Download or read book Kevlar Legions The Transformation of the United States Army 1989 2005 written by John Sloan Brown and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2012-08-12 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of how the United States Army responded to the challenges of the end of the Cold War by transforming itself into the most capable ground force in the world today. It argues that from 1989 through 2005 the U.S. Army attempted, and largely achieved, a centrally directed and institutionally driven transformation relevant to ground warfare that exploited Information Age technology, adapted to post?Cold War strategic circumstances, and integrated into parallel Department of Defense efforts. The process not only modernized equipment, it also substantially altered doctrine, organization, training, administrative and logistical practices, and the service culture. Kevlar Legions further contends that the digitized expeditionary Army has withstood the test of combat, performing superbly with respect to deployment and high-end conventional combat and capably with respect to low-intensity conflict and the counterinsurgency challenges of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Download or read book Lessons Unlearned written by Pat Proctor and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2020-03-09 with total page 503 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Colonel Pat Proctor’s long overdue critique of the Army’s preparation and outlook in the all-volunteer era focuses on a national security issue that continues to vex in the twenty-first century: Has the Army lost its ability to win strategically by focusing on fighting conventional battles against peer enemies? Or can it adapt to deal with the greater complexity of counterinsurgent and information-age warfare? In this blunt critique of the senior leadership of the U.S. Army, Proctor contends that after the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. Army stubbornly refused to reshape itself in response to the new strategic reality, a decision that saw it struggle through one low-intensity conflict after another—some inconclusive, some tragic—in the 1980s and 1990s, and leaving it largely unprepared when it found itself engaged—seemingly forever—in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The first book-length study to connect the failures of these wars to America’s disastrous performance in the war on terror, Proctor’s work serves as an attempt to convince Army leaders to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

Download or read book The First Infantry Division and the U S Army Transformed written by Gregory Fontenot and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2017-06-30 with total page 587 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fast-paced and compelling read closes a significant gap in the historiography of the late Cold War U.S. Army and is crucial for understanding the current situation in the Middle East. From the author's introduction: “My purpose is a narrative history of the 1st Infantry Division from 1970 through the Operation Desert Storm celebration held 4th of July 1991. This story is an account of the revolutionary changes in the late Cold War. The Army that overran Saddam Hussein’s Legions in four days was the product of important changes stimulated both by social changes and institutional reform. The 1st Infantry Division reflected benefits of those changes, despite its low priority for troops and material. The Division was not an elite formation, but rather excelled in the context of the Army as an institution.” This book begins with a preface by Gordon R. Sullivan, General, USA, Retired. In twelve chapters, author Gregory Fontenot explains the history of the 1st infantry Division from 1970 to 1991. In doing so, his fast-paced narrative includes elements to expand the knowledge of non-military readers. These elements include a glossary, a key to abbreviations, maps, nearly two dozen photographs, and thorough bibliography. The First infantry Division and the U.S. Army Transformed: Road to Victory in Desert Storm is published with support from the First Division Museum at Cantigny.

Download or read book Part Time Soldiers written by Andrew Lewis Chadwick and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2023-11-24 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Part-Time Soldiers, Andrew Lewis Chadwick offers the first in-depth historical study of the development and evolution of modern army reserve forces. In doing so, he explores how a confluence of military, political, and socioeconomic developments since the First World War has forced armies preparing for major war to increase their dependence on reservists (part-time soldiers who reinforce or augment professionals or conscripts in wartime) for critical and routine military tasks. At the same time, he shows how these developments placed tremendous stress on the industrial-era reserve policies and structures that armies continue to use today. For example, reservists training for less than thirty days a year have struggled to keep up with the increasingly high-skilled character of modern warfare, as evidenced by the poor performance of reservists in the world wars and, most recently, the ongoing Russia-Ukraine War. Chadwick primarily examines these developments in the cases of the US Army National Guard and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Army Reserve, given that unique geopolitical conditions have forced the United States and Israel to frequently employ reservists in combat over the past century. These cases, which Chadwick explores using archival and secondary sources, reveal how armies using two different reserve models—the former built around volunteers and the latter around discharged conscripts—have attempted to mitigate the challenge of maintaining combat-ready reservists in the era of high-tech and high-skilled warfare. By doing so, Chadwick identifies an enduring and often overlooked problem facing contemporary defense policymaking: how does one build and maintain effective army reserve forces at an affordable cost without causing undue stress on reservists’ civilian lives?

