Strategic Outpost Summer Reading List

Out of all the listings below, I would highly recommend War Stories From the Future…some really good reading there.

Also If you have not read it already, do yourself a favor and read Ghost Fleet by August Cole and PJ Singer ASAP…arguably one of the best books I have read this year so far. -SF

Attention all defense nerds! We know you. We are you. You are getting ready for your August vacation, when normal people take a break from work. You, however, are not normal people. Your vacations are really just a chance to surreptitiously catch up on juicy work reading while pretending to relax with family and friends (or to escape them entirely).

So before you grudgingly flee your keyboards and cubicles and take your pasty bodies to the beach, here is our list of top reads (and looks and listens) that you may have missed during the past year. Catch up and keep those brain cells energized after slathering on the sunscreen! Not all of these are obviously about defense and national security, but all will sharpen your thinking and help you think more creatively about future as well as the world we live in now.

The Recent Wars

Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, by Sebastian Junger. The best-selling author of War and co-director of the striking Afghan war documentary Restrepo (which is an absolute must-see), Junger wrestles in this book with the vast discontinuities between the surprisingly uplifting experience of bonding in combat and the reality of coming home to a fractured nation lacking any sense of solidarity. He finds that the veterans of today’s wars “often come home to find that, although they’re willing to die for their country, they’re not sure how to live for it.” This unusual meditation is not so much about veterans as it is a reflection upon the deep divisions in American society today and what to do about it, drawn from the lessons of those who have fought.

Ashley’s War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield, by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon. This engaging book tells the story of the first women to serve in the Army’s Cultural Support Teams (CST), which were attached to special operations forces fighting in Afghanistan. Although women were not technically allowed to serve in combat positions at the time, they faced the very same dangers while gathering vital intelligence that their male colleagues could not obtain from Afghan women. Lemmon weaves together their combat experiences with the more personal details of the sisterhood that these trailblazers formed and beautifully describes how these women and their male counterparts grieved together when the first CST member was killed in action. (While you’re at it, read Secretary of Defense Ash Carter’s December 2015 announcement that opened all positions in the U.S. military to women — it’s the true epilogue to this book.)

Youngblood, by Matt Gallagher. A gripping novel that navigates the often unique challenges of small unit leadership in today’s wars, combining thriller, mystery, and love story into a compelling account. Narrated by “Lieutenant Jack,” a young Army platoon leader in post-surge Iraq, the tale veers in surprising directions with an unexpected ending that highlights the irony and complexity of our recent wars — and what we are asking our young men and women in uniform to do. This might be the best fictional piece yet from the wars of 9/11.

Season 2 of Serial. This 11-episode podcast interviews Army soldier Bowe Bergdahl about his disappearance from an outpost in eastern Afghanistan in 2009. This fresh and riveting chronicle exposes the bizarre mindset that led him to leave his base and the immense efforts of the soldiers who put themselves at risk to find him. More than just a story about Bergdahl, this series does a remarkable job explaining the larger context of the war with all its frustrating and often inexplicable contradictions. Listening to this account in the words of those who were there makes it starkly clear why his fellow soldiers were so outraged upon his return.

The Wars of Today and Tomorrow

“The Obama Doctrine,” by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic. Whether you agree with the president or not, there is no doubt that his decisions about Syria, Iran, Russia, terrorism, and beyond will shape the U.S. national security agenda for years to come. This fascinating article, based on extensive personal interviews, reveals both the practical reasons and the deeper philosophical underpinnings of some of his key decisions —including his dim view of foreign policy experts and why he chose to break, in his own words, “the playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow.”

Eye in the Sky, a film thriller on the moral dilemmas of drone warfare. Helen Mirren stars as British Colonel Katherine Powell, directing a U.S.-operated drone mission in support of a U.K. counterterror raid in Kenya. It is the best depiction to date about the gut-wrenching decisions and consequences of drone warfare — including the civilian and military leaders agonizing over potential collateral damage, those killed and wounded when the missiles strike, and the drone operators who get to absorb the carnage they have wrought in high-definition detail. It’s a powerful story as well as a lesson in the moral conundrums of modern warfare and the fight against terrorism.

