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• Tremors
• The new American way of war
• Pirates!
• Wanna go to Gitmo?
• Lawyers with guns
• The full spectrum
• The secret war
• Future warfare
• What's an army for?
• What we've made it
• How we got here
• Putting war into a box
• Taming war
• An optimistic enterprise
• Making war
• Making the state
• Un-making sovereignty
• Making the military
• An age of uncertainty
• Counting the costs
• Car bombs and radioactive sushi
• War everywhere, law nowhere?
• Institutional costs
• Managing war's paradoxes.

The Pentagon's a strange place. Inside secure command centers, military officials make life and death decisions--but the Pentagon also offers food courts, banks, drugstores, florists, and chocolate shops. When Rosa Brooks gave her family a tour, her mother gaped at the glossy window displays: "So the heart of American military power is a shopping mall?" In a sense, yes: the U.S. military has become our one-stop-shopping solution to global problems. Today's military personnel analyze computer code, train Afghan judges, build Ebola isolation wards, eavesdrop on electronic communications, develop soap operas, and patrol the seas for pirates. Rosa Brooks traces this seismic shift in how America wages war from an unconventional perspective. She is a former top Pentagon official and the daughter of antiwar protesters; a human rights activist and the wife of an Army Special Forces officer. Her book is by turns a memoir, a work of journalism, and a scholarly exploration of history, anthropology, and law. But at its heart it is a rallying cry, for Brooks shows that when the war machine breaks out of its borders, we undermine the values and rules that keep our world from sliding toward chaos. And as we pile new tasks onto the military, we make it increasingly ill-prepared for the threats America faces. Brooks sounds an alarm, forcing us to see how the collapsing barriers between war and peace threaten both America and the world. And time is running out to make things right.--From dust jacket.

• Tremors
• The new American way of war
• Pirates!
• Wanna go to Gitmo?
• Lawyers with guns
• The full spectrum
• The secret war
• Future warfare
• What's an army for?
• What we've made it
• How we got here
• Putting war into a box
• Taming war
• An optimistic enterprise
• Making war
• Making the state
• Un-making sovereignty
• Making the military
• An age of uncertainty
• Counting the costs
• Car bombs and radioactive sushi
• War everywhere, law nowhere?
• Institutional costs
• Managing war's paradoxes.

The first serious book to examine what happens when the ancient boundary between war and peace is erased.Once, war was a temporary state of affairs-a violent but brief interlude between times of peace. Today, America's wars are everywhere and forever: our enemies change constantly and rarely wear uniforms, and virtually anything can become a weapon. As war expands, so does the role of the US military. Today, military personnel don't just "kill people and break stuff." Instead, they analyze computer code, train Afghan judges, build Ebola isolation wards, eavesdrop on electronic communications, develop soap operas, and patrol for pirates. You name it, the military does it. Rosa Brooks traces this seismic shift in how America wages war from an unconventional perspective-that of a former top Pentagon official who is the daughter of two anti-war protesters and a human rights activist married to an Army Green Beret. Her experiences lead her to an urgent warning: When the boundaries around war disappear, we risk destroying America's founding values and the laws and institutions we've built-and undermining the international rules and organizations that keep our world from sliding towards chaos. If Russia and China have recently grown bolder in their foreign adventures, it's no accident; US precedents have paved the way for the increasingly unconstrained use of military power by states around the globe. Meanwhile, we continue to pile new tasks onto the military, making it increasingly ill-prepared for the threats America will face in the years to come. By turns a memoir, a work of journalism, a scholarly exploration into history, anthropology and law, and a rallying cry, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything transforms the familiar into the alien, showing us that the culture we inhabit is reshaping us in ways we may suspect, but don't really understand. It's the kind of book that will leave you moved, astonished, and profoundly disturbed, for the world around us is quietly changing beyond recognition-and time is running out to make things right.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

This fascinating book is the first to cover the little known C Squadron of the Special Air Service. Operating in Africa, the Squadron was involved in almost continuous counter communist terrorist operations over the period 1968 to 1980. In the unstable final stages of British colonial and white rule, the Squadron was never short of action. African nationalist movements, backed by Russia s and China s direct and indirect support posed a constant and deadly threat to the existing regimes. Small highly trained detachments of the SAS with highly developed bush warfare skills proved devastatingly effective and achieved results out of all proportion to their size. Often their enemies believed that they were facing rival factions and turned on each other. The inevitable involvement of African wildlife adds an extra dimension of excitement Written by a seasoned former senior member of C Squadron, Secret **SAS Missions in Africa** paints a graphic and thrilling account of their covert operations and the colourful characters that undertook them.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Published in association with Imperial War Museums, this is a fascinating anthology of first-hand stories from Spitfire heroes and heroines of the Second World War.The Spitfire is the world's most iconic aeroplane. Coming into its own during the Battle of Britain, it became famous during the Second World War as the only plane that could match the enemy fighters in the sky.Yet, even today, the history of the Spitfire contains many hitherto hidden or little-known stories of the men and women behind the plane; not only the gifted creators and inventors who brought the Spitfire to life, or the brave fighter pilots from many countries who triumphed in battle, but also the thousands of other people whose lives were affected by their personal connection to it - engineers, ground crew, factory or office workers, and their families. Spitfire Stories recounts the memories and stories of these people, from the birth of the Spitfire in the 1930s to the present day. Among these accounts is the extraordinary tale of the fighter pilot who only discovered, fifty years on, the tragic truth of his last Spitfire flight, the businessman whose blank cheque changed the course of the war, the ninety-five-year-old RAF engineer who was determined to be reunited with his beloved Spit before he died, and the little girl who inspired the plane's creation - and went on to marry a movie star.Using documents, letters and photographs from the Imperial War Museums' unparalleled archive, plus exclusive first-hand interviews, these stories of the Spitfire are a revelatory collection of small but significant histories, to be treasured by all who love and admire the iconic plane.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

To bale out of a stricken aeroplane is a pilot's or aircrew's final chance to escape death. It is a traumatic and hazardous exercise that is only practiced in extremis and is in itself full of danger with no guarantee of survival. Many struggled free of a flaming and spinning aircraft only to see their parachute alight above them, some were machine gunned to death by their opponents as they drifted to earth, some landed in mine-fields and were blown apart and many landed in forests and died suspended from the treetops. And yet many survived, some to fight again and some to become prisoners of war. This book relates the experiences of many airmen who survived to tell the tale, some quite remarkable because of pure good luck, some because of ingenuity and some through pure determination to survive at all costs. This book includes escapes from crippled German, British and US aircraft; stories of the first pilots to use parachutes in WW1; amazing escapes from aircraft in the inter-war years.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)