War on the Rocks » Book Reviews

Elizabeth Varon, Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South (Simon & Schuster, 2023) When I recently visited Montgomery, Alabama, I went to see the rows of rusted plinths that toget...

http://warontherocks.com/2024/04/longstreet-and-how-much-work-remains-to-be-done/

Steve Coll, The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2024). Was the Iraq War a product of mutual misperception by U.S. a...

http://warontherocks.com/2024/03/the-icarus-trap-arrogance-misperception-and-the-u-s-invasion-of-iraq/

Lee Hsi-ming, Taiwan’s Plan for Victory: An Asymmetric Strategy to Use the Small to Control the Large: All of Taiwan Should Understand the Overall Defense Concept (Linking Books, 2022). In 1874...

http://warontherocks.com/2024/02/taiwans-theory-of-the-fight/

The literature on 21st-century naval warfare has been dominated by discussions focused on technology, discussions that consistently have lauded technology, argued for its inevitability, and frett...

http://warontherocks.com/2023/10/plus-ca-change-a-french-approach-to-naval-warfare-in-the-21st-century/

Agathe Demarais, Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022). In the dead of night on January 29, 2018, the Department of the Tre...

http://warontherocks.com/2023/05/a-note-of-caution-how-sanctions-can-undermine-u-s-interests/

Paul Scharre, Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2023). It is widely believed that the world is on the brink of another military r...

http://warontherocks.com/2023/04/ai-at-war/

Melvyn Leffler, Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq (Oxford University Press, 2023) Historians have always faced the problem of deciding how much to trust their so...

http://warontherocks.com/2023/01/confronting-the-iraq-war-melvyn-leffler-george-bush-and-the-problem-of-trusting-your-sources/

 Christopher Lyke, The Chicago East India Company (Double Dagger Books, 2022). My sole unequivocally proud memory of America’s post-9/11 wars occurred in Bossaso — a city in Somalia’s Punt...

http://warontherocks.com/2022/10/the-chicago-east-india-company/

Michael P. Fischerkeller, Emily O. Goldman, and Richard J. Harknett, Cyber Persistence Theory: Redefining National Security in Cyberspace (Oxford University Press, 2022). Predictions about cybe...

http://warontherocks.com/2022/08/prescribing-a-new-paradigm-for-cyber-competition/

Rebecca Lissner, Wars of Revelation: The Transformative Effects of Military Intervention on Grand Strategy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022) The Anglo-Boer War between October 1899 and Ma...

http://warontherocks.com/2022/05/war-and-adjustment-military-campaigns-and-national-strategy/

Ian Morris, Geography is Destiny. Britain’s Place in the World: A 10,000-Year History (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2022) In a 2018 episode of the vacuous but addictive British reality TV show L...

http://warontherocks.com/2022/04/the-honeytrap-of-universal-history-brexit-and-grand-sweeps-of-history-and-geography/

Mark Mazower, The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe (Penguin Press, 2021) Imagine a poor nation on the edge of Europe. Its people, Orthodox Christians, have an ancient histor...

http://warontherocks.com/2022/04/revisiting-the-greek-war-of-independence-while-ukraine-fights-for-its-own/

Nicholas Mulder, The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War (Yale University Press, 2022) Isabella Weber, How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate (Routle...

http://warontherocks.com/2022/03/is-the-west-laissez-faire-about-economic-warfare/

Takuma Melber (translated by Nick Somers), Pearl Harbor: Japan’s Attack and America’s Entry into World War II (Polity Press, 2020).   Although there’s no shortage of hot takes and policy p...

http://warontherocks.com/2022/03/from-waterloo-to-pearl-harbor-the-evolving-historiography-of-national-security-events/

Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis, 2034: A Novel of the Next World War (Penguin Press, 2021)   What starts a war? Is it an invasion in Eastern Europe, an assassination on the streets of Saraje...

http://warontherocks.com/2022/03/the-war-we-dread/

Leonard Rubenstein, Perilous Medicine: The Struggle to Protect Health Care from the Violence of War (Columbia University Press, 2021)   Embracing humanity isn’t controversial — until it come...

http://warontherocks.com/2022/02/for-humanitys-sake-keep-red-crosses-on-medevac-helicopters/

Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less (Flatiron Books, 2021) It’s Monday morning and the battalion is formed at the motor pool. The battalion commander steps forward and rallies m...

http://warontherocks.com/2021/12/doing-less-to-do-better-why-the-military-cant-solve-its-overwork-problem/

