A nation must think before it acts.
Footnotes are essays designed in particular for teachers and students and are often drawn from the lectures at our nationally recognized Butcher History Institute for Teachers.
A quick victory in Iraq validated military professionals’ post-Vietnam War emphasis on warfighting using decisive force. Operation DESERT STORM represented the services’ successful intellectual and physical efforts to reorient from graduated escalation strategies and guerrilla warfare in the jungles...
Read more »Besides the well-known technical advances that have occurred during major wars of the past 150 years, each one also has produced significant advances in medicine. Some of these advances were completely innovative because of circumstances that occur primarily during...
Read more »Besides the well-known technical advances that have occurred during major wars of the past 150 years, each one also has produced significant advances in medicine. Some of these advances were completely innovative because of circumstances that occur primarily during...
Read more »The previous article, The Post-Soviet Wars: Part I, advanced a causal explanation for the post-Soviet wars, the wars that broke out in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, and Ukraine during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. To...
Read more »Russia’s intervention in Georgia in 2008 and, more recently, in Ukraine awaked many in the West to a category of wars they had assumed to be resolved and, in any case, of little consequence to Western security: the post-Soviet...
Read more »Confidence in the future of democracy has been shaken by the authoritarian resurgence of the past decade, and some now argue that it is not realistic for the U.S. to continue to champion democracy abroad. Does Democracy Matter? provides...
Read more »The Spanish-American War is a relatively forgotten war in American history. The most remembered wars—the Revolution, the Civil War, World War II, Vietnam—absorb much of our attention and leave smaller wars, even “a splendid little war” in the shade....
Read more »Why did the U.S. go to war in Vietnam? This is a question historians continue to debate. One of the main reasons it remains a source of argument is that it is difficult to say when the U.S. war...
Read more »Economists have debated for years why it is that some nations prosper while others do not. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea, DPRK) and the Republic of Korea (South Korea, ROK), for example, started out as poor...
Read more »In April 2015, the Foreign Policy Research Institute presented its Madeleine and W.W. Keen Butcher History Institute on Ethical Dilemmas in American Warfare hosted by the First Division Museum at Cantigny, Wheaton, IL. Covering such topics as the Dilemmas...
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