Download or read book Deadly Paradigms written by D. Michael Shafer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Shafer argues that American policymakers have fundamentally misperceived the political context of revolutionary wars directed against American clients and that because American attempts at counterinsurgency were based on faulty premises, these efforts have failed in virtually every instance. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book Deadly Paradigms the Failure of U S Counterinsurgency Policy written by Michael D. Shafer and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Deadly Paradigms written by D. Michael Shafer and published by . This book was released on 1988-05 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Politics Paradigms and Intelligence Failures written by Ofira Seliktar and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-05-20 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Washington's failure to foresee the collapse of its superpower rival ranks high in the pantheon of predictive failures. The question of who got what right or wrong has been intertwined with the deeper issue of "who won" the Cold War. Like the disputes over "who lost" China and Iran, this debate has been fought out along ideological and partisan lines, with conservatives claiming credit for the Evil Empire's demise and liberals arguing that the causes were internal to the Soviet Union. The intelligence community has come in for harsh criticism for overestimating Soviet strength and overlooking the symptoms of crisis; the discipline of "Sovietology" has dissolved into acrimonious irrelevance. Drawing on declassified documents, interviews, and careful analysis of contemporaneous literature, this book offers the first systematic analysis of this predictive failure at the paradigmatic, foreign policy, and intelligence levels. Although it is focused on the Soviet case, it offers lessons that are both timely and necessary.
Download or read book Managing Defense Transformation written by Adam N. Stulberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why are some military organizations more adept than others at reinventing themselves? Why do some efforts succeed rapidly while others only gather momentum over time or become sidetracked or even subverted? This book explicates the conditions under which military organizations have both succeeded and failed at institutionalizing new ideas and forms of warfare. Through comparative analysis of some classic cases - US naval aviation during the interwar period; German and British armour development during the same period; and the US Army's experience with counter-insurgency during the Vietnam War - the authors offer a novel explanation for change rooted in managerial strategies for aligning service incentives and norms. With contemporary policy makers scrambling to digest the lessons of recent wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as to meet the unfolding challenges of the new revolution in military affairs (RMA), understanding the sources and impediments to transformation has become critical.
Download or read book The Small Wars of the United States 1899 2009 written by Benjamin R. Beede and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-08-06 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Small Wars of the United States, 1899–2009 is the complete bibliography of works on US military intervention and irregular warfare around the world, as well as efforts to quell insurgencies on behalf of American allies. The text covers conflicts from 1898 to present, with detailed annotations of selected sources. In this second edition, Benjamin R. Beede revises his seminal work, bringing it completely up to date, including entries on the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. An invaluable research tool, The Small Wars of the United States, 1899–2009 is a critical resource for students and scholars studying US military history.
Download or read book Counterinsurgency written by Steven Metz and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 1995 with total page 39 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dr. Steven Metz argues that the way the Department of Defense and U.S. military spend the time when counterinsurgency support is not an important part of American national security strategy determines how quickly and easily they react when policymakers commit the nation to such activity. If analysis and debate continues, at least at a low level, the military is better prepared for the reconstitution of capabilities. If it ignores global developments in insurgency and counterinsurgency, the reconstitution of capabilities would be more difficult.
Download or read book The Case Against Military Intervention written by Donald M. Snow and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-07-16 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since World War II, military intervention in developing world internal conflicts (DWIC) has become the primary form of U.S. military activity, and these interventions have proven unsuccessful in places like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. This book argues such failure was entirely predictable, even inevitable, due both to the nature and dynamics of foreign military intrusion in the affairs of other countries and especially the DWICs that provide the major contemporary form of potential U.S. military in the foreseeable future. Basing its analysis in both human nature (the adverse reaction to prolonged outsider intrusion) and historical analogy, the book argues strongly why military intervention should be avoided as a national security option and the implications of such a policy decision for national security strategy and policy.
