Michael Howard, the great British historian, once advised that military officer who wish to avoid the pitfalls of military history should study in width, depth, and context—studying the great sweep of military history to see what changes and what does not; studying a single campaign in all its complexity to “get beyond the order created by the historian;” and studying the nature of the societies that fight the wars we seek to understand.

Here at The Strategy Bridge, we feel very much the same way about the study of strategy, and we work hard to realize this width, depth, and context in the books we review each week.

We believe the study of strategy is a broad one, encompassing a host of topics, ranging from the explicit study of the long sweep of military history to analysis of the possibilities for war and warfare in the future, from the use of air power in the Falklands to the use of artillery in the desert and to modern naval operations, and from China to Russia to Africa. You’ll find this width—and much more—in our reviews and our reviewers from 2023.

Some destinations in the intellectual landscape of strategy, national security, and military affairs deserve repeated visits, repeated efforts to unpack their complexities, and just as we’ve used #Reviewing to explore the width of the intellectual landscape, so have we plumbed some of its depths in 2023. Leadership is an area rich in its depth, for example, and we’ve looked to lessons from Admiral Chester Nimitz, Major General Samuel Curtis, President Ronald Reagan, and even from science fiction. Strategic questions of race affecting the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, and American society have been much on our minds, as have critical questions of civil-military relations past and present raised by recent history.

And just as Michael Howard advises, we have explored the interactions between strategy, national security, and military affairs and the societal contexts within which they operate. We looked at the emergence of the Geneva Conventions and their influence on the norms driving how we fight wars. We’ve looked at the influence of economics and the marketplace on national security. We’ve even looked at how technological, biological, legal, economic, psychological, sociological, and political issues will shape the future of humanity as we explore and settle in outer space.

Our explorations have been varied in 2023—width, depth, and context go hand in hand—and we’ve enjoyed and learned from it all! Thanks to all of you for coming on the journey with us this year!

#TheBridgeReads

Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America's Misguided Wars. Edited by Andrew Bacevich and Daniel A. Sjursen. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, 2022.

Read a review from Tim Bettis here:
Despite its omissions, Paths of Dissent is an exceptionally substantive and moving book for anyone interested in personal accounts at the intersection of ethics and military service…As America exits another costly decades-long counterinsurgency era  into an uncertain future, it  requires courageous dissenters…to avoid national security malpractice. It is only by capturing the perspectives of those who are willing to make personal sacrifices in informing the public’s understanding of war that principled countries can avoid waste and hypocrisy in its conduct.

An Army Afire: How the US Army Confronted Its Racial Crisis in the Vietnam Era. Beth Bailey. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2023.

Read Daniel Sukman’s review here:
An Army Afire offers lessons for leaders throughout the joint force in how to approach and solve complex and seemingly overwhelming problems. Bailey’s work is an important addition to the historical record of the U.S. military, and, more specifically, the U.S. Army. Innovative ideas and novel courses of action are necessary for combat and institutional actions. The military that fought in the 1991 Gulf War, and later in Afghanistan and Iraq were more than the product of combat platforms, the Goldwater-Nichols Act, and AirLand Battle; it was a force composed of a diverse set of men and women who stood on the shoulders of those who suffered and fought to change a system of inequality.

Reconsidering American Civil-Military Relations: Military Society, Politics and Modern War. Edited by Lionel Beehner, Risa Brooks and Daniel Maurer. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Read Chiara Ruffa’s review here:
Reconsidering American Civil-Military Relations shows how the various views of civil-military relations have transformed in a dramatic fashion, but also how much we rely on old conceptual tools to study new phenomena. It definitely shifts existing conversations about civil-military relations, allowing us to imagine that it is possible to move beyond Huntington…Moving past Huntington's model means recognizing complication and fluid boundaries. This departure from Huntington could also build better military and civilian expertise to understand and navigate civil-military relations, rather than dangerously assuming superiority in a military class that is isolated from democratic society.

A Short History of War. Jeremy Black. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022.

Read a review from Jean-Michel Turcotte here:
A Short History of War will certainly be welcomed by a larger public interested in military history. Not only has Black remarkably explored multiple facets of the global history of war, but he also highlights complex elements regarding the evolution of warfare over a long period of time. In addition, the volume is written in a language accessible to a general public unfamiliar with the field of war history which helps to democratize debates and discussion about the nature of war.

