zenpundit.com

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“]

As the holiday season is here, I thought it would be amusing between now and Christmas to do a series of posts on books by people who have, in some fashion, been friends of ZP by supporting us with links, guest-posts, friendly comments and other intuitive gestures of online association. One keyboard washes the other.

Gian Gentile 

Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency 

How Effective is Strategic Bombing?: Lessons Learned From World War II to Kosovo 

Colonel Gentile is a historian, a professor at West Point, a combat veteran of Iraq and is the foremost public critic of pop-centric COIN theory around, bar none, which he has translated into a book-length critique that is required reading for the con side of the COIN debate. Gian has also been kind enough to grace the comment section here from time to time as well as participating in the Afghanistan 2050 Roundtable at ChicagoBoyz blog.

Don Vandergriff

Manning the Future Legions of the United States: Finding and Developing Tomorrow’s Centurions 

Spirit, Blood and Treasure: The American Cost of Battle in the 21st Century 

The Path to Victory

Raising the Bar: Creating and Nurturing Adaptability to Deal with the Changing Face of War 

I have had the pleasure of hearing Don speak and demonstrate some of his adaptive leadership techniques at the Boyd Conferences which I greatly enjoyed and strongly endorse, for those interested in having Vandergriff as a speaker or consultant. His absence this year at Boyd was much regretted but Don was off doing some important work this year overseas. Catch him in print instead.

John Robb 

Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization 

I am an unabashed huge fan of John’s work and Global Guerrillas has been on my (very) short list of must read sites for years. This book, like Ronfeldt and Arquilla’s Netwars, is a classic of emerging trends in warfare and strategy that belongs on your shelf.

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a “zen“]

Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945 by R.J.B. Bosworth 

This book was Fascist Italy not of the newsreels of frenzied Roman crowds cheering bombastic speeches by Mussolini but how fascism’s imperial grandiosity were an ill-fitting facade for an Italy that underneath remained substantially an impoverished, traditionalist, parochial society of peasant squabbles and regional jealousies. Bosworth, one of the world’s top experts on the period takes a granular look at Italy under Fascism and the reader comes away amazed at how Mussolini fooled the great powers into taking his regime seriously for as long as they did.

At 692 pages, including 88 pages of endnotes, Mussolini’s Italy lays out in exhaustive detail how ordinary Italians carried on as best they could under the dictatorship, with the traditional reliance on corruption and the influence of kin and “men of respect” to undermine and ameliorate “totalitarian” rule. Repeatedly the regime sanctions dissidents (usually politically naive -or simply drunken – tradesmen or villagers) to “confino”, internal exile to faraway unpleasant regions only to have the intervention of some Fascist bigwig result in a swift amnesty.The brutality of the regime’s informal sanctions – the beatings, castor oil, kidnappings and murders – carried out by roving Fascist squadrists or at the orders of a local Fascist Ras (boss) like Cremona’s thuggish Roberto Farinacci, were by contrast, real enough.

Outside of the violent hooliganism of blackshirt squadrism there at times seems little to have held Fascism together as a political movement without Mussolini’s tin cult of personality, there was seldom agreement among fascists about such fundamental political issues as the role of the state vs. the party, capitalism vs. autarky, the sanctity of private property, the need for unions, whether Fascism should be antisemitic or the role of the Catholic Church in Italian life? An incoherence that left Mussolini, who was never much of a stickler for consistency, as supreme arbiter. A role he kept secure by arbitrarily moving his preening, intriguing, womanizing and feuding cabal of uniformed henchmen and party apparatchiks from job to job all the way into his bitter gotterdammerung of the Salo Republic, where Mussolini was reduced to being the puppet gauleiter of Lombardy and eventually patheitic victim of popular revenge.

Bosworth does a scholarly take-down of the original Fascist regime, demonstrating the deep propensity for cultural continuity in any society in the long term, even in one under the heavy hand of self-proclaimed revolutionaries and Roman tyrants.

As the holiday season is here, I thought it would be amusing between now and Christmas to do a series of posts on books by people who have, in some fashion, been friends of ZP by supporting us with links, guest-posts, friendly comments and other intuitive gestures of online association. One keyboard washes the other.

The second installment focuses on Poetry, War and Business:

Stanton Coerr

Rubicon: The Poetry of War 

Colonel Stan Coerr is a combat vet (USMC) of Iraq, a naval aviator, poet and a key organizer of the Boyd & Beyond Conference. He is also intent on becoming a historian, to which I give a hearty thumb’s up!