Download or read book Professional Journal of the United States Army written by and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Shot in the Dark A History of the U S Army Asymmetric Warfare Group written by Paul J. Cook and published by Vernon Press. This book was released on 2024-05-14 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the U.S. Army Asymmetric Warfare Group (AWG) as an example of successful change by the Army in wartime. It argues that creating the AWG required senior leaders to create a vision differing from the Army’s self-conceptualization, change bureaucratic processes to turn the vision into an actual unit, and then place the new unit in the hands of uniquely qualified leaders to build and sustain it. In doing this, it considers the forces influencing change within the Army and argues the two most significant are its self-conceptualization and institutional bureaucracy. The work explores three major subject areas that provide historical context. The first is the Army’s institutional history from the early 1950s through 2001. This period begins with the Army seeking to validate its place in America’s national security strategy and ends with the Army trying to chart a path into the post-Cold War future. The Army’s history is largely one of asymmetric warfare. The work thus examines several campaigns that offered lessons for subsequent wars. Some lessons the Army took to heart, others it ignored. As the AWG was a direct outgrowth of the failures and frustrations the Army experienced in Afghanistan and Iraq, the book examines these campaigns and identifies the specific problems that led senior Army leaders to create the AWG. Finally, the work chronicles the AWG’s creation in 2006, growth, and re-assignment from the Army staff to a fully-fledged organization subordinate to the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command in 2011 to its deactivation. This action resulted not from the unit’s failure to adapt to a post-insurgency Army focusing on modernization. Rather, it resulted from the Army failing to realize that while the AWG was a product of counterinsurgency, it provided the capability to support the Army during a period of great strategic and institutional uncertainty.

Download or read book Army History written by and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Military Review written by and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 908 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Counterinsurgency written by Douglas Porch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-11 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Counterinsurgency has staked its claim in the new century as the new American way of war. Yet, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have revived a historical debate about the costs - monetary, political and moral - of operations designed to eliminate insurgents and build nations. Today's counterinsurgency proponents point to 'small wars' past to support their view that the enemy is 'biddable' if the correct tactical formulas are applied. Douglas Porch's sweeping history of counterinsurgency campaigns carried out by the three 'providential nations' of France, Britain and the United States, ranging from nineteenth-century colonial conquests to General Petraeus' 'Surge' in Iraq, challenges the contemporary mythologising of counterinsurgency as a humane way of war. The reality, he reveals, is that 'hearts and minds' has never been a recipe for lasting stability and that past counterinsurgency campaigns have succeeded not through state-building but by shattering and dividing societies while unsettling civil-military relations.

Download or read book Uncertain Warriors written by David Fitzgerald and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-30 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the identity crisis of the post-Cold War US Army and their struggles to adapt to profound geopolitical and cultural changes.

Download or read book Army Readiness Reporting Systems 1945 2003 written by William M. Donnelly and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The U.S. Army before 1945 did not have and did not need a formal readiness reporting system. After World War II, however, it found itself committed to large-scale deployments in Europe and in the Pacific, commitments that with the Cold War would continue for the next 45 years. The demands of this war, along with the wars in Korea and Vietnam, made it vital that senior service leaders had accurate information on the readiness of units in the Regular Army, the Army National Guard, and the Army Reserve. The methods for measuring readiness, however, soon became and then remained a matter of contention. Equally contentious was the use of data generated by readiness reporting systems, both within the service and by others outside the service. The end of the Cold War did not end these disputes. Indeed, the years between that victory and the start of the second Iraq war in 2003 were a time of heightened concern over military readiness and how to assess it."--Provided by publisher.

Download or read book Army Officer s Guide written by Robert J. Dalessandro and published by Stackpole Books. This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 690 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: • Practical advice on Army leadership and command • Fully updated with the latest information for officers of all ranks, branches, and components • Uniforms and insignia, duties and responsibilities, privileges and restrictions, courtesy and customs, posts and organizations, regulations and references • Color images of medals and badges

Download or read book The Other Face of Battle written by Wayne E. Lee and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-10 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking its title from The Face of Battle, John Keegan's canonical book on the nature of warfare, The Other Face of Battle illuminates the American experience of fighting in "irregular" and "intercultural" wars over the centuries. Sometimes known as "forgotten" wars, in part because they lacked triumphant clarity, they are the focus of the book. David Preston, David Silbey, and Anthony Carlson focus on, respectively, the Battle of Monongahela (1755), the Battle of Manila (1898), and the Battle of Makuan, Afghanistan (2020)--conflicts in which American soldiers were forced to engage in "irregular" warfare, confronting an enemy entirely alien to them. This enemy rejected the Western conventions of warfare and defined success and failure--victory and defeat--in entirely different ways. Symmetry of any kind is lost. Here was not ennobling engagement but atrocity, unanticipated insurgencies, and strategic stalemate. War is always hell. These wars, however, profoundly undermined any sense of purpose or proportion. Nightmarish and existentially bewildering, they nonetheless characterize how Americans have experienced combat and what its effects have been. They are therefore worth comparing for what they hold in common as well as what they reveal about our attitude toward war itself. The Other Face of Battle reminds us that "irregular" or "asymmetrical" warfare is now not the exception but the rule. Understanding its roots seems more crucial than ever.

