Understanding War: An Annotated Bibliography

by Christian P. Potholm

Overview

The third book in Professor Christian Potholm’s war trilogy (which includes Winning at War and War Wisdom), Understanding War provides a most workable bibliography dealing with the vast literature on war and warfare. As such, it provides insights into over 3000 works on this overwhelmingly extensive material. Understanding War is thus the most comprehensive annotated bibliography available today.

Moreover, by dividing war material into eighteen overarching themes of analysis and fifty seminal topics, and focusing on these, Understanding War enables the reader to access and understand the broadest possible array of materials across both time and space, beginning with the earliest forms of warfare and concluding with the contemporary situation.

Stimulating and thought-provoking, this volume is essential for an understanding of the breadth and depth of the vast scholarship dealing with war and warfare through human history and across cultures.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780761867739
Publisher:	University Press of America
Publication date:	08/03/2016
Pages:	718
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.90(d)

About the Author

Christian P. Potholm is the DeAlva Stanwood Alexander Professor of Government at Bowdoin College. He has studied and taught about war for over 50 years. His major works on war include Winning at War: Seven Keys to Military Victory Throughout History, War Wisdom: A Cross Cultural Sampling, Liberation and Exploitation and Strategy and Conflict.

Table of Contents

Preface
Part I Analyzing Warfare

1. Why Study Military Matters?
2. “Eros and Mars: The Nature of Humankind” -or- “Making Love AND War”
3. The Search for Fundamental Truths about War: Sun Tzu, Kautilya, Thucydides, Jomini, Clausewitz and Other Military Thinkers and Students of War
4. Geopolitics and the Long Shadow of Geography
5. The Template of Mars

“Superior Weapons Technology”
“Superior Discipline”
“Sustained but Controlled Ruthlessness”
“Receptivity to Military and Integrative Innovation”
“The Ability and Willingness to Protect Capital from People and Rulers”
“The Centrality of Superior Will”
“The Belief That There Will Always Be another War”

1. “The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb” -or- “Hiroshima as Seen Through the Lens of Mars”
2. “Mars is a Jealous God”: Part I The Lessons of Iraq War I-or-“Clausewitz Vindicated—For the Last Time?”
3. “Is the Template Obsolete in the Face of Insurgencies?”

Theoreticians and Practitioners
Overviews of Insurgency
Some Illustrative Case Studies: Showing the Experience of Insurgency and Counter Insurgency Across Cross-Cultural Lines

1. The American “Empire” and the Dangers Which Lie Ahead

The Empire as Empire (or Hegemon)
The Nuclear Dimension
China
Failed and Fragile States
Islamic Radical Salafists and Local and Global Insurgencies
Afghanistan: Watch on the Danube Redux
Part II Topics in War

1. Early Warfare
2. Classical Infantry: Greek
3. Classical Infantry: Roman
4. “The Horsemen Commeth”: The Centrality of Mounted Warcraft

Part I: The Mounted Horsemen of the Steppes
Part II: European Heavy Horse: Feudalism and Knighthood, Power Diffusion and Its Consequences and Later Power Centralization
Part III: Byzantium
Part IV: African Heavy Horse: Power Centralization and Power Diffusion
Part V: Arab Light(er) Horse: Flow and Ebb, Ebb and Flow
Part VI: Japanese and Chinese
Part VII: Parthian and Sassanian
Part VIII: Mongol and Later Turkic Asian Horsemen
Part IX: Indian and South Asian

1. The Vikings
2. The Gunpowder and Discipline Revolution and The Expansion of the Gunpowder Empires
3. Era of the European Great Captains

Maurice of Nassau (1567-1625)
Gustavus Adolphus (1594-1632)
Charles XII (1682-1718)
Louis XIV
The Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722)
Frederick the Great (1712-1786)

1. Warfare on the Periphery and The Expansion of the European Gunpowder Empires
2. Revolution and Civil War
3. The Real United States Is Born

American Military History (General)
War of 1812
The Mexican War

1. Further Democratization of War: The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars Spread Nationalism to Prussia, Austria and Especially Russia
2. “The American Civil War: Fratricide in Living Color”
3. Civil Wars in Perspective

Some Illustrative Examples

1. Precursors to 20th Century War
2. World War I: “The Hypertrophy of War and the Triumph of the Defense”
3. Transition Within the Continuum: The Interwar Years
4. The Battle of Nomonhan/Khalkin Gol
5. “The Triumph of the Offense”: The War in Europe
6. World War II: “Warcraft in the Pacific: 1941–1945”
7. The Cold War and Nuclear Weapons 1946–1992
8. The Korean War: or “The Forgotten War of Great Irony”
9. Vietnam: “People’s War, Long War”
10. “Mars is a Jealous God” Part II, The Lessons of Afghanistan I and II, and Iraq II and III

Afghanistan I and II
Iraq Wars II and III

1. Weapons in War
2. Logistics in War
3. “The Daughters of Mars:” Women at War
4. Homosexuality and Warfare
5. Warriorhood
6. The Return of Warriors
7. Other Wars
8. War Novels, Short Stories, Memoires and Poetry
9. War and Anti-War Films Including Revolutionary Warfare
10. Just War/Moral War

End note