Americans like to think of themselves as a peaceful and peace-loving people, and in remembering their own revolutionary past, American historians have long tended to focus on colonial origins and Constitutional aftermath, neglecting the fact that the American Revolution was a long, hard war. In this book, John Shy shifts the focus to the Revolutionary War and explores the ways in which the experience of that war was entangled with both the causes and the consequences of the Revolution itself. This is not a traditional military chronicle of battles and campaigns, but a series of essays that recapture the social, political, and even intellectual dimensions of the military effort that had created an American nation by 1783. Book jacket.
Since the launch of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars—now the longest wars in American history—the US military has struggled to recruit troops. It has responded, as Matt Kennard’s explosive investigative report makes clear, by opening its doors to neo-Nazis, white supremacists, gang members, criminals of all stripes, the overweight, and the mentally ill. Based on several years of reporting, Irregular Army includes extensive interviews with extremist veterans and leaders of far-right hate groups—who spoke openly of their eagerness to have their followers acquire military training for a coming domestic race war. As a report commissioned by the Department of Defense itself put it, “Effectively, the military has a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy pertaining to extremism.” Irregular Army connects some of the War on Terror’s worst crimes to this opening-up of the US military. With millions of veterans now back in the US and domestic extremism on the rise, Kennard’s book is a stark warning about potential dangers facing Americans—from their own soldiers.
A blistering critique of the gulf between America's soldiers and the society that sends them off to war. As war has become normalized, armed conflict has become an "abstraction" and military service "something for other people to do." Bacevich takes stock of a nation with an abiding appetite for war waged at enormous expense by a standing army demonstrably unable to achieve victory.
Lieutenant Colonel R. Alan King and his 422nd Civil Affairs Battalion became operations central after the collapse of the Iraqi army and the beginning of the occupation of Iraq in March 2003. While under his command, these civil affairs and psychological operations soldiers were not content to stay in secure offices inside the green zone. Instead, they knew that to do their job they had to get out and make "house calls," and in the process the 422nd became the most highly decorated civil affairs unit in the history of the U.S. Army, with twenty-one individual awards for valor and five purple hearts. King was particularly well-suited for the new kind of war being waged in Iraq. Armed with his rifle, a Palm Pilot that contained an English translation of the Koran, and an informed and nuanced respect for Middle Eastern culture, King and his team captured or arranged the surrender of almost a dozen of the most-wanted villains from Saddam's regime, including several from the famous deck of cards. He became privy to secrets as weighty as those of Iraq's nuclear weapons program and as light as those behind the outlandish press briefings of the infamous Baghdad Bob. Twice Armed - its title is taken from Plato's maxim We are twice armed if we fight with faith - provides a compelling view of the Iraq war, and the experience from the Iraqi perspective, from one of the war's most decorated officers. The regional expertise that helped King negotiate with clerics and sheikhs also informs his provocative opinions about what it will take to win the battle for the hearts and minds of Iraq, an ancient, mystifying, and deeply religious culture. King has been compared to the legendary T. E. Lawrence, with the press dubbing him “Alan of Arabia,” and this book sheds light on a new and necessary component of modern warfare, one that goes far beyond artillery and armor, and instead tells King's story of cultural interaction and respect that yielded results in his area at the beginning of the war. A trenchant and necessary look at how the winning of the hearts and minds of people in Iraq is as crucial to success as the winning of tactical military goals.
American Military History provides the United States Army-in particular, its young officers, NCOs, and cadets-with a comprehensive but brief account of its past. The Center of Military History first published this work in 1956 as a textbook for senior ROTC courses. Since then it has gone through a number of updates and revisions, but the primary intent has remained the same. Support for military history education has always been a principal mission of the Center, and this new edition of an invaluable history furthers that purpose. The history of an active organization tends to expand rapidly as the organization grows larger and more complex. The period since the Vietnam War, at which point the most recent edition ended, has been a significant one for the Army, a busy period of expanding roles and missions and of fundamental organizational changes. In particular, the explosion of missions and deployments since 11 September 2001 has necessitated the creation of additional, open-ended chapters in the story of the U.S. Army in action. This first volume covers the Army's history from its birth in 1775 to the eve of World War I. By 1917, the United States was already a world power. The Army had sent large expeditionary forces beyond the American hemisphere, and at the beginning of the new century Secretary of War Elihu Root had proposed changes and reforms that within a generation would shape the Army of the future. But world war-global war-was still to come. The second volume of this new edition will take up that story and extend it into the twenty-first century and the early years of the war on terrorism and includes an analysis of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq up to January 2009.
In November 1774, a pamphlet to the People of America was published in Philadelphia and London. It forcefully articulated American rights and liberties and argued that the Americans needed to declare their independence from Britain. The author of this pamphlet was Charles Lee, a former British army officer turned revolutionary, who was one of the earliest advocates for American independence. Lee fought on and off the battlefield for expanded democracy, freedom of conscience, individual liberties, human rights, and for the formal education of women. Renegade Revolutionary: The Life of General Charles Lee ais a vivid new portrait of one of the most complex and controversial of the American revolutionaries. LeeOCOs erratic behavior and comportment, his capture and more than one year imprisonment by the British, and his court martial after the battle of Monmouth in 1778 have dominated his place in the historiography of the American Revolution. This book retells the story of a man who had been dismissed by contemporaries and by history. Few American revolutionaries shared his radical political outlook, his cross-cultural experiences, his cosmopolitanism, and his confidence that the American Revolution could be won primarily by the militia (or irregulars) rather than a centralized regular army. By studying LeeOCOs life, his political and military ideas, and his style of leadership, we gain new insights into the way the American revolutionaries fought and won their independence from Britain."
Although much has changed in the United States since the eighteenth century, our framework for gun laws still largely relies on the Second Amendment and the patterns that emerged in the colonial era. America has long been a heavily armed, and racially divided, society, yet few citizens understand either why militias appealed to the founding fathers or the role that militias played in North American rebellions, in which they often functioned as repressive—and racist—domestic forces. In Armed Citizens, Noah Shusterman explains for a general reader what eighteenth-century militias were and why the authors of the Constitution believed them to be necessary to the security of a free state. Suggesting that the question was never whether there was a right to bear arms, but rather, who had the right to bear arms, Shusterman begins with the lessons that the founding generation took from the history of Ancient Rome and Machiavelli’s reinterpretation of those myths during the Renaissance. He then turns to the rise of France’s professional army during seventeenth-century Europe and the fear that it inspired in England. Shusterman shows how this fear led British writers to begin praising citizens’ militias, at the same time that colonial America had come to rely on those militias as a means of defense and as a system to police enslaved peoples. Thus the start of the Revolution allowed Americans to portray their struggle as a war of citizens against professional soldiers, leading the authors of the Constitution to place their trust in citizen soldiers and a "well-regulated militia," an idea that persists to this day.
Prologue: lives, interrupted -- Fathers and sons -- Moses and Phoebe -- Son of Linonia -- The unhappy misunderstanding -- More extensive public service -- A very genteel looking fellow -- The terrible crisis of my earthly fate -- Post mortem
