Showing titles in Military

The all-volunteer force that has served our country well for more than 50 years is at a critical inflection point. Today, recruiters are struggling to bring enough Zoomers into the armed services. Mismatched fundamental ideals, divergent beliefs about the workplace, and other sociocultural influences have contributed to the United States military scrambling to get a grasp on how to appeal to Gen Z.

New York Times best-selling author David A. Stockman is the ultimate Washington insider turned iconoclast. Here, he debunks Trump-O-Nomics and the perils of Washington's addiction to perpetual wars. Stockman says Trump is headed for a great big fall from the imminent crash of a 30-year financial bubble, which he condemned on the campaign trail, but foolishly embraced once in office. Stockman warns "the twin fiscal menace of the Warfare State and Welfare State" will be Trump's undoing.

From Major General Jeffrey Schloesser - former commanding general of the 101st Airborne Division and Regional Command-East - comes a revealing memoir of leadership in the chaos and fog of the Afghanistan War.

The military is often perceived by well-meaning Americans as the last stronghold against the progressive march through America’s institutions. But this is no longer simply the case. Our Armed Forces were once the envy of the world, in large part because we selected based on merit, and instilled in our fighting men an unshakeable military ethos. Both the ethos and the selection, however, have been in steady decline as the Department of Defense succumbs to a dangerous ideology: selection and promotion based on racial and gender identity.

The most important task of any government remains the defence of its state and its citizens. Traditionally governments have used armed forces to do this. World events and comparative peace in Europe since 1989 have led most European governments to lose their focus on defence. However, recent events have proved that war is now as nasty, violent, destructive and prevalent as it has ever been, and governments need to fundamentally re-think their relationship with armies and soldiers.

U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in Europe had little military value during the Cold War and they have even less today. Instead of giving these aging weapons a costly upgrade, Washington should begin phasing them out.

Many see China's rise as a threat to US leadership in Asia and beyond. Thomas J. Christensen argues instead that the real challenge lies in dissuading China from regional aggression while eliciting its global cooperation. Drawing on decades of scholarship and experience as a senior diplomat, Christensen offers a deep perspective on China's military and economic capacity. Assessing China's political outlook and strategic goals, Christensen shows how nationalism and the threat of domestic instability influence the party's decisions about regional and global affairs.

This book analyses the events leading up to the cluster munitions ban, the provisions of the treaty, as well as assesses the progress made in the years since towards a world without the presence of cluster munitions. Cluster bombs are weapons that are small but deadly. They often look like small metal canisters, and some of them are painted, giving them the innocuous appearance of a soda can. The unexploded submunitions that are scattered on the ground, in effect, act as landmines, that can kill or severely injure anyone who comes across them, sometimes even years and decades later. It has ...

Insanity can be defined as doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result. As a nation, America has cycled through the same defense and intelligence issues since the end of the Cold War. In Insanity Defense, Congresswoman Jane Harman chronicles how four administrations have failed to confront some of the toughest national security policy issues and suggests achievable fixes that can move us toward a safer future.

Spiral is what we can call a perpetual and continuously widening war that has put the country in a "state of exception". Bush's promise that we have "taken the gloves off" and Obama's inability to define an endgame have had a profound effect on us even though the actual combat is fought by a tiny percentage of our citizens. In the name of security, some of our accustomed rights and freedoms are circumscribed.

Joseph O. Chapa, with unique credentials as Air Force officer, Predator pilot, and doctorate in moral philosophy, serves as our guide to understanding this future, able to engage in both the language of military operations and the language of moral philosophy. Through gripping accounts of remote pilots making life-and-death decisions and analysis of high-profile cases such as the killing of Iranian high government official General Qasem Soleimani, Chapa examines remote warfare within the context of the just war tradition, virtue, moral psychology, and moral responsibility.

Is America fated to decline as a great power? Can it recover? With absorbing insight and fresh perspective, foreign policy expert Andrew Imbrie provides a road map for bolstering American leadership in an era of turbulence abroad and deepening polarization at home. This is a book about choices: the tough policy trade-offs that political leaders need to make to reinvigorate American money, might, and clout. In the conventional telling, the United States is either destined for continued dominance or doomed to irreversible decline.

The Shadow Empire: How Authoritarians Built a Parallel World Order While America was fighting the war on terror, China and Russia were building something far more dangerous: an alternative to the entire Western system. The "rules-based international order" is crumbling. Not from external attack, but from internal rot and external alternatives. While Western leaders still speak as if American dominance is eternal, authoritarian powers have quietly constructed a shadow empire—complete with parallel financial systems, trade networks, and political alliances that make Western sanctions ...

Authors Simon Reich and Peter Dombrowski challenge the common view of grand strategy as unitary. They eschew prescription of any one specific approach, chosen from a spectrum that stretches from global primacy to restraint and isolationism, in favor of describing what America’s military actually does, day to day. They argue that a series of fundamental recent changes in the global system, the inevitable jostling of bureaucratic politics, and the practical limitations of field operations combine to ensure that each presidential administration inevitably resorts to a variety of strategies.

Some refugees who had fled from Germany, in an attempt to escape Nazi persecution, were rounded up, interned, and later used in a prisoner exchange program between the United States and German governments. The American government also went to great lengths to secure Germans living across Latin America, who they believed posed a tangible threat, should they cross America’s southern border. In spite of a preponderance of evidence affirming the occurrence of these events, the United States government persistently denied it for decades.

When Barack Obama took office, he brought with him a new group of foreign policy advisors intent on carving out a new global role for America in the wake of the Bush administration’s war in Iraq. Now the acclaimed author of Rise of the Vulcans offers a definitive, even-handed account of the messier realities they’ve faced in implementing their policies. In The Obamians, acclaimed author James Mann tells the compelling story of the administration’s struggle to enact a coherent and effective set of policies in a time of global turmoil.

Ukraine's devastating assault on Russia's Black Sea Fleet didn't come from submarines or destroyers—it came from swarms of autonomous maritime drones that cost a fraction of traditional warships yet delivered crippling blows to a nuclear superpower's navy. This isn't just another conflict headline. It's the opening chapter of a maritime revolution that's rewriting the rules of naval warfare. For centuries, naval supremacy meant building bigger, more powerful capital ships. The logic was simple: concentrate overwhelming firepower in fortress-like vessels that could dominate vast stretches ...

This book highlights the September 26, 2024 seminar of The Sir Richard Williams Foundation which was entitled: “Enhancing and Accelerating the Integrated Force: An Operational Perspective.” This seminar focused on how the force in being or the ready force was focused on improving its capability, its survivability and lethality for the fight tonight. For such a focus, one needs a sense of urgency for how to improve the force in the short to mid-term, rather than over emphasizing the long-term future and future force structure planning. In addition to the seminar report, Dr. Robbin Laird ...

This is the fourth annual publication we have published at Second Line of Defense and Defense Information. Each of the four publications highlight themes from essays we have published during that year. We are living in a time of compressed history, and our essays in each volume captures the history emerging in that year. We focus on defense issues, so we have highlighted some of the key developments affecting the evolution of defense and security challenges facing the United States and its key allies in that year, as well as innovations and developments in selected military technologies and...

While critics obsessed over cost overruns and early setbacks, something extraordinary was happening on battlefields from Iraq to the Pacific. The Marines weren't just flying a new aircraft—they were pioneering an entirely new way of war. This is the story of that transformation. Since 2007, the Osprey has rewritten the rules of military aviation. It transformed the Marine Corps from a traditional amphibious force into a rapid-deployment global strike capability. It gave Air Force Special Operations unprecedented reach and flexibility. Now it's revolutionizing Navy logistics and promising ...