CDS Professional Reading List: Theories and Nature of War

Why do we use military force to solve our political problems? And why do our forces win the military battles but this fails to solve those problems? It is because the force used lacks utility. From Iraq to the Balkans, and from Afghanistan to Chechneya, over the past fifteen years there has been a steady stream of military interventions that have not delivered on their promise for peace, or even political resolution. The Utility of Force explains this anomaly at the heart of our current international system. Reaching back to Napoleon and ahead to our future, this book fundamentally changes the way to understand war.

Over the last decade (and indeed ever since the Cold War), the rise of insurgents and non-state actors in war, and their readiness to use terror and other irregular methods of fighting, have led commentators to speak of 'new wars'. They have assumed that the 'old wars' were waged solely between states, and were accordingly fought between comparable and 'symmetrical' armed forces. Much of this commentary has lacked context or sophistication. It has been boundedby norms and theories more than the messiness of reality. Fed by the impact of the 9/11 attacks, it has privileged some wars and certain trends over others. Most obviously it has been historicallyunaware. But it has also failed to consider many of the other dimensions which help us to define what war is - legal, ethical, religious and social. The Changing Character of War, the fruit of a five-year interdisciplinary programme at Oxford of the same name, draws together all these themes, in order to distinguish between what is really changing about war and what only seems to be changing. Self-evidently, as the product of its own times, the character of each war is always changing.But if war's character is in flux, its underlying nature contains its own internal consistency. Each war is an adversarial business, capable of generating its own dynamic, and therefore of spiralling indirections that are never totally predictable. War is both utilitarian, the tool of policy, and dysfunctional. This book brings together scholars with world-wide reputations, drawn from a clutch of different disciplines, but united by a common intellectual goal: that of understanding a problem of extraordinary importance for our times.

Chronicles the end of the Cold War and argues that there now exists an explosive world political situation without historical precedent--economic globalization accompanied by the quest for ethnic identity.

A powerful and provocative exploration of how war has changed our society--for the better "War! . . . . / What is it good for? / Absolutely nothing," says the famous song--but archaeology, history, and biology show that war in fact has been good for something. Surprising as it sounds, war has made humanity safer and richer. InWar! What Is It Good For?, the renowned historian and archaeologist Ian Morris tells the gruesome, gripping story of fifteen thousand years of war, going beyond the battles and brutality to reveal what war has really done to and for the world. Stone Age people lived in small, feuding societies and stood a one-in-ten or even one-in-five chance of dying violently. In the twentieth century, by contrast--despite two world wars, Hiroshima, and the Holocaust--fewer than one person in a hundred died violently. The explanation: War, and war alone, has created bigger, more complex societies, ruled by governments that have stamped out internal violence. Strangely enough, killing has made the world safer, and the safety it has produced has allowed people to make the world richer too. War has been history's greatest paradox, but this searching study of fifteen thousand years of violence suggests that the next half century is going to be the most dangerous of all time. If we can survive it, the age-old dream of ending war may yet come to pass. But, Morris argues, only if we understand what war has been good for can we know where it will take us next.

New and Old Wars has fundamentally changed the way both scholars and policy-makers understand contemporary war and conflict. In the context of globalization, this path-breaking book has shown that what we think of as war is becoming an anachronism. In its place is a new type of organized violence or 'new wars'--a mixture of war, organized crime, and massive violations of human rights. This new edition has been fully revised and updated, and includes an afterword answering the critics of the New Wars argument. A new chapter shows how old war thinking in Afghanistan and Iraq greatly exacerbated what turned out to be, in many ways, archetypal new wars--characterized by identity politics, a criminalized war economy, and civilians as the main victims. The third edition of New and Old Wars will be essential reading for students of international relations, politics, and conflict studies, as well as to all those interested in the changing nature and prospect of warfare.

In recent years, the nature of conflict has changed. Through asymmetric warfare radical groups and weak state actors are using unexpected means to deal stunning blows to more powerful opponents in the West. From terrorism to information warfare, the Wests air power, sea power and land power are open to attack from clever, but much weaker, enemies. <p>In this clear and engaging introduction, Rod Thornton unpacks the meaning and significance of asymmetric warfare, in both civilian and military realms, and examines why it has become such an important subject for study. He seeks to provide answers to key questions, such as how weaker opponents apply asymmetric techniques against the Western world, and shows how the Wests military superiority can be seriously undermined by asymmetric threats. The book concludes by looking at the ways in which the US, the state most vulnerable to asymmetric attack, is attempting to cope with some new battlefield realities.<br /> </p> <p>This is an indispensable guide to one of the key topics in security studies today.</p>

From the ideas of Clausewitz to contemporary doctrines of containment and cold war, this is a definitive history of modern military thought. A one-volume collection of Azar Gat's classic trilogy, it explores conceptions of war, strategy, and military theory and relates them to their cultural and historical contexts.

This volume in the Praeger Security International (PSI) series Classics of the Counterinsurgency Era reveals how French officers who served in Indochina, like the author, Roger Trinquier, fought fierce rear-guard actions against ideologically motivated insurgents in the 1940s and 1950s to a far greater extent than their American counterparts later faced in Vietnam. The lack of coherent strategic direction from Paris in the chaotic years of the Fourth Republic left the military with the task of making political decisions in the field. With the original introduction by Bernard B. Fall and a new foreword prepared by Eliot A. Cohen.

This text examines the Unites States military's use of concepts from non-linear science, such as chaos and complexity theory, in its efforts to theorise information-age warfare.

A military expert reveals how science fiction is fast becoming reality on the battlefield, changing not just how wars are fought, but also the politics, economics, laws, and ethics that surround war itself P. W. Singer's previous two books foretold the rise of private military contractors and the advent of child soldiers - predictions that proved all too accurate. Now, he explores the greatest revolution in military affairs since the atom bomb - the advent of robotic warfare. We are just beginning to see a massive shift in military technology that threatens to make the stuff of I,Robotand the Terminatorall too real. More than seven- thousand robotic systems are now in Iraq. Pilots in Nevada are remotely killing terrorists in Afghanistan. Scientists are debating just how smart - and how lethal - to make their current robotic prototypes. And many of the most renowned science fiction authors are secretly consulting for the Pentagon on the next generation. Blending historic evidence with interviews from the field, Singer vividly shows that as these technologies multiply, they will have profound effects on the front lines as well as on the politics back home. Moving humans off the battlefield makes wars easier to start, but more complex to fight. Replacing men with machines may save some lives, but will lower the morale and psychological barriers to killing. The 'warrior ethos,' which has long defined soldiers' identity, will erode, as will the laws of war that have governed military conflict for generations. Paradoxically, these new technologies will also bring war to our doorstep. As other nations and even terrorist organizations start to build or buy their own robotic weapons, the robot revolution could undermine America's military preeminence. While his analysis is unnerving, there's an irresistible gee-whiz quality to the innovations Singer uncovers. Wired for Wartravels from Iraq to see these robots in combat to the latter-day 'skunk works' in America's suburbia, where tomorrow's technologies of war are quietly being designed. In Singer's hands, the future of war is as fascinating as it is frightening.