Going to try to catch up this week on the backlog of book reviews I need to do, particularly those books sent to me by publishers. I may have to break down and do a set of mini-reviews, so far behind I have gotten myself.
So, naturally, that was a suitable pretext to order more books 🙂
Luttwak’s book is a strategy classic and I recently enjoyed his Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire. I first heard of Stefan Zweig from Lexington Green but nearly everyone who has read The World of Yesterday that I have encountered has raved about it, so I am looking forward to that one. Why the West Rules- For Now is another rec from the Chicago Boyz crowd but I do not think that anyone has reviewed it there as of yet. Finally, I am pairing War Before Civilization with Azar Gat’s War in Human Civilization – have a sense that Gat’s ideas may be somewhat in tune with Martin van Creveld.
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Tom did a very nice job with this piece, particularly his reference to the historically underexamined but diplomatically significantNixon Doctrine. He’s right. The strategic shift is a radical departure from the previous Bush era and is closely following the mammoth budgetary requests of our high tech services that are gearing up, along with industry lobbyists, to battle for every last dollar of a shrinking defense pie ( one reason I recently asked, Is COIN Dead?).
However, the military strategy should be driving acquisitions rather than being a shopping list transformed into a strategy ( see Shape the Future Force section) considering we are in at least two wars, perhaps three depending on how you count, from which we have yet to bring to a satisfactory resolution. That there is a shift here is not bad per se – East Asia is certainly far more significant to American security than is Afghanistan but that shift is so heavily laden with major economic and diplomatic variables, which, frankly, are of much greater longitudinal importance than military operational planning or short term force structure.
You know, I really enjoy building my DoubleQuotes. They can be entirely frivolous, as is this one, for instance:
with its touch of gothic — a taste I share with my friend Bryan Alexander.
Or they can work like a Necker cube, offering opposite framings with which to view a single topic — in this case, video games.
They can also work like Rorschach blots — this one compares two prophecies, one from the Quran and one from a contemporary Christian prophet (if I’m not mistaken, President Obama quoted him recently) —
— but it is left up to the reader to determine the value of each…
And they can also pose fundamental questions of preference:
Has science simply replaced myth, d’you think? or is science for the facts, perhaps, and the mind — while poetry and myth are for the heart, and truth?
Received a courtesy review copy of WAR yesterday from the publisher, due entirely to the kind offices of Kanani.
Read the first 50 pages this afternoon and found it it interesting because as a book, it exists on the opposite end of the spectrum fromMackinlay and Kilcullen. Where the former are giving a panoramic or telescopic view of COIN as strategic-operational-grand tactics, the author of WAR, journalist Sebastian Junger, is using a microscope to show COIN in the Korengal valley, Afghanistan as seen by an Army platoon, squad and individual soldier. Maybe an electron microscope would be a better analogy. Gritty.
Will write a full review when I am finished. If any active duty or veteran readers were in Korengal or Afghanistan or have read WAR and care to sound off in the comment section, you are cordially encouraged to do so.
Zenpundit is a blog dedicated to exploring the intersections of foreign policy, history, military theory, national security,strategic thinking, futurism, cognition and a number of other esoteric pursuits.
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