Well, Gen. Odierno did crowdsource suggestions for his reading list.

(Though I will agree, it is a good one)

This list contains some I've read and learned from and more I have yet to read. It reminds me of how I keep learning what I don't know as I get older.

I am finally reading Black Hearts. This book is one that has cost me sleep the last couple of nights because I can't put it down. I am just stunned at how this platoon disintegrated while allegedly under adult supervision. It has caused me to reconsider Mr. Ricks' various comments about the way that senior enlisted personnel fit into the Army leadership model.

There is certainly no more despicable crime than what these guys did but I was also blown away on another level by the young enlisted guy telling his battalion commander, "f--- you, sir" and not being disciplined. What a disaster in so many ways.

All levels of military and civilians should be required to read this book. The fact it is not on the subject list is causing me to wonder about the role of the Army as the US transitions to the next strategic sphere. A place where SECDEF is asking the Navy and Air Force to think about Air Land battles. Hmmm.....

I haven't seen the Army's past reading lists, so I don't know if this is a new addition, but I'm extremely pleased to see it includes "Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War" by Robert Coram. The book builds off the earlier "Pentagon Wars" about the challenges of dealing with DOD bureaucracy, plus I believe Boyd is one of the most underappreciated US military strategists of the last few decades. I actually try to use his "To Be or To Do" ethos in my military career and think it's a good way to avoid being captured by the system.

For Iraq books, you can't go wrong with "Generation Kill": on a personal level, I can say that the book played a major factor in me enlisting in the Marine Corps, plus it comes with a highly-watchable miniseries. "Baghdad at Sunrise" by Col. Peter Mansoor, which examines the initial occupation from a Brigade Commander's perspective, is suprisingly readable and is already on the Marine Corps' reading list. I don't know if "No True Glory" by Bing West is still the definitive book on the battles for Fallujah, but it's still extremely popular in the Marine Corps and is another personal favorite. Finally, there's "Defense of Jisr Al Doreaa" which has already been discussed in detail on this blog.

Mr. R.- "Odysseus in America" is pretty good, but not nearly as good as the first installment, "Achilles in Vietnam." As one of the few Army guys who can also say that he has a degree in Classics, I found the discussion of the Iliad in the latter to be more solidly rooted in the ancient text than "Odysseus in America" was in the Odyssey. What I thought remarkable about both was that not only did Shay make an original contribution to psychiatry by using the Iliad and Odyssey as an inspiration to describe some of the elements of PTSD, which is notable in itself, but he also made a very original contribution to classical studies by placing Achilles, Odysseus, the Iliad, and the Odyssey in the context of PTSD. I was particularly struck by his comparison of Achilles dragging Hector's body around the walls of Troy with Audie Murphy's behavior after his best friend was killed in France in 1944, an episode that classicists usually put down to "rage" but that Shays explains with far more subtlety by linking it to the effects of extended exposure to combat. Given that the field of classical studies is 2000+ years old and has attracted a whole bunch of brains over the centuries, that's pretty impressive.

Mr. Ricks,
I wrote about the Starfish book this past July when I saw that General Dempsey mentioned he had read it. Below is my quick (and very rough - in fact, I feel like maybe I should clean this up before passing it along...oh well) review of the book with an eye towards its applicability to a military audience. For those interested in reading with links, the connection to my blog is below...hope this adds to the discussion.

All best, MAJ Matt Cavanaugh

http://apacstrat.blogspot.co.nz/2011/07/centralized-or-decentralized.html

"Centralized or Decentralized"

The incoming Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, GEN Martin Dempsey, recently did an interview with the NY Times in which he revealed that he was currently reading The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations.

Upon learning that, I picked it up from the library and read its 208 pages fairly quickly. The book jacket describes:
"If you cut off a spider's head, it dies; but if you cut off a starfish's leg, it grows a new one, and that leg can grow into an entirely new starfish. Traditional top-down organizations are like spiders, but now starfish organizations are changing the face of business and the world."
This is light, summer or bathroom reading, not disturbed with thick references to detailed study. Each written page goes by quickly and casual readers should not be deterred out of fear of technical language. If I had to use one word to describe the book, it would either be "clear" or "simple."

