I love books

During my third tour in Iraq, as a staff officer, I spent the preponderance of my non-working time reading. It was an ideal situation to read if only because there was not much else to do. In my first tour, where we invaded Iraq and moved around quite a bit, with a deplorable mail delivery system, I read whatever I could get my hands on. My second tour in 2005 was more stable, with regard to location stability, and I read quite a bit. But it was really in this last tour that spanned from early 2007 until mid-2008 that I really became a voracious reader based on opportunity and intellectual growth that yearned for more.

I had been a reader from my earliest days, but school seemed to take up much of my reading time until adulthood. My mother works for the public library in my hometown in eastern Pennsylvania, forcing me to spend much of my time among many and varied volumes. In this last tour of note, she was assigned the task of ensuring I had plenty to read (my father, bless him, was tasked with keeping my humidor stocked). I sent my mother lists before and during deployment and received in return large boxes of books, through our markedly improved post. Initially, my reading interests were varied. Already well steeped in the books of my profession - Clausewitz's On War, Jomini's The Art of War, works by Galula and Tranquier, and a seemingly infinite suite of Army doctrine - I took interest in the books of the war of which I was a participant. Michael Gordon's Cobra II and particularly Tom Ricks' Fiasco became influential in my thinking of the war and how I addressed my small part of it. Possibly because of this mono-topical study or possibly in spite of it, I felt I needed to widen my reading (and beyond my exhaustive collection of Hemingway that dominated my fiction shelves).

In my first major package of books of that deployment (thanks, Mum!), I received the last Harry Potter, Nietzsche, Plato, Aristotle, Mill, Kateb, Dickens, Hobbes, Thucydides, Dante, de Tocqueville, Hiaasen, Adam Smith, Arendt, Huxley, Bryson, Isaacson's biography of Einstein, a few non-fiction adventure books (I recommend from these Rounding the Horn by Dallas Murphy and The Last Expedition by Daniel Liebowitz and Charles Pearson), and most prominently Joyce's Ulysses.  These were the books I felt necessary to begin a study of the human condition beyond war (except the adventure books, which were wisely the purview of my mother, and the Harry Potter, which I merely enjoyed). Except for the Joyce, which I read every day and still took the entire deployment to finish, this was 6 months of reading material.  When this package of knowledge was delivered to me during duty in my brigade's operations center south of Baghdad, another captain on the staff expressed to me, "I love books!" Meanly, I thought, "Of course you do; who doesn't?"  At the time, I thought it a stupid thing to say.

In retrospect, I disagree with my moderately younger self and declare that I, too, love books. It is not obvious. Not everyone does. And while I may love books in a different way than our maligned captain (my agape vice her philia, if you will excuse both the probably unnecessary distinction and probable blasphemy), her sentiment is one which I have come to embrace entirely and tirelessly. I do not just love reading, I love books. I love to hold a book in my hands, to feel the binding and the paper, to smell the ink. I love the plates and pictures. I love the font and the layout of the pages, even if they include irregularities (such as my nth-hand copy of Joyce's Dubliners, where the printing is partially smudged throughout the middle third). I suspect that many of you do as well, the military scholar being a peculiar subset of the bibliophile that tends towards bookishness and book collecting, even if said collecting extends beyond the typical cast of characters that have contributed to the art of war and warfare. My personal interactions indicate that you are a well-read and erudite community that reads compulsively on topics for which we are paid to read and topics for which we enjoy and topics we read because we believe that it makes us a better person.

Which is why I am writing this non-security specific post on books to recommend to you two book I have read this year on the topic of book collecting: Jacques Bonnet's Phantoms on the Bookshelves and Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night. What I love about these books and what I predict you will as well, is that Bonnet and Manguel provide a quasi-philosophy to the condition present in so many of our community that requires us to not just read, but to amass those books we read. To have them on hand. To organize them according to our whims. To thumb through them and scribble in their margins. To place markers in them for quick reference in the future. To display them proudly in the most intimate corners of our homes and offices like the trophies of big game hunters.

