Books published by publisher Potomac Books publisher

Effective strategic thinking requires a clear understanding of one’s external environment. Each organization has a unique environment, but as Ross Harrison explains in Strategic Thinking in 3D, any environment—whether in the fields of national security, foreign policy, or business—has three dimensions: systems, opponents, and groups. Systems strategy involves the challenge of creating leverage against opponents by shaping the external environments they rely on for sustaining their power. Opponents-based strategy requires analyzing a competitor’s capability, motivation, and strategy, assessing one’s own competitive challenges, and then developing approaches for directly confronting the opponent. Group strategy aims to mobilize political, consumer, and market groups against the power of an opponent. Strategic Thinking in 3D makes strategy “portable” for individuals who switch careers multiple times during their professional lives, moving among public, nonprofit, and private sector jobs. Harrison uses al Qaeda’s strategy against the United States as a “capstone” case study to demonstrate how strategic success often results from the cascading effect of “wins” in all three of these dimensions. Conversely, strategic failure can come from the mutual reinforcement of “losses” across these same three dimensions. Reinforcing and integrating the concepts, Harrison shows how strategy in 3D actually works in practice.

When World War I began, war reporting was a thoroughly masculine bastion of journalism. But that did not stop dozens of women reporters from stepping into the breach, defying gender norms and official restrictions to establish roles for themselves—and to write new kinds of narratives about women and war. Chris Dubbs tells the fascinating stories of Edith Wharton, Nellie Bly, and more than thirty other American women who worked as war reporters. As Dubbs shows, stories by these journalists brought in women from the periphery of war and made them active participants—fully engaged and equally heroic, if bearing different burdens and making different sacrifices. Women journalists traveled from belligerent capitals to the front lines to report on the conflict. But their experiences also brought them into contact with social transformations, political unrest, labor conditions, campaigns for women’s rights, and the rise of revolutionary socialism. An eye-opening look at women’s war reporting, An Unladylike Profession is a portrait of a sisterhood from the guns of August to the corridors of Versailles.

God's Samurai is the unusual story of Mitsuo Fuchida, the career aviator who led the attack on Pearl Harbor and participated in most of the fiercest battles of the Pacific war. A valuable record of major events, it is also the personal story of a man swept along by his times. Reared in the vanished culture of early twentieth-century Japan, war hero Fuchida returned home to become a simple farmer. After a scandalous love affair came his remarkable conversion to Christianity and years of touring the world as an evangelist. His tale is an informative, personal look at the war "from the other side."

Ted W. Lawson’s classic Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo appears in an enhanced reprint edition on the sixtieth anniversary of the Doolittle Raid on Japan. “One of the worst feelings about that time,” Ted W. Lawson writes, “was that there was no tangible enemy. It was like being slugged with a single punch in a dark room, and having no way of knowing where to slug back.” He added, “And, too, there was a helpless, filled-up, want-to-do-something feeling that [the Japanese] weren’t coming—that we’d have to go all the way over there to punch back and get even.” Lawson gives a vivid eyewitness account of the unorthodox assignment that eighty five intrepid volunteer airmen—the “Tokyo Raiders”—under the command of celebrated flier James H. Doolittle executed in April 1942. The plan called for sixteen B-25 twin-engine medium bombers of the Army Air Corps to take off from the aircraft carrier Hornet, bomb industrial targets in Japan, and land at airfields in China. While the raid came off flawlessly, completely surprising the enemy, a shortage of fuel caused by an early departure, bad weather, and darkness took a heavy toll of the raiders. For many, the escape from China proved a greater ordeal. Peter B. Mersky provides new information on the genesis of the raid, places it in the context of the early operations against Japan, and updates Ted Lawson’s biography.

