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"Military art and science United States History 20th century."
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Other People's Wars
Other People's Wars explores key US efforts involving
direct observation missions and post-conflict investigations
throughout its history. Sterling shows how initiatives to learn
from other nations' wars can yield significant benefits,
emphasisizing comprehensive qualitative learning to foster better
military preparedness and adaptability.
Case studies explore how to improve military adaptation
and preparedness in peacetime by investigating foreign
wars
Preparing for the next war at an unknown date against an
undetermined opponent is a difficult undertaking with extremely
high stakes. Even the most detailed exercises and wargames do not
truly simulate combat and the fog of war. Thus, outside of their
own combat, militaries have studied foreign wars as a valuable
source of battlefield information. The effectiveness of this
learning process, however, has rarely been evaluated across
different periods and contexts.
Through a series of in-depth case studies of the US Army, Navy,
and Air Force, Brent L. Sterling creates a better understanding of
the dynamics of learning from \"other people's wars,\" determining
what types of knowledge can be gained from foreign wars,
identifying common pitfalls, and proposing solutions to maximize
the benefits for doctrine, organization, training, and
equipment.
Other People's Wars explores major US efforts involving
direct observation missions and post-conflict investigations at key
junctures for the US armed forces: the Crimean War (1854-56),
Russo-Japanese War (1904-5), Spanish Civil War (1936-39), and Yom
Kippur War (1973), which preceded the US Civil War, First and
Second World Wars, and major army and air force reforms of the
1970s, respectively. The case studies identify learning pitfalls
but also show that initiatives to learn from other nations' wars
can yield significant benefits if the right conditions are met.
Sterling puts forth a process that emphasizes comprehensive
qualitative learning to foster better military preparedness and
adaptability.
eBook
The echo of battle : the Army's way of war
From Lexington and Gettysburg to Normandy and Iraq, the wars of the United States have defined the nation. But after the guns fall silent, the army searches the lessons of past conflicts in order to prepare for the next clash of arms. In the echo of battle, the army develops the strategies, weapons, doctrine, and commanders that it hopes will guarantee a future victory.
In the face of radically new ways of waging war, Brian Linn surveys the past assumptions--and errors--that underlie the army's many visions of warfare up to the present day. He explores the army's forgotten heritage of deterrence, its long experience with counter-guerrilla operations, and its successive efforts to transform itself. Distinguishing three martial traditions--each with its own concept of warfare, its own strategic views, and its own excuses for failure--he locates the visionaries who prepared the army for its battlefield triumphs and the reactionaries whose mistakes contributed to its defeats.
Discussing commanders as diverse as Dwight D. Eisenhower, George S. Patton, and Colin Powell, and technologies from coastal artillery to the Abrams tank, he shows how leadership and weaponry have continually altered the army's approach to conflict. And he demonstrates the army's habit of preparing for wars that seldom occur, while ignoring those it must actually fight. Based on exhaustive research and interviews, The Echo of Battle provides an unprecedented reinterpretation of how the U.S. Army has waged war in the past and how it is meeting the new challenges of tomorrow.
eBook
Warfare and culture in world history
\"It has long been acknowledged that the study of war and warfare demands careful consideration of technology, institutions, social organization, and more. But, for some, the so-called \"war and society\" approach increasingly included everything but explained nothing, because it all too often seemed to ignore the events on the battlefield itself. The military historians in Warfare and Culture in World History return us to the battlefield, but they do so through a deep examination of the role of culture in shaping military institutions and military choices. Collected here are some of the most provocative recent efforts to analyze warfare through a cultural lens, drawing on and aggressively expanding traditional scholarship on war and society through sophisticated cultural analysis. With chapters ranging from an organizational analysis of American Civil War field armies to the soldiers' culture of late Republican Rome and debates within Ming Chinese officialdom over extermination versus pacification, this one volume provides a full range of case studies of how culture, whether societal, strategic, organizational, or military, could shape not only military institutions but also actual battlefield choices.-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Reminiscences of Conrad S. Babcock
The son of an army officer, Conrad S. Babcock graduated from West Point in 1898, just in time for the opening of the Spanish-American War. Because of his father's position, he managed to secure a place in the force that Major General Wesley Merritt led to Manila to secure the city. The Philippine Insurrection, as Americans described it, began shortly after he arrived. What Babcock observed in subsequent months and years, and details in his memoir, was the remarkable transition the U.S. Army was undergoing. From after the Civil War until just before the Spanish War, the army amounted to 28,000 men. It increased to 125,000, tiny compared with those of the great European nations of France and Germany, but the great change in the army came after its arrival in France in the summer of 1918, when the German army compelled the U.S. to change its nineteenth-century tactics.
