Parameters最新文献

{"title":"A Generous and Merciful Enemy: Life for German Prisoners of War during the American Revolution","authors":"J. Warren","doi":"10.5860/choice.51-1679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.51-1679","url":null,"abstract":"A Generous and Merciful Enemy: Life for German Prisoners of War during the American Revolution By Daniel Krebs Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013 392 pages $24.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Ansbach, Germany still displays the colors of its regiments deployed during the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), and a visitor to this quaint town in Mittelfranken would not depart thinking that the Ansbachers were mercenaries. Daniel Krebs, a native German speaker, in fact claims the term was a misnomer for Germans in British employ during the war. In his well-crafted \"new military history,\" A Generous and Merciful Etiemj, Krebs makes excellent use of the extant primary sources to explore the social aspects of these soldiers' backgrounds, families, military experience, and life after combat. In so doing, he relates a story heretofore marginalized in Anglo-American accounts of the conflict. This commitment of soldiers by the resource-starved tiny principalities of the Holy Roman Empire--then the sick-man of Europe--was no small matter. During and immediately after the war, German cultural elites depicted their princes' motivations for contributing troops as the greedy pursuit of a life of debauchery. Later German nationalist writers derided these rulers as insufficiently German. Krebs counters that the reality was more nuanced. Sovereigns, in addition to raising money for domestic projects (often to better their subjects' condition), also sought prestige for themselves and their kingdoms; then a not uncommon objective for royalty. There was also the matter of supporting a British king of German ethnicity from the Hanoverian line, and the tradition of supporting Protestant war efforts, particularly after the Catholic French and Spanish joined with the American revolutionaries. Although not all German \"subsidy soldiers,\" as Krebs refers to them, were Hessians, \"almost the entire Hessen-Kassel army entered British service\" (22) and eventually numbered 20,000 regulars (plus replacements) during the war. Krebs is able to pattern a mosaic of the varying American treatment of these soldiers by time and place because more than 14 percent of all German subsidy soldiers fell into revolutionary hands. Colonial treatment of the Germans even differed within American states, as Lancaster, Pennsylvania, at first provided generous conditions, while nearby Reading failed to provide adequate treatment. In Chapter 4, Krebs uses the topic of handling prisoners as an opportunity to detail how the Western tradition evolved over centuries in matters of military captivity. He examines how the reality of prisoners' treatment on and after the battlefield often ran afoul of the lofty philosophical ideals of the drawing room. The American revolutionaries deemed Pennsylvania a sound location for prisoner of war camps because of the German ethnicity of many of the state's inhabitants, although major camps also existed in nearby Maryland, as well as Virginia and Connecticut. ","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"44 1","pages":"166"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71143516","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 Unseen War: Allied Airpower and the Takedown of Saddam Hussein","authors":"C. Crane","doi":"10.5860/choice.51-6420","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.51-6420","url":null,"abstract":"The Unseen War: Allied Airpower and the Takedown of Saddam Hussein By Benjamin S. Lambeth Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2013 480 pages $59.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] After describing the overwhelming 2003 campaign to topple Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Stephen Budiansky closes his book Air Power (2004) with this passage: The great historical joke on airmen was that after having struggled for a century to escape the battlefield in their quest for equal status and independence --having fought so many bitter battles to free themselves from the indignity' of providing \"mere support\" to ground forces--it was on the battlefield where air power finally achieved not merely equality', but its claim to ascendancy. That quote has caused very lively debates in classrooms at the Army War College, and now Benjamin Lambeth has provided the most thorough evaluation available of airpower's role in the 23 days of formal conventional combat that began Operation Iraqi Freedom. Lambeth is the most eloquent and enthusiastic writer on American airpower today. Though published by Naval Institute Press, his study was initially written for RAND under the sponsorship of US Air Forces Central (AFCENT), known until 2009 as US Central Command Air Forces (CENTAF). Lambeth does not claim quite as much as Budiansky, but he does argue \"counterland air attack has increasingly begun to move doctrinally beyond solely the classic supporting roles of CAS (direct support) and air interdiction (indirect support) toward missions that are not intended just to support the friendly ground force, but rather to destroy the enemy's army directly and independently as the overall main weight of effort.