Soldiers of Reason

Soldiers of Reason PDF Author: Alex Abella
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156033442
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
This history of the RAND Corporation, written with full access to its archives, is a page-turning chronicle of the rise of the secretive think tank that has been the driving force behind the American government for 60 years.

Soldiers of Reason

Soldiers of Reason PDF Author: Alex Abella
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156033442
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
This history of the RAND Corporation, written with full access to its archives, is a page-turning chronicle of the rise of the secretive think tank that has been the driving force behind the American government for 60 years.

Soldiers of Reason

Soldiers of Reason PDF Author: Alex Abella
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 015603512X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
An “entertaining and fast-paced” account of the organization that defines the military-industrial complex—and continues to shape our world today (The New York Times Book Review). The RAND Corporation was born in the wake of World War II as a think tank to generate research and analysis for the United States military. It was a magnet for the best and the brightest—and also the most dangerous. RAND quickly became the creator of America’s anti-Soviet nuclear strategy, attracting such Cold War luminaries as Albert Wohlstetter, Bernard Brodie, and Herman Kahn, who arguably saved us from nuclear annihilation—and unquestionably created the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned against. In the Kennedy era, RAND analysts and their theories of rational warfare steered our conduct in Vietnam. Those same theories drove our invasion of Iraq forty-five years later, championed by RAND affiliated actors such as Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and Zalmay Khalilzad. But RAND’s greatest contribution might be its least known: rational choice theory, a model explaining all human behavior through self-interest. Through it RAND sparked the Reagan-led transformation of our social and economic system, but also unleashed a resurgence of precisely the forces whose existence it denied: religion, patriotism, tribalism. With Soldiers of Reason, Alex Abella shares a “well-researched” history of America’s last half century that casts a new light on our problematic present (San Francisco Chronicle).

Military Experience in the Age of Reason

Military Experience in the Age of Reason PDF Author: Christopher Duffy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135794588
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 526

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Book Description
First published in 1987. War in the 18th century was a bloody business. A line of infantry would slowly march, to the beat of a drum, into a hail of enemy fire. Whole ranks would be wiped out by cannon fire and musketry. Christopher Duffy's investigates the brutalities of the battlefield and also traces the lives of the officer to the soldier from the formative conditions of their earliest years to their violent deaths or retirement, and shows that, below their well-ordered exteriors, the armies of the Age of Reason underwent a revolutionary change from medieval to modern structures and ways of thinking.

A Soldier's Duty

A Soldier's Duty PDF Author: Jean Johnson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0441020631
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
Ia is a precog, tormented by visions of the future where her home galaxy has been devastated. To prevent this vision from coming true, Ia enlists in the Terran United Planets military with a plan to become a soldier who will inspire generations for the next three hundred years-a soldier history will call Bloody Mary.

Three Soldiers

Three Soldiers PDF Author: John Dos Passos
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486114767
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
A grimly realistic depiction of army life follows a trio of idealists as they contend with the regimentation, violence, and boredom of military service. A powerful exploration of warfare's dehumanizing effects.

Breach of Trust

Breach of Trust PDF Author: Andrew J. Bacevich
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
ISBN: 0805096035
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
A blistering critique of the gulf between America's soldiers and the society that sends them off to war, from the bestselling author of The Limits of Power and Washington Rules The United States has been "at war" in Iraq and Afghanistan for more than a decade. Yet as war has become normalized, a yawning gap has opened between America's soldiers and veterans and the society in whose name they fight. For ordinary citizens, as former secretary of defense Robert Gates has acknowledged, armed conflict has become an "abstraction" and military service "something for other people to do." In Breach of Trust, bestselling author Andrew J. Bacevich takes stock of the separation between Americans and their military, tracing its origins to the Vietnam era and exploring its pernicious implications: a nation with an abiding appetite for war waged at enormous expense by a standing army demonstrably unable to achieve victory. Among the collateral casualties are values once considered central to democratic practice, including the principle that responsibility for defending the country should rest with its citizens. Citing figures as diverse as the martyr-theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the marine-turned-anti-warrior Smedley Butler, Breach of Trust summons Americans to restore that principle. Rather than something for "other people" to do, national defense should become the business of "we the people." Should Americans refuse to shoulder this responsibility, Bacevich warns, the prospect of endless war, waged by a "foreign legion" of professionals and contractor-mercenaries, beckons. So too does bankruptcy—moral as well as fiscal.

Beyond Duty

Beyond Duty PDF Author: Walter S. Zapotoczny Jr.
Publisher: Fonthill Media
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description


A Soldier of the Great War

A Soldier of the Great War PDF Author: Mark Helprin
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 808

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Book Description
A young aesthete from a privileged Roman family, Alexandro Giuliani, found his charmed existence shattered by the coming of WWI. Highly recommended.

Supreme Command

Supreme Command PDF Author: Eliot A. Cohen
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 074324222X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
The relationship between military leaders and political leaders has always been a complicated one, especially in times of war. When the chips are down, who should run the show -- the politicians or the generals? In Supreme Command, Eliot Cohen examines four great democratic war statesmen -- Abraham Lincoln, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill, and David Ben-Gurion -- to reveal the surprising answer: the politicians. Great states-men do not turn their wars over to their generals, and then stay out of their way. Great statesmen make better generals of their generals. They question and drive their military men, and at key times they overrule their advice. The generals may think they know how to win, but the statesmen are the ones who see the big picture. Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill, and Ben-Gurion led four very different kinds of democracy, under the most difficult circumstances imaginable. They came from four very different backgrounds -- backwoods lawyer, dueling French doctor, rogue aristocrat, and impoverished Jewish socialist.Yet they faced similar challenges, not least the possibility that their conduct of the war could bring about their fall from power. Each exhibited mastery of detail and fascination with technology. All four were great learners, who studied war as if it were their own profession, and in many ways mastered it as well as did their generals. All found themselves locked in conflict with military men. All four triumphed. Military men often dismiss politicians as meddlers, doves, or naifs. Yet military men make mistakes. The art of a great leader is to push his subordinates to achieve great things. The lessons of the book apply not just to President Bush and other world leaders in the war on terrorism, but to anyone who faces extreme adversity at the head of a free organization -- including leaders and managers throughout the corporate world. The lessons of Supreme Command will be immediately apparent to all managers and leaders, as well as students of history.

Soldiers of the Sun

Soldiers of the Sun PDF Author: Meirion Harries
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679753036
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 605

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Book Description
Soldiers of the Sun traces the origins of the Imperial Japanese Army back to its samurai roots in the nineteenth century to tell the story of the rise and fall of this extraordinary military force. Meirion and Susie Harries have written the first full Western account of the Imperial Japanese Army. Drawing on Japanese, English, French, and American sources, the authors penetrate the lingering wartime enmity and propaganda to lay bare the true character of the Imperial Army.