Which is principally why the book fails for a military audience, aptly described by HL Mencken, as "for every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." Although I can't recall a point at which the authors specifically mention applicability to a military audience, they do use several military examples (Apaches, Cortes, al Qaeda) which indicate at least a tacit connection. Essentially, I think The Starfish and the Spider is an over-broad application of trends related to business/economic models that have adapted to the rise of the internet ~ which has limited utility to a military audience. I also think that the book sets up a false dichotomy between centralized and decentralized features of organizations. Here are my reasons for believing so:

1. The digital world does not have much applicability to the military sphere.

The book spends the vast majority of its full length examples on "music swappers, the Skype callers, the eBay merchants, the Wikipedia contributors, the craigslist community members, the recovering addicts, or anyone who's ever used the internet." Outside of some computer-based information and intelligence sharing (a notable trend towards Wiki structures that break stove-piping), these examples are generally inapplicable to a contemporary military audience interested in the threat or use of force for the ends of policy.

An example of this comes from the "rules" developed at the end of the book, specifically, "Rule 5: Everyone Wants to Contribute." The rule states that "not only do people throughout a starfish have knowledge, but they also have a fundamental desire to share and to contribute." The problem with this rule as applied to a military environment is that in a military context not everyone has "knowledge," and, enabling mass-participation in leadership decisions would more likely disable a military organization than make it "unstoppable."

2. The military examples used are largely irrelevant to an American military audience.

The book's first military example is of Cortes taking Tenochtitlan, which is provided as a straw man for later examination of Aztecs decentralization. This description of Cortes is meant to portray a good old-fashioned, centralized military tactic: "coercive" force. The Spanish are described as "a centralized body" that "had been used to seeing everything through the lens of a centralized, or coercive, system."

The problem with this concept is that it fundamentally misreads history. Cortes took Tenochtitlan with 600 Spaniards and another couple thousand locals. Although they did use a "centralized" and "coercive" strategy, one can hardly consider that the most important factor in Spanish victory. The Spanish more likely sailed home thanking their lucky stars for guns, germs, and steel.

The Cortes case sets up the Aztec example:
"When [the Spanish] encountered the Apaches, they went with the tactics that had worked in the past (the take-the-gold-and-kill-the-leader-strategy) and started eliminating [local Aztec leaders]. But as soon as they killed one off, a new [local Aztec leader] would emerge. The strategy failed because no one person was essential to the overall well-being of Apache society.

Not only did the Apaches survive the Spanish attacks, but, amazingly, the attacks served to make them even stronger...This is the first major principle of decentralization: when attacked, a decentralized organization tends to become even more open and decentralized."
Put bluntly: how did the Apaches fare after the Spanish? If one types in a search for "Apache" today, they find a software, not a group of people. It is clear that decentralization worked to some degree against the Spanish, but did not suffice against the American westward expansion. So was that a "loss" for decentralization that the authors selectively chose to edit? Moreover, militarily-speaking, has there ever been a fully decentralized organization that has fully (or mostly) met its political objectives without centralizing, politically and militarily? [Apaches - no. Basques - no. Palestinians - no. IRA, Israel and Mao - all examples of achievement of political objectives through path from decentralization to centralization].

Overall, the Apache example does not provide much meaningful insight for the military student in the context provided.

3. Some of the book's principal content is repackaged, without credit, in a less interesting way, from The Tipping Point (by Malcolm Gladwell).

Although a huge fan of the "Everything is a Remix" series, and believe that creativity generally involves a process that includes heavy copying and imitation, it is hard to watch a later idea so similar go without credit.

Starfish was written in 2006, six years after Tipping Point (2000). Read Starfish's "catalyst" and then look up Tipping Point's "connector." Starfish's "desire to help" comes from Tipping Point's "maven" (who is described as "almost pathologically helpful"). And Starfish's "emotional intelligence" is derived from Tipping Point's "salesmen/persuaders." The similarities are striking and highlight the reason why one would better spend their time reading the original form of the concept (in Tipping Point) rather than it's derivative in Starfish.

Take-away: Decentralized Sweet Spot

As stated above, I think the book creates a false dichotomy between an organization's centralized and decentralized characteristics. However, on page 189, the authors hit the nail on the head when they wrote that "The decentralized sweet spot is the point along the centralized-decentralized continuum that yields the best competitive position." This is the book's take-away, and should have been its comprehensive thesis all along, as opposed to just one chapter.