\" (296) Readers who are prone to discount such assertions as USAF hype need to read Lambeth's account and think seriously about the implications of what he has to say. While the beginning of OIF was \"an all but flawless undertaking by joint and combined forces\" including not only land components but indispensable contributions from \"virtually the entire spectrum of allied, air, maritime and space capabilities,\" (4) Lambeth points out correctly the air campaign has been underreported in postwar accounts of the march on Baghdad. This was not only due to the lack of embedded reporters with air units, but also because the continuing violence in Iraq quickly overshadowed the early successes. There was far more coverage of air operations in 1991, with the long period of initial bombing before the ground attack was launched. Lambeth aims to fill the gaps, and does so admirably. He describes the high-level planning in Washington and in headquarters at CENTCOM and CENTAF. The initial \"shock and awe\" plan was modified by desires to limit noncombatant casualties and to preserve infrastructure, and by General Tommy Franks' decision to attack early. That meant CENTAF's major air offensive started 28 hours after ground forces had begun their advance and had overrun many areas. …","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"44 1","pages":"185"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71146124","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":"Adapting to Win: How Insurgents Fight and Defeat Foreign States","authors":"R. Bunker","doi":"10.5860/choice.189264","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.189264","url":null,"abstract":"Adapting to Win: How Insurgents Fight and Defeat Foreign States By Noriyuki Katagiri Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014 320 pages $69.65 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Adapting to Win is written by Dr. Noriyuki Katagiri, a political scientist, who presently teaches at the Air War College. It is derived from his 2010 dissertation \"Evolving to Win: Sequencing Theory of Extra-systemic Warfare\" at the University of Pennsylvania. The book represents over five years of research and study on this topical area and benefits from a great deal of support, including fellowships--in both the United States and Japan. As a result, the work is extensively researched, tightly designed, and is both well written and innovative. It represents a very polished product drawing upon the Correlates of War (COW) data spanning the years 1816 to 2010. The intent of the book is to present \"...an alternative research project to the mainstream body of security studies that until recently been fixated on great power interstate conflict and civil wars\" and \"...to enrich the policy-making community through the study of what lessons' powerful states can learn to fight foreign insurgencies (4). \" It focuses on the concept of \"extrasystemic\" wars, which are a blending of civil wars in which \"... a foreign government intervenes in a civil war on either side (5).\" The work proposes insurgents use conflict phase-sequencing (conceptually derived from evolutionary biology and evident in revolutionary warfare) as they attempt to prevail in taking over a state. Six models of extrasystemic war based on sequencing are evident. Each model witnesses from one to three phases derived from conventional war, guerilla war, and state-building as the starting point. The first four models (Conventional, Primitive, Degenerative, and Premature) are quite common, only possess one or two stages, and typically fail. The last two models (Maoist and Progressive--a Maoist variant) are rare, possess all three stages, and typically see their insurgencies succeed. Table 3: Six Models of Extrasystemic War (49) helps to highlight the various models and phases. Not surprisingly, \"The central argument of this book is that insurgent groups are likely to defeat foreign states in war when they achieve an orderly combination of three phases: state building, guerrilla war, and conventional war\" (169) which is very Maoist-insurgency oriented. The work is divided into nine chapters: how insurgents fight and defeat foreign states in war, origins and proliferation of sequencing, how sequencing theory works, presentations of the six sequencing models and case studies (the Conventional model--Dahomean war, 18901914, Primitive model--Malayan Emergency, 1948-1960, Degenerative model--Iraq War, 2003-2011, Premature model--Anglo-Somali War, 1900-1920, Maoist model--Guinean War of Independence, 1963-1974, and Progressive model--Indochina War, 1946-1954), and a conclusion. Criticism of this work focuses solely on the C","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"44 1","pages":"179"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71027159","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":"Law and War","authors":"Sibylle Scheipers","doi":"10.1515/9780804788861","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804788861","url":null,"abstract":"Law and War Edited by Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas and Martha Merrill Umphrey Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, CA: 2014 248 pages $75.00 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The introduction to Law and War opens with a brief discussion of the targeted killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen and suspected al-Qaeda member, who was killed on 30 September 2011 by a CIA-led Predator drone strike in Yemen. It references central figures involved in the debate over the Bush administration's approach to the law of armed conflict, such as Benjamin Wittes and Harold Koh. It is hence not implausible for the reader to assume this edited volume sets out to reassess the relationship between war and law thirteen years into the so-called \"War on Terror,\" as major combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have drawn to a close. However, this is not the case or, rather, if this was the aim, the book failed to