This book aims to serve the military profession, and so the national interest, by helping to generate intelligent reform of how the armed forces train, educate, and promote officers who shape our military strategy and write our war plans. Readers will discover the professional and intellectual improvement that wide reading in the masters of historical narrative offers to them. The first chapter, "Lessons Not Learned," surveys our strategic documents-and their recent applications-and offers criticism and recommendations. The second chapter, "Transformation Ballyhoo," evaluates our current efforts at military transformation and offers an alternative approach to rehabilitating our armed forces. The third chapter, "The Brain of An Army," offers ideas on building a first-rate Joint War College. Chapters four through six focus on military campaigns: France 1940; Stalingrad; North Africa, 1940-43. The theme is that moral and intellectual qualities determine the fate of armies in war, and that material and bureaucratic machinery are not nearly so vital as we seem to think nowadays.

The first book to examine in detail the impact of the Northern Irish Troubles on southern Irish society. This study vividly illustrates how life in the Irish Republic was affected by the conflict north of the border and how people responded to the events there. It documents popular mobilization in support of northern nationalists, the reaction to Bloody Sunday, the experience of refugees and the popular cultural debates the conflict provoked. For the first time the human cost of violence is outlined, as are the battles waged by successive governments against the IRA. Focusing on debates at popular level rather than among elites, the book illustrates how the Troubles divided southern opinion and produced long-lasting fissures. -- .

This book examines the relationship between Irish republicanism, policing and crime from 1916 to the present day. While little academic attention has been paid to this aspect of republican history, crime and policing arose as issues in every era of the IRA's existence. This book describes republican attempts to deal with crime during the War of Independence, the problems caused by the Civil War split and how the organization grappled with accusations of criminality throughout much of the twentieth century. These questions emerged again with a vengeance during the modern Irish conflict after 1969 and persisted into the twenty-first century. During this period, the perceived connection between the IRA and gangland crime became established in both popular culture and state discourse, north and south of the border. This book contains much new information on the IRA's role in policing crime during the War of Independence. It looks at the way in which accusations of involvement in crime were weaponized during the Civil War and the IRA's attitude to crime and criminals thereafter. It also then examines the way in which the modern Northern Ireland conflict transformed the relationship between republicans and crime, north and south. Though written for a popular audience this book would also interest scholars in a variety of fields.