Two books I recently read that I think were very good.

The Great Rifle Controversy: Search for the Ultimate Infantry Weapon from World War II Through Vietnam and Beyond, by E.C Ezell.

This book was written in 1982 and is probably known by most around here but I liked it and learned a lot about technical detail and bureaucratic dynamics. Two things, of many, stood out for me. First the author said American military rifle development was not a story of innovation, but mostly a story of incremental product improvement. He hoped that future decades would change that and see some real innovation. That was written in 1982 and the ensuing 30 years have seen...incremental product improvement.

The second thing was that I think the Senate committee that investigated the M-16 rifle introduction debacle concluded that there had been negligence rising to a criminal level but the program was structured so diffusely that no individual or small group of individuals could be held responsible. When I read that I realized how little things had changed in 50 years.

The other book is:

Jungle of Snakes: A Century of Counterinsurgency Warfare from the Philippines to Iraq by James R. Arnold.

The book is a study of 4 small wars, Philippine Insurrection, Algeria, Malaya and Vietnam. Mr. Arnold is an excellent writer and can use a sentence to convey an idea where others (like me) need paragraphs; so he has quite a lot of valuable things to say about these conflicts in not so many pages.

For example, he said that one of the primary reasons for the success of the much debated "Surge" in Iraq was that AQI overplayed its hand by its homicidal fanaticism. I haven't read that in too many other places and it is interesting to contemplate what would have happened if their political platform had extended much beyond maniacal killing.