You know our tagline: #TheBridgeReads. But we don’t read merely for the sake of reading, and it’s certainly not just for ourselves. At The Strategy Bridge, we believe readers are leaders, and leaders are readers. And you, the Bridge Community, have demonstrated that this year in spades.

You, the readers of The Strategy Bridge, have outdone yourselves this year with sixty book reviews covering a wide variety of topics from grand strategy and the profession of arms, to comedy and poetry. You’ve examined technologies well-known and emerging, great power competition, and limited, dirty wars. You’ve investigated the past, present, and future. You’ve brought perspectives from every domain of warfare, including the most human domain of all—ourselves.

We have to hand it to you. This is what our community is all about. The Strategy Bridge exists to promote the development of people with a passion for strategy, military affairs, and national security. As you share your ideas with the rest of our growing network, we all become stronger through continued conversation and critique. As we’ve long recognized, this vigorous—but always respectful—engagement is the engine of insight.

Oh, and we mean that bit about our community: it is as much your Bridge as ours. Probably more.

The Strategy Bridge community is a network of people with a wide variety of backgrounds and opinions, all united by one fact: we care about strategy, national security, and military affairs. This diversity is the foundation and strength of our Bridge. Whether you’re an academic, a practitioner, or a little of both, you make The Strategy Bridge stronger by contributing.

So, keep reading.

Read widely, deeply, and critically. The best reminder of all the things you don’t yet know is a full stack of books yet to be read, what in Japanese is termed tsundoku. And when you’ve finished, remember that great line from Dead Poets Society: “Don’t just consider what the author thinks: consider what you think.” Then most importantly, tell us, because #TheBridgeWrites, too.

#TheBridgeReads

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence. Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2018.

Read a review by Steven Fino here:
For Agrawal, Gans, and Goldfarb, artificial intelligence is simply a prediction machine—it uses information we possess to generate information we do not possess. This simple realization immediately refocuses contemporary discussions and guides fruitful development of artificial intelligence. It underscores the situation-specific nature of its data and tools. It discloses its fallibility. And it reveals the role of predictions in our decision process, not as determinants but rather as inputs that must be evaluated according to our uniquely-human judgement. According to the three economists, that is the “most significant implication of prediction machines”—they “increase the value of judgement.”

Winning Armageddon: Curtis LeMay and Strategic Air Command 1948-1957. Trevor Albertson. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2019.

Read John M. Curatola’s review here:
This book is an excellent contribution to the historiography of the early Cold War, Strategic Air Command, and LeMay, making it a must for any student of the cold war. Albertson helps provide more insight into Strategic Air Command leadership during LeMay’s tenure while illustrating the commander’s thought process and quiet, yet aggressive, style of leadership. The author’s excellent use of primary sources adroitly illustrate his thesis and fills a void in the current historiography. The book is a worthy and needed addition to the current historiography regarding the Cold War and strategic nuclear bombardment.

Small Boats and Daring Men: Maritime Raiding, Irregular Warfare, and the Early American Navy. Benjamin Armstrong. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019.

Read Ian Abbey’s review here:
Benjamin Armstrong makes a strong effort to show that irregular warfare was standard in the Navy’s early days by examining its activities during early wars where it was a clear underdog, particularly naval actions in the Caribbean, Mediterranean, and Southeast Asia. He begins with minor actions occurring just before the American Revolution, as irregular activities increased with popular sentiment against British rule. He then continues through the Quasi-War and the foreign ventures against the Barbary states, where the miniscule United States Navy had to rely on irregular action to supplement its small numbers. Because there is much more to describe in the War of 1812, Armstrong devotes the next two chapters to that conflict as privateers and irregulars had to shoulder the heavier burden of fighting while most of the blue water navy eventually got bottled up in port. Armstrong then details the navy’s efforts against piracy in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea after the Latin American wars for independence, and concludes with the far-flung campaigns against pirates in the Dutch East Indies.

Bold Venture: The American Bombing of Japanese-Occupied Hong Kong, 1942-1945. Steven K. Bailey. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2019.

Read Joseph Fonseca’s review here:
Bold Venture’s presence as a window into a little known air campaign that evolved and grew as fortunes, strategies, and leadership changed, makes it worthwhile for those interested in learning more about how American bomber crews and fighter pilots and their Japanese opponents interacted above the skies of the Pearl River Delta between 1942 and 1945.

A British Profession of Arms: The Politics of Command in the Late Victorian Army. Ian F.W. Beckett. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018.

Read James D. Campbell’s review here:
An examination of the true nature of the military as a profession can help us understand ways in which modern armies respond in times of significant political turmoil, transition, and more or less continuous world-wide operations. Such an understanding is critical not only to the citizens and members of the political class whom the military serves, but especially to military professionals themselves. Beckett’s book provides a piercing window into an army in just such a time of transition and persistent global conflict and is therefore not only useful for specialists in Victorian British history, but to anyone interested in how military organizations navigate complex times.

Military Readiness: Concepts, Choices, Consequences. Richard K. Betts. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1995.

