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In this new edition, Bernard Cole revises his acclaimed study of China s navy, one that continues to grow while the U.S. Navy shrinks. According to the author, Beijing is now giving increased attention to guarding its vital sea lanes because of the nation s growing dependence on maritime trade, especially energy supplies. He provides a thorough description of China s naval establishment, including its personnel system, followed by a detailed view of its ships, submarines, and aircraft, all marked by technical sophistication and capability as China reaches the top rank of the world s maritime powers. His evaluation is based on extensive interviews with Chinese and other naval experts, in-depth perusal of original documents, and visits to Chinese warships, training facilities, and shore establishments.

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This action-packed biography focuses on a 1944 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy who was one of only fifty Jewish midshipmen commissioned in his class during World War II. In the Pacific, Lt. Shulman s destroyer survived both a typhoon and a Japanese kamikaze aircraft attack. After leaving the U.S. Navy and returning to civilian life, he volunteered to help the Haganah, the paramilitary force of the Jewish Agency for Palestine headed by David Ben-Gurion. Shulman had been introduced to Ben-Gurion by his mother, who was an executive with Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of America. Working in New York City, he helped to buy surplus warships for the Haganah s clandestine sealift that brought Holocaust survivors from Europe to Palestine.In early 1948 Ben-Gurion called the 25-year-old Shulman to Israel to set up an academy to train officers and NCOs to man ships of Israel s fledgling navy, which at that point only had the refugee vessels. Beginning with almost no assets, within three months, now-Kvarnit (Commander) Shulman took the Israeli squadron into action against enemy ships, and even against one vessel fighting with Israeli forces. After Israel won its independence most of the 1,200 American and Canadian volunteers went home. Shulman, with his wife and infant son, remained in Israel, settling in Haifa, which would be their home for the next forty years. After Shulman died in 1994, a stained glass window was dedicated in his memory at the U.S. naval Academy s new Uriah P. Levy Chapel.Wandres book fully documents Shulman s role in helping to launch the navy of new Israeli nation. Based on interviews and correspondence with former U.S. Navy shipmates and Machal volunteers, Israeli and American archives, and declassified Secret U.S. Department of State documents, The Ablest Navigator provides a unique window into Israel s history and its relations with the United StatesThis narrative biography relies on interviews and correspondence with former U.S. Navy shipmates and Machal volunteers, Israeli and American archives, and declassified Secret U.S. Department of State documents.

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Gen. Andrew J. Goodpaster was one of the leading soldier-scholars of his time. He was one of the key figures during the Cold War – one who stood among the dominant American military and political personalities of those times. Goodpaster served Gen. Dwight Eisenhower in establishing the international military component of NATO and then served as his Staff Secretary. He achieved the highest international military command assignment possible – as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, Europe and restored the integrity of West Point during a major ethical crisis. Upon his final retirement and for over a quarter-century thereafter, he was actively involved both the formal and informal world of Washington policy-making, making his mark repeatedly as a respected participant.

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The book examines the evolution of American naval thinking in the post-Cold War era. It recounts the development of the U.S. Navy’s key strategic documents from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the release in 2007 of the U.S. Navy’s maritime strategy, A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower. An insightful and penetrating intellectual history, it critically analyzes the Navy’s way of thinking and ideas, and recounts how they interacted with those that govern U.S. strategy to shape the course of U.S. naval strategy in the post-Cold War era.The book explains how the Navy arrived at its current strategic outlook and why it took nearly two decades for the Navy to develop a maritime strategy in an era in which the relative saliency of such should have been more apparent to Navy leaders. The author, a Navy captain, doesn’t shy from taking to task the institution and its leaders for their narrow worldview and failure to understand the virtues and contributions of American sea power, particularly in an era of globalization.It describes the reasons behind the Navy’s late development of a maritime strategy during the post-Cold War era. It recounts the origins and evolution of the Navy’s distinctive way of thinking and ideas about sea power since before the Second World War, particularly how they shaped and were shaped by the Navy’s Cold War experiences.It argues that the Navy’s way of thinking and ideas, and how they interacted those that governed U.S. strategy, bounded and channeled U.S. naval strategy away from a maritime approach as they had during the Cold War. It took an implausible series of events for one to emerge, including a losing war in Iraq—that called into question long-standing assumptions about U.S. strategy, threatened the Navy’s relevance, and brought about a systemically oriented U.S. strategic approach—and the appearance of two maritime-minded Navy leaders.It focuses on the process by which the Navy developed its strategic documents, the process where institutional ideas are assembled, negotiated, and reshaped in light of other influences—i.e., the direction of U.S. strategy, budgetary constraints, perceived threats, and the competing interests of other domestic and institutional actors—because even though the subject is American naval thinking (and here it must be emphasized that the concept itself is somewhat metaphorical as only people can think), that is how real strategy is made.

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In this new paperback edition of America Spreads Her Sails, fourteen writers and historians demonstrate how American men and goods in American-made ships moved out over Alfred Thayer Mahan’s “broad common,” the sea, to extend the country’s commerce, power, political influence, and culture. Capt. Thomas ap Catesby Jones, Lt. John “Mad Jack” Percival, and Comm. Matthew Calbraith Perry are among some of the colorful names that many will recognize. They are all gone now, these strong men and their stout ships, who carried their country’s colors up to the Northern Lights, down to the Antarctic’s stillness, over the cutting coral, across the Roaring Forties, and into the great ports and the backwaters of the world. The results of their adventures, however, are not forgotten, but instead set the stage for America to indisputably become the dominant world power of the past century.

