Askaris Asymmetry And Small Wars Operational Art And The German East African Campaign 1914 1918

This monograph analyzed whether Lieutenant Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck used operational art to defeat British forces in the East African campaign of World War I. British forces were superior in quantity of men and equipment, but slow moving and heavily dependent on secure lines of communication. Lettow-Vorbeck’s forces maintained an asymmetric advantage in mobility, knowledge of terrain, and responsive logistics. An analogy was suggested that the U.S. Army in the twenty-first century is similar to British forces in 1914, and the nation’s future adversaries could potentially use Lettow-Vorbeck’s unconventional warfare and asymmetric tactics woven together in a comprehensive campaign plan. This monograph reviewed the origins and characteristics of operational art. The Army’s emerging doctrine, Student Text 3-0, Operations defines operational art as the “use of military force to achieve strategic goals through the design, organization, integration, and conduct of theater strategic, campaigns, major operations, and battles” and serves as the entry point for discussion. A synthesis of Shimon Naveh and James Schneider’s theories revealed five primary characteristics of operational art and was used as the criteria to evaluate the research question. The five characteristics were: operational objectives, operational maneuver, disruption, operational approach, and operational logistics. The East African campaign was analyzed from the perspective of Lettow-Vorbeck linking his strategic aim of forcing the British to commit forces to a secondary theater of operations to his limited resources. The four-year campaign was divided into three phases based on Lettow-Vorbeck’s operational objectives and the correlation of forces. Significant tactical vignettes were examined as part of an overarching campaign plan. Finally, this monograph considered how the U.S. Army would fight an asymmetric enemy in a similar environment.

From the Treaty of Versailles to the 2018 centenary and beyond, the history of the First World War has been continually written and rewritten, studied and contested, producing a rich historiography shaped by the social and cultural circumstances of its creation. Writing the Great War provides a groundbreaking survey of this vast body of work, assembling contributions on a variety of national and regional historiographies from some of the most prominent scholars in the field. By analyzing perceptions of the war in contexts ranging from Nazi Germany to India’s struggle for independence, this is an illuminating collective study of the complex interplay of memory and history.

The book focuses on an area called Maúa, not because I believe Maúa represents the whole of Mozambique as such, but because highlighting a specific area and people helps to understand the Mozambican history more deeply and comprehensively. In any case, it would be impossible to study the experience of all Mozambicans. I am not attempting to write a history textbook of Mozambique, or a glorious history of the liberation struggle, but rather trying to fill a gap in the descriptions of contemporary Mozambican history by delving into matters that have not been written about before.

A study of the evolving 'national styles' of conducting insurgencies and counter-insurgency, as influenced by transnational trends, ideas and practices.

This book studies the changes that have marked war in the Western World since the thirteenth century.

Conventional wisdom in international relations maintains that democracies are only peaceful when encountering other democracies. Using a variety of social scientific methods of investigation ranging from statistical studies and laboratory experiments to case studies and computer simulations, Rousseau challenges this conventional wisdom by demonstrating that democracies are less likely to initiate violence at early stages of a dispute. Using multiple methods allows Rousseau to demonstrate that institutional constraints, rather than peaceful norms of conflict resolution, are responsible for inhibiting the quick resort to violence in democratic polities. Rousseau finds that conflicts evolve through successive stages and that the constraining power of participatory institutions can vary across these stages. Finally, he demonstrates how constraint within states encourages the rise of clusters of democratic states that resemble "zones of peace" within the anarchic international structure.

The Ottoman Army had a significant effect on the history of the modern world and particularly on that of the Middle East and Europe. This study, written by a Turkish and an American scholar, is a revision and corrective to western accounts because it is based on Turkish interpretations, rather than European interpretations, of events. As the world's dominant military machine from 1300 to the mid-1700's, the Ottoman Army led the way in military institutions, organizational structures, technology, and tactics. In decline thereafter, it nevertheless remained a considerable force to be counted in the balance of power through 1918. From its nomadic origins, it underwent revolutions in military affairs as well as several transformations which enabled it to compete on favorable terms with the best of armies of the day. This study tracks the growth of the Ottoman Army as a professional institution from the perspective of the Ottomans themselves, by using previously untapped Ottoman source materials. Additionally, the impact of important commanders and the role of politics, as these affected the army, are examined. The study concludes with the Ottoman legacy and its effect on the Republic and modern Turkish Army. This is a study survey that combines an introductory view of this subject with fresh and original reference-level information. Divided into distinct periods, Uyar and Erickson open with a brief overview of the establishment of the Ottoman Empire and the military systems that shaped the early military patterns. The Ottoman army emerged forcefully in 1453 during the siege of Constantinople and became a dominant social and political force for nearly two hundred years following Mehmed's capture of the city. When the army began to show signs of decay during the mid-seventeenth century, successive Sultans actively sought to transform the institution that protected their power. The reforms and transformations that began frist in 1606successfully preserved the army until the outbreak of the Ottoman-Russian War in 1876. Though the war was brief, its impact was enormous as nationalistic and republican strains placed increasing pressure on the Sultan and his army until, finally, in 1918, those strains proved too great to overcome. By 1923, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk emerged as the leader of a unified national state ruled by a new National Parliament. As Uyar and Erickson demonstrate, the old army of the Sultan had become the army of the Republic, symbolizing the transformation of a dying empire to the new Turkish state make clear that throughout much of its existence, the Ottoman Army was an effective fighting force with professional military institutions and organizational structures.