{"id":4567,"date":"2011-12-06T04:29:22","date_gmt":"2011-12-06T04:29:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=4567"},"modified":"2011-12-06T04:29:22","modified_gmt":"2011-12-06T04:29:22","slug":"odiernos-reading-list","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=4567","title":{"rendered":"Odierno’s Reading List"},"content":{"rendered":"

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General Ray Odierno<\/a>, Chief of Staff of the US Army<\/strong> has a pretty good prospective professional reading list in the work<\/a>s with many titles of general interest to people in national security and foreign policy fields. He’s asking for feedback too.<\/p>\n

Minus the Mustache of Understanding<\/a><\/strong>, whose inclusion seems to be required on lists of these kind, there are titles here that I would strongly recommend including McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom<\/a><\/strong>, \u00a0The Landmark Thucydides<\/a><\/strong>, Luttwak’s Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire<\/strong><\/a> and the best of military historians and strategists like Paret, Keegan, van Creveld and Parker.<\/p>\n

I would recommend adding Acheson’s memoir Present at the Creation<\/a><\/strong>, for an understanding of policy and national strategy and Alan Schom’s critical and monumental biography, Napoleon Bonaparte: A Life<\/a><\/strong>, for a comprehensive understanding of Napoleon’s campaigns in context with his psychology and political leadership.<\/p>\n

But what seems to really be missing from the General’s list is a good book on intelligence history and tradecraft.<\/p>\n

Since the list is intended for military officers, it would not have to be a technical critique along the lines of Roberta Wohlstetter’s Warning and Decision<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>(though that would not hurt) but something that gave a good overview, spymaster biography or history, would help.<\/p>\n

I can think of many, but I’d like to see what the readership would nominate in the comment section. Have at it!<\/p>\n

Hat tip to Lucien.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

General Ray Odierno, Chief of Staff of the US Army has a pretty good prospective professional reading list in the works with many titles of general interest to people in national security and foreign policy fields. He’s asking for feedback too. Minus the Mustache of Understanding, whose inclusion seems to be required on lists of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[350,420,133,34,165,51,78,336,39,367,445,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-army","category-authors","category-book","category-education","category-historians","category-history","category-ideas","category-intellectuals","category-military","category-military-history","category-reading","category-recommended-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4567"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4568,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4567\/revisions\/4568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}