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The Captain from Connecticut is the definitive biography of the man who became a national hero as the commander of the USS Constitution in her dramatic victory over HMS Guerriere in the War of 1812. While Isaac Hull’s outstanding seamanship was in evidence throughout his career, Maloney makes the case that it is ironic that he is remembered for his tactical prowess in this famous battle, because he was actually the most pacific of men.

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Today, women in all U.S. military services are involved in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. They serve as pilots and crewmen of assault helicopters, bombers, fighters, and transport planes, and are frequently engaged in firefights with enemy insurgents while guarding convoys, traveling in hostile territory, or performing military police duties. Like their male counterparts, they carry out their missions with determination and great courage. The advent of the insurgency war, which has no rear or front lines, has made the debate regarding women in combat irrelevant. In such a war zone, anyone can be killed or injured at any moment. The stories of these courageous women are told by James E. Wise and Scott Baron, who use a format similar to the one employed with such success in the book «Stars in Blue». The profiles of some forty women and their photographs are included. To record their stories, the authors conducted numerous personal interviews, and in every case Wise and Baron were struck by the women's extraordinary display of dedication to their mission and to the soldiers and sailors with whom they served. Because the service of women in the military has been under reported to date, most of the women included in this book will be unknown to readers and reveal another dimension to the service of women in the desert and the vital role they play in the armed forces. While the book's focus is on today's women in combat, it also reaches back to Vietnam, Korea, and World War II to offer selected stories of inspiring women who served at the «cusp of the spear» as they fought and died for their country.

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In this story of men, machines and missions, Kenneth Estes tells how the U.S. Marine Corps came to acquire the armored fighting vehicle and what it tried to do with it. The longtime Marine tank officer and noted military historian offers an insider's view of the Corps's acquisition and use of armored fighting vehicles over the course of several generations, a view that illustrates the characteristics of the Corps as a military institution and of the men who have guided its development. His book examines the planning, acquisition, and employment of tanks, amphibian tractors, and armored cars and explores the ideas that led to the fielding of these weapons systems along with the doctrines and tactics intended for them, and their actual use in combat.Drawing on archival resources previously untouched by researchers and interviews of both past and serving crewmen, Estes presents a unique and unheralded story that is filled with new information and analysis of the armored vehicles, their leaders, and the men who drove these steel chariots into battle. Such authoritative detail and documentation of the decisions to acquire, develop, and organize armored units in the U.S. Marine Corps assures the book's acknowledgement as a definitive reference.

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Lauded for his ability to tell compelling, true adventure stories, award-winning author Andrew C.A. Jampoler has turned his attention this time to a young American naval officer on a mission up the Congo River in May 1885. Lt. Emory Taunt was ordered to explore as much of the river as possible and report on opportunities for Americans in the potentially rich African marketplace. A little more than five years later, Taunt, 39, was buried near the place he had first come ashore in Africa. His personal demons and the Congo’s lethal fevers had killed him. In 2011, to better understand what happened, Jampoler retraced Taunt’s expedition in an outboard motorboat. Striking photographs from the author’s trip are included to lend a visual dimension to the original journey.Readers join Taunt in his exploration of some 1400 miles of river and follow him on two additional assignments. A commercial venture to collect elephant ivory in the river’s great basin and an appointment as the U.S. State Department’s first resident diplomat in Boma, capital of King Leopold II’s Congo Free State, are filled with promise. But instead of becoming rich and famous, he died alone, bankrupt, and disgraced. Jampoler’s account of what went so dreadfully wrong is both thrilling and tragic. He provides not only a fascinating look at Taunt’s brief and extraordinary life, but also a glimpse of the role the United States played in the birth of the Congo nation, and the increasingly awkward position Washington found itself as stories of atrocities against the natives began to leak out.

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Airpower Reborn offers a conceptual approach to warfare that emphasizes airpower’s unique capability to achieve strategic effects. Six world-leading theorists argue that a viable strategy must transcend the purely military sphere, view the adversary as a multi-dimensional system, and pursue systemic paralysis and strategic effects rather than military destruction or attrition.The book is divided into three parts. The first section presents a historical perspective on airpower theory and airpower strategy, tracing their evolution from the 1920s to the 1980s. The second section contains in-depth examinations of the strategic concepts that John R. Boyd and John A. Warden developed in the 1980s and 1990s, with an emphasis on their contemporary relevance. The final section provides further context on modern airpower theory and strategy. Theory, in this setting, serves as the basic paradigm, strategy represents its generic, mechanisms-centered application, and plans of campaign constitute the specific steps for any given situation.In short, the authors look beyond the land-centric, battlefield-oriented paradigm that has continued to dominate military theories and strategies long after airpower offered new options. The book acknowledges the essential role of advanced technology in improving airpower capabilities, but emphasizes that air services must cultivate and harness the intellectual acumen of airmen and encourage officers and men to think conceptually and strategically about the application of aerospace power. Modern airpower can offer political decision-makers more and better options—provided the underlying strategy coherently links the application of airpower directly to the end-state objectives rather than limiting it to “the battle.”The book recommends that all countries should consider establishing a dynamic and vibrant environment for mastering aerospace history, theory, strategy, and doctrine; a milieu for cultivating broader knowledge of and insight into airpower; and a setting in which airpower experts have the opportunity to communicate their narrative to politicians, the media, and fellow officers, and to interact to mutual benefit with experts from all sectors of governance. This effort should emphasize the potentially unique contribution of airpower to political objectives and joint operations, and in turn connect to operational headquarters that do operational planning. Mastering such strategic thought lies at the heart of the military profession, but it requires in-depth knowledge and understanding of theory, strategy, and airpower, and transcends traditional metrics.

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