This book examines the ethics and values that render a war discourse normative, and features the stories of American soldiers who fought in the Iraq War to show how this narrative can change. The invasion of Iraq, launched in March 2003, was led by the United States under the now discredited claim that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD). However, critical questions concerning what we may be able to learn from this experience remain largely unexplored. The focus of this book, therefore, is on soldiers as systems of war - and the internal battle many of them wage as they live a reality that slowly emerges as inconsistent with familiar beliefs and value commitments. This work offers a reflective study of identity struggle from the perspective of emotional psychology and delves into the 'narrative field' of socio-politics. Going beyond the political contestations over the U.S. military intervention in Iraq, the author analyses original research on the evolving beliefs and value-commitments of veterans of the war, exploring their faith in its 'just cause' and their personal sense of self and national identity. This book will be of much interest to students of the Iraq War, US foreign policy, military studies, discourse analysis, and IR in general.

To witness war is, in large part, to hear it. And to survive it is, among other things, to have listened to it-and to have listened through it. Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq is a groundbreaking study of the centrality of listening to the experience of modern warfare. Based on years of ethnographic interviews with U.S. military service members and Iraqi civilians, as well as on direct observations of wartime Iraq, author J. Martin Daughtry reveals how these populations learned to extract valuable information from the ambient soundscape while struggling with the deleterious effects that it produced in their ears, throughout their bodies, and in their psyches. Daughtry examines the dual-edged nature of sound-its potency as a source of information and a source of trauma-within a sophisticated conceptual frame that highlights the affective power of sound and the vulnerability and agency of individual auditors. By theorizing violence through the prism of sound and sound through the prism of violence, Daughtry provides a productive new vantage point for examining these strangely conjoined phenomena. Two chapters dedicated to wartime music in Iraqi and U.S. military contexts show how music was both an important instrument of the military campaign and the victim of a multitude of violent acts throughout the war. A landmark work within the study of conflict, sound studies, and ethnomusicology, Listening to War will expand your understanding of the experience of armed violence, and the experience of sound more generally. At the same time, it provides a discrete window into the lives of individual Iraqis and Americans struggling to orient themselves within the fog of war.

DON'T MISS OLLIE OLLERTON'S EXPLOSIVE FOLLOW UP TO SCAR TISSUE, THE NEW THRILLER ALL OR NOTHING! PRE-ORDER YOUR COPY NOW. OLLIE OLLERTON CO-HOSTS SAS: WHO DARES WINS ALONGSIDE ANT MIDDLETON, JASON FOX and MARK BILLINGHAM. THIS IS HIS INCREDIBLE TRUE STORY Where is your break point? Is it here? Facing the gruelling SAS selection process on one leg, with a busted ankle and the finish line nowhere in sight? Or here? Under heavy fire from armed kidnappers while protecting journalists en route to Baghdad. Or is it here? At the bottom of a bottle, with a family in pieces, unable to adapt to a civilian lifestyle, yearning for a warzone? Ex-Special Forces soldier and star of TV's SAS: Who Dares Wins, Ollie Ollerton has faced many break points in his life and now he tells us the vital lessons he has learnt. His incredible story features hardened criminals, high-speed car chases, counter-terrorism and humanitarian heroics - freeing children from a trafficking ring in Thailand. Ollie has faced break points in his personal life too, surviving a freak childhood attack, run-ins with the law as a teenager rebelling against a broken home, his self-destructive battles with alcohol and drug addiction, and his struggles with anxiety and depression. His final redemption as an entrepreneur and mental health charity ambassador has seen him overcome adversity to build a new and better life. 'Everyone has the capacity for incredible achievement, because it's only when it's crunch time, when you're down to your last bullet - when you're at break point - that you find out who you really are.'

After a million deaths and twice that number injured, after the destruction of much of the infrastructure of Iran and Iraq, disruption of trade throughout the Gulf and the involvement of the USA and USSR, was the Gulf War a pointless exercise, a futile conflict which achieved nothing and left the combatants at the end of it all back in exactly the same position from which they started in 1980? In this book, first published in 1989, the authors argue that the lack of territorial gain was irrelevant: the real advantages won by each side were far more important, intangible though they were. For Iran, the channelling of the energies of her people away from domestic concerns meant the continuation of the Islamic revolution and ensured the stability of the mullahs. In Iraq, the war propped up the increasingly shaky regime of Saddam Hussein. The outside world, especially the superpowers, was terrified of the spread of Muslim fundamentalism, so made no effort to prevent Iraq from trying to halt this spread. But Israel, Saudi Arabia, Syria and the oil states also had vested interests in promoting the continuation of the war.

