Navies in Northern Waters is a collection of articles covering the roles played by the secondary navies of northern European powers and the United States within the maritime balance of power. The contributions covering the 18th and 19th centuries focus on their relations with each other as they sought to create a counterweight to the dominant naval power of Britain. The inter-war years are treated from the perspectives of international disarmament efforts within the framework of collective security, and the subsequent naval rivalry in the Baltic area in the years leading up to the Second World War. For the post-1945 period, the contributions concentrate on superpower rivalry in northern waters during the Cold War, the changing aspects of security policy since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the particular challenges facing small coastal states policing extensive waters of increasing economic importance.

Navies in Northern Waters is a collection of articles covering the roles played by the secondary navies of northern European powers and the United States within the maritime balance of power. The contributions covering the 18th and 19th centuries focus on their relations with each other as they sought to create a counterweight to the dominant naval power of Britain. The inter-war years are treated from the perspectives of international disarmament efforts within the framework of collective security, and the subsequent naval rivalry in the Baltic area in the years leading up to the Second World War. For the post-1945 period, the contributions concentrate on superpower rivalry in northern waters during the Cold War, the changing aspects of security policy since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the particular challenges facing small coastal states policing extensive waters of increasing economic importance.

Although previously undervalued for their strategic impact because they represented only a small percentage of total forces, the Union and Confederate navies were crucial to the outcome of the Civil War. In War on the Waters, James M. McPherson has crafted an enlightening, at times harrowing, and ultimately thrilling account of the war's naval campaigns and their military leaders. McPherson recounts how the Union navy's blockade of the Confederate coast, leaky as a sieve in the war's early months, became increasingly effective as it choked off vital imports and exports. Meanwhile, the Confederate navy, dwarfed by its giant adversary, demonstrated daring and military innovation. Commerce raiders sank Union ships and drove the American merchant marine from the high seas. Southern ironclads sent several Union warships to the bottom, naval mines sank many more, and the Confederates deployed the world's first submarine to sink an enemy vessel. But in the end, it was the Union navy that won some of the war's most important strategic victories--as an essential partner to the army on the ground at Fort Donelson, Vicksburg, Port Hudson, Mobile Bay, and Fort Fisher, and all by itself at Port Royal, Fort Henry, New Orleans, and Memphis.

Following Israel's War of Independence in 1948 and 1949, the anticipated peace did not materialize and the new nation soon found itself embroiled in protracted military conflict with neighbouring Arab states. Demobilization of its armed forces led to the formation of special elite unit under the command of Ariel Sharon to cope with cross-border infiltration, pillage and murder. A policy of deterrence was governed by the tactic of retaliation, which contained the seeds of escalation. At the same time, a military dynamic unfolded in which the logic of field unit response dictated both military and political policy and caught the imagination of a demoralized and war-weary Israeli society. The myth of the Israeli paratroopers at the beginning of the 1950s, and their heroic deeds in the reprisal raids, embodied the new Zionist ethos for which the current Prime Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, claims much of the credit. The book thus provides historical insight into some of the most intractable developments of the current Arab-Israeli conflict.

This book, first published in 1988, analyses the interests and activities of the Soviet Union in the northern Atlantic. It gives particular attention to the growth in exploration and exploitation of resources and to the problems presented by jurisdictional disputes. The responses of NATO, the United States and the Nordic countries to the expanded Soviet military presence are examined in detail.