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Author : Robert H. Gregory Publisher : U of Nebraska Press Page : 328 pages File Size : 39,99 MB Release : 2015-10-01 Category : History ISBN : 1612347312
"Clean Bombs and Dirty Wars: Air Power in Kosovo and Libya explores how the U.S. public, policymakers, and military services perceived and utilized air power and precision munitions before, during, and after Operation Allied Force in Kosovo in 1999 with incorrect assumptions"--
Author : Robert H. Gregory Publisher : U of Nebraska Press Page : 329 pages File Size : 37,71 MB Release : 2015-10 Category : History ISBN : 1612347886
After the United States, along with NATO allies, bombed the Serbian forces of Slobodan Milosevic for seventy-eight days in 1999, Milosevic withdrew his army from Kosovo. With no troops on the ground, political and military leaders congratulated themselves on the success of Operation Allied Force, considered to be the first military victory won through the use of strategic air power alone. This apparent triumph motivated military and political leaders to embrace a policy of using “clean bombs” (precision munitions and air strikes)—without a dirty ground war—as the preferred choice for answering military aggression. Ten years later it inspired a similar air campaign against Muammar Gaddafi’s forces in Libya as a groundswell of protests erupted into revolution. Clean Bombs and Dirty Wars offers a fresh perspective on the role, relevance, and effectiveness of air power in contemporary warfare, including an exploration of the political motivations for its use as well as a candid examination of air-to-ground targeting processes. Using recently declassified materials from the William J. Clinton Presidential Library along with primary evidence culled from social media posted during the Arab Spring, Robert H. Gregory Jr. shows that the argument that air power eliminates the necessity for boots on the ground is an artificial and illusory claim.
Airpower can achieve military objectives—sometimes, in some circumstances It sounds simple: using airpower to intervene militarily in conflicts, thus minimizing the deaths of soldiers and civilians while achieving both tactical and strategic objectives. In reality, airpower alone sometimes does win battles, but the costs can be high and the long-term consequences may fall short of what decision-makers had in mind. This book by a long-time U.S. intelligence analyst assesses the military operations and post-conflict outcomes in five cases since the mid-1990s in which the United States and/or its allies used airpower to “solve” military problems: Bosnia in 1995, Kosovo in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001, Lebanon in 2006, and Libya in 2011. In each of these cases, airpower helped achieve the immediate objective, but the long-term outcomes often diverged significantly from the original intent of policymakers. The author concludes that airpower sometimes can be effective when used to support indigenous ground forces, but decision-makers should carefully consider all the circumstances before sending planes, drones, or missiles aloft.
Liberal democracies have always accepted the need to go to war, despite the fact that war can undermine liberal values. Wars may be won or lost, not only on the battlefield, but in the perceptions of the publics who pay for them. Presentation is therefore increasingly important. Starting with the First World War, the first major war fought by liberal democracies after the emergence on mass media, Liberal Democracies at War explores the relationship between representations of liberal violence and the ways in which the liberal state understands 'rights' in war. Experts in the field explore crucial questions such as: · How have the violences of war perpetrated in their names been communicated to publics of liberal democracies? · How have representations of conflict changed over time? · How far have the victims of liberal wars been able to insert their stories into the record?
The investigations continue and Garzon is still attempting to establish the full extent of the relationship between the former Spanish Government and the GAL's death squads."--Jacket.
The first century of airpower has ended, yet few critics have addressed the literature that chronicles its human toll. Airpower in Literature: Interrogating the Clean War, 1915-2015 offers fresh insight into this airpower century by placing literature of five major wars in conversation with the clean war discourse. Kimberly Dougherty examines the paradoxical representation of aerial warfare that has allowed extensive airstrikes on cities and civilians while promising a “cleaner” method of waging war. First suggested by early military theorists, the notion of a clean air war—one that would save lives through its speed and precision— proved seductive in the twentieth century and continues to shape the rhetoric of airpower today. The air war is perceived as clean, the author argues, when we see neither the aviator nor the targeted populations in the bombing dynamic. Through analysis of fiction, poetry, drama, and journalism, from the ruins of World War I to the technologies of post-modern war, the author identifies counternarratives that make visible both aviators and bombed societies, and present aerial warfare that is not clean, but messy, prolonged, and imprecise. This exploration encourages readers, and writers, to approach the next century of airpower with greater wisdom and empathy.