War Stories from the Future, edited by August Cole. This innovative collection from the Atlantic Council’s Art of Future Warfare project includes a series of science fiction short stories and eye-catching art. Drawing on established authors as well as contest-winning writers and visual artists, this anthology brings new voices and new ideas to emerging defense and national security topics. As former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey writes in the introduction, these stories “invite us to shed the shackles that bind us to our current constructs and instead imagine things as they might be, for better or for worse.” (For more on the “critical task of forecasting the future of warfare,” check out the WOTR podcast with August Cole, B.J. Armstrong, and John Amble.)

Global Trends

The Industries of the Future, by Alec Ross. A striking book about the “next economy” and its world-changing implications for all of us. Ross, former Chief Innovation Officer for the secretary of state, outlines in concise terms what technology-driven industries will transform the world we know now — in enormous but deeply unequal ways — over the next two decades. Chapters on the “future of the human machine,” “the weaponization of code,” and data as the “raw material of the information age” provide important clues on how to prepare our nation, our societies, and our families for what’s coming (and sooner than you think).

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner. Tetlock’s last book demonstrated the real limitations of expert predictions, famously concluding that they did about the same as a “dart-throwing chimp.” Based on the findings of the Good Judgment Project, this sequel of sorts examines the characteristics of “superforecasters” — otherwise average people who can consistently make better predictions with openly available information than intelligence analysts using classified information. Fortunately for the rest of us, the authors show how these skills can be learned — including a very handy appendix called “Ten Commandments for Aspiring Superforecasters.”

Just Because

The Duffel Blog. Yes, we put this on our last reading list, but you can’t ever get enough of the military version of The Onion. Articles from the last couple of weeks alone include CENTCOM Commander Can’t Believe It’s Not His Problem For Once and Army Replaces Benefits with Rolled Sleeves. Our line of work may be serious, but every now and then you just gotta laugh about it.

Extra Credit

Finally, a bit of shameless self-promotion: our article in The Atlantic called “Can the U.S. Military Halt its Brain Drain?” It tells the story of how the military must transform its archaic personnel system through the tales of two remarkable junior officers.

With that, dear readers, we bid you a fair summer farewell. Strategic Outpost is taking its own August vacation and will be back right after Labor Day. Until then, happy reading, watching, and listening!

Read the Original Article at War on the Rocks

World War I History: Australia And The Battle of Fromelles

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The Interpreter, which is published by the Lowy Institute for International Policy, an independent, nonpartisan think tank based in Sydney. War on the Rocks is proud to be publishing articles from The Interpreter weekly.

Fromelles, fought one hundred years ago this week, is now one of the most famous battles in which Australians fought during World War I. It is routinely remembered as the greatest disaster in Australian military history: 5533 casualties in 24 hours, all for an operation that manifestly had no strategic value.

But Fromelles was not always central to Australian memory of war. In the inter-war years, the battleground became the site of one of the thousands of cemeteries created by the Imperial War Graves Commission. Here, at VC Corner, the remains of 410 unidentified Australian dead were interred and the names of the 1299 Australian missing from Fromelles inscribed on the memorial walls. In Australia, meanwhile, survivors of Fromelles would gather every year on July 19, while families who had lost men in what they called Fleurbaix would also insert “In Memoriam” notices in newspapers.

However, Fromelles was not then a “national memory,” in the sense of being a battle that was honored in prominent national rituals of commemoration. Perhaps this was because it was soon eclipsed by other costlier battles on the Western Front, such as Pozieres on the Somme and the Third Battle of Ypres in Flanders in 1917. Perhaps it was because survivors of World War I preferred to see themselves as heroes, not victims, as is the vogue in war commemoration of the early 21^st century. The 5th Division, for instance, when asked in 1919 where it wanted to install the memorial celebrating its wartime achievements chose not Fromelles but Polygon Wood, the site of one of the more successful actions during the Third Battle of Ypres.

