Author: Jim Mattis Publisher: Hoover Press ISBN: 0817919368 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 290
Book Description
A diverse group of contributors offer different perspectives on whether or not the different experiences of our military and the broader society amounts to a "gap"—and if the American public is losing connection to its military. They analyze extensive polling information to identify those gaps between civilian and military attitudes on issues central to the military profession and the professionalism of our military, determine which if any of these gaps are problematic for sustaining the traditionally strong bonds between the American military and its broader public, analyze whether any problematic gaps are amenable to remediation by policy means, and assess potential solutions. The contributors also explore public disengagement and the effect of high levels of public support for the military combined with very low levels of trust in elected political leaders—both recurring themes in their research. And they reflect on whether American society is becoming so divorced from the requirements for success on the battlefield that not only will we fail to comprehend our military, but we also will be unwilling to endure a military so constituted to protect us. Contributors: Rosa Brooks, Matthew Colford,Thomas Donnelly, Peter Feaver, Jim Golby, Jim Hake, Tod Lindberg, Mackubin Thomas Owens, Cody Poplin, Nadia Schadlow, A. J. Sugarman, Lindsay Cohn Warrior, Benjamin Wittes
Author: Sten Rynning Publisher: Brookings Institution Press ISBN: 0815738951 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 336
Book Description
Perceptions of time contributed to recent Western military failings The “decline of the West” is once again a frequent topic of speculation. Often cited as one element of the alleged decline is the succession of prolonged and unsuccessful wars—most notably those waged in recent decades by the United States. This book by three Danish military experts examines not only the validity of the speculation but also asks why the West, particularly its military effectiveness, might be perceived as in decline. Temporality is the central concept linking a series of structural fractures that leave the West seemingly muscle-bound: overwhelmingly powerful in technology and military might but strategically fragile. This temporality, the authors say, is composed of three interrelated dimensions: trajectories, perceptions, and pace. First, Western societies to tend view time as a linear trajectory, focusing mostly on recent and current events and leading to the framing of history as a story of rise and decline. The authors examine whether the inevitable fall already has happened, is underway, or is still in the future. Perceptions of time also vary across cultures and periods, shaping socio-political activities, including warfare. The enemy, for example, can be perceived as belong to another time (being “backward” or “barbarian”). And war can be seen either as cyclical or exceptional, helping frame the public's willingness to accept its violent and tragic consequences. The pace of war is another factor shaping policies and actions. Western societies emphasize speed: the shorter the war the better, even if the long-term result is unsuccessful. Ironically, one of the Western world's least successful wars also has been America's longest, in Afghanistan. This unique book is thus a critical assessment of the evolution and future of Western military power. It contributes much-needed insight into the potential for the West's political and institutional renewal.
Author: Erik Ching Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess ISBN: 0268076995 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 488
Book Description
In December 1931, El Salvador’s civilian president, Arturo Araujo, was overthrown in a military coup. Such an event was hardly unique in Salvadoran history, but the 1931 coup proved to be a watershed. Araujo had been the nation’s first democratically elected president, and although no one could have foreseen the result, the coup led to five decades of uninterrupted military rule, the longest run in modern Latin American history. Furthermore, six weeks after coming to power, the new military regime oversaw the crackdown on a peasant rebellion in western El Salvador that is one of the worst episodes of state-sponsored repression in modern Latin American history. Democracy would not return to El Salvador until the 1990s, and only then after a brutal twelve-year civil war. In Authoritarian El Salvador: Politics and the Origins of the Military Regimes, 1880-1940, Erik Ching seeks to explain the origins of the military regime that came to power in 1931. Based on his comprehensive survey of the extant documentary record in El Salvador’s national archive, Ching argues that El Salvador was typified by a longstanding tradition of authoritarianism dating back to the early- to mid-nineteenth century. The basic structures of that system were based on patron-client relationships that wove local, regional, and national political actors into complex webs of rival patronage networks. Decidedly nondemocratic in practice, the system nevertheless exhibited highly paradoxical traits: it remained steadfastly loyal to elections as the mechanism by which political aspirants acquired office, and it employed a political discourse laden with appeals to liberty and free suffrage. That blending of nondemocratic authoritarianism with populist reformism and rhetoric set the precedent for military rule for the next fifty years.