Martin Indyk, Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy (Knopf, 2021)   When I was an undergraduate studying international relations in New York City, I took the o...

http://warontherocks.com/2021/12/were-not-in-kissingers-middle-east-any-more/

Colin Kahl and Thomas Wright, Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order (St. Martin’s Press, 2021)   There was a problem with the way that history was taught in...

http://warontherocks.com/2021/11/international-order-through-the-historians-eye/

Kevin D. McCranie, Mahan, Corbett, and the Foundations of Naval Strategic Thought (Naval Institute Press, 2021). Strategists and writers examining naval affairs argue a lot: the necessary size of...

http://warontherocks.com/2021/11/the-shared-genius-of-mahan-and-corbett/

Seth G. Jones, Three Dangerous Men: Russia, China, Iran and the Rise of Irregular Warfare (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2021). When the United States prepared to withdraw from Afgha...

http://warontherocks.com/2021/10/the-united-states-left-afghanistan-to-prepare-for-a-war-it-will-probably-never-fight/

Phil Klay, Missionaries (New York: Penguin Press, 2020)   War is a disorienting experience. One way that individuals process it is through writing. Two decades after the attacks that spawned wha...

http://warontherocks.com/2021/10/global-violence-on-an-intimate-scale-the-work-of-missionaries/

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared as “Leadership Decapitation Is No Panacea” in our sister publication, the Texas National Security Review. Be sure to check out the full rou...

http://warontherocks.com/2021/10/killing-terrorist-leaders-is-no-silver-bullet/

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from “Book Review Roundtable: Nationalizing Natural Resources” from our sister publication, the Texas National Security Review. Be sure to check out the ...

http://warontherocks.com/2021/09/authoritarianism-and-nationalizing-natural-resources/

Wesley Morgan, The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan’s Pech Valley (Random House, 2021)   Afghanistan’s hoary reputation as “the graveyard of empires” is ill-des...

http://warontherocks.com/2021/09/what-losing-looks-like-afghanistans-hardest-place/

Delphine Schrank, The Rebel of Rangoon, (Nation Books, 2016)   Since it staged a coup d’etat in February, Myanmar’s military has waged war against the country’s democracy and its own peopl...

http://warontherocks.com/2021/08/totalitarianism-and-resistance-in-myanmar/

Rush Doshi, The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order (Oxford University Press, 2021)   If one day China should change her color and turn into a superpower, if she too s...

http://warontherocks.com/2021/08/a-thorough-explanation-of-chinas-long-term-strategy/

Carsten Wieland, Syria and the Neutrality Trap: The Dilemmas of Delivering Humanitarian Aid through Violent Regimes (Bloomsbury, 2021)   Bashar al Assad relied on Russian warplanes to ensure hi...

http://warontherocks.com/2021/08/the-road-to-damascus-is-paved-with-good-intentions/

Jack Kelly, Valcour: The 1776 Campaign That Saved the Cause of Liberty (St. Martin’s, 2021)   Brooklyn Heights, Saratoga, Yorktown. Many Americans know the battles of the Revolutionary War as ...

http://warontherocks.com/2021/07/the-american-revolution-naval-power-and-the-21st-century/

Simon Akam, The Changing of the Guard: The British Army Since 9/11 (Scribe, 2021)   The senior British officer was proud to witness one of his non-commissioned officers destroying so many of the...

http://warontherocks.com/2021/07/a-peacetime-army-goes-to-war/

Kyle J. Gardner, The Frontier Complex: Geopolitics and the Making of the India-China Border, 1846-1962 (Cambridge University Press, 2021)   When the first Englishman visited Leh, the capital of ...

http://warontherocks.com/2021/07/how-british-imperial-history-does-and-doesnt-shape-the-sino-indian-border-dispute/

Kenneth Payne, I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict (Hurst, 2021)   As the Cold War intensified in 1979, Soviet officials tried to gain a strategic advantage by outsourcing a...

http://warontherocks.com/2021/07/warbots-tactically-brilliant-strategically-naive/

Steve Miska, Baghdad Underground Railroad: Saving American Allies in Iraq (Los Angeles: Onward Press, 2021). Book proceeds support the U.S. Veterans’ Artist Alliance (https://usvaa.org).    �...

http://warontherocks.com/2021/06/interpreters-on-the-run-baghdad-underground-railroad/

