This timely book argues for a new, leader-centric approach to counterinsurgency, based on a reexamination of the history of counterinsurgency warfare.According to the prevailing view of counterinsurgency, the key to defeating insurgents is selecting methods that will win the people's hearts and minds. The hearts-and-minds theory permeates not only most counterinsurgency books of the twenty-first century but the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Man...

The epic story of America's most elite warriors: the Special Operations Forces.Born as small appendages to the conventional armies of World War II, the Special Operations Forces have grown into a behemoth of 70,000 troops, including Navy SEALs, Army Special Forces, Special Operations Marines, Rangers, and Delta Force. Weaving together their triumphs and tribulations, acclaimed historian Mark Moyar introduces a colorful cast of military men, brimming with exceptiona...

An inside perspective of the federal bureaucracy, with personal intrigue and prescriptions for future administrations."In the United States you can elect any president you want, but a small group of people you’ve never heard of still run everything — year after year, administration after administration. That’s not democracy. It’s oligarchy, and Mark Moyar explains exactly how it works."—Tucker CarlsonThis book tells a remarkable tru...

Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965–1968 is the long-awaited sequel to the immensely influential Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965. Like its predecessor, this book overturns the conventional wisdom using a treasure trove of new sources, many of them from the North Vietnamese side. Rejecting the standard depiction of U.S. military intervention as a hopeless folly, it shows America’s war to have been a strategic necessity that could have ended victoriously ha...

The essential resource on military and political strategy and the making of the modern worldThe New Makers of Modern Strategy is the next generation of the definitive work on strategy and the key figures who have shaped the theory and practice of war and statecraft throughout the centuries. Featuring entirely new entries by a who’s who of world-class scholars, this new edition provides global, comparative perspectives on strategic thought from antiquity to...

In this timely and fascinating account of US military power in the era of Barack Obama, a renowned historian with more than a decade inside the US Department of Defense reveals the true nature of the president’s political legacy as his two terms in office draw to a close.In stunning detail, Mark Moyar illustrates how the mounting global catastrophes of Obama’s second term are the direct result of the president’s first-term decisions to shrink US defense and replace...

This study explodes prevailing myths about the Phoenix Program, the CIA's top-secret effort to destroy the Viet Cong by neutralizing its “civilian” leaders. Drawing on recently declassified documents and interviews with American, South Vietnamese, and North Vietnamese sources, Mark Moyar examines the attempts to eradicate the Viet Cong infrastructure and analyzes their effectiveness. He addresses misconceptions about these efforts and provides an accurate, complete picture of the allies’ d...

Current foreign aid programs are failing because they are based upon flawed assumptions about how countries develop. They attempt to achieve development without first achieving good governance and security, which are essential prerequisites for sustainable development. In focusing on the poorer members of society, they neglect the elites upon whose leadership the quality of governance and security depends. By downplaying the relevance of cultural factors to development, they avoid altering...

In this stunningly detailed account of U.S. military power in the Obama era, Mark Moyar reveals how Obama's military decisions have led to the international catastrophes of his second term. While the current downward spiral did not become noticeable until 2014, Moyar finds its roots in Obama's first-term decisions to shrink the U.S. military and replace large overseas military commitments with "light footprints."Moyar illustrates how Obama's policies led to the rise of ISIS and how...

One of the most acclaimed books of our time—the definitive Vietnam War exposé and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.When he came to Vietnam in 1962, Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann was the one clear-sighted participant in an enterprise riddled with arrogance and self-deception, a charismatic soldier who put his life and career on the line in an attempt to convince his superiors that the war should be fought another way. By the time he d...

Vietnam was the first war America lost. It left the country bitterly divided. Many of the 2.7 million Americans who served there suffered psychologically for decades to come and the USA discovered that, for all its might and technological superiority, it could not defeat the ill-equipped peasant army of a small and fiercely determined enemy.In this concise account, historian Nigel Cawthorne traces the conflict from its inception to its traumatic end. He looks at the political event...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Based on the celebrated PBS television series, the complete text of an engrossing history of America’s least-understood conflict, “a significant milestone [that] will no doubt do much to determine how the war is understood for years to come.” —The Washington PostMore than forty years have passed since the end of the Vietnam War, but its memory continues to loom large in the national psyche. In this intimate history, Geoffrey C. Ward a...