Author: Timothy J. Lynch Publisher: ISBN: 0199759251 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 1489
Book Description
•Entries written by renowned diplomatic and military historians as well as key scholars in international relations •Provides assessments and analyses of key episodes, issues and actors in the military and diplomatic history of the United States •Based on the award-winning Oxford Companion to United States History •Comprehensive collection of entries that span the founding of the U.S. to its present state •Offers a wide range of perspectives to provide an encompassing context of the United States' military and diplomatic legacies •Expansive bibliographies and suggested readings for each article to aid in research The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History, a two-volume set, will offer both assessment and analysis of the key episodes, issues and actors in the military and diplomatic history of the United States. At a time of war, in which ongoing efforts to recalibrate American diplomacy are as imperative as they are perilous, the Oxford Encyclopedia will present itself as the first recourse for scholars wishing to deepen their understanding of the crucial features of the historical and contemporary foreign policy landscape and its perennially martial components. Entries will be written by the top diplomatic and military historians and key scholars of international relations from within the American academy, supplemented, as is appropriate for an encyclopedia of diplomacy, with entries from foreign-based academics, in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. The crucial importance of the subject is reflected in the popularity of university courses dedicated to diplomatic and military history and the enduring appeal of international relations (IR) as a political science discipline drawing on both. The Oxford Encyclopedia will be a basic reference tool across both disciplines - a potentially very significant market. Readership: University-level undergraduate and graduate students in History
Author: Stephen Wertheim Publisher: Belknap Press ISBN: 067424866X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year “Even in these dismal times genuinely important books do occasionally make their appearance...You really ought to read it...A tour de force...While Wertheim is not the first to expose isolationism as a carefully constructed myth, he does so with devastating effect.” —Andrew J. Bacevich, The Nation For most of its history, the United States avoided making political and military commitments that would entangle it in power politics. Then, suddenly, it conceived a new role for itself as an armed superpower—and never looked back. In Tomorrow, the World, Stephen Wertheim traces America’s transformation to World War II, right before the attack on Pearl Harbor. As late as 1940, the small coterie formulating U.S. foreign policy wanted British preeminence to continue. Axis conquests swept away their assumptions, leading them to conclude that America should extend its form of law and order across the globe, and back it at gunpoint. No one really favored “isolationism”—a term introduced by advocates of armed supremacy to burnish their cause. We live, Wertheim warns, in the world these men created. A sophisticated and impassioned account that questions the wisdom of U.S. supremacy, Tomorrow, the World reveals the intellectual path that brought us to today’s endless wars. “Its implications are invigorating...Wertheim opens space for Americans to reexamine their own history and ask themselves whether primacy has ever really met their interests.” —New Republic “For almost 80 years now, historians and diplomats have sought not only to describe America’s swift advance to global primacy but also to explain it...Any writer wanting to make a novel contribution either has to have evidence for a new interpretation, or at least be making an older argument in some improved and eye-catching way. Tomorrow, the World does both.” —Paul Kennedy, Wall Street Journal
Author: Matthew Karp Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674973844 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 369
Book Description
Winner of the John H. Dunning Prize, American Historical Association Winner of the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Winner of the James H. Broussard Best First Book Prize, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Winner of the North Jersey Civil War Round Table Book Award Finalist for the Harriet Tubman Prize, Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery When the United States emerged as a world power in the years before the Civil War, the men who presided over the nation’s triumphant territorial and economic expansion were largely southern slaveholders. As presidents, cabinet officers, and diplomats, slaveholding leaders controlled the main levers of foreign policy inside an increasingly powerful American state. This Vast Southern Empire explores the international vision and strategic operations of