Book Review: The New Law of War

The Long War: CENTCOM, Grand Strategy, and Global Security, by John Morrissey, University of Georgia Press, 184 pp, $24.95, ISBN: 978-0820351056 John Morrissey is a political geographer at NUI Galway. He has been studying how modern warfare is changing, looking, in particular, at the novelties introduced by CENTCOM, one of six regional coordinated command regions of the US military. After the Second World War, the US decided that in its major theatres of war, its military should be under consolidated command, as provided for the US military as a whole by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. These regional combined commands were given specific AORs, Areas of Responsibility, and were set up in the Pacific, in the Caribbean/South America, in the Far East, and in Europe. No more were established until CENTCOM in 1983, which was first given the Middle East and later extended to the former Soviet republics of Central Asia.