The Battle of Kursk
The Battle of Kursk

Author: Valeriy Zamulin

Publisher: Helion and Company

Published: 2017-07-27

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 191311807X

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In this book, noted historian of the Battle of Kursk Valeriy Zamulin, the author of multiple Russian-language books on the Battle of Kursk and Destroying the Myth: The Tank Battle at Prokhorovka, Kursk, July 1943: An Operational Narrative takes a fresh look at several controversial and neglected topics regarding the battle and its run-up. He starts with a detailed look at the Soviet and Russian historiography on the battle, showing how initially promising research was swamped by Party dogma and censorship during the Brezhnev area, before being resumed with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Zamulin then transitions to discussions of how the southern shoulder of the Kursk bulge was formed, preparations for the battle on both sides, and the size and composition of Model’s Ninth Army. He then examines such controversial topics as whether or not the II SS Panzer Corps was aware of the pending Soviet counterattack at Prokhorovka, and the effectiveness of the Soviet preemptive barrage that struck the German troops that were poised to attack. Zamulin also discusses whether or not General Vatutin, the Commander-in-Chief of Voronezh Front, erred when arranging his defenses. Zamulin also takes a look at how the myth of 1,500 tanks colliding on a narrow strip of farm fields became perpetuated in Soviet and foreign history books, when in fact it was impossible for the 5th Guards Tank Army’s tanks to attack in massive wave after wave due to the constrictions of the terrain. Zamulin also reveals incidents of the battle that were long kept “behind the curtain” by Soviet censorship. For example, the 183rd Rifle Division defending the Prokhorovka axis was repeatedly struck by friendly aircraft, and a Soviet tank counterattack overran the positions of one of its battalions. Zamulin discusses other cases of fratricide in the Voronezh Front, including the death of one of the 1st Tank Army’s foremost tank commanders in a friendly fire incident. In the process, he reveals that a wave of suicides swept through the junior command staff of the 5th Guards Tank Army immediately prior to the famous counteroffensive on 12 July 1943. All in all, Valeriy Zamulin with this collection of essays and articles, two of which have been reprinted from the Journal of Slavic Military History, makes a new contribution to our knowledge and understanding of this pivotal, epochal battle of the Second World War.

War's Logic
War's Logic

Author: Antulio J. Echevarria II

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-02-18

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 1009038281

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Antulio J. Echevarria II reveals how successive generations of American strategic theorists have thought about war. Analyzing the work of Alfred Thayer Mahan, Billy Mitchell, Bernard Brodie, Robert Osgood, Thomas Schelling, Herman Kahn, Henry Eccles, Joseph Wiley, Harry Summers, John Boyd, William Lind, and John Warden, he uncovers the logic that underpinned each theorist's critical concepts, core principles, and basic assumptions about the nature and character of war. In so doing, he identifies four paradigms of war's nature - traditional, modern, political, and materialist - that have shaped American strategic thought. If war's logic is political, as Carl von Clausewitz said, then so too is thinking about war.

Militarism in a Global Age
Militarism in a Global Age

Author: Dirk Bönker

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2012-03-15

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 0801463882

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At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States and Germany emerged as the two most rapidly developing industrial nation-states of the Atlantic world. The elites and intelligentsias of both countries staked out claims to dominance in the twentieth century. In Militarism in a Global Age, Dirk Bonker explores the far-reaching ambitions of naval officers before World War I as they advanced navalism, a particular brand of modern militarism that stressed the paramount importance of sea power as a historical determinant. Aspiring to make their own countries into self-reliant world powers in an age of global empire and commerce, officers viewed the causes of the industrial nation, global influence, elite rule, and naval power as inseparable. Characterized by both transnational exchanges and national competition, the new maritime militarism was technocratic in its impulses; its makers cast themselves as members of a professional elite that served the nation with its expert knowledge of maritime and global affairs. American and German navalist projects differed less in their principal features than in their eventual trajectories. Over time, the pursuits of these projects channeled the two naval elites in different directions as they developed contrasting outlooks on their bids for world power and maritime force. Combining comparative history with transnational and global history, Militarism in a Global Age challenges traditional, exceptionalist assumptions about militarism and national identity in Germany and the United States in its exploration of empire and geopolitics, warfare and military-operational imaginations, state formation and national governance, and expertise and professionalism.

The Soldier and the State
The Soldier and the State

Author: Samuel P. Huntington

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1957

Total Pages: 564

ISBN-13: 9780674817364

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World war II: the alchemy of power; Civil-military relations in the postwar decade; The political roles of the Joints Chiefs; The separation of power and the cold war defense; Departmental structure of civil-military relations; Toward a new equilibrium.

Geopolitics, Geography and Strategy
Geopolitics, Geography and Strategy

Author: Colin S. Gray

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-01-14

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 1135265097

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Geopolitical conditions influence all strategic behaviour - even when cooperation among different kinds of military power is expected as the norm, action has to be planned and executed in specific physical environments. The geographical world cannot be avoided, and it happens to be 'organized' into land, sea, air and space - and possibly the electromagnetic spectrum including 'cyberspace'. Although the meaning of geography for strategy is a perpetual historical theme, explicit theory on the subject is only one hundred years old. Ideas about the implication of geographical, especially spatial, relationships for political power - which is to say 'geopolitics'- flourished early in the twentieth century. Divided into theory and practice sections, this volume covers the big names such as Mackinder, Mahan and Haushofer, as well as looking back at the vital influence of weather and geography on naval power in the long age of sail (sixteenth to nineteenth centuries). It also looks forward to the consequences of the revival of geopolitics in post-Soviet Russia and the new space-based field of "astropolitics".

