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Books > Humanities > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history > From 1900 > Postwar, from 1945 > Vietnam War
An army, Lewis Mumford once observed, "is a body of pure
consumers"-and it is logistics that feeds this body's insatiable
appetite for men and materiel. Successful logistics-the
transportation of supplies and combatants to battle-cannot
guarantee victory, but poor logistics portends defeat. In Feeding
Victory, Jobie Turner asks how technical innovation has affected
this connection over time and whether advances in technology, from
the railroad and the airplane to the nuclear weapon and the
computer, have altered both the critical relationship between
logistics and warfare and, ultimately, geopolitical
dynamics.Covering a span of three hundred years, Feeding Victory
focuses on five distinct periods of technological change, from the
preindustrial era to the information age. For each era Turner
presents a case study: the campaign for Lake George from 1755 to
1759, the Western Front in 1917, the Battle of Guadalcanal in 1942,
the Battle of Stalingrad from 1942 to 1943, and the Battle of Khe
Sanh in 1968. In each of these cases the logistics of the
belligerents were at their limit because of geography or the vast
material needs of war. With such limits, the case studies both give
a clear accounting of the logistics of the period, particularly
with respect to the mode of transportation-whether air, land, or
sea-and reveal the inflection points between success and failure.
What are the continuities between eras, Turner asks, and what can
these campaigns tell us about the relationship of technology to
logistics and logistics to geopolitics? In doing so, Turner
discovers just how critical the biological needs of the soldiers on
the battlefield prove to be; in fact, they overwhelm firepower in
their importance, even in the modern era. His work shows how
logistics aptly represents technological shifts from the
enlightenment to the dawn of the twentyfirst century and how, in
our time, ideas have come to trump the material forces of war.
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more
at www.luminosoa.org. What happens when refugees encounter
Indigenous sovereignty struggles in the countries of their
resettlement? From April to November 1975, the US military
processed over 112,000 Vietnamese refugees on the unincorporated
territory of Guam; from 1977 to 1979, the State of Israel granted
asylum and citizenship to 366 non-Jewish Vietnamese refugees. Evyn
Le Espiritu Gandhi analyzes these two cases to theorize what she
calls the refugee settler condition: the fraught positionality of
refugee subjects whose resettlement in a settler colonial state is
predicated on the unjust dispossession of an Indigenous population.
This groundbreaking book explores two forms of critical geography:
first, archipelagos of empire, examining how the Vietnam War is
linked to the US military buildup in Guam and unwavering support of
Israel, and second, corresponding archipelagos of trans-Indigenous
resistance, tracing how Chamorro decolonization efforts and
Palestinian liberation struggles are connected through the
Vietnamese refugee figure. Considering distinct yet overlapping
modalities of refugee and Indigenous displacement, Gandhi offers
tools for imagining emergent forms of decolonial solidarity between
refugee settlers and Indigenous peoples.
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