Success and Failure in Limited War

Success and Failure in Limited War PDF Author: Spencer D. Bakich
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022610785X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Common and destructive, limited wars are significant international events that pose a number of challenges to the states involved beyond simple victory or defeat. Chief among these challenges is the risk of escalation—be it in the scale, scope, cost, or duration of the conflict. In this book, Spencer D. Bakich investigates a crucial and heretofore ignored factor in determining the nature and direction of limited war: information institutions. Traditional assessments of wartime strategy focus on the relationship between the military and civilians, but Bakich argues that we must take into account the information flow patterns among top policy makers and all national security organizations. By examining the fate of American military and diplomatic strategy in four limited wars, Bakich demonstrates how not only the availability and quality of information, but also the ways in which information is gathered, managed, analyzed, and used, shape a state’s ability to wield power effectively in dynamic and complex international systems. Utilizing a range of primary and secondary source materials, Success and Failure in Limited War makes a timely case for the power of information in war, with crucial implications for international relations theory and statecraft.

Success and Failure in Limited War

Success and Failure in Limited War PDF Author: Spencer D. Bakich
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022610785X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Get Book Here

Book Description
Common and destructive, limited wars are significant international events that pose a number of challenges to the states involved beyond simple victory or defeat. Chief among these challenges is the risk of escalation—be it in the scale, scope, cost, or duration of the conflict. In this book, Spencer D. Bakich investigates a crucial and heretofore ignored factor in determining the nature and direction of limited war: information institutions. Traditional assessments of wartime strategy focus on the relationship between the military and civilians, but Bakich argues that we must take into account the information flow patterns among top policy makers and all national security organizations. By examining the fate of American military and diplomatic strategy in four limited wars, Bakich demonstrates how not only the availability and quality of information, but also the ways in which information is gathered, managed, analyzed, and used, shape a state’s ability to wield power effectively in dynamic and complex international systems. Utilizing a range of primary and secondary source materials, Success and Failure in Limited War makes a timely case for the power of information in war, with crucial implications for international relations theory and statecraft.

Why America Loses Wars

Why America Loses Wars PDF Author: Donald Stoker
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009220888
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
How can you achieve victory in war if you don't have a clear idea of your political aims and a vision of what victory means? In this provocative challenge to US political aims and strategy, Donald Stoker argues that America endures endless wars because its leaders no longer know how to think about war, particularly wars fought for limited aims, taking the nation to war without understanding what they want or valuing victory and thus the ending of the war. He reveals how flawed ideas on so-called 'limited war' and war in general evolved against the backdrop of American conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. These ideas, he shows, undermined America's ability to understand, wage, and win its wars, and to secure peace. Now fully updated to incorporate the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, Why America Loses Wars dismantles seventy years of misguided thinking and lays the foundations for a new approach to the wars of tomorrow.

On War

On War PDF Author: Carl von Clausewitz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Military art and science
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description


Irregular Armed Forces and their Role in Politics and State Formation

Irregular Armed Forces and their Role in Politics and State Formation PDF Author: Diane E. Davis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139439987
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 431

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Book Description
Existing models of state formation are derived primarily from early Western European experience, and are misleading when applied to nation-states struggling to consolidate their dominion in the present period. In this volume, scholars suggest that the Western European model of armies waging war on behalf of sovereign states does not hold universally. The importance of 'irregular' armed forces - militias, guerrillas, paramilitaries, mercenaries, bandits, vigilantes, police, and so on - has been seriously neglected in the literature on this subject. The case studies in this book suggest, among other things, that the creation of the nation-state as a secure political entity rests as much on 'irregular' as regular armed forces. For most of the 'developing' world, the state's legitimacy has been difficult to achieve, constantly eroding or challenged by irregular armed forces within a country's borders. No account of modern state formation can be considered complete without attending to irregular forces.

The United States Military in Limited War

The United States Military in Limited War PDF Author: Kevin Dougherty
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476600104
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
After World War II, the United States military increasingly found itself involved in operations that have been described variously as limited wars, small wars, low intensity conflicts, operations other than war, support and stability operations, and the like. The most common name throughout much of the 1990s was "operations other than war" (OOTW). During this period there was an explosion of doctrinal material on the subject, including a 1993 official field manual listing six principles of OOTW: objective, unity of effort, legitimacy, perseverance, restraint and security. The author of the present work examines four successful OOTWs (the Greek Civil War, Lebanon, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua/Honduras) and four failed ones (Vietnam, Beirut, Somalia, and Haiti) and concludes there is a positive correlation between adherence to the principles and an operation's outcome.