Phantoms and The Library provide intellectual rigor to these habits, nay, necessities. Bonnet and Manguel elegantly provide reason to our need to have books and have them just so. Both men are men of letters and consumers of primarily fiction books, but they both show their desire for philosophy and sciences to help them contemplate and understand the world that underpins their fiction. They explore why we collect books, why read: mainly to understand our world. A world in which our existence is so limited and so short that we cannot possibly experience it all. We therefore attempt to experience it through the experiences of others. Books provide this surrogate experience in a very personal and intimate way. Both books explore how our intimate curiosities drive the nature of our own libraries and how the books we collect in our libraries drive the nature of our curiosities. That our libraries are ourselves by other means.

We have written a number of times on these pages on the topic of books, mainly in the vein of reading lists and reviews. Some of these posts have been our most popular posts, indicative of your interest in reading.  Even for a profession that values reading (of course, by Huntington's constructs all professions inherently value reading), this post is a bit off the beaten path. But I suspect that many of you who do read these books, or have, will be as touched by them as I was. If only to help you grasp how and why you habitually buy and love these rectangular cuboids of pulped wood waste upon which the human condition itself is imprinted.

As we move into a new year, Ink Spots may move in a more focused direction. I believe that my interactions here will be dominated by book reviews more so than discussions of the day. This is partially due to time available (these books aren't going to read themselves) and partially to what it is that I wish to gain out of this experience. My next post, in 2013, will most likely be a review of Neville Bolt's The Violent Image, a book that is so far excellent, topical for this audience, and timely. Until and beyond then, I hope that you have wonderful things to read.  I also hope that you have a very Merry Christmas (if that's your thing) and a very Happy New Year. We here at Ink Spots look forward to talking with you in 2013.

What we're reading #6

In "What we're reading #5," I lamented the fact that we hadn't done one of these in two months. That was three months ago. We're getting worse. Here's what we're looking at these days.

Gulliver:

That bit of reading material pretty much has me occupied for the next 96 hours or so. (Yes, SNLII, believe it or not -- I do work sometimes.) But as I board my flight in a few hours, I'll be carrying a few things with me:

• John Mackinlay's The Insurgent Archipelago just arrived in my mailbox yesterday at long last (because I'm apparently too stupid to order it from the U.S. version of Amazon. Oh well, at least I got the paperback!). Mackinlay's gotten good reviews from his colleague David Betz at KoW, and props from Carl Prine, Gian Gentile, Ken White, Niel Smith (quite the impressive cast of characters!) and others at SWJ. I'm looking forward to this one.

• Just this morning I was sent Jason Lyall's article from the Winter 2010 International Organization, entitled "Do democracies make inferior counterinsurgents? Reassessing democracy's impact on war outcomes and duration." I've just skimmed through it and feel reasonably unconvinced of Lyall's thesis, which is that once you've corrected for various selection biases, democracies and autocracies have similar levels of tolerance for extended counterinsurgency campaigns.

• I still haven't finished the March/April 2010 Foreign Affairs, which contains a cute little article by Sheri Berman comparing state-building in Afghanistan to Louis XIV's consolidation of France.

• That piece neatly dovetails with another book I'm about halfway through, which also focuses on state consolidation and counterinsurgency in medieval Europe: The Revolt of Owain Glyn Dwr, by R.R. Davies. (Somehow I scored the last reasonably-priced copy on the interwebs, I guess -- I think I paid $4 including shipping, and now all I see is $115 and up!) I'm just now getting to the good bits, which is to say the actual burning and looting and whatnot. (Joke, people.)

Co-bloggers, let us know what you're working on!

Gunslinger:

I'm focusing on some of the "classic" books on COIN and small wars these days - mainly due to a couple of nice Christmas gifts that I'm still working through. Since I spent a bit of time doing COIN, I didn't get a whole lot of reading done on the subject and I'm making up for that now. After finishing "The Sling and the Stone" earlier this week (which I did not particularly enjoy), I'm paging through the following:

Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency by Roger Trinquier. It's only 90 pages so it's the low-hanging fruit of the group. It seems to apply mainly to colonial wars, but interesting non-the-less.

The Logic of Violence in Civil Wars by Stathis Kalyvas. It's awfully dense so this is taking some time. So far so good (I'm about a third of the way through), but so far I'm skeptical about it's applicability to U.S. operations because he narrowly defines the conflicts that he analyzes. Time and pages will tell though.

Small Wars Their Principles and Practice by C.E. Calwell. This book gets a bad rap among a lot of COINdinistas. Other than some extremely racist language and dated ideas of norms in war, there are some real nuggets in this tome.

