First published in 1987, The Compendium of Armaments and Military Hardware provides, within a single volume, the salient technical and operational details of the most important weapons. The complete range of hardware used in land, sea and air forces throughout the world at the time of publication is covered, from tanks to rocket systems, helicopters to cruise missiles, alongside full details of size, weight and operational range. The book’s main strength lies in the detail it gives of armament and associated ammunition capabilities, and of the sensors and other electronics required for the weapons to be used effectively. A key title amongst Routledge reference reissues, Christopher Chant’s important work will be of great value to students and professionals requiring a comprehensive and accessible reference guide, as well as to weapons ‘buffs’.

First published in 1987, The Compendium of Armaments and Military Hardware provides, within a single volume, the salient technical and operational details of the most important weapons. The complete range of hardware used in land, sea and air forces throughout the world at the time of publication is covered, from tanks to rocket systems, helicopters to cruise missiles, alongside full details of size, weight and operational range. The book’s main strength lies in the detail it gives of armament and associated ammunition capabilities, and of the sensors and other electronics required for the weapons to be used effectively. A key title amongst Routledge reference reissues, Christopher Chant’s important work will be of great value to students and professionals requiring a comprehensive and accessible reference guide, as well as to weapons ‘buffs’.

This book presents the U.S. Army Asymmetric Warfare Group (AWG) as an example of successful change by the Army in wartime. It argues that creating the AWG required senior leaders to create a vision differing from the Army’s self-conceptualization, change bureaucratic processes to turn the vision into an actual unit, and then place the new unit in the hands of uniquely qualified leaders to build and sustain it. In doing this, it considers the forces influencing change within the Army and argues the two most significant are its self-conceptualization and institutional bureaucracy. The work explores three major subject areas that provide historical context. The first is the Army’s institutional history from the early 1950s through 2001. This period begins with the Army seeking to validate its place in America’s national security strategy and ends with the Army trying to chart a path into the post-Cold War future. The Army’s history is largely one of asymmetric warfare. The work thus examines several campaigns that offered lessons for subsequent wars. Some lessons the Army took to heart, others it ignored. As the AWG was a direct outgrowth of the failures and frustrations the Army experienced in Afghanistan and Iraq, the book examines these campaigns and identifies the specific problems that led senior Army leaders to create the AWG. Finally, the work chronicles the AWG’s creation in 2006, growth, and re-assignment from the Army staff to a fully-fledged organization subordinate to the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command in 2011 to its deactivation. This action resulted not from the unit’s failure to adapt to a post-insurgency Army focusing on modernization. Rather, it resulted from the Army failing to realize that while the AWG was a product of counterinsurgency, it provided the capability to support the Army during a period of great strategic and institutional uncertainty.

Ranging from prehistoric times to the Nuclear Age, demonstrates how social and economic conditions have determined the types of weapons and tactics employed in warfare.

A history of weapons and warfare, from the Macedonian sarissa to the atomic bomb. The book describes technological and strategic advances in military science, but also aims to evoke the horror of war and comment on the future of warfare.

Ken Booth’s study, first published in 1979, investigates the way in which cultural distortions have affected the theory and execution of strategy. Its aim is to illustrate the importance of ethnocentrism in all areas of the subject, to follow through its implications and to suggest approaches to the different problems it poses. Insights are offered into the character of a number of important issues in Cold War international politics, including the superpower arms race, détente, the Middle Eastern crisis, the Soviet arms build-up and the SALT talks. In light of the cost of modern warfare, it is all the more important to avoid strategic failures in the future. Strategy and Ethnocentrism aims to alert students of military and strategic studies to some ways of minimising the risks of failure in an age when war is increasingly characterised by racial, cultural and religious conflict.