At 3:17 p.m. on March 18, 1937, a natural gas leak beneath the London Junior-Senior High School in the oil boomtown of New London, Texas, created a lethal mixture of gas and oxygen in the school’s basement. The odorless, colorless gas went undetected until the flip of an electrical switch triggered a colossal blast. The two-story school, one of the nation’s most modern, disintegrated, burying everyone under a vast pile of rubble and debris. More than 300 students and teachers were killed, and hundreds more were injured. As the seventy-fifth anniversary of the catastrophe approaches, it remains the deadliest school disaster in U.S. history. Few, however, know of this historic tragedy, and no book, until now, has chronicled the explosion, its cause, its victims, and the aftermath. Gone at 3:17 is a true story of what can happen when school officials make bad decisions. To save money on heating the school building, the trustees had authorized workers to tap into a pipeline carrying “waste” natural gas produced by a gasoline refinery. The explosion led to laws that now require gas companies to add the familiar pungent odor. The knowledge that the tragedy could have been prevented added immeasurably to the heartbreak experienced by the survivors and the victims’ families. The town would never be the same. Using interviews, testimony from survivors, and archival newspaper files, Gone at 3:17 puts readers inside the shop class to witness the spark that ignited the gas. Many of those interviewed during twenty years of research are no longer living, but their acts of heroism and stories of survival live on in this meticulously documented and extensively illustrated book.

To read of sea roving's various incarnations - piracy, privateering, buccaneering, la flibuste, la course - is to bring forth romantic, and often violent, imagery. Indeed, much of this imagery has become a literary and cinematic cliché . And what an image it is! But its truth is by halves, and paradoxically it is the picaresque imagery of Pyle, Wyeth, Sabatini, and Hollywood that is often closer to the reality, while the historical details of arms, tactics, and language are often inaccurate or entirely anachronistic. Successful sea rovers were careful practitioners of a complex profession that sought wealth by stratagem and force of arms. Drawn from the European tradition, yet of various races and nationalities, they raided both ship and town throughout much of the world from roughly 1630 until 1730. Using a variety of innovative tactics and often armed with little more than musket and grenade, many of these self-described "soldiers and privateers" successfully assaulted fortifications, attacked shipping from small craft, crossed the mountains and jungles of Panama, and even circumnavigated the globe. Successful sea rovers were often supreme seamen, soldiers, and above all, tacticians. It can be argued that their influence on certain naval tactics is felt even today. The Sea Rover's Practice is the only book that describes in exceptional detail the tactics of sea rovers of the period - how they actually sought out and attacked vessels and towns. Accessible to both the general and the more scholarly reader, it will appeal not only to those with an interest in piracy and in maritime, naval, and military history, but also to mariners in general, tall-ship and ship-modeling enthusiasts, tacticians and military analysts, readers of historical fiction, writers, and the adventurer in all of us.

Share a fun moment and start learning your toddler's letters happily with the alphabets and ABCs in this #1 Best-Selling cute book: Each page shows one letter of the alphabet in particular, along with a cute illustration of a fruit that has a funny name (starting with each specific letter, of course!). This book will be a perfect gift of learning, allowing parents and baby to 2, toddlers and preschool children to have a good time while discoverong and learning the basic concept of alphabet through the special enjoying and juicy theme of fruits !Very appealing for the little ones, this book will also capture their attention through basic but attractive colours. The pictures are simple so as to make each letter special and memorable. You will also be able to introduce new fruits into their world, which is a great opportunity to make new taste discoveries and to teach them from an early age to have a varied and balanced diet.You will therefore have the opportunity to teach your child to take advantage of every little moment to learn in a fun way.

On August 1, 1943, an enormous armada of America B-24 Liberator bombers roared at nearly treetop level over the peaceful farms and villages of Romania. This mission was Operation Tidal Wave. Its target―“the taproot of German might,” Hitler’s giant oil refineries at Ploesti. Hundreds of U.S. airmen had volunteered for the mission despite warnings that half might not return. In thirty minutes, more firepower was exchanged than in two Gettysburgs, and five men earned the Medal of Honor. Ploesti presents a vivid reconstruction of a dramatic and controversial mission.

America Ascendant vividly portrays the global crisis that brought the media and the government into an alliance that changed the course of American and world history. President Franklin D. Roosevelt organized an extraordinary partnership between the U.S. government and America’s media outlets to communicate to the reluctant and isolationist American public the nature of the threat that World War II posed to the nation and the world. The coalition’s aim was to promote the concept of American exceptionalism and use it to galvanize the public for the government’s cause.America Ascendant details the efforts of many prominent individuals and officials to harness the collective energy of the nation and guide the United States throughout World War II then describes its aftermath and the Cold War period. Dennis M. Spragg demonstrates how the news and entertainment of American broadcasters such as David Sarnoff, William Paley, and Elmer Davis helped rally the American people to fashion a new liberal democratic order to stop the global spread of Communism. This media-government alliance, however, was not achieved without difficulty. Spragg highlights the competing visions and personalities that clashed, as media and government leaders tried to develop the paradigm that ultimately shifted American cultural and political thought. Throughout this searching history he sheds light on the underappreciated coordination between the media and the government to establish a liberal democratic world order and demonstrates why American exceptionalism still matters.

