Drone Warfare is the first comprehensive analysis of one of the fastest growing--and most secretive--fronts in global conflict: the rise of robot warfare. In 2000, the Pentagon had fewer than fifty aerial drones; ten years later, it had a fleet of nearly 7,500, and the US Air Force now trains more drone "pilots" than bomber and fighter pilots combined. Drones are already a $5 billion business in the US alone. The human cost? Drone strikes have killed more than 200 children alone in Pakistan and Yemen. CODEPINK and Global Exchange cofounder Medea Benjamin provides the first extensive analy ..read more

Command in war is about forging effective strategies and implementing them, making sure that orders are appropriate, well-communicated, and then obeyed. But it is also an intensely political process. This is largely because how wars are fought depends to a large extent on how their aims are set. It is also because commanders in one realm must possess the ability to work with other command structures, including those of other branches of the armed forces and allies. In Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine (Oxford UP, 2022), Lawrence Freedman explores ..read more

Armed conflict and natural disasters have plagued the twenty-first century. Not since the end of World War II has the number of armed conflicts been higher. At the same time, natural disasters have increased in frequency and intensity over the past two decades, their impacts worsened by climate change, urbanization, and persistent social and economic inequalities. Providing the first comprehensive analysis of the interplay between natural disasters and armed conflict, Catastrophes, Confrontations, and Constraints: How Disasters Shape the Dynamics of Armed Conflicts (MIT Press, 2023 ..read more

"'The God of War' is near to revealing himself, because we have heard his prophet." So wrote Jean Colin, naming Napoleon the God of War and Jacques-Antoine-Hippolyte, comte de Guibert, as his prophet. Guibert was the foremost philosopher of the Military Enlightenment, dedicating his career to systematizing warfare in a single document. The result was his magnum opus, The General Essay on Tactics, which helped to lay the foundation for the success of French armies during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. In Jonathan Abel's Guibert's General Essay on Tactics (Brill, 20 ..read more

The story of Reconstruction is often told from the perspective of the politicians, generals, and journalists whose accounts claim an outsized place in collective memory. But this pivotal era looked very different to African Americans in the South transitioning from bondage to freedom after 1865. They were besieged by a campaign of white supremacist violence that persisted through the 1880s and beyond. For too long, their lived experiences have been sidelined, impoverishing our understanding of the obstacles post-Civil War Black families faced, their inspiring determination to survive, and the ..read more

Arthur Snell's book How Britain Broke the World: War, Greed and Blunders from Kosovo to Afghanistan (1997-2021) (Canbury Press, 2022) critically assesses UK foreign policy over the past 25 years, from Kosovo in 1998 to Afghanistan in 2021, while also scrutinising British policy towards the powerhouses of the USA, Russia, India, and China. Far from being unimportant, Snell reveals, Britain has often played a pivotal role in world affairs. For instance, London supplied the false intelligence that justified the Allied invasion of Iraq and plugged Russia's corrupt elite into We ..read more

This book distills war down to individual young men climbing into defenseless gliders made of plywood, ready to trust the towing aircraft that would pull them into enemy territory by a single cable wrapped with a telephone wire. Based on their after-action reports, journals, oral histories, photos and letters home, Brotherhood of the Flying Coffin: The Glider Pilots of World War II (Osprey, 2023) reveals every terrifying minute of their missions. They were all volunteers, for a specialized duty that their own government projected would have a 50 percent casualty rate. None faltered ..read more

At the Battle of Saratoga, the tide of the Revolutionary War turned in favor of unlikely victors: the American patriots.  What were the major strategy elements at play in the Saratoga Campaign, and why did it prove so crucial? Where did England misstep, and what did the Americans get right? To find out, we chat with Kevin Weddle *03, Professor of Military Theory and Strategy at the Army War College. A graduate of West Point and veteran of operations Desert Storm and Enduring Freedom, Dr. Weddle received his PhD here at Princeton, and was the 2019 William L. Garwood visiting professor with ..read more

In The Rise of the Military Entrepreneur: War, Diplomacy, and Knowledge in Habsburg Europe (Cornell UP, 2022), Suzanne Sutherland explores the role of the military entrepreneur and explains how these international military figures emerged from, and exploited, the seventeenth century's momentous political, military, commercial, and scientific changes. During the Thirty Years' War, these figures traveled rapidly and frequently across Europe using private wealth, credit, and connections to raise and command the armies that rulers desperately needed. Using the individual of Rai ..read more

The surprise success of the German offensive in the West that commenced on May 10, 1940 caught the Allies completely off-guard, and France would soon capitulate to the Germans in late June. During the course of the campaign, large numbers of Allied forces would become trapped along the coast of the English Channel at the port of Dunkirk. The mass evacuation of Allied forces at the port of Dunkirk in 1940 is often considered one of the most iconic moments of the Second World War (1939-1945), demonstrating the resolve of the British in particular to carry on the fight against Nazi Germany. This ..read more