What Are You Currently Reading? 2008

[Kreker]

"Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam" by Mark Bowden, author of "Blackhawk Down." Am lokking for some feedback
Best

[LawVol]

by Jossef Bodansky.

I picked this book up because it sounded interesting and I wanted to get a non-Iraq/Afghanistan view of the terror movement. The author's creds looked good but in the first 100 pages or so he briefly mentions that Chechen terrorists help Al Qaeda acquire nuclear suitcase bombs in 1998. My thinking on this is that if AQ had those we'd all know because they would have used them by now. Now I'm thinking maybe the rest of the book is BS. Any thoughts?

[SteveMetz]

by Jossef Bodansky.

I picked this book up because it sounded interesting and I wanted to get a non-Iraq/Afghanistan view of the terror movement. The author's creds looked good but in the first 100 pages or so he briefly mentions that Chechen terrorists help Al Qaeda acquire nuclear suitcase bombs in 1998. My thinking on this is that if AQ had those we'd all know because they would have used them by now. Now I'm thinking maybe the rest of the book is BS. Any thoughts?

Bodansky does have a mixed reputation. That said, I've also bought that book (but not yet read it). I'm doing a paper on high value targeting in counterinsurgency for the RAND Insurgency Board, and Chechnya is one of the case studies I'm going to use.

[Sergeant T]

That was an endurance trial. The suitcase nukes thing was the first flag. Later he briefly mentions a shoe bomber (a la Richard Reid) bringing down American Flight 587 in November of 2001. (NTSB disagrees with Bodansky.) He also glosses over the Nord Ost and Beslan hostage incidents. For a guy that makes a lot of claims about who said what and who's got nukes he doesn't cite too much in the way of sources. It wasn't quite a strategic overview, nor was it a quite a tactical outline. I kind of reminded me of reading the Old Testament: So and So begat So and So, then So and So begat So and So, repeat ad infinitum. I wanted a refund on my time when I finished. Terror at Beslan gave me a better understanding and overview of the Chechen conflict than Bodansky's 300+ page paperweight.

[pjliddy]

Finally getting to read Andrew Birtle's U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine, 1860-1941. I've used the parts of it for research on indigenous forces in the Philippine Insurrection, but I'm finally getting a chance to read it cover to cover. It presents a number of interesting cases on U.S. military small wars operations before any kind of formal doctrine was developed.

Anyone's thoughts on it would be appreciated.

[Ken White]

"Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam" by Mark Bowden, author of "Blackhawk Down." Am lokking for some feedback
Best

Read it and passed it to my son (or maybe he passed it to me -- we get confused sometimes). It's pretty good and I think fairly accurate. I was stationed in Tehran for a couple of years, still have some acquaintances from there I swap e-mails with and it seems to be pretty well on the mark. I'd recommend it.

[Ski]

Some readings from the Master's Program:

Peoples and Cultures of the Middle East by Daniel Bates and Amal Rassam
The Shi'is of Iraq by Yitzhak Nakash

Also:

Superclass by David Rothkopf - this is mandatory reading for anyone involved with strategic planning in my opinion. I'll let you read it and see for yourself