Read Daniel Sukman’s review here:
It is imperative that military professionals understand the term readiness. Richard K. Betts aids that understanding by expanding the framing of readiness as a series of choices and consequences for policy makers, similar to how military commanders frame decisions and risk. Paramount to readiness is the choice between operational and structural readiness. This article will examine the term, how the joint force applies readiness, and propose additional and alternate methods of readiness vis-à-vis recently published strategic guidance.

Land Warfare Since 1860: A Global History of Boots on the Ground. Jeremy Black. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2018.

Read Michael Barr’s review here:
It is popular for historians to look for continuity and coherence in military history, because it speaks to a comfortable and familiar narrative. Such histories look for patterns and predetermined ends. Victors write the history, and they tend to justify what was done in hindsight, often making outcomes that were near things appear as part of some inevitable flow of history. Looking for continuity and coherence in the midst of change is comforting. This bias is not evil or stupid; it is fundamentally human. The problem with continuity and coherence in a historical narrative is that it works as long as actual events correspond with our interpretations, but, when they do not, the generalizations tend to turn history into myth. Myths that project a well ordered pattern to history are not pragmatic tools for facing the future.

A New Conception of War: John Boyd, the U.S. Marines, and Maneuver Warfare. Ian T. Brown. Quantico, Virginia: Marine Corps University Press, 2018.

Read Dan Grazier’s review here:
Brown places the entire saga in its proper context and succeeds in his intended purpose of reminding his target audience of his fellow Marines why a slim manual of just over 100 pages dictates every facet of their working lives. He does miss an opportunity to expand that audience by showing that the intellectual changes that had taken place within the Marine Corps were part of a larger military-reform effort of that era that spanned the services and the entire national-security space. There is some debate about whether the maneuver warfare revolution would have occurred at all had it not been for the outside pressure exerted by lawmakers who, having received Boyd’s briefings, engaged with service leaders about actual warfare and combat rather than just budget and acquisition details that so often dominate discussions today. Still, this book shows how just relatively few junior military officers wielding innovative ideas can combine forces, perhaps with an outsider or two, to completely revamp the way their service thinks about warfare.

Terrorism, Betrayal & Resilience: My Story of the 1998 U.S. Embassy Bombings. Prudence Bushnell. Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books, 2018.

Read a review from Robert Clemm here:
In 2020, American citizens will come of voting age who were not born when the 9/11 attacks occurred. While there are voters who have not lived absent the repercussions of the 9/11 attacks, the proximate cause of American involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq will enter a new age as that attack fades into historical memory. For those who lived through the attacks, the thought that such a horrifying event could fade in public consciousness seems at least shocking, if not an indictment of American culture. But, that critique may be unfair given how easily those who were alive in 2001 had already forgotten the past.  The attacks of 9/11 did not occur in a vacuum and the frenetic work of the 9/11 Commission served as much as a critique of the U.S. government as it did of the American people’s ability to forget. Only after 9/11 were events, such as the Battle of Mogadishu and the USS Cole, recalled in the glaring clarity of hindsight. Such hindsight allows Americans to see these events as crumbs along a path to the passenger jets in New York and Washington, D.C. A recent work, however, attempts to remind us of yet another crumb and to contextualize it in light of all that has occurred before and since.

Road Warriors: Foreign Fighters in the Armies of Jihad. Daniel Byman, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Read a review from Margaret Dene here:
Daniel Byman’s Road Warriors is a timely piece on the history and evolution of foreign fighters’ role in jihad. Readers will walk away from this book with a better understanding of the severity of the threat of foreign fighters, as well as how the rise of the Islamic State was possible to begin with. Foreign fighter flow to jihadi conflicts is evidence of the way the modern, globalized world fans conflict beyond its regional nucleus. This book will appeal to serious scholars for its analytical argument.

The Fighters: Americans in Combat. C.J. Chivers. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2018.

Read a review from Justin Lynch here:
This book reveals very little about national strategy or defense policy, or even about the effectiveness of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but it is a worthwhile read for those interested in the ground-level experience of war and Americans who want to know more about the actions committed overseas in their name.

Read an alternate review from William M. Stephens here:
This book should be read, immediately reread, and then read again after a long introspection as readers will find it hauntingly illustrative of the installments in blood, innocence, tears, family heartache, and hardship, as well as time, peace of mind, and family harmony which will also be due in future conventional or in multi-domain conflicts.

War and Remembrance: The Story of the American Battle Monuments Commission. Thomas H. Conner. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2018.

Read Kate Clarke LeMay’s review here:
Those who have walked the grounds of an overseas American war cemetery are unlikely to forget the experience. The endless rows of white marble headstones, meticulously cared for lawns, and works of art and architecture organized around the Christian theme of redemption distinguish these sites as particularly American. No other nation has created such a variety of works of high design. In fact, the grave marker in the shape of the Latin cross has become an icon for American war sacrifice. The overseas American war cemeteries were the work of the smallest agency of the executive branch, the American Battle Monuments Commission—one of the least understood agencies in the federal government, which is saying a lot. The history of the American Battle Monuments Commission is a fascinating account of logistical genius, cultural diplomacy, remembrance priorities, and memory wars.

Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security. Michael C. Desch. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019.

Read Jessica D. Blankshain’s review here:
Michael C. Desch makes two important contributions to this bridging-the-gap discussion. He provides a fascinating, well-researched account of the relationship between university academics and national security policymakers in 20th and 21st century America, and argues for the importance of the security environment as a key determinant of this relationship. Deschs’s second argument, that professionalization has made the social sciences increasingly irrelevant to policymakers since the end of World War II, with academics emphasizing rigor over relevance, is less novel and less convincing.

Four Guardians: A Principled Agent View of American Civil-Military Relations. Jeff Donnithorne. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018.

Read Jim Golby’s review here:
Four Guardians is a laudable effort that should be carefully and widely read by scholars and practitioners of civil-military relations. This ambitious project attempts not only to explore the impact that each distinct military service culture will have on civil-military relations, but also to extend and re-imagine one of the most prominent theories in the field, Peter Feaver's Principal-Agent framework.

America in Afghanistan: Foreign Policy and Decision Making from Bush to Obama to Trump. Sharifullah Dorani. London, UK: I.B. Taurus, 2019.

Read a review by Carter Malkasian here:
Dorani brings an Afghan perspective to the debates that have played out in Washington. The major question he explores is: How did U.S. policy fail in stabilizing Afghanistan? He examines the decisions of each administration, describing how personality, domestic politics, economic factors, regional power politics, and ideology shaped the outcome. If he has a common criticism, it is that U.S. presidential administrations suffered from a lack of understanding and a narrow point of view: “The policy assumptions made by the Bush and Obama Administrations were ill-informed, misjudged and derived from rigid ideologies rather than realities on the ground.” The criticism is perhaps a tad harsh, but he performs a service in reminding outsiders to question how much they understand foreign lands.

Bayly’s War: The Battle for the Western Approaches in the First World War. Steven Dunn. Barnesley, UK: Seaforth Publishing, 2018.

Read Thomas Sheppard’s review here:
The popular conception of World War I centers on hellish trench warfare and all its horrors. While it is undeniable that the war was won and lost on the Western Front, the lines stretching back across the Atlantic that brought men and desperately needed supplies into the theater of operations played an essential part in Allied victory. Although he will never have the notoriety of a Pershing or Foch, Bayly did his part to sustain the Allied war effort, and it is fitting that he and the men he led get their due here.

The Bridge to Airpower: Logistics Support for Royal Flying Corps Operations on the Western Front, 1914-1918. Peter Dye. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2015.

Read Jobie Turner’s review here:
More pertinent to the study of the military profession is to ask the question: What books stand out in the field of logistics? Ask any officer or senior enlisted leader who has graduated from a professional military education course and they can tell you two things: a book about strategy they liked and many they did not. Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, and even the much-maligned but desperately needed for his time Jomini, all fit the mold. Ask the same crowd to suggest the best book on military logistics and the answer is likely to be silence. Thus, in odd juxtaposition, logistics is so important in war that the most popular quotation about logistics is apocryphal and the vast majority of military leaders could not name one book on the subject. Peter Dye steps into this confusion with his magisterial The Bridge to Airpower: Logistics Support for Royal Flying Corps Operations on the Western Front, 1914-1918, and provides much-needed clarity.

After Combat: True War Stories from Iraq and Afghanistan. Marian Eide and Michael Gibler. Lincoln. NE: Potomac Books, 2018.

Read a review by James Sandy here:
As the United States approaches the end of another decade of combat, strife, and uncertainty in its global affairs, two conflicted regions loom large. The American presence in Iraq and Afghanistan drags onward, and, as the American population and government discuss withdrawal, the narrative of the last twenty years begins to come into view. The experiences of American soldiers deployed to these regions, sometimes over and over again, are central to this story, including consideration of the lasting impact of their time abroad. American culture is already rife with conversations about post-traumatic stress, veterans’ services, and treatments following deployments. Unfortunately, the voice of the veterans themselves is seldom heard with clarity in these conversations.

Victor in the Jungle. Alex Finley. Smiling Hippo Press, 2019.

Read Daniel Scheringa’s review here:
Great satire rarely spawns sequels. There is no Office Space II or Catch-23. The satirist generally hits his or her target so perfectly the first time there is no need to fire a second shot. Mike Judge was able to skewer late 90s corporate culture in one movie, and Joseph Heller fit all of his scorn for military bureaucracy into one book. What makes Victor in the Jungle such a fine follow-up is that Finley has the ability to find new things to satirize. A second novel merely to rehash her satire of the GWOT and CIA bureaucracy would have also been unnecessary. But Finley not only finds new targets for her satire—the State Department, corrupt dictators, Ugly American syndrome—she also writes a genuinely fun adventure story that stands on its own.

Tank Warfare on the Eastern Front 1941-1942: Schwerpunkt. Robert Forczyk. Barnsley, U.K.: Pen & Sword Books Ltd, 2016.

