Vietnam War - General & Miscellaneous, Astronautical Engineering - General & Miscellaneous, Aeronautical Engineering - General & Miscellaneous, U.S. Armed Forces - General & Miscellaneous - Military Biography, 20th Century American History - General & Mis

The Electronic Battlefield

Name: The Electronic Battlefield
Author: Paul Dickson
ISBN: 9781936771400

by Paul Dickson

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Overview

Today's American Military is the most technologically advanced fighting force in the history of the world. Drone aircraft spy on-and attack, and destroy-designated targets, acting on commands from half a world away. Remote-control warfare has come into the world, forcing our society to face endless new questions, from the morality of doing battle without risk, to the emotional debate over whether drone operators can distinguish a band of terrorists from a group assembling for a wedding.
And the drones are merely the most dramatic and visible example of astonishing, unstoppable, technological advance in the military. Battlefield sensors and satellite imagery provide a flood of information to commanders. Computers themselves have become targets-and weapons. How did it get that way? How and when were the decisions made, the weapons created, the strategies and tactics chosen that brought us to this point?
In this classic account, Paul Dickson takes us back to the waning days of the Vietnam conflict, and the earliest days of "push-button war"-and the startling story of the birth of The Electronic Battlefield.

About the Author, Paul Dickson

Paul Dickson is the author of more than 55 nonfiction books and hundreds of magazine articles. Although he has written on a variety of subjects from ice cream to kite flying to electronic warfare, he now concentrates on writing about the American language, baseball and 20th century history.
Dickson, born in Yonkers, NY, graduated from Wesleyan University in 1961 and was honored as a Distinguished Alumnae of that institution in 1996. After graduation, he served in the U.S. Navy and later worked as a reporter for McGraw-Hill Publications.
Since 1968, he has been a full-time freelance writer contributing articles to various magazines and newspapers, including Smithsonian, Esquire, The Nation, Town & Country, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post and writing numerous books on a wide range of subjects.
He received a University Fellowship for reporters from the American Political Science Association to do his first book, Think Tanks (1971). For his book The Electronic Battlefield (1976), about the impact automatic weapons systems have had on modern warfare, he received a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism to support his efforts to get certain Pentagon files declassified.
His book The Bonus Army: An American Epic, written with Thomas B. Allen,was published by Walker and Co on February 1, 2005. It tells the dramatic but largely forgotten story of the approximately 45,000 World War I veterans who marched on Washington in the summer of 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, to demand early payment of a bonus promised them for their wartime service and of how that march eventually changed the course of American history and led to passage of the GI Bil—the lasting legacy of the Bonus Army. A documentary based on the book aired on PBS stations in May 2006 and an option for a feature film based on the book has been sold.
Dickson’s most recent baseball book, Bill Veeck—Baseball’s Greatest Maverick was published in April, 2012. It follows other bat and ball books including including The Hidden Language of Baseball: How Signs and Sign Stealing Have Influenced the Course of our National Pastime, The Joy of Keeping Score, Baseball’s Greatest Quotations—which came out in a new and expanded edition in 2007—Baseball: the President’s Game and The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, now in its third edition. Updated and expanded, this edition also came out in Marc