It occurred to me that the characteristic phrase of our time may be "body parts." Journalists just love to use it, most often I think in reporting on car bomb explosions. That strikes me as lazy -- why not say "arms, legs, heads, jawbones, and so on"? (Unless, of course, you can't tell what they are.)

I was on riding the Washington, DC Metro finishing the May issue of the Marine Corps Gazette when I realized I had not read more than a paragraph or two into any of the articles. Part of the problem was that the topics of the issue were mainly aviation and cyberwar, which I know are important, but are not special interests of mine. But I also got the feeling that they simply took every boring article they had lying around and stuffed them all into one issue.

Even so, the Gazette is better off than the Army's Parameters, which doesn't seem to have put out an issue since "Autumn 2012." Maybe it's going to publish only on an annual basis. Nice work if you can get it. 

Here are the results of our survey of good books of military history that aren't about the U.S. military.

There were so many British books mentioned that I moved them into a second category. The first part here is genuinely foreign books -- not necessarily written by foreigners (though most are) but about wars in which the British and Americans were not major players, or at least not written from the Anglo-American perspective.

Most of these mentions were in the comments, but about 10 percent came in by e-mail.

I offer them in no particular order. Not even cleaned up -- just pasted in. For details on the books, go back to the comments section -- lots of explanations there about why a particularly book was nominated.

David Glantz, When Titans Clashed

Rommel's Infantry Attacks (2 nominations)

Counterinsurgency in Africa: The Portuguese Way of War 1961-74

Zhuang-zhi

Epictetus

Martin Van Creveld, everything but especially Command in War

Michael Oren, Six Days of War (2 votes)

Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff, 34 Days: Israel, Hezbollah, and the War in Lebanon

Alistair Horne's The Price of Glory

Noel Mostert's The Line Upon a Wind

Patrick Rambaud's The Battle

Roland Perry, Sir John Monash: The Outsider Who Won a War

Larteguy's The Centurions and The Praetorians (3 nominations)

Harold Parker's Three Napoleonic Battles (short treatments of Friedland, Aspern-Essling, and Waterloo, with observations uniting all three)

John Elting's Swords Around a Throne (the Billy Yank/Johnny Reb treatment of what it was like for soldiers, leaders, and specialists in Napoleon's Grande Armee)

David Galula's Pacification in Algeria

Legionnaire, by Simon Murray

B.H. Liddell Hart's Caesar: Man, Soldier, and Tyrant

Colonel Saburo Hayashi, Kogun: The Japanese Army in the Pacific War  

Hoito Edoin, The Night Tokyo Burned

No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War, by Hiroo Onoda

The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919, by Mark Thompson

The Franco Regime, by Stanley G. Payn

Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa, by Peter Godwin

Sean Maloney's three-volume history of the Canadian experience in Afghanistan (Enduring the Freedom, Confronting the Chaos, and Fighting for Afghanistan). He also did a narrative of the first eight or so years entitled War in Afghanistan: Eight Battles in the South.

Ivan's War, by Catherine Merridale (2 nominations)

The Reluctant Admiral, by Hiroyuki Agawa (Yamamto)

Vasily Grossman, A Writer at War

Bernard Fall: Memories of a Soldier-Scholar, by his wife Dorothy with an introduction by David Halberstam

Quotations of Chairman Mao Tse Tung

Either The Code of the Samurai or The Hagakure or The 47 Ronin

Heart of Darkness for anyone about to do an AFRICOM rotation. (And one de-nomination.)