Philip Stephens, Britain Alone: The Path from Suez to Brexit (Faber, 2021) In 1962, former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson dealt a crushing blow to the British foreign policy establishment. ...

http://warontherocks.com/2021/06/losing-itself-in-a-role-a-half-century-of-british-foreign-policy/

George W. Cully,  Adapt or Fail: The USAF’s Role in Reconstituting the Iraqi Air Force, 2004-2007 (Air University Press 2017) Forrest L. Marion, Flight Risk: The Coalition’s Air Advisory Mis...

http://warontherocks.com/2021/04/into-thin-air-aviation-security-force-assistance-in-iraq-and-afghanistan/

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from “Book Review Roundtable: Law’s Wars, Law’s Trials” from our sister publication, the Texas National Security Review. Be sure to check out the full ...

http://warontherocks.com/2021/01/counter-terrorism-and-the-rule-of-law/

Barack Obama, A Promised Land (New York: Crown, 2020)   “Whatever you do won’t be enough. … Try anyway.” — President Barack Obama   It was December 2009 and the still-new president wa...

http://warontherocks.com/2020/12/obamas-non-nuclear-memoir/

Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade & the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World (New York: Public Affairs, 2020)   How do you get policymakers in Washing...

http://warontherocks.com/2020/11/the-washington-method-in-southeast-asia/

Do the people who fight America’s wars ever think civilians truly understand and appreciate their experiences? Phil Klay argues that American soldiers don’t expect Americans to understand, be...

http://warontherocks.com/2020/11/missionaries-from-a-strange-land-veterans-and-the-society-that-sends-them/

Kremlin-backed trolls are sowing disinformation and have adapted their game for the 2020 campaign. U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr has been vague about the probity of accepting foreign assistance...

http://warontherocks.com/2020/10/inside-job-the-challenge-of-foreign-online-influence-in-u-s-elections/

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from “Book Review Roundtable: Iran Reframed” from our sister publication, the Texas National Security Review. Be sure to check out the full roundtable. N...

http://warontherocks.com/2020/09/selling-the-revolution-to-irans-next-generation/

Audrey Kurth Cronin, Power to the People: How Open Technological Innovation is Arming Tomorrow’s Terrorists, (Oxford University Press, 2020).   When asked about terrorists’ use of modern tec...

http://warontherocks.com/2020/09/terror-and-technology-from-dynamite-to-drones/

Robert Draper, To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq (Penguin Press, 2020).   The two most glaring challenges of writing recent foreign affairs history are the lack ...

http://warontherocks.com/2020/09/opening-up-new-avenues-to-understanding-the-path-to-war-in-iraq/

Stephen M. Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018)   What makes for good grand strategy? Containment...

http://warontherocks.com/2020/08/blame-it-on-the-blob-how-to-evaluate-american-grand-strategy/

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from “Book Review Roundtable: Tempting Fate” from our sister publication, the Texas National Security Review. Be sure to check out the full roundtable. Pau...

http://warontherocks.com/2020/08/what-military-confrontations-could-mean-for-understanding-the-nuclear-revolution/

Covell F. Meyskens, Mao’s Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War China (Cambridge University Press, 2020)   When the imperialist powers of Europe and Japan finally withdrew from their Afr...

http://warontherocks.com/2020/08/maos-secret-factories-in-cold-war-china/

John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened (Simon & Schuster, 2020)   Let me take advantage of the fact that John Bolton’s memoir of his time as national security advisor — The Room Where It Ha...

http://warontherocks.com/2020/07/the-room-where-not-much-happened/

Erik Edstrom, Un-American: A Soldier’s Reckoning of our Longest War (Bloomsbury, 2020).   President Barack Obama’s foreign policy mantra was, in brief, “Don’t do stupid shit.” The exte...

http://warontherocks.com/2020/06/visions-of-war-west-point-and-waywardness/

Christian Brose, The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare (Hachette Books, 2020)   Although I served in the Pentagon more than a half century ago, I can remember some...

http://warontherocks.com/2020/06/on-military-innovation-the-more-things-change-the-more-things-stay-the-same/

Technological innovation has made life safer and easier, raising living standards as well as life expectancy for the mass of humanity. Yet, these improvements have always come coupled with what e...

http://warontherocks.com/2020/05/bowling-alone-with-robots/

Colin Dueck, Age of Iron: On Conservative Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 2019)   Nationalism – like power, empire, or hegemony – is one of those political science concepts that defy e...