Inheriting the Bomb: The Collapse of the USSR and the Nuclear Disarmament of Ukraine. Mariana Budjeryn. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023.

Read Shawn Conroy’s review here:
Inheriting the Bomb looks at the diplomatic process that led to the removal of nuclear weapons on the territories of newly independent Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine, with a focus on the latter.  Inheriting the Bomb contributes to a resurgence of interest in Ukraine’s denuclearization in the wake of Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Mariana Budjeryn highlights the complexity (a myriad of factors) rather than contingency (one factor) that affected Ukraine’s denuclearization.

Fighting the Fleet: Operational Art and Modern Fleet Combat. Jeffrey R. Cares and Anthony Cowden. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2021.

Read Tyler A. Pitrof’s review here:
Fleets, Cares and Cowden argue, have four functions—striking, screening, scouting, and basing—and proper naval operational art is the ability to defeat an opponent by appropriately combining all four. While Cares and Cowden make no bones about the fact that this work is a math-heavy textbook intended for current naval officers, the two retired captains nevertheless succeed in crafting an accessible entryway into the world of modern naval command and planning in a text that is a spare 101 pages, plus technical appendices.

Is Remote Warfare Moral? Weighing Issues of Life and Death from 7,000 Miles. Joseph O. Chapa. New York, NY: Public Affairs, 2022. 

Read a review from Christine Sixta Rinehart here:
Is Remote Warfare Moral? Weighing Issues of Life and Death from 7,000 Miles by Joseph O. Chapa is a thoughtful and necessary contribution to the literature on RPA warfare. The book’s biggest contribution is that of a primary source from a seasoned veteran and RPA instructor in the United States Air Force. The book also elucidates some of the ambiguity surrounding RPA warfare.

The American Way of Irregular Warfare: An Analytical Memoir. Charles T. Cleveland and Daniel Egal. Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2020.

Read M.T. Mitchell’s review here:
While satisfied with the U.S. military’s tactical performance in irregular warfare, Cleveland rejects the argument that special operations can raid their way to victory or capture enough terrain. Cleveland uses the strategic failures of the U.S. in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan to argue the U.S. military must focus on its failure to structurally, doctrinally, and militarily invest in irregular warfare to succeed.

Autumn of Our Discontent: Fall 1949 and the Crises in American National Security. John Curatola. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2022.

Read David W. Bath’s review here:
Curatola’s most important accomplishment is creating a comprehensive look at how the United States changed its perspective on national security policy during 1949 by identifying and highlighting the importance of the lesser known national security issues that may have been hidden by the creation of the nuclear bomb.

The Wandering Army: The Campaigns that Transformed the British Way of War. Huw J. Davies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022.

Read Brandon Bernick’s review here:
The Wandering Army offers a new and powerful perspective on debates surrounding the British way of war. By suggesting observational and experiential learning in previous wars led to experimentation and knowledge diffusion throughout the officer class, Davies challenges previous views on an old subject. As such, he makes a great contribution to the field of military history and is one that should be considered of interest to experts as Davies crafts a very interesting book that furthers opportunities for study and debate.

Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests. Agathe Demarais. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2022.

Read Gregory Brew’s review here:
In a series of short, engaging, and clearly written chapters, Demarais breaks down why the U.S. found sanctions such an appealing policy instrument; how their widespread use in the 1990s and 2000s triggered changes and upheavals, as countries around the world coped with the issues of challenges of compliance; and, finally, how sanctions implementation has generally backfired, imposing costs on the U.S. and its allies while encouraging targeted states towards policies and strategies designed to insulate their governments and economies from U.S. pressure.

The Lone Leopard. Sharifullah Dorani. Bedford, England: S&M Publishing House, 2022.

Read Matthew C. Brand’s review here:
In his novel The Lone Leopard, Sharifullah Dorani provides a sweeping view of the struggle that Afghans endured under the burden of foreign influence, ethnic and religious seams, and the clash between traditional conservative cultural norms versus more modern liberal western ideals. The book does an excellent job of bringing the reader into the complicated societal mosaic that makes Afghanistan so unique.

Writing Wars: Authorship and American War Fiction, WW1 to Present. David F. Eisler. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2022.

