Big Wars and Small Wars
Title | Big Wars and Small Wars PDF eBook |
Author | Hew Strachan |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 200 |
Release | 2006-09-27 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1134233280 |
This is a fascinating new insight into the British army and its evolution through both large and small scale conflicts. To prepare for future wars, armies derive lessons from past wars. However, some armies are defeated because they learnt the wrong lessons, fighting new conflicts in ways appropriate to the last. For the British Army in the twentieth century, the challenge has been particularly great. It has never had the luxury of emerging from one major European war with the time to prepare itself for the next. The leading military historians show how ongoing commitments to a range of ‘small wars’ have always been part of the Army’s experience. After 1902 and after 1918 they included colonial campaigns, but they also developed into what we would now call counter-insurgency operations, and these became the norm between 1945 and 1969. During the height of the Cold War, in 1982, the Army was deployed to the Falklands. Since 1990 the dominant tasks of the Army have been peace support operations. This is an excellent resource for all students and scholars of military history, politics and international relations and British history.
Small Wars, Big Data
Title | Small Wars, Big Data PDF eBook |
Author | Eli Berman |
Publisher | Princeton University Press |
Pages | 411 |
Release | 2018-06-12 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 140089011X |
How a new understanding of warfare can help the military fight today’s conflicts more effectively The way wars are fought has changed starkly over the past sixty years. International military campaigns used to play out between large armies at central fronts. Today's conflicts find major powers facing rebel insurgencies that deploy elusive methods, from improvised explosives to terrorist attacks. Small Wars, Big Data presents a transformative understanding of these contemporary confrontations and how they should be fought. The authors show that a revolution in the study of conflict--enabled by vast data, rich qualitative evidence, and modern methods—yields new insights into terrorism, civil wars, and foreign interventions. Modern warfare is not about struggles over territory but over people; civilians—and the information they might choose to provide—can turn the tide at critical junctures. The authors draw practical lessons from the past two decades of conflict in locations ranging from Latin America and the Middle East to Central and Southeast Asia. Building an information-centric understanding of insurgencies, the authors examine the relationships between rebels, the government, and civilians. This approach serves as a springboard for exploring other aspects of modern conflict, including the suppression of rebel activity, the role of mobile communications networks, the links between aid and violence, and why conventional military methods might provide short-term success but undermine lasting peace. Ultimately the authors show how the stronger side can almost always win the villages, but why that does not guarantee winning the war. Small Wars, Big Data provides groundbreaking perspectives for how small wars can be better strategized and favorably won to the benefit of the local population.
The Accidental Guerrilla
Title | The Accidental Guerrilla PDF eBook |
Author | David Kilcullen |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 377 |
Release | 2011 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0199754098 |
A Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to General David Petraeus, Kilcullen's vision of war dramatically influenced America's decision to rethink its military strategy in Iraq. Now, Kilcullen provides a remarkably fresh perspective on the War on Terror.
Small Wars
Title | Small Wars PDF eBook |
Author | Sir Charles Edward Callwell |
Publisher | |
Pages | 592 |
Release | 1906 |
Genre | History |
ISBN |
Small Wars Manual
Title | Small Wars Manual PDF eBook |
Author | United States. Marine Corps |
Publisher | |
Pages | 602 |
Release | 1940 |
Genre | Guerrilla warfare |
ISBN |
Losing Small Wars
Title | Losing Small Wars PDF eBook |
Author | Frank Ledwidge |
Publisher | Yale University Press |
Pages | 339 |
Release | 2017-02-21 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0300229097 |
This new edition of Frank Ledwidge’s eye-opening analysis of British involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan unpicks the causes and enormous costs of military failure. Updated throughout, and with fresh chapters assessing and enumerating the overall military performance since 2011—including Libya, ISIS, and the Chilcot findings—Ledwidge shows how lessons continue to go unlearned. “A brave and important book; essential reading for anyone wanting insights into the dysfunction within the British military today, and the consequences this has on the lives of innocent civilians caught up in war.”—Times Literary Supplement
Clausewitz on Small War
Title | Clausewitz on Small War PDF eBook |
Author | Carl von Clausewitz |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 260 |
Release | 2015 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0198737130 |
Widely recognized as one of the most important theorists of warfare, important strands of Carl von Clausewitz's thinking on the subject are not widely known. In the English-speaking world, few are familiar with anything other than his major, though unfinished and posthumously published, opus On War, which is available in numerous translations. Although the corpus of Clausewitz's writings on the topic of warfare is far greater, most of these texts have never been translated. In Clausewitz on Small War, Christopher Daase and James W. Davis begin to redress this unfortunate state of affairs. In this volume they have assembled and translated Clausewitz's most important texts devoted to the analysis of asymmetric, unconventional, guerrilla, and small unit warfare, including Clausewitz's Lectures on Small War, held at the Prussian War Academy in 1810 and 1811. Augmenting our understanding of Clausewitz with his early writings on Small War leads to the conclusion that asymmetric warfare is not an historical development that can be termed pre- or post-Clausewitzian as many contemporary scholars of war and military strategy argue. Rather, Clausewitz himself emerges as an early theorist of insurgency and asymmetric warfare with insights that are relevant today. The book is a must read for soldiers, military strategists, historians of war, and students of international security.