http://warontherocks.com/2020/03/foreign-policy-is-much-more-than-a-liberal-vs-conservative-brawl/

Oriana Skylar Mastro, The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime (Cornell University Press, 2019).   The peace agreement between the United States and the Taliban raises a l...

http://warontherocks.com/2020/03/how-can-negotiations-bring-wars-to-an-end/

Elizabeth A. Stanley, Widen the Window: Training Your Brain and Body to Thrive During Stress and Recover from Trauma (Avery/Penguin Random House, 2019).   Most of us have been there: You are wor...

http://warontherocks.com/2020/02/training-to-thrive-in-a-toxic-national-security-profession/

Ian Urbina, The Outlaw Ocean (Alfred A. Knopf, 2019) Philosophers ask the essential questions — who are we, where do we come from, why are we here? President John Kennedy eloquently summed up o...

http://warontherocks.com/2020/02/the-grim-reality-of-the-cruel-seas/

James Mattis and Bing West, Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead (New York: Random House, 2019)   In 2016, I interviewed Gen. James Mattis about his experiences as commander of 1st Marine Division ...

http://warontherocks.com/2019/12/the-firing-line/

Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir (Dey Street Books, 2019) Americans who work with foreign countries, particularly poor, non-European countries, too often start off with answ...

http://warontherocks.com/2019/11/an-insider-memoir-that-tells-what-the-author-learned-not-how-right-she-was/

Austin Carson, Secret Wars: Covert Conflict in International Politics (Princeton University Press, 2018) Lindsey A. O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War (Cornell Universi...

http://warontherocks.com/2019/08/covert-wars-to-what-end/

David P. Fields, Foreign Friends: Syngman Rhee, American Exceptionalism, and the Division of Korea, University Press of Kentucky, 2019 South Koreans are generally happy to see the United States a...

http://warontherocks.com/2019/07/how-does-syngman-rhees-friendship-with-america-still-matter-today/

Michael J. Mazarr, Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America’s Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy (PublicAffairs, 2019)   Brits have long joked that when Hollywood gets its hands on any Worl...

http://warontherocks.com/2019/07/forgetting-allies-writing-the-british-out-of-the-history-of-the-iraq-war/

Dmitry Adamsky, Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy: Religion, Politics, and Strategy (Stanford University Press, 2019). Russia’s Federal Nuclear Center, the All-Russian Institute of Experimental Physics...

http://warontherocks.com/2019/06/blessed-be-thy-nuclear-weapons-the-rise-of-russian-nuclear-orthodoxy/

Hal Brands and Charles Edel, The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order (Yale University Press, 2019). In January 405 BCE, Athens was in a desperate situation. The city had somehow weathe...

http://warontherocks.com/2019/06/in-statecraft-what-is-tragedy-good-for/

Ingo Trauschweizer, Maxwell Taylor’s Cold War: From Berlin to Vietnam (University Press of Kentucky, 2019).   There is an inherently aspirational quality to strategic planning. Former U.S. Arm...

http://warontherocks.com/2019/05/hope-as-a-method-maxwell-taylor-and-americas-cold-war/

Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019).   Many Americans would love to say that the United States is not and has never...

http://warontherocks.com/2019/05/the-case-for-a-narrower-view-of-empire-in-the-study-of-u-s-foreign-relations/

Anthony King, Command: The Twenty-First-Century General (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Upon receiving this book, I was very interested in reading it, having never come across a book that add...

http://warontherocks.com/2019/05/surveying-the-responsibility-of-command/

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from “Book Review Roundtable: What to Make of the Suez Canal Crisis” from our sister publication, the Texas National Security Review. Be sure to check...

http://warontherocks.com/2019/05/the-suez-crisis-and-the-fog-of-diplomacy/

Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire (Farrar, Strous, and Giroux, 2019).   The concluding words of Daniel Immerwahr’s new book should leave no one in doubt as to where he stands. “The his...

http://warontherocks.com/2019/04/an-empire-if-you-can-find-it-american-hegemony-and-imperial-control/

Remy Mauduit, The Insurgent Among Us: My Life as a Rebel, French Officer and Desertor (Independently published, 2018).   History and time can obscure both the brutality and the complexity of rev...

http://warontherocks.com/2019/04/a-war-to-the-death-the-ugly-underside-of-an-iconic-insurgency/

Andrew J. Gawthorpe To Build as Well as Destroy: American Nation-building in South Vietnam (Cornell University Press, 2018) From its occupation of the Philippines following the Spanish-American w...