achieve it. The introduction is followed by five chapters on a variety of topics ranging from biological warfare to war crimes trials. The quality of the individual chapters differs, which is to a certain extent inevitable in an edited volume. A number of chapters, most notably Sarah Sewall's chapter on the limits of law, Gabriella Blum's chapter on the individualization of war and Laura K. Donohue's chapter on pandemic disease and biological warfare, reiterate the basic tenets of the globalization narrative, according to which globalization has led to a rise in the participation of so-called \"non-state actors\" in armed conflict, which in turn will undermine the law of armed conflict. This view, though oft repeated, is deeply problematic, as it mistakes the exclusionary mechanisms that are internal to the law of armed for external limitations of its applicability. (1) The edited volume is further marred by a number of manifest misrepresentations of authors such as Carl Schmitt: both the introduction and Blum's chapter seem to imply that for Schmitt legal constraints on warfare are irrelevant (7, 55), ostensibly deriving this conclusion from Carl Schmitt's Concept of the Political and his Political Theology, but failing to take into account Schmitt's emphasis on the importance of the law of armed conflict for restraining warfare in the Nomos of the Earth. Sewall includes a largely misleading reference to an article by Adam Roberts on civilian casualties in her chapter (26, note 6) and, when discussing reciprocity in \"asymmetric conflicts,\" does not consider pertinent recent studies on the concept, such as Mark Osiel's seminal book The End of Reciprocity. Samuel Moyn's chapter on Vietnam and the \"War on Terror\" is quite interesting and innovative. Moyn makes the case that despite large-scale violations of the law of armed conflict, public criticism regarding the US intervention in Vietnam focused on jus ad bellum issues, whereas the critical debate on the \"War on Terror\" has largely seized upon jus in bello issues. …","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"44 1","pages":"163"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66815025","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":"Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force","authors":"R. Wadle","doi":"10.5860/choice.52-1084","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.52-1084","url":null,"abstract":"Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force By Robert M. Farley Lexington: University Press of Kentucy, 2014. 244 pages $26.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Robert Farley's Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force offers a bold, provocative thesis: the Air Force as a separate entity should be eliminated with its assets and missions distributed between the Army and Navy. Farley argues the Air Force's independence has always rested solely on its ability to carry out strategic attack missions. Early airpower theorists such as Brigadier General William Mitchell linked the independent air service with strategic bombing theoretically capable of defeating enemies quicker and cheaper than traditional ground and naval campaigns, and this core belief continues to drive the modern Air Force. Farley argues this optimistic view of airpower's potential violates Clausewitz's theories on the nature of war and has never been borne out through a century of combat experience. America's political leaders and decision makers continue to give the Air Force a privileged position because they are seduced by airpower's assurances of efficient, almost bloodless war; but the Air Force is incapable of delivering on its promises. Since the Air Force is presently attempting to apply its own skewed, paranoid worldview to cyberspace, seemingly unable to perform its nuclear deterrent mission, and is under cultural assault by the promise of remotely piloted aircraft (RPA), Farley reasons the Air Force should be abolished. Farley's fundamental point about the need for defense reorganization in the wake of both the Cold War and the post-9/11 interventions is a sound one. He also identifies failings of the Air Force as a fascination with technology and frequent conflation of targeting and strategy. The author's critique of the Air Force's Manichean cyberspace policies and its contrasts with the Navy's view of cyberspace as a virtual global commons is easily the highlight of Grounded. Yet, while lay readers may be entranced with Farley's argument and see a viable path for defense reform, informed readers will find a book heavily reliant on secondary sources with oversights, conceptual flaws, and factual errors that completely undermine the book's core thesis. By focusing so much on the Air Force's organizational behavior and its policymaking consequences, Farley gives short shrift to the strategic context of decision making. Unlike many defense reorganization plans, Farley specifies neither the threat he envisions the United States and its allies will face in the coming decades nor how abolishing the Air Force will help the nation overcome those challenges. There is a similar absence of strategic context in the historical examples cited as evidence. It was not by accident the two dominant sea powers of the last two centuries --the United States and Great Britain - pursued strategic bombing and robust, independent air forces while most other great power","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"17 1","pages":"150"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71147886","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":"Proconsuls: Delegated Political-Military Leadership from Rome to America Today","authors":"Don M. Snider","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-4096","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-4096","url":null,"abstract":"PROCONSULS: Delegated Political-Military Leadership from Rome to America Today By Carnes Lord Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012 254 pages $30.99 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] First, understand that this is a book about a unique form of leadership at the strategic level, in the words of the author a \"generic political phenomenon seemingly never to have been systematically studied and which remains a neglected--indeed, virtually an unrecognized--topic of scholarly investigation and analysis.