Read a Jared Young’s review here:
Simply put, Writing Wars is necessary reading for scholars and writers working at the intersections of literary, military, and American studies. The interdisciplinary nature of the book also makes it well suited for a variety of classes. In addition to American Literature and History courses, select chapters on higher education’s influence on the genre and the ethics of authorship would make for insightful reading in creative writing classes that consider the history of writing programs or how identity politics figures into the ethos of storytelling. This potential widespread readership of Writing Wars is timely. With the ongoing military conflict in Ukraine and the reverberating effects of the U.S. campaigns in the Middle East, there is a need for a new wave of war fiction and, perhaps more importantly, a diverse collection of voices to tell such stories. Eisler’s book emphasizes the critical importance of this need and illuminates how those diverse voices can effectively address it.

The Future of Decline: Anglo-American Culture at its Limits. Jed Esty. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022.

Read a review from Katherine Voyles here:
Esty’s slim book charts what he terms “declinism” to powerful effect, distinguishing declinism from decline: “Decline is a fact; declinism is a problem. American decline is happening, slowly but inevitably. It is a structural and material process. Declinism is a problem of rhetoric or belief.” This story of America on a downhill slide that Esty tells is not self-consciously set in opposition to today’s national security concerns—whether they are framed as integrated deterrence, multi-domain operations, or large-scale combat operations—but the implications of Esty’s account are profound for what America might look like on the backside of decline.

Victor in Trouble. Alex Finley. Athens, Greece: Smiling Hippo Press, 2022.

Read a review from Nicole E. Dean here:
Finley’s work is part of a long and glorious tradition of satire in the world of military and foreign affairs. Her books are a welcome mental break for modern audiences, but the wellspring of military and diplomatic satire was already deep. For autocratic societies, where censorship is a defining characteristic, satirists walk fine lines to say quiet thoughts out loud.

Strategiya: The Foundations of the Russian Art of Strategy. Edited by Ofer Fridman. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2021.

Read B.A. Friedman’s review here:
A shroud of myth and legend surrounds Russian strategy. As far back as the 1980s, the U.S. began looking at the widespread use of precision-guided munitions and other associated technology because the Russians had an allegedly more advanced conception of their potential. In 1982, the operational level of war debuted in U.S. doctrine, allegedly because it existed in Soviet doctrine. The only way to combat such misconceptions is to take the Russians at their word. Specifically, by reading their words. Strategiya: The Foundations of the Russian Art of Strategy, edited by Dr. Ofer Fridman, Lecturer at King’s College London, is one of the best weapons available.

A Republic in the Ranks: Loyalty and Dissent in the Army of the Potomac. Zachery A. Fry. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.

Read Kathryn Angelica’s review here:
Zachery A. Fry reimagines the camps and battlegrounds of the Army of the Potomac as focal points of ideological debate. Enlisted men not only reflected partisan divides of the broader Northern public but directly engaged in the political process through correspondence, voting, and political resolutions. This book sheds light upon mobilization within the ranks to reframe notions of political space and activity during the Civil War. 

Putin’s Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine. Mark Galeotti. Oxford, UK: Osprey, 2022.

Read a review from Andrew Forney here:
Labeled an acute threat by the U.S. Department of Defense in its 2022 National Defense Strategy, the Russian military in Ukraine revealed itself as the flimsiest of paper tigers, a modern-day Potemkin army meant to prop up a faltering regime and its neo-imperialist visions. Where were the unmanned vehicles and the modernized tanks and the fire strikes employed in eastern Ukraine in 2014? Was that army actually a mirage, with the real army now being bled dry eight years later? There was no way that two disparate things, two photo negatives of each other, could exist at the same time. Can two divergent ideas—or two opposite armies—both be true?

Space Civilization: An Inquiry into the Social Questions for Humans Living in Space. James Gilley. London, United Kingdom: Lexington Books, 2020.

Read Brian Green’s review here:
In Space Civilization: An Inquiry into the Social Questions for Humans Living in Space, political science professor James Gilley provides an ambitious interdisciplinary overview of the social factors, from the interpersonal to the international levels, that will affect humanity’s ability to become a truly interplanetary species. In its relatively short format, the book moves briskly through many of the broad technological and biological, legal, economic, psychological, sociological, and political issues that will shape the future human exploration and potential settlement of outer space.

The Turkish Arms Embargo: Drugs, Ethnic Lobbies, and U.S. Domestic Politics. James F. Goode. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2020.

