Full Spectrum Dominance

This well-written and tightly organized book...covers an important topic of American foreign policy: evolving US responses to global terrorism during recent administrations....[It] closes with a well-reasoned conclusion, supported by extensive notes and an index. Recommended. -- M. A. Morris Maria Ryan has made an important contribution to the literature on counterinsurgency by showing that so-called peripheral theaters in the Global War on Terror were in fact central to the evolution of American thinking on irregular war. Her thoughtful analysis illuminates how U.S. ambitions for global 'full spectrum dominance' foundered on the realities of local conflicts that were poorly understood in Washington. -- David Fitzgerald Maria Ryan has provided us with a tour-de-force treatise on how the United States reoriented itself to the demands of fighting irregular war in the post 9/11 era. In unhurried, clear and concise prose, she has provided a definitive political and military history of how the country gradually descended down the slippery slope of into a series of unwinnable, ill-advised wars thousands of miles from home in which no amount of tactical and operational proficiency could deliver victory. -- James Russell Ryan offers an important contribution to the study of warfare, military intervention, and diplomacy in the twenty-first century...the policy implications of this book are noteworthy. -- Matthew Timmerman