\" Thus, as the title states, the author's attempt is to provide such a systematic inquiry into the role of our \"proconsuls.\" Skirting scholarly debates about an American empire while using their language, he further defines: \"the core of the proconsular function is political-military leadership. . .that in the best of cases rises to statesmanship; its chief challenge is the coordination of civil and military authority in the periphery and the alignment with political-military leadership at the center.\" Few authors could attempt such a broad inquiry into uncharted scholarship, but Professor Lord is imminently qualified to do so, and as we shall see, does so with remarkably fine results. With two earned doctorates (Yale-classics; Cornell-political science), over a decade in the national-security policy arena in Washington in the 1980s and 1990s (National Security Council; Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs; Distinguished Fellow at the National Defense University), and three previous books in the field, he was uniquely qualified for such an inquiry. While the background is drawn from Rome, the focus of the book is clearly on America as a modern democracy and great power--\"an effort has been made to include at least some discussion of all of the most important figures who can plausibly be identified as proconsuls in the properly functional sense of the term, from Spanish-American War to the present [2012].\" The most prominent among them are General Leonard Wood and William Howard Taft in Cuba and the Philippines in the early twentieth century; MacArthur in the Philippines, Japan, and Korea from 1936-1951; General Lucius Clay in Germany in the late 1940's; the intelligence operative Edward Lansdale in the Philippines and Vietnam in the early 1950s; Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and General Maxwell Taylor in Vietnam in the early 1960s; General Creighton Abrams, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker and William Colby in Vietnam in the late 1960 and early 1970s; General Wesley Clark in the Balkans in the late 1990s; Ambassador L. Paul Bremer in Iraq in 2003-04; and General David Petraeus in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2006 [to 2011], Each era, along with its American proconsuls, is presented in the richly documented detail expected from an eminent scholar and practitioner of our national security affairs. But to this reader it is not the individual analyses that are most informative for our work today and into the future. Rather, it is the synthesis tha","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"10 1","pages":"112"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71141342","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":"Learning to Forget: US Army Counterinsurgency Doctrine and Practice from Vietnam to Iraq","authors":"David H. Ucko","doi":"10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim170230017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim170230017","url":null,"abstract":"Learning to Forget: US Army Counterinsurgency Doctrine and Practice from Vietnam to Iraq By David Fitzgerald Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013 285 pages $45.00 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In Learning to Forget, David Fitzgerald traces the effects of the Vietnam War's legacy on the US Army's understanding and approach to counterinsurgency. Fitzgerald, a Lecturer in International Politics at University College Cork, Ireland, broaches this topic chronologically, assessing first the role of counterinsurgency in the Vietnam War and then how the memory and lessons of that conflict shaped future institutional attempts to avoid, learn from, repeat, or even recall whatever it was that happened. The overarching argument is the memory of Vietnam has been neither static nor uncontested, but reinterpreted depending on the dominant context and personalities at any given time. The legacy, thus, remains \"fluid and open to reconstruction\" (210-211) and is used to justify a range of often incompatible arguments. As Fitzgerald implies, this historiographical tug-of-war reveals the long shadow the conflict still casts over the US Army as an institution. The book's strengths include its argumentation and structure; it is an eminently readable text. It weaves its way from Vietnam and the codification of its immediate lessons in the 1970s, to the re-encounter with irregular challenges in Central American in the 1980s, and then to the peace operations of the 1990s, and their relationship to the Army's counterinsurgency legacy. The last two chapters consider the spectacular highs and lows of counterinsurgency during the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Throughout, counterinsurgency has most commonly been marginalized as an institutional priority and area of investment, a trend bucked only by \"major traumatic events,\" (206) most recently the fear of utter failure during the civil war in Iraq. A second strength of the book is its measured tone and analysis. Fitzgerald has