Lester Grau, The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan

Alistair Horne's Savage War of Peace

Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom

Avigdor Kahalani, Heights of Courage

Rabinovich's Yom Kippur War

On the Banks of the Suez: An Israeli General's Personal Account of the Yom Kippur War, by Avraham Adan

Forgotten Soldier, by Guy Sajer (2 nominations)

All Quiet on the Western Front, and the lesser known but just as powerful sequel to the book, The Road Back, both by Erich Maria Remarque

Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel

Coalitions, Politicians and Generals -- Some Aspects of Command in Two World Wars, by Dominick Graham and Shelford Bidwell

Strange Victory, by Ernest May

Julian Jackson's The Fall of France

Witness to Surrender, by Brig. Siddiq Salik

The Way It Was, by Brig. Z.A. Khan

In the Line of Duty, by Lt. Gen. Harbaksh Singh

Guerrilla Warfare, by Ernesto "Che" Guevara

Afgantsy, by Rodric Braithwaite

The Jungle is Neutral, by F.Spencer Chapman

The War in Paraguay: With a Historical Sketch of the Country and Its People and Notes Upon the Military Engineering of the War, by George Thompson

On British military -- listed separately because more familiar

Keith Douglas, Alamein to Zem Zem

George MacDonald Fraser's Quartered Safe Out Here (3 nominations)

John Masters, first two volumes of his memoirs

Emile Simpson, War from the Ground Up

Keegan's Face of Battle

The Dambusters

William Slim, Defeat into Victory (4 nominations)

The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command, by Andrew Gordon (4 nominations)

Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of The Great War, by Robert K. Massie (4 nominations)

The Last European War: September 1939-December 1941, by John Lukacs

How the War Was Won: Factors that Led to Victory in World War One and The Killing Ground: The British Army, the Western Front & the Emergence of Modern War 1900-1918, two volumes by Tim Travers

Churchill's Generals

The Story of the Malakand Field Force, by Winston Churchill

Churchill and Seapower, by Christopher Bell 

J.F.C. Fuller's Strategy

Donald Morris, The Washing of the Spears (Zulu Wars)

Gordon Corrigan's Mud, Blood, and Poppycock (attempts to bust many of the popular myths about WWI on the Western Front)

Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War (doorstopper-sized analysis of WWI)

Andrew Roberts' Masters and Commanders

The Tizard Mission: The Top-Secret Operation That Changed the Course of WWII, by Stephen Phelps

Not Mentioned in Dispatches

18 Platoon, by Sidney Jary

The Defence of Duffer's Drift, by Maj. Gen. Ernest Dunlop Swinton.

Brazen Chariots, by Robert Crisp

My War Gone By, I Miss It So, Anthony Loyd, ex-British soldier in Bosnia.

The Swordbearers

Forgotten Armies: Britain's Asian Empire and the War with Japan, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper

The Great Crusade: A New Complete History of the Second World War, by H. P. Willmott

Battle for the Falklands, by Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins

Poetry

Sassoon's The War Poems

The Dark Hills, by Edwin Arlington Robinson

Bingen on the Rhine, by Caroline E. Norton

A major in the 101st Airborne suggests that we do a reading list of modern military books that are not about the American military experience (and not the usual classics). Three of his suggestions are The Dambusters, Defeat into Victory , and Churchill's Generals.

To that start, I'd add Keegan's Face of Battle and Alistair Horne's Savage War of Peace. What else? I'll allow histories, memoirs, novels, and poetry.

There. Got it off my chest. Just had to say it. Slow to load, balky to use.

And my blood pressure spikes every time I read that cheerful, dumb introduction, "Welcome to Foreign Policy's new commenting system! The good news is that it's now easier than ever to comment and share your insights with friends."

Like I say, the bad news is the new commenting sucks! That's the insight I wish to share.

As one reader commented recently, "the Battle of the Somme was a model of efficiency in comparison to 'Livefyre.'"

 By Jim Gourley

Best Defense commenter of the year

Last week Tom requested suggestions for new blogs to add to his daily reading list. I thought there were some interesting recommendations from readers, but after investigating each one I went back and clicked through the different windows in succession to gain a little more perspective.

Looking at them in aggregate provoked questions. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, so what world view would the range of sites produce? How does the news feed presented by these sites differ from what Tom is probably already reading? Grouping the sites by their emphasis implies that view would be primarily technology-based, lightly seasoned by some current events in specific regions with dubious commentary. There is very little context. By and large, it lacks breadth and depth. The spectrum of information is narrow and the range of subjects too one-dimensional to provide necessary background.