Limited War Revisited

Limited War Revisited PDF Author: Robert E. Osgood
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429727453
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
The strategy of limited war has transformed the American approach to the use of force and played a key role in U.S. foreign policy since World War II. As the mainstay of containment it was designed to deter and fight wars effectively at a tolerable cost and risk in the nuclear age by providing the United States with a flexible and controlled response to a variety of military threats. The strategy met a severe challenge in the Vietnam war; it has nevertheless continued to prevail as a doctrine, if not necessarily with its former utility, by adapting to the changing domestic and international environment after Vietnam. Robert E. Osgood critically examines the success, ambiguities, and flaws of the strategy in its expanding application to postwar military policy. He interprets its impact on the Vietnam war and vice versa, extends his analysis to the new challenges posed by changes in technology and the military balance that affect U.S. security, and concludes with a searching inquiry into the problems of limited war where its utility as an instrument of foreign policy is now most in doubt: the Third World.

Scenes from an Unfinished War

Scenes from an Unfinished War PDF Author: Daniel P. Bolger
Publisher: www.Militarybookshop.CompanyUK
ISBN: 9781780390055
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Low-intensity conflict (LIC) often has been viewed as the wrong kind of warfare for the American military, dating back to the war in Vietnam and extending to the present conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. From the American perspective, LIC occurs when the U.S. military must seek limited aims with a relatively modest number of available regular forces, as opposed to the larger commitments that bring into play the full panoply of advanced technology and massive commitments of troops. Yet despite the conventional view, U.S. forces have achieved success in LIC, albeit "under the radar" and with credit largely assigned to allied forces, in a number of counterguerrilla wars in the 1960s."Scenes from an Unfinished War: Low-Intensity Conflict in Korea, 1966-1969" focuses on what the author calls the Second Korean conflict, which flared up in November 1966 and sputtered to an ill-defined halt more than three years later. During that time, North Korean special operations teams had challenged the U.S. and its South Korean allies in every category of low-intensity conflict - small-scale skirmishes along the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas, spectacular terrorist strikes, attempts to foment a viable insurgency in the South, and even the seizure of the USS Pueblo - and failed. This book offers a case study in how an operational-level commander, General Charles H. Bonesteel III, met the challenge of LIC. He and his Korean subordinates crafted a series of shrewd, pragmatic measures that defanged North Korea's aggressive campaign. According to the convincing argument made by "Scenes from an Unfinished War," because the U.S. successfully fought the "wrong kind" of war, it likely blocked another kind of wrong war - a land war in Asia. The Second Korean Conflict serves as a corrective to assumptions about the American military's abilities to formulate and execute a winning counterinsurgency strategy. Originally published in 1991. 180 pages. maps. ill.

Yellow Smoke

Yellow Smoke PDF Author: Robert H. Scales
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742517745
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
This timely book draws upon a long and distinguished military career and wars dating back to Korea for lessons for America's future land wars. Scales looks at Afghanistan and Iraq, and ahead to a wargame scenario of Kosovo 2020 to develop a picture of the American style of war. Visit our website for sample chapters!

"Cold Blood"

Author: George C. Herring
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Vietnam War, 1961-1975
Languages : en
Pages : 48

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Book Description


The Evolution of US Army Tactical Doctrine, 1946-76

The Evolution of US Army Tactical Doctrine, 1946-76 PDF Author: Robert A. Doughty
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Military art and science
Languages : en
Pages : 68

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Book Description
This paper focuses on the formulation of doctrine since World War II. In no comparable period in history have the dimensions of the battlefield been so altered by rapid technological changes. The need for the tactical doctrines of the Army to remain correspondingly abreast of these changes is thus more pressing than ever before. Future conflicts are not likely to develop in the leisurely fashions of the past where tactical doctrines could be refined on the battlefield itself. It is, therefore, imperative that we apprehend future problems with as much accuracy as possible. One means of doing so is to pay particular attention to the business of how the Army's doctrine has developed historically, with a view to improving methods of future development.