Read Russell Hellyer’s review here:
Anyone who has any doubt about how the war evolved in these crucial first years would do well to read Tank Warfare on The Eastern Front. This work gives a thorough dismantling of many of the myths surrounding these campaigns, though much of this is done indirectly, outside of the introduction. Forczyk allows for his research to stand on its own, while rejecting amateur tendencies of what might have been, instead choosing to carefully evaluate the actual performance of men, equipment, and organizations. The Eastern front has important lessons for practitioners of military and political strategy, and this work has an important role in any library.

Drone. Kim Garcia. Omaha, NE: The Backwaters Press, 2016.

Read Olivia Garard’s review here:
Garcia’s work was more than a grenade. It was a drone that fired a missile, rifling through me, exploding me into another kind of mist. This is why we need art. My initial reaction—if we can call two years of brooding initial—is exactly why we need more poetry about the experience of modern war. We need it for catharsis, communication, and reckoning. We need more poetry that forces us to wrestle in the cobwebs and the debris of the darkest corners of the attic. We need to reflect in the mirrors, be they clear, clouded, or cracked, that we find locked away in the trunk. Garcia gave me a key. Maybe it will work for you as well.

The Soldier from Independence: A Military Biography of Harry Truman. Vol. I: 1906-1919. D. M. Giangreco. Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books, 2018.

Read Jame’s Matray’s review here:
D. M. Giangreco, author of several valuable studies on topics in U.S. military history, examines in detail the early military career of the 33rd president of the United States. Harry Truman, he writes, “always wanted to be a soldier.” In 1905, at age 21, he enlisted in Battery B of the First Missouri Field Artillery, serving two three-year tours of duty. After the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, Truman reenlisted. Gaining promotion to captain, he commanded an artillery battalion that fought in France for three months. “Little has been written of Truman’s first six years as a part-time soldier” because of limited sources, Giangreco notes, but he ably fills this void.

The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11. Garrett M. Graff. New York, NY: Avid Reader Press, 2019.

Read a review from Katherine Voyles here:
Accounts that dig into what came before 9/11, accounts that unfold the events of that day, accounts of what came after, all carry their own unique virtues and drawbacks, but I am grateful for them all and believe we need all of them because they talk over and next to and alongside one another. Graff’s volume is a crucial addition to writing about 9/11 because of its immersive power and its capacity to plunge the reader back into the day itself.

Douglas Haig and the First World War. J.P. Harris. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Read a review by Samuel Wilkins here:
Douglas Haig and the First World War is a serious and effective contribution towards the study of one of the most important figures in British military history. Harris successfully dismantles flawed popular narratives concerning Haig’s generalship while avoiding the clientelism and nationalism that color some other historical reassessments. The Haig that emerges is neither butcher nor genius, but instead a diligent but aloof professional struggling to rise to the immense challenges posed by high command.

Building Militaries in Fragile States: Challenges for the United States. Mara E. Karlin. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.

Read a review from Matthew J. Kuhlman here:
Building partner militaries has been an important tool of American foreign policy throughout modern history. Building Militaries in Fragile States brings to light the intricacies of this often underappreciated policy tool and is an important book for policymakers and practitioners in the realms of international affairs and security assistance.

The Hooligans of Kandahar: Not All War Stories Are Heroic. Joseph Kassabian. TCK Publishing, 2018.

Read a review by Tyrell Mayfield here:
It seems everyone is writing these days. And the conclusion I came to at the end of this book is that Kassabian did not write it for you to read. He wrote it to sort out this chapter of his life, to put his experiences in a book that he could put on a shelf and store them in a way that other life experiences don’t need to be handled. The book is not artfully done. It is disjointed and repetitive at times, but then again so is combat. It is not a slog; the narrative keeps the reader moving and there is enough empathy created to keep one’s interest in the outcome. No general would ever suggest you read this book, and maybe that is why you should make time to do it. The first person perspective offered by Kassabian is unpolished, irreverent, and told from a soldier’s perspective. In a world full of strategic challenges it is, in my view, a good thing for those making the decisions and grappling with the consequences to get an appreciation for what the greatest of plans looks like when 18-year-old Americans are sent forth to implement them.

War Flower: My Life After Iraq. Brooke King. Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books, 2019

Read a review from Brandee Leon here:
”This is the story of not only what war can do to a human brain, but what it specifically did to Brooke King’s brain. War Flower is a story of a child of a broken home going to war, getting spat out broken, and trying to piece her life back together for the sake of her sanity and the well-being of her children. It is a memoir of war.”

The ‘Stan. Kevin Knodell, David Axe, and Blue Delliquanti. Annapolis, MD: Dead Reckoning, 2018.

Read Michael Doidge’s review here:
Large though these casualty figures appear, within them exist thousands of profound and meaningful moments from which the world can learn a great deal. They deserve the writing and visualization necessary to give voice to their meaning. And we, the reader, would be better for it.

