Potomac Books: 562 books

During the Cold War, stories of espionage became popular on both sides of the Iron Curtain, capturing the imagination of readers and filmgoers alike as secret police quietly engaged in surveillance under the shroud of impenetrable secrecy. And curiously, in the post–Cold War period there are no...

One failure of 9/11 that has not received the attention it deserves is the inadequacy of the U.S. and international network of financial transparency reporting requirements to detect terrorist finance. In Hide and Seek, John A. Cassara, an expert in the fields of terrorist financing and money laundering,...

This first-ever anthology of the war reporting and commentary of Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist Sydney Schanberg is drawn from more than four decades of reporting at home and abroad for the New York Times, Newsday, the Village Voice, and various magazines. The centerpiece of the collection is his signature...

The turbulent occupation of Iraq has once again embroiled the United States military in an unconventional war. Chasing Ghosts is a study of unconventional warfare in American military history and its implications for the present and future. John J. Tierney examines AmericaÆs numerous past experiences...

With the words ôThis is London,ö Edward R. MurrowÆs groundbreaking radio broadcasts from 1939 to 1941 brought the blitz into AmericaÆs living rooms. Countering the tide of U.S. isolationism, Murrow told his huge audience that the United States could not avoid a confrontation with Hitler and that...

Since the first edition of Assignment: Pentagon was published in 1988, great changes have occurred in the international environment, the application of U.S. national security strategy, and the manner in which the Pentagon functions. Now in its fourth printing and with a coauthor to lend a different perspective,...

Beginning with the landslide political changes in Europe in the early 1990s, politicians and military planners started to contemplate the possible effects on military postures. Most countries, however, did not enforce plans for post-Cold War reform because they lacked political will and money, their...

What is the current state of the global security system, and where is it headed? What challenges and opportunities do we face, and what dangers are emerging? How will various regions of the world be affected? How can the United States best act to help shape the future while protecting its security, interests,...

Beating Goliath examines the phenomenon of victories by the weak over the strongùmore specifically, insurgencies that succeeded against great powers. Jeffrey Record reviews eleven insurgent wars from 1775 to the present and determines why the seemingly weaker side won. He concludes that external assistance...

In the life of the great cultural icon baseball slugger Mickey Mantle, we see AmericaÆs romance with boldness, its celebration of muscle, and its comfort in power during a time when might did make right. But if his life symbolized the great expectations of America in the 1950s, it also epitomized the...

What influences have shaped air power since human flight became a reality more than a hundred years ago? Global Air Power provides insight into the evolution of air power theory and practice by examining the experience of six of the worlds largest air forcesthose of the United Kingdom, the United States,...

What would cause an otherwise intelligent, well-educated, and, by all accounts, privileged Californian to forgo an easy life in the United States to struggle for survival in a land of strife and mortal danger? With this question in mind, journalist Mark Kukis retraces the personal and spiritual evolution...

While the specifics of individual wars vary, they share a common epilogue: the task of finding and identifying the “disappeared.” The Bosnian war of the early 1990s, which destroyed the sovereign state of Yugoslavia, is no exception. In Working in the Killing Fields, Howard Ball focuses on recent...

The year 1982 was a desperate time for the U.S. defense community. The United States had no effective system to protect itself completely from a Soviet attack with nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles, which the Soviet Union possessed in large quantity, and the doomsday philosophy of mutually...