637,721 research outputs found

    Klotzen, Nicht Kleckern (Strike Together, Not Divided!): the Panzer Divisions As New Dominating Strategy of Modern Warfare

    Get PDF
    The beginning of the Second World War was dominated by a new type of strategy developed by German General Heinz Guderian that overwhelmed the Allied armies in Poland and France. Guderian argued that the best way to win on the battlefield and avoid the stalemate of World War I should be done through the use of tanks grouped together in formation: the product of this strategy was embodied in the Panzer divisions that, through mobility and coordination of multiple weapons, were able to breach the enemy\u27s defensive lines with devastating effects

    U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan: Old Wine in Trump's Bottle

    Get PDF
    The Afghan government, along with the United States does not have what it takes to substantially win against the Taliban on the battlefield, but they do not want to lose either. So, the new U.S. strategy on Afghanistan that has come after much reviews and reassessment among Trump’s inner circle of advisers is designed to avoid losing, rather than winning in Afghanistan. From a presidential candidate who believed that the U.S. should pull out immediately from Afghanistan to a president who has now owned the war publicly, President Trump has come a long way in a short time. However, it is still unclear what the new troop surge in Afghanistan is meant for, and what it sets to do, what has not been tried and tested already

    Why winning a war is no longer necessary : modern warfare and the United States of America through the prism of the wars of Vietnam and Iraq

    Get PDF
    This thesis explores the role of warfare and the United States of America (US) in contemporary times. Prior to this, however, pre-modern warfare is examined to illustrate its dynamics prior to the emergence of the nation-state... This thesis is original because it steps beyond the boundaries of what war research has focussed on, which directly postulates victory or defeat in war is what provides unambiguous power-stakes. The thesis addresses why it is no longer necessary to win a war in order for power to be unambiguous and I contend, not needing to win a war, in the traditional sense of the term is the new objective of the US military, and the way in which this is accomplished is examined in detail."Doctor of Philosoph

    Winning the war, winning the peace: The image of the \u27Indian\u27 in English-Canada, 1930-1948

    Get PDF
    This dissertation examines the impact of the Second World War on the image of the \u27Indian\u27 prevalent in English-Canada between 1930 and 1948. Traditionally, historical studies have assumed that the war formed a watershed in Canadian social, cultural and Aboriginal history: marking the end of the \u27era of irrelevance\u27 for Aboriginal people and creating a paradigm-shift in feelings about \u27racial\u27 tolerance and human rights. This study explores the shift in English-Canadian images of the \u27Indian\u27 from 1930 to 1948, as a way of testing the prevailing interpretation of the war as a major historical pivot in Canadian cultural constructions of the \u27other\u27 and in state-Aboriginal relations. The image developed by the Indian Affairs Branch (IAB) is treated separately from that evident in the public domain. The former constructed the \u27Administrative Indian\u27 in a hostile and derogatory manner, necessary to legitimise and rationalise the IAE\u27s goal of assimilation. The public, by contrast, had the luxury to think about the First Nations, or not, as they wished. The result was an ambivalent dual image, which trivialised Aboriginal people and issues and helped Canadians manage collective guilt for the displacement and plight of the \u27Indian\u27. The efforts to win the war and later to win the peace created acute pressure on images of the \u27Indian\u27. While the IAB\u27s disciplined discourse weathered the strain almost unchanged, the same cannot be said of the public discourse, which proved adept at incorporating new images into its existing mental framework as circumstances warranted. As the country entered the post-war period, Canadians wished to do right by the Indian\u27, in appreciation for the symbolically important contributions of Aboriginal people to the national war effort_ The resulting parliamentary committee, which sat between 1946-1948, re-enshrined assimilation as the goal of Canadian Indian policy. Adherence to this policy was still based on an underlying certainty in English-Canadian society\u27s superiority over that of the \u27Indian\u27, but it could no longer be defended on those grounds. In post-1945 Canada, assimilation was renewed and rationalised through a new faith in interventionist government, liberal-democratic principles and the promise of scientific social engineering

