You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Conventional wisdom holds that the US Army in Vietnam, thrust into an unconventional war where occupying terrain was a meaningless measure of success, depended on body counts as its sole measure of military progress. In No Sure Victory, Army officer and historian Gregory Daddis looks far deeper into the Army's techniques for measuring military success and presents a much more complicated-and disturbing-account of the American misadventure in Indochina. Daddis shows how the US Army, which confronted an unfamiliar enemy and an even more unfamiliar form of warfare, adopted a massive, and eventually unmanageable, system of measurements and formulas to track the progress of military operations th...
None
Examines the nature of counterinsurgency and nation-building missions, the institutional obstacles inherent in dealing effectively with such operations, and the strengths and weaknesses of U.S. doctrine, including the problems that can occur when that doctrine morphs into dogma.
None
None
NOTE: NO FURTHER DISCOUNT FOR THIS PRINTED PRODUCT- OVERSTOCK SALE -- Significantly reduced list price Engineers at War describes the role of military engineers, especially the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in the Vietnam War. It is a story of the engineers' battle against an elusive and determined enemy in one of the harshest underdeveloped regions of the world. Despite these challenges, engineer soldiers successfully carried out their combat and construction missions. The building effort in South Vietnam allowed the United States to deploy and operate a modern 500,000-man force in a far-off region. Although the engineers faced huge construction tasks, they were always ready to support the ...
In the annals of Vietnam War history, no figure has been more controversial than Ngo Dinh Diem. During the 1950s, U.S. leaders hailed Diem as “the miracle man of Southeast Asia” and funneled huge amounts of aid to his South Vietnamese government. But in 1963 Diem was ousted and assassinated in a coup endorsed by President John F. Kennedy. Diem’s alliance with Washington has long been seen as a Cold War relationship gone bad, undone either by American arrogance or by Diem’s stubbornness. In Misalliance, Edward Miller provides a convincing new explanation for Diem’s downfall and the larger tragedy of South Vietnam. For Diem and U.S. leaders, Miller argues, the alliance was more than ...
Counterinsurgency has staked its claim in the new century as the new American way of war. Yet, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have revived a historical debate about the costs - monetary, political and moral - of operations designed to eliminate insurgents and build nations. Today's counterinsurgency proponents point to 'small wars' past to support their view that the enemy is 'biddable' if the correct tactical formulas are applied. Douglas Porch's sweeping history of counterinsurgency campaigns carried out by the three 'providential nations' of France, Britain and the United States, ranging from nineteenth-century colonial conquests to General Petraeus' 'Surge' in Iraq, challenges the contemporary mythologising of counterinsurgency as a humane way of war. The reality, he reveals, is that 'hearts and minds' has never been a recipe for lasting stability and that past counterinsurgency campaigns have succeeded not through state-building but by shattering and dividing societies while unsettling civil-military relations.
This edited volume offers a first thorough review of peacekeeping theory and reality in contemporary contexts, and attempts to align the two to help inform practice.
Learning to Forget analyzes the evolution of US counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine over the last five decades. Beginning with an extensive section on the lessons of Vietnam, it traces the decline of COIN in the 1970s, then the rebirth of low intensity conflict through the Reagan years, in the conflict in Bosnia, and finally in the campaigns of Iraq and Afghanistan. Ultimately it closes the loop by explaining how, by confronting the lessons of Vietnam, the US Army found a way out of those most recent wars. In the process it provides an illustration of how military leaders make use of history and demonstrates the difficulties of drawing lessons from the past that can usefully be applied to contemporary circumstances. The book outlines how the construction of lessons is tied to the construction of historical memory and demonstrates how histories are constructed to serve the needs of the present. In so doing, it creates a new theory of doctrinal development.