There was a time when the most prestigious job on a major newspaper belonged to the baseball beat writer, who enjoyed unparalleled longevity and influence within his profession. Through a variety of events and circumstances—television, expansion, all-sports radio, lifestyle changes, and the Internet revolution—those days are long gone. The baseball beat writers endure, but jobs change, and they have faced new challenges.Keepers of the Game celebrates the last generation of baseball writers whose careers were rooted in Teletype machines, train travel, and ten-team leagues, and who wielded an influence and power within the game that are unimaginable today. Dennis D’Agostino brings together, for the first time, the personal histories of a group of journalists whose influence, power, and dedication to the game of baseball is part of a golden age of sports journalism that is now a thing of the past. Twenty-three vintage beat writers tell their own stories, with an individual chapter devoted to each writer. The interview subjects include nine winners of the Baseball Hall of Fame’s J. G. Taylor Spink Award, the baseball writing profession’s highest honor: Ross Newhan, Hal McCoy, Murray Chass, Peter Gammons, Bob Elliott, Rick Hummel, Tracy Ringolsby, Nick Peters, and Bill Madden.They and their colleagues were the best of their breed, that last generation of writers who were the unquestioned gatekeepers of the national pastime. For decades, their words shaped the history of the game.If you’re a baseball fan or someone who dreamed of being a baseball writer, this book is for you.

Strategy and reality collide in Peter Fey’s gripping history of aircraft carrier USS Oriskany’s three deployments to Vietnam with Carrier Air Wing 16 (CVW-16). Its tours coincided with the most dangerous phases of Operation Rolling Thunder, the ill-fated bombing campaign against North Vietnam, and accounted for a quarter of all the naval aircraft lost during Rolling Thunder—the highest loss rate of any carrier air wing during Vietnam. The Johnson administration’s policy of gradually applied force meant that Oriskany arrived on station just as previous restrictions were lifted and bombing raids increased. As a result CVW-16 pilots paid a heavy price as they ventured into areas previously designated off-limits by Washington, DC. Named after one of the bloodiest battles of the Revolutionary War, the Oriskany lived up to its name. After two years of suffering heavy losses, the ship caught fire—a devastating blow given the limited number of carriers deployed. With only three months allotted for repairs, Oriskany deployed a third and final time and ultimately lost more than half of its aircraft and more than a third of its pilots. The valor and battle accomplishments displayed by Oriskany’s aviators are legendary, but the story of their service has been lost in the disastrous fray of the war itself. Fey portrays the Oriskany and its heroes in an indelible memorial to the fallen of CVW-16 in hopes that the lessons learned from such strategic disasters are not forgotten in today’s sphere of war-bent politics.

PRAISE FOR THE FIRST EDITION: "Millen reminds me of Erwin Rommel, George Patton, and Dwight Eisenhower, who also put their concentration as junior officers on the small units.” —Stephen E. Ambrose, author of Band of Brothers and Citizen Soldiers “Command Legacy is a first-class primer on company-level command. Wish I’d had a copy when I took over my first company as its skipper. . . . Must reading for pros.” —Col. David Hackworth, USA (Ret.), author of About Face “One of the most important soldier’s manuals developed in modern Army times.” —Lt. Col. Dominic J. Caraccilo, USA, in Military Heritage The burden of fighting wars, large or small, often rests on the soldiers and junior leaders of small infantry units. Command Legacy, the definitive source on small-unit tactics, presents one combat officer’s conclusions about how to approach tactical problems and missions and about the links among tactical theory, doctrine, and practice. It is meant to prime junior leaders for tactical operations, team building, and professional development and explains in detail what needs to be done, why, when, and by whom. It attempts to reconcile both what to think and how to think, providing a voice of experience to readers. Newly returned from a tour in Afghanistan, Lt. Col. Raymond Millen has updated the book with fresh information to reflect lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, new equipment, and new methods of counterinsurgency and urban combat. From developing company doctrine, preparing for a mission, and conducting assaults to addressing such concerns of the individual soldier as supply, terrain, and weather, any leader—officer or enlisted—tasked to conduct tactical operations needs this valuable book.