Nathan K. Finney and Tyrell O. Mayfield, “Redefining the Modern Military: The Intersection of Profession and Ethics” (Naval Institute Press, 2018)
Redefining the Modern Military: The Intersection of Profession and Ethics (Naval Institute Press, 2018), edited by Nathan K. Finney and Tyrell O. Mayfield, is a collection of essays examining military professionalism and ethics in light of major changes to modern warfare. Contributors examine philosophical and legal questions about what constitutes a profession, the requirements of a military professional, and military education. Additionally, the authors tackle questions of ethics related to new technological advancements, such as unmanned aircraft. Finally, an interesting discussion of the military’s relationship with society, and vice versa, is discussed as an important component of oversight of the profession. Today I spoke with Finney and one of the contributors, Brian Laslie. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
31 Okt 201853min
N. M. Sambaluk, “The Other Space Race: Eisenhower and the Quest for Aerospace Security” (Naval Institute Press, 2015)
Many people place the beginning of the American space program at 7:28pm, October 4, 1957 – the moment the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik I, into orbit. This event prompted the United States to open up its own crash program to put first a satellite, then later, human beings, into space. The primary motivating factor for all this, was the fear of missiles being the primary delivery system for nuclear warheads at the height of the Cold War. Our guest in this episode –Nicholas Michael Sambaluk – makes the case for another perspective on the Eisenhower Administration’s decision to engage in space exploration. In his book The Other Space Race: Eisenhower and the Quest for Aerospace Security (Naval Institute Press, 2015), Sambaluk describes the checkered history of the Dynamic Soarer Space Glider Bomber – a.k.a. “Dyna-Soar,” a heat-resistant single seat-space shuttle that was intended to guarantee American aerospace superiority. Though ultimately canceled, the Dyna-Soar program’s legacy continues to this day in the form of the SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance Aircraft, the Space Shuttle, and future orbiting space vehicles. Sambaluk is an associate professor of strategy at the Air University, at Maxwell Air Force Base, in Montgomery, Alabama. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
29 Okt 20181h 26min
David Pietrusza, “TR’s Last War: Theodore Roosevelt, the Great War, and a Journey of Triumph and Tragedy” (Lyons Press, 2018)
Teddy Roosevelt had one of the most colorful lives in the American history, but few have deeply explored his final years. Historian David Pietrusza does just that in TR’s Last War: Theodore Roosevelt, the Great War, and a Journey of Triumph and Tragedy (Lyons Press, 2018), taking us through a period in which Roosevelt exhorts an America prone to isolationism to join the war against Germany, only for the war to take the life of one of his sons. Pietrusza tracks how Roosevelt’s alters America’s political history, abandoning his “Bull Moose” party and re-uniting the Republicans in hopes of strengthening American foreign policy. And the author chronicles Roosevelt’s heartbreak, unable to die a glorious death on the battlefield himself, but bereaved to see his son die from a policy he advocated. Pietrusza also offers evidence of a controversial theory: that a depressed Roosevelt ultimately took his own life with an overdose of morphine. Bill Scher is a Contributing Editor for POLITICO Magazine. He has provided political commentary on CNN, NPR and MSNBC. He has been published in The New York Times, The New Republic, and The New York Daily News among other publications. He is author of Wait! Don’t Move to Canada, published by Rodale in 2006. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
17 Okt 201858min
Nathaniel Philbrick, “In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown” (Viking, 2018)
Most Americans do not appreciate the extent to which victory in the American Revolution was due to the leadership of a French aristocrat. As Nathaniel Philbrick demonstrates in his new book In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown (Viking, 2018), it was Admiral Comte de Grasse’s naval victories which made possible George Washington’s decisive victory at the battle of Yorktown. Such a victory did not seem possible at the start of 1781, as the British imperial forces seemed locked in an intractable stalemate with the rebelling colonists. In that year, however, the assistance of the French helped to tip the balance, not just on sea but in the land war as well. Once Admiral de Grasse’s ships drove off the British fleet in the battle of the Chesapeake, Washington was able to lay siege to General Charles Cornwallis’s forces at Yorktown with a combined Franco-American army, defeating the main British force in the Southern states and realizing America’s independence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
16 Okt 201847min
Susan Carruthers, “The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace” (Harvard UP, 2016)
