Since the development of the modern state system in Europe four centuries ago, there have been ten general wars involving a majority of the major powers and a high level of casualties. Another major war is difficult to conceive of, since it would presumably be the last such conflict, and yet it is not an impossibility. In this volume a distinguished group of political scientists and historians examine the origins of major wars and discuss the problems in preventing a nuclear war.

The British troops who fought so successfully under the Duke of Wellington during his Peninsular Campaign against Napoleon have long been branded by the duke's own words - ""scum of the earth"" - and assumed to have been society's ne'er-do-wells or criminals who enlisted to escape justice. Now Edward J. Coss shows to the contrary that most of these redcoats were respectable laborers and tradesmen and that it was mainly their working-class status that prompted the duke's derision. Driven into the army by unemployment in the wake of Britain's industrial revolution, they confronted wartime hardship with ethical values and became formidable soldiers in the bargain These men depended on the king's shilling for survival, yet pay was erratic and provisions were scant. Fed worse even than sixteenth-century Spanish galley slaves, they often marched for days without adequate food; and if during the campaign they did steal from Portuguese and Spanish civilians, the theft was attributable not to any criminal leanings but to hunger and the paltry rations provided by the army. Coss draws on a comprehensive database on British soldiers as well as first-person accounts of Peninsular War participants to offer a better understanding of their backgrounds and daily lives. He describes how these neglected and abused soldiers came to rely increasingly on the emotional and physical support of comrades and developed their own moral and behavioral code. Their cohesiveness, Coss argues, was a major factor in their legendary triumphs over Napoleon's battle-hardened troops. The first work to closely examine the social composition of Wellington's rank and file through the lens of military psychology, All for the King's Shilling transcends the Napoleonic battlefield to help explain the motivation and behavior of all soldiers under the stress of combat.

This book examines the German air force monograph project known as the Karlsruhe project where the US Air Force employed former Luftwaffe generals to record the history of World War II from the German perspective. The Air Force monographs have proven useful to historians because of their high quality. The Karlsruhe monographs writers were insulated from outside pressure, and produced studies immediately useful to the military. The Air Force ignored the monographs and failed to benefit from the experience of the Luftwaffe. The author illustrates the inherent tensions in writing official military history and uses the Karlsruhe project as a lens to examine problems plaguing the Air Force during the early Cold War. Still, cooperative historical work proved to be an inexpensive and unexpected way of cementing the critical West German-American military alliance, and both air forces came to value this aspect of the project more than the historical studies it produced.

On May 12, 1975, less than two weeks after the fall of Saigon, Khmer Rouge naval forces seized the S.S. Mayaguez, an American container ship, off the Cambodian coast in the Gulf of Siam. The swift military response ordered by President Gerald Ford was designed to recapture the Mayaguez, held at anchor off the island of Koh Tang, to liberate her crew, and to demonstrate U.S. strength and resolve in the immediate aftermath of America's most humiliating defeat. Guilmartin, a former air rescue helicopter pilot stationed in Thailand, provides a unique and compelling account of the Mayaguez-Koh Tang crisis, shedding new light on the politics, the tactics, the orders, the high-level decision makers, and the fighting men entangled in a crucial military action that nearly ended in disaster for U.S. forces. ." . . a brilliant and exceptionally clear tactical study that offers a point of departure for broader reflections on the nature of contingency and uncertainty in all military operations."--Foreign Affairs "This is an exceptional book. . . Guilmartin's] work transcends the events themselves, illustrating numerous aspects of men in war. His insights and observations are compelling."--Journal of Military History ." . . written with the flair and excitement of an adventure novel. Even those who know the outcome and the lessons of the Mayaguez incident will find this book hard to put down until finished."--Proceedings JOHN F. GUILMARTIN JR., professor of history at the Ohio State University, flew 119 combat missions over Southeast Asia as an Air Force helicopter pilot.