All of this changed in the 1990s. As the extraordinary resurgence of interest in war memory occurred not only in Australia but around the globe, Fromelles was rediscovered. This was the result of both government intervention and individual initiatives. In 1998, the Australian government opened a memorial park at Fromelles on the 80^th anniversary of the end of World War I. At its heart was a statue of a man staggering under the weight of a wounded soldier draped across his shoulders. Called Cobbers, it immortalizes a Victorian farmer, Sergeant Simon Fraser of 57^th Battalion, who in the days after the Fromelles battle joined small groups scouring the battlefield for the wounded. It was a story of compassion and mateship waiting to join other icons of Australian war memory:Simpson and his Donkey, and “Weary” Dunlop. Indeed, the sculptor of Cobbers, Peter Corlett, had already created the statues of these two iconic figures that stand now outside the Australian War Memorial.

Read the Remainder at War on the Rocks

World War II History: Lessons From the Winter War – Frozen Grit and Finland’s Fabian Defense

Whether on the soccer pitch or the field of battle, humans have a natural tendency to root for the underdog. Oursacred texts, medieval ballads, and regimental histories are filled with gut-wrenching tales of desperate men facing overwhelming odds. From the battle of Thermopylae to the siege of the Alamo, from the gunfight at Camaron to the clash at Rorke’s Drift, there is something about such lopsided contests that continues to exert a powerful sway over our collective imagination.

All too often, however, it is certain climactic battles-or flashes in the pan of martial history that capture our interest, rather than the more protracted and less cinematic struggles between two unevenly matched armies. An exception might be the campaigns of Quintus Fabius Maximus during the Second Punic War. The redoubtable Roman’s efforts have bequeathed to us something of an awkward nomenclature — the adjective Fabian — now used to designate nationally driven scorched-earth tactics or strategies of delay and progressive attrition.

There are countless other fascinating examples of Fabian warfare that could and should be drawn upon by contemporary strategists. Alfred the Great’s hit-and-run campaign against the marauding Danes, launched from his swampy sanctuary deep in the Somerset Marshes, provides one such example, as do the less fortunate attempts of Hereward the Wake (the Northern English Lord who inspired the legend of Robin Hood) to coordinate a region-wide resistance against the brutal occupation of William the Conqueror. The Duke of Wellington’s fostering of a Spanish “ulcer” during the Napoleonic Wars and Josip Tito’s war against Axis forces during World War II are both equally rife with lessons.

Yet one of history’s most dramatic tales of Fabian defense is found much further north, in the dark pine forests stretching beyond the Arctic Circle and in the mass graveyards that still dot the banks of the Karelian Isthmus. Karelia, renowned for its natural beauty, is one of those many bucolic but benighted stretches of territory that by the tyranny of geography have found themselves repeatedly ravaged by great power conflicts.

Finland’s Winter War with the Soviet Union, waged over the course of 105 days from November 1939 to March 1940, should be an object of study for all students of military strategy. Finland, a weak, sparsely populated, and diplomatically isolated nation, succeeded in imposing staggering costs on a far more potent aggressor. Indeed, the respective kill ratios and casualty rates are perhaps some of the starkest in the annals of 20th century warfare. While Helsinki is estimated to have lost approximately 25,000 soldiers during the Soviet offensive, the invader’s fatalities have been pegged at close to 200,000, with hundreds of thousands more crippled by frostbite. This was a war of extremes, whose battles were fought during one of the coldest winters on record, in snowbound woods where daylight only lasted a few hours and temperatures regularly plummeted far below freezing. In such conditions, any exposed flesh ran the risk of being immediately afflicted by frostbite, while stacks of bodies froze in minutes, acquiring the solidity of brick walls. Raging blizzards and howling winds regularly disrupted radio transmissions, prevented aerial reconnaissance, and deviated the trajectory of artillery fire. Finland eventually buckled under the weight of Stalin’s onslaught and found itself obliged to part with large tracts of territory. Its citizen army had so severely gored the Soviet bear, however, that the Nordic nation preserved its independence and was spared the grim fate of the Baltic states. The conflict also put a severe dent in the prestige of a Red Army still reeling from the savage leadership purges of the 1930s. Moscow’s pained post-mortem of the conflict triggered endless bouts of internal recrimination before eventually leading to some much-needed military reforms.

