Parameters最新文献

{"title":"Mission Revolution: The US Military and Stability Operations","authors":"James H. Embrey","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-5290","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-5290","url":null,"abstract":"Mission Revolution: The US Military and Stability Operations By Jennifer Morrison Taw New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2012 280 pages $26.00 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A recurring debate within US military affairs is whether change within military operations is \"revolutionary\" because they are a profound, distinct departure from the past, or they are \"evolutionary\" as the next logical steps in adapting to complex, recurring and somewhat intractable problems. In \"Mission Revolution,\" Professor Jennifer Taw asserts over the past two decades Defense Department civilian and military leaders have made a revolutionary shift in accepting and integrating \"stability operations\" as a core mission for US military forces. Faced with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and \"persistent conflict\" in coming years, issuance of DoD Directive 3000.05 was the pivotal point where progressive defense leaders mandated reform and improvements of doctrine, organization and training whereby \"stability operations\"--the capability to establish order advancing US interests and values--were put on equal footing with offense and defense capabilities. In doing so, progressives began purposefully moving military forces from a warfighting focus on delivering \"decisive force\" into areas traditionally civilian-dominated efforts due to the rise of complex threats of international criminals, terrorist, and jihadists. Taw offers alternative reasons beyond the past two decades of peacekeeping and counterinsurgency experience as to why such \"infamously stubborn institutions\" such as the US military would adopt such changes, asserting they are mostly pragmatic and self-interested: that Pentagon leaders now embrace new, non-standard missions reinforcing the utility of military efforts in policy accomplishment in order to retain force structure during future austerity. Taw provides an interesting overview of the historical context and doctrinal development for stability operations throughout US history, noting land forces have been constantly involved in a variety of lesser contingencies and post-war commitments exceeding the capacity and acceptable risk of civilian USG efforts. However, \"warfighting\" preparation has dominated readiness efforts while assuming the risk that a military prepared for conventional conflict could readily adapt to lesser contingencies where security and stability were the focus of USG efforts. These perspectives ran counter to the needs of post-Cold War Administrations who complained the Pentagon's \"all or nothing\" to using military force created an expensive military with little utility in shaping and maintaining international order. Much to Secretary Rumsfeld's frustration (who also believed the military shouldn't \"do windows\"), Iraq and Afghanistan post-conflict requirements again highlighted military force in itself is rarely decisive, and significant skilled and capable military forces are required in insecure environments to accomplish sustainable political ou","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"45 1","pages":"131"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71141843","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Violence after War: Explaining Instability in Post-Conflict States","authors":"James H. Lebovic","doi":"10.5860/choice.185026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.185026","url":null,"abstract":"Violence After War: Explaining Instability in Post-Conflict States By Michael J. Boyle Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014 448 pages $69.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Michael J. Boyle's new book offers a welcome look at post-conflict violence in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Rwanda, East Timor, and Iraq. Despite its tide, the book sensitizes readers more generally to the fallacy of assuming that countries have graduated to post-conflict status with the ostensible end in fighting. Conflict can persist when parties seek to \"renegotiate\" the terms of a peace through violence, new parties arise to stake their claim to power, or coalitions dissolve in disputes over the division of the spoils. The book focuses accordingly on \"strategic violence\" which is \"designed to transform the balance of power and resources in a state\" (8). Such violence is most obvious when one or more of the contending parties seeks to challenge the terms of a settlement having agreed to them, perhaps, under duress or false pretenses. But strategic violence sometimes has a more complex explanation with ambiguous evidentiary support. It can occur when groups fragment to pursue their own (unclear) agendas by capitalizing on ethnic, religious, or political conflict and engaging in criminal activities by employing criminal gangs to mobilize resources and target opponents for \"strategic\" purposes. \"Not only can such violence be unconnected or only indirectly related to the cause of the war itself, but it can also provide a space for opportunists to pursue a variety of personal or criminal vendettas, some of which will be detached from the fighting that preceded it.