Audiobooks by James A. Warren

Outmaneuvered: America's Tragic Encounter with Warfare from Vietnam to Afghanistan

From a celebrated military historian, a highly engaging and thought-provoking exploration of why the United States has failed again and again in irregular wars and military campaigns from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Since the early 1960s, the United States has fought in four major wars and a cluster of complicated and bloody irregular warfare campaigns. The majority have ended in failure, or something close to it. Why has the US been so ineffective, despite the American armed forces being universally recognized as the best in the world? Most scholars and analysts believe that the primary cause of our abysmal war record since Vietnam has been the US military's overwhelmingly conventional approach to conflict, which favors kinetic operations, highly mobile precision firepower, and sophisticated systems of command and control. Here, James Warren argues that a much more formidable obstacle to success has been pervasive strategic ineptitude at the highest levels of decision-making, including the presidency, the national security council, and the foreign policy community in DC. Time and time again, American presidents have committed military forces to operations in foreign countries whose politics and cultures they did not fully understand. Presidents of both political parties, including Johnson, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Obama have overestimated the capacity of US forces to alter the social and political landscape of foreign nations, and underestimated the ability of insurgents and terrorists to develop effective protracted war strategies that, in time, sap Washington's will to carry on the fight. In the War on Terror, Warren asserts that senior military officers have been complicit in extending bankrupt strategies by refusing to speak truthfully about them to their civilian bosses. So have the American people, who lost interest in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and refused to press their president and congress to bring an end to two futile conflicts. Warren advocates for a less hubristic foreign policy and a broader conception of warfare as a political and military enterprise. For readers of political, military, and US history—as well as anyone interested in international relations and geopolitical strategy—this book offers unparalleled insights into America's prior—and potentially future—military conflicts.

James A. Warren (Author), Jonathan Beville, Unknown (Narrator)

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God, War, and Providence: The Epic Struggle of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians against t

A devout Puritan minister in seventeenth-century New England, Roger Williams was also a social critic, diplomat, theologian, and politician who fervently believed in tolerance. Banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635, Williams purchased land from the Narragansett Indians and laid the foundations for the colony of Rhode Island as a place where Indian and English cultures could flourish side by side, in peace. As the seventeenth century wore on, a steadily deepening antagonism developed between an expansionist, aggressive Puritan culture and an increasingly vulnerable, politically divided Indian population. Indian tribes that had been at the center of the New England communities found themselves shunted off to the margins of the region. By the 1660s, all the major Indian peoples in southern New England had come to accept English authority, either tacitly or explicitly. All, except one: the Narragansetts. In God, War, and Providence James A. Warren tells the remarkable and little-known story of the alliance between Roger Williams's Rhode Island and the Narragansett Indians, and how they joined forces to retain their autonomy and their distinctive ways of life against Puritan encroachment.

James A. Warren (Author), Bob Souer (Narrator)

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The Lions of Iwo Jima: The Story of Combat Team 28 and the Bloodiest Battle in Marine Corps History

It was the bloodiest battle in Marine Corps history, claiming a third of all marines killed in World War II. The relentless fighting on Iwo Jima lasted for thirty-six days, but most of us only know the iconic photo of five soldiers raising the American flag on Mount Surabachi. For Fred Haynes, a young captain in Combat Team 28, Surabachi was one marker in a ferocious blood-letting against an enemy of 22,000 warriors who were dug into caves and tunnels. The stories told here for the first time will seem too cruel, too heartbreaking, even too fantastic to be believed. As one veteran remarked, "Each day we learned a new way to die." By the time Haynes's unit had broken through the main Japanese resistance, 75 percent of the three assault battalions—the frontline fighters who charged enemy positions—were gone. Many of the exhausted survivors were shattered. In five weeks, Combat Team 28 had advanced 5,600 yards, closed 2,088 caves, and lost 5,885 lives. The Lions of Iwo Jima helps answer the essential questions: who were these men, how were they trained, and what accounts for their extraordinary performance in battle?

James A. Warren, Major General Fred Haynes (USMC-Ret.) (Author), Michael Prichard (Narrator)

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