This chapter begins by examining the James Monroe and John Quincy Adams administrations. They continued America’s expansionist drive and the quest for security. John Quincy Adams was one of America’s first grand strategists, and he and Monroe used Andrew Jackson to secure parts of Florida from Spain while also giving us the Monroe Doctrine, which meant the US wouldn’t tolerate establishment of any European footholds in the Western hemisphere. They also fought the First Seminole War. Andrew Jackson succeeded Adams as president. Achieving security against enemies foreign and domestic was his key aim. He fought against the Bank of the United States, pursued Indian Removal that famously produced the “Trail of Tears,” quashed the Nullification Crisis, and fought wars against the Blackhawk, Creeks, and Seminole. The Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, and John Tyler administrations are briefly examined on the way to the James K. Polk administration and the Mexican War. Polk’s victorious war, which included campaigns by Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott, saw the US seize enormous tracts of Mexico, including California. Expansion was Polk’s aim. Expansionism became inextricably tied to Manifest Destiny in 1845.

Describing drone programs as a network of interacting and interdependent factors including the contemporary technological capacities of drones, law and military strategy is one of the main aspects of this study. All chapters identify where and how these factors converge or diverge and examine the result of this interaction. This description shows that combat drone technology facilitates anticipatory warfare – the scope of which is indefinite in time and space – and that the law is rearranged around anticipation. Further examining the socio-techno-legal phenomena produced by drone programs, the book explores the long-term effects produced by drone programs over populations living under drones as well as the international legal order. This book can be thought of as an act of compiling the textual, bureaucratic, and material traces of these programs in order to lay bare the infrastructure that is extending warfare in time and space and exacerbating state power.

Continuity in Russian strategy reflects a set of enduring predilections indicative of strategic culture preferences, and habitual responses to persistent, or recurring challenges. While individual leaders and their ideas matter, the pursuit of a geopolitical space where Russian interests predominate has remained central to Russian thinking, along with a quest for status, and influence as a Great Power. The strategy for pursuing these goals, and for dealing with other leading powers like the United States, has proven sticky. Contemporary Russian strategy reprises the offensive approach which defined much of the Soviet Union’s consensus, investing in the military means for direct competition and leveraging indirect approaches to sustain a contest against a much stronger opponent in the international system. Russian grand strategy has proven evolutionary: While it grapples with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the post-Cold War world, there is greater continuity than change in the calculus and ambitions that define Russian decision-making.

Chapter 8 analyzes the thinking of Harry Summers, especially his critique of the Vietnam War. Summers was an outspoken military practioner who exposed the harmful effects of applying academic (and untested) strategic theories in Vietnam. He believed most armed conflicts would be fought below the nuclear threshold and hence he maintained the principles of war, which he regarded as timeless, were still sound guides for crafting military strategy. This chapter discusses his model of war’s nature, which retreated somewhat from that of Eccles and Wylie because it paid less attention to war’s sociocultural dimension. It did, however, bridge to the modern model by reemphasizing the importance of the concept of Clausewitzian friction.

The pope’s support for the new king of Naples in the ‘agreement, alliance and pact’ signed in Rome on 28 March 1494 changed the balance of power in Italy – and with it, Piero’s importance as a mediator. It had been the pope’s long years of conflict with his recalcitrant vassal Ferrante that had enabled Lorenzo de’ Medici to mediate between Italy’s rulers as the needle of the balance, but the new alignment meant that Piero had lost his father’s role, and once the French expedition was confirmed, the months of temporising were also over. But Lorenzo had not called Piero his ‘warrior son’ for nothing, and when the war was decided on, he entered energetically into its planning, offering forth ideas as his father used to do, who liked to share his fantasies or ghiribizzi with his colleagues as a form of thinking aloud.1 So although the events of the next few months are well known in outline, Piero’s own role – which, as usual, combined bursts of action with periods of inaction or escape – is less familiar.2