Warriors Without War takes readers beneath the placid waters of the Seminole’s public image and into the fascinating depths of Seminole society and politics. For the entire last quarter of the twentieth century, the Seminole Tribe of Florida, a federally recognized American Indian Tribe, struggled as it transitioned from a tiny group of warriors into one of the best-known tribes on the world’s economic stage through their gaming enterprises. Caught between a desperate desire for continued cultural survival and the mounting pressures of the non-Indian world—especially, the increasing requirements of the United States government— the Seminoles took a warriorlike approach to financial risk management. Their leader was the sometimes charming, sometimes crass and explosive, always warriorlike James Billie, who twice led the tribe in fights with the State of Florida that led all the way to the US Supreme Court. Patricia Riles Wickman, who lived and worked for fifteen years with the Seminole people, chronicles the near-meteoric rise of the tribe and its leader to the pinnacle of international fame, and Billie’s ultimate fall after twenty-four years in power. Based partly on her own personal experiences working with the Seminole Tribe of Florida, Wickman has produced an in-depth study of the rise of one of the largest Indian gaming operations in the United States that reads almost like a Capote nonfiction novel.

Coker (international relations, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK) puts a new spin on war by considering it as a changeable phenomenon that varies through time and place. The shift of war from an event that drew physically and emotionally on a nation's people to one that is seen with detachment as foreign policy is the book's major premise. Coker considers numerous wars, both ancient and modern (including the recent conflicts in Somalia and Afghanistan), and also considers the impact of computers and the possibility of cyber-war. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

WARS CHANGE, WARRIORS DON'T We are all warriors. Each of us struggles every day to define and defend our sense of purpose and integrity, to justify our existence on the planet and to understand, if only within our own hearts, who we are and what we believe in. Do we fight by a code? If so, what is it? What is the Warrior Ethos? Where did it come from? What form does it take today? How do we (and how can we) use it and be true to it in our internal and external lives? The Warrior Ethos is intended not only for men and women in uniform, but artists, entrepreneurs and other warriors in other walks of life. The book examines the evolution of the warrior code of honor and "mental toughness." It goes back to the ancient Spartans and Athenians, to Caesar's Romans, Alexander's Macedonians and the Persians of Cyrus the Great (not excluding the Garden of Eden and the primitive hunting band). Sources include Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch, Xenophon, Vegetius, Arrian and Curtius--and on down to Gen. George Patton, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, and Israeli Minister of Defense, Moshe Dayan.

Technology is changing the way wars are fought. Unmanned robots are used to drop bombs, launch missiles, and are even used in ground combat . . . but if things go wrong, who's really to blame? In the ever-challenging deserts of Iraq, US army officer Nathan Dixon comes face to face with the future of warfare. Assigned to investigate a friendly fire incident involving a rogue unmanned ground combat vehicle, Dixon finds that behind every action lies a chain of hidden decisions. And this one placed hundreds, maybe thousands, of troops in harm's way. Journalist Alex Hughes is out to expose the truth. As the insurgencies heat up around them, Dixon must weed through self-serving paramilitary contractors, fledging commanding officers, and soldiers willing to hide the facts at any cost, to discover who defines the rules of war without the soldier. And where does patriotism end and national security begin? At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

The founder of Blackwater offers the gripping true story of the world’s most controversial military contractor. In 1997, former Navy SEAL Erik Prince started a business that would recruit civilians for the riskiest security jobs in the world. As Blackwater’s reputation grew, demand for its services escalated, and its men eventually completed nearly 100,000 missions for both the Bush and Obama administrations. It was a huge success except for one problem: Blackwater was demonized around the world. Its employees were smeared as mercenaries, profiteers, or worse. And because of the secrecy requirements of its contracts with the Pentagon, the State Department, and the CIA, Prince was unable to correct false information. But now he’s finally able to tell the full story about some of the biggest controversies of the War on Terror, in a memoir that reads like a thriller.

Foremost military historian Richard Holmes offers us a compelling and at times terrifying account of what it means to be a contemporary soldier.

A leading cultural historian of premodern Japan draws a rich portrait of the emerging samurai culture as it is portrayed in gunki-mono, or war tales, examining eight major works spanning the mid-tenth to late fourteenth centuries. Although many of the major war tales have been translated into English, Warriors of Japan is the first book-length study of the tales and their place in Japanese history. The war tales are one of the most important sources of knowledge about Japan's premodern warriors, revealing much about the medieval psyche and the evolving perceptions of warriors, warfare, and warrior customs.

Widely-researched and fast-paced, Private Warriors surveys the generals, gun-runners and national security staffers who were cast adrift at the end of the Cold War and who now operate in the private sector. In these pages we encounter Ernst Werner Glatt, a right-wing German who was for many years the Pentagon's preferred gun-runner; ex-Secretary of State Alexander Haig who now lobbies for China and assists in selling weapons to Turkey; and Frank Gaffney, an ex-Pentagon official who has grown rich by promoting the biggest boondoggle of them all, Star Wars. Today's private warriors have a direct financial interest in war and the connections to push for the maintenance of bloated military budgets.

A diverse group of contributors offer different perspectives on whether or not the different experiences of our military and the broader society amounts to a "gap"—and if the American public is losing connection to its military. They analyze extensive polling information to identify those gaps between civilian and military attitudes on issues central to the military profession and the professionalism of our military, determine which if any of these gaps are problematic for sustaining the traditionally strong bonds between the American military and its broader public, analyze whether any problematic gaps are amenable to remediation by policy means, and assess potential solutions. The contributors also explore public disengagement and the effect of high levels of public support for the military combined with very low levels of trust in elected political leaders—both recurring themes in their research. And they reflect on whether American society is becoming so divorced from the requirements for success on the battlefield that not only will we fail to comprehend our military, but we also will be unwilling to endure a military so constituted to protect us. Contributors: Rosa Brooks, Matthew Colford,Thomas Donnelly, Peter Feaver, Jim Golby, Jim Hake, Tod Lindberg, Mackubin Thomas Owens, Cody Poplin, Nadia Schadlow, A. J. Sugarman, Lindsay Cohn Warrior, Benjamin Wittes

"From the mud and bloody hell of Flanders to forlorn battles in Siberia and bitter street fighting to the very heart of Berlin 1945. From Africa to the Arctic, fighting men from a country frowned upon for its 'cowardly' neutrality participated in all the crucial battles of World War I and II. Their homeland was Sweden, which has enjoyed almost two hundred years of peace ... despite Sweden's policy of neutrality, no fewer than 23,000 Swedish citizens went to war between 1914 and 1945 ... [this book] also puts an end to the myth that most Swedes enlisted in Hitler's forces. Only 200 joined the Waffen-SS or the Wehrmacht of 1939-1945. In the same period, 9,000 Swedish citizens joined the Americans, the British, the Norwegians, and the Poles. In addition, well over 200,000 men of Swedish descent served in US, British, Canadian, and Australian Armed Forces"--Page 4 of cover