The Politics and Strategy of Clandestine War

The Politics and Strategy of Clandestine War PDF Author: Neville Wylie
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134166494
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 459

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Book Description
This fascinating new collection of essays on Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) explores the ‘non-military’ aspects of British special operations in the Second World War. It details how SOE was established in the summer of 1940 to ‘set Europe ablaze’, as Churchill memorably put it. This was a task it was meant to achieve by detonating popular resistance against Axis rule, and nurturing ‘secret armies’, which might be capable of providing military and other forms of assistance for British forces when they were once again able to return to the offensive and conduct land operations in Europe. The importance of the collection, however, goes beyond merely illuminating aspects of SOE’s work which have largely been overlooked in previous scholarship. More significantly, by situating SOE within the context of Britain’s broader political needs, the essays demonstrate the extent to which SOE came to epitomise and embody the range of skills that are found in today’s secret service organisations. SOE showed itself capable of operating on a global scale and developing the necessary expertise, equipment and personnel to conduct activities across the whole spectrum of what we have come to know as ‘covert operations’. By bringing SOE’s activities into sharper focus and exposing the scale of its involvement in Britain’s wartime external relations, the essays echo current thinking on the place of the so-called ‘secret world’ in international politics.

The Politics and Strategy of Clandestine War

The Politics and Strategy of Clandestine War PDF Author: Neville Wylie
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134166494
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 459

Get Book Here

Book Description
This fascinating new collection of essays on Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) explores the ‘non-military’ aspects of British special operations in the Second World War. It details how SOE was established in the summer of 1940 to ‘set Europe ablaze’, as Churchill memorably put it. This was a task it was meant to achieve by detonating popular resistance against Axis rule, and nurturing ‘secret armies’, which might be capable of providing military and other forms of assistance for British forces when they were once again able to return to the offensive and conduct land operations in Europe. The importance of the collection, however, goes beyond merely illuminating aspects of SOE’s work which have largely been overlooked in previous scholarship. More significantly, by situating SOE within the context of Britain’s broader political needs, the essays demonstrate the extent to which SOE came to epitomise and embody the range of skills that are found in today’s secret service organisations. SOE showed itself capable of operating on a global scale and developing the necessary expertise, equipment and personnel to conduct activities across the whole spectrum of what we have come to know as ‘covert operations’. By bringing SOE’s activities into sharper focus and exposing the scale of its involvement in Britain’s wartime external relations, the essays echo current thinking on the place of the so-called ‘secret world’ in international politics.

Cold War Monks

Cold War Monks PDF Author: Eugene Ford
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300218567
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- One: The Buddhist World and the United States at the Onset of the Cold War, 1941-1954 -- Two: Washington Formulates a Buddhist Policy, 1954-1957 -- Three: Thailand and the International Buddhist Arena, 1956-1962 -- Four: Reforming the Monks: The Cold War and Clerical Education in Thailand and Laos, 1954-1961 -- Five: Thailand and the International Response to the 1963 Buddhist Crisis in South Vietnam -- Six: Enforcing the Code: South Vietnam's "Struggle Movement" and the Limits of Thai Buddhist Conservatism -- Seven: Thailand's Buddhist Hierarchy Confronts Its Challengers, 1967-1975 -- Eight: The Rage of Thai Buddhism, 1975-1980 -- Conclusion: From Byoto to Kittivudho -- Notes -- Selected Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- X -- Y -- Z

Modern Warfare

Modern Warfare PDF Author: Roger Trinquier
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
ISBN: 142891689X
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 131

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Book Description


Political Warfare

Political Warfare PDF Author: Kerry K. Gershaneck
Publisher: Independently Published
ISBN:
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Political Warfare provides a well-researched and wide-ranging overview of the nature of the People's Republic of China (PRC) threat and the political warfare strategies, doctrines, and operational practices used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The author offers detailed and illuminating case studies of PRC political warfare operations designed to undermine Thailand, a U.S. treaty ally, and Taiwan, a close friend"--

