This is the first biography of Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, a key figure in the early development of airpower, whose significant and varied achievements have been overlooked because of his subsequent involvement in the fall of Singapore. It highlights Brooke-Popham’s role in developing the first modern military logistic system, the creation of the Royal Air Force Staff College and the organizational arrangements that underpinned Fighter Command’s s ...
The American military-industrial complex and accompanying culture are most often associated with massive weapons procurement programs and advanced technologies. However, one aspect of the complex is not a weapon or even a machine, but one of the world’s most highly engineered consumer products: the manufactured cigarette. Smoke ’Em If You Got ’Em describes the origins of the often comfortable, yet increasingly controversial relationship among th ...
Catkiller 3-2 provides unique insights into the role of the tactical air controller, airborne (TACA) in I Corps as seen through the eyes of one of the pilots who flew low-flying, unarmed, single-engine aircraft in support of Marine ground units during the Vietnam War. When Gen. William Westmoreland changed the Marines’ role in I Corps into a combat one, the Marines found themselves in need of more fixed wing aircraft to handle the TACA missions. ...
This book uses the 21st Century Foundations series format to re-introduce to the military community the writings of General Thomas S. Power, the third Commander-in-Chief of the Strategic Air Command (SAC). His unappreciated works contain many insights into military topics such as technology and the arms race, the nature of deterrence, and the military utility of space. Unifying all of these writings was Power’s quest to maintain nuclear superior ...
Red Crew is a first-hand account of U.S. Coast Guard anti-smuggling operations during the early years of the nation’s maritime war on drugs. Jim Howe describes his experience as the executive officer of a specialized drug-hunting crew that sailed in then-state-of-the-art “surface effect ships,” a small flotilla of high-speed vessels pressed into the drug war on short notice. In the early 1980s, South Florida and the Caribbean were awash ...
This study examines how intellectual and institutional developments transformed the U.S. Navy from 1873 to 1898. The period was a dynamic quarter-century in which Americans witnessed their Navy evolve. Cultures of progress—clusters of ideas, beliefs, values, and practices pertaining to modern warfare and technology—guided the Navy's transformation. The agents of naval transformation embraced a progressive ideology. They viewed scien ...
The Free Sea offers a unique, single-volume analysis of incidents in American history that affected U.S. freedom of navigation at sea. The book spans more than 200 years, beginning in the Colonial era with the Quasi-War with France in 1798 and extending to contemporary Freedom of Navigation operations in the South China Sea. Through wars and numerous crises with North Korea, North Vietnam, Cambodia, Iran, Russia and China, freedom of navigation ...
Learning War examines the U.S. Navy’s doctrinal development from 1898–1945 and explains why the Navy in that era was so successful as an organization at fostering innovation. A revolutionary study of one of history’s greatest success stories, this book draws profoundly important conclusions that give new insight, not only into how the Navy succeeded in becoming the best naval force in the world, but also into how modern organizations can exploit ...
This riveting biography details how Stanley “Swede” Vejtasa became a World War II naval hero. During the Battle of the Coral Sea, Swede flew an SBD Dauntless dive-bomber and helped sink Shoho, the first aircraft carrier lost by Japan in World War II. The next day, in that same Dauntless, he took off from USS Yorktown and out-flew and out-gunned three Japanese Zeros, making him the only dive bomber pilot to be awarded Navy Crosses for both bombin ...
