Here are 100 books that The Limits of Air Power fans have personally recommended if you like
The Limits of Air Power.
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I recently retired as a military and naval history professor at the University of Memphis, where I continue to teach strategy for the US Naval War College. I am the author of seven books and many articles on maritime and military history and the histories of technology and sexuality.
Assigned to students at every American war college, this book offers a chronological and thorough examination of changing strategic thought over the last 500 years. It describes important theorists and ideas, how these developed over time, and how they shaped the planning and conduct of modern warfare. Most importantly, it underlines the relationships among different strategic theorists and how their ideas influenced one another.
The essays in this volume analyze war, its strategic characterisitics and its political and social functions, over the past five centuries. The diversity of its themes and the broad perspectives applied to them make the book a work of general history as much as a history of the theory and practice of war from the Renaissance to the present. Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age takes the first part of its title from an earlier collection of essays, published by Princeton University Press in 1943, which became a classic of historical scholarship. Three essays are repinted…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I recently retired as a military and naval history professor at the University of Memphis, where I continue to teach strategy for the US Naval War College. I am the author of seven books and many articles on maritime and military history and the histories of technology and sexuality.
An influential political scientist and military analyst, Luttwak provides an insightful overview of military strategy. He provides clear explanations of important theorists and concepts but, most importantly, emphasizes the paradoxical nature of strategic planning in discussions that resemble the duel of wits in the book and movie The Princess Bride (1973 and 1987).
How does one outthink and outwit an enemy while avoiding falling into the traps an enemy has laid for you? How does one avoid executing obvious and easy strategies while still playing to one’s strengths and avoiding needless complexity? How does one encourage an enemy to make mistakes and lure them into traps?
"If you want peace, prepare for war." "A buildup of offensive weapons can be purely defensive." "The worst road may be the best route to battle." Strategy is made of such seemingly self-contradictory propositions, Edward Luttwak shows-they exemplify the paradoxical logic that pervades the entire realm of conflict.
In this widely acclaimed work, now revised and expanded, Luttwak unveils the peculiar logic of strategy level by level, from grand strategy down to combat tactics. Having participated in its planning, Luttwak examines the role of air power in the 1991 Gulf War, then detects the emergence of "post-heroic" war in Kosovo…
I recently retired as a military and naval history professor at the University of Memphis, where I continue to teach strategy for the US Naval War College. I am the author of seven books and many articles on maritime and military history and the histories of technology and sexuality.
Alfred Thayer Mahan was the first modern scholar to seriously explore naval strategy. He discussed how strategy at sea differed from strategy on land, what naval power could and could not do, and the advantages of being a sea power like Great Britain as opposed to a land power like Russia or Germany.
Unfortunately, Mahan’s works, particularly his classic The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890), are ponderous and often difficult to read. Jon Sumida’s short book summarizes and explains Mahan’s key ideas, often better than Mahan himself, and underlines their enduring importance.
Between 1890 and 1913, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan published a series of books on naval warfare in the age of sail, which won a wide readership in his own day and established his reputation as the founder of modern strategic history. But Mahan's two principal arguments have been gravely misunderstood ever since, according to Jon Tetsuro Sumida. Instead of representing Mahan as an advocate of national naval supremacy, Sumida shows him asserting that only a multinational naval consortium could defend international trade. Instead of presenting Mahan as a man who adhered to strategic principles, Sumida shows that he stressed the…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I recently retired as a military and naval history professor at the University of Memphis, where I continue to teach strategy for the US Naval War College. I am the author of seven books and many articles on maritime and military history and the histories of technology and sexuality.
While not as focused on strategy as the title implies, this book’s short offers an entertaining discussion of various military issues within the context of the Star Wars films and television shows. Among the standouts are a plea for nation-building on Endor by Max Brooks, best known for his novel World War Z (2006), and M.L. Cavanaugh’s “A Strategist Yoda was Not.” As Cavanaugh points out, there is no evidence of any strategic education in Jedi training, which shows.
The most successful film franchise of all time, Star Wars thrillingly depicts an epic multigenerational conflict fought a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. But the Star Wars saga has as much to say about successful strategies and real-life warfare waged in our own time and place. Strategy Strikes Back brings together more than thirty of today's top military and strategic experts, including generals, policy advisors, seasoned diplomats, counterinsurgency strategists, science fiction writers, war journalists, and ground-level military officers, to explain the strategy and the art of war by way of the Star Wars films.