Dictionary of Military and Naval Quotations
Dictionary of Military and Naval Quotations

Author: Robert Debs Heinl, Jr.

Publisher: Naval Institute Press

Published: 2014-01-15

Total Pages: 721

ISBN-13: 1612513573

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The quotations in this unique dictionary cover all aspects of the military art─war, personalities, traditions and customs, weapons and equipment, as well as virtues and failings. It is a fascinating and comprehensive collection which includes over 5000 quotations and spans the past two thousand years. The words of Catherine the Great are here, along with those of Churchill, Shakespeare, Nimitz, Clausewitz, Kant, and John F. Kennedy. Napoleon I and Thomas Jefferson share a page with Robert E. lee and Alfred Thayer Mahan. The scope of the subject matter covered by the quotations is extensive. The table of rubrics runs between Action to Zeal with 365 pages in between. Aggression, Causes of War, Détente, Duty, Loyalty, Luck, Profanity, Recruits, Victory, Weapons, and Women are but a few of the headings. Quotations under each entry appear in chronological order. Transcending the barriers of the profession of arms, there is much here for the student, the teacher, the historian, the politician, the reference specialist, the public speaker, and the interested reader. The words of hundreds of the world's greatest philosophers, poets, admirals, generals, prophets, and politicians serve both to inspire and to remind us of Santayana's words: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Preparing for Blockade 1885-1914
Preparing for Blockade 1885-1914

Author: Stephen Cobb

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-08

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 131707615X

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Today, the First World War is remembered chiefly for the carnage of the Western Front, but at the time the Royal Navy's blockade of Germany was a more frequent source of debate. For, even at a time of war, there were influential voices in Britain who baulked at a concept of economic warfare that hindered the free passage of goods on the high seas, and brought German society to the brink of famine. To further our understanding of these issues, this book looks at the background to the blockade, and the effects of its implementation in 1914. It argues that there was a widely shared, but largely unwritten, strategic culture within British naval circles which accepted that in a war with a major maritime power the British response would be to attack enemy trade. This is demonstrated by the fact that from at least the late 1880s the Royal Navy planned for the use of armed merchantmen to enforce an economic blockade of an enemy. This it did by entering into detailed arrangements with major British shipping companies for the design and subsidy of liners with the potential for use as merchant cruisers, and stockpiling their prospective armament. In line with the contemporary, Corbettian, view that seapower depends upon free communications, the book concludes by asserting that the primary role of the Grand Fleet in the First World War was to guarantee the ability of the merchant cruisers on the Northern Patrol to interdict German seaborne trade, rather than to engage in large set-piece battles.

Maritime Strategy and Global Order
Maritime Strategy and Global Order

Author: Daniel Moran

Publisher: Georgetown University Press

Published: 2016-05-15

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1626163014

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Taken for granted as the natural order of things, peace at sea is in fact an immense and recent achievement—but also an enormous strategic challenge if it is to be maintained in the future. In Maritime Strategy and Global Order, an international roster of top scholars offers historical perspectives and contemporary analysis to explore the role of naval power and maritime trade in creating the international system. The book begins in the early days of the industrial revolution with the foundational role of maritime strategy in building the British Empire. It continues into the era of naval disorder surrounding the two world wars, through the passing of the Pax Britannica and the rise of the Pax Americana, and then examines present-day regional security in hot spots like the South China Sea and Arctic Ocean. Additional chapters engage with important related topics such as maritime law, resource competition, warship evolution since the end of the Cold War, and naval intelligence. A first-of-its-kind collection, Maritime Strategy and Global Order offers scholars, practitioners, students, and others with an interest in maritime history and strategic issues an absorbing long view of the role of the sea in creating the world we know.

Letters and Papers of Professor Sir John Knox Laughton, 1830-1915
Letters and Papers of Professor Sir John Knox Laughton, 1830-1915

Author: Andrew Lambert

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-08-15

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 135156028X

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John Knox Laughton created modern naval history to harmonise the adacemic standards of the new English historical profession with the strategic and doctrinal needs of the contemporary Royal Navy. His correspondents included major figures in both the historical and the naval professions: Alfred T. Mahan, Samuel Rawson Gardiner, Julian Corbett, Cyprian Bridge and many others. This volume will be of particular interest to those interested in the development of naval history and naval theory.

Militarism and the British Left, 1902-1914
Militarism and the British Left, 1902-1914

Author: M. Johnson

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2013-01-11

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1137274131

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Militarism has traditionally been regarded as a phenomenon of the political right. As this book demonstrates, however, various groups on the political left in Britain during the years before the Great War were able to accommodate, and even assimilate, militaristic ideas, sentiments, and policies to a remarkable degree.