Read a review from Bob Beach here:
Goode’s corrective to the history of this incident is an important work in the study of U.S. foreign policy entering its last phase of the Cold War. Goode skillfully places the embargo in a new light, emphasizing the role of ethnic lobbies, the U.S. war on drugs, and the political negotiations on Capitol Hill. Long considered a failure of U.S. foreign policy in a time of executive turmoil and legislative assertiveness, Goode suggests the episode was a demonstration of the dynamics of political processes in a functioning representative society.

Reagan’s War Stories: A Cold War Presidency. Benjamin Griffin. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2022.

Read Chris Booth’s review here:
Highly engaging and thought-provoking, Griffin has put together an insightful book that leaves the reader with an improved understanding of pop culture’s impact on Reagan in not only leading the nation through the Cold War, but in the totality of his life as well.

Flying Camelot: The F-15, the F-16, and the Weaponization of Fighter Pilot Nostalgia. Michael W. Hankins. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021.

Read Luke Truxall’s review here:
In Flying Camelot: The F-15, the F-16, and the Weaponization of Fighter Pilot Nostalgia, Michael W. Hankins argues that starting as early as the 1960s, a group of fighter pilots and reformers sought to change the procurement process for aircraft to emphasize the importance of the fighter pilot and air superiority missions. Hankins states that this resulted in the development and acquisition of the F-15 and F-16 fighters by the United States Air Force. Hankins further asserts that these reformers sought to change how fighter pilots were trained to emphasize the importance of dogfighting and air superiority campaigns over other aspects of air combat.

Armies in Retreat: Chaos, Cohesion, and Consequence. Edited by Timothy G. Heck and Walker D. Mills. Fort Leavenworth, Kansas: Army University Press, 2023.

Read Marshall McGurk’s review here:
Military leaders and policy makers would be foolish to believe that war with a peer adversary would not involve some form of retreat or retrograde. Retreats can lead to routs, or they can provide critical time to rally forces for new campaigns or counteroffensives. Routs must be avoided, but such disaster may befall those who fail to study the history of armies in retreat.

The Digital Silk Road: China’s Quest to Wire the World and Win the Future. Jonathan E. Hillman. New York, NY: Harper Business, 2021.

Read Christopher D. Booth’s review here:
This short, yet comprehensive, and extensively documented examination of the Digital Silk Road and the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to develop world-dominating technology (through collaboration between the military, state-owned enterprises, and closely associated parastatal private companies), will be of interest to policymakers, national security professionals, and hopefully U.S. and Western business leaders.

Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, From Missiles to the Moon to Mars. Nathalia Holt. New York, NY: Back Bay Books, 2017.

Read Amy E. Foster’s review here:
Nathalia Holt’s book on the women of JPL and their contributions to the United States’ history in space is a welcome addition. JPL is only one of twenty NASA centers. The women and their contributions at each NASA center deserve attention and recognition. What Nathalia Holt has done with this book is remind readers that women’s work for NASA did propel us to the Moon and Mars.

Mastering the Art of Command: Admiral Chester W. Nimitz and Victory in the Pacific. Trent Hone. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2022.

Read a review from Lewis Bernstein here:
Hone’s study shows Nimitz understood command is an art based on collaboration that relies on effective personal relationships to extract ideas and understand new opportunities. He adopted his subordinates’ ideas and made them part of his own plans. Nimitz never backed away from difficult decisions and when appropriate was as bold as any commander. He relied on unified command with decentralized execution combined with the continual consideration of options; the figures and tables Hone provides show this in operation.

The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink. William Inboden. New York, NY: Dutton, 2022.

Read Laren Turek’s review here:
The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink takes up the banner of attributing the end of the Cold War to the foreign policy acumen and foresight of Ronald Reagan. Indeed, it suggests that Reagan possessed a remarkable perspicacity that allowed him to perceive the world's historic changes on the horizon well before others did, and that this, plus his innate optimism, helped him lead the United States toward a better future.

To Boldly Go: Leadership, Strategy, and Conflict in the 21st Century and Beyond. Jonathan Klug and Steven Leonard, Eds. Haverton, PA: Casemate, 2021.

Read Brett Swaney’s review here:
Drawing on a universe of science fiction franchises including The Expanse, Star Wars, Star Trek, Ender’s Game, Starship Troopers, Dune, Earthseed, The Murderbot Diaries, and many more, a wonderful array of authors, who are strategic thinkers in their own right, offer fresh perspectives in 35 chapters that span 6 major themes: leadership and command; military strategy and decision making; ethics, culture, and diversity; cooperation, competition, and conflict; the human relationship with technology; and toxic leaders.

