Overview

This groundbreaking book provides the first systematic comparison of America's modern wars and why they were won or lost. John D. Caldwell uses the World War II victory as the historical benchmark for evaluating the success and failure of later conflicts. Unlike WWII, the Korean, Vietnam, and Iraqi wars were limited, but they required enormous national commitments, produced no lasting victories, and generated bitter political controversies. Caldwell comprehensively examines these four wars through the lens of a strategic architecture to explain how and why their outcomes were so dramatically different. He defines a strategic architecture as an interlinked set of continually evolving policies, strategies, and operations by which combatant states work toward a desired end. Policy defines the high-level goals a nation seeks to achieve once it initiates a conflict or finds itself drawn into one. Strategy means employing whatever resources are available to achieve policy goals in situations that are dynamic as conflicts change quickly over time. Operations are the actions that occur when politicians, soldiers, and diplomats execute plans. A strategic architecture, Caldwell argues, is thus not a static blueprint, but a dynamic vision of how a state can succeed or fail in a conflict.

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9781665216692

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Chris Sorensen is a veteran audiobook narrator with over 160 titles to his name. He has received three AudioFile Earphones Awards, and his recording of Sent by Margaret Peterson Haddix (Recorded Books, LLC) was selected as one of the Best Audiobooks of 2010 by AudioFile magazine. He is a member of SAG-AFTRA and the APA. Chris has worked extensively as an actor, playwright, and screenwriter. He studied at the Rutgers Professional Actor Training Program under William Esper, Edward Stern, and Maggie Flanigan. He is an original member of the Present Company, producers of FringeNYC. The Thin Air Theatre Company of Colorado considers him their playwright-at-large and has produced thirteen of his plays over the past twelve years. He has numerous optioned screenplays and has recently completed his first book for kids, The Mad Scientists of New Jersey. John D. Caldwell retired in 2007 after a fifty-year career working with defense think tanks and aerospace companies. Trained as a political scientist with a PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara, he was first posted to Saigon in 1968 as part of a classified research project for the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency. Caldwell joined TRW Space & Defense in 1982 to work on major defense, NASA, and intelligence community programs. He remains an active consultant at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems, which acquired TRW in 2002. He lives in Santa Barbara with his wife, Karen, and their dog Daisy, cat Mr. Bingley, and Martha, a desert tortoise.

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