Secret Wars

Secret Wars PDF Author: Austin Carson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691204128
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Secret Wars is the first book to systematically analyze the ways powerful states covertly participate in foreign wars, showing a recurring pattern of such behavior stretching from World War I to U.S.-occupied Iraq. Investigating what governments keep secret during wars and why, Austin Carson argues that leaders maintain the secrecy of state involvement as a response to the persistent concern of limiting war. Keeping interventions “backstage” helps control escalation dynamics, insulating leaders from domestic pressures while communicating their interest in keeping a war contained. Carson shows that covert interventions can help control escalation, but they are almost always detected by other major powers. However, the shared value of limiting war can lead adversaries to keep secret the interventions they detect, as when American leaders concealed clashes with Soviet pilots during the Korean War. Escalation concerns can also cause leaders to ignore covert interventions that have become an open secret. From Nazi Germany’s role in the Spanish Civil War to American covert operations during the Vietnam War, Carson presents new insights about some of the most influential conflicts of the twentieth century. Parting the curtain on the secret side of modern war, Secret Wars provides important lessons about how rival state powers collude and compete, and the ways in which they avoid outright military confrontations.

The Big Three Allies and the European Resistance

The Big Three Allies and the European Resistance PDF Author: Associate Professor of Contemporary History Tommaso Piffer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198826346
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
The first comparative and pan-European study of the Big Three's involvement in Resistance movements across wartime Europe. From Yugoslavia to Poland and from Greece to France and Italy, the book vividly depicts and sharply analyses how this proxy war shaped the history of the post-war settlement.

Disrupt and Deny

Disrupt and Deny PDF Author: Rory Cormac
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019108753X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
British leaders use spies and Special Forces to interfere in the affairs of others discreetly and deniably. Since 1945, MI6 has spread misinformation designed to divide and discredit targets from the Middle East to Eastern Europe and Northern Ireland. It has instigated whispering campaigns and planted false evidence on officials working behind the Iron Curtain, tried to foment revolution in Albania, blown up ships to prevent the passage of refugees to Israel, and secretly funnelled aid to insurgents in Afghanistan and dissidents in Poland. MI6 has launched cultural and economic warfare against Iceland and Czechoslovakia. It has tried to instigate coups in Congo, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and elsewhere. Through bribery and blackmail, Britain has rigged elections as colonies moved to independence. Britain has fought secret wars in Yemen, Indonesia, and Oman -- and discreetly used Special Forces to eliminate enemies from colonial Malaya to Libya during the Arab Spring. This is covert action: a vital, though controversial, tool of statecraft and perhaps the most sensitive of all government activity. If used wisely, it can play an important role in pursuing national interests in a dangerous world. If used poorly, it can cause political scandal -- or worse. In Disrupt and Deny, Rory Cormac tells the remarkable true story of Britain's secret scheming against its enemies, as well as its friends; of intrigue and manoeuvring within the darkest corridors of Whitehall, where officials fought to maintain control of this most sensitive and seductive work; and, above all, of Britain's attempt to use smoke and mirrors to mask decline. He reveals hitherto secret operations, the slush funds that paid for them, and the battles in Whitehall that shaped them.