http://warontherocks.com/2019/04/nation-building-in-a-time-of-war-revisiting-vietnam/

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from “Book Review Roundtable: Building Militaries in Fragile States” from our sister publication, the Texas National Security Review. Be sure to check ...

http://warontherocks.com/2019/04/making-security-assistance-work-rethinking-u-s-efforts-to-boost-partner-militaries/

Jason Rezaian, Prisoner: My 544 Days in an Iranian Prison — Solitary Confinement, a Sham Trial, High-Stakes Diplomacy, and the Extraordinary Efforts It Took to Get Me Out (Anthony Bourdain/ Ecc...

http://warontherocks.com/2019/02/no-concessions-a-closer-look-at-u-s-hostage-recovery-policy/

Mark Urban, The Skripal Files: The Life and Near Death of a Russian Spy (Henry Holt, 2018). On Sunday, March 4, 2018, in the sleepy English city of Salisbury, Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy...

http://warontherocks.com/2019/02/wet-work-in-salisbury-sergei-skripal-and-the-human-factor-of-russian-active-measures/

Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown (Viking, 2018). George Washington was supposed to be an admiral. Not just any admiral �...

http://warontherocks.com/2019/01/everything-honorable-and-glorious-george-washingtons-maritime-world/

Scott Decker, Recounting the Anthrax Attacks: Terror, the Amerithrax Task Force, and the Evolution of Forensics in the FBI (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018). Time may have diminished the memory of the...

http://warontherocks.com/2019/01/death-in-the-air-revisiting-the-2001-anthrax-mailings-and-the-amerithrax-investigation/

Eli Berman, Joseph H. Felter, and Jacob N. Shapiro, Small Wars, Big Data (Princeton University Press, 2018). Goodbye Syria. Goodbye Afghanistan. The Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institu...

http://warontherocks.com/2019/01/lessons-from-the-long-war-the-role-of-information-in-counter-insurgency/

Kathleen McInnis, The Heart of War: Misadventures in the Pentagon (Post Hill Press, 2018). Comedians have gotten a lot of mileage out of the plodding pace of bureaucracy. It’s such a common cr...

http://warontherocks.com/2019/01/bureaucrats-in-the-defense-department-an-ethnography/

Kathleen J. McInnis, The Heart of War: Misadventures in the Pentagon (Post Hill Press, 2018).   When you start working in the Pentagon as a young civilian or contractor, there isn’t a handbook...

http://warontherocks.com/2018/12/murphys-law-and-learning-to-love-the-pentagon/

Patrick Porter, Blunder: Britain’s War in Iraq (Oxford University Press, 2018). The case against the Iraq war now looks blindingly obvious. First there was the failure to find weapons of mass d...

http://warontherocks.com/2018/12/a-failure-of-ideas-revisiting-tony-blairs-legacy-in-iraq/

Rachel Kleinfeld, A Savage Order: How the World’s Deadliest Countries Can Forge a Path to Security. New York: Pantheon Books, November 2018. Despite much talk about great power rivalry defining...

http://warontherocks.com/2018/12/taming-state-violence-against-citizens-a-new-perspective-on-intrastate-conflict/

Elizabeth Economy, The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State (Oxford University Press, 2018)   Last year in October, President Xi Jinping strutted to the podium at the Chinese C...

http://warontherocks.com/2018/11/the-dilemmas-of-competing-with-xi-jinpings-china/

Mark Galeotti, The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia. (Yale University Press, 2018). The vory, the professional elite of Russian organized crime, have roots that go far back into the days of the tsars...

http://warontherocks.com/2018/11/a-tangled-web-organized-crime-and-oligarchy-in-putins-russia/

Peter Lee, Reaper Force: Inside Britain’s Drone Wars (John Blake, 2018) We know how to operate with … and they pretty much speak English too, so that helps. – Maj. Gen. Jim Poss, U.S. Air ...

http://warontherocks.com/2018/10/inside-britains-reaper-force-human-stories-and-ethical-dilemmas/

P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018). Along with August Cole, Peter Singer wrote one of the best books abo...

http://warontherocks.com/2018/09/social-media-as-war/

Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay, The Empty Throne: America’s Abdication of Global Leadership (Hachette, 2018) With no apparent sense of irony, Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay’s new book on Amer...

