zenpundit.com

My friend and sometime co-author Shane Deichman reviews Senator’s Son: An Iraq War Novel  by Luke S. Larson ( my review will be coming later this month).  For those readers unfamiliar with Shane, he is a former USMC Science Adviser at JFCOM. Physicist. Former Managing Director of Operations for IATGR. Former Managing Director of EnterraSolutions, LLC. ORCAS (Oak Ridge). Currently with the National Missile Defense Agency, Shane blogs at Wizards of Oz, Dreaming 5GW and Antilibrary:

Review: Senator’s Son

by Shane Deichman

Nearly 25 years ago, as a freshman college student balancing a science major with the obligatory credits in the Humanities, my English 101 professor introduced me to the concept of “verisimilitude“: the likeness or resemblance of a creative writing effort to reality. While this was a difficult feat for me in my writing assignments, it is something that Luke Larson has effortlessly achieved in his first novel, Senator’s Son.

Luke was a journalism major at a rival PAC-10 school, courtesy of an NROTC scholarship to the University of Arizona, and as a junior officer in the U.S. Marine Corps served two tours in Iraq (both in al Anbar province – first in 2005 during the election of the Iraqi Transitional Government that was to draft a permanent constitution, and again in 2007 during the Iraqi national referendum and the start of General Petraeus’s “Surge”).

Senator’s Son wastes no time hurling the reader into the breech. Written in a tempo prestissimo style, this rapid-fire novel gives you a no-holds-barred perspective of modern counterinsurgency from multiple perspectives: the families at home with a dissociated populace; the wounded warriors battling the demons of recovery, opiate pain-killer addictions and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder; the careerist bureaucrats that infiltrate every large organization; and most importantly the junior officers and non-commissioned officers who must make up for “higher’s” planning inadequacies and strategic myopia. Larson’s use of a 2047 scenario in the southwest Pacific, with a lone Senator holding the deciding vote on whether or not to commit U.S. military power abroad, helps to reinforce the strategic consequences our actions today can have on future generations.

Set in 2007 Ar Ramadi, a city of nearly a half-million that serves as the provincial capital of al Anbar province just west of Baghdad, Senator’s Son is the story of the platoons of GOLF Company. GOLF is a Marine company (part of a Marine battalion tied to an Army brigade) responsible for sweeping missions in south Ramadi in the days prior to the 2007 Iraqi national referendum (and a few months prior to “The Surge”). Their early ventures from the “Snake Pit” (a heavily fortified Marine firm base) poignantly demonstrate the complexities of contemporary warfare.

The force protection concerns are palpable – one can almost smell the raw sewage flowing through the ruined streets of a dying city, and feel the peering eyes of snipers tracking you in their sights. Every piece of litter is a potential Improvised Explosive Device, and every sound a threat. And like Mayor Giuliani’s “Broken Windows” theory in late 1990s New York City, the reluctant shift from a hardened, up-armored patrol mindset to one of cooperative engagement with a foreign culture underscores the essence of counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine now codified in FM 3-24/MCWP 3-33.5: Counterinsurgency.

Like real life, there are few “happy endings” in this book. Each platoon commander in GOLF has his own strengths and fallibilities: from steadfast Bama’s bravery and bigotries to the maverick Greg’s ingenuity and independence. And each must face his own demons in the prose that Larson deftly weaves.

At a minimum, Senator’s Son is a brilliant primer on leadership: how to learn which rules are worth breaking, the importance of adaptability when there are no black-or-white situations but only gray, and the primacy of relationships.

But it is also a tribute to those who answer a call to serve – whether they serve in their own communities as volunteers, or have the privilege of wearing the Eagle-Globe-and-Anchor of a Marine (like my grandfather, a mortarman with CHARLIE-1-6 in Guadalcanal and Tarawa, and my grandmother, a clerk-typist at Hunters Point-San Francisco who met my grandfather after his malaria washed him out of the Fleet Marine Force). Senator’s Son is a testament to the resilience of those who carry the burden of personal sacrifice with such humility that we can take our own freedom for granted.

This book is a “must read” for anyone who cares about the greater world beyond our neighborhood – and the role that power (be it the “hard” power of weaponry and kinetic energy, or the “soft” power of relationships) can play in shaping the world for better or for worse.

(cross-posted at Antilibrary, Wizards of Oz and Zenpundit)

Senator’s Son: An Iraq War Novel  by Luke S. Larson

Just received a review copy of new author Luke Larson’s novel Senator’s Son. I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of works of fiction that I have reviewed at ZP, but two things caught my attention about Senator’s Son:

First, the novel is historical realism with a theme of COIN. Secondly, the author Luke Larson is a decorated Marine officer with two tours in Iraq under his belt. Flipping the pages reveals a gritty, sometimes humorous, staccato writing style and military/strategy/policy issues that are discussed here, or at SWJ or Abu Muqawama come to life through the eyes of still learning practitioners. I’m looking forward to reading Senator’s Son and reviewing it in full in late February or early March ( need to finish Carr’s Inside Cyber Warfare first).

