A01=Roger Beaumont
Author_Roger Beaumont
Category=JWCM
Category=NHB
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eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Military History
Product details
- ISBN 9780275971724
- Weight: 510g
- Dimensions: 156 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 28 Feb 2001
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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This study provides an overview of the International Air Force (IAF) concept, which emerged in the early 20th century out of a long progression of schemes for creating multi-national armed forces to enforce the peace, most often referred to as an international police force (IPF). After broadly tracing the IAF's complex lineage, Beaumont surveys the proliferation of IPF and IAF proposals throughout the 20th century, including schemes offered by Kipling, H.G. Wells, and Theodore Roosevelt. Later ideas included the Allies' Independent Air Force of 1917-18, the evolution of the League to Enforce Peace into the League of Nations, imperial air policing between the World Wars, and a host of proposals, official and informal, such as visions of a United Nations IAF and the ad hoc coalition air forces assembled by the major western powers in the Gulf War and the Balkans in the 1990s.
The IAF concept gained far greater popularity, even among contemporary historians, than is generally appreciated. Beaumont interweaves the review of the IAF and IPF designs with diplomacy and war, especially the rise of air power, and the confounding of its advocates' visions of a cheap, quick road to victory. Based on Beaumont's survey of secondary and primary sources during more than a decade of research, this book considers the IAF image from such diverse perspectives as pacifism, popular culture, and collective security.
ROGER BEAUMONT has taught history at Texas A&M University since 1974. Co-founder and former North American editor of the journal Defense Analysis, he has written twelve books and monographs, including Special Operations and Elite Units, 1939-1988: A Research Guide (Greenwood Press, 1988), Joint Military Operations: A Short History (Greenwood, 1993), War, Chaos, and History (Praeger, 1994), The Nazis' March to Chaos: The Hitler Era Through the Lenses of Chaos-Complexity Theory (Praeger, 2000), and eighty book chapters and articles.
