Modernizing the King of Battle, the companion volume to Boyd L. Dastrup's King of Battle: A Branch History of the U.S. Army's Field Artillery, records the U.S. Army's aggressive program to modernize field artillery during the decades between the end of the Vietnam conflict in 1973 and the start of the Persian Gulf War in 1991. In order to fight effectively across the entire spectrum of conflict, the Army resurrected itself as a powerful fighting force capable of taking on the heavily mechanized Soviet and Warsaw Pact armies on both high-intensity and low- to mid-intensity battlefields. As recent events in Afghanistan and Iraq have demonstrated, field artillery is still a vital component of the contemporary battlefield. Those involved in the ongoing modernization of the King of Battle will benefit greatly from a careful reading of the historical background in this valuable work.

“An “insightful and informative” overview of the role of tanks in combat from the First World War to the present day (Dennis Showalter, author of Armor and Blood). The story of the battlefield in the twentieth century was dominated by a handful of developments. Foremost of these was the introduction and refinement of tanks. In Tank Warfare, Jeremy Black, a recipient of the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize from the Society for Military History, offers a comprehensive global account of the history of tanks and armored warfare in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. First introduced onto the battlefield during World War I, tanks represented the reconciliation of firepower and mobility and immediately seized the imagination of commanders and commentators concerned about the constraints of ordinary infantry. The developments of technology and tactics in the interwar years were realized in the German blitzkrieg in World War II and beyond. Yet the account of armor on the battlefield is a tale of limitations and defeats as well as of potential and achievements. Tank Warfare examines the traditional narrative of armored warfare while at the same time challenging it, and Black suggests that tanks were no “silver bullet” on the battlefield. Instead, their success was based on their inclusion in the general mix of weaponry available to commanders and the context in which they were used. “An excellent overview of the subject.” —Alaric Searle, author of Armoured Warfare: A Military, Political and Global History

A professional bulletin for redlegs.