The China Mission: George Marshall’s Unfinished War, 1945-1947. Daniel Kurtz-Phelan. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.

Read a review by John Q. Bolton here:
The China Mission is an important book for those seeking to understand China or, more realistically, grasp the near-impossibility of understanding the complexities of China, in the past or present. Like other recent scholarship from the Council on Foreign Relations—see Elizabeth Economy’s The Third Revolution—The China Mission throws cold water on any China expert who makes definitive claims about China or the Chinese; China remains truly foreign to most Americans.

Future War: Preparing for the New Global Battlefield. Robert H. Latiff. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.

Read a review from Walker D. Mills here:
In a concise volume, Latiff presents his assessment of where the U.S. military is now, the challenges ahead, and the way forward. Latiff is comfortable imagining a complicated ethical future of engineered soldiers and autonomous weapons while critiquing the political roots of persistent defense issues. His work is not simply an overview of emerging technology but a look at the coming changes in the character of warfare he believes these technologies will bring. He uses technology as a starting point for discussing the ethical and political limitations of the current state of the civilian and uniformed military civilian leadership at the national level.

Grand Strategy. Peter Layton. 2018.

Read a review by James Griffin here:
The practice of grand strategy has been a staple of statesmanship since time immemorial. But only since the Napoleonic era has much ink been spilt analyzing and grappling with the grand strategic behavior of varied historical dynamos. Until now, scholars have largely demurred from trying to pin down the theoretical essence of what grand strategy actually is. By borrowing insights from fields as varied as strategic studies and cognitive theory, Layton has created an interpretation of how grand strategy could and should look in practice.

Never in Finer Company: The Men of the Great War’s Lost Battalion. Edward G. Lengel. New York, NY: Da Capo Press, 2018.

Read a review from Edmund D. Potter here:
In the end, Never in Finer Company is an interesting read, but it is not recommended for the lay reader for which it is intended. A novice in World War I and the American role in the conflict would be better served acquiring Lengel’s earlier work. Likewise, this text does not fulfill the expectation of its title, and Robert Laplander’s Finding the Lost Battalion is a more useful source.

Kissinger on Kissinger: Reflections on Diplomacy, Grand Strategy, and Leadership. Winston Lord. New York, NY: All Points Books, 2019.

Read a review from Thomas Alan Schwartz here:
Winston Lord, the former American ambassador to China and a distinguished American diplomat, begins this short and engaging book by pointing out that Henry Kissinger has never done an oral history. Given that Kissinger has written over 4000 pages of memoirs and sat for thousands of interviews with journalists, the absence of a simple and direct oral history surprised Lord. Yet it gave him and his collaborator, former Deputy National Security Adviser in the Trump Administration K. T. McFarland, an opportunity to contribute to the historical record. Kissinger on Kissinger is the result of their efforts, a largely uncritical account of the diplomacy of the most famous—and controversial—American diplomat of the 20th century.

Searching for Boko Haram: A History of Violence in Central Africa. Scott MacEachern. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Read a review from Diane Chido here:
Frontier zones are the most complex and interesting of regions. They have been explored as wild badlands of smuggling and insurgency in the international system in many recent books from Niall Ferguson, George Friedman, Robert Kaplan, and David Kilcullen. In this vein, Scott MacEachern takes a microscopic view of one relatively small frontier area around the Mandara Mountains on the Cameroon-Nigeria border and describe its’ inhabitants’ cultural evolution over seven millennia. MacEachern examines identity fluidity and the “cultural logics” of violence applicable to all frontier areas where “the marginalized can become wealthy and where the wealthy and powerful can become more so.”

Flight Risk: The Coalition's Air Advisory Mission in Afghanistan, 2005–2015. Forrest L. Marion. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2018.

Read a review from Paul Morris here:
Marion is first to the drawing board in capturing the challenges of the Coalition’s Air Advisory mission, and Flight Risk is worth the read. The escalation of military objectives coupled with air advisors’ suspicions of linkages to criminal patronage networks provide important points of reference for understanding the seemingly eternal mission. Paradoxically, the very aid meant to promote democratic institutions and support self-determination may have further entrenched a corrupt tribal elite with no intentions of institutional reform. The abstract lines of the Westphalian state may only be a reality to western visitors, tolerated by fractured Afghan leaders only for personal gain.

Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America’s Great Foreign Policy Tragedy. Michael J. Mazarr. New York, NY: PublicAffairs, 2019.

Read Frank Hoffman’s review here:
In theory, policy, and strategy are the product of extensive analysis, detailed cost-benefit calculations, and rational criteria for decision-making. In practice, good strategy development is also about compromise and consensus building, resolving problems, mitigating uncertainty and constraints, and steering downstream through the fluid dynamics of international and domestic politics. In theory, leaders master the rational cost-benefit analysis and minimize the bureaucratic inertia towards desired political goals. In practice, hubris and institutional bias can cloud sound judgment and prudent strategy formulation. Leap of Faith is forensic political science at its best.

Operations Analysis in the United States Army Eighth Air Force in World War II. Charles W. McArthur. Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society, 1990.