\" In consequence, \"the violence of the post-conflict period will often appear as an inchoate mix of personal attacks, criminal violence, and political-strategic violence significantly different from violence in the war that preceded it\" (5). In Boyle's terminology, strategic violence mixes with \"expressive violence,\" an emotional response to loss or suffering, and \"instrumental violence,\" undertaken for criminal or personal gain. The analytical challenge is met, as Boyle recognizes, by ascertaining the collective (not individual) motives behind the violence, as discerned from tell-tale, aggregate patterns. For that effort, Boyle marshals revealing quantitative and qualitative evidence to portray trends over time in the various conflicts. According to Boyle, the key to understanding the role of strategic violence in post-conflict countries is appreciating the distinction between the \"direct pathway\" to violence in which the parties, targets, and issues in contestation remain relatively constant (from the conflict through the post-conflict periods) and the \"indirect pathway\" in which groups splinter and violence is a function of \"multiple and overlapping bargaining games between new and emergent claimants for power and resources\" (12). In discussing these pathways, Boyle's central argument reduces to four hypotheses ","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"45 1","pages":"106"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71024937","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Laws, Outlaws, and Terrorists: Lessons from the War on Terrorism","authors":"Sibylle Scheipers","doi":"10.5860/choice.48-5340","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.48-5340","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"45 1","pages":"159"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71133898","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief","authors":"M. Pinsker","doi":"10.5860/choice.189760","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.189760","url":null,"abstract":"Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief By James M. McPherson New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2014. 320 pages $32.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Nobody was better trained as a mid-nineteenth-century commander in chief than Jefferson Davis. There were more important American military leaders and more successful Washington hands prior to the Civil War, but Davis was almost unique in the way he navigated both worlds. A graduate of West Point, combat veteran and war hero (from his role as a regimental officer in the Mexican War), Davis was also a long-serving US senator from Mississippi, who had chaired the Committee on Military Affairs and held the post of Secretary of War during the Pierce Administration. If anybody was prepared for the challenges of an American civil war, it was Davis. Yet both contemporaries and historians have always appeared underwhelmed by the man whom James McPherson now sympathetically labels, \"The Embattled Rebel.\" Part of the problem was too much expertise. Davis knew better than his generals how to fight the war, and with a few exceptions (such as in his relationship with Robert E. Lee), he meddled and micromanaged incessantly. McPherson goes so far as to claim, \"No other chief executive in American history exercised such hands-on influence in the shaping of military strategy.\" (11) That's a bold statement in light of Abraham Lincoln's equally assertive leadership style, but the noted Civil War historian demonstrates time and again how obsessive Davis was about exercising his duties as commander in chief. The signs were apparent from the beginning, when on Sunday morning, July 21, 1861, the Confederate president \"could stand it no longer\" and \"commandeered a special train\" to take him out to the first great battlefield of the war near Manassas Junction. (41) There, Davis even acted briefly as a field commander, \"rallying\" straggling troops by proclaiming, on horseback, \"I am Jefferson Davis ... Follow me back to the field.\" (41) Lincoln, too, saw a little bit of combat in 1864 at Fort Stevens near Washington, but the former Illinois militia captain never ventured anything quite as bold as this. Nor was Lincoln as aggressive as Davis in demanding face-to-face conferences with his generals in the field, though both civilian leaders were surprisingly eager throughout the conflict to travel out to the frontlines to see for themselves what was happening. Of course, Lincoln usually gets praised for being attentive to such details while Davis often gets vilified for nitpicking. McPherson warns against allowing these sorts of comparisons to cloud a more objective evaluation of the losing side of this equation. Instead, the author tries to understand Davis on his own terms and that's exactly what makes this particular Rebel leader seem so embattled. Even the most devoted Civil War buff will be surprised by how early and often Davis found himself criticized and undermined by his own contemporaries. At his First Inaugural add","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"45 1","pages":"164"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71027214","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Strategist: Brent Scowcroft and the Call of National Security","authors":"S. Metz","doi":"10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim250040048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim250040048","url":null,"abstract":"The Strategist: Brent Scowcroft and the Call of National Security By Bartholomew Sparrow New York, NY: PublicAffairs, 2015 752 pages $34.99 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Few people have influenced US national security policy as much as Brent Scowcroft. Some luminaries burned more brightly--Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski come to mind--but their time in the spotlight was shorter. Scowcroft was a senior policy maker in both the Ford and George H.W. Bush administrations, and an influential figure in Washington policy circles between and after his stints in the White House. And he was there for some of the most seminal events in American history including the final collapse of South Vietnam and the end of the Cold War. As Bartholomew Sparrow puts in The Strategist, his massive new authorized biography of Scowcroft, \"... no other official or analyst has consistently had such a profound impact on the national security policy of the United States. For many in Washington, Brent Scowcroft is a pillar of the foreign policy community and a global strategist par excellence.