Today's protracted asymmetrical conflicts confuse efforts to measure progress, often inviting politics and wishful thinking to replace objective evaluation.In Assessing War, military historians, social scientists, and military officers explore how observers have analyzed the trajectory of war in American conflicts from the Seven Years’ War through the war in Afghanistan. Drawing on decades of acquired expertise, the contributors examine wartime assessment in both theory an...

John M. Collins has distilled the wisdom of historys great military minds to tutor readers on the necessary intellectual skills to win not only battles but also wars. He illuminates practices that worked well or poorly in the past, together with reasons why. He discusses national security interests, strategic building blocks, military strategies across the conflict spectrum, methods for developing talent and strategic acumen, and recent case studies that put principles into practice. Collins ...

The second edition of Strategic Studies: A Reader brings together key essays on strategic theory by some of the leading contributors to the field. This revised volume contains several new essays and updated introductions to each section.The volume comprises hard-to-find classics in the field as well as the latest scholarship. The aim is to provide students with a wide-ranging survey of the key issues in strategic studies, and to provide an introduction to the main ideas an...

This is the first book to examine the concept of anti-access and area denial warfare, providing a definitive introduction to both conceptual theories and historical examples of this strategy. Also referred to by the acronym "A2/AD," anti-access warfare has been identified in American strategic planning as the most likely strategy to be employed by the People's Republic of China or by the Islamic Republic of Iran in any future conflict with the United States. While previous studies of the s...

"Speak softly and carry a big stick" Theodore Roosevelt famously said in 1901, when the United States was emerging as a great power. It was the right sentiment, perhaps, in an age of imperial rivalry but today many Americans doubt the utility of their global military presence, thinking it outdated, unnecessary or even dangerous.In The Big Stick, Eliot A. Cohen-a scholar and practitioner of international relations-disagrees. He argues that hard power remains essential for A...

Threats to international peace and security include the proliferation of weapons of mass destructions, rogue nations, and international terrorism. The United States must respond to these challenges to its national security and to world stability by embracing new military technologies such as drones, autonomous robots, and cyber weapons. These weapons can provide more precise, less destructive means to coerce opponents to stop WMD proliferation, clamp down on terrorism, or end humanitarian ...

Understanding Modern Warfare has established itself as the leading introduction to the issues, ideas, concepts and context necessary to understand the theory and conduct of warfare in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is an invaluable text for military professionals and students of military history. Key features include: incisive coverage of the debates surrounding contemporary and future warfare; accessible, yet sophisticated, discussion across the land, sea, and air environmen...

The Oxford Handbook of War is the definitive analysis of war in the twenty-first century. With over forty senior authors from academia, government and the armed forces world-wide the Handbook explores the history, theory, ethics and practice of war. The Handbook first considers the fundamental causes of war, before reflecting on the moral and legal aspects of war. Theories on the practice of war lead into an analysis of the strategic conduct of war and ...

Professionally converted for accurate flowing-text e-book format reproduction, this military publication presents fascinating papers about the American military on the frontier from the Seventh Military History Symposium hosted at the Air Force Academy.They are arranged into four sections: "The Frontier and American Military Tradition," "Comparison of Military Frontiers," "Impact of the Military on the Frontier," and "Military Life on the Frontier." Papers in the first two sections...

Challenging several longstanding notions about the American way of war, this book examines US strategic and operational practice from 1775 to 2014. It surveys all major US wars from the War of Independence to the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as most smaller US conflicts to determine what patterns, if any, existed in American uses of force. Contrary to many popular sentiments, Echevarria finds that the American way of war is not astrategic, apolitical, or defined by the use of...

First published in 2005. This is a special issue of the Journal of Peace Psychology which presents a dialogue on military ethics. Including articles on the five obstacles facing military ethics, decision making and collateral, the question of whether wars can be justified, unprofessional soldiers, and lessons learned from the Battle of Algiers.

This book explores the issue of civilian devastation in modern warfare, focusing on the complex processes that effectively establish civilians’ identity in times of war.Underpinning the physicality of war’s tumult are structural forces that create landscapes of civilian vulnerability. Such forces operate in four sectors of modern warfare: nationalistic ideology, state-sponsored militaries, global media, and international institutions. Each sector promotes its own constructions of c...