authored a sober and dispassionate study that resists the hyperbole and sensationalism typical of other related works. Perhaps Fitzgerald's distance from the debate, as an Ireland-based academic, affords him the necessary perspective. Nonetheless, the nuanced take on this all-too-often overheated topic is refreshing and, also, necessary. Third, the research is thorough and well documented in over sixty pages of footnotes. It is clear that Fitzgerald has consulted the relevant works, which he applies with due recognition of contending interpretations. The eye to detail and fastidious sourcing may be explained by the book's origins as Fitzgerald's own doctoral thesis, something evident in the book's initial literature review and primer on methodology. This last point relates also to one of the book's two weaknesses. Whereas Fitzgerald's analysis is commendably detached, one might wish he more often established his own view on controversial and divisive topics. He cites the dominant voices both for ","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"44 1","pages":"136"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64420536","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":"Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War","authors":"S. Metz","doi":"10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim260030013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim260030013","url":null,"abstract":"Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War By Robert M. Gates New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014 618 pages $35.00 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Duty is Robert Gates' second volume of memoirs and covers his time as Secretary of Defense in the George W Bush and Barack Obama administrations. Few people are better versed in how Washington works (or doesn't work) than Gates. He spent twenty-seven years in the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Council before becoming the only Secretary of Defense asked to stay in office when the White House changed hands between political parties. Because of this, the book's released caused a major stir, particularly in Washington. Gates' anger and unvarnished opinions about senior policymakers and elected officials, including some still holding office drew the most initial attention. While he respects the two presidents he served, Gates indicts Washington's hyperpartisan climate in general and Congress in particular which he describes as \"Uncivil, incompetent in fulfilling basic constitutional responsibilities (such as time appropriates), micromanagerial, parochial, thin-skinned, [and] often putting self (and reelection) before country.\" He is particularly disdainful of Senator Harry Reid, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, and Vice President Joe Biden, at times resorting to unnecessary low blows as when he sarcastically writes that Biden \"presumed to understand how to make CT (counterterrorism) work better than Stan (McChrystal)\" even though Biden was talking about policy and strategy and General McChrystal's expertise was at the operational level of war. Like any memoir, Duty does not weigh all sides of the story equally but concentrates on explaining Gates' position on key issues, particularly the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. One theme that will appeal to military readers was Gates' fierce dedication to the men and women in uniform, particularly those in combat zones. Time after time he excoriates the Department of Defense for its preoccupation \"with planning, equipping, and training for future major wars with other nation-states, while assigning lesser priority to current conflicts and other forms of conflict, such as irregular or asymmetric war.\" At times this compelled him to take things into his own hands. He proudly recounts his efforts at forcing improvements in the care of wounded warriors and jamming through production of Mine Resistant, Ambush Protected (MRAP) armored fighting vehicles and increased intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities. The crush of managing two wars and the daily operations of one of the world's largest and most complex organizations left Gates little time for broad questions about American strategy. But there is also no indication in Duty that he would have done so even if given the opportunity. For all of his talents, Secretary Gates was not a strategic visionary. For instance, there is no indication that he seriously questioned the assumptions that justified U","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"44 1","pages":"110"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64432177","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":"Maximalist: America in the World from Truman to Obama","authors":"M. Daniels","doi":"10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim010190051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim010190051","url":null,"abstract":"Maximalist: America in the World from Truman to Obama by Stephen Sestanovich New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014 416 pages $28.