Despite glasnost and the unexpected thaw in East-West relations, American foreign policy continues to evolve within the shadow of a nuclear strategy profoundly shaped by the writings of Bernard Brodie.

Renowned as "the American Clausewitz," Bernard Brodie (1910-1978) was one of the premier architects and proponents of the strategy of deterrence and one of the most articulate voices in the debate over the role of nuclear weapons. His writings reflect his struggle with the dramatic shift in defense strategy brought about by "the bomb" and his unswerving belief that nuclear weapons had made...

Heirs to a storied past and glamorized as modern-day knights, the Marine Corps--the elite fighting force in America's military--in fact has not always been so highly regarded. As Jack Shulimson shows, only a century ago the Corps' identity and existence were much in question.

Although the Marines were formally established by Congress in 1798 and subsequently distinguished themselves fighting on the Barbary Coast, their essential mission and identity remained unclear throughout most of the nineteenth century. But amid the crosscurrents of industrialization, technological change,...

Popularized by books and films like Andersonville, The Great Escape, and The Hanoi Hilton, and recounted in innumerable postwar memoirs, the POW story holds a special place in American culture. Robert Doyle's remarkable study shows why it has retained such enormous power to move and instruct us.

Long after wartime, memories of captivity haunt former wartime prisoners, their families, and their society-witness the continuing Vietnam MIA-POW controversies-and raise fundamental questions about human nature and survival under inhumane conditions. The prison landscapes...

Steven Woodworth's previous book, the critically acclaimed Jefferson Davis and His Generals, won the prestigious Fletcher Pratt Award and was a main selection of the History Book Club. In that book he showed how the failures of Davis and his military leaders in the west paved the way for Confederate defeat. In Davis and Lee at War, he concludes his study of Davis as rebel commander-in-chief and shows how the lack of a unified purpose and strategy in the east sealed the Confederacy's fate.

Woodworth argues that Davis and Robert E. Lee, the South's greatest military leader, had...

This is the first English-language military history of what the People's Republic of China called the "War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea." Based upon a vast array of recently available Chinese sources, it provides a revealing new look at the far-reaching influence of Mao Zedong's political and military thought on China's conduct of the war.

As Shu Guang Zhang reminds us, many observers in 1950 thought it foolhardy for this young and underdeveloped communist nation to engage in yet another war. Coming so soon after its costly civil war with the Nationalists, the Korean crisis...

Legendary "Wild Bill" Donovan, CIA directors Allen Dulles and William Casey, journalists Stewart Alsop and James Reston, diplomat John McCloy, philanthropist Paul Mellon, playwright Robert Sherwood, theatrical great John Houseman, and civil rights leader Ralph Bunche were among the thousands of people who led or participated in America's massive propaganda campaign against Nazi Germany. In The Propaganda Warriors Clayton Laurie fully unveils for the first time this unprecedented, ambitious, and embattled wartime enterprise.

Laurie details the creation, evolution, and field...

Under Joseph Stalin's iron-fisted rule, the Soviet state tried to forge an army that would be both a shining example of proletarian power and an indomitable deterrent against fascist aggression. In reality, Roger Reese reveals, Stalin's grand military experiment failed miserably on both counts before it was finally rescued within the crucible of war.

Reese greatly expands our understanding of the Red Army's evolution during the 1930s and its near decimation at the beginning of World War II. Counter to conventional views, he argues that the Stalinist state largely failed in its attempt to...

Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruninghooks into spears: let the weak say I am strong.-Joel 3:10

Beating Plowshares into Swords inaugurates an extraordinarily ambitious effort by Paul Koistinen to compose a comprehensive and wide-ranging study on the economics of American warfare from the colonial period to the present. When completed, this multi-volume project will stand as the definitive work on a complex subject that until now has been superficially treated or completely ignored.

Koistinen focuses not upon battlefields and battles but upon the means used to make...

The engines are started, twenty shiny propellers glistening in the sun, forty exhausts rumbling and belching blue smoke. . . . Everything ready, the pilot waves his hand, the blocks are pulled and the flights taxi out one at a time. Away goes the commander, motor roaring, streamers flying, and the rest follow in their proper formation order. A couple of turns around the aerodrome and they're away to the line-up, up, and they soon disappear in the haze.

Just beyond that beckoning "haze," Captain Bogart Rogers and his fellow pilots flew into enemy territory to fight the world's first air...

Bestselling author Bradley Smith reveals the surprisingly rich exchange of wartime intelligence between the Anglo-American allies and the Soviet Union, as well as the procedures and politics that made such an exchange possible.

Between the late 1930s and 1945, allied intelligence organizations expanded at an enormous rate in order to acquire the secret information their governments needed to win the war. But, as Smith demonstrates, the demand for intelligence far outpaced the ability of any one ally to produce it. For that reason, Washington, London, and Moscow were compelled to share...