Read Katherine A. Batterton’s review here:
McArthur’s Operations Analysis in the United States Army Eighth Air Force in World War II is not always the easiest read, but anyone interested in operations research, the history of World War Two, strategic bombing, the United States Air Force, or improving military operations would gain value from its pages. Most importantly, future war will almost invariably involve another Great Experiment as warfighters try to implement new ideas of warfare whose vision on paper do not live up to the cruel reality of war.

Military Anthropology: Soldiers, Scholars and Subjects at the Margins of Empire. Montgomery McFate. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Read a review from Julian Koeck here:
Modern wars are often about changing other cultures. While many wars in history were about enrichment and honor, modern wars often pursue goals that aim at the annihilation of certain cultural traits like Prussian militarism after 1945 or the creation of new ones like a democratic way of life. The contemporary American wars of the 2000s are paradigmatic examples for this. In these wars, strategy is the art of implementing enduring cultural change in a foreign culture to further a state’s own interest. Thus, understanding distinctive cultures, both of the opponent’s and one’s own, is not only of theoretical—or, even worse, academic—importance. Why this is and how cultural knowledge needs to be used in current and future wars is demonstrated in this cleverly written book.

The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder. Sean McFate. New York, NY: William Morrow, 2019.

Read Bob Underwood’s review here:
McFate, using an enigmatic style that evokes Sun-Tzu, offers readers a diagnosis and a prescription, and he excels at exposing uncritical assumptions animating most thinking about the future of war and its practice. Here there is some real insight. Clearly naming problems is important, and McFate does this well. The ten rules pitch at real problems such as fighting with and against mercenaries, supporting or exploiting a fatiguing international order, and adapting to conflict with groups of persons that do not share a Western commitment to the social primacy of states. The rules are worth reading, because they offer a quick and challenging outline that vividly describes these problems.

Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times. Alison McQueen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Read Brian Sandberg’s review here:
We seem to be living in apocalyptic times. Since the September 11 attacks in 2001, apocalyptic language and visions of worldly destruction have proliferated in American political culture and news media and around the world. George W. Bush’s crusading Global War on Terror rhetoric employed frequent allusions to God’s will and the Last Judgment. The massive American bombardment and invasion of Iraq—accompanied by oil fires, looting, and destruction—produced a wealth of apocalyptic imagery. The ensuing sectarian conflict during the Iraq War fueled horrific killings, market bombings, and massacres. The brutality of the Syrian Civil War has prompted millions of Syrians to flee as refugees from a war-torn and devastated landscape. Militants have claimed to be acting to establish an Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in preparation for the end times. Civil warfare and religious violence in Nigeria, Congo, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan, Myanmar, Indonesia, and other nations is often described in apocalyptic terms. Meanwhile, climate scientists warn of the potentially devastating effects of global warming, leading many journalists to offer apocalyptic predictions of global disaster.

The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower. Michael Pillsbury. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, 2015.

Read a review from John F. Sullivan here:
Reflecting on China’s ancient history is a worthwhile endeavor, but Pillsbury’s insistence that millennia-old texts reveal a detailed roadmap to understanding China’s current and future actions is woefully misplaced. He need not have waded so deeply into China’s murky historical waters to shed light on the ongoing rivalry between two powerful yet prideful nations. If the U.S. and China ultimately clash to the world’s detriment, it will regrettably be an all-too-familiar tragedy in the course of human affairs.

No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy: The Life of General James Mattis. Jim Proser. New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2018.

Read Steven L. Ossad’s review here:
Proser sets out at the beginning of the Trump administration to uncover the “qualities of character…[and] personal magnetism” that accounted for the acclaim then greeting the Mattis appointment, culminating in his confirmation by the Senate in a vote of 98 to 1. Despite obvious admiration, the author only partially succeeds. Examples that display martial virtues abound, but readers looking for insights into the personality or inner life of Jim Mattis will struggle not only with making political connections to recent events, but also with what might come next in his public life.

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History. Tomas Rid. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016.

Read a review from Heather Venable here:
I often hear people say something akin to, “I don’t get why the Air Force thinks it owns cyber.” Rid’s account provides some insights into how deeply cyber has been woven into the Air Force’s fabric, although his intent is much broader.. Because, of course, Rise of the Machines is not a history of cyber but a history of cybernetics. Yet cyber emerges from cybernetics, which can be understood as human-machine interactions.

The Rise and Fall of an Officer Corps: The Republic of China Military, 1942-1955. Eric Setzekorn. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018.

Read a review from James Char here:
In elegant prose, Setzekorn offers well-reasoned analysis and empowers the reader to navigate through the course of events until Taiwan’s political opening-up in the concluding chapter. More elucidation of the probable linkages between the 12 years that Chiang Ching-kuo had spent under Leninist tutelage in the Soviet Union and the effects that might have had on his work in the Republic of China military would certainly have made Rise and Fall a more balanced account. Nevertheless, this work provides us with an important reminder of a key phase of China’s modern history that is increasingly fading from the public consciousness. With Taipei’s economic and diplomatic fortunes having gone south (vis-à-vis Beijing’s) in recent decades—coupled with the rising stature of the Chinese armed forces—the story of the original party-army that ruled China proper, indubitably, has been neglected by both popular media and academe alike.

