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Military Statecraft and the Rise of Shaping in World Politics
Kyle Wolfley
In today’s complex international environment, how do the United States, China, and Russia manage the return of great power competition as well as the persistent threat of violent non-state actors? This book explores shaping: the use of military power to construct a more favorable environment by influencing the characteristics of other militaries, altering the relationships between them, or managing the behavior of allies. As opposed to traditional strategies of warfighting or coercion, shaping relies less on threats, demonstrations, and uses of violence and more so on attraction, persuasion, and legitimacy. Because shaping relies on less hard power and more on soft power, this counterintuitive way of military statecraft contradicts the conventional wisdom of the purpose militaries serve.
Military Statecraft and the Rise of Shaping in World Politics explores the emergence of shaping in classical strategy and its increased frequency following the end of the Cold War when threats and allies became more ambiguous. The four logics of shaping—attraction, socialization, delegation, and assurance—are illustrated through five case studies of recent major military exercise programs led by the United States, China, India, the United Kingdom, and Russia. Moreover, sentiment analysis and statistics of over 1,000 multinational exercises from 1980-2016 reveal how major powers reacted to a complex international environment by expanding the number and scope of shaping exercises. This book illuminates an understudied but frequently common tool of military statecraft for students, practitioners, and interested readers to understand the varied use of military power in today’s competitive international system.
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The U.S. Army in the Iraq War – Volume 1: Invasion – Insurgency – Civil War, 2003-2006
Jeanne Godfroy, Matthew Zais, Joel D. Rayburn, Frank Sobchak, James Powell, and Matthew Morton
The Iraq War has been the costliest U.S. conflict since the Vietnam War. To date, few official studies have been conducted to review what happened, why it happened, and what lessons should be drawn. The U.S. Army in the Iraq War is the Army's initial operational level analysis of this conflict, written in narrative format, with assessments and lessons embedded throughout the work. This study reviews the conflict from a Landpower perspective and includes the contributions of coalition allies, the U.S. Marine Corps, and special operations forces. Presented principally from the point of view of the commanders in Baghdad, the narrative examines the interaction of the operational and strategic levels, as well as the creation of theater level strategy and its implementation at the tactical level. Volume 1 begins in the truce tent at Safwan Airfield in southern Iraq at the end of Operation DESERT STORM and briefly examines actions by U.S. and Iraqi forces during the interwar years. The narrative continues by examining the road to war, the initially successful invasion, and the rise of Iraqi insurgent groups before exploring the country's slide toward civil war. This volume concludes with a review of the decision by the George W. Bush administration to “surge” additional forces to Iraq, placing the conduct of the “surge” and its aftermath in the second volume.
This study was constructed over a span of 4 years and relied on nearly 30,000 pages of handpicked declassified documents, hundreds of hours of original interviews, and thousands of hours of previously unavailable interviews. Original interviews conducted by the team included President George W. Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Secretaries of Defense Leon Panetta and Robert Gates, Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and every theater commander for the war, among many others. With its release, this publication, The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, represents the U.S. Government's longest and most detailed study of the Iraq conflict thus far.
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The U.S. Army in the Iraq War – Volume 2: Surge and Withdrawal, 2007-2011
Jeanne Godfroy, Matthew Zais, Joel D. Rayburn, Frank Sobchak, James Powell, and Matthew Morton
The Iraq War has been the costliest U.S. conflict since the Vietnam War. To date, few official studies have been conducted to review what happened, why it happened, and what lessons should be drawn. The U.S. Army in the Iraq War is the Army's initial operational level analysis of this conflict, written in narrative format, with assessments and lessons embedded throughout the work. This study reviews the conflict from a Landpower perspective and includes the contributions of coalition allies, the U.S. Marine Corps, and special operations forces. Presented principally from the point of view of the commanders in Baghdad, the narrative examines the interaction of the operational and strategic levels, as well as the creation of theater level strategy and its implementation at the tactical level. Volume 1 begins in the truce tent at Safwan Airfield in southern Iraq at the end of Operation DESERT STORM and briefly examines actions by U.S. and Iraqi forces during the interwar years. The narrative continues by examining the road to war, the initially successful invasion, and the rise of Iraqi insurgent groups before exploring the country's slide toward civil war. This volume concludes with a review of the decision by the George W. Bush administration to “surge” additional forces to Iraq, and reviews the conduct of the “surge” and its aftermath.
This study was constructed over a span of 4 years and relied on nearly 30,000 pages of handpicked declassified documents, hundreds of hours of original interviews, and thousands of hours of previously unavailable interviews. Original interviews conducted by the team included President George W. Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Secretaries of Defense Leon Panetta and Robert Gates, Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and every theater commander for the war, among many others. With its release, this publication, The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, represents the U.S. Government's longest and most detailed study of the Iraq conflict thus far.
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From Hitler's Germany to Saddam's Iraq: The Enduring False Promise of Preventive War
Scott Silverstone
The run up to the Iraq War in 2003 sparked renewed interest among policy makers and scholars in the strategic and ethical dimensions of preventive war; this interest was deepened by debate in the years since over whether preventive attack against Iran's or North Korea's nuclear infrastructure would be a wise strategy to neutralize these potential threats. Historically, preventive war has been a common strategy for states facing a rival that’s growing in military power, a situation that often generates the temptation to deliver a physical blow against the rival today in order to avoid a more dangerous future. This book confronts the strategic logic of preventive war head on, drawing from 2,500 years of history to warn against the false promise that attacking rising threats will solve the security problems that haunt our visions of the future. The book showcases a paradoxical outcome that has plagued preventive war strategies for millenia, in which operational military success against rising powers in the short term most often creates greater strategic dangers over the long term rather than eliminate them. At the heart of the book is the story of an iconic historical claim that Britain and France missed an opportunity to stop World War II through preventive attack against Germany during the 1936 Rhineland crisis. A sober minded assessment of the European security dilemma in the 1930s opens a window on the enduring flaws inherent to preventive war strategies that have relevance to contemporary foreign policy problems.
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