 2) how strategic narratives develop during the course of the conflict; 3) how these narratives are disseminated, framed and perceived through various media outlets; 4) how domestic audiences respond to strategic narratives; 5) how this interplay is conditioned by both events on the ground, in Afghanistan, and by structural elements of the domestic political systems. This book will be of much interest to students of international intervention, foreign policy, political communication, international security, strategic studies and IR in general.

This book identifies some of the main lessons for civil-military interactions that can be derived from the experiences of Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Afghanistan. The book has three main themes. Firstly, the volume analyses why the ways in which civil and military actors interact in theatres of operations such as Afghanistan matter - for both those categories of actors, and for the ordinary people who their interactions serve. Second, the book highlights that these interactions are invariably complex. The third theme, which arises specifically from 'the PRT experience' in Afghanistan, is that such teams vary significantly in their roles, resourcing, and operational environments. Consequently, to appraise the value of 'the PRT experience', it is necessary to unpack the experiences of different PRTs, which the use of case studies allows one to do. The volume comprises an introduction, identifying some key questions to which the PRT experience gives rise, and case studies of the experiences of the United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Canada, The Netherlands, Australia, Germany and France; chapters dealing with the roles played by NGOs and the UN system and a discussion from an Afghan perspective of the implications of civilian casualties. It is the combination of the diverse cases discussed in this book with a focus on the broad challenges of optimising civil-military interactions that makes this book distinctive. This book will be of much interest to students of the Afghan War, civil-military relations, statebuilding, Central Asian politics and IR in general.

During his 2009-2010 combat tour in Afghanistan, battalion commander Lt. Col. Michael J. Forsyth kept a daily journal. In it he candidly writes about his daily interactions with the Afghan government, citizens, security forces, and his intermittent conflict with the enemy. As the deployment progresses, the journal reveals that his initial expectations for peace in Afghanistan were tempered by his experiences and encounters. In the process, Col. Forsyth learned critical lessons in leadership and changed his thinking about realistic goals that can be accomplished in Afghanistan. The journal, and its subsequent annotations, also provides a glimpse into how the U.S. Army functions at the unit level and what America's Soldiers do on a daily basis to prepare for and engage in combat.

This volume explores the way governments endeavoured to build and maintain public support for the war in Afghanistan, combining new insights on the effects of strategic narratives with an exhaustive series of case studies. In contemporary wars, with public opinion impacting heavily on outcomes, strategic narratives provide a grid for interpreting the why, what and how of the conflict. This book asks how public support for the deployment of military troops to Afghanistan was garnered, sustained or lost in thirteen contributing nations. Public attitudes in the US, Canada, Australia and Europe towards the use of military force were greatly shaped by the cohesiveness and content of the strategic narratives employed by national policy-makers. Assessing the ability of countries to craft a successful strategic narrative, the book addresses the following key areas: 1) how governments employ strategic narratives to gain public support; 2) how strategic narratives develop during the course of the conflict; 3) how these narratives are disseminated, framed and perceived through various media outlets; 4) how domestic audiences respond to strategic narratives; 5) how this interplay is conditioned by both events on the ground, in Afghanistan, and by structural elements of the domestic political systems. This book will be of much interest to students of international intervention, foreign policy, political communication, international security, strategic studies and IR in general.

This edited volume describes various analytic methods used by intelligence analysts supporting military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan as members of the Iraq and Afghan Threat Finance Cells-interagency intelligence teams tasked to disrupt terrorist and insurgent funding. All contributors have deployed to Iraq and/or Afghanistan and detail both the bureaucratic and intellectual challenges in understanding terrorist and insurgent finance networks and then designing operations to attack such networks via conventional military operations, Special Forces kill/capture targeting operations, and non-kinetic operations such as asset freezing or diplomacy. The analytic methods described here leverage both quantitative and qualitative methods, but in a language and style accessible to those without a quantitative background. All methods are demonstrated via actual case studies (approved for release by the U.S. government) drawn from the analysts' distinct experiences while deployed. This book will be of interest to current or aspiring intelligence analysts, students of security studies, anti-money laundering specialists in the private sector, and more generally to those interested in understanding how intelligence analysis feeds into live operations during wartime at a very tactical level.