\" (xii) Capturing a career of this magnitude is an ambitious undertaking so Sparrow's book includes well over 500 pages of primary text. It draws deeply from both secondary and primary material--including Scowcroft's personal files--as well as extensive interviews with Scowcroft himself and dozens of his colleagues and associates, many of them central architects of American security policy. Sparrow's admiration for Scowcroft is evident on every page. At times it tips so far toward imbalance that it detracts from the power of the book: the author consistently gave Scowcroft credit for everything that worked out well and absolves him of responsibility for what might seem to be missteps. For instance, when recounting components of the Bush policy that were less than successful or outright failures such as Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Scowcroft recedes into the background. On successful endeavors such as the Bush administration's response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, he moves to the fore as when Sparrow argues that Scowcroft \"Almost single handedly ... determined what the United States' response to the invasion of Kuwait was going to be\" (385). Still, there is much to be drawn from this impressive book. Two questions are particularly important. Sparrow places great stress on the idea that Scowcroft is the model of a national security adviser, combining a detailed grasp of complex issues with realism, pragmatism and a willingness to work behind the scenes rather than hogging the limelight. Sparrow notes George H.W. Bush described Scowcroft as \"the perfect national security advisor. …","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"33 1","pages":"144"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64429532","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Every Citizen a Soldier: The Campaign for Universal Military Training after World War II","authors":"Charles D Allen","doi":"10.5860/choice.187157","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.187157","url":null,"abstract":"Every Citizen a Soldier: The Campaign for Universal Military Training after World War II By William A. Taylor College Station, TX: Texas AM determining the role of universal military training (UMT) and its impact on groups within American society; and defining the relationship of citizenry to its military. Taylor provides a well-explicated precursor to the UMT efforts. Military historians will be familiar with the post-First World War Plattsburg Movement where American students and businessmen volunteered for basic military training under the command of then-former Army Chief of Staff General Leonard Wood. The movement's success greatly influenced Wood and future generals whom he mentored--George C. Marshall and John Palmer--both who became the foremost uniformed advocates for UMT. This legacy of the First World War became the National Defense Act of 1920, which reorganized the General Reserve (including the National Guard). However, a critical provision for compulsory military training of males between the ages of 18 and 21 was dropped from the bill. In hopes the world would not brook another conflict of a scale as the Great War, the United States followed George Washington's imperative for a \"respectably defensive posture\" (22) with a small standing army and reliance on mobilizing its citizenry for military operations. Embroiled in the Second World War in 1944, Army Chief of Staff General Marshall signed War Department Circular No. 347 to make UMT \"the primary goal of the army's postwar establishment.\" (29) To Marshall, UMT was essential in developing military leaders, informing public opinion on military matters, minimizing the expense of a large standing army, and aligning democratic traditions with civilian participation in defense and a small standing force. …","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"45 1","pages":"155"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71026004","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Devils' Alliance: Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941","authors":"J. Maiolo","doi":"10.5860/choice.188271","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.188271","url":null,"abstract":"The Devils' Alliance: Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941 By Roger Moorhouse Basic Books: New York, NY 2014 372 pages $29.99 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 23, 1939 is one of the most notorious diplomatic arrangements of all time. With this deal on economic cooperation and spheres of influence between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, Hitler and Stalin crushed Poland, divided up central and Eastern Europe between them and heralded the coming of the Second World War. During the Cold War, historians could only consult the German records of the negotiations leading to the non-aggression pact and the brief period of Nazi-Soviet collaboration, but since the collapse of the Soviet Union our knowledge of the Soviet side of the episode has benefited enormously from the opening up of Russian archives. In The Devils' Alliance, Roger Moorhouse draws on the latest research and sources to offer readers a vivid retelling of the making and breaking of the deal. He carefully reconstructs the game of political hardball played play by the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov. The absorbing story of the diplomatic bargaining over