Babcock's original manuscript has been shortened by Robert H. Ferrell into eight chapters which illustrate the tremendous shift in warfare in the years surrounding the turn of the century. The first part of the book describes small actions against Filipinos and such assignments as taking a cavalry troop into the fire-destroyed city of San Francisco in 1906 or duty in the vicinity of Yuma in Arizona when border troubles were heating up with brigands and regular troops. The remaining chapters, beginning in 1918, set out the battles of Soissons (July 18–22) and Saint-Mihiel (September 12–16) and especially the immense battle of the Meuse-Argonne (September 26–November 11), the largest (1.2 million troops involved) and deadliest (26,000 men killed) battle in all of American history.
By the end of his career, Babcock was an adroit battle commander and an astute observer of military operations. Unlike most other officers around him, he showed an ability and willingness to adapt infantry tactics in the face of recently developed technology and weaponry such as the machine gun. When he retired in 1937 and began to write his memoirs, another world war had begun, giving additional context to his observations about the army and combat over the preceding forty years.
Until now, Babcock's account has only been available in the archives of the Hoover Institution, but with the help of Ferrell's crisp, expert editing, this record of army culture in the first decades of the twentieth century can now reach a new generation of scholars.
eBook
Reminiscences of Conrad S. Babcock : the old U.S. Army and the new, 1898-1918
\"Babcock's original manuscript has been shortened by Robert H. Ferrell into eight chapters which illustrate the tremendous shfit in warfare in the years surrounding the turn of the century\"--Publisher's description.
Book
Warriors and Scholars
Few works of military history are able to move between the battlefield and academia. But Warriors and Scholars takes the best from both worlds by presenting the viewpoints of senior, eminent military historians on topics of their specialty, alongside veteran accounts for the modern war being discussed. Editors Peter Lane and Ronald Marcello have added helpful contextual and commentary footnotes for student readers. The papers, originally from the University of North Texas's annual Military History Seminar, are organized chronologically from World War II to the present day, making this a modern war reader of great use for the professional and the student. Scholars and topics include David Glantz on the Soviet Great Patriotic War, 19411945; Robert Divine on the decision to use the atomic bomb; George Herring on Lyndon Baines Johnson as Commander-in-Chief; and Brian Linn comparing the U.S. war and occupation in Iraq with the 18991902 war in the Philippines. Veterans and their topics include flying with the Bloody 100th by John Luckadoo; an enlisted man in the Pacific theater of World War II, by Roy Appleton; a POW in Vietnam, by David Winn; and Cold War duty in Moscow, by Charles Hamm.
eBook
Strategic inventions of the Cold War
\"In the years following World War II, a new kind of war gripped the world. This was not a war fought on a battlefield but a war fought in the mind and through willpower and demonstrations of strength. The Cold War, as this conflict became known, lasted from the 1950s to the 1980s. It was a time that saw many new technologies emerge. Among them were ballistic missiles, the M1 Abrams tank, and the television. This book details the events of the Cold War, the need for these technologies, and the impact these advancements had on societies of the past as well as today.\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Doctrine Under Trial: American Artillery Employment in World War I
Artillery proved to be the greatest killer on the Western front in World War I, and the use and misuse of artillery was certainly a determining factor in the war^D's outcome. While many books explore the artillery forces and employment of the European powers, this is the first study to examine artillery employment in the American Expeditionary Force. Grotelueschen follows one AEF division through its entire World War I experience, from preliminary training to each of its battles in France. This approach allows for great investigative depth and an opportunity to explore the implementation of doctrinal changes throughout the war. While accounts of the AEF written in the immediate aftermath of the war praised it as a great fighting machine, most scholars have concluded that the AEF was a flawed combat force. This study demonstrates that despite significant flaws and weaknesses, especially in artillery doctrine and employment, at least some AEF divisions did attain effective fighting ability. American divisions were most successful when carrying out limited, set-piece attacks, efforts that ran counter to approved US Army and AEF doctrine at the time. Historians will find this unique approach to the study of division level strengths and weaknesses to be useful in making more accurate and complete comparisons among the great armies of the Western Front.
eBook