The Gulf War inflicted dramatic environmental damage upon the fragile desert and shore environments of Kuwait and north eastern Saudi Arabia. Marine environments experienced oil spills; inland, oil lakes and burning oil wells caused widespread pollution. This book, first published in 1994, presents an in-depth analysis of these environmental disasters, their long-term consequences, and potential ways to repair the damage.

Why has the US so dramatically failed in Afghanistan since 2001? Dominant explanations have ignored the bureaucratic divisions and personality conflicts inside the US state. This book rectifies this weakness in commentary on Afghanistan by exploring the significant role of these divisions in the US's difficulties in the country that meant the battle was virtually lost before it even began. The main objective of the book is to deepen readers understanding of the impact of bureaucratic politics on nation-building in Afghanistan, focusing primarily on the Bush Administration. It rejects the 'rational actor' model, according to which the US functions as a coherent, monolithic agent. Instead, internal divisions within the foreign policy bureaucracy are explored, to build up a picture of the internal tensions and contradictions that bedevilled US nation-building efforts. The book also contributes to the vexed issue of whether or not the US should engage in nation-building at all, and if so under what conditions.

The crisis in the Gulf of 1990-1 affected more than just the regional powers in the area. Rippling outward, its military, economic and political effects were felt throughout the international political system, testing US steadfastness in the face of Saddam Hussein's political survival, European ability to form a united front on foreign policy issues and the effectiveness of the UN in confronting international aggression. The rationale behind this book, first published in 1993, is to investigate and analyse the various aspects of the crisis, especially in regard to the interactions between internal and international prospects for a new order in the Middle East. It also examines the wider effects of the war, and includes analysis of Europe, America and the Soviet Union. Each one of the essays chosen for this volume has been written by an expert in their field. This collaboration between historians, regional specialists and political scientists, integrating a variety of research methods in the framework of one book, will be useful to a wide range of readers.

"This is the story of Abu Ghraib that you haven't heard, told by the soldier sent by the Army to restore order and ensure that the abuses that took place there never happen again." In April 2004, the world was shocked by the brutal pictures of beatings, dog attacks, sex acts, and the torture of prisoners held at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. As the story broke, and the world began to learn about the extent of the horrors that occurred there, the U.S. Army dispatched Colonel Larry James to Abu Ghraib with an overwhelming assignment: to dissect this catastrophe, fix it, and prevent it from being repeated.
A veteran of deployments to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and a nationally well-known and respected Army psychologist, Colonel James's expertise made him the one individual capable of taking on this enormous task. Through Colonel James's own experience on the ground, readers will see the tightrope military personnel must walk while fighting in the still new battlefield of the war on terror, the challenge of serving as both a doctor/healer and combatant soldier, and what can-and must-be done to ensure that interrogations are safe, moral, and effective.
At the same time, Colonel James also debunks many of the false stories and media myths surrounding the actions of American soldiers at both Abu Ghraib and GuantanamoBay, and he reveals shining examples of our men and women in uniform striving to serve with honor and integrity in the face of extreme hardship and danger.
An intense and insightful personal narrative, Fixing Hell shows us an essential perspective on Abu Ghraib that we've never seen before.

This book critiques the conceptualization of security found in mainstream and critical theoretical debates, and applies this to the empirical case of the 2003 Iraq War. The Iraq War represents one of the most puzzling, complex, and controversial events in the post-Cold War era. The manner in which the Bush administration finally decided to hold Saddam Hussein accountable through military intervention provoked a worldwide outcry due to the narratives they constructed to justify the "pre-emptive use of force" and "enhanced interrogation techniques." Responding to constructivist and post-structuralist scholars' calls for a turn to discourse, and aligning its argument with critical security studies, particularly the Copenhagen School (CS), this book conceptualizes language as a pivotal mechanism of power. Adopting a Wittgensteinian approach, it moves away from thinking about the nexus between security and language from a single action, or speech act, to a series of actions or interactions. To illustrate this new approach, the author examines two cases in particular: the UN inspectors' finding that there was no credible evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in early 2003 and the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004. Both events show that the boundaries and relations between securitized rules and environments are not pre-given but produced in a particular language game. This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, US foreign policy, and IR in general.