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The recent spate of writing decrying the decline of American power and influence centers on issues of domestic decay and turmoil, with the view that the United States has somehow lost its way in the world. Some authors argue these domestic political, economic, and social challenges have hamstrung the current administration in pursuing the kind of aggressive, engaged foreign policy needed in this volatile time. Stephan Sestanovich, author of Maximalist, shows the current challenges of the Obama administration are not new, but part of a cycle that can be traced back to the post-World War II Truman administration. Sestanovich is a former US diplomat, who served under both Presidents Reagan and Clinton. He is currently a professor of international relations at Columbia, as well as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Sestanovich has written a highly-readable and thorough history of US foreign policy since 1947. The book does not offer much in the way of new research or detail. However, the author succeeded in repackaging previous works and incorporating a great many anecdotes to retell this story with a slightly new twist. It is a worthy addition to US foreign policy scholarship, and should be read by any serious student of diplomatic history, or for anyone in a position to advise on or craft future foreign policy. The book expands on the author's earlier thesis, regarding the \"maximalist\" tradition in US foreign policy, one advanced in a Spring 2005 article in The National Interest. Sestanovich, describes foreign policy and diplomacy in a continuum cycling between periods of maximalism and retrenchment. One criticism of the book is the author never defines these two terms, which are so central to his argument. The reader quickly summarizes that maximalism equals overreach, with retrenchment the \"do less\" corollary that follows when America must pick up the pieces. The author details the approach administrations have taken cycling between these two extremes: the maximalist Truman followed by a retrenching Eisenhower; who is then followed by maximalist Kennedy/Johnson administrations; then by a long period of retrenchment under presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter; the maximalism of Reagan; a pause in the cycle under presidents George H.W. Bush and Clinton; the maximalism of George W. Bush; and finally this current period of retrenchment under President Obama. A few unanswered questions linger below the surface of a linear story long on narrative but short on analysis. My central criticism is the cycle is described as far too simplistic. Can any administration be categorized as purely maximalist or retrenching? …","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"44 1","pages":"121"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64628610","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":"Concrete Hell: Urban Warfare from Stalingrad to Iraq","authors":"Gregory Fontenot","doi":"10.5040/9781472895820","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5040/9781472895820","url":null,"abstract":"By Louis A. DiMarco Oxford, UK: Osprey Publishing, 2012 232 pages $24.96 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In Concrete Hell, Louis A. DiMarco surveys historical trends in urban combat since World War II. Lieutenant Colonel DiMarco brings to his task both professional and personal interests. An experienced soldier and historian, DiMarco has focused his recent professional life on the problem of urban combat as a doctrine writer and teacher at the Army Command and General Staff College. DiMarco seeks to make three contributions related to understanding the urban battle space, providing insights into the nature of urban combat and its evolution-drawing from tactical, operational, and strategic considerations he believes will remain relevant. Regarding the last item, he explores the transition of urban combat from \"simplistic conventional\" fights in Stalingrad and Aachen to a \"complex hybrid mixture\" found in Chechnya and Iraq, concluding these \"hybrid\" fights in Chechnya and Iraq foretell the future. Generally, DiMarco makes his case effectively. He begins by noting that at the turn of the century the Army was \"particularly wary\" of urban combat. DiMarco is absolutely right. The Army and, for that matter, US armed forces sought to avoid fighting in cities. This tendency may have come, in part, from focusing on defending cities in Europe. The Army in Europe, in particular, gave considerable thought to how to fight in towns and cities in the context of defense but far less thought on offensive urban combat. At the end of the Cold War, few soldiers imagined the United States would find itself in any kind of urban combat. Moreover, there were a great many \"defense experts\" who claimed that various revolutions in military affairs precluded ground combat let alone urban ground combat. Some believed that the nature of warfare itself had changed and that \"contactless\" battle would result. But DiMarco's argument, at least where the US Army is concerned, would have benefited from reviewing what the Army did do. Shortly after Operation Desert Storm, General Fred Franks (commanding the Training and Doctrine Command) confronted the idea that urban combat would be among the missions the post-Cold War Army might have to undertake. He did not have the money to develop large urban combat training centers and instead focused on developing a single \"world class\" venue at Fort Polk. However, Fort Polk's urban combat venue was useful at the tactical level only. The absence of large venues did not prevent the Army thinking and writing about urban combat. DiMarco played an important role in this effort providing a chapter in one of several books on urban combat published by the Army. These included Roger Spiders' Sharp Comers in 2001 and William G. Robertson and Lawrence Yeats, Block By Block in 2003. These major studies were accompanied by lively arguments in journals as well. In the fall of 2002, the Army's angst over urban combat came to a head as the possibility of war with Iraq","PeriodicalId":35242,"journal":{"name":"Parameters","volume":"44 1","pages":"149"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70520017","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}