Download or read book Fighting Like a Guerrilla written by Rajesh Rajagopalan and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2020-11-29 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book deals with two significant issues: the peculiar and paradoxical question of why regular armies, better suited to fighting conventional high-intensity wars, adopt inappropriate measures when fighting guerilla wars; and the evolution of the Indian army’s counterinsurgency doctrine over the last decade. In addition, the book also includes the first detailed analysis of the trajectory of the army’s counterinsurgency doctrine, arguing that while it was consolidated only over the last decade, the essential elements of the doctrine may in fact be traced back to the army’s first confrontation with the Naga guerillas in the 1950s. It outlines the three essential elements that make up the Indian army’s counterinsurgency doctrine: that there are no military solutions to an insurgency; that military force can only help to reduce levels of violence to enable political solutions; and that there should be limited use of military force. Rajagopalan argues that international circumstances — particularly the need to counter conventional military threats from Pakistan and China — led to a counterinsurgency doctrine that had a strong conventional war bias. This bias also conditioned the organisational culture of the Indian army.
Download or read book The Salvador Option written by Russell Crandall and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-23 with total page 719 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: El Salvador's civil war between the Salvadoran government and Marxist guerrillas erupted into full force in early 1981 and endured for eleven bloody years. Unwilling to tolerate an advance of Soviet and Cuban-backed communism in its geopolitical backyard, the US provided over six billion dollars in military and economic aid to the Salvadoran government. El Salvador was a deeply controversial issue in American society and divided Congress and the public into left and right. Relying on thousands of archival documents as well as interviews with participants on both sides of the war, The Salvador Option offers a thorough and fair-minded interpretation of the available evidence. If success is defined narrowly, there is little question that the Salvador Option achieved its Cold War strategic objectives of checking communism. Much more difficult, however, is to determine what human price this 'success' entailed - a toll suffered almost entirely by Salvadorans in this brutal civil war.
Download or read book Crucible of Power written by Howard Jones and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2008 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this updated edition of Crucible of Power, Howard Jones draws on his remarkable breadth as a historian of U.S. foreign relations to produce a distinguished survey of America's growth from an emerging power in the 1890s to its present day position of global preeminence. Comprehensive, tempered, and highly accessible, Jones demonstrates the complexities facing U.S. policy makers and the limitations on their actions.
Download or read book Final Solutions written by Benjamin A. Valentino and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-14 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Benjamin A. Valentino finds that ethnic hatreds or discrimination, undemocratic systems of government, and dysfunctions in society play a much smaller role in mass killing and genocide than is commonly assumed. He shows that the impetus for mass killing usually originates from a relatively small group of powerful leaders and is often carried out without the active support of broader society. Mass killing, in his view, is a brutal political or military strategy designed to accomplish leaders' most important objectives, counter threats to their power, and solve their most difficult problems. In order to capture the full scope of mass killing during the twentieth century, Valentino does not limit his analysis to violence directed against ethnic groups, or to the attempt to destroy victim groups as such, as do most previous studies of genocide. Rather, he defines mass killing broadly as the intentional killing of a massive number of noncombatants, using the criteria of 50,000 or more deaths within five years as a quantitative standard. Final Solutions focuses on three types of mass killing: communist mass killings like the ones carried out in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia; ethnic genocides as in Armenia, Nazi Germany, and Rwanda; and "counter-guerrilla" campaigns including the brutal civil war in Guatemala and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Valentino closes the book by arguing that attempts to prevent mass killing should focus on disarming and removing from power the leaders and small groups responsible for instigating and organizing the killing.
Download or read book Small Wars written by Michael Gambone and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2013-02-15 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Small Wars is unique in its complexity and breadth. This book would be of great interest to both military and diplomatic historians, and those that teach Recent America.” —Nancy Gentile Ford, author of Issues of War and Peace Today, conventional fighting waged by massed, industrial armies is nearly extinct as a viable means of warfare, replaced by a broad and diverse array of conflicts that consume the modern American military. Fought in sprawling urban areas of the underdeveloped world or in desolate border regions where ethnicity and tradition reign, these “small wars” involve a vast and intricate network of operations dedicated to attacking the cultural, political, financial, and military layers that surround America’s new enemies. In this intriguing study, Michael Gambone explores America’s approach to small wars since Vietnam, providing a fascinating analysis of the basic goals, missions, conduct, and consequences of modern American conflict. Going beyond a simple comparison of Vietnam to the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Gambone thoroughly tracks the continuous evolution of U.S. intervention between these events, revealing a dramatic shift in the role of the American military to covert operations that require fluidity, creativity, and ingenuity. He examines in detail the many different forms of military intervention that America has taken in the last forty years, including actions in Central America in the 1980s, the first Gulf War, airstrikes in Kosovo in the 1990s, and the war on terror, as well as the Iran-Contra affair, the drug war in Columbia, and the role of private military contractors such as Blackwater. After the Cold War, Gambone shows, American military missions served a wide variety of tasks—peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance, counterterrorism—that significantly departed from conventional missions, a trend that continued and expanded after 9/11. By exploring the history and assessing the effectiveness of the small wars fought since Vietnam, Gambone reveals the importance of these smaller actions in modern military planning and operations and clearly traces the development of American warfare from the massive military machine of World War II into a complex hybrid of traditional and innovative techniques. MICHAEL GAMBONE, a professor of history at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania, is the author of The Greatest Generation Comes Home: The Veteran in American Society and editor of Documents of American Diplomacy: From the American Revolution to the Present.
