Transforming War – serie
Visar alla böcker i serien Transforming War. Handla med fri frakt och snabb leverans.
3 produkter
3 produkter
309 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
As Clausewitz observed, “In war more than anywhere else, things do not turn out as we expect.” The essence of war is a competitive reciprocal relationship with an adversary. Commanders and institutional leaders must recognize shortfalls and resolve gaps rapidly in the middle of the fog of war. The side that reacts best (and absorbs faster) increases its chances of winning. Mars Adapting examines what makes some military organizations better at this contest than others. It explores the institutional characteristics or attributes at play in learning quickly. Adaptation requires a dynamic process of acquiring knowledge, the utilization of that knowledge to alter a unit's skills, and the sharing of that learning to other units to integrate and institutionalize better operational practice.Mars Adapting explores the internal institutional factors that promote and enable military adaptation. It employs four cases, drawing upon one from each of the U.S. armed services. Each case was an extensive campaign, with several cycles of action/counteraction. In each case the military institution entered the war with an existing mental model of the war they expected to fight. For example, the U.S. Navy prepared for decades to defeat the Japanese Imperial Navy and had developed carried-based aviation. Other capabilities, particularly the Fleet submarine, were applied as a major adaptation. The author establishes a theory called Organizational Learning Capacity that captures the transition of experience and knowledge from individuals into larger and higher levels of each military service through four major steps. The learning/change cycle is influenced, he argues, by four institutional attributes (leadership, organizational culture, learning mechanisms, and dissemination mechanisms). The dynamic interplay of these institutional enablers shaped their ability to perceive and change appropriately.
Training for Victory
U.S. Special Forces Advisory Operations from El Salvador to Afghanistan
Inbunden, Engelska, 2025
343 kr
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One of the most difficult security challenges of the post–Cold War era has been stabilizing failing states in an era of irregular warfare. A consistent component of the strategy to address this problem has been security force assistance where outside powers train and advise the host nation’s military. Despite billions of dollars spent, the commitment of thousands of advisors, and innumerable casualties, the American efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq failed catastrophically. Nevertheless, among those colossal military disasters were pockets of success. The Iraqi Special Operations Forces (ISOF) held back the Islamic State in 2014 long enough to allow American and allied forces to flow back into the country, and many Afghan commando units fought to the bitter end as their country disintegrated around them. What made those units successful while the larger missions ended disastrously? Author Frank K. Sobchak explores security force assistance across five case studies, examining what factors were most critical for U.S. Special Forces units to build capable partners like the ISOF and the commandos. More specifically, the book assesses the impact of five components of Special Forces advisory missions: language training and cultural awareness of the advising force; the partner force-to-advisor ratio; the advisors’ ability to organize host-nation forces; whether advisors are permitted to guide in combat; and the consistency in advisor pairing. Based on the experiences of U.S. Army Special Forces in El Salvador (1981–1991), Colombia (2002–2016), the Philippines (2001–2015), Iraq (2003–2011), and Afghanistan (2007–2021), Sobchak argues that the most crucial factors in producing combat-effective partners are consistency in advisor pairing and maintaining a partner force-to-advisor ratio of twelve special forces soldiers advising a company-sized force or smaller. Intriguingly, and counter to conventional wisdom, at first glance language training and cultural awareness do not seem to be critical factors, as most of the Green Berets that trained units in Iraq and Afghanistan lacked both capabilities. Despite an orthodoxy that argues the opposite, there is little evidence that combat advising is decisive in producing effective partners and there is conflicting evidence that language training and cultural awareness are important. Many of these findings, while focused on Special Forces operations and doctrine, could be used to improve the odds of success for larger security-force assistance missions as well.
354 kr
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For more than half its existence, the U.S. Marine Corps and its members largely self-identified as soldiers. In the early decades, being a Marine did not yet mean something distinct, either to Marines or to the public at large. The Corps’ peculiar position resulted in a sort of identity crisis: Being neither a land-based organization like the Army nor an entirely sea-based one like the Navy, the Corps’ role overlapped with both institutions. While the Army and Navy easily could define their respective domains, Marines inherently shouldered a more varied array of land-and-sea responsibilities. Author Heather Venable argues that, since the Marine Corps could not readily rally around a sole defining mission, it turned instead to an image to ensure its institutional survival. As Marine officers immersed themselves in the Corps’ historical records, they initiated a process by which a maligned group of nineteenth-century naval policemen eventually would come to be regarded as elite warriors. Embracing their storied past, fin-de-siècle Marines began to justify their existence by invoking their traditions, celebrating their many martial engagements, and claiming to be the nation’s oldest and proudest military branch. A new and enduring institutional persona emerged—that of a fighting force ultimately superior to soldiers and sailors. Although there are countless works on the Marine Corps, How the Few Became the Proud is the first to explore the origin of the myths behind the mystique.