http://warontherocks.com/2018/09/you-cant-go-home-again-foreign-policy-edition/

Farhana Qazi, Invisible Martyrs: Inside the Secret World of Female Islamic Radicals (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2018) According to social media posts, 46-year-old Puji Kuswati, enjoyed cat...

http://warontherocks.com/2018/09/alter-egos-misconceptions-about-religiously-radicalized-women/

Jeffrey Lewis, The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States: A Speculative Novel (Mariner Books, 2018) Many of us believe that if nuclear missiles were...

http://warontherocks.com/2018/09/a-horrifying-and-believable-path-to-nuclear-war-with-north-korea/

Richard Aldous, Schlesinger: The Imperial Historian (W.W. Norton, 2017) Anyone who has ever been a geek at a frat party will shudder at a story involving Arthur Schlesinger, President John F. Ken...

http://warontherocks.com/2018/08/the-perils-of-the-court-historian/

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from “Book Review Roundtable: The Future of War” from our sister publication, the Texas National Security Review. Be sure to check out the full round...

http://warontherocks.com/2018/08/why-we-get-it-wrong-reflections-on-predicting-the-future-of-war/

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from “Book Review Roundtable: America’s Hot and Cold Relationship with Its Counterterrorism Partners” from our sister publication, the Texas National...

http://warontherocks.com/2018/08/the-trouble-with-counter-terrorism-partnerships-tackling-the-toughest-cases/

Michael McFaul, From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018)   May 9 is Victory Day in Russia, commemorating the Nazi surrender in the...

http://warontherocks.com/2018/06/who-lost-russia-again/

Steve Coll, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan (New York: Penguin Press, 2018) Advising a crusty Afghan general is a delicate endeavor. Like Ameri...

http://warontherocks.com/2018/06/three-tours-one-unsolvable-riddle-an-airmans-reflections-on-securing-the-peace-in-afghanistan/

Michael McFaul, From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018). “We pressed some of these ideas, albeit not as forcefully as I would ha...

http://warontherocks.com/2018/06/russian-elegies-candide-goes-to-moscow/

Max Brooks, John Amble, ML Cavanaugh, and Jaym Gates, eds. Strategy Strikes Back: How Star Wars Explains Modern Military Conflict (Potomac Books, 2018) In the years I taught War and Politics, we ...

http://warontherocks.com/2018/06/youre-imagining-things-pop-culture-warfare-and-the-real-life-lessons-of-star-wars/

Ed Burke, An Army of Tribes: British Army Cohesion, Deviancy and Murder in Northern Ireland (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018). On an autumn evening in late October 1972, Michael Naan ...

http://warontherocks.com/2018/05/why-did-this-band-of-brothers-turn-to-murder/

Paul Scharre, Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War (W. W. Norton, 2018). The field of artificial intelligence (AI) has known some historical ups and downs. Breakthroughs and f...

http://warontherocks.com/2018/05/winter-isnt-coming-but-hals-grandkids-are/

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from “Book Review Roundtable: Is the Pentagon at War Against America’s Presidents?” from our sister publication, the Texas National Security Review. ...

http://warontherocks.com/2018/05/17414/

Robert D. Kaplan, The Return of Marco Polo’s World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century (Random House, 2018) “Yet, given the political weakening and stagnation ...

http://warontherocks.com/2018/04/searching-for-scythians-on-the-new-silk-road-robert-kaplans-modern-day-realism/

John Lewis Gaddis, On Grand Strategy, New York: Penguin Press, 2018, 345 pgs. The formulation of sound strategy may often be a rational process, but it is complicated by several polar tensions or...

http://warontherocks.com/2018/04/vulpine-virtues-and-strategic-success/

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from “Book Review Roundtable: Lost Opportunities in Vietnam,” from our sister publication, the Texas National Security Review. Be sure to check out the...

http://warontherocks.com/2018/04/revisiting-revisionism-vietnam-counterinsurgency-and-the-lessons-of-edward-lansdale/

Richard Nephew, The Art of Sanctions: A View from the Field (Columbia University Press, 2017) “Not over our dead body,” the Russian official warned his Turkish counterpart. “No to gas pipel...

http://warontherocks.com/2018/04/questions-of-power-beyond-the-conventional-wisdom-on-sanctions-and-coercion/

David Patrikarakos, War in 140 Characters: How Social Media is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century (Basic Books, 2017). Violence, like Twitter, is a means of communication. If we do no...

http://warontherocks.com/2018/03/the-once-and-future-infowars/