Download or read book The Columbia Guide to the Vietnam War written by David L. Anderson and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2002-07-10 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than a quarter of a century after the last Marine Corps Huey left the American embassy in Saigon, the lessons and legacies of the most divisive war in twentieth-century American history are as hotly debated as ever. Why did successive administrations choose little-known Vietnam as the "test case" of American commitment in the fight against communism? Why were the "best and brightest" apparently blind to the illegitimacy of the state of South Vietnam? Would Kennedy have pulled out had he lived? And what lessons regarding American foreign policy emerged from the war? The Columbia Guide to the Vietnam War helps readers understand this tragic and complex conflict. The book contains both interpretive information and a wealth of facts in easy-to-find form. Part I provides a lucid narrative overview of contested issues and interpretations in Vietnam scholarship. Part II is a mini-encyclopedia with descriptions and analysis of individuals, events, groups, and military operations. Arranged alphabetically, this section enables readers to look up isolated facts and specialized terms. Part III is a chronology of key events. Part IV is an annotated guide to resources, including films, documentaries, CD-ROMs, and reliable Web sites. Part V contains excerpts from historical documents and statistical data.
Download or read book The Greek Civil War written by Spyridon Plakoudas and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Greek Civil War (1946-1949) was one of the few instances in the post-World War II era of a clear-cut and permanent victory by right-wing government forces over an insurgent communist movement. Spyridon Plakoudas here explores the factors which ultimately caused the downfall of the communist insurgency in Greece which had, at some points, seemed undefeatable. He questions whether the guerrilla movement fell victim to the feud between Stalin and Tito or whether the significant British and, above all, American aid in fact rescued the Greek monarchist regime from collapse. Plakoudas explores the strategies adopted by government forces in order to counter the communist insurgency, how external and internal actors influenced these policies and when, how and why these policies achieved success. Featuring previously unseen sources and documents, this book reveals the strategy and tactics of the monarchist regime.
Download or read book US Internal Security Assistance to South Vietnam written by William Rosenau and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-05-07 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new study of American support to the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam illuminates many contemporary events and foreign policies. During the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, the United States used foreign police and paramilitary assistance to combat the spread of communist revolution in the developing world. This became the single largest internal security programme during the neglected 1955-1963 period. Yet despite presidential attention and a sustained campaign to transform Diem’s police and paramilitary forces into modern, professional services, the United States failed to achieve its objectives. Given the scale of its efforts, and the Diem regime’s importance to the US leadership, this text identifies the three key factors that contributed to the failure of American policy. First, the competing conceptions of Diem’s civilian and military advisers. Second, the reforms advanced by US police training personnel were also at odds with the political agenda of the South Vietnamese leader. Finally, the flawed beliefs among US police advisers based on the universality of American democracy. This study also shows how notions borrowed from academic social science of the time became the basis for building Diem’s internal security forces. This book will be of great interest to all students and scholars of intelligence studies, Cold War studies, security studies, US foreign policy and the Vietnam War in general.
Download or read book America in the World written by Frank Costigliola and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-23 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume includes historiographical surveys of American foreign relations since 1941 by some of the country's leading historians. Some of the essays offer sweeping overviews of the major trends in the field of foreign/international relations history. Others survey the literature on US relations with particular regions of the world or on the foreign policies of presidential administrations. The result is a comprehensive assessment of the historical literature on US foreign policy that highlights recent developments in the field.