Transformation of War

Transformation of War PDF Author: Martin Van Creveld
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439188890
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
At a time when unprecedented change in international affairs is forcing governments, citizens, and armed forces everywhere to re-assess the question of whether military solutions to political problems are possible any longer, Martin van Creveld has written an audacious searching examination of the nature of war and of its radical transformation in our own time. For 200 years, military theory and strategy have been guided by the Clausewitzian assumption that war is rational - a reflection of national interest and an extension of politics by other means. However, van Creveld argues, the overwhelming pattern of conflict in the post-1945 world no longer yields fully to rational analysis. In fact, strategic planning based on such calculations is, and will continue to be, unrelated to current realities. Small-scale military eruptions around the globe have demonstrated new forms of warfare with a different cast of characters - guerilla armies, terrorists, and bandits - pursuing diverse goals by violent means with the most primitive to the most sophisticated weapons. Although these warriors and their tactics testify to the end of conventional war as we've known it, the public and the military in the developed world continue to contemplate organized violence as conflict between the super powers. At this moment, armed conflicts of the type van Creveld describes are occurring throughout the world. From Lebanon to Cambodia, from Sri Lanka and the Philippines to El Salvador, the Persian Gulf, and the strife-torn nations of Eastern Europe, violent confrontations confirm a new model of warfare in which tribal, ethnic, and religious factions do battle without high-tech weapons or state-supported armies and resources. This low-intensity conflict challenges existing distinctions between civilian and solder, individual crime and organized violence, terrorism and war. In the present global atmosphere, practices that for three centuries have been considered uncivilized, such as capturing civilians or even entire communities for ransom, have begun to reappear. Pursuing bold and provocative paths of inquiry, van Creveld posits the inadequacies of our most basic ideas as to who fights wars and why and broaches the inevitability of man's need to "play" at war. In turn brilliant and infuriating, this challenge to our thinking and planning current and future military encounters is one of the most important books on war we are likely to read in our lifetime.

Interrogation in War and Conflict

Interrogation in War and Conflict PDF Author: Christopher Andrew
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134703457
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
This edited volume offers a comparative and interdisciplinary analysis of interrogation and questioning in war and conflict in the twentieth century. Despite the current public interest and its military importance, interrogation and questioning in conflict is still a largely under-researched theme. This volume’s methodological thrust is to select historical case studies ranging in time from the Great War to the conflicts in former Yugoslavia, and including the Second World War, decolonization, the Cold War, the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland and international justice cases in The Hague, each of which raises interdisciplinary issues about the role of interrogation. These case-studies were selected because they resurface previously unexplored sources on the topic, or revisit known cases which allow us to analyse the role of interrogation and questioning in intelligence, security and military operations. Written by a group of experts from a range of disciplines including history, intelligence, psychology, law and human rights, Interrogation in War and Conflict provides a study of the main turning points in interrogation and questioning in twentieth-century conflicts, over a wide geographical area. The collection also looks at issues such as the extent of the use of harsh techniques, the value of interrogation to military intelligence, security and international justice, the development of interrogation as a separate profession in intelligence, as well as the relationship between interrogation and questioning and wider society. This book will be of much interest to students of intelligence studies, strategic studies, counter-terrorism, international justice, history and IR in general.

Predatory States

Predatory States PDF Author: J. Patrice McSherry
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 0742568709
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
This powerful study makes a compelling case about the key U.S. role in state terrorism in Latin America during the Cold War. Long hidden from public view, Operation Condor was a military network created in the 1970s to eliminate political opponents of Latin American regimes. Its key members were the anticommunist dictatorships of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil, later joined by Peru and Ecuador, with covert support from the U.S. government. Drawing on a wealth of testimonies, declassified files, and Latin American primary sources, J. Patrice McSherry examines Operation Condor from numerous vantage points: its secret structures, intelligence networks, covert operations against dissidents, political assassinations worldwide, commanders and operatives, links to the Pentagon and the CIA, and extension to Central America in the 1980s. The author convincingly shows how, using extralegal and terrorist methods, Operation Condor hunted down, seized, and executed political opponents across borders. McSherry argues that Condor functioned within, or parallel to, the structures of the larger inter-American military system led by the United States, and that declassified U.S. documents make clear that U.S. security officers saw Condor as a legitimate and useful 'counterterror' organization. Revealing new details of Condor operations and fresh evidence of links to the U.S. security establishment, this controversial work offers an original analysis of the use of secret, parallel armies in Western counterinsurgency strategies. It will be a clarion call to all readers to consider the long-term consequences of clandestine operations in the name of 'democracy.'