I read lots of blogs, none of them regularly and not all of them related to defense matters per se, but I tend to see value in unique cultural overlaps. I seek context, perspective, answers. Lately, I find the blogosphere giving me more questions than answers.

Spend enough time reading the tech blogs and you'll see that there are scores of unmanned weapons systems in development in the United States and throughout the world. Within fifteen years we may have a UAV that brings J.J. Abrams' new television series to life, warships with lasers, and bipedal battlefield terminators assistants. All of these blog posts follow the same thematic approach. They simply show us the technology. That's valuable information, but I only need to see it once.

Nowhere can I find answers to the immediate questions I ask upon reading these blogs. Why are we developing these technologies? What existing weapons programs that we're currently shoveling money into will be rendered obsolete by these new weapons? Where does the care and equipping of human service members fit into this? Exactly what threats and enemies are such weapons meant to counter, and what retaliatory developments do we anticipate said enemies to attempt? Do we have a plan or are we just building stuff?

Intelligence and strategy blogs have made the pivot to China well in advance of the defense department, it seems. The American political discourse about the Chinese threat was electrified during the presidential campaign and think tanks are moving apace with speculations of what a conflict with China would look like. But in all the debate over who would do best at "getting tough with China," I didn't hear a compelling argument for getting tough in the first place. Is China really our enemy? Do they have to be our enemy? Is the conventional wisdom more conventional (or perhaps convenient) than it is wise? I have no end of questions about what the American security establishment thinks of China because there is no clear explanation of how it thinks about China. Is there a blog for that?

The defense, intelligence and national law enforcement architectures continue to meld in ways both mysterious and disturbing. The DEA has operated in Afghanistan for a number of years. Predator drones have been used to track cattle rustlers in North Dakota. Part of President Obama's legacy will be a government that can wire-tap my phone without a warrant and assassinate me without due process. I see these developments and I have more questions. Are there still such things as American defense, intelligence and law enforcement establishments, or is it gelling into a monolithic "security establishment?" How long a shadow does it cast and do civil liberties and posse comitatus fall underneath it? Is everyone contributing to this emergent construct actually okay with the potential consequences, or are we just following orders?

Blogs are a relatively new species in the journalism environment, but already the conceptualization of them has become traditional. They were conceived as web-based forums for microbursts of data to help news organizations keep up with the increasing pace of information flow. It was believed that the in-depth analysis would be left to the more substantive print media side of the house. The value of print has already been challenged and found lacking, but so too should the idea that synthesis and analysis can maintain the old pace as developments continue to accelerate. Blogs can't just be places to collate data points any longer. They need to start connecting the dots that are rapidly accumulating. I think 'Best Defense' has succeeded in that endeavor, but Tom depends on good sources of information like any human being. There are more questions than ever. More blogs ought to attempt answering them. Those answers matter now more than ever, because the new pace to which blogs have contributed is not going to wait.  

Jim Gourley has been elected to the Best Defense all-star commenter team three years running. 

While Tom Ricks is away from his blog, he has selected a few of his favorite posts to re-run. We will be posting a few every day until he returns. This originally ran on September 15, 2010.

I am finding Army magazine over the last couple of years much better than in the past, consistently running relevant, thoughtful articles like the two I have highlighted in the last couple of days. I think Army has surpassed the Marine Corps Gazette and is giving Proceedings a run for the money as the most interesting and relevant of the services' glossy professional magazines.

Meanwhile, speaking of the U.S. Army and publications, whatever happened to Parameters? And has Military Review just gone stupid? It apparently is being edited by people who haven't read the last several years of its own articles -- witness this straw man article written by someone who seems to think that the COIN campaign in Iraq in 2007-08 didn't have an extremely lethal element.

I frequently am interested by stuff in Joint Force Quarterly and Prism, but they are too new to have established records, and JFQ especially seems to have its ups and downs -- witness a goofy, uninformed article on military dissent in the new issue. (And a misspelled name, too.) And it has been years since I've read anything really new in the Naval War College Review or in anything published by the Air Force, with the exception of a volume of war poems and stories collected by some faculty members at the Air Force Academy. 

