What Are You Currently Reading? 2013

[jmm99]

You caused me to download the Amazon and Kindle apps to my Android tablet - previously used to read pdf files. The funny thing is that I couldn't order the e-book directly using the Android (it wouldn't place the order). But, adaptation being in order, I ordered it on my desktop and it was automatically delivered to the Android.

Warrior King was an excellent book.

Regards

Mike

[TheCurmudgeon]

I know I shouldn't be, but because I became so interested in the idea based on my recent research into primitive war I am reading "less than human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others"

It has an interesting slant:

In this book, I will argue that dehumanization is a joint creation of biology, culture, and the architecture of the human mind."

Dehumanization is a scourge, and has been so for millennia. It acts as a psychological lubricant, dissolving our inhibitions and inflaming our destructive passions. As such, it empowers us to perform acts that would, under other circumstances, be unthinkable.

[ganulv]

Lawrence in Arabia is on my reading list after yesterday’s Fresh Air interview with author Scott Anderson. Non-fictional T. E. Lawrence was actually even more interesting than semi-fictional T. E. Lawrence, if this interview is at all accurate.

[Bob's World]

I just placed my order on Amazon for Colonel Brian Petit's first (there will be more) book. I had the distinct pleasure to serve with Brian in both the Pacific and in Afghanistan. Brian is one of our great operators as well as one of our great thinkers. He has served in critical SOF assignments in Iraq, the Philippines, and Afghanistan. Perhaps as important he served in a critical SOF assignment at Fort Leavenworth where he was often the intellectual connective tissue between the Army and Army SOF.

From the Amazon page:

Going Big by Getting Small examines how the United States Special Operations Forces apply operational art, the link between tactics and strategy, in the non-wartime, steady-state environments called Phase Zero. With revised and innovative operational art constructs, US Special Operations offer scalable and differentiated strategic options for US foreign policy goals. This book analyzes light footprint special operations approaches in Yemen, Indonesia, Thailand, and Colombia. When a large military presence may be inappropriate or counterproductive, Colonel Brian Petit makes the case for fresh thinking on Phase Zero operational art as applied by small, highly skilled, joint-force teams coupled with interagency partners. The past decade (2002-2012) of operations focused on large-scale, post-conflict counterinsurgency. Less publicized, but no less important in this same decade, was the emerging application of nuanced campaigns, actions, and activities in Phase Zero. These efforts were led or supported by special operations in countries and regions contested, but not at war. This book fills a gap in the literature of how to adapt the means, method, and logic of US military foreign engagements in a diplomacy-centric world with rapidly shifting power paradigms. Going Big by Getting Small is not a yarn on daring special operations raids nor a call for perpetual war. It is the polar opposite: this book contemplates the use of discreet engagements to sustain an advantageous peace, mitigate conflict, and prevent crises.
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Link to Amazon.com, note no reviews:http://www.amazon.com/Going-Big-Gett...+Getting+Small

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About the Author
Colonel Brian S. Petit is a US Army Special Forces officer with worldwide experience in combat, conflict, and peacetime environments. He has written articles on special operations for Special Warfare and Military Review.

[Backwards Observer]

Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoit Chantre (Studies in Violence, Mimesis, & Culture). A discussion of Clausewitz by the anthropological philosopher, Rene Girard. Interesting if you like that sort of thing.

Ren Girard: Achever Clausewitz is a book about modern war, really. Clausewitz is a writer who wrote only about war; he was in love with war. He hated Napoleon, the enemy of his country, Prussia, but he also loved him because the emperor had restored war to its glorious nature after the eighteenth century, which weakened war by having conflicts that made maneuvers and negotiations more important than actual fighting. That is why Clausewitzs hatred for Napoleon was curiously united to a passionate admiration for the man who had restored war to its former glory.

CH: The love-hate nature of mimetic rivalry is apparent here but is there anything else that attracted you to this offbeat topic?

RG: I found another interesting correspondence with my own work. Because Clausewitz talks only about war, he describes human relations in a way that interests me profoundly. When we describe human relations, we usually make them better than they are: gentle, peaceful, and so forth, whereas in reality they are often competitive. War is the most extreme form of competition. That is why Clausewitz says that business commercial business and war are very close to each other.

CH: Youve pointed out that our whole contemporary society is reaching a point of mimetic crisis. What, exactly, causes a mimetic crisis?

RG: A mimetic crisis is when people become undifferentiated. There are no more social classes, there are no more social differences, and so forth. What I call a mimetic crisis is a situation of conflict so intense that on both sides people act the same way and talk the same way even though, or because, they are more and more hostile to each other. I believe that in intense conflict, far from becoming sharper, differences melt away.

When differences are suppressed, conflicts become rationally insoluble. If and when they are solved, they are solved by something that has nothing to do with rational argument: by a process that the people concerned do not understand and even do not perceive. They are solved by what we call a scapegoat process.

CH: You say that the history of scapegoating is suppressed by those who do the scapegoating.

RG: Scapegoating itself is the suppressing. If you scapegoat someone, only a third party can become aware of it. It wont be you, because you will believe you are doing the right thing. You will believe that you are either punishing someone who is truly guilty, or fighting someone who is trying to kill you. We never see ourselves as responsible for scapegoating.

If you look at archaic religions, it becomes clear that religion is a way to master, or at least control, violence. I think that archaic religions are based on a collective murder, on a lynch-mob murder, which unites the people and saves the community. This process is the beginning of a religion: salvation as a result of scapegoating. That is why the people turn their scapegoat into a god.