This book examines the ethics and values that render a war discourse normative, and features the stories of American soldiers who fought in the Iraq War to show how this narrative can change. The invasion of Iraq, launched in March 2003, was led by the United States under the now discredited claim that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD). However, critical questions concerning what we may be able to learn from this experience remain largely unexplored. The focus of this book, therefore, is on soldiers as systems of war - and the internal battle many of them wage as they live a reality that slowly emerges as inconsistent with familiar beliefs and value commitments. This work offers a reflective study of identity struggle from the perspective of emotional psychology and delves into the 'narrative field' of socio-politics. Going beyond the political contestations over the U.S. military intervention in Iraq, the author analyses original research on the evolving beliefs and value-commitments of veterans of the war, exploring their faith in its 'just cause' and their personal sense of self and national identity. This book will be of much interest to students of the Iraq War, US foreign policy, military studies, discourse analysis, and IR in general.

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.

In this galvanizing account of the most dramatic of the Arab-Israeli hostilities, Abraham Rabinovich, who reported the conflict for the Jerusalem Post, transports us into the midst of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Rabinovich's masterly narrative begins as Israel convinces itself there will be no war, while Egypt and Syria plot the two-front conflict. Then, on Yom Kippur, Saturday, October 6, 1973, we see Arab armies pouring across the shattered Bar-Lev Line in the Sinai and through the Golan defenses. Even the famed Israeli air force could not stop them. On the Golan alone, Syria sent 1,460 tanks against Israel's 177, and 115 artillery batteries against Israel's 11. And for the first time, footsoldiers wielding anti-tank weapons were able to stop tank charges, while surface-to-air missiles protected those troops from air attack
Rabinovich takes us into this inferno and into the inner sanctums of military and political decision making. He allows us to witness the dramatic turnaround that had the Syrians on the run by the following Wednesday and the great counterattack across the Suez Canal that, once begun, took international intervention to halt.
Using extensive interviews with both participants and observers, and with access to recently declassified materials, Rabinovich shows that the drama of the war lay not only in the battles but also in the apocalyptic visions it triggered in Israel, the hopes and fears it inspired in the Arab world, the heated conflicts on both sides about the conduct of the war, and the concurrent American face-off with the Soviets in Washington, D.C., Moscow, and the Mediterranean. A comprehensive account of one of the pivotal conflicts of the twentiethcentury.

"From the Hardcover edition.

A fully illustrated study of the extraordinarily successful early-generation jet, the F2H Banshee, a frontline aircraft that served with 27 US Navy and US Marine Corps squadrons and three Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) squadrons. The F2H Banshee was an extraordinarily successful early-generation jet that outlasted both contemporary and more modern fighter types on the decks of the US Navy's aircraft carriers in the 1950s. It served in a variety of roles and was a frontline aircraft for more than a decade in an era when jet fighters came and went with relatively short service careers. This book examines the entire service life of the F2H in the service of the US Navy, US Marine Corps and the RCN. Initially created as a replacement aircraft for McDonnell's pioneering FH1 Phantom, the F2H served in the Korean War as a strike fighter, close air support aircraft, B29 escort, and photoreconnaissance aircraft, including the latter's forays over the Soviet Union and China. Post service in Korea, the Banshee served as a carrier based nuclear strike aircraft, followed by its service as a defensive fighter for antisubmarine aircraft carriers. Filled with first-hand accounts and rare colour photographs, this is the engrossing story of the F2H Banshee, exploring its variety of roles in service and detailing the technology development that improved the aircraft's capabilities over time.

