Download or read book A Cartographic Analysis of Soviet Military City Plans written by Martin Davis and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-09-29 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collapse of the Soviet Union has seen the emergence of its unprecedentedly comprehensive global secret military mapping project and the commercial availability of a vast number of detailed topographic maps and city plans at several scales. This thesis provides an in-depth examination of the series of over 2,000 large-scale city plans produced in secret by the Military Topographic Directorate (Военное топографическое управление) of the General Staff between the end of the Second World War and the collapse of the USSR in 1991. After positioning the series in its historical context, the nature and content of the plans are examined in detail. A poststructuralist perspective introduces possibilities to utilise and apply the maps in new contexts, which this thesis facilitates by providing a systematic, empirical analysis of the Soviet map symbology at 1:10,000 and 1:25,000, using new translations of production manuals and a sample of the city plans. A comparative analysis with the current OpenStreetMap symbology indicates scope for Soviet mapping to be used as a valuable supplementary topographic resource in a variety of existing and future global mapping initiatives, including humanitarian crisis mapping. This leads to a conclusion that the relevance and value of Soviet military maps endure in modern applications, both as a source of data and as a means of overcoming contemporary cartographic challenges relating to symbology, design and the handling of large datasets.
Download or read book The Red Atlas written by John Davies and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1950 to 1990, the Soviet Army conducted a global topographic mapping program, creating large-scale maps for much of the world that included a diversity of detail that would have supported a full range of military planning. For big cities like New York, DC, and London to towns like Pontiac, MI and Galveston, TX, the Soviets gathered enough information to create street-level maps. What they chose to include on these maps can seem obvious like locations of factories and ports, or more surprising, such as building heights, road widths, and bridge capacities. Some of the detail suggests early satellite technology, while other specifics, like detailed depictions of depths and channels around rivers and harbors, could only have been gained by actual Soviet feet on the ground. The Red Atlas includes over 350 extracts from these Cold War maps, exploring their provenance and cartographic techniques as well as what they can tell us about their makers and the Soviet initiatives that were going on all around us.
Download or read book Dissemination of Cartographic Knowledge written by Mirela Altić and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-09-07 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book gathers 22 papers which were presented at the 6th International Symposium of the ICA Commission on the History of Cartography in Dubrovnik, Croatia on 13–15 October 2016. The overall conference theme was ‘The Dissemination of Cartographic Knowledge: Production – Trade – Consumption – Preservation’. The book presents original research by internationally respected authors in the field of historical cartography, offering a significant contribution to the development of this field of study, but also of geography, history and the GIS sciences. The primary target audience includes researchers, educators, postgraduate students, map librarians and archivists.
Download or read book Soviet Topographic Map Symbols written by United States. Department of the Army and published by . This book was released on 1958 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mapping Empires Colonial Cartographies of Land and Sea written by Alexander James Kent and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-08-26 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book comprises 17 chapters derived from new research papers presented at the 7th International Symposium of the ICA Commission on the History of Cartography, held in Oxford from 13 to 15 September 2018 and jointly organized by the ICA Commission on Topographic Mapping and the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. The overall conference theme was ‘Mapping Empires: Colonial Cartographies of Land and Sea’. The book presents a breadth of original research undertaken by internationally recognized authors in the field of historical cartography and offers a significant contribution to the development of this growing field and to many interdisciplinary aspects of geography, history and the geographic information sciences. It is intended for researchers, teachers, postgraduate students, map librarians and archivists.
Download or read book Russian Grand Strategy in the era of global power competition written by Andrew Monaghan and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a nuanced and detailed examination of two of the most important current debates about contemporary Russia's international activity: is Moscow acting strategically or opportunistically, and should this be understood in regional or global terms? The book addresses core themes of Russian activity – military, energy and economic - but it offers an unusual multi-disciplinary analysis to these themes. Monaghan incorporates both regional and thematic specialist expertise to give a fresh perspective to each of these core themes. Underpinned by detailed analyses of the revolution in Russian geospatial capabilities and the establishment of a strategic planning foundation, the book includes chapters on military and maritime strategies, energy security and economic diversification and influence. This serves to highlight the connections between military and economic interests that shape and drive Russian strategy.
