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Energy is an enabler of – and a constraint on – military power. Operational Energy provides military officers with knowledge and skills to plan effectively for the operational energy needs of their forces. Operational energy is the energy used to train, move, and sustain military forces and weapons platforms for military operations. Energy has always played a role in battlefield outcomes. Over the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries the importance of energy in warfighting has grown. Today, energy is a critical pillar of national defense and a major factor in military power. In modern warfare, attaining energy superiority over one's adversaries is a critical condition for success on the battlefield. Operational energy planning is an integral part of all combat and regular operations. Operational Energy is a valuable and extensive resource for students of US Department of Defense courses in military universities, colleges, and academic training programs; scholars of geopolitics, and researchers on US and global energy security. Operational Energy is to date the only textbook on defense energy planning, analysis, and strategy. It examines in detail fuel types, geopolitical issues, energy supply risks, market economic factors, and technology, presenting topics for future research. It also includes chapter summaries, main points for study, and case studies.

The ability to deploy and maintain infrastructure and equipment is crucial to military operations and national security. However, the ability to make and repair equipment in a wide range of operational environments is increasingly vulnerable to disruptions in global supply chains and to attacks. Emerging technologies and innovations offer exciting new opportunities to create structures remotely using a broad range of materials, as well as new capabilities for repair and operational support to sustain assets in the long term. To examine these issues and reveal areas of opportunity for military applications and the U.S. Department of Defense, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine hosted the Workshop on Logistics and Manufacturing Under Attack on June 2-4, 2021. The virtual event brought together speakers and attendees representing materials science, engineering, logistics, and manufacturing experts from industry, academia, and government agencies. The event was organized around three main topics: additive manufacturing of large structures, critical systems supply and repair, and supply and manufacturing in space. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussion of the workshop.

Why do soldiers fight? What keeps them going? What compels them to face death when their long-time comrades have fallen around them? Strangers in Arms addresses these questions in a groundbreaking study of the behaviour, morale, and motivations of Canadian infantrymen on the front lines of the Second World War. Canada's army has long faced intense criticism for its combat performance during the war, and Canada's official history has presented Canadian soldiers as deficient, inexperienced, and unprepared in comparison with their enemies. Questioning entrenched views, Robert Engen explores a trove of contemporaneous documents to create a remarkable new portrait of Canadians at war. Rather than the popular'band of brothers'image of soldier cohesion in battle, he finds staggering casualty rates and personnel turmoil that left Canadian infantrymen often working with and fighting beside men they hardly knew. Yet these strangers in arms continued to fight - effectively and in good spirits - against a tenacious and deadly enemy, triumphing in the face of heartrending loss and sacrifice. Challenging old narratives about the Canadian soldier and supported by cutting-edge empirical and qualitative research, Strangers in Arms crafts a new understanding of what happens at the sharp end of battle.

Sun Tzu asserts that success is not winning every battle fought, but subduing the enemy's will without fighting. Nevertheless, modern military thought fails to distinguish an enemy's will-to-fight from their means to do so, limiting the ways military leaders apply operational art, problem framing, and conflict termination in pursuit of strategic objectives. The author asserts that gaining and maintaining a position of relative advantage for favorable conflict resolution requires leaders to understand the enemy's will-to-fight with equal fidelity as their means. This study examines U.S. planning efforts for post-WWII Japan from 1942 to 1945, focusing on the options planners possessed to achieve their ends; their choice to safeguard the Japanese Emperor; their understanding of the Japanese will-to-fight; and the way planners developed that understanding. The record reveals that-despite more forceful options-planners favored safeguarding the Imperial Institution; planners considered the Japanese people's will-to-fight as inexorably linked to the condition of their Sovereign, increasing in response to threats against Japanese national identity; and planners developed this understanding through discourse among experts in diplomacy, military governance, political culture, anthropology, and military intelligence. The implication-an enemy's will-to-fight can be targeted separate from their means and doing so may not require fighting.

This consequential work by a pioneer aviation historian fills a significant lacuna in the story of the defeat of France in May-June 1940 and more fully explains the Battle of Britain of July–October of that year and the influence it had on the Luftwaffe in the 1941 invasion of the USSR. Robin Higham approaches the subject by sketching the story and status of the three air forces--the Armée de l'Air, the Luftwaffe, and the Royal Air Force--their organization and preparation for their battles. He then dissects the the campaigns, their losses and replacement policies and abilities. He paints the struggles of France and Britain from both the background provided by his recent Two Roads to War: From Versailles to Dunkirk (NIP, 2012) and from the details of losses tabulated by After the Battle's The Battle of Britain (1982, 2nd ed.) and Peter Cornwell's The Battle of France Then and Now (2007), as well as in Paul Martin's Invisible Vainqueurs (1990) and from the Luftwaffe summaries in the British National Archives Cabinet papers. One important finding is that the consumption and wastage was not nearly as high as claimed. The three air forces actually shot down only 19 percent of the number claimed. In the RAF case, in the summer of 1940, 44 percent of those shot down were readily repairable thanks to the salvage and repair organizations. This contrasted with the much lower 8 percent for the Germans and zero for the French. Brave as the aircrews may have been, the inescapable conclusion is that awareness of consumption, wastage, and sustainability were intimately connected to survival.

Armies of Empire uniquely reflects upon the experience of two divisions from different armies facing similar challenges in the Second World War. The 9th Australian Division and the British 50th (Northumbrian) Division both saw long service and suffered heavy casualties, and both encountered morale, discipline and battlefield effectiveness problems. In this illuminating, comparative study of Australian and British divisions at war, Allan Converse draws extensively on primary sources as well as recent scholarship on morale and combat efficiency. His fresh approach questions the popular mythology surrounding the Australian Digger and the British Tommy, and shows how it was a combination of leadership, loyalty and tactics, rather than intrinsic national qualities, which resulted in victory for Churchill's armies.