    THE AMERICAN CONSCIENCE FROM PRAGUE TO HIROSHIMA: PEACE PSYCHOLOGY TOWARD A NUCLEAR-FREE WORLD WITHOUT FIRING A SHOT

    Get PDF
    The 9/11 and the subsequent Afghanistan and Iraq Wars failed to meet the ardent but sincerest expectations of all the people in the world who longed for the world peace. The 20th century was characterized by the most tragic inhumanity of the never-ending wars: the two world wars and the subsequent Cold War: wars in Korea, Vietnam, central America and elsewhere. It was as if the two superpowers had displaced their conflicts to avoid a nuclear war erasing the human race. The height of the Cold War during the 1980s also brought about the nuclear disarmament movement by people across the globe while one of the two superpowers, an “evil empire” (Reagan,1983), was falling as best symbolized by the fall of Berlin Wall in 1989. During the disappearing of the “enemy” and the building of world peace in the early 21st century, the author argues, the only superpower has come to a standstill in leading the way to defeat the “new enemy” or win the world peace, not due to the lack of its military might, but because of its reckoning filtered through the Cold War, an old mindset proved wrong: “[M]oral leadership is more powerful than any weapon,” according to President Obama’s Prague speech, the Noble Peace Prize recipient in 2009. This research presents such variables as nationalism, nuclear politics, powerlessness and conscience. The author points to America’s declaration in Hiroshima of “no first-use of a nuclear bomb” as the way to world peace in the 21st century

    THE AMERICAN CONSCIENCE FROM PRAGUE TO HIROSHIMA: PEACE PSYCHOLOGY TOWARD A NUCLEAR-FREE WORLD WITHOUT FIRING A SHOT

    Get PDF
    The 9/11 and the subsequent Afghanistan and Iraq Wars failed to meet the ardent but sincerest expectations of all the people in the world who longed for the world peace. The 20th century was characterized by the most tragic inhumanity of the never-ending wars: the two world wars and the subsequent Cold War: wars in Korea, Vietnam, central America and elsewhere. It was as if the two superpowers had displaced their conflicts to avoid a nuclear war erasing the human race. The height of the Cold War during the 1980s also brought about the nuclear disarmament movement by people across the globe while one of the two superpowers, an “evil empire” (Reagan,1983), was falling as best symbolized by the fall of Berlin Wall in 1989. During the disappearing of the “enemy” and the building of world peace in the early 21st century, the author argues, the only superpower has come to a standstill in leading the way to defeat the “new enemy” or win the world peace, not due to the lack of its military might, but because of its reckoning filtered through the Cold War, an old mindset proved wrong: “[M]oral leadership is more powerful than any weapon,” according to President Obama’s Prague speech, the Noble Peace Prize recipient in 2009. This research presents such variables as nationalism, nuclear politics, powerlessness and conscience. The author points to America’s declaration in Hiroshima of “no first-use of a nuclear bomb” as the way to world peace in the 21st century

    The Emancipation Proclamation In The Writings Of Selected Professional Negro Historians And Selected Professional Southern White Historians

    Get PDF
    Revolutionary changes is one of the most interesting phenomenon in the study of historiography, m no area has there been such a change in the area of historical writing in the era of the Civil War by black and white writers in recent years. The purpose of this paper is to examine the Emancipation Proclamation in the light of the contemporary Civil rights and Negro rights struggle as well as the struggle of the southern region to maintain some semblance of traditional cultural identity and distinctiveness. The writer chose this topic because the Emancipation Proclamation readily becomes the focal point of much emotional bias in historical interpretation. There are few incidences in American history with the capacity to evoke reactions strong enough to overcome the caution of the trained professional because the status of race was involved in the act. The writer feels that it is significant in the study to use professional Negro and Southern White writers in an area of public controversy instead of lay writers because of the way professional historians write and document their materials. What will be demonstrated here is not new information on the Emancipation Proclamation, but the fact that the facts of history are, under the best professional circumstances, the victim of overt bias of the writer, some of which even he himself would find it difficult to explain. STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM The development of the scholarship on the problem of the Emancipation Proclamation among the seven selected Negro writers shows the follox^ing Pattern between World War II and the present. Three categories dominate this pattern of writing which appeared successively as international humanitarian, military, and war for human freedom. There are three Negroes who fall into the international humanitarian category. They are, W.E.B. DuBois, Charles Wesley, and John Hope Franklin. DuBois saw the Emancipation Proclamation come not simply to black folks in 1863; to white Americans came slowly a new vision and a new uplift, a sudden freeing of hateful mental shadows. Charles Wesley observed that the Emancipation Proclamation as far as foreign nations were concerned was to shift the war issue to slavery and to win anti-slavery sympathizers in Europe. John Hope Franklin felt that the Emancipation Proclamation had moral and humanitarian significance