Terry Barnhart

Creating a Lean R&D System: Lean Principles and Approaches for Pharmaceutical and Research-Based Organizations

Scientist and organizational consultant, Dr. Terry Barnhart, is the originator of “fast learning” strategies for organizational excellence and problem solving. I personally use Terry’s “Critical Question Mapping” strategy with students and elicited amazing results each time.

James Frayne

Meet the People: Why businesses must engage with public opinion to manage and enhance their reputations

Across the pond, James Frayne is a leading British political and media strategy consultant and former government official. Some of you may remember James from his excellent ( now defunct) political strategy blog Campaign War Room and from his participation in the Reagan Roundtable at Chicago Boyz.

More to come…..

ADDENDUM:

The previous post in the series has been pulled temporarily due to emerging scripting execution errors – it will be restored in a few days

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a “zen“]
 

Strategy: A History by Sir Lawrence Freedman  
Out of the Mountains by David Kilcullen

As I promised Professor Freedman a few weeks ago in the comments section, I ordered his book, Strategy: A History and it arrived yesterday, so I am bumping it to the top of my very large and disorderly book pile ( now a desk high stack) and will begin reading it immediately. I believe Scott Shipman is already reading it too, so perhaps when I review it we can have a mini-round table with other people posting or guest posting their impressions, maybe end of November.

Out of the Mountains will be the third book by COIN guru David Kilcullen that I have read. I think he is on the right track here, in big picture terms. If guerrillas need, like fish, to swim in the sea of people, densely packed urban areas, megacities, are needed to thwart aerial surveillance and inhibit freely administered “death from the skies” delivered by drones.  Bombing a hamlet in FATA is a different kettle of fish from taking out a Land Rover speeding on an 8 lane highway outside LA with a Hellfire missile  or targeting a shopping mall in a ritzy Chicago suburb on the Lake.

I am also reading the following books:

The former is giving me a granular view of Fascism in its original form with a social historian’s perspective. I’m 250 pages in and I’m not half finished. Echevarria is always a good read with clear arguments.

This past year, I have not read enough or read seriously with attending marginalia comments and I am feeling the absence. Too many things have been permitted to distract me; while this was not always within my control, honesty compels me to admit that my self-discipline slackened this year. It is time to rectify that – evidence for which will be more frequent book review here.

What are you reading?

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“]

Working on a number of things, top priority among which is a cross-post for Nuclear Diner about the Myhrvold Report that Cheryl Rofer decisively shredded here last week. Cheryl and I have done some point-counterpoint and blogging  round tables together in the past but, this time I have been handicapped in my response by being largely in agreement 🙂  I will try to hit the report from a somewhat different angle but like Cheryl I have some serious reservations.

Picked up a few new reads this weekend that should be interesting to the readership:

Confronting the Classics by Mary Beard

Dirty Wars by Jeremy Scahill 

Mary Beard is a British celebrity classicist from King’s College, an eminent figure in the field and extremely active in the social media realm where her blog, A Don’s Life and her twitter account are highly popular. She seems somewhat leftish anti-American in her politics, but does not appear to be under what Popper termed “the spell of Plato” and regards Socrates as a radical and subversive ( which he was, though not quite in the modern sense of those words).  Here is a sample of Beard’s prose:

Marcus Tullius Cicero was murdered on 7 December 43 BC: Rome’s most famous orator, off-and-on defender of Republican liberty and thundering critic of autocracy. He was finally hunted down by lackeys of Mark Antony, a member of Rome’s ruling junta and principal victim of Cicero’s dazzling swansong of invective: more than a dozen speeches called the Philippics, after Demosthenes almost equally nasty attacks on Philip of Macedon, three centuries earlier.

Cicero of course shared the fate of Demosthenes, dying less ignobly than Pompey but much less impressively to his fellow Romans than did the fanatical Cato. As a result, Cato has an equally uncompromising libertarian think tank named in his honor while America’s gift to Cicero’s posterity is only a mafia-infested Chicago suburb.

Scahill is much better known figure than Beard. I frankly disagree in principle with his take on drones and al Qaida targets – unless they are hors d’ combat or attempting to surrender, as combatants *all* AQ members are legitimate military targets under the laws of war, period – but I wanted to see what his argument was at it’s most expansive and fully documented. Should be an interesting read.