What are you currently reading in 2017?

[Backwards Observer]

Military Misfortunes by Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch


Endless Empire by Alfred W. McCoy, Josep M. Fradera, and Stephen Jacobsen (editors)

[omarali50]

Posted at Brownpundits.

Text:
The history of the Second World War continues to offer up new and fascinating details as archives are opened and dying old men occasionally decide to tell the truth before they die (the latter opportunity is now almost gone, the first is still a work in progress). Lynne Olson does a good job here of bringing to light an aspect of that titanic struggle that deserves its own book length treatment: the European exiles who found shelter in Great Britain (the “Last Hope Island” of the title) and the role they played in the war.

These exiles did not always come to England because England had stood by them; The Czechs had been sold out; the Poles, while unlikely to survive in any case, received little or no real help against the Nazis; the Norwegian campaign and Britain’s blunders and betrayals in that saga are already relatively well known (Churchill, responsible for some of the biggest blunders, was lucky to survive them and become PM; that he did survive them also proved fortunate for those who opposed Nazism, since blunders and all, he was still crucial to the survival of Britain and even the eventual liberation of Western Europe). Benelux and the French fell mostly to their own weaknesses, but Britain’s interventions were not without their share of blunders, minor betrayals and other embarrassments. This book reveals all these details, and shows how much of what did survive owed to individual initiatives, chance, and the vicissitudes of fate, and not to the brilliant performance of the British establishment. Though to be fair, the lesson here is not that Britain had a bumbling establishment, but rather how much stupidity and muddle-headedness attends any great war, especially before the kinks are worked out.
The role of the Poles in particular is worth highlighting (and tragic, now that we know what happened to that much-abused nation in the years that followed); it is already relatively well known that Polish pilots played an outsize role in the crucial Battle of Britain, but I did not realize how much resistance they faced before being allowed to play that role; what is less well appreciated, even today, is how critical their role was in the decoding of Enigma, far and away the greatest intelligence coup of the war. The role of the French in Enigma is also highlighted, as is the absolutely critical role they played in jump-starting the Western nuclear program.

(side note: i did not know that Marian Rejewski, the great Polish mathematician who first broke Enigma, died in near-obscurity in Soviet controlled Poland, living for 20 years in anonymity to avoid the fate of countless other returning Polish exiles, who were exiled to Siberia or killed outright by the Soviets).


The fact that MI6 was a bumbling, incompetent old boys club led by second-raters is made clear, as is the reason for their extremely exalted reputation (including among their enemies; Hitler was a huge fan); they benefited from (and shamelessly took credit for) the flood of intelligence they were able to get from the intelligence networks of many defeated nations (now headquartered under their supervision in London), first and foremost, the heroic Poles.
Interesting tidbit: Roosevelt talked about handing over the Norwegian port of Narvik to the Soviets after the war. That he was generally shameless (and ill-informed and foolish) about the fate of smaller nations is pretty well known already, and is highlighted in this book; incidentally, the “free world” may have dodged a bullet by having him die in time for the relatively more principled and less megalomaniacal Truman to take over, errors and omissions excepted.
The book follows the general progress of the war to its end, including the liberation of France, the probably avoidable Dutch hunger winter that followed Montgomery’s over-cautious and then over-ambitious blundering, and the much more clouded and frequently cruel liberation that attended the Soviet victory in the East. It ends with an account of the setting up of supranational institutions (starting with the Benelux treaty, then the larger and much more consequential coal and steel pacts, the EEC and finally the EU).


Personally, I would have liked some more facts and figures and a few pages offering the author’s own summary of the lessons learned from each section, but that is just me.
All in all, a very readable, very interesting, fact-packed book about an important but somewhat neglected aspect of the war. It is possible that the weight of Soviet numbers, Russian asabiya and American industry would have led to the same final outcome and all other players (including even Great Britain) were relatively small fry, but it is also possible, even probable, almost certain, that the survival of that Island was critical, and that relatively small contingencies played a big part in that survival. One of those was the arrival on that island of some very determined, courageous and talented refugees from Nazi occupied Europe. This is their story.

By the way, brought to my attention by @cybertosser : some of the Poles ended up in Pakistan. One, Air Commodore Turowicz, played an important role in setting up not just the technical facilities of the Pakistan Air Force, but also our infant space program..

And Seapower:

This is not really a history of sea power in any strong sense. Stavridis mostly gives a somewhat superficial and cliched review of all the world's oceans (the books is organized ocean by ocean) and ends with some cliched remarks about the importance of sea power and that is about it. If you are interested in a history of sea power, this is not really the book for you.
Still, you will learn some new things (and several good book recommendations; he recommends books about every topic he covers) and it does have some nice anecdotes about his time in the US Navy and its activities around the world in the last 40 years.
Not much meat.

[Backwards Observer]

Ideal Illusions by James Peck


Everything Is Going According To Plan by Dmitry Orlov

[Bill Moore]

The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What You Think, and How You Vote

by Sharyl Attkisson

from Amazon

Ever wonder how politics turned into a take-no-prisoners blood sport? The New York Times bestselling author of Stonewalled pulls back the curtain on the shady world of opposition research and reveals the dirty tricks those in power use to influence your opinions

.