I fell into researching women’s antiwar activism during the U.S. war in Vietnam by chance when I came across evidence of middle-aged American women traveling to Jakarta, Indonesia in 1965 to meet with women from North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front—the enemies of the United States at the time. Discovering that some of these same U.S. women (and many others), would later travel to Hanoi despite the United States conducting extensive bombing raids over North Vietnam, despite travel to North Vietnam being prohibited, and despite some of the women having young children at home, simply astounded me, and I had to find out more.
Telling the story of the girl who became an international icon when the Associated Press published a photograph of her running from napalm bombing in her village in 1972, Denise Chong’s The Girl in the Picture offers insight into the day-to-day lives of South Vietnamese villagers who simply wanted to survive. Caught between the U.S.-supported South Vietnamese military and the National Liberation Front, villagers often had family members fighting on both sides of the war, not because of divergent ideological beliefs, but because repressive recruitment efforts left young men no choice but to enlist. Through the eyes of Kim Phuc, Denise Chong’s book humanizes life on the ground in a war zone and describes what happened when U.S. troops left the country.
On 8 June 1972, nine-year-old Kim Phuc, severely burned by napalm, ran from her burning village and into the eye of history. Her photograph, seen around the world, helped turn public opinion against the Vietnam War and is one of a handful of images that remain branded in the public consciousness. This book is the story of how that photograph came to be - but also of what happened to Kim Phuc after it was taken. It opens up to readers an unknown world - the world of Vietnam after the US army left. Kim became a pawn in the…
I grew up with my Dad telling us stories of how he used to sneak outside to lie on the roof of the family home in Brighton to watch the dogfight battles overhead during World War II – then at school I was captivated by a story we studied about a brave agent in France who needed to acquire the undercover skill of not looking the wrong way when she crossed the road! I emerged with an appreciation of courage and a love of reading in a variety of genres. I hope you enjoy the books on the list as much as I have!
I was gripped by this fast-paced and detailed account telling the remarkable story of the RAF’s wooden aircraft and read it over three days.
The book’s insights as to the perils of aircraft manufacturing politics left me with the uncomfortable sense that the whole project almost never happened! In another instance of helpful historical context, the book highlights the (confusing) 3-way split of Nazi rule in occupied Denmark, explaining the story of Danish resistance (and prior collaboration) in the process.
I found it illuminating that the culminating Mosquito raid on the Copenhagen Gestapo HQ, whilst tragically costing many Danish civilian lives, played a significant part in salvaging Danish pride and helping secure a better post-war future for Denmark.
'Captivating' Daily Telegraph 'Stunning' James Holland 'Superb' Daily Express 'Wonderful' John Nichol 'Remarkable' RAF News _________________________________
Built of lightweight wood, powered by two growling Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, impossibly aerodynamic, headspinningly fast and armed to the teeth, the de Havilland Mosquito was the war-winning wonder that should never have existed: the aircraft the RAF didn't think it wanted then couldn't do without.
Flying on operations barely eighteen months after a single prototype was ordered off the drawing board, it was the answer to its pilots' prayers: a stunningly versatile warplane capable of leaving the Luftwaffe in its wake to attack when…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I am well qualified to speak of the Vietnam aviation experience because these things happened during my formative years as a pilot, and I was on the “front lines” of seeing and experiencing much of it. In addition, I keep up-to-date with it via reunions and reading stories told by other pilots, and I have met Kenny Fields, George Marrett, and Leo Thorsness.
Rasimus was an F-105 pilot who flew 100 missions over North Vietnam early in the war when things were really hot. He tells of the courage it took to fly into such a dangerous environment and of some of the pilots who did it.
Ed Rasimus straps the reader into the cockpit of an F-105 Thunderchief fighter-bomber in his engaging account of the Rolling Thunder campaign in the skies over North Vietnam. Between 1965 and 1968, more than 330 F-105s were lost—the highest loss rate in Southeast Asia—and many pilots were killed, captured, and wounded because of the Air Force’s disastrous tactics. The descriptions of Rasimus’s one hundred missions, some of the most dangerous of the conflict, will satisfy anyone addicted to vivid, heart-stopping aerial combat, as will the details of his transformation from a young man paralyzed with self-doubt into a battle-hardened veteran.…
I’m a writer and journalist with an eye on South and Southeast Asia. I first visited beautiful, land-locked, and sleepy Laos in 2000, as the country reluctantly reemerged from post-revolutionary isolation. I researched and co-wrote The Most Secret Place on Earth, a feature documentary on how the CIA created a clandestine army to fight Laotian and Vietnamese communists, rigged elections, and eventually destroyed much of the country with carpet bombing. This slice of secret history forms the narrative backbone of my novel. The Man with the Golden Mind is a spy thriller, as well as an ode to one of the most isolated countries in the world.