Download or read book Foreign Maps written by United States. Department of the Army and published by . This book was released on 1956 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Losing Military Supremacy written by Andrei Martyanov and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2018-06-04 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Marytanov explains why and how the US armed forces have lost the military supremacy they thought they once had and how Russia, which supposedly had been defeated in the Cold War, succeeded not only in catching up with USA, but actually surpassing it in many key domains such as long range cruise missiles, diesel-electric submarines, air defenses, electronic warfare, air superiority and many others. Andrei Martyanov's book is an absolute 'must read' for any person wanting to understand the reality of modern warfare and super-power competition." THE SAKER While exceptionalism is not unique to America, the intensity of their conviction and its global ramifications are. This view of its exceptionalism has led the US to grossly misinterpret—sometimes deliberately—the causative factors of key events of the past two centuries. Accordingly, the wrong conclusions have been derived, and very wrong lessons learned. Nowhere has this been more manifest than in American military thought and its actual application of military power. Time after time the American military has failed to match lofty declarations about its superiority, producing instead a mediocre record of military accomplishments. Starting from the Korean War the United States hasn’t won a single war against a technologically inferior, but mentally tough enemy. The technological dimension of American “strategy” has completely overshadowed any concern with the social, cultural, operational and even tactical requirements of military (and political) conflict. With a new Cold War with Russia emerging, the United States enters a new period of geopolitical turbulence completely unprepared in any meaningful way—intellectually, economically, militarily or culturally—to face a reality which was hidden for the last 70+ years behind the curtain of never-ending Chalabi moments and a strategic delusion concerning Russia, whose history the US viewed through a Solzhenitsified caricature kept alive by a powerful neocon lobby, which even today dominates US policy makers’ minds. Martyanov’s former Soviet military background enables deep insight into the fundamental issues of warfare and military power as a function of national power—assessed correctly, not through the lens of Wall Street “economic” indices and a FIRE economy, but through the numbers of enclosed technological cycles and culture, much of which has been shaped in Russia by continental warfare and which is practically absent in the US.
Download or read book The Revenge of Geography written by Robert D. Kaplan and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2013-09-10 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this “ambitious and challenging” (The New York Review of Books) work, the bestselling author of Monsoon and Balkan Ghosts offers a revelatory prism through which to view global upheavals and to understand what lies ahead for continents and countries around the world. In The Revenge of Geography, Robert D. Kaplan builds on the insights, discoveries, and theories of great geographers and geopolitical thinkers of the near and distant past to look back at critical pivots in history and then to look forward at the evolving global scene. Kaplan traces the history of the world’s hot spots by examining their climates, topographies, and proximities to other embattled lands. The Russian steppe’s pitiless climate and limited vegetation bred hard and cruel men bent on destruction, for example, while Nazi geopoliticians distorted geopolitics entirely, calculating that space on the globe used by the British Empire and the Soviet Union could be swallowed by a greater German homeland. Kaplan then applies the lessons learned to the present crises in Europe, Russia, China, the Indian subcontinent, Turkey, Iran, and the Arab Middle East. The result is a holistic interpretation of the next cycle of conflict throughout Eurasia. Remarkably, the future can be understood in the context of temperature, land allotment, and other physical certainties: China, able to feed only 23 percent of its people from land that is only 7 percent arable, has sought energy, minerals, and metals from such brutal regimes as Burma, Iran, and Zimbabwe, putting it in moral conflict with the United States. Afghanistan’s porous borders will keep it the principal invasion route into India, and a vital rear base for Pakistan, India’s main enemy. Iran will exploit the advantage of being the only country that straddles both energy-producing areas of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. Finally, Kaplan posits that the United States might rue engaging in far-flung conflicts with Iraq and Afghanistan rather than tending to its direct neighbor Mexico, which is on the verge of becoming a semifailed state due to drug cartel carnage. A brilliant rebuttal to thinkers who suggest that globalism will trump geography, this indispensable work shows how timeless truths and natural facts can help prevent this century’s looming cataclysms.
Download or read book The Marshall Plan written by Benn Steil and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 621 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the history of the Marshall Plan and the efforts to reconstruct western Europe as a bulwark against communist authoritarianism during a two-year period that saw the collapse of postwar U.S.-Soviet relations and the beginning of the Cold War.
Download or read book Russian Soviet Unconventional Wars in the Caucasus Central Asia and Afghanistan Illustrated Edition written by Dr. Robert F. Baumann and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-06 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: [Includes 12 maps and 4 tables] In recent years, the U.S. Army has paid increasing attention to the conduct of unconventional warfare. However, the base of historical experience available for study has been largely American and overwhelmingly Western. In Russian-Soviet Unconventional Wars in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Afghanistan, Dr. Robert F. Baumann makes a significant contribution to the expansion of that base with a well-researched analysis of four important episodes from the Russian-Soviet experience with unconventional wars. Primarily employing Russian sources, including important archival documents only recently declassified and made available to Western scholars, Dr. Baumann provides an insightful look at the Russian conquest of the Caucasian mountaineers (1801-59), the subjugation of Central Asia (1839-81), the reconquest of Central Asia by the Red Army (1918-33), and the Soviet war in Afghanistan (1979-89). The history of these wars—especially as it relates to the battle tactics, force structure, and strategy employed in them—offers important new perspectives on elements of continuity and change in combat over two centuries. This is the first study to provide an in-depth examination of the evolution of the Russian and Soviet unconventional experience on the predominantly Muslim southern periphery of the former empire. There, the Russians encountered fierce resistance by peoples whose cultures and views of war differed sharply from their own. Consequently, this Leavenworth Paper addresses not only issues germane to combat but to a wide spectrum of civic and propaganda operations as well.