On Desperate Ground: The Marines at The Reservoir, the Korean War’s Greatest Battle. Hampton Sides. New York, NY: Doubleday, 2018.

Read Ian Cameron’s review here:
While a scholar of the Korean War may not find a lot of new material in this history, he or she will still enjoy the compelling writing that makes this history accessible to more casual students of military history. Importantly, Sides’ history highlights lessons from one of America’s few large-scale conventional conflicts in the post-World War II era. Sides’ story highlights the risk of miscalculating a foreign power’s intention to intervene in a conflict, the American predilection to over-rely on technology in warfare, and the enduring importance of experienced leadership in combat. As the United States faces rising strategic competition with peer competitors, these lessons deserve close examination.

LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media. P. W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2018.

Read Joe Buccino’s review here:
Despite its shortcomings, this captivating book has far-reaching implications for our future and an urgent message for national security leaders and elected officials. America in 2019 is a place where the value of agreed-upon truth holds fading relevance. Claims on Twitter that have long been conclusively defeated by objective research are often met with the respect generally accustomed to scientific principles. Spending a few hours poking around social media, one may find the Orwellian idea that two plus two can be made to equal five if enough people believe it. This embrace of deceit serves as a present danger for not only the United States but for the world.

Seizing Power: The Strategic Logic of Military Coups. Naunihal Singh. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017.

Read a review from Beth Rabinowitz here:
Singh makes a singular contribution to the study of coup politics. Whether the evidence unequivocally proves the theory is rather beside the point. The granular description of the coups studied is fascinating and will serve as a valuable reference for future scholars. Indeed, Singh presents valuable information about coup-plotters strategic choices rarely covered in the literature. Moreover, his analysis of the failed Soviet coup—a case which presents an interesting puzzle because the top military supported the coup and yet it did not succeed—is compelling. Taken as a whole, this work offers a critical means to analyze coup success and introduces a layer of analysis that has been greatly needed. Above all his work underscores the need for scholars to work harder at differentiating between the motivation behind a coup and the probability of its tactical success.

Military Virtues. Michael Skerker, David Whetham, and Don Carrick (eds). Hampshire, UK: Howgate Publishing, 2019.

Read Joeseph O. Chapa’s review here:
The recent skepticism of military virtue is complicated. It does seem, after all, as though moral virtue is utterly relevant to the Reaper crew in the story above, even though they face no discernible physical risk to themselves in the moment. They are faced with a moral dilemma that demands a decision. According to Aristotle’s system of ethics, the virtues are those states of character that enable a person to act “to the right person, in the right amount, at the right time, for the right end, and in the right way.” What is the right amount, the right way, and the right time to use force in, for example, the Reaper case above? If the crew is to answer these questions well, whether or not they will need physical courage, surely they will have to rely on other Aristotelian virtues such as justice, mildness, and practical wisdom. This is the crux of the contemporary critique of martial virtue and the erstwhile lacuna in the literature: If the old sets of martial virtues are insufficient for the modern warfighter, what should a revised set look like? Military Virtues offers one answer to that question.

To Master the Boundless Sea: The U.S. Navy, the Marine Environment, and the Cartography of Empire. Jason W. Smith. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2018.

Read a review by Kevin M. Boyce here:
To Master the Boundless Sea draws on maritime, environmental, social history, and the history of naval science to highlight those who helped chart the course for America’s expansionist goals. With today’s changing climates, rising sea levels, and shifting coastlines, Smith’s work is both timely and valuable for military strategists and policy makers when facing challenges concerning the open seas, littoral zones, and brown waterways affecting naval operations and the future of America’s global influence.

Why America Loses Wars: Limited War and U.S. Strategy from the Korean War to the Present. Donald Stoker. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Read a review from Adam Wunische here:
The national defense and foreign policy establishments in the United States are collectively looking away from Afghanistan and Iraq and towards China and Russia. As such, debates now center around how the military should be organized to deal with near-peer conventional conflict rather than the counterinsurgency conflicts it has been fighting for the better part of two decades. The debate is long overdue. Doctrinal documents and international developments are now beginning to refocus the military’s attention on high-intensity conventional conflict. However, reorganizing the military for new missions is far from sufficient. Reorganizing the military for great power competition and then selecting yet another conflict that requires counterinsurgency and stability operations will leave warfighters unprepared and dangerously exposed, as has happened repeatedly in the 70 years since World War II. Poor political decisions have the potential to undermine any advantageous reorganizing of the military, and a new book by Donald Stoker suggests this is likely to occur yet again.

The Girls Next Door: Bringing the Home Front to the Front Lines. Kara Dixon Vuic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019.