During the CIA’s covert war in Laos between 1964 and 1973, the US dropped more than 2 million tons of bombs on the country, a planeload every 8 minutes for 9 years and makes Laos, along with Cambodia, which shared a similar fate, is the most bombed country in the world. To this day, countless people, many of them children, are maimed and killed by unexploded ordinance that remains hidden in the country’s soil. Fred Branfman, a young American stationed in Laos in the late 1960s, discovered the bombing and exposed the CIA’s covert campaign of terror.
Branfman not only interviewed more than 2,000 refugees of the bombing but motivated many survivors to record their experiences in essays, poems, and pictures. This book, an excellent antidote and companion piece to Air America, is the result.
During the Vietnam War the United States government waged a massive, secret air war in neighbouring Laos. Fred Branfman, an educational advisor living in Laos at the time, interviewed over 1,000 Laotian survivors. Shocked by what he heard and saw, he urged them to record their experiences in essays, poems, and pictures. Voices from the Plain of Jars was the result of that effort.
When first published in 1972, this book was instrumental in exposing the bombing. In this expanded edition, Branfman follows the story forward in time, describing the hardships that Laotians faced after the war when they returned…
A decorated Air Force combat pilot, Tom Yarborough served two tours in Vietnam as a forward air controller. After leaving the Air Force he was a professor and department chair at Indiana University and history professor at Northern Virginia Community College. His writing background includes the books Da Nang Diary, winner of the Military Writers Society of America Gold Medal for the best memoir of 2014, and A Shau Valor, a finalist for the 2016 Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award.
The Ravens were young Air Force pilots, all volunteers, who flew tiny Cessna O-1 Bird Dog spotter planes through heavy groundfire to identify targets and call in air-strikes during the top-secret war in northern Laos. Their mission was so secret that they wore no uniforms and carried no identification. Fed up with the bureaucracy of the war in Vietnam, these young FACs accepted the 50% casualty rates of what was known as the Steve Canyon Program in return for a life of unrestricted flying and fighting. Devoted to the CIA-sponsored hill tribesmen they supported, the Ravens did their job with extraordinary skill and raw courage. This is their story, brilliantly told in Christopher Robbins. Based on extensive interviews with the survivors, it is a tale of undeniable heroism, blending real-life romance, adventure, and tragedy.
Drawing on materials that were, until recently, classified, this account depicts the intense air war fought over Laos and profiles the "Ravens," the pilots who risked their lives in this little-known field of war.
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I spent twenty five years on active duty with nineteen months in Vietnam as a helicopter pilot. I served as a tactics instructor at the US Army Infantry Center; two years teaching the operational level of war at the US Army Command and General Staff College; two years teaching at the German Army Tactics Center. I commanded two rifle companies, one being an Airborne rifle company in Alaska and served two years as battalion commander of an air assault infantry battalion during Operation Desert Shield/Storm. I hold a Masters Degree in Military Strategy from the US Army Command and Staff College.
I recommend this book as it is a firsthand account of actions by US Advisors to the South Vietnamese forces in the spring of 1972. The author exposes the flaws that caused the North Vietnamese forces to have such success in the opening days.
I found his examples of leadership, duty, and honor to be exceptional, and not only his actions but the actions of most of the advisors. I was surprised by the examples of Vietnamese bravery, especially in the South Vietnamese Marines and airborne units, something that I had not seen in my nineteen months serving in Vietnam.
The Easter Offensive was a military campaign conducted by the People's Army of Vietnam against the Army of the Republic of Vietnam and the United States military between 30 March and 22 October 1972, during the Vietnam War. This conventional invasion was a radical departure from previous North Vietnamese offensives. The offensive was not designed to win the war outright, but North Vietnam aimed to gain as much territory and destroy as many units of South Vietnam as possible, to improve the North's negotiating position as the Paris Peace Accords drew toward a conclusion.
This thoroughly documented chronology serves both…
