These direct and hard-hitting briefs will inform, fascinate, and shock everyone who wants to know what's really going on in the world's perpetual hot spots. You can't find the reasons and context for world conflict in thethirty-second news capsules on television and in newspapers, but you can find them here, quick and dirty.

James F. Dunnigan and Austin Bay, who are military simulations experts, provide the tools for understanding these human conflicts. They cut away ideologies, rationales, and myths to expose the nature of ongoing armed conflicts, their historic and geopolitical sources, and the strategies and goals of their participants. Then, focusing on the issues most important to Americans, they rate superpower involvement, assess the economic and human costs, and predict in percentages the likely outcomes.

Dunnigan and Bay have chosen fifteen wars that arc representative of world conflict today: Lebanon; Israel and the Middle East; the Persian Gulf; Afghanistan; Libya and Chad; Zaire; South Africa; the Philippines; Korea; El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras; Suriname; the Falkland lslands; Albania and Yugoslavia; Spain and Catalonia; and the European Central Front. Each chapter is organized like a briefing paper for fast access, with sections such as Source of Conflict, Who's Involved, Potential Outcomes, and Cost of War. There arc also one-page Quick Looks at many more conflict areas, for example, Diego Garcia, Burma, the Sudan, and India and the Sikhs.

In addition, two masterful charts provide extensive data on all the world's conflicts and the war-making abilities of every nation.

Peppered with wry and startling observations, A Quick and Dirty Guide to War will forever change your perspectives on world conflict.