frontiers and trade is set against the wider context of the implementation of the pact. The twenty-two months of Nazi-Soviet collaboration enabled the two regimes to experiment in the brutal imposition of their ideological visions on the peoples of Eastern Europe. Behind the German armies, advancing into Poland came special police units to murder Jews and others deemed enemies of the Third Reich; the advance of the Red Army permitted Moscow step by step to Sovietize its share of eastern Poland and the Baltic states and to murder or exile its political foes. With great skill, Moorhouse conveys the human tragedy of these events with telling details from individual experiences. Through these individual tragedies multiplied thousands of times over, Moorhouse reminds us why the collective memories of the period of Nazi-Soviet collaboration overshadow the politics of Eastern Europe to this day. Moorhouse underscores the basis of the deal was strategic, not ideological. Although the two regimes are often lumped together under the \"totalitarian\" rubric, there was no red-brown political affinity drawing them together. Ribbentrop may have dreamed about a grand alliance between the Axis states and the Soviet Union to confront Anglo-American powers, but he was alone in this respect. …","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"45 1","pages":"170"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71026533","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Four Decades On: Vietnam, the United States, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War","authors":"W. Allison","doi":"10.5860/choice.51-2219","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.51-2219","url":null,"abstract":"Four Decades On: Vietnam, the United States, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War Scott Laderman, Edwin A. Martini, eds. Durham, NO Duke University Press, 2013 334 pages $24.94 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The American War in Vietnam continues to engage creative scholars from across diverse academic disciplines to rethink both the legacies of the war and the war itself. The editors of Four Decades On have assembled an impressive collection of scholarship in this vein, drawing from the transnational study of identity, memory, film, culture, tourism, and economy. The contributors explore boundaries, official histories and counter-narratives, and remembrance and reconciliation to assess the enduring legacies of a ten-year war, now literally Four Decades On, and they go beyond traditional, though still useful, American or Vietnamese-centric approaches. The resulting collection compels reflection on how assumptions and myths influence memory, and emphasizes the illuminating conclusions of new, cross-disciplinary approaches applied to understand better the deep and fingering legacy of this war. In this, the editors succeed. Christina Schwenkel, for example, an anthropologist at the University of California, Riverside, argues transnationalism influences the evolving narrative of the war exhibited at museums, memorials, and other war-related sites in Vietnam. As Vietnam's economy becomes more global and war tourism gains popularity among American visitors, narratives at these sites (which Schwenkel calls \"memory-scapes\") have shifted from the older hurray-for-we-defeated-the-Americans to a softer, more American friendly tone, often focusing on mutual victim-hood of combatants and non-combatants, regardless of nationality. For Schwenkel, reconciliation, ironically, may be the most important if not unintended consequence of Vietnam's desire to open markets with the United States and court American tourists. Analyzing cultural legacies looms large in this collection. Historian Walter Hixson, of the University of Akron, examines how Americans have emphasized healing and overcoming the Vietnam Syndrome through a variety of means, but most interestingly through film, which tends to focus on the American soldier as victim and the Vietnamese as nearly invisible. These cultural influences allow revisionist history to take root, which can deflect attention from real questions of American intent in Vietnam and American militarism in general. Fitting well into this rubric of memory, narrative, and reconciliation are the divisive issues of \"Agent Orange\" and accounting for POWs/ MIAs. The legacies of both have been strewn with myth, politics, and manipulation. Diane Niblack Fox, an anthropologist who also teaches Vietnamese Studies at the College of the Holy Cross, offers one the better article-length studies of this controversial issue. Fox looks at the impact of the use of chemical defoliants from multiple perspectives--science, medicine, public policy and law, t","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"45 1","pages":"171"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71143836","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire","authors":"James D. Scudieri","doi":"10.5860/choice.52-0431","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.52-0431","url":null,"abstract":"A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire By Geoffrey Wawro New York, NY: Basic Books/Perseus Books Group, 2014 440 pages $29.99 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The present work is a long-overdue look at a neglected topic on the First World War. Author Geoffrey Wawro is a well established author with earlier monographs on the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian Wars of 1866 and 1870 respectively. His current work blazes a new trail. A Mad Catastrophe examines the pre-war Austro-Hungarian Empire, policy makers' monumental decisions, and the disastrous operations in 1914. The acknowledgments section is a fascinating read unto itself on his ancestors and their links to the current story. He intends to demolish