Korea used to be the forgotten war. Now, however, experts widely view it as a pivotal moment in the history of the Cold War, while its legacy still scars contemporary East Asian politics.

The sixtieth anniversary of the Korean War is a fitting time both to assess the current state of historiography on the conflict and to showcase new research on its different dimensions. This book contains six essays by leading experts in the field. These essays explore all aspects of the war, from collective security and alliance relations, to home front politics and historical memory. They are also international in scope, focusing not just on the familiar Western belligerents but also on the actions of the two Koreas, China and the Soviet Union.

These stimulating essays shed new light on various aspects of the Korean War experience, as well as examining why the war remains so important to the politics of the region.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Journal of Strategic Studies."

Fallujah, the cradle of an insurgency that plunged Iraq into years of chaos and bloodshed, conjures up images of the brutal house-to-house fighting that occurred during the 2004 U.S. invasion of the iconic city. The violence peaked again two years later when American Marines and Iraqi government forces struggled with a reinvigorated insurgency and the prospect of premature withdrawal by U.S. forces. Now in paperback, Fallujah Awakens--widely praised for presenting a balanced description of this crucial transition from both the American and the Iraqi perspectives--recounts the complex story of the remarkable turn around that began to take place in 2006-2007. As an embedded journalist, Bill Ardolino was in a unique position to observe and explain how local tribal leaders and U.S. Marines forged a surprising alliance that enabled them to secure the heavily contested battleground. Based on more than 120 interviews with Iraqis and Americans, he explores how a company of Reservists, led by a medical equipment sales manager from Michigan, succeeded where previous efforts had stalled. Circumstance combined with smart leadership enabled Marines to build relationships with members of a Sunni tribe--once written off as dangerous and intractable--who pushed al Qaeda and other insurgents from their notoriously rebellious area. Accidental killings, intertribal rivalries, insurgents, and intrigue all conspired to undo the tenuous alliance forged on Fallujah's peninsula. But the partnership was cemented after a Marine commander's risky decision to welcome nearly 100 injured civilians onto a secure American facility after a ruthless chemical attack by al Qaeda. Ardolino's exhaustive documentation will prove valuable to military students, analysts, and historians and will help policy makers better understand what is and is not possible in counterinsurgency. Photographs and maps further enhance the reader's understanding of the struggle for Fallujah, from tribal dynamics to the geography of firefights.

Waging Gendered Wars examines, through the analytical lens of feminist international relations theory, how U.S. military women have impacted and been affected by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although women were barred from serving formally in ground combat positions within the U.S. armed forces during both wars, U.S. female soldiers are being killed in action. By examining how U.S. military women's agency as soldiers, veterans, and casualties of war affect the planning and execution of war, Eager assesses the ways in which the global world of international politics and warfare has become localized in the life and death narratives of female service personnel impacted by combat experience, homelessness, military sexual trauma, PTSD, and the deaths of fellow soldiers. Review: 'This book breaks new ground, revealing the complex issues that face women in military service, such as heroism, combat, sexual assault, PTSD, and as veterans. Through her research and interviews, the author provides us with surprising, uplifting, and sometimes alarming facts about the role of women in peacetime and war.'Margaret Gonzalez-Perez, Southeastern Louisiana University, USA

This collection of stories of American men and women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan reveals their personal experiences as military combat personnel. Their stories are told through interviews, plus information from questionnaires and official military documents.

When in 1950 the United Nations called upon its members to provide aid to South Korea, more than forty nations responded. Some of these sent troops which fought under the United Nations Command, some sent commodities and medical supplies. Some nations offered moral and political support but for a variety of reasons were not able to send aid. This book looks at the nations involved, what was behind their willingness to provide troops or aid, or what prevented them from doing so. The military contribution of the nations involved is discussed. The combination of troops, and their individual needs, made the logistics of this enterprise difficult, but in the end troops from 17 nations fought together to defend the freedom of South Korea.

