This history of the RAND Corporation, written with full access to its archives, is a page-turning chronicle of the rise of the secretive think tank that has been the driving force behind the American government for 60 years.

Ia is a precog, tormented by visions of the future where her home galaxy has been devastated. To prevent this vision from coming true, Ia enlists in the Terran United Planets military with a plan to become a soldier who will inspire generations for the next three hundred years-a soldier history will call Bloody Mary.

A blistering critique of the gulf between America's soldiers and the society that sends them off to war. As war has become normalized, armed conflict has become an "abstraction" and military service "something for other people to do." Bacevich takes stock of a nation with an abiding appetite for war waged at enormous expense by a standing army demonstrably unable to achieve victory.

In this work Alan Forrest brings together some of the recent research on the Revolutionary army that has been undertaken on both sides of the Atlantic by younger historians, many of whom look to the influential work of Braudel for a model. Forrest places the armies of the Revolution in a broader social and political context by presenting the effects of war and militarization on French society and government in the Revolutionary period. Revolutionary idealists thought of the French soldier as a willing volunteer sacrificing himself for the principles of the Revolution; Forrest examines the convergence of these ideals with the ordinary, and often dreadful, experience of protracted warfare that the soldier endured.

Engagingly written by the diplomatic correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, this book tells the tale of Israel's lone soldiers, young men who have left family, friends, studies, and top jobs behind to travel to an unfamiliar country and culture and join its army. Revealing images from noted photojournalist Ricki Rosen bring the stories of 14 of these young men--including Michael Levin, who died in the Second Lebanon War-- to life. This chronicle also profiles Lieutenant Colonel (res.) Tzvika Levy, known as the "father of the lone soldiers," whose mission it is to welcome and prepare the foreign recruits. The stories gathered here serve as a testament to the enduring strength of the nation of Israel and its armed forces.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 Henry H. Arnold was a true believer in the power of the Air Force. He was one of only nine people ever to earn the rank of five-star general, and the only one with that rank in the Air Force. He had pushed for an Air Force independent of the Army, and he never wavered in his conviction of the usefulness of maximum destructive power in combat. #2 Arnold was a fanatical swimmer, and he pushed for the Air Force to be independent of the Army. He hired a test pilot named Franklin R. Collbohm to help him establish a new kind of scientific community, and the two men flew to California to meet with Douglas Aircraft boss Donald Douglas. #3 The Air Force was formed in 1946, and it was led by General Curtis LeMay. He was a cold warrior who wanted to develop new weapons, and he was the ideal candidate to lead the organization. #4 The US government contracted out its scientific research to private companies, so that they could create new weapons faster and cheaper.

Elizabeth D. Samet and her students learned to romanticize the army "from the stories of their fathers and from the movies." For Samet, it was the old World War II movies she used to watch on TV, while her students grew up on Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan. Unlike their teacher, however, these students, cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point, have decided to turn make-believe into real life. West Point is a world away from Yale, where Samet attended graduate school and where nothing sufficiently prepared her for teaching literature to young men and women who were training to fight a war. Intimate and poignant, Soldier's Heart chronicles the various tensions inherent in that life as well as the ways in which war has transformed Samet's relationship to literature. Fighting in Iraq, Samet's former students share what books and movies mean to them—the poetry of Wallace Stevens, the fiction of Virginia Woolf and J. M. Coetzee, the epics of Homer, or the films of James Cagney. Their letters in turn prompt Samet to wonder exactly what she owes to cadets in the classroom. Samet arrived at West Point before September 11, 2001, and has seen the academy change dramatically. In Soldier's Heart, she reads this transformation through her own experiences and those of her students. Forcefully examining what it means to be a civilian teaching literature at a military academy, Samet also considers the role of women in the army, the dangerous tides of religious and political zeal roiling the country, the uses of the call to patriotism, and the cult of sacrifice she believes is currently paralyzing national debate. Ultimately, Samet offers an honest and original reflection on the relationship between art and life.

How war gave birth to revolution in the 19th century The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 introduced new military technologies, transformed the organization of armies, and upset the continental balance of power, promulgating new regimented ideas of nationhood and conflict resolution more widely. However, the mass armies that became a new standard required mass mobilization and the arming of working people, who exercised a new power through both a German social democracy and popular insurgent French movements. As in the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Paris Commune of 1871 grew directly from the discontent among radicalized soldiers and civilians pressed into armed service on behalf of institutions they learned to mistrust. If this militarized class conflict, the brutality of the Commune's subsequent repression not only butchered the tens of thousands of Parisians but slaughtered an old utopian faith that appeals to reason and morality could resolve social tensions. War among nations became linked to revolution and revolution to armed struggle.