In her new book, The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace (Harvard University Press, 2016), Dr. Susan Carruthers, professor of American Studies at the University of Warwick, chronicles America’s transition from wartime combatant to post-war occupier in both Germany and Japan. This excellent book examines occupation by exploring the thoughts and feelings of ordinary servicemen and women who participated in the difficult task of rebuilding defeated nations. By examining occupation from the ground up, this book effectively tackles the mythology surrounding America’s occupation and demonstrates that the rebuilding of post-war Europe and Japan was a difficult and by no means straightforward. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
15 Okt 20181h
Brian VanDeMark, “The Road to Disaster: A New History of America’s Descent Into Vietnam” (Harper Collins, 2018)
Many books have been written on the tragic decisions regarding Vietnam made by the young stars of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Yet despite millions of words of analysis and reflection, no historian has been able to explain why such decent, brilliant, and previously successful men stumbled so badly. That changes with The Road to Disaster: A New History of America’s Descent Into Vietnam (Harper Collins, 2018). Historian Brian VanDeMark, a professor of history at the United States Naval Academy, draws upon decades of archival research, his own interviews with many of those involved, and a wealth of previously unheard recordings by Robert McNamara and Clark Clifford, who served as Defense Secretaries for Kennedy and Johnson. Yet beyond that, Road to Disaster is also the first history of the war to look at the cataclysmic decisions of those in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations through the prism of recent research in cognitive science, psychology, and organizational theory to explain why the “Best and the Brightest” became trapped in situations that suffocated creative thinking and willingness to dissent, why they found change so hard, and why they were so blind to their own errors. An epic history of America’s march to quagmire, Road to Disaster is a landmark in scholarship and a book of immense importance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
9 Okt 201827min
Joan E. Cashin, “War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War” (Cambridge UP, 2018)
The Civil War was even more disastrous than we thought. Joan Cashin, already a distinguished scholar of the period, looks afresh at the war through the lens of environmental history and material culture and finds only more terrors and even greater suffering. War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2018) draws from a dizzying cache of research from nearly four dozen archives to capture the brutality and desperation of the wars that raged beyond the battlefield—over food, timber, shelter, and the control of people themselves. Most of these struggles were not between the armies, but between soldiers and civilians. Despite Lost Cause slurs against Sherman and his ilk, Cashin finds both armies fully capable of emptying the stores, robbing the woodlots, and torching the homes of white noncombatants. To have two massive armies with nearly inexhaustible appetites for resources crisscrossing the South ensured widespread devastation. But the destruction was all the greater because soldiers on both sides paid little attention to military codes regulating pillage and plunder, and their commanders were usually unwilling or unable to reign them in. So, Cashin argues, the war caused starvation, deforestation, the razing of villages, and an underappreciated amount of hostage-taking and abuse of civilians. After the war, there was no reckoning, no recompense for the toll both armies took on white southerners, and the scars were bandaged with myths that deceive us still. Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
28 Sep 201857min
Giulio Ongaro, “Peasants and Soldiers: The Management of the Venetian Military Structure in the Mainland Dominion between the 16th and 17th Centuries” (Routledge, 2017)
Dr. Giulio Ongaro, currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Economics Department at the University of Milan-Bicocca has just published Peasants and Soldiers: The Management of the Venetian Military Structure in the Mainland Dominion between the 16th and 17th Centuries (Routledge, 2017), a fascinating study of the early modern Venetian military. Rather than focus on the city itself or the republic’s higher-profile naval forces, Ongaro examines the workings of the Venetian land forces—its cavalry, militia, and fortress structures. Financing and supplying these forces required increasingly sophisticated administrative measures that, as in so many European states at the time, drove the expansion of state institutions. Most previous studies have assumed that such expansion came at the expense of local power structures and that state administrations existed in competition with local elites. By examining the records of municipal and rural archives in the Venetian hinterland, Ongaro instead shows that while the central state had the power to make demands, those demands were most often satisfied in cooperation with local forces, rather than in competition. Local elites benefitted from the contracts to provision fortresses or supply saltpeter, for example, and so did not resist state directives as a matter of course. This detailed economic history will expand your horizons and your understanding of early modern military history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
25 Sep 201830min