these southerners at the commanding heights of American politics. “At the close of the Civil War, more than Southern independence and the bones of the dead lay amid the smoking ruins of the Confederacy. Also lost was the memory of the prewar decades, when Southern politicians and pro-slavery ambitions shaped the foreign policy of the United States in order to protect slavery at home and advance its interests abroad. With This Vast Southern Empire, Matthew Karp recovers that forgotten history and presents it in fascinating and often surprising detail.” —Fergus Bordewich, Wall Street Journal “Matthew Karp’s illuminating book This Vast Southern Empire shows that the South was interested not only in gaining new slave territory but also in promoting slavery throughout the Western Hemisphere.” —David S. Reynolds, New York Review of Books
Author: Yaprak Gursoy Publisher: University of Michigan Press ISBN: 0472130420 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 329
Book Description
Examines military interventions in Greece, Turkey, Thailand, and Egypt, and the military's role in authoritarian and democratic regimes
Author: Suzanne C. Nielsen Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM ISBN: 0801895057 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 649
Book Description
American Civil-Military Relations offers the first comprehensive assessment of the subject since the publication of Samuel P. Huntington’s The Soldier and the State. Using this seminal work as a point of departure, experts in the fields of political science, history, and sociology ask what has been learned and what more needs to be investigated in the relationship between civilian and military sectors in the 21st century. Leading scholars—such as Richard Betts, Risa Brooks, James Burk, Michael Desch, Peter Feaver, Richard Kohn, Williamson Murray, and David Segal—discuss key issues, including: • changes in officer education since the end of the Cold War • shifting conceptions of military expertise in response to evolving operational and strategic requirements • increased military involvement in high-level politics • the domestic and international contexts of U.S. civil-military relations. The first section of the book provides contrasting perspectives of American civil-military relations within the last five decades. The next section addresses Huntington’s conception of societal and functional imperatives and their influence on the civil-military relationship. Following sections examine relationships between military and civilian leaders and describe the norms and practices that should guide those interactions. What is clear from the essays in this volume is that the line between civil and military expertise and responsibility is not that sharply drawn, and perhaps given the increasing complexity of international security issues, it should not be. When forming national security policy, the editors conclude, civilian and military leaders need to maintain a respectful and engaged dialogue. Essential reading for those interested in civil-military relations, U.S. politics, and national security policy.
Author: Peter Feaver Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 9780674036772 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 410
Book Description
How do civilians control the military? In the wake of September 11, the renewed presence of national security in everyday life has made this question all the more pressing. In this book, Peter Feaver proposes an ambitious new theory that treats civil-military relations as a principal-agent relationship, with the civilian executive monitoring the actions of military agents, the armed servants of the nation-state. Military obedience is not automatic but depends on strategic calculations of whether civilians will catch and punish misbehavior. This model challenges Samuel Huntington's professionalism-based model of civil-military relations, and provides an innovative way of making sense of the U.S. Cold War and post-Cold War experience--especially the distinctively stormy civil-military relations of the Clinton era. In the decade after the Cold War ended, civilians and the military had a variety of run-ins over whether and how to use military force. These episodes, as interpreted by agency theory, contradict the conventional wisdom that civil-military relations matter only if there is risk of a coup. On the contrary, military professionalism does not by itself ensure unchallenged civilian authority. As Feaver argues, agency theory offers the best foundation for thinking about relations between military and civilian leaders, now and in the future.
Author: Jim Mattis![Political and Military Episodes in the Latter Half of the Nineteenth [i.e. Eighteenth] Century PDF](https://books.google.com/books/content/images/frontcover/0kksOaKrcTAC?fife=w80-h100)
Author: Edward Barrington De Fonblanque
Author: Sten Rynning
Author: Erik Ching
Author: Timothy J. Lynch
Author: Stephen Wertheim
Author: Matthew Karp
Author: Yaprak Gursoy
Author: Suzanne C. Nielsen
Author: Peter Feaver