Hybrid organizations that are nimble and adaptive enough to employ both decentralized and centralized features/systems will achieve "success" (defined as both achievement of goals and resilience against the shocks of an unforeseen future). "Centralized" and "decentralized" methods are just methods of attacking problems. Like the foreign policy choice between "unilateral" and "bilateral," one is not "wrong" or "bad" while the other is "correct" or "good" ~ they're just characteristics like "black" or "white." And as in the real world, often the most accurate description is a mix of the two (gray).

....seriously, what is it going to tell you other than the toilet habits of the last infestation in a hostile environment? And of course, it will praise the sophisticated supply chain and the risk management processes that went into sustaining the paper roll reasonably reliably. Next will be a lean six sigma study to reduce the ply of the paper while still removing soil and preserving the sterility of the applying fingertips.

Better that we should grow strategy in the Center for Disease control, at waste treatment plants and among international transients, financiers, rent-takers and assorted prophets, sideshow barkers, drug, arms, money and human capital traders.

It's an interesting concept but argued at a really simplistic, sub-bestseller level. In its place I recommend my former professor David Stark's The Sense of Dissonance on how flat organizations innovate and adapt.

Enough homilies to our illustrious American fighting ancestors and glib Gladwellian smoke generation. Enough corporate self-help books (nobody cares who moved your cheese.) Enough of the din of credentialled sterile parrots locked in a positive feedback loop. History did not start in 1776, nor is Washington the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Have we mastered the writings of the past well enough that we need a new crop of literary pop stars every year? I think not.

Where are the books by those dead old men who actually conquered and kept foreign lands? A lot of them wrote candid how-to's about their adventures. They don't even have to be white-the Baburname works just fine if you want to know how to occupy and administer Afghanistan. Or if direct occupation isn't your bag and you want "by, with and through"-R.E. Dyer's Raiders of the Sarhad is just the right speed for you.

For a general overview on successful high-level occupational administration within the constraints of a democratic facade, try Cromer's Modern Egypt. If you want the same process described from the pointy end of the stick, try Aussaresses' Battle For Algiers. And if you want some impartial descriptions of the failure of this process and its effects, try Elie Kedourie's Chatham House Version.

All this stuff is not that much harder to get through than Ambrose, but much more informative. If you spent your deployments awake, you'll be amazed at the analogies that jump off the page at you.

I agree with you it is a good reading list, however it is a bit long, if I was the benevolent dictator of the Western World I would shorten the list.

I would also add three books to the reading list:

a. Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August which I content is the best book on the effects of "Strategic Miscalculation."
b. Strunk and White, The Elements of Style. I will admit I am not the world's best writer; but compared to the vast majority of Army Officers I am William Faulkner!
c. I would add any one of the books by Lyn MacDonald; http://www.bookfinder.com/author/lyn-macdonald/ which bring to life the voices of the British soldiers who fought World War I.

I hereby nominate "B" as Chancelor of American Sanity- I have'nt laughted this hard in years " nobody cares who moved your cheese". I thought that was crap when I forced to sit through a department training on adapting to change.

Is it worth reading? I never have. What are you learning from it?
Thanks,
Tom

Given the military focus on the ME, I've always wondered why the Army was never and continues to not be interested in a serious study of Judaism and its history. Especially, to my mind, in understanding Islam and its connections to Ebionite/Nazarite Christianity for instilling some American humility into the discourse . . . Maybe it would not matter, but akin to Hunter's point about reading Night Draws Near, I think it would help a lot with tempering, such as with the OCF crew out there.

I saw earlier that Tom was reading Paul Johnson's History of the Jews--maybe a book like that would be useful. PJ is pretty pious though, so it may do more harm than good. Anyway, many of the books on this new CSA list strike me as more of the same old mental masturbation. _B_ is right.... enough.

Leibniz has been, and probably still is, way under appreciated. So I actually think it's a great point, but one you don't ever see made. He anticipated things in science and politics that have gone unrecognized until now, so, again, it makes me wonder. His philosophy too is prescient, but it refers back to that Platonic metaphysic driving most of the nonsense I see in the world.

>We have a way of thinking about man's nature, the world and man's place in it which is the logical culmination of several centuries of Protestant and post-Protestant thought. It rules our lives, our country, and through these, the globe. We are reduced to small insectile specialists,.

I could not agree more.

Thanks for responding.

I am uncertain of your question about powers but I am sure the president will have the final say. He also has the benefit of many of his officers who can give their opinion. I have put a message about foreign policy aimed at Obama haters in sources..

"Is rio orange war always forfait sosh inevitable ?"
MaximB