This book was written by someone in the know, and it will be very illuminating for many Americans who haven't been exposed to how our media spins so called news stories and shapes the opinions of Americans (and beyond). However, at the end of the day, the mostly far left media, despite employing a wide span of dirty tricks, failed to stop the successful Presidential bid of Donald Trump. Thankfully many Americans saw past the spin.

While she provides a lot of insight into the dirty tricks the Clintons (both Hillary and Bill) employed over the years, Republicans and others are also exposed.

My interpretation of the book, is Sharyl describes how politics evolved from mostly issues based competition to mostly personal attacks, and issues have taken a back seat. She exposes the millions of dollars spent on opposition party research, and then the elaborate campaigns to ruin the reputation of the candidates running for office. She points out that smear campaigns are driven by passion, money, and ideology. She adds a successful smear is interesting (sex, illegal activity), explainable in a sentence (crooked Hillary), and confirms what people want to believe.

Most importantly, unlike a democracy should work, agendas are set by those who can bring their persuasive arguments before a power broker, and money talks more than anything else in the cesspool of D.C.'s politics. She acknowledges smear campaigns in the U.S. go all way back to our founding fathers, but they have reached a new level. She argues the shift was made possible by 2010 Supreme Court decision in the "Citizens v. Federal Elections Commission. Until this decision, federal law imposed strict limits on how much a person could donate to a political campaign to limit the ability of the wealthy special interest groups to "buy" candidates. This decision eliminated those limits and even allows corporations and unions to give unlimited funds to non-profits to support a particular candidate. This resulted in the emergence of tax-exempt social welfare groups called superPACs.

In my view, this explains why our politicians can't sit down, roll up their sleeves, and negotiate compromised solutions across the aisle. They are bought and paid for, and therefore beholden to those who paid for them. Of course, this is why several individuals and corporations that donated millions of dollars to the Clinton campaign are so upset she lost.

Not only people are smeared, but so are the issues themselves. For example, fake science provides arguments on both sides of the global warming debate. A critical issue now masked in the fog (or smog) of fake science supported by moneyed interests instead of the interest of mankind.

There is some wisdom to the argument of kill all the lawyers, the vast majority of our political elite. Replace them with Engineers and doctors and others who make a living solving problems instead of creating them. I don't know if a deep state actually exists, but I'm convinced there is a deep meta-state consisting of the media and moneyed interest groups that seek to deceive the American people to protect their interests. No doubt a move is afoot to smear the author of this book, but if read it will expose how the system currently operates.

[Backwards Observer]

Imperial Bandits by Bradley Camp Davis


Evans Carlson, Marine Raider by Duane Schultz

[Bill Moore]

https://www.amazon.com/Way-Knife-Sec...ct_top?ie=UTF8

The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth. By Mark Mazzetti (2014)

This book is a hodgepodge of stories about CIA and JSOC operations, and the associated interagency friction/competition. He spends a lot of time condemning the CIA's use of drones, and in true western reporting fashion focuses the bulk of his comments on so-called collateral damage and very little time on the number of terrorist attacks prevented. The media should hold us accountable, we made numerous tragic errors, but there have also been numerous successes at the tactical level. As the author readily admits, when you're dealing with mostly confidential sources providing information that frequently can't be validated or dual sourced, there will be a degree of error in reporting.

If the author is trying to make an overall point, it is that our national security structure was turned upside down after 9/11. In his view the CIA assumed the role of the military, and military SOF assumed the role of the CIA (intelligence collection). In my view, he overstates this since the CIA has always been involved to various degrees in paramilitary operations and the military has always done intelligence operations. Clearly the type and scale of intelligence operations and paramilitary operations have changed since 9/11 based on the threat.

The book is a quick read, and the inside stories on Yemen and Pakistan probably make the book worth reading with the caveat that it is written with a high degree of bias.

[Bill Moore]

American Radical: Inside the World of an Undercover Muslim FBI Agent

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/11...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

This is a simple and fast read, but also a good read that tells an important story about how a Muslim American FBI American penetrated a terrorist network, or terrorist wanttobes, in the U.S. and how the investigation stretched into Canada resulting a combined U.S. and Canadian bust at the end of the investigation.

I assume there are many reasons the FBI approved the release of this book, which details how they conduct these investigations. For one, it tells the American people the good work our law enforcement is conducting to protect the homeland. Second, it demonstrates most American Muslims reject this radical ideology (to include the agent that risked his life and sacrificed his personal life to conduct these investigations and still remain true to his religion). Third, it should sow distrust among Islamists attempting to establish an operational cell in the U.S.

It is a serious story, but the author also includes a lot of humor throughout the book. On the darker side, it does illustrate how full of hate the terrorist are and their unending desire to kill a large number of Americans. It should also be somewhat alarming on well educated these terrorists are.