Bøger udgivet af U S NAVAL INST PR

Shortly before embarking on her attempt to circumnavigate the globe, Amelia Earhart confided to a friend, "I have a feeling there is just about one more good flight left in my system and I hope this trip around the world is it." This book is the product of The Earhart Project, a thirty-four-year investigation of the Earhart tragedy by The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery. TIGHAR investigators had no agenda. They were not out to advocate, excuse, honor, or impugn. They saw the Earhart disappearance as an aviation accident and reasoned the answer to its cause and outcome should be discoverable if they could find, assemble, and analyze the relevant data. To understand why she died it was necessary to strip away the myths and sentimentality that have grown up over the years and examine the hard truths behind how Earhart's trip around the world came about and why it went so terribly wrong. The U.S. Navy and Coast Guard were major players in the 1937 flight, disappearance, and search for Amelia Earhart, and in the aftermath. The story of the pressures and frustrations the services faced and the mistakes they made contain valuable lessons for today's commanders. Gillespie's first book, Finding Amelia - The True Story of the Earhart Disappearance (Naval Institute Press, 2006) chronicled what was known at that time. This new book updates the story with important new information from historical documents discovered since then and also provides extensive prequel and sequel narratives that complete the saga and give new perspective to the life and death of an American icon.

Published to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Tet Offensive, this new paperback edition brings back into print a book that became an essential source for a 2006 study of the battle by the U.S. Army s Center of Military History. It takes a critical look at what went wrong in early 1968 during one of the first engagements of Tet, when a U.S. infantry battalion was ordered to attack a large North Vietnamese force near Hue City without air or artillery support. The tragic military foul-up resulted in over 60 percent casualties for the 2d Battalion, 12th Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division, when the soldiers were surrounded by the enemy and began running out of ammunition. The bold decision by battalion commander Lt. Col. Richard Sweet to break out with his remaining soldiers under cover of darkness saved this encirclement from being a total disaster. Author Charles Krohn, the unit s intelligence officer at the time, provides a much-needed analysis of what took place and fills his account with details that have been confirmed as factual by other survivors. Krohn examines the battalion s involvement in two other major attacks for lessons learned when vital systems break down lessons, he says, that are timeless and applicable anywhere. This book is published in cooperation with the Association of the United States Army.

Airpower in the War against ISIS chronicles the planning and conduct of Operation Inherent Resolve by U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) from August 2014 to mid-2018, with a principal focus on the contributions of U.S. Air Forces Central Command (AFCENT). Benjamin S. Lambeth contends that the war's costly and excessive duration resulted from CENTCOM's inaccurate assessment of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), determining it was simply a resurrected Iraqi insurgency rather than recognizing it as the emerging proto-state that it actually was. This erroneous decision, Lambeth argues, saw the application of an inappropriate counterinsurgency strategy and use of rules of engagement that imposed needless restrictions on the most effective use of the precision air assets at CENTCOM's disposal. The author, through expert analysis of recent history, forcefully argues that CENTCOM erred badly by not using its ample air assets at the outset not merely for supporting Iraq's initially noncombat-ready ground troops but also in an independent and uncompromising strategic interdiction campaign against ISIS's most vital center-of-gravity targets in Syria from the effort's first moments onward.

"While the resounding American victory at Midway in June 1942 blunted Japanese momentum to a great extent, it left the opposing forces precariously balanced, particularly in the South Pacific. In Knife's Edge Robert C. Stern provides an account of the Battles of the Eastern Solomons and the Santa Cruz Islands, the two pivotal carrier air battles that followed the initial engagements at the Coral Sea and Midway between the U.S. Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy. Three U.S. aircraft carriers were sunk or badly damaged over the two months following Midway, including USS Enterprise at the Battle of the Eastern Solomons. Had it not been for the fortuitous arrival of USS Hornet at the end of August, the Americans would have been without an aircraft carrier in the South Pacific until Enterprise returned from repairs on 24 October. At that moment, another major Japanese offensive was afoot, again led by two large carriers, this time supported by another light carrier and a mid-sized merchant-hull conversion. The resulting Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands on 26 October 1942 was a solid tactical victory for the Japanese, who managed to sink Hornet and once again damage Enterprise. Stern has written a history of the two final early carrier battles fought between the U.S. Navy and Imperial Japan. These pivotal battles, coming after the triumph of the U.S. at Midway, illustrate lessons learned from these earlier battles of the Pacific War. Readers already familiar with the history of World War II at sea should find this account a riveting new look at a chapter of the Pacific War rarely covered until now. "--

The new breed of American fast aircraft carriers could make thirty-three knots, and each carried almost one hundred strike aircraft. Brought together as Task Force 58, also known as the Fast Carrier Task Force, this armada at times comprised more than one hundred ships carrying more than ten thousand men afloat. By 1945, more than one thousand combat aircraft, fighters, dive-and torpedo-bombers could be launched in under an hour. Rod Macdonald covers the birth of naval aviation, the appearance of the first modern carriers in the 1920s, through to the famous surprise six-carrier Kidō Butai Japanese raid against Pearl Harbor, and then the early U.S. successes of 1942 at the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway. The fast carriers allowed America, in late 1942 and early 1943, to finally move from bitter defense against the Japanese expansionist onslaught, to mounting her own offensive to retake the Pacific. Task Force 58 swept west and north from the Solomon Islands to the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, neutralizing Truk in Micronesia, and Palau in the Caroline islands, before the vital Mariana Islands operations, the Battle of Saipan, the first battle of the Philippine Sea and the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot. The strikes by Task Force 58 took Allied forces across the Pacific, to the controversial Battle of Leyte Gulf and to Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Task Force 58 had opened the door to the Japanese home islands themselves--allowing US bombers to finally get close enough to launch the devastating nuclear bombing raids on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Task Force 58 participated in virtually all the US Navy's major battles in the Pacific theatre during the last two years of the war. Historian Rod Macdonald has created the most detailed account to date of the fast carrier strike force, the force that brought Japan to its knees and brought World War II to its crashing conclusion.