While most historians of the Vietnam War focus on the origins of U.S. involvement and the Americanization of the conflict, Lien-Hang T. Nguyen examines the international context in which North ...Vietnamese leaders pursued the war and American intervention ended. This riveting narrative takes the reader from the marshy swamps of the Mekong Delta to the bomb-saturated Red River Delta, from the corridors of power in Hanoi and Saigon to the Nixon White House, and from the peace negotiations in Paris to high-level meetings in Beijing and Moscow, all to reveal that peace never had a chance in Vietnam.Hanoi's Warrenders transparent the internal workings of America's most elusive enemy during the Cold War and shows that the war fought during the peace negotiations was bloodier and much more wide ranging than it had been previously. Using never-before-seen archival materials from the Vietnam Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as materials from other archives around the world, Nguyen explores the politics of war-making and peace-making not only from the North Vietnamese perspective but also from that of South Vietnam, the Soviet Union, China, and the United States, presenting a uniquely international portrait.
By the spring of 1970, Americans were frustrated by continuing
war in Vietnam and turmoil in the inner cities. Students on
American college campuses opposed the war in growing numbers and
joined with ...other citizens in ever-larger public demonstrations
against the war. Some politicians-including Ronald Reagan, Spiro
Agnew, and Richard Nixon-exploited the situation to cultivate anger
against students. At the University of California at Berkeley,
student leaders devoted themselves, along with many sympathetic
faculty, to studying the war and working for peace. A group of art
students designed, produced, and freely distributed thousands of
antiwar posters. Posters for Peace tells the story of those
posters, bringing to life their rhetorical iconography and
restoring them to their place in the history of poster art and
political street art. The posters are vivid, simple, direct,
ironic, and often graphically beautiful. Thomas Benson shows that
the student posters from Berkeley appealed to core patriotic values
and to the legitimacy of democratic deliberation in a
democracy-even in a time of war.
InThe Dictator's Army, Caitlin Talmadge presents a compelling new argument to help us understand why authoritarian militaries sometimes fight very well-and sometimes very poorly. Talmadge's framework ...for understanding battlefield effectiveness focuses on four key sets of military organizational practices: promotion patterns, training regimens, command arrangements, and information management. Different regimes face different domestic and international threat environments, leading their militaries to adopt different policies in these key areas of organizational behavior.Authoritarian regimes facing significant coup threats are likely to adopt practices that squander the state's military power, while regimes lacking such threats and possessing ambitious foreign policy goals are likely to adopt the effective practices often associated with democracies. Talmadge shows the importance of threat conditions and military organizational practices for battlefield performance in two paired comparisons of states at war: North and South Vietnam (1963-1975) and Iran and Iraq (1980-1988). Drawing on extensive documentary sources, her analysis demonstrates that threats and practices can vary not only between authoritarian regimes but also within them, either over time or across different military units. The result is a persuasive explanation of otherwise puzzling behavior by authoritarian militaries.The Dictator's Armyoffers a vital practical tool for those seeking to assess the likely course, costs, and outcomes of future conflicts involving nondemocratic adversaries, allies, or coalition partners.
InThe Dictator's Army, Caitlin Talmadge presents a compelling new argument to help us understand why authoritarian militaries sometimes fight very well-and sometimes very poorly. Talmadge's framework for understanding battlefield effectiveness focuses on four key sets of military organizational practices: promotion patterns, training regimens, command arrangements, and information management. Different regimes face different domestic and international threat environments, leading their militaries to adopt different policies in these key areas of organizational behavior.
Authoritarian regimes facing significant coup threats are likely to adopt practices that squander the state's military power, while regimes lacking such threats and possessing ambitious foreign policy goals are likely to adopt the effective practices often associated with democracies. Talmadge shows the importance of threat conditions and military organizational practices for battlefield performance in two paired comparisons of states at war: North and South Vietnam (1963-1975) and Iran and Iraq (1980-1988). Drawing on extensive documentary sources, her analysis demonstrates that threats and practices can vary not only between authoritarian regimes but also within them, either over time or across different military units. The result is a persuasive explanation of otherwise puzzling behavior by authoritarian militaries.The Dictator's Armyoffers a vital practical tool for those seeking to assess the likely course, costs, and outcomes of future conflicts involving nondemocratic adversaries, allies, or coalition partners.