Christianity will be victorious, but only in defeat. - Girard Interview - First Things - 7.16.2009

During a meeting last year of an informal philosophical reading group, Girard recounted the Old Testament story of Joseph, son of Jacob, bound and sold into slavery by his "mob" of 10 half-brothers. At first, "they all get together and try to kill him. The Bible knows that scapegoating is a mob affair." Joseph establishes himself as one of the leaders of Egypt and then tearfully forgives his brothers in a dramatic reconciliation. It is, Girard said, a story "much more mature, spiritually, than the beginning of Genesis." Moreover, the story has no precedent in archaic literature.

"Like many biblical stories, it is a counter-mythical story," he said, "because in myth, the lynchers are always satisfied with their lynching."

History is a test. Mankind is failing it. - Girard Interview - Stanford Magazine - July 2009

Rene Girard - wikipedia

Battling to the End - Amazon

***

The Cambodian Wars: Clashing Armies and CIA Covert Operations by Kenneth Conboy.

***

The Whole Heart of Zen: The Complete Teachings from the Oral Tradition of Ta-Mo (Bodhidharma) by John Bright-Fey.



the violence inherent in the system - monty python

Up the Irons \m/

[davidbfpo]

I have finally finished reading Carter Malkasian's slim book 'War Comes to Garmsir: Thirty Years of Conflict on the Afghan Frontier'. Read on the train commuting to London and Oxford and finally at home.

There are a number of other SWC reviews of the book in this thread and his name appears in nearly a dozen threads.

His style and the content are simply gripping. Human terrain at it's best, context, details and insight.

I have not read many of the books on the contemporary Afghan conflict, it is for this "armchair" observer too sad. This book is different, it is about the Afghan people, their leaders, institutions and their visiting foreign guests.

The last chapter, the conclusion 'The End or the Intermission', is excellent. I expect those who have served anywhere in Afghanistan, outside the wire, will agree with his reflections and so taken from his final paragraph:

What I think I can say is that Afghanistan surely will not be the last of America's interventions in messy wars in developing states - our history is too full to think otherwise......Garmser offers no answers as to whether such conflicts are worth it. It merely suggest they are likely to be troublesome, murky, messy and grey.

Link:http://www.amazon.com/War-Comes-Garm...rter+malkasian

If you now intend to buy a copy there is a SWJ link, so we get a commission.

[Firn]

I have come back to the great book Wages of Destruction to get the German economic reality in one or two periods of interest.

The British author, which speaks more then excellent German, has in my opinion been able to write the book on the German economy of that timeframe which will set the standard for quite some time. Based upon increasingly better research, good economic understanding and clear thinking he is able to tie up a considerable amount of lose political, military and economic threads. Many decisions, right or wrong, make a lot more sense when you can put them into the big picture of the specific timeframe.

You can put yourself into the shoes of many different German decision makers from the Weimar days onward which had to face stark and diverse constraints. A cronic lack of foreign-currency reserves, evaporating exports due to the Great Recession, severe lack of investment and the inferior capital stock, the severe economic and political damage inflicted by the hyper-inflation and the harsh austerity, the resulting long-term damage of the economic potential, the policial instability and so forth were arguably bigger problems then those faced by the rest of the Powers. It is no surprise that the rearmament could only operate within severe limits even when it was greatly pushed after the rise of the brown shirts.

Some chapters were especially insightful like the one showing the trade-offs between production, human capital and food and the 'rational' consequences of the grim logic under the brutal ideology with the implications for the Jews, other 'foreign' labor, German army logistics and the German labor force. The relationships between the small, undermechanized and relative inefficient Central European agriculture and the partly hidden high participation of women in the work force which in turn can be tied up with the desperate need for foreign labour. The low degree of efficency was partly due the low mechanization which can be explained by the small farm sizes and the more general lack of capital and ressources. It is impossible to mention even all the most important relationships, some already quite known some not.

It is quite ironic to read about the dire situation in oil and food the British war economy faced in the darkest days of the Uboat war and to compare it with the small amount available to the German one. Amusingly the British came up with a surprisingly accurate account of the the German oil reserves and oil production around 1940 but doubled the former because they just could not believe that Germany could be able to wage war with that.

I think it is fair to say that it is difficult to get a good understanding of the whole war without understanding some key concepts presented in the book. Some may know them from other studies and sources but for people with less available time the best way is to read it in Toozes work.

P.S: It is also highly informative to look at the current world through the lens of that book, for example from an European/American/Indian/Chinese/Russian point of view. As an European the even greater reliance on imports for many basic ressources becomes obvious and many vital supply chains have links overseas which sometimes are impossible to replace. The substitution of others would greatly decrease efficiency and productivity. Sadly my secret plan for world domination is thus unlikely to work.

[Granite_State]

I have finally finished reading Carter Malkasian's slim book 'War Comes to Garmsir: Thirty Years of Conflict on the Afghan Frontier'. Read on the train commuting to London and Oxford and finally at home.

There are a number of other SWC reviews of the book in this thread and his name appears in nearly a dozen threads.

His style and the content are simply gripping. Human terrain at it's best, context, details and insight.

I have not read many of the books on the contemporary Afghan conflict, it is for this "armchair" observer too sad. This book is different, it is about the Afghan people, their leaders, institutions and their visiting foreign guests.

The last chapter, the conclusion 'The End or the Intermission', is excellent. I expect those who have served anywhere in Afghanistan, outside the wire, will agree with his reflections and so taken from his final paragraph:

Link:http://www.amazon.com/War-Comes-Garm...rter+malkasian

If you now intend to buy a copy there is a SWJ link, so we get a commission.

Agreed, great book for anyone looking to understand the campaign in Helmand. I was also just across the river from some of the places and people mentioned, the book made me aware (far too late to be of use) of a lot of local dynamics that I either didn't know or partially puzzled out during my last deployment.