The great photo above came from Army magazine, taken by the hard-working Dennis Steele. I used to run into him at United Air's international departure gates at Dulles Airport.

"Hey, Dennis, coming or going?"

"Going."

"Iraq or Afghanistan?"

"Both."

And off he would trudge under his bags of cameras.

Dennis Steele, ARMY magazine

Now the new CNO has one. "Whoa, homeys, some mad crazy budget bullshit going on in the Tank with the Chiefs today." I wish!

Dexter Filkins has a terrific piece in the new, Sept. 19 issue of the New Yorker that at first glance is just about the recent killing of a Pakistani journalist, but actually is kind of an overview of the state of play with the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency.

I am glad that he did it, but also awed that he did it. It takes real nerve to go around Pakistan these days prying into the ISI's relationship to the Taliban and al Qaeda, and about whether it is killing journalists -- especially in the country where Danny Pearl was kidnapped and decapitated for doing something similar.

One item in the article particularly struck me: A March 17 airstrike by U.S. drones not only killed some insurgent leaders, but also the ISI officials with whom they were meeting.

Anyone interested in Pakistan should run out and buy a copy of this article.

I was struck by this observation by "JESTEPHENS" about the BD character in Doonesbury: "If only we all were as reflective as BD has become. Remember in the early days of the strip how emptyheaded and reactionary he was. Trudeau has taken BD from that shallowness to a character who has become something of a cultural barometer."

This is one of those things that seems obvious when you read it -- but it had never occurred to me. BD is now one of the major heroes of the strip.

Despite my intentions, I wound up reading a smattering of the 9/11 coverage. Lots of energy expended by the writers, I am not sure to what end. I think yesterday's Doonesbury strip captured my feelings best.

And my second favorite comment is from old Francis Fukuyama: "Since 2001 the most important world-historical story has been the rise of China. This is a development whose impact will almost certainly be felt in 50 years' time. Whether anyone will remember Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida at that remove is a different matter."

That's the article I'd like to read by everyone who predicted a stalemate or quagmire in which the United States eventually would have to insert ground troops. (For those of you too hurried to click through to all them links, I am calling out the following members of the diverse quagmire/stalemate coalition: Dov Zakheim, Andrew Sullivan, Alexander Cockburn, Anne Applebaum, Richard Norton-Taylor, Melanie Clarke, the German government, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, the Xinhua news service, and the Beirut Daily Star.)

Who wants to go first?

Meanwhile, from Fareed Zakaria, here is one of the best summaries I have seen of the meaning of the Libyan war:

The Libyan intervention offers a new model for the West. It was a humanitarian mission with strategic interests as well -- support for the Arab Spring and the new aspirations of the people of the Middle East. It was also a new model in that it involved an America that insisted on legitimacy and burden sharing, that allowed the locals to own their revolution. That means, however, that it is in the hands of the Libyans. They can avoid the mistakes of Iraq, which makes the challenge before them even more daunting. But it is a challenge they have eagerly sought and one for which they will find help from friends around the world.

The little think tank that could is launching a new TV series, titled "Command Post," with the Lucian empire. You can see the first episodes, about the future direction of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, here.

Next, "CNAS: The Movie"? If so, I wanna be played by Homer Simpson, the TV character with whom I most closely identify.

It looks like I got taken in here. If she is a phony, I apologize for highlighting passages in this blog. HT to salty Littlemantate for good antenna on this.

But there may be even more to this story. "I wouldn't give up on her yet," cautions Jim Gourley, our chief correspondent for physical and mental fitness. "I've dealt with people like this before. She's obviously in Damascus, and pretty apparently homosexual. Given that, I'd say the real story may still be a sympathetic one. What I've found in my experience is that people like this craft these kinds of elaborate personalities for themselves as an escape. I would hypothesize that the incident with her father facing down the security goons is half-true, with the heroic father being the creation of an imagination that wishes her real father was like that. Probably more likely is that she was rejected by her family in the beginning and feels horrible about it."