After these I still have a whole pile more to go through along the same vein, but it's been slow-going because of my schedule of late.

Alma:

I am looking forward to finishing Eliot Cohen's Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime, which I abandoned in mid-course... last Summer. This does not speak to the quality of the book, which is excellent, but rather to my being caught in other things and trying now to clear the backlog of books started in a distant past and not finished yet.

When I am done, I will get started on H.R. McMaster's Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam, which I should have read a long time ago but, well, it is never too late...

On that same topic, I will also have a look at Jonathan Caverley's piece on Vietnam and COIN in International Security, which was flagged on Kings of War earlier this week not once but twice.

And because my weekend can not be spent on war narratives only, I am going to continue Column McCann's Let the Great World Spin. It starts on a beautiful scene describing Philippe Petit walking on a wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. If you have not yet seen the documentary on this fascinating (and hair-rising) feat, it is here and worth 94 minutes of your weekend time.

Lil:
I'm a bit behind on this one but here goes. I'm still working on Kalyvas' The Logic of Violence in Civil War. Like Alma, it's not that I've found it boring or anything, I've just been busy with other things (though I did turn the main one in last night!). Sometimes I think we all run a book club because I also have McMaster's book sitting on my shelf.

Today, I picked up the latest copy of Prism, the journal of the new Center for Complex Operations at the National Defense University. It has some articles about state fragility.

Finally, I grabbed Building Peace after War by Mats Berdal from my boss' shelf.

What we're reading #5

Almost two months since we've done one of these! So here's a rundown on a few things we've read recently, are currently reading, or that are in the stack for the weekend.

Gulliver:

I'm in the middle of a very dry, very academic paper in the journal Iranian Studies called "Informal (In)security in Urban Afghanistan", by Stefan Schutte, but I'm really giving serious thought to quitting halfway. I never quit reading things in the middle. Draw your own conclusions.

I've also just begun David Ucko's The New Counterinsurgency Era: Transforming the U.S. Military for Modern Wars, which was a birthday gift from my very gracious co-bloggers. I know books like this make SNLII and Gentile crazy; more of The Dominant Narrative!

The most recent issue of Parameters has been going back and forth to work with me for the last two weeks; I'm about to start on "Insurgent Mistakes: Playing for the breaks," by Lincoln B. Krause. Also see that issue for the 50th recitation of Gian Gentile's ideas about the pernicious influence of the COINdinistas. (Or don't. I promise you've already read that article.)

Something I recently read that's getting a lot of play among people who are interested in the training/advising/mentoring angle in Afghanistan: "Getting the most out of the ANA, so we can do less." It was written by Jeff Haynes, a retired Marine colonel and former commander of Regional Corps Advisory Command-Central, and has some interesting and controversial ideas about how to improve training for the ANSF.

And one more from the FPRI crowd: "What Afghans Want," by Andrew Garfield. I recently read an op-ed that was based on this longer piece, so I'm looking forward to it.

Finally, just so you guys know I read about other stuff, too (a good friend of mine recently chuckled that he thought his interests "are a little broader than [mine]" when defending his interest in Harry Potter and Twilight; while I disagree with his specific choices, I winced at the underlying suggestion that I'm not interested in anything but war!): last week I finished Malcolm Gladwell's newest, What the Dog Saw. If you think the book sucks, or if you think Gladwell sucks, or if you think pop science/economics/behavioral psychology sucks, that's fine -- just don't quote bleedin' Steven Pinker at me.

Ok, that's enough for now. Compadres?

MK

I'm working on a few papers right now, so re-reading Paul Brass's Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in the Representation of Collective Violence - one of the touchstones of the study of social violence and political identity.

Likewise, going back over Kalyvas' The Logic of Violence in Civil War with a fine-toothed comb, picking out where I think more work needs to be done.

Aside from a slew of Kalyvas' papers ( 'Ethnic Defection in Civil War,' 'Bosnia's Civil War: Origins and Violence Dynamics,' 'How "Free" is Free Riding in Civil Wars?', 'Ethnic Cleavages and Irregular War: Iraq and Vietnam'), I'm looking forward to tackling Alex Alderson's 'Comprehensive Approach: Theories, strategies, plans and practice' in NDC Forum Paper #9.