This book examines relations between China and the Soviet Union during the 1950s, and provides an insight into Chinese thinking about the Korean War. This volume is based on a translation of Shen Zihua's best-selling Chinese-language book, which broke the mainland Chinese taboo on publishing non-heroic accounts of the Korean War.The author combined information detailed in Soviet-era diplomatic documents (released after the collapse of the Soviet Union) with Chinese memoirs, official document collections and scholarly monographs, in order to present a non-ideological, realpolitik account of the relations, motivations and actions among three Communist actors: Stalin, Mao Zedong and Kim Il-sung. This new translation represents a revisionist perspective on trilateral Communist alliance relations during the Korean War, shedding new light on the origins of the Sino-Soviet split and the rather distant relations between China and North Korea. It features a critical introduction to Shen's work and the text is based on original archival research not found in earlier books in English. This book will be of much interest to students of Communist China, Stalinist Russia, the Korean War, Cold War Studies and International History in general.

Immortal is the only single-volume English-language survey of Iran's military history. CIA analyst Steven R. Ward shows that Iran's soldiers, from the famed "Immortals" of ancient Persia to today's Revolutionary Guard, have demonstrated through the centuries that they should not be underestimated. This history also provides background on the nationalist, tribal, and religious heritages of the country to help readers better understand Iran and its security outlook. Immortal begins with the founding of ancient Persia's empire under Cyrus the Great and continues through the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) and up to the present. Drawing on a wide range of sources including declassified documents, the author gives primary focus to the modern era to relate the build-up of the military under the last Shah, its collapse during the Islamic revolution, its fortunes in the Iran-Iraq War, and its rise from the ashes to help Iran become once again a major regional military power. He shows that, despite command and supply problems, Iranian soldiers demonstrate high levels of bravery and perseverance and have enjoyed surprising tactical successes even when victory has been elusive. These qualities and the Iranians' ability to impose high costs on their enemies by exploiting Iran's imposing geography bear careful consideration today by potential opponents.

The British Hurt Locker. In the Iraq War, Cpt Kevin Ivison defused bombs and IEDs left by the Taliban. Each time he took the 'longest walk' to a bomb, it could have been his last. How many times can a man stare death in the face before he breaks? Even the most skilful operators can only roll the dice so many times before they get unlucky . . . This was my bomb, my task and my fate alone. There was nothing left to do but walk. When two of his colleagues are killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq, young bomb disposal officer Kevin Ivison is called in to defuse a second, even deadlier bomb just a hundred yards from the bodies of his friends. To make things worse, the entire area is under fire from snipers, and a crowd of angry Iraqis have begun to hurl petrol bombs... With little chance of living through this impossible task, Kevin leaves final messages for his loved ones and sets out alone towards the bomb that he is sure will be the last thing he sees. In this gut-wrenching and terrifying true story of heroism and survival, Kevin Ivison explains why he chose to be a bomb disposal expert in the first place, how he found the courage to face his death, and the unendurable stress that has given him nightmares ever since. An absorbing, honest, true story of life on the front lines in the Iraq War. Perfect for fans of The Hurt Locker, Sniper One and Bomb Hunters. 'The honesty with which Kevin relays his fear, his overwhelming sense that he is going to die, is impressive . . . unpretentious and accessible' Daily Telegraph 'Absorbing ... At the heart of the book is a taut, riveting account of the events of a single day - February 28, 2006 - when Ivison rushed to the scene of an IED ambush on a road known as RED ONE' - DAILY MAIL 'RED ONE is plain-spoken, heart-thumping stuff' - THE TIMES