Military Alliances in the Twenty-First Century. Alexander Lanoszka. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Read a review from Davis Ellison here:
In this welcome addition to the literature on alliances, international relations scholar Alexander Lanoszka makes an optimistic case for the continued salience of the U.S.-led alliance system. In his two-hundred-page study, he reviews the most common areas that past studies have focused on: alliance formation, fears of entrapment and abandonment, burden-sharing, warfare, and alliance termination.

Cinema and the Cultural Cold War: U.S. Diplomacy and the Origins of the Asian Cinema Network. Sangjoon Lee. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020.

Read Ben Griffin’s review here:
The book primarily examines how during the first two decades of the Cold War, the Asia Foundation utilized funding from the Central Intelligence Agency to support the work of, and establish connections between, anti-communist filmmakers throughout east Asia…Cinema and the Cultural Cold War is a welcome addition to the growing historiography on how Cold War belligerents actively sought to influence popular culture both domestically and abroad.

The Big Picture: The Cold War on the Small Screen. John W. Lemza. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2021.

Read Peter Molin’s review here:
The subject of John W. Lemza’s scholarly study The Big Picture: The Cold War on the Small Screen is a U.S. Army-produced documentary television series called The Big Picture that ran from 1951-1971 on network, local, and educational stations, as well as on the Armed Forces Network of overseas stations. Lemza’s study is relevant to our own era in which a gaping civil-military divide separates the American public from the military, and in which the military largely fails to communicate a compelling appreciation of its goals, virtues, and activities.

Desert Redleg: Artillery Warfare in the First Gulf War. L. Scott Lingamfelter. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2020.

Read a review from Kevin Woods here:
The book’s title alone might suggest a more general history or analysis of the use of artillery in the Gulf War, but the book is primarily a wartime memoir framed by the experiences of a senior artilleryman whose perspectives were shaped in the Cold War’s final decade. As a memoir, Desert Redleg lands somewhere between the classic campaign and sentimental forms. In an appendix, the author dedicates a chapter to lessons of the war gleaned from a broader military and geo-political perspective.

Wars of Revelation: The Transformative Effects of Military Intervention on Grand Strategy. Rebecca Lissner.  New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Read Christi Siver’s review here:
Reconsideration of U.S. grand strategy is critical in the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine alongside rising tensions with China. Rebecca Lissner’s Wars of Revelation makes a compelling argument that past U.S. military interventions have played an important role in shaping U.S. grand strategy.

Our Best War Stories: Prize-winning Poetry & Prose from the Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Awards. Edited by Christopher Lyke. Johnston, Iowa: Middle West Press, 2020.

Read a review from Scott Noon Creley here:
This collection is remarkable because, whether or not everything in each story is strictly speaking factual, everything is true. If you’re interested in military culture, the ongoing cultural change in the armed forces, or just looking for excellent writing from veterans and their families, this is a book that belongs on your shelf.

Tales from the Cold War: The U.S. Army in West Germany 1960-1975. Michael D. Mahler. Dahlonega, Georgia: University Press of North Georgia, 2021.

Read Kevin Li’s review here:
Knowing the Cold War historical context, namely the necessity of, and the paradoxical relations between the deterrence mission in Europe and the mission of fighting limited wars around the globe is indispensable for understanding Mahler and his comrades’ experiences in U.S. Army Europe.

Master Negotiator: The Role of James A. Baker, III at the End of the Cold War. Diana Villiers Negroponte. Bloomington, IN: Archway Publishing, 2020.

Read Javan David Frazier’s review here:
The title of Negroponte’s book nicely sums up her work. Her first four segments explore questions and themes related to James Baker’s overall time as secretary of state. She explores the real goal for the foreign policy review initiated by the National Security Council and how it affected all aspects of President George H.W. Bush’s administration; the challenges of German reunification and Germany’s admission to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); the response of the United States to the June 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre; and the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

Military History for the Modern Strategist: America’s Major Wars since 1861. Michael E. O’Hanlon. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2023.

Read J.P. Clark’s review here:
Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, is an influential advisor to the national security elite with a reputation for deep expertise and careful judgment. Though O’Hanlon is a political scientist, he argues that military history can usefully inform current policy debates. His latest work, Military History for the Modern Strategist: America’s Major Wars since 1861, attempts to do just that through a survey of over 150 years of U.S. military history.

