Bombs Without Boots

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.

In this groundbreaking title, A. R. Oppenheimer tells how the Irish Republican Army became the most adept and experienced insurgency group the world has ever seen through their bombing expertise – and how, after generations of conflict, it all came to an end. The book is a comprehensive account of more than 150 years of Irish republican strategic, tactical, and operational details, and an analysis of the IRA’s mission, doctrine, targeting, and acquisition of weapons and explosives. As a leading expert on non-conventional weapons and explosives, Oppenheimer vividly presents the story behind the bombs – those who built and deployed them; those who had to deal with and dismantle them; and those who suffered or died from them. He analyses where, how, and why the IRA’s 19,000 bombs were built, targeted and deployed, and explores what the IRA was hoping to accomplish in its unrivaled campaign of violence and insurgency through covert acquisition, training, intelligence and counter-intelligence. Beginning with the Fenian ‘Dynamiters’ in the second half of the nineteenth century, Oppenheimer fully describes and assesses the impact of the pre-1970s bombing campaigns in Northern Ireland and England and the evolution of strategies and tactics during the Troubles. He concludes with the decommissioning of an arsenal big enough to arm several battalions – which included an entire home-crafted missile system, an unsurpassed range of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and enough explosives to blow up several urban centres. The author scrutinises the level of deadly improvisation that became the hallmark of the Provisional IRA’s expertise and the ingenuity in its pioneering IED timing, delay and disguise technologies, and follows the arms race it carried on with the British Army and security services in a long war of mutual assured disruption. He also provides an insight into the bombing equipment and guns in the vast IRA inventory held at Irish Police HQ in Dublin.

The thrilling career of ATF agent Cynthia Beebe is told through the lens of six-high profile cases involving bombings, arson, and the Hell's Angels. Boots in the Ashes is the memoir of Cynthia Beebe's groundbreaking career as one of the first women special agents for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, (ATF). A smart and independent girl growing up in suburban Chicago, she unexpectedly became one of the first women to hunt down violent criminals for the federal government. As a special agent for 27 years, Beebe gives the reader first-hand knowledge of the human capacity for evil. She tells the story of how, as a young woman, she overcame many obstacles on her journey through the treacherous world of illegal guns, gangs, and bombs. She battled conflicts both on the streets and within ATF. But Beebe learned how to thrive in the ultra-masculine world of violent crime and those whose job it is to stop it. Beebe tells her story through the lens of six major cases that read like crime fiction: four bombings, one arson fire and a massive roundup of the Hell's Angels on the West Coast. She also shares riveting never before revealed trial testimonies, including killers, bombers, arsonists, victims, witnesses and judges.

The discipline of international relations offers much insight into why violent power transitions occur, yet there have been few substantive examinations of why and how peaceful changes happen in world politics. This work is the first comprehensive treatment of that subject. The Oxford Handbook of Peaceful Change in International Relations provides a thorough examination of research on the problem of change in the international arena and the reasons why change happens peacefully at times, and at others, violently. It contains over forty chapters, which examine the historical, theoretical, global, regional, and national foreign-policy dimensions of peaceful change. As the world enters a new round of power transition conflict, involving a rapidly rising China and a relatively declining United States, this Handbook provides a necessary resource for decisionmakers and scholars engaged in this vital area of research.

This book introduces a much-needed theory of tactical air power to explain air power effectiveness in modern warfare with a particular focus on the Vietnam War as the first and largest modern air war. Phil Haun shows how in the Rolling Thunder, Commando Hunt, and Linebacker air campaigns, independently air power repeatedly failed to achieve US military and political objectives. In contrast, air forces in combined arms operations succeeded more often than not. In addition to predicting how armies will react to a lethal air threat, he identifies operational factors of air superiority, air-to-ground capabilities, and friendly ground force capabilities, along with environmental factors of weather, lighting, geography and terrain, and cover and concealment in order to explain air power effectiveness. The book concludes with analysis of modern air warfare since Vietnam along with an assessment of tactical air power relevance now and for the future.

Benjamin Brewster finally accepts that he is burned out as a Boston attorney, and when he discovers that his live-in love interest has been sleeping with one of the firm’s partners, he becomes desperate to recover from his disintegrating life. As advised by his therapist, he gets away from Boston and rents a beach house on Block Island for three months. His vacation is picture-perfect until Hurricane Edwina moves up the coast and Ben is forced to hunker down overnight in a cellar as the category 4 hurricane hits. At first light, he eagerly searches for treasures that the storm blew onto his beachfront. He spies tangled ropes heaped over what looks like a rubber raft and scrambles to his new possession, which turns out to be a prized Zodiac. When he pulls away the debris, he finds a woman sprawled in the bottom. The woman, Mel Yarrow, begs Ben to hide her. Men are looking to murder her because of a secret plot she inadvertently discovered while reading through some papers at work. He finally agrees to let her stay at the beach house. That decision drives him into her deadly world and he becomes a target for murder. Mel is drawn into the mysterious, paranormal world of Block Island. She meets an old woman in a cemetery who has powerful visions of these killers and warns Mel. To survive, Ben and Mel know that they need to stop the execution of the plot before the killers find them.