Download or read book A History of the U S Army Officer Corps 1900 1990 written by Arthur Thomas Coumbe and published by Department of the Army. This book was released on 2014 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume was written as a supplement to a series of monographs authored by Casey Wardynski, David Lyle, and Mike Colarusso of the Army's Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis, and published by the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College from 2009 to 2010. In those monographs, Wardynski, Lyle, and Colarusso adumbrated an officer corps strategy based on the theory of talent management. This volume aims to provide a historical context for their discussion of an officer strategy (and for what has passed for such a strategy in the past). Like the earlier monographs, this volume is organized around the functionally interdependent concepts of accessing, developing, retaining, and employing talent. Each chapter will take the reader up to the point where the earlier monographs began their story, which generally falls in the timeframe of the late-1980s and early-1990s. The purpose of the present volume is to supplement these OEMA (Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis) monographs by providing a historical context for their discussion of an officer strategy. First an overview is provided, outlining some key developments and assumptions that have guided and shaped the Officer Corps and the way it has been managed over the last century. Other historical products pertaining to the US Army History that may be of interest include the following: A Contemporary History of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps can be found at this link: http: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-023-00139-1 Forging the Shield: The U.S. Army in Europe, 1951-1962 (Hardcover) can be found at this link: http: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-029-00585-9?ctid=151 Forging the Shield (Paperback) can be found at this link: http: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-029-00584-1?ctid=151 Don't forget to subscribe to Army History: The Professional Bulletin of Army History, which can be found at his link: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/708-108-00000-6 This professional military magazine, published four times a year by the U.S. Army Center of Military History (CMH), is devoted to informing the military history community about new work on the Army's history. Issues include illustrated articles, commentaries, book reviews, and news about Army history and the U.S. Army Center of Military History. Quarterly issues feature: Thoughtful illustrated articles about the history of the U.S. Army Incisive book reviews by experts in the field of military history Insightful commentaries News Notes providing the latest information about CMH activities and publications

Download or read book Margin of Victory written by Douglas MacGregor and published by Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2016-06-15 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Margin of Victory Douglas Macgregor tells the riveting stories of five military battles of the twentieth century, each one a turning point in history. Beginning with the British Expeditionary force holding the line at the Battle of Mons in 1914 and concluding with the Battle of Easting in 1991 during Desert Storm, Margin of Victory teases out a connection between these battles and teaches its readers an important lesson about how future battles can be won. Emphasizing military strategy, force design, and modernization, Macgregor links each of these seemingly isolated battles thematically. At the core of his analysis, the author reminds the reader that to be successful, military action must always be congruent with national culture, geography, and scientific-industrial capacity. He theorizes that strategy and geopolitics are ultimately more influential than ideology. Macgregor stresses that if nation-states want to be successful, they must accept the need for and the inevitability of change. The five warfighting dramas in this book, rendered in vivid detail by lively prose, offer many lessons on the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of war.

Download or read book The Girls Next Door written by Kara Dixon Vuic and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-04 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the intrepid young women who volunteered to help and entertain American servicemen fighting overseas, from World War I through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The emotional toll of war can be as debilitating to soldiers as hunger, disease, and injury. Beginning in World War I, in an effort to boost soldiers’ morale and remind them of the stakes of victory, the American military formalized a recreation program that sent respectable young women and famous entertainers overseas. Kara Dixon Vuic builds her narrative around the young women from across the United States, many of whom had never traveled far from home, who volunteered to serve in one of the nation’s most brutal work environments. From the “Lassies” in France and mini-skirted coeds in Vietnam to Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe, Vuic provides a fascinating glimpse into wartime gender roles and the tensions that continue to complicate American women’s involvement in the military arena. The recreation-program volunteers heightened the passions of troops but also domesticated everyday life on the bases. Their presence mobilized support for the war back home, while exporting American culture abroad. Carefully recruited and selected as symbols of conventional femininity, these adventurous young women saw in the theater of war a bridge between public service and private ambition. This story of the women who talked and listened, danced and sang, adds an intimate chapter to the history of war and its ties to life in peacetime.

Download or read book The Rise of the Military Welfare State written by Jennifer Mittelstadt and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-12 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of US military benefits “offers a disturbing view of the armed forces as a high-value target in political clashes over public assistance” (The Nation). Since the end of the draft, the U.S. Army has prided itself on its patriotic volunteers who heed the call to “Be All That You Can Be.” But beneath the recruitment slogans, the army promised volunteers something more tangible: a social safety net including medical care, education, housing assistance, legal services, and other privileges that had long been reserved for career soldiers. The Rise of the Military Welfare State examines how the U.S. Army’s extension of benefits to enlisted men and women created a military welfare system of unprecedented size and scope. In the 1970s, widespread opposition to the draft led to the establishment of America’s all-volunteer army. For this to succeed, a new strategy was needed for attracting and retaining soldiers. The army solved the problem, Jennifer Mittelstadt shows, by promising to take care of its own. While the United States dismantled its civilian welfare system in the 1980s and 1990s, army benefits continued to expand. Mittelstadt also examines how critics of this expansion fought to roll back its signature achievements, even as a new era of war began.