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.

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.

A sophisticated appraisal of the problem of asymmetric conflict in the post–World War II period. In a sophisticated combination of quantitative research and two in-depth case studies, Larisa Deriglazova surveys armed conflicts post World War II in which one power is much stronger than the other. She then focuses on the experiences of British decolonization after World War II and the United States in the 2003 Iraq war. Great Powers, Small Wars employs several large databases to identify basic characteristics and variables of wars between enemies of disproportionate power. Case studies examine the economics, domestic politics, and international factors that ultimately shaped military events more than military capacity and strategy.

Carl von Clausewitz has long been interpreted as the paradigmatic thinker of major interstate war. This book challenges this assumption by showing that Clausewitz was an ardent analyst of small war and integrated many aspects of his early writings on partisan warfare and people's war into his magnum opus, On War. It reconstructs Clausewitz's intellectual development by placing it in the context of his engagement with the political and philosophical currents of his own times - German Idealism, Romanticism, and Humanism. The central question that Clausewitz and his contemporaries faced was how to defend Prussia and Europe against Napoleon's expansionist strategy. On the one hand, the nationalization of war that had occurred as a result of the French Revolution could only be countered by drawing the people into the defence of their own countries. On the other, this risked a descent into anarchy and unchecked terror, as the years 1793 and 1794 in France had shown. Throughout his life Clausewitz remained optimistic that the institution of the Prussian Landwehr could achieve both an effective defence of Prussia and a social and political integration of its citizens. Far from leaving behind his early advocacy of people's war, Clausewitz integrated it systematically into his mature theory of war. People's war was war in its existential form; it risked escalating into 'absolute war'. However, if the threat of defensive people's war had become a standard option of last resort in early-nineteenth century Europe, it could also function as a safeguard of the balance of power.

“Small Wars is unique in its complexity and breadth. This book would be of great interest to both military and diplomatic historians, and those that teach Recent America.” —Nancy Gentile Ford, author of Issues of War and Peace Today, conventional fighting waged by massed, industrial armies is nearly extinct as a viable means of warfare, replaced by a broad and diverse array of conflicts that consume the modern American military. Fought in sprawling urban areas of the underdeveloped world or in desolate border regions where ethnicity and tradition reign, these “small wars” involve a vast and intricate network of operations dedicated to attacking the cultural, political, financial, and military layers that surround America’s new enemies. In this intriguing study, Michael Gambone explores America’s approach to small wars since Vietnam, providing a fascinating analysis of the basic goals, missions, conduct, and consequences of modern American conflict. Going beyond a simple comparison of Vietnam to the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Gambone thoroughly tracks the continuous evolution of U.S. intervention between these events, revealing a dramatic shift in the role of the American military to covert operations that require fluidity, creativity, and ingenuity. He examines in detail the many different forms of military intervention that America has taken in the last forty years, including actions in Central America in the 1980s, the first Gulf War, airstrikes in Kosovo in the 1990s, and the war on terror, as well as the Iran-Contra affair, the drug war in Columbia, and the role of private military contractors such as Blackwater. After the Cold War, Gambone shows, American military missions served a wide variety of tasks—peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance, counterterrorism—that significantly departed from conventional missions, a trend that continued and expanded after 9/11. By exploring the history and assessing the effectiveness of the small wars fought since Vietnam, Gambone reveals the importance of these smaller actions in modern military planning and operations and clearly traces the development of American warfare from the massive military machine of World War II into a complex hybrid of traditional and innovative techniques. MICHAEL GAMBONE, a professor of history at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania, is the author of The Greatest Generation Comes Home: The Veteran in American Society and editor of Documents of American Diplomacy: From the American Revolution to the Present.

In this ebook short story, also available in the new, complete Jack Reacher short story collection No Middle Name, #1 Sunday Times bestselling author Lee Child goes back to 1989, when Jack Reacher is serving as an officer in the military police. A young lieutenant colonel, in a stylish handmade uniform, roars through the damp woods of Georgia in her new silver Porsche - until she meets a very tall soldier with a broken-down car. What could connect a cold-blooded off-post shooting with Reacher, his elder brother Joe, and a secretive unit of pointy-heads from the Pentagon? _________ Don't miss Reacher's newest adventure, no.26, Better off Dead! ***COMING SOON and AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER NOW***

This thought-provoking analysis of military failure and its costs examines the British involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, revealing how and why it went so wrong. Original.

Despite being a pacifist, Wells masterfully explains and gathers all the prerequisites for waging a war... with toy soldiers. ‘Little Wars’ can be said to be the original instruction manual for how to run a tabletop battle. Satire and pacifist views blend in this narrative that expresses Wells' idea that wars should be waged on the dining room floor rather than among the corpse-ridden trenches of Europe. The book’s influence on modern warfare manuals and board games is indisputable, as tabletop conflicts are conducted to this day. Wells portrays the harrowing nature of war, but his humour ensures the book remains an entertaining read. The whimsical writing and stunning sketches create a book that should be read by all fans of tabletop war games. H. G. Wells (1866-1946) was a celebrated English writer, remembered mostly for his science fiction works. Often described as a futurist, H. G. Wells’ influence cannot be overstated for his works foresaw many technological innovations such as space travel, the atomic bomb, and the Internet. A four-time Nobel Prize in Literature nominee, Wells explored a wide array of themes in his works, from religion to social criticism and beyond. Some of his best works include the time-travel novel ‘The Time Machine’, the sci-fi adventure novel ‘The Island of Dr. Moreau’, and the mankind-versus-aliens novel ‘The War of the Worlds’. Wells occupies one of the central seats in the canon of science-fiction literature and his writing inspired other celebrated authors such as Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick. Wells’ stories are still widely read to this day and have had numerous cinematic adaptations including ‘The Invisible Man’ starring Elisabeth Moss.

In many ways, modern warfare is information warfare. Bruce Berkowitz's explanation of how Information War revolutionized combat and what it means for our soldiers could not be better timed. As Western forces wage war against terrorists and their supporters, in actions large and small, on several continents, The New Face of War explains how they fight and how they will win or lose. America's use of networked, elite ground forces, in combination with precision-guided bombing from manned and unmanned flyers, turned Afghanistan from a Soviet graveyard into a lopsided field of American victory. Yet we are not invulnerable, and the same technology that we used in Kuwait in 1991 is now available to anyone with a credit card and access to the Internet. Al Qaeda is adept in the new model of war, and has searched long and hard for weaknesses in our defenses.

This book illustrates how Africa’s defence and security domains have been radically altered by drastic changes in world politics and local ramifications. First, the contributions of numerous authors highlight the transnational dimensions of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency in Africa and reveal the roles played by African states and regional organisations in the global war on terror. Second, the volume critically evaluates the emerging regional architectures of countering terrorism, insurgency, and organised violence on the continent through the African Union Counterterrorism Framework (AU-CTF) and Regional Security Complexes (RSC). Third, the book sheds light on the counterterrorism and counterinsurgency (CT-COIN) structures and mechanisms established by specific African states to contain, degrade, and eliminate terrorism, insurgency, and organised violence on the continent, particularly the successes, constraints, and challenges of the emerging CT-COIN mechanisms. Finally, the volume highlights the entry of non-state actors – such as civil society, volunteer groups, private security companies, and defence contractors – into the theatre of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency in Africa through volunteerism, community support for state-led CT-COIN Operations, and civil-military cooperation (CIMIC). This book will be of use to students and scholars of security studies, African studies, international relations, and terrorism studies, and to practitioners of development, defence, security, and strategy.