** Includes a New Postcript 'The Chilcot Report-Early Thoughts on Military Matters'** From 2001 Britain supported the United States in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 'Victory' in such conflicts is always hard to gauge and domestic political backing for them was never robust. For this, the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were held responsible, and paid the price, but the role played by the High Command in the Ministry of Defence also bears examination. Critics have noted that the armed services were riven by internal rivalry and their leadership was dysfunctional, but the truth is more complicated. In his book Elliott explores the circumstances that led to these wars and how the Ministry of Defence coped with the challenges presented. He reveals how the Service Chiefs were set at odds by the system, almost as rivals in the making, with responsibility diffuse and authority ambiguous. The MoD concentrated on making things work, rather than questioning whether what they were being asked to do was practicable.

As it seeks to win the hearts and minds of citizens in the Muslim world, the United States has poured millions of dollars into local television and radio programming, hoping to generate pro-American currents on Middle Eastern airwaves. However, as this fascinating new book shows, the Middle Eastern media producers who rely on these funds are hardly puppets on an American string, but instead contribute their own political and creative agendas while working within U.S. restrictions. The Other Air Force gives readers a unique inside look at television and radio production in Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories, from the isolated villages of the Afghan Panjshir Valley to the congested streets of Ramallah. Communications scholar Matt Sienkiewicz explores how the U.S. takes a ""soft-psy"" approach to its media efforts combining ""soft"" methods of encouraging entertainment programming, such as adaptations of The Voice and The Apprentice with more militaristic ""psy-ops"" approaches to information control. Drawing from years of field research and interviews with everyone from millionaire executives to underpaid but ever resourceful cameramen, Sienkiewicz considers the perspectives of the Afghan and Palestinian media workers trying to forge viable broadcasting businesses without straying outside American-set boundaries for acceptable content. As it carefully examines the interplay of U.S. military and economic might with the capacity for local ingenuity and resistance, the book also analyzes the intriguingly complex programming that emerges from this tension. Combining eyewitness reportage with cutting-edge scholarship, The Other Air Force reveals the remarkable creative output that can emerge even from the world's tensest conflict zones.

Winner, 2020 Peter C Rollins Prize, given by the Northeast Popular & American Culture Association Enables a reckoning with the legacy of the Forgotten War through literary and cinematic works of cultural memory Though often considered "the forgotten war," lost between the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War, the Korean War was, as Daniel Y. Kim argues, a watershed event that fundamentally reshaped both domestic conceptions of race and the interracial dimensions of the global empire that the United States would go on to establish. He uncovers a trail of cultural artefacts that speaks to the trauma experienced by civilians during the conflict but also evokes an expansive web of complicity in the suffering that they endured. Taking up a range of American popular media from the 1950s, Kim offers a portrait of the Korean War as it looked to Americans while they were experiencing it in real time. Kim expands this archive to read a robust host of fiction from US writers like Susan Choi, Rolando Hinojosa, Toni Morrison, and Chang-rae Lee, and the Korean author Hwang Sok-yong. The multiple and ongoing historical trajectories presented in these works testify to the resurgent afterlife of this event in US cultural memory, and of its lasting impact on multiple racialized populations, both within the US and in Korea. The Intimacies of Conflict offers a robust, multifaceted, and multidisciplinary analysis of the pivotal-but often unacknowledged-consequences of the Korean War in both domestic and transnational histories of race.

Strap in alongside the Sabre pilots as they experienced the world's first large-scale jet-vs-jet combats. Brought to life with innovative tactical artwork and dramatic first-hand accounts from the pilots themselves. The F-86A Sabre had entered USAF service in 1949, and in December 1950 three squadrons were sent to South Korea. Despite primitive basing conditions and overwhelming Chinese opposition, the Sabre pilots stopped communist air forces from attacking UN ground troops and allowed Allied fighter-bombers to operate without threat of interception. The ensuing air battles between Sabres and MiG-15s were the first since World War II, and the last in recent times to involve large numbers of jet fighters in direct confrontation. In all of them the victorious F-86 pilots demonstrated the superiority of their training and tactics and the outstanding qualities of their Sabres. Contemporary photographs and specially commissioned artwork, including a dramatic battlescene, armament views, technical diagrams and ribbon diagrams illustrating step-by-step each main dogfight explored in the book, bring the experiences of the Sabre pilots and their battle tactics vividly to life.