During the second half of the twentieth century, the American military chaplaincy underwent a profound transformation. Broad-based and ecumenical in the World War II era, the chaplaincy emerged from ...the Vietnam War as generally conservative and evangelical. Before and after the Vietnam War, the chaplaincy tended to mirror broader social, political, military, and religious trends. During the Vietnam War, however, chaplains' experiences and interpretations of war placed them on the margins of both military and religious cultures. Because chaplains lived and worked amid many communities--religious and secular, military and civilian, denominational and ecumenical--they often found themselves mediating heated struggles over the conflict, on the home front as well as on the front lines.In this benchmark study, Jacqueline Whitt foregrounds the voices of chaplains themselves to explore how those serving in Vietnam acted as vital links between diverse communities, working personally and publicly to reconcile apparent tensions between their various constituencies. Whitt also offers a unique perspective on the realities of religious practice in the war's foxholes and firebases, as chaplains ministered with a focus on soldiers' shared experiences rather than traditional theologies.
Westmoreland's War Daddis, Gregory
2013, 2014, 2013-11-20, 2013-11-19
eBook
This groundbreaking study offers a major reinterpretation of American strategy during the first half of the Vietnam War. Gregory A. Daddis argues senior military leaders developed a comprehensive ...campaign strategy, one not confined to 'attrition' of enemy forces. This innovative work is a must for a genuine understanding of the Vietnam War.
In this paper we demonstrate that forecast encompassing tests are valuable tools in getting an insight into why competing forecasts may be combined to produce a composite forecast which is superior ...to the individual forecasts. We also argue that results from forecast encompassing tests are potentially useful in model specification. We illustrate this using forecasts of quarterly UK consumption expenditure data from three classes of models: ARIMA, DHSY and VAR models.
In 1955 the Supreme Court ruled that veterans of the U.S. armed forces could not be courtmartialed for overseas crimes that were not detected until after they had left military service. Territorial ...limitations placed such acts beyond the jurisdiction of civilian courts, and there was no other American court in which they could be adjudicated. As a result, a jurisdictional gap emerged that for decades exempted former troops from prosecution for war crimes. “This was not merely a theoretical possibility,” Patrick Hagopian writes. Over a dozen former soldiers who participated in the My Lai massacre did in fact “get away with murder.” Further court rulings expanded the gap to cover civilian employees and contractors that accompanied the armed forces. In American Immunity, Hagopian places what he calls the “superpower exemption” in the context of a longstanding tension between international law and U.S. sovereignty. He shows that despite the U.S. role in promulgating universal standards of international law and forming institutions where those standards can be enforced, the United States has repeatedly refused to submit its own citizens and troops to the jurisdiction of international tribunals and failed to uphold international standards of justice in its own courts. In 2000 Congress attempted to close the jurisdictional gap with passage of the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act. The effectiveness of that legislation is still in question, however, since it remains unclear how willing civilian American juries will be to convict veterans for conduct in foreign war zones.
Common and destructive, limited wars are significant international events that pose a number of challenges to the states involved beyond simple victory or defeat. Chief among these challenges is the ...risk of escalation—be it in the scale, scope, cost, or duration of the conflict. In this book, Spencer D. Bakich investigates a crucial and heretofore ignored factor in determining the nature and direction of limited war: information institutions.Traditional assessments of wartime strategy focus on the relationship between the military and civilians, but Bakich argues that we must take into account the information flow patterns among top policy makers and all national security organizations. By examining the fate of American military and diplomatic strategy in four limited wars, Bakich demonstrates how not only the availability and quality of information, but also the ways in which information is gathered, managed, analyzed, and used, shape a state's ability to wield power effectively in dynamic and complex international systems.Utilizing a range of primary and secondary source materials, Success and Failure in Limited War makes a timely case for the power of information in war, with crucial implications for international relations theory and statecraft.
