Law, Science, Liberalism and the American Way of Warfare: The Quest for Humanity in Conflict

摘要

In their valuable addition to the JL literature on strategic culture and American warfare, Stephanie Carvin and Michael John Williams chart the relationship between the United States' core liberal democratic principles, its technological situation and its restrained use of military force. This work expands upon what Thomas Mahnken called the country's 'technological optimism' in Technology and the American Way of War since 1945 (Columbia University Press, 2009) in an original and thoughful way. Here, the authors analyse the role that political beliefs, law and science play in the construction of restraint, and the divergent concepts of clean warfare that have arisen in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.