Rethinking Security

Book Dreams: Ancient and Modern

Typepad ate my post up, so I decided to retype it and make it shorter. I've already alluded to my habit of skipping around when reading books, and I've been consistently in awe of Zenpundit's discipline in conquering his industrial-strength booklist. I, on the other hand, can't resist the temptation to jump my scheduled reading lists (especially when a new biography of Orde Wingate is almost published!).

It's also got me thinking somewhat, as I've been re-reading parts of both the 1943 and 1987 editions of Makers of Modern Strategy as well as Azar Gat's History of Military Thought, about personal and professional reading in defense in the premodern era. Even when I keep to my reading lists, I still feel like a laggard when I read about the extensive research and reading of figures like Machiavell, Jomini, or Hans Delbruck. Of many writers and individuals with interest in the national security and foreign policy fireld, only polymathic writers like Dr. Gat himself seems to keep up with the wide-ranging reading of those centuries-old figures.  In general, a range of thinkers and practitioners from times that we might regard today as completely primitive accomplished impressive scholarship and personal reading --before Amazon.com, Kindle, Googlebooks, Worldcat, or rapid interlibrary/institutional loan.

Of course, maybe the lack of Facebook, Twitter, or lolcats had something to do with it. Maybe Schlieffen wouldn't have completed his study of Cannae if he got too wrapped up making demotivational posters, Rickrolling other members of the General Staff, or trolling sites that might have indirectly inspired Jersey Shore. Or, worse yet, he might have discovered Lady Gaga or the awesomeness that was the first two Terminator movies. In short, he might have ended up like these unfortunate fellows.

Reviews: Limited and Local Wars

Finished reading War of Atonement, MCDP 1-2 Campaigning, and (yes, I jump around a lot when reading) Robert Citino's The Quest for Decisive Victory: From Stalemate to Blitzkrieg in Europe 1899-1940. I give a little summary of the latter book in the course of my RTJ post on power projection and defense.

Campaigning is an interesting document on the science, role, and planning of campaigns. If you're engrossed in the ongoing campaign planning debate going on today it's useful to look at MCDP 1-2's historical overview, especially the Marine Corps interpretation of Grant, Lee, and Sherman's generalship in the Civil War.

War of Atonement is Chaim Herzog's 1975 account of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Despite its proximity to the event in question, it is still a very good history and analysis - especially because there are few English-language histories of the conflict. Other analyses that came later do not substantially improve on it. Oddly enough, it seems that unlike Michael Oren's recent history of the 1967 war there hasn't been extensive digging in Egyptian, Syrian, Soviet, and US archives to round out the full diplomatic and military picture.

War of Atonement is essentially the story of how the Egyptians decided to employ force in a limited war to change the "facts on the ground." The military-technical lessons of the conflict were extensively analyzed by US, European, and Soviet specialists, mainly focusing on whether or not the tank had been rendered immobile by anti-tank weapons and whether or not the Israeli Air Force's initial failures against the SAM net in the canal zone meant that future ground forces should expect little to no close air support (CAS) in a high-intensity war. Of course, as Herzog himself notes the first issue was overblown as many of the tank attacks that failed lacked proper all-arms support. The idea that close air support would not be a characteristic of future conflict also takes the placement of the SAM nets a bit too far. It is interesting that after 1991's Desert Storm that the airpower pendulum would swing in the opposite direction.

The value in reading War of Atonement is that you can see a middle ground in the "future of war" debates between the cliche of "COIN vs. the Fulda Gap." What the Soviets called conventional "local wars" that happened in a "limited" context in the Third World were once objects of intense debate. These "local wars" were not particularly big by World War II standards--Paddy Griffith points out in Forward Into Battle that all of the 1973 war might fit into exactly two battles on the Eastern Front. But they mattered all the same in world politics.