This highly illustrated title traces the development of mercenary soldiering from individuals and small units in the African wars of the 1960s-90s to today's state-employed corporate military contractors. The phenomenon of mercenary soldiering has constantly recurred in the news since the 1960s and has always attracted lively interest. The concept of 'mercenaries' began in the former Belgian Congo during the 1960s when men such as Mike Hoare and Bob Denard assembled hundreds of military veterans to 'do the fighting' for a particular leader or faction. This idea soon evolved into small teams of individuals training and leading local forces with varying success; wars in Rhodesia and on South Africa's borders attracted foreign volunteers into national armed forces, and veterans of these conflicts later sought employment elsewhere as mercenaries. The wars in the former Yugoslavia also attracted foreign fighters inspired as much by political and religious motives as by pay. This picture then evolved again, as former officers with recent experience set up sophisticated commercial companies to identify and fill the needs of governments whose own militaries were inadequate. Most recently, the aftermath of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has seen such contractors taking on some of the burden of long-term security off major national armies, while the subsequent rise of ISIS/Daesh has added a parallel strain of ideological volunteers. The author is well placed to describe how the face of mercenary soldiering has evolved and changed over 60 years. Using first-hand accounts, photos and detailed illustrations, this book presents a compelling snapshot of the life, campaigns and kit used by mercenary operatives engaged in fighting within both larger and more specific conflicts around the world.

You know about MI5. You know about MI6.

Now discover the untold stories behind Britain's most secretive intelligence agency, in the first ever authorised history of GCHQ.

For a hundred years, GCHQ - Government Communications Headquarters - has been at the forefront of innovation in national security and British secret statecraft. Famed for its codebreaking achievements during the Second World War, and essential to the Allied victory, GCHQ also held a critical role in both the Falklands War and Cold War. Today, amidst the growing threats of terrorism and online crime, GCHQ continues to be the UK's leading intelligence, security and cyber agency, and a powerful tool of the British state.

Based on unprecedented access to classified archives, Behind the Enigma is the first book to authoritatively tell the entire history of this most unique and enigmatic of organisations - and peer into its future at the heart of the nation's security.

An expertly written, illustrated new analysis of the Desert Storm air campaign fought against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, which shattered the world's fourth-largest army and sixth-largest air force in just 39 days, and revolutionized the world's ideas about modern air power. Operation Desert Storm took just over six weeks to destroy Saddam Hussein's war machine: a 39-day air campaign followed by a four-day ground assault. It shattered what had been the world's fourth-largest army and sixth-largest air force, and overturned conventional military assumptions about the effectiveness and value of air power. In this book, Richard P. Hallion, one of the world's foremost experts on air warfare, explains why Desert Storm was a revolutionary victory, a war won with no single climatic battle. Instead, victory came thanks largely to a rigorously planned air campaign. It began with an opening night that smashed Iraq's advanced air defense system, and allowed systematic follow-on strikes to savage its military infrastructure and field capabilities. When the Coalition tanks finally rolled into Iraq, it was less an assault than an occupation. The rapid victory in Desert Storm, which surprised many observers, led to widespread military reform as the world saw the new capabilities of precision air power, and it ushered in today's era of high-tech air warfare.

From master storyteller Andy McNab, this is the opening book in an adventure-filled and action-packed new series telling, for the first time ever, the true stories of Special Forces missions. 'McNab's first major non-autobiographical work of non-fiction ... The operation is told like a novel [...] and it is as refreshingly informal and compellingly immediate as his other books' Daily Express 'Part history lesson, part military manual, part fixed-bayonets thriller. A must for Special Forces fans' The Sun It is the early 2000s and 9/11 is fresh in the world's memory. The Taliban have taken over Afghanistan, and armed militants and explosive devices are terrorising the people. And now a new threat is emerging in the country: suicide bombings, ordered by military commander of the Taliban, Mullah Dadullah. Special Forces are sent in to stop him. The Hunt is the thrilling story of the secret mission to catch Dadullah, one of the most dangerous men alive. Using classified sources and his unique insight into the way the SAS works, Andy McNab gives a page-turning account of what it took the Special Forces to find their target and what they would have to do to take him down. An explosive story of hostage negotiations, undercovers missions and a final, epic assault on Dadullah's compound that could leave only one side alive, The Hunt is a powerful retelling of a real-life Special Forces mission.