the myth of the quaint Austro-Hungarian Empire under grandfatherly Emperor Franz Joseph. His introduction sets the stage in no uncertain terms. Chapters 1 through 5 describe the peacetime Dual Monarchy, including war plans and the pre-military response to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie. He sees an unworkable state, the more so due to Magyar duplicity; Austrian inadequacy; and unsolvable, ethnic tensions, which demanded national, self-determination. Franz Joseph, the venerable Emperor from 1848, is out of his depth in the unraveling domestic situation and the more-challenged diplomacy of the early twentieth century during its latest crisis. Domestically, his shortcomings were glaring in a structure that empowered him over a bureaucracy of ostensibly representative institutions. Wawro explains why the Hapsburg state did not posture itself for success. The long-expected showdown with Serbia, showcased by the assassinations, provided more challenges than opportunities. Diplomacy notwithstanding, nearly six weeks passed before troops invaded Serbia. Swift action by Austria would have capitalized upon international sympathy. More critically, Chief of General Staff Conrad von Hotzendorf should have understood Austria's limitations in fighting both Serbia and Russia simultaneously. A Serbian campaign had to be immediate or not at all. The text paints a similarly dismal picture of Austro-Hungarian conflict of military operations. Chapters 6 through 13 cover 1914. Austrian General Oskar Potiorek commanded no less than three disastrous invasions of Serbia in four months, between August and December. Conrad sabotaged proper weighting of effort and deployment in either theater. The fighting in Galicia ebbed and flowed, but Wawro's thrust is poor Austro-Hungarian performance against a better-prepared Russian Army, despite its own challenges. Chapter 14 outlines the devastating cost to the Empire of just five months of war with staggering casualties. He is not the first historian to state Austria-Hungary retained a sort of \"militia army\" due to losses in experienced officers and noncommissioned officers, besides untrained conscripts. The Epilogue reviews the rest of the war, marked by fas","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"45 1","pages":"167-171"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71147236","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Waging War: Alliances, Coalitions, and Institutions of Interstate Violence","authors":"Russell A. Burgos","doi":"10.5860/choice.52-0522","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.52-0522","url":null,"abstract":"Waging War: Alliances, Coalitions, and Institutions of Interstate Violence By Patricia A. Weitsman Palo Alto, CA: Standford University Press, 2014 279 pages $27.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Allies are the most aggravating of people. They introduce considerations of their own nationalpolitics, none of which have the faintest bearing on the matter of immediate issue [but] their most annoying characteristic is the astonishing way they seem incapable of recognising how sound, how wise, how experienced are our views.\" Diary of Field-Marshal William J. Slim, commander of the British 14th Army in World War II In Waging War, Patricia A. Weitsman argues our understanding of what the late military historian Russell Weigley famously called \"the American way of war\" needs to be brought into the 21st-century. Weigley claimed annihilation--destroying the enemy's armed forces and (ideally) occupying his capital--was the basic American strategy in war. While European great powers hewed closely to the Clausewitzian understanding of war as a continuation of diplomacy by other means--a necessary limitation for nation-states embedded in a delicate continental balance of power--the United States approached war as kind of violent intermission to diplomacy: we negotiate, we fight, we negotiate again, making peace on our terms. Weigley's thesis cohered nicely with 20th-century notions of \"American Exceptionalism\" and strategic unilateralism. To Weitsman, however, that is its principal weakness: in fact, the United States doesn't simply make war (or peace) on its terms. America is embedded in a network of global alliances, coalitions, and institutions simultaneously enabling and constraining its power. As a result, Weitsman argues, the American way of war is profoundly multilateral --profoundly political. \"The norm of multilateralism,\" she writes, \"is entrenched in the American way of waging war.\" This means American policymakers and strategists must take into consideration the goals, objectives, and objections of its allies and coalition partners at all stages of war fighting--compromises can, and often do, frustrate policymakers, public opinion, and even the conduct of America's wars themselves. Waging War is not a book about the operational aspects of coalition warfare, though one can glean some insights from Weitsman's case studies. Her book is a contribution to scholarly debates about alliances and coalitions within the international relations and security studies disciplines and as a result may frustrate those professionally interested in the operational or political-military dynamics of alliance and coalition warfare. Weitsman frames her argument in the context of what she calls \"realist institutionalism,\" attempting to bridge the gap between the two dominant strands of International Relations theorizing--realism, with its emphasis on interests, and neoliberalism, with its emphasis on formal and informal international institutions--showing military alliances and coal","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"44 1","pages":"172"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71147337","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}