The Chechen War was supposed to be over in 1996 after the first Yeltsin campaign, but in the summer of 1999, the new Putin government decided, in their own words, to 'do the job properly'. Before all the bodies of those who had died in the first campaign had been located or identified, many more thousands would be slaughtered in another round of fighting. The first account to be written by a Russian woman, A Dirty War is an edgy and intense study of a conflict that shows no sign of being resolved. Exasperated by the Russian government's attempt to manipulate media coverage of the war, journalist Anna Politkovskaya undertook to go to Chechnya, to make regular reports and keep events in the public eye. In a series of despatches from July 1999 to January 2001 she vividly describes the atrocities and abuses of war, whether it be the corruption endemic in post-Communist Russia, in particular the government and the military, or the spurious arguments and abominable behaviour of the Chechen authorities. In these courageous reports, Politkovskaya excoriates male stupidity and brutality on both sides of the conflict and interviews the civilians whose homes and communities have been laid waste, leaving them nowhere to live, and nothing and no one to believe in.
Growth is commonly regarded as something positive, as something to be rewarded. At the same time the growth of the global population and economy leads to depletion of resources, violent competition and consequently, to the impairment of the quality of life on earth. Science has opened innumerable Pandora boxes, and humankind has no option but to live with the consequences. Once any item of knowledge has entered the world, it is practically impossible to remove it from the world. We could do away with all weapons of mass destruction, but still could not remove the fundamental ability of humans to construct such weapons. Progress is always accompanied by destruction. Where cities grow nature must give way, when a new technology arises it pushes aside older technologies, and where one group of humans appropriates resources it deprives another group of humans of them. The discovery of fossil fuels as energy resource around 250 years ago has allowed for tremendous growth and progress in a very short time span. If the current CO2 emissions continue, the atmospheric CO2 concentrations will reach concentrations that negatively affect cognitive functions within the lifetime of our children and reach lethal concentrations within a few generations. Methane is a 25 times more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 and might apart from human economic activities be released in large amounts from melting permafrost areas of the earth. With melting of polar ice shields global warming will accelerate as sun energy that previously was reflected through the albedo effect gets saved in the oceans. With depletion of resources we think of resources to keep up our civilisation such as oil and gas. However we also have to consider the depletion of resources essential for the pure survival of human beings, such as water. While human populations grow exponentially , ground water levels shrink nearly everywhere. If we are not facing near term human extinction we will at least face enormous challenges in the coming years with potential mass dying in some regions of the world, most of them probably in poor developing countries of the tropics. The creative power of destruction is the destructive power of creation.
“This brief, provocative, and accessible book offers snapshots of seven pernicious myths in military history that have been perpetrated on unsuspecting students, readers, moviegoers, game players, and politicians. It promotes awareness of how myths are created by 'the spurious misuse and ignorance of history' and how misleading ideas about a military problem, as in asymmetric warfare, can lead to misguided solutions. “Both scholarly and engaging, this book is an ideal addition to military history and historical methodology courses. In fact, it could be fruitfully used in any course that teaches critical thinking skills, including courses outside the discipline of history. Military history has a broad appeal to students, and there’s something here for everyone. From the so-called 'Western Way of War' to its sister-myth, technological determinism, to the ‘academic party game’ of once-faddish ‘Military Revolutions,’ the book shows that while myths about history may be fun, myth busting is the most fun of all.” —Reina Pennington, Norwich University