Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The Military's Business
Over recent years Western armed forces have been costing more yet achieving less. Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen draws on the ideas of business strategy to argue that Western militaries need to reform in order to become viable businesses which address relevant security issues within a realistic budget.
The West, Civil Society and the Construction of Peace
The West, Civil Society and the Construction of Peace describes how the challenges of peacemaking following the First and Second World Wars defined the West. In turn, the difficulties in applying the Western recipe for peace to the new security challenges of a globalizing world is threatening to destroy the international community. Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen explains how the values of civil society have held the West together and concludes that 'the democratic peace ' is not a 'law' but a recipe for security.
The Risk Society at War
In the globalised world of the twenty-first century, security policy in Western societies is driven by a wish to prevent future threats from becoming reality. Applying theories of 'risk society' to the study of strategy, this book analyses the creation of a new approach to strategy. The author demonstrates that this approach creates new choices for policy-makers and challenges well-established truths within the study of security and strategy. He argues that since the seventeenth century the concept of strategy has served to rationalise new technologies, doctrines and agents. By outlining the history of the concept of strategy in terms of rationality, Rasmussen presents a framework for studying strategy in a time of risk and uses this framework to analyse how new technologies of war, pre-emptive doctrines, globalisation and the rise of the 'terrorist approach to warfare' can formulate a new theory of strategy.
Learning to Forget
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.
The Limits of Alliance
Are the relationships that the United States forged with North and Central Europe during the Cold War still viable today? As the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) declines and the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) emerges, can the United States and Europe bridge the transatlantic fissures that opened when the United States prepared to go to war with Iraq? In a post-9/11 world, North and Central Europe have had to adapt their national security policies and rethink their relationship with the United States. In an in-depth look at the security policies of the states in North and Central Europe, Andrew Michta highlights how historical legacies, regional geostrategic constraints...
Intelligence Practices in High-Trust Societies
This book examines the dynamics of intelligence practices in the Scandinavian culture of high social cohesion and high trust. Situated within the new body of scholarly literature, the book emphasizes critical empirical investigations of intelligence practices, highlighting the specific cultural settings of such practices. By providing Scandinavian perspectives on intelligence studies, the work distinguishes Scandinavian intelligence studies from the predominant Anglo-American perspectives. Throughout the Western world, the past two decades have generated a rapid expansion of the legal mandate, funding, and capabilities of intelligence agencies which, simultaneously, have been pushed to reneg...
Strategic Culture and Ways of War
This study will provide a badly-needed survey and synopsis of the scholarly literature on strategic culture and ways of war.
Battlestar Galactica and International Relations
Looking at a television franchise like Battlestar Galactica (BSG) is no longer news within the discipline of International Relations. A growing number of scholars in and out of IR are studying the importance of cultural artifacts – popular or otherwise – for the phenomena that make up the core of our discipline. The genre of science fiction offers the analyst an opportunity that cannot be matched by more mimetic genres, namely the chance to look at how sets of widely-circulating expectations of the social serve to constrain authors as they work to introduce as yet unexplored problematiques, the fantasy aspect in much of science fiction storytelling is premised simply on a material differ...
Twenty-First Century Military Innovation
Contemporary war is as much a quest for decisive technological, organizational, and doctrinal superiority before the fighting starts as it is an effort to destroy enemy militaries during battle. Armed forces that are not actively fighting are instead actively reengineering themselves for success in the next fight and imagining what that next fight may look like. Twenty-First Century Military Innovation outlines the most theoretically important themes in contemporary warfare, especially as these appear in distinctive innovations that signal changes in states’ warfighting capacities and their political goals. Marcus Schulzke examines eight case studies that illustrate the overall direction o...