Read Nancy Trayor-Heard’s review here:
Kara Dixon Vuic examines American women’s work in wartime recreation and entertainment from World War I to the Gulf War. She argues the women and their work were significant not only because they defined wartime gender roles, but also because they helped “maintain an effective fighting force” and rally support from the public. These women literally brought the home front to the front lines.

In the Year of the Tiger: The War for Cochinchina, 1945–1951. William M. Waddell III. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018.

Read Nathan L. Moir’s review here:
In the Year of the Tiger deserves serious consideration by scholars as a worthwhile book in the growing field of academic investigation into the First Indochina War. Despite shortfalls in commission and omission at points, Waddell provides a cogent and useful analysis on which others may usefully build. That should, after all, be the goal among those who seek to understand how the First Indochina War conditioned the disaster the United States chose to pursue after final French defeat in 1954.

Selling Sea Power: Public Relations and the U.S. Navy, 1917-1941. Ryan D. Wadle. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019.

Read Rob Schorman’s review here:
The book is probably a cautionary tale as much as an object lesson for those engaged in a similar task, but in any case, Wadle offers a valuable, deeply researched, and multifaceted rendering of the navy’s relationship with the public during this period and a vivid descriptions of the problems it faced as it attempted to control its public image.

China’s Vision of Victory. Jonathan D.T. Ward. Fayettville, NC: Atlas Publishing and Media, 2019.

Read T.S. Allen’s review here:
In a compelling foreword, the former commander of the Pacific Fleet, retired Admiral Scott Swift, argues this book justifies a new American grand strategy to deal with China. Not all Americans will agree with this approach; “engage but hedge” still has many defenders in the foreign policy establishment. But China’s Vision of Victory represents the most compelling case yet to replace it. After reading this book, its defenders cannot claim they were not warned about the risks they face.

The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World. Sharon Weinberger. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2017.

Read a review from Walker D. Mills here:
Weinberger’s history of DARPA is an enthralling read and especially recommended for professionals in acquisition or research areas. It should appeal far beyond the defense community, it is  perhaps the best institutional case study in innovation management and adaptive organizational design available. And despite some cheerleading and a mild case of myopia, The Imagineers of War will scratch the insatiable desire to peek into the secretive and hidden corners of the U.S. government and leave you more knowledgeable for it.

War Virgin: My Journey of Repression, Temptation and Liberation. Laura Westley. Dunedin, FL: War Virgin, Inc., 2016.

Read Kathryn Sudhoff’s review here:
At first, I read through my fingers, horrified by author Laura Westley’s memoir of wildly unprofessional behavior as a young officer in the U.S. Army. But a pattern emerged of more experienced, senior men who, by Westley’s account, sought overly-close relationships with her, usually so they could share their sexual fantasies and standards for female sexuality. My paradigm shifted as I saw a subtext not addressed by Westley in her “journey of repression, temptation, and liberation,” one focused instead on exploitation and toxic mentorship.

The Enlightened Soldier: Scharnhorst and the Militärische Gesellschaft in Berlin, 1801-1805. Charles Edward White. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1989.

Read a review from Bryan T. Jones here:
White’s masterfully-written history of Scharnhorst and his efforts should be heralded as a guide and model of true military professionalism, and the ideal to which we should strive for in the realm of professional military education today. I can only echo the laurels that Samuel Huntington dedicates to The Enlightened Soldier, in proclaiming that the reforms of Scharnhorst “mark the true beginning of the military profession in the West.”For any who seek to better understand the history of the military profession, and what it truly means to be a student of war, C.E. White’s The Enlightened Soldier will be an incredible aid in this endeavor.

Fighting for Peace in Somalia: A History and Analysis of the African Union Mission (AMISOM) 2007-2017. Paul Williams. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Read Whitney Grespin’s review here:
Given his field research experience, extensive network of and unique access to practitioner experts, a decade-plus of monitoring peace operations across Africa, and record of academic publishing, Williams remains an authority on the sociopolitical dynamics of peace and stability operations in Horn of Africa, and Fighting for Peace is an achievement that will only serve to solidify this reputation.

Red Star Over the Pacific: China’s Rise and the Challenge for U.S. Maritime Strategy. Toshi Yoshihara and James R. Holmes. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2018.

Read a review from Zachery Tyson Brown here:
China seeks nothing less than to displace the United States as the preeminent power in the Pacific, if not the world. It intends to make a new order that expands the reach of its state-driven economic model. To achieve this vision, China's leaders have characterized the first two decades of the 21st century as a "period of strategic opportunity," during which Xi Jinping's “Chinese Dream” of national rejuvenation can be realized. Red Star concludes by arguing there must be major changes to America’s maritime strategy in the Pacific if Xi’s vision is to remain unrealized.

The Generals’ War: Operational Level Command on the Western Front in 1918. David T. Ząbecki. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2018.

Read a review from Williamson Murray here:
Why should we, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, be reading a book about events that occurred over a century ago? The answer quite simply is that the leadership provided by the opposing generals suggests a great deal about how we should think about military leadership in our time. Above all, Zabecki’s account makes it clear coherent strategy is far more important than brilliant tactics.