It is not enough, and sometimes self-deceiving, to study
war by simply reading historical accounts.
During the Cold War, Trevor Dupuy
and his colleagues produced groundbreaking studies on all aspects of conflict.
Chris Lawrence, director of the Dupuy Institute, revives this intensive examination
of war in his War By Numbers. By applying sophisticated but well-explained
statistical methods to the extensive datasets of combat developed by the
institute over the last four decades, Lawrence challenges a great many conventional-held beliefs about the outcomes of battle and campaigns.
For
example, Lawrence demonstrates that urban combat is far less costly in
casualties than widely believed. Most historical analyses examine singular
events, making identifying patterns difficult. Lawrence’s treatment is
consequently very enriching and generalizable, and is a crucial companion to
any study of military history.
War by Numbers assesses the nature of conventional warfare through the analysis of historical combat. Christopher A. Lawrence establishes what we know about conventional combat and why we know it. By demonstrating the impact a variety of factors have on combat he moves such analysis beyond the work of Carl von Clausewitz and into modern data and interpretation. Using vast data sets, Lawrence examines force ratios, the human factor in case studies from World War II and beyond, the combat value of superior situational awareness, and the effects of dispersion, among other elements. Lawrence challenges existing interpretations of conventional warfare…
The
best books are those that successfully unseat widely held beliefs that are
actually completely wrong and have a terrible influence on public policy.
Robert Pape, in Bombing to Win, set-out to demonstrate that the air force (of
nearly every country’s) sociological model that bombing an enemy will produce a
cheap and fast victory, is completely false. In fact, Pape shows that there has
never been a case where an air force campaign achieved victory on its own,
without being closely integrated with naval and army operations.
This is
important because countries often start wars believing that air power will
produce a prompt victory. Furthermore, air forces frequently make these claims
in order to claim wildly disproportionate shares of defense budgets. The reality
is that bombing rarely succeeds at coercing societies that are committed to
resistance.
From Iraq to Bosnia to North Korea, the first question in American foreign policy debates is increasingly: Can air power alone do the job? Robert A. Pape provides a systematic answer. Analyzing the results of over thirty air campaigns, including a detailed reconstruction of the Gulf War, he argues that the key to success is attacking the enemy's military strategy, not its economy, people, or leaders. Coercive air power can succeed, but not as cheaply as air enthusiasts would like to believe.Pape examines the air raids on Germany, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq as well as those of Israel versus…
There
is a widely held belief that modern educated populations of industrial
countries are the most morally assertive societies. Consequently, unlike less
democratic peoples, it is the conventional wisdom that these societies would be
the least likely to acquiesce to being occupied by a foreign military.
Narratives of resistance and revolution pervade the popular media. Peter
Liberman, in his book Does Conquest Pay?, refutes these incorrect sociological
understandings of contemporary democracies, and in fact shows how easy it is in
fact to occupy urban populations.
Despite the obvious humiliation and agony of
contemplating being occupied by a foreign power, Liberman’s case studies of
German conquest of France and Soviet occupation of select Warsaw Pact states,
shows that contemporary societies are the easiest to occupy because of their
actual social fragmentation.
Can foreign invaders successfully exploit industrial economies? Since control over economic resources is a key source of power, the answer affects the likelihood of aggression and how strenuously states should counter it. The resurgence of nationalism has led many policymakers and scholars to doubt that conquest still pays. But, until now, the "cumulativity" of industrial resources has never been subjected to systematic analysis. Does Conquest Pay? demonstrates that expansion can, in fact, provide rewards to aggressor nations. Peter Liberman argues that invaders can exploit industrial societies for short periods of time and can maintain control and economic performance over the…
There's a widespread belief that states with military governments have an increased
tendency to start wars because armed forces seek glory through combat and
conquest. Building on the work of Samuel Huntington, Alfred Vagts, and Dick
Betts, Julian Schofield shows how militarization of a country’s government is by
degrees, and depends on successfully adapting that configuration of
government to the correct strategic threat environment. He rejects the
Clausewitzian dictum that military policy should be entirely subordinated to civilian authorities. Both militarized as well as over-civilianized regimes
suffer dysfunctions that can increase the likelihood of the outbreak of war. They
privilege different sources of information on crisis decision-making. In
particular, militarized regimes suffer from heightened sensitivity resulting
from insecurity, and their decisions for war aren't always maladaptive
responses to these threats.