On Killing Remotely: The Psychology of Killing with Drones. Wayne Phelps. NY, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2021.

Read Caleb Miller’s review here:
To date, moral injury remains a syndrome, that is, a group of symptoms lacking clear definition or cause. Phelps exemplifies a possible way ahead in On Killing Remotely. In terms of quantifiability, Phelps makes room for analyzing a new arena for moral injury without stretching the term past its breaking point. In terms of severity, Phelps clarifies that stakes can be high without involving immediate personal danger, thus opening up discussions of comparable scenarios with the potential to morally injure. In terms of technology, Phelps distinguishes between kinds of unmanned or remote aerial technology, sketching a taxonomy and noting the unique stressors of each tool or mission.

Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968. Thomas E. Ricks. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2022.

Read Christopher G. Ingram’s review here:
Ninety years after the abolition of slavery in the United States, Blacks faced a dominant caste system in the 1950s that used the violence and power of the state to deny equal treatment or opportunity across the deep south. In more general terms, when confronting an imbalance of power, a subjugated people face a choice between submission or finding a way to alter the nature of the fight. To overcome this disparity, the Civil Rights Movement developed a strategy that aligned their actions to their desired change.

Blood/Not Blood Then the Gates: Poems. Ron Riekki. Johnston, IA: Middle West Press, 2022.

Read a review from Zac Rogers here:
Ron Riekki’s new collection of poems Blood/Not Blood Then the Gates is a pitiless, unsentimental, and piercing insight into the legacy of extreme violence on a human being. The volume left me with the strong impression that redemption is neither sought nor expected. What is needed is relief.

The Avoidable War: The Dangers of a Catastrophic Conflict Between the US and Xi Jinping’s China. Kevin Rudd. New York, NY: Public Affairs, 2022.

Read Ian Boley’s review here:
All told, Kevin Rudd’s The Avoidable War is very much worth the time and effort. Through a series of missteps in execution, it takes Rudd a while to get the reader onboard with his topic. Once there, however, the information provided is valuable, and Rudd’s perspective from personal experience does give his words an air of authority in these matters. For those starting out on their journey to understand what is arguably the world’s most important contemporary competition, this book is a fine place to begin.

War Transformed: The Future of Twenty-First Century Great Power Competition and Conflict. Mick Ryan. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2022.

Read a review from Brian Kerg here:
The character of war is rapidly changing. The increasing availability of evolving technology confounds previous frameworks for military operations. Socioeconomic factors and demographic shifts complicate manpower and force generation models for national defense. Ubiquitous connectivity links individuals to global audiences, expanding the reach of influence activities. And a renewed emphasis on strategic competition enhances the scope of military action below the threshold of violence. This is the world that Mick Ryan explores in War Transformed: The Future of Twenty-First-Century Great Power Competition and Conflict.

Union General: Samuel Ryan Curtis and Victory in the West. William L. Shea. Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books, 2023.

Read Lindsey R. Peterson’s review here:
Shea successfully demonstrates that more attention should be paid to this understudied Union general. Curtis’ wartime emancipation policies should shift historians’ narrowed focus away from the Eastern Theater to more thoroughly integrate the trans-Mississippi West into their analyses of wartime emancipation. Hopefully, Union General will inspire other historians to incorporate Curtis into the current historiography on wartime emancipation, the Missouri and Arkansas home front, and Civil War memory. Ultimately, Union General is a worthy addition to the scholarship on military leadership and will appeal to readers.

Air Power in the Falklands Conflict: An Operational Level Insight into Air Warfare in the South Atlantic. John Shields. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Air World, 2021.

Read a review from Heather Venable here:
The line between celebrating heritage and creating a fully-rounded history can be a fine one in many institutional histories. Appreciating this tendency, Royal Air Force-insider John Shields reassesses the 1982 Falklands Conflict, seeking to explode multiple myths while also providing a better assessment of the air campaign by focusing on the operational rather than the tactical level of war.

Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East. Steven Simon. New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2023.

Read Joe Buccino’s review here:
Simon reviews more than four decades of American endeavors in the region from the perspective of eight presidential administrations ranging from Jimmy Carter to Joe Biden. The book’s chapters illuminate cabinet-level thinking on vexing national security issues: Iranian influence in the Levant in the 1980s, the response to the U.S. Marine Corps barracks bombing in Beirut, the Persian Gulf War, the unsolvable Israel-Palestine quandary, and the rise and fall of Saddam Hussein and the resultant chaos in Iraq and Syria.

