Explore the vast range of titles available.

\"This collection of case studies examines the role of innovation in military affairs since the twelfth century. Covering a broad geographical area, the contributors analyze innovations in a variety of areas, including weapon technology, strategy, research, and development philosophy\"--Provided by publisher.

As the U.S. experience in Iraq following the 2003 invasion made abundantly clear, failure to properly plan for risks associated with postconflict stabilization and reconstruction can have a devastating impact on the overall success of a military mission. In Waging War, Planning Peace , Aaron Rapport investigates how U.S. presidents and their senior advisers have managed vital noncombat activities while the nation is in the midst of fighting or preparing to fight major wars. He argues that research from psychology-specifically, construal level theory-can help explain how individuals reason about the costs of postconflict noncombat operations that they perceive as lying in the distant future. In addition to preparations for \"Phase IV\" in the lead-up to the Iraq War, Rapport looks at the occupation of Germany after World War II, the planned occupation of North Korea in 1950, and noncombat operations in Vietnam in 1964 and 1965. Applying his insights to these cases, he finds that civilian and military planners tend to think about near-term tasks in concrete terms, seriously assessing the feasibility of the means they plan to employ to secure valued ends. For tasks they perceive as further removed in time, they tend to focus more on the desirability of the overarching goals they are pursuing rather than the potential costs, risks, and challenges associated with the means necessary to achieve these goals. Construal level theory, Rapport contends, provides a coherent explanation of how a strategic disconnect can occur. It can also show postwar planners how to avoid such perilous missteps. As the U.S. experience in Iraq following the 2003 invasion made abundantly clear, failure to properly plan for risks associated with postconflict stabilization and reconstruction can have a devastating impact on the overall success of a military mission. In Waging War, Planning Peace , Aaron Rapport investigates how U.S. presidents and their senior advisers have managed vital noncombat activities while the nation is in the midst of fighting or preparing to fight major wars. He argues that research from psychology-specifically, construal level theory-can help explain how individuals reason about the costs of postconflict noncombat operations that they perceive as lying in the distant future.In addition to preparations for \"Phase IV\" in the lead-up to the Iraq War, Rapport looks at the occupation of Germany after World War II, the planned occupation of North Korea in 1950, and noncombat operations in Vietnam in 1964 and 1965. Applying his insights to these cases, he finds that civilian and military planners tend to think about near-term tasks in concrete terms, seriously assessing the feasibility of the means they plan to employ to secure valued ends. For tasks they perceive as further removed in time, they tend to focus more on the desirability of the overarching goals they are pursuing rather than the potential costs, risks, and challenges associated with the means necessary to achieve these goals. Construal level theory, Rapport contends, provides a coherent explanation of how a strategic disconnect can occur. It can also show postwar planners how to avoid such perilous missteps.

\"A comparison of nine leaders who led their nations through the greatest wars the world has ever seen and whose unique strengths--and weaknesses--shaped the course of human history\"-- Provided by publisher.

\"Alliances have shaped grand strategy and warfare since the dawn of civilization. Indeed, it is doubtful that the United States of America would have gained its independence without its Revolutionary War alliance with France. Such alliances may prove even more important to international security in the twenty-first century. Economic and financial difficulties alone will ensure that policy makers attempt to spread the burden of securing vital interests onto other nations through alliances, both formal organizations such as NATO and informal alliances of convenience as developed to wage the Gulf War in 1991. A team of leading historians examine the problems inherent in alliance politics and relationships in the framework of grand strategy through the lens of history. Aimed at not just the military aspects of alliances, the book uncovers the myriad factors that have made such coalitions succeed or fail in the past\"-- Provided by publisher.

WarfareÆs evolution, especially since 2001, has irrevocably changed the meaning of war. In the twentieth centuryùhumankindÆs bloodiestù231 million people died in armed conflicts. Battlefield deaths since then have been steadily declining, despite the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by 2012 less than 1 person in a million dies in war every year. This drastic change has led some academics to label our era one of peace, recalling the erroneously named ôHundred YearsÆ Peaceö or ôPax Britannicaö of the nineteenth century, which nonetheless saw many violent conflicts. But war hasnÆt gone extinct. It has merely evolved . In Shadow Wars , journalist David Axe tells the story of the new war eraùone of insurgents and counterinsurgents, terrorists and their hunters, pirates, mercenaries, smugglers, and slavers wreaking havoc on regions where conditions are brutal, people are poor, governments are weak, and the world rarely pays attention. Axe shows us what war has become in our era of peace. The mainstream media, meanwhile, ignores it. This book profoundly challenges readersÆ conceptions of war and peace in the twenty-first century.

\"Military Adaptation in War addresses one of the most persistent, yet rarely examined, problems that military organizations confront: namely, the problem of how to adapt under the trying, terrifying conditions of war. This work builds on the volume that Professor Williamson Murray edited with Allan Millett on military innovation (a quite different problem, though similar in some respects). In Clausewitzian terms, war is a contest, an interactive duel, which is of indeterminate length and presents a series of intractable problems at every level, from policy and strategy down to the tactical. Moreover, the fact that the enemy is adapting at the same time presents military organizations with an ever-changing set of conundrums that offer up no easy solutions. As the British general, James Wolfe, suggested before Quebec: \"War is an option of difficulties.\" Dr. Murray provides an in-depth analysis of the problems that military forces confront in adapting to these difficulties\"-- Provided by publisher.

The recent work of anthropologists, historians, and historical archaeologists has changed the very essence of military history. While once preoccupied with great battles and the generals who commanded the armies and employed the tactics, military history has begun to emphasize the importance of the “common man” for interpreting events. As a result, military historians have begun to see military forces and the people serving in them from different perspectives.

pSince the end of World War II a paradigm shift has occurred in armed conflict. Asymmetric, or fourth-generation warfare-the challenge of nonstate belligerents to the authority and power of the state-has become the dominant form of conflict, while interstate conventional war has become an increasingly irrelevant instrument of statecraft. In asymmetric conflicts the enemy is often a fellow citizen with a different vision for the future of the country-waging war among the people, maneuvering on the borderlines between parliamentary politics, street politics, criminal activity, and combat operations./p p emWinning Wars/em emamongst the People/em analyzes the special circumstances of asymmetric conflicts in the domestic context and seeks to identify those principles that allow a democratic state's security forces to meet the challenge, while at the same time obey their homeland's laws, protect its culture, observe its values, and maintain its liberties, traditions, and way of life. Using five detailed case studies, Peter A. Kiss explains the fundamental differences between the paradigm of conventional warfare and that of asymmetric warfare as well as the latter's political, social, and economic roots and main characteristics. Most important, he identifies the measures a government must take to prepare its security forces and other institutions of state for an asymmetric conflict./p