Setting aside the book itself, something else occurred to me – that we have reached the point where the war is now appearing not as news, but as literature; Iraq and Afghanistan are proving to be culturally transformative wars for America in ways that the Gulf War or the Korean War were not.

If you consider WWI, the Great War represented an existential crisis for Western Civilization that found expression in the Lost Generation and, in Germany, the polar opposite novels All Quiet on the Western Front and Storm of Steel as well as Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. The Spanish Civil War electrified international opinion, foreshadowing as it did the ideological death-match of the 20th century, and yielded Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. WWII and the Vietnam War have generated an ocean of histories down to the minutest detail, as well as their share of novels, short stories and movies. It is noteworthy, that most of the time, literature and history followed the conclusion of peace, be it in victory or defeat.

In our time, the books on the war in Iraq, or Afghanistan or against terrorism are arriving while the conflict is still in full throttle, in time to shape the perceptions of policymakers and the public to an unprecedented extent. Something is happening out there, an inchoate need for answers or reassurance that writers are attempting to answer. Most of these books so far have been non-fiction, journalistic instant histories salted with examples of policy analysis and war memoirs.

Senator’s Son marks a new turn toward a wave of fiction addressing the crucible of America’s current wars. Literature can shape a nation’s psyche more profoundly than even the most soberly researched work of history.

Daemon by Daniel Suarez

I was not entirely happy with the amount of book reading that I accomplished in 2009 and this year I am going to shoot for both a larger number of books as well as more books that are fiction or relate to science. In this instance, both.

I picked up Daemon because of the exceptionally high praise given to Suarez’s new book, Freedom
TM by John Robb and Shlok Vaidya (Freedom is the sequel to Daemon and Robb has a blurb on the book jacket). They were right. Suarez is good. As in William Gibson good. Orson Scott Card good. Philip K. Dick good. You get the idea.

Complicit: How Greed and Collusion Made the Credit Crisis Unstoppable by Mark Gilbert

Inside Cyber Warfare: Mapping the Cyber Underworld by Jeffrey Carr

Received courtesy review copies of two books that will serve to “stretch” my knowledge base and increase my cognitive map.

Mark Gilbert is a financial columnist and bureau chief for Bloomberg News in London and he has written a hard hitting deconstruction of the great credit collapse and crisis bail-out of 2008-2009. Gilbert is telling a story of breathtaking risk assumption, regulatory capture, academic hubris, central bankers as naked emperors and unrepentant banksters who have learned nothing and forgotten nothing from the crisis. My personal background in credit issues is rooted solidly in the dustily agrarian economic history of the 19th century and the painful transition from yeoman “book debt” to gold standard dollars, so I look forward to broadening my understanding of modern financial systems from reading Complicit.

I will probably review Complicit in a cross-blog conjunction with Lexington Green, who also has a copy in his possession.

Jeffrey Carr is the CEO of GreyLogic and a researcher, presenter and consultant on issues related to cybersecurity, hacking, cyberterrorism and asymmetric conflicts in virtual domains. Carr offers a cohesive and compact look at the major problems and players in the uncertain crossroads of national security and cyberspace. Non-geeks (like myself) will appreciate Carr’s focus in Inside Cyber Warfare on the connection to the worlds of intelligence, law enforcement, international law and military operations and doctrine. As an added bonus, the foreword is by Lewis Shepherd, another blogfriend and the former Senior Technology Officer of the DIA.

Originally, I had wanted to review Inside Cyber Warfare before last Christmas, so now that I have the book, I will move it to the top of my titanic reading pile.

The Landmark Xenophon’s Hellenika by Xenophon. Edited by Robert Strassler

Strassler’s “Landmark” series are gems. After enjoying this year’s Xenophon Roundtable at Chicago Boyz, I was glad to see Hellenika newly released. A little pricey though in hardcover.

I am adding more books to my Antilibrary, keeping in the spirit of  Nassim Nicholas Taleb, from his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable:

….The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. he is the owner of a large personal library ( containing thirty thousand books), and separates vistors into two categories: those who react with ‘Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?’ and others – a very small minority- who get the point that a private library is not an ego boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real estate market allow you to put there. You wil accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call the collection of unread books an antilibrary.

While the real estate markets are no longer “tight”, the substance still applies. Here’s what else I just picked up:

After the Ice: A Global Human History 20,000-5000 BC  by Steven Mithen

Panzer Leader by General Heinz Guderian

Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 by Christopher Clark

Strategy by B.H. Liddell Hart

Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present by Michael Oren

The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe by Wiliam Hitchcock

This last was an Xmas gift from my scientific amigo, Dr. Von