An exploration of military responses to revolutions and how to predict such reactions in the future We know that a revolution's success largely depends on the army's response to it. But can we predict the military's reaction to an uprising? How Armies Respond to Revolutions and Why argues that it is possible to make a highly educated guess—and in some cases even a confident prediction—about the generals' response to a domestic revolt if we know enough about the army, the state it is supposed to serve, the society in which it exists, and the external environment that affects its actions. Through concise case studies of modern uprisings in Iran, China, Eastern Europe, Burma, and the Arab world, Zoltan Barany looks at the reasons for and the logic behind the variety of choices soldiers ultimately make. Barany offers tools—in the form of questions to be asked and answered—that enable analysts to provide the most informed assessment possible regarding an army's likely response to a revolution and, ultimately, the probable fate of the revolution itself. He examines such factors as the military's internal cohesion, the regime's treatment of its armed forces, and the size, composition, and nature of the demonstrations. How Armies Respond to Revolutions and Why explains how generals decide to support or suppress domestic uprisings.

An exploration of military responses to revolutions and how to predict such reactions in the future We know that a revolution's success largely depends on the army's response to it. But can we predict the military's reaction to an uprising? How Armies Respond to Revolutions and Why argues that it is possible to make a highly educated guess—and in some cases even a confident prediction—about the generals' response to a domestic revolt if we know enough about the army, the state it is supposed to serve, the society in which it exists, and the external environment that affects its actions. Through concise case studies of modern uprisings in Iran, China, Eastern Europe, Burma, and the Arab world, Zoltan Barany looks at the reasons for and the logic behind the variety of choices soldiers ultimately make. Barany offers tools—in the form of questions to be asked and answered—that enable analysts to provide the most informed assessment possible regarding an army's likely response to a revolution and, ultimately, the probable fate of the revolution itself. He examines such factors as the military's internal cohesion, the regime's treatment of its armed forces, and the size, composition, and nature of the demonstrations. How Armies Respond to Revolutions and Why explains how generals decide to support or suppress domestic uprisings.

Armies of Arabia is the first book to comprehensively analyze the armed forces of the Gulf monarchies. Zoltan Barany explains the conspicuous ineffectiveness of Gulf militaries with a combination of political-structural and sociocultural factors. Following a brief exposition on their historical evolution, he explores the region's six armies of the region comparatively, through the lenses of military politics, sociology, economics, and diplomacy. The book'sthemes come together in the last chapter that critically evaluates the Saudi and Emirati armed forces' record in the on-going war in Yemen.

"In the 20th and 21st century revolutions have become more urban, often less violent, but also more frequent and more transformative of the international order. Whether it is the revolutions against Communism in Eastern Europe and the USSR; the "color revolutions" across Asia, Europe and North Africa; or the religious revolutions in Iran, Afghanistan, and Syria; today's revolutions are quite different from those of the past. Modern theories of revolution have therefore replaced the older class-based theories with more varied, dynamic, and contingent models of social and political change. This new edition updates the history of revolutions, from Classical Greece and Rome to the Revolution of Dignity in the Ukraine, with attention to the changing types and outcomes of revolutionary struggles. It also presents the latest advances in the theory of revolutions, including the issues of revolutionary waves, revolutionary leadership, international influences, and the likelihood of revolutions to come. This volume provides a brief but comprehensive introduction to the nature of revolutions and their role in global history"--

This book brings together, for the first time, the classic articles that began and have shaped the debate about the Military Revolution in early modern Europe, adding important new essays by eminent historians of early modern Europe to further this important scholarly interchange.

This book studies the changes that have marked war in the Western World since the thirteenth century.

The 2011 eruptions of popular discontent across the Arab world, popularly dubbed the Arab Spring, were local manifestations of a regional mass movement for democracy, freedom, and human dignity. Authoritarian regimes were either overthrown or put on notice that the old ways of oppressing their subjects would no longer be tolerated. These essays from Middle East Report—the leading source of timely reporting and insightful analysis of the region—cover events in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, and Yemen. Written for a broad audience of students, policymakers, media analysts, and general readers, the collection reveals the underlying causes of the revolts by identifying key trends during the last two decades leading up to the recent insurrections.

Advances in technology can bring about dramatic changes in military operations, often termed revolutions in military affairs or RMAs. Such technology-driven changes in military operations are not merely a recent phenomenon: they have been occurring since the dawn of history, they will continue to occur in the future, and they will continue to bestow a military advantage on the first nation to develop and use them. Accordingly, it is important to the continued vitality and robustness of the U.S. defense posture for the DoD R&D community to be aware of technology developments that could revolutionize military operations in the future, and for the U.S. military services to be on the lookout for revolutionary ways in which to employ those technologies in warfare. This report examines the history of past RMAs, to see what can be learned from them regarding the challenge confronting the DoD today, when it has set out on a concerted effort to bring about a technology-driven transformation of the U.S. military to achieve the operational goals outlined in Joint Vision 2010. Among its many findings are three of particular note: RMAs are rarely brought about by dominant players (such as the U.S. military is today). For a dominant player to bring about an RMA requires a receptive organizational climate, fostering a continually refined vision of how war may change in the future and encouraging vigorous debate regarding the future of the organization; senior officers with traditional credentials willing to sponsor new ways of doing things and able to establish new promotion pathways for junior officers practicing a new way of war; mechanisms for experimentation, to discover, learn, test and demonstrate new ideas; and ways of responding positively to the results of successful experiments, in terms of doctrinal changes, acquisition programs, and force structure modifications. The DoD has some of these elements today, but is missing others. The report makes specific suggestions regarding ways of filling in the missing elements. Doing these things will facilitate DoD's force transformation activities and help ensure that the next RMA is brought about by the United States. and not some other nation.

This paper focuses on the formulation of doctrine since World War II. In no comparable period in history have the dimensions of the battlefield been so altered by rapid technological changes. The need for the tactical doctrines of the Army to remain correspondingly abreast of these changes is thus more pressing than ever before. Future conflicts are not likely to develop in the leisurely fashions of the past where tactical doctrines could be refined on the battlefield itself. It is, therefore, imperative that we apprehend future problems with as much accuracy as possible. One means of doing so is to pay particular attention to the business of how the Army's doctrine has developed historically, with a view to improving methods of future development.

In this magnificent synthesis of military, technological, and social history, William H. McNeill explores a whole millennium of human upheaval and traces the path by which we have arrived at the frightening dilemmas that now confront us. McNeill moves with equal mastery from the crossbow—banned by the Church in 1139 as too lethal for Christians to use against one another—to the nuclear missile, from the sociological consequences of drill in the seventeenth century to the emergence of the military-industrial complex in the twentieth. His central argument is that a commercial transformation of world society in the eleventh century caused military activity to respond increasingly to market forces as well as to the commands of rulers. Only in our own time, suggests McNeill, are command economies replacing the market control of large-scale human effort. The Pursuit of Power does not solve the problems of the present, but its discoveries, hypotheses, and sheer breadth of learning do offer a perspective on our current fears and, as McNeill hopes, "a ground for wiser action."