Detention operations are vital to U.S. military doctrine and crucial to the success of combat and recovery missions. This book shows that the image of abuse from Abu-Ghraib were but one small, harmful element in an overwhelmingly successful detention mission in Iraq. It focuses on the subsequent developments and successes, explaining the standard rule-of-law approach taken by the U.S. military and examining the work in Iraq of such leaders as Major General John D. Gardner and Major General Douglas M. Stone. Overall, the text moves away from the Abu-Ghraib scandal to illuminate a largely unknown successful development in the U.S. detention operations. Following the Abu Ghraib scandal of 2003-2004, the U.S. Department of Defense scrambled to recover its reputation and that of its troops. As the Bush Administration sought to redefine torture, military judge advocates consistently challenged such moves, arguing in favor of the Geneva Conventions' humanitarian practices. By 2006, Department of Defense policy stipulated full respect for and use of the Geneva Conventions. This development was indeed a victory for American support for rule of law in Iraq, as well as an affirmation of standard practices in the detention command, Task Force 134. Pressures of war, however, continued to present their own challenges.

Pat Tillman was well-known to American sports fans: a chisel-jawed and talented young professional football star, he was on the brink of signing a million dollar contract when, in 2001, al-Qaeda launched terrorist attacks against his country. Driven by deeply felt moral patriotism, he walked away from fame and money to enlist in the United States Special Operations Forces. A year later he was killed - apparently in the line of fire - on a desolate hillside near the Pakistan border in Afghanistan. News of Tillman's death shocked America. But even as the public mourned his loss, the US Army aggressively maneuvered to conceal the truth: that it was a ranger in Tillman's own platoon who had fired the fatal shots. In Where Men Win Glory, Jon Krakauer reveals how an entire country was deliberately deceived by those at the very highest levels of the US army and government. Infused with the power and authenticity readers have come to expect from Krakauer's storytelling, Where Men Win Glory exposes shattering truths about men and war.

First published in 1985, this is a book written at the height of the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Based on five clandestine trips into Afghanistan with the resistance, the book examines why the Soviets invaded in 1979 and what they were seeking to defend. The author analyses their deliberate policy of migratory genocide through a combination of aerial bombardments, political repression and economic blockades. The book is written by the journalist Ed Girardet, one of the world's leading authorities on the conflict, whose particular strength is his dispassionate reporting style and his firsthand proximity to the conflict. He interviewed many of the leaders of the Afghan resistance, both inside Afghanistan and in the refugee camps and he explains in depth the nature of the Afghan Islamic anti-communist struggle for independence. This is a book in the finest tradition of war reporting on the front line and the reissue is essential reading for all those interested in the history of the conflict in Afghanistan.

Voicing Dissent presents a unique and original series of interviews with American artists (including Guerrilla Girls on Tour, Tony Shalhoub, Shepard Fairey, Sean Astin, and many others) who have voiced their opposition to the war in Iraq. Following Pierre Bourdieu's example, these discussions are approached sociologically and provide a thorough analysis of the relationships between arts and politics as well as the limits and conditions of political speech and action. These painters and graphic artists, musicians, actors, playwrights, theatre directors and filmmakers reveal their perceptions of politics, war, security and terrorism issues, the Middle East, their experiences with activism, as well as their definition of the artist's role and their practice of citizenship. Addressing the crucial questions for contemporary democracies - such as artists' function in society, the crisis of political legitimacy and representation, the rise of new modes of contestation, and the limits to free public speech - this book will be of interest to scholars in sociology, politics, and the arts.

When Taliban forces took Kabul on 15 August 2021, it marked the end of the Western intervention that had begun nearly twenty years earlier with the US-led invasion. The fall of Afghanistan triggered a seismic shock in the West, where US President Joe Biden announced an end to America's involvement in conflicts overseas. In Afghanistan itself it produced terror for the future for those who had worked with and grown up under the coalition-supported administration. Now, with the country spiralling into economic collapse and famine, Losing Afghanistan is a plea for us to keep our gaze on the plight of the people of Afghanistan and to understand how action and inaction in the West shaped the fate of the nation. Why was Afghanistan lost? Can it be regained? And what happens next? Edited by international development expert Brian Brivati, this collection of twenty-one essays by analysts, politicians, soldiers, commentators and practitioners - interspersed with powerful eyewitness testimony from Afghan voices - explains what happened in Afghanistan and why, and what the future holds both for its people and for liberal intervention.