    Etika rata i „teorija pravednog rata“

    Get PDF
    The paper examines the justification of warfare. The main thesis is that war is very difficult to justify, and justification by invoking “justice” is not the way to succeed it. Justification and justness (“justice”) are very different venues: while the first attempts to explain the nature of war and offer possible schemes of resolution (through adequate definitions), the second aims to endorse a specific type of warfare as correct and hence allowed – which is the crucial part of “just war theory.” However, “just war theory,” somewhat Manichean in its nature, has very deep flaws. Its final result is criminalization of war, which reduces warfare to police action, and finally implies a very strange proviso that one side has a right to win. All that endangers the distinction between ius ad bellum and ius in bello, and destroys the collective character of warfare (reducing it to an incomprehensible individual level, as if a group of people entered a battle in hopes of finding another group of people willing to respond). Justification of war is actually quite different – it starts from the definition of war as a kind of conflict which cannot be solved peacefully, but for which there is mutual understanding that it cannot remain unresolved. The aim of war is not justice, but peace, i.e. either a new articulation of peace, or a restoration of the status quo ante. Additionally, unlike police actions, the result of war cannot be known or assumed in advance, giving war its main feature: the lack of control over the future. Control over the future, predictability (obtained through laws), is a feature of peace. This might imply that war is a consequence of failed peace, or inability to maintain peace. The explanation of this inability (which could simply be incompetence, or because peace, as a specific articulation of distribution of social power, is not tenable anymore) forms the justification of war. Justice is always an important part of it, but justification cannot be reduced to it. The logic contained here refers to ius ad bellum, while ius in bello is relative to various parameters of sensitivity prevalent in a particular time (and expressed in customary and legal rules of warfare), with the purpose to make warfare more humane and less expensive

    Great war leaders' successful media strategies for business: how Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John Curtin won journalists' support

    Get PDF
    At the height of the Pacific war, the American and Australian leaders communicated successfully with journalists, providing valuable business strategies on how to develop positive media relations in crises. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in December 1941, the United States President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Australian Prime Minister, John Curtin, generated favorable news coverage about their leadership. Yet there is a lack of information on their media strategies to win journalists' support in a time of crisis. This paper shows how Roosevelt and Curtin managed to influence and persuade the news media. First, they frequently communicated to journalists in an honest, egalitarian and friendly way, increasing the number of regular news briefings between the press and the national leader. Secondly, they advanced the relatively new medium of radio to broadcast appealing, inclusive and accessible messages. Journalists repeated and amplified their radio talks in the news. Thirdly, they used practiced, forceful rhetoric and hand gestures in filmed newsreel scenes to convey their resolve and create the appearance of a direct, friendly relationship with their target audiences. These media strategies are still useful to business leaders when managing information needs in today's 24-hour news cycle

    The Muse Dons Khaki: American Songs and Music of World War I

    Get PDF
    During the years 1917 and 1918 the United States participated in a "war to end all wars." During the conflict the government deliberately enlisted the power of song both at home and on the fighting front to help in the great task of winning the war. The idea of organized singing in the training of the U. S. Army was comparatively new at the time America entered World War I, but it soon came to be recognized as an integral part of the training itself. The government encouraged singing in the army both on marches and in leisure-time groups because it contributed substantially to the enjoyment, contentment and efficiency of the soldier. The ballads, however, that eased tired muscles after a long days march and boosted morale after a day of heavy fighting were not government sponsored songs, but parodies and GI folk songs that the Sammies themselves composed. These ditties gave glimpses of the real army, the friendly rivalry between the various branches and the traditional humor of the service. Such songs, though lusty and bawdy, preserved for posterity the spirit of the A.E.F. Then, too, songs and music proved to be of great value to the "stay-at-homes" during World War I. Our "army of the interior" responded readily to the stimulus of music. It participated in "Liberty Sings," "Bond Singing," and "Four-minute Singing" in the nation's theaters. The civilian community wanted to sing popular patriotic songs because it then felt a closer relationship to loved ones who were in service. In addition, song fests satisfied man's natural craving for security and inspiration. During the American period of the war, Tin Pan Alley rushed to the fore and supplied the country with no less than nine thousand songs from 1917 to 1919. Such ditties buoyed up sunken spirits, boosted morale, and made for a united force on the home front. Songs are usually a yardstick of the times and give us a clue as to what the entire populace is thinking or how it feels about certain issues. The songs and music of our country from 1914 to 1919 reflected not only the history but moods, manners and impulses that constituted the American way of life. In 1914 and 1915 our songs exhibited a staunch pacifism and a fervent desire to remain aloof from the political entanglements in Europe. However, in 1916, 1917 and 1918 the pacifism which had been exhibited earlier in our songs gave way to a surging pride and a firm determination to win the war. Then in 1919 our songs reflected the relief and happiness that came when the task of war was over. Music during World War I was not a luxury or a gift but a necessity. Songs were indispensable to our armed forces, but they were also a necessity for those who had to remain behind, to hope, to pray and to wait
    • …
    corecore