Download or read book Russia s Chechen Wars 1994 2000 written by Olga Oliker and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 2001-09-28 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the difficulties faced by the Russian military in planningand carrying out urban operations in Chechnya.Russian and rebel military forces fought to control the Chechen city ofGrozny in the winters of 1994-1995 and 1999-2000, as well as clashing insmaller towns and villages. The author examines both Russian and rebeltactics and operations in those battles, focusing on how and why thecombatants' approaches changed over time. The study concludes that whilethe Russian military was able to significantly improve its ability to carryout a number of key tasks in the five-year interval between the wars, otherimportant missions--particularly in the urban realm--were ignored, largelyin the belief that the urban mission could be avoided. This consciousdecision not to prepare for a most stressful battlefield met withdevastating results, a lesson the United States would be well served tostudy.
Download or read book Soviet Night Operations in World War II written by Claude R. Sasso and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 1982 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Doomsday Machine written by Daniel Ellsberg and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-12-05 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction Finalist for The California Book Award in Nonfiction The San Francisco Chronicle's Best of the Year List Foreign Affairs Best Books of the Year In These Times “Best Books of the Year" Huffington Post's Ten Excellent December Books List LitHub's “Five Books Making News This Week” From the legendary whistle-blower who revealed the Pentagon Papers, an eyewitness exposé of the dangers of America's Top Secret, seventy-year-long nuclear policy that continues to this day. Here, for the first time, former high-level defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg reveals his shocking firsthand account of America's nuclear program in the 1960s. From the remotest air bases in the Pacific Command, where he discovered that the authority to initiate use of nuclear weapons was widely delegated, to the secret plans for general nuclear war under Eisenhower, which, if executed, would cause the near-extinction of humanity, Ellsberg shows that the legacy of this most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization--and its proposed renewal under the Trump administration--threatens our very survival. No other insider with high-level access has written so candidly of the nuclear strategy of the late Eisenhower and early Kennedy years, and nothing has fundamentally changed since that era. Framed as a memoir--a chronicle of madness in which Ellsberg acknowledges participating--this gripping exposé reads like a thriller and offers feasible steps we can take to dismantle the existing "doomsday machine" and avoid nuclear catastrophe, returning Ellsberg to his role as whistle-blower. The Doomsday Machine is thus a real-life Dr. Strangelove story and an ultimately hopeful--and powerfully important--book about not just our country, but the future of the world.
Download or read book Russian Military Mapping written by A. A. Psarev and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Manual contains information about the atmosphere, weather and climate, winds, time and length of day; about terrain and their effect on troop combat operations; about topographic and special maps and photographic documents. The book presents basic data shown on topographic and special maps, the procedure used by unit commanders to maintain their working maps, and the effects of meteorological elements on missions and assesses terrain as an element of battlefield conditions.
Download or read book Rethinking Maps written by Martin Dodge and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-06-02 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maps are changing. They have become important and fashionable once more. Rethinking Maps brings together leading researchers to explore how maps are being rethought, made and used, and what these changes mean for working cartographers, applied mapping research, and cartographic scholarship. It offers a contemporary assessment of the diverse forms that mapping now takes and, drawing upon a number of theoretic perspectives and disciplines, provides an insightful commentary on new ontological and epistemological thinking with respect to cartography. This book presents a diverse set of approaches to a wide range of map forms and activities in what is presently a rapidly changing field. It employs a multi-disciplinary approach to important contemporary mapping practices, with chapters written by leading theorists who have an international reputation for innovative thinking. Much of the new research around mapping is emerging as critical dialogue between practice and theory and this book has chapters focused on intersections with play, race and cinema. Other chapters discuss cartographic representation, sustainable mapping and visual geographies. It also considers how alternative models of map creation and use such as open-source mappings and map mash-up are being creatively explored by programmers, artists and activists. There is also an examination of the work of various ‘everyday mappers’ in diverse social and cultural contexts. This blend of conceptual chapters and theoretically directed case studies provides an excellent resource suited to a broad spectrum of researchers, advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in human geography, GIScience and cartography, visual anthropology, media studies, graphic design and computer graphics. Rethinking Maps is a necessary and significant text for all those studying or having an interest in cartography.
Download or read book A Map of Betrayal written by Ha Jin and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-11-04 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Year From the award-winning author of Waiting and War Trash: a riveting tale of espionage and conflicted loyalties that spans half a century in the entwined histories of two countries—China and the United States—and two families. When Lilian Shang, born and raised in America, discovers her father’s diary after the death of her parents, she is shocked by the secrets it contains. She knew that her father, Gary, convicted decades ago of being a mole in the CIA, was the most important Chinese spy ever caught. But his diary, an astonishing chronicle of his journey as a Communist intelligence agent, reveals the pain and longing that his double life entailed—and point to a hidden second family that he’d left behind in China. As Lilian follows her father’s trail back into the Chinese provinces, she begins to grasp the extent of his dilemma: he is a man torn between loyalty to his motherland and the love he came to feel for his adopted country. She sees how his sense of duty distorted his life, and as she starts to understand that Gary too had been betrayed, Lilian finds that it is up to her to prevent his tragedy from endangering yet another generation of Shangs. A stunning portrait of a multinational family and an unflinching inquiry into the meaning of citizenship, patriotism, and home, A Map of Betrayal is a spy novel that only Ha Jin could write.