Read the Remainder at War on the Rocks

Military History: Chilcot and a Very British History of Dubious Military Decisions

The publication of the long-awaited report by Sir John Chilcot and his committee on Britain’s involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq proved more surprising and damning than expected. Many of the report’s conclusions confirmed what was widely understood to be the case. But the authoritative, exhaustive, and rigorous nature of the report has made those assumptions irrefutable. The Iraq invasion was of dubious legality, based on faulty intelligence, the result of poor strategic maneuvering by the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair, and exposed yet another failure of the political and military interface. If Britain’s military history is any guide, this will not be the last such failure.

In the days leading up to the publication, media reports repeatedly emphasized that it was beyond the remit of the inquiry to comment on the legality of the war. The report came as close to declaring the war to be illegal as was possible, without actually doing so. “The UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted,” the inquiry chair, Sir John Chilcot, said in his public statement. “Military action at that time was not a last resort.”

Although shocking to read in a public statement, there is nothing surprising for those of us who have taught the history of ethics and morality in war. The principle of Last Resort is one of the explicit principles of the Just War criteria. A war cannot be just if peaceful diplomatic alternatives exist as an alternative. Legal scholars and ethicists can debate the true meaning of this: Is it just to resort to war if diplomatic alternatives exist, but they are certain to fail? Blair, in 2002 and 2003, clearly believed this was the case, and continues to do so now.

But this forthright comment was not the only damning statement to emerge from the report. Again, much of this was no surprise. Intelligence failings were apparent, ranging from collection to analysis. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the British government was suffering from group-think at best, cognitive dissonance at worst. Chilcot highlights that the Joint Intelligence Committee failed to make clear that the intelligence on which the Blair government was basing its decisions was short of reliable. For its part, the Blair government failed to ask the necessary questions of the intelligence, choosing instead to believe wholeheartedly what was presented, and ignore the considerable caveats that any serious analysis would have revealed. “The judgements about the severity of the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction –  WMD –  were presented with a certainty that was not justified,” Chilcot concluded.

Read the Remainder at War on the Rocks

Military History: Was The Russian Military A SteamRoller From WW2 Until Today?

Joseph Stalin supposedly claimed that “quantity has a quality all its own,” justifying a cannon-fodder mentality and immense casualties. The problem is, Stalin never actually said that, but it fits our stereotype about the Russian military so neatly that everyone believes he did.

When it comes to war, Russia is commonly perceived as favoring quantity over quality and winning mainly by overwhelming its opponents with hordes of poorly trained soldiers. You can hardly find any account of Russia’s wars that does not use terms like “hordes,” “masses,” and even “Neolithic swarms.” Quantity, it is believed, made quality almost irrelevant.

German generals propagated the myth of a Red Army comprised of faceless masses of troops, motivated only by NKVD rifles at their backs and winning only through sheer force of numbers. Many Western histories accept this view, and it is standard fare in Hollywood, notably in the 2001 Enemy at the Gates.  The story was also standard fare during the Cold War, when the intelligence community frequently overestimated the quantitative side of Soviet capabilities while belittling its quality.

True, some analysts argued for a more nuanced approach. For instance, Michael Handel in 1981 wrote that “To claim that the USSR is emphasizing quantity over quality in military equipment is to foster a dangerous misconception” [emphasis in the original]. We also know that the “missile gap” and “bomber gap” were artifacts of faulty intelligence analysis.

However, when you crunch the numbers, it turns out that Russian superiority has not been as great as most people believe. In fact during World War II, the U.S. Army often had about the same numerical advantage over its enemies as did the Red Army. A better understanding of the past might shift our perceptions of the present.

Read the Remainder at War on the Rocks