From Hegemony to Competition: Marine Perspectives on Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations. Edited by Matthew R. Slater. Quantico, VA: Marine Corps University Press, 2022.

Read B.J. Armstrong’s review here:
From Hegemony to Competition: Marine Perspectives on Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations offers thoughtful examinations of important elements of the transition to what the 2018 National Security Strategy called a new era of Great Power competition and how new Marine Corps concepts continue to develop. This book’s great strength is the questions that it is asking, and the rigorous efforts put forth to study them.

Cold War Liberation: The Soviet Union and the Collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa, 1961–1975. Natalia Telepneva. University of North Carolina Press, 2022.

Read a review by Charlie Thomas here:
The history of African decolonization is inherently linked with the processes, rivalries, and challenges of the global Cold War. Even those states that saw a pacific removal of colonial authority, such as Ghana or Senegal, did so under the shadow of the rivalry between the capitalist and communist states. However, the process was even more stark in Southern Africa, where the Cold War saw the contests for armed African liberation interpreted as proxy conflicts between the two ideological blocs.

Against All Tides: The Untold Story of the USS Kitty Hawk Race Riot. Marv Truhe. Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill Books, 2022.

Read B.J. Armstrong’s review here:
The “Kitty Hawk Race Riot'” holds an important place in American naval history. An illustration of the deep and unavoidable connections between the sailors and officers of the Navy and the society they served during the Civil Rights era, it is often mentioned in passing but rarely examined in detail. Marv Truhe’s new book sets out to rectify that oversight and to help readers dive deeply into both the details of the history and the important questions it raises about the Navy of the 1970s as well as the Navy of the 21st century.

Preparing for War: The Making of the Geneva Conventions. Boyd van Dijk. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2022.

Read Brian Drohan’s review here:
International humanitarian law has only appeared to be absent during recent wars in Yemen, Syria, and Ukraine, but Boyd van Dijk’s Preparing for War: The Making of the Geneva Conventions reveals that the 1949 Geneva Conventions have an enduring influence. He shows that the Conventions have retained their legal, moral, and ethical applicability through a contextualized understanding of their history.

Heat + Pressure: Poems from War. Ben Weakley. Johnston, Iowa: Middle West Press, 2022.

Read Marshall McGurk’s review here:
A design draws you in through color or shock; a title intrigues you. Heat + Pressure: Poems From War by Ben Weakley delivers on the initial interest brought about by its unique title that sits in bold letters over the melted green army figure on the cover. Heat + Pressure shows how today’s warriors can become poets and help veterans synthesize war and their reintegration into society.

Mud Soldiers: Life Inside the New American Army.  George C. Wilson. New York, NY: Scribners, 1989.

Read Harrison Manlove’s review here:
Mud Soldiers: Life Inside the New American Army is an examination of the post-Vietnam U.S. Army and the pre-Gulf War Army. It serves as an excellent supplement to recent works on the AVF by authors like Beth Bailey, Bernard Rostker, and William A. Taylor. Author George C. Wilson writes a broad study of Charlie Company, 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment (2-16), 1st Infantry Division spanning two generations of soldiers.

The Military and the Market. Edited by Mark R. Wilson and Jennifer Mittlestadt. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022.

Read Sam Canter’s review here:
Looking beyond more traditionally studied factors such as battlefield tactics, leadership, and military strategy, new studies under the general War and Society umbrella take into account social dynamics such as race, class, and gender in the context of national defense and warfare. In the case of The Military and the Market, the wide scholarly aperture offered by the War and Society approach extends to marketplace and economic factors, adding additional layers of complexity to American military history.

Die Selbständigkeit der Unterführer im Kriege. Karl Woide. Berlin: Eisenschmidt, 1895.

Read a review from Panagiotis Gkartzonikas here:
In pre-nineteenth century wars with linear tactics, initiative existed but was not necessary in the same ways. From the Napoleonic Wars onwards, initiative became imperative, mainly due to the increase in the size of armies. The third chapter examines how we should interpret the principle of initiative. Woide believes that it should be made obligatory for the entire army, its implementation should be formalized and it should be considered a professional duty.

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Header Image: Richard Macksey’s home library. (Will Kirk/Johns Hopkins University)