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.

First published in 2005, this encyclopedia demonstrates that the millennium from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance was a period of great intellectual and practical achievement and innovation. In Europe, the Islamic world, South and East Asia, and the Americas, individuals built on earlier achievements, introduced sometimes radical refinements and laid the foundations for modern development. Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine details the whole scope of scientific knowledge in the medieval period in more than 300 A to Z entries. This comprehensive resource discusses the research, application of knowledge, cultural and technology exchanges, experimentation, and achievements in the many disciplines related to science and technology. It also looks at the relationship between medieval science and the traditions it supplanted. Written by a select group of international scholars, this reference work will be of great use to scholars, students, and general readers researching topics in many fields, including medieval studies, world history, history of science, history of technology, history of medicine, and cultural studies.

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.

First published in 1977, Arms Control and Technological Innovation is primarily concerned with three subjects: the causes of the arms race; the consequences of the arms race to the world; and the control of the arms race. Written by experts in the field, it brings themes like new technologies and new weapon systems; new tactics to replace tactical nuclear weapons in Europe; the Anglo-American nuclear relationship; strategic arms limitation and military strategic concepts; and a new approach to strategic arms limitation and reduction. The book argues that the principal problem of the arms race, according to several lectures, is that weapons and delivery-systems technology have developed so much as to threaten the survival of civilization itself. The pace of technological change is proceeding more rapidly than ever before and there is serious doubt whether political institutions are adapting to this change in time to avoid devastating consequences to the world. This book is a must read for scholars and researchers of military and strategic studies, international relations, international politics and geopolitics.

This book examines the use of military force as a coercive tool by the United States, using lessons drawn from the post-Cold War era (1991–2018). The volume reveals that despite its status as sole superpower during the post-Cold War period, US efforts to coerce other states failed as often as they succeeded. In the coming decades, the United States will face states that are more capable and creative, willing to challenge its interests and able to take advantage of missteps and vulnerabilities. By using lessons derived from in-depth case studies and statistical analysis of an original dataset of more than 100 coercive incidents in the post-Cold War era, this book generates insight into how the US military can be used to achieve policy goals. Specifically, it provides guidance about the ways in which, and the conditions under which, the US armed forces can work in concert with economic and diplomatic elements of US power to create effective coercive strategies. This book will be of interest to students of US national security, US foreign policy, strategic studies and International Relations in general.

This novel and original book examines and disaggregates, theoretically and empirically, operations of power in international security regimes. These regimes, varying in degree from regulatory to prohibitory, are understood as sets of normative discourses, political structures and dependencies (anarchies, hierarchies, and heterarchies), and agencies through which power operates within a given security issue area with a regulatory effect. In International Relations, regime analysis has been dominated by several generations of regime theory/theorization. As this book makes clear, not only has the IR Regime Theory been of limited utility for security domain due to its heavy focus on economic and environmental regimes, but it, too, heuristically suffered from its rigid pegging to general IR Theory. It is not surprising then that the evolution of IR Regime Theory has largely been mirroring the evolution of IR Theory in general: from the neo-realist/neo-liberal institutionalist convergence regime theory; through cognitivism; to constructivist regime theory. The commitment of this book is to remedy this situation by bringing together robust power analysis and international security regimes. It provides the reader with a theoretically and empirically uncompromising and comprehensive analysis of the selected international security regimes, which goes beyond one or another school of IR Regime Theory. In doing so, it completely abandons existing, and piecemeal, analysis of regimes within the intellectual field of IR based on conventional grand/mid-range theorization.