At the top of my pile after all that are Decoding the New Taliban edited by Giustozzi (who, by the way, has yet another new book out - could someone tell the man to stop writing so the rest of us can catch up!?), Ahmed Hashim's Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq, and Kimberly Kagan's The Surge: A Military History.

But no 'The Real Housewives of Orange County' for me - clearly that's Gulliver's niche.

Background for me lately has been a lot of Mingus, and a great Congolese rock/soul artist named So Kalmery.

Lil:

Well, I raided the library at Gulliver's when we were there for dinner so here's what I'll be reading:

La Guerre Probable, by Vincent Desportes and

Writing to Change the World, by Mary Pipher (because Reviving Ophelia was so amazing, if you're still wondering what those teenage years were all about, it really does help).

If the Kalyvas actually came in the mail today then I'll be reading that too.

Plus, I need to read all sorts of boring documents but I won't bore you with the details.

What we're reading #4

Not sure that the others will have the opportunity to chime in on this one, so it may just be "what I'm reading"!

Gulliver:

I'm going out of the country for the weekend (again) starting tomorrow -- about six hours of flying and lots of time on the beach -- so hopefully I'll get a couple of these books done. First is Galula's Pacification in Algeria, 1956-1958, a monograph that he wrote for RAND in 1963. It's a tactically-oriented catalogue of what Galula did as a company commander during the pacification of Algeria.

Criticisms of Galula's more famous Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice seem to center around the allegation that it abstracts company-level lessons from one specific geographic sector (and one that happened to be reasonably calm, at that) into broad maxims intended for application in all counterinsurgencies in all places. Some of the people who level this criticism are a lot smarter and more well-read than me, so I'm not going to try to debate that here. But it seems like Pacification in Algeria is more narrow in its aims and application -- there's even a sort of disclaimer in the introduction, in which RAND's editorial staff explains the reasons that they've chosen to present the book in the form it is written, with its admittedly limited perspective -- and probably less susceptible to that sort of criticism. Good so far, if not particularly earth-shattering.

I'm also hoping to finally crack open Rufus Phillip's Why Vietnam Matters: An Eyewitness Account of Lessons Not Learned. Amazon usefully informs me that I purchased this book on November 4, 2008, so unless I selected 11-month shipping, this should be taken as evidence that I'm a lazy bugger.

That's pretty much it for this weekend, I think. I've also recently taken in Andrew Exum's Afghanistan 2011: Three Scenarios; Steven Biddle's "Is There a Middle Way?" (Biddle's answer, unsurprisingly: no!) in The New Republic, which Ex calls "important and timely" and I think is neither; LTC Daniel Davis' "Go Big or Go Deep: An Analysis of Strategy Options on Afghanistan," which is really excellent (and which answers Biddle's question in a very different way); and am a couple of pages into Tony Cordesman's "The Levin 'Plan:' A Wrong Approach in Afghanistan," which has a hilariously patronizing title if nothing else.

Have a good weekend, everybody. Hasta next week.

What we're reading #3

We haven't done one of these in a while, so I figure an update is in order.

Gulliver:

This should be a big reading weekend for me: the gf leaves for an overseas trip at 0500 tomorrow, so I have the run of the house (and the most unfortunate distraction: my new-ish flat screen) for a week. When I'm not reading (which is to say, tomorrow), I'll be watching Premiership soccer and the Springboks-Wallabies Tri-Nations tilt (ugh, 5pm on tape delay) at Fado.

When I am reading, this is what it's gonna be...

Finishing up Stathis Kalyvas' The Logic of Violence in Civil War. Here's what I wrote about this book on Bernard Finel's blog, to give you some idea of how it's going:

This is going to sound a little over-the-top, and I know I’m probably parroting the “dominant narrative of the COIN crowd” (to paraphrase COL Gentile), but I think it’s the most important book I’ve read on the subject of what animates insurgencies. (In light of our recent exchange about conceptual grouping and abstraction, I’ll caveat that with ‘…to the degree that we can generalize about “insurgency”‘).

I've got a little bit of that left, and then it's on to Brooks and Wohlforth's World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy (about which I know next to nothing) or Avoiding Trivia: The Role of Strategic Planning in American Foreign Policy, edited by Daniel Drezner. Lemme know what you think if you've read either of these -- they're sitting at the top of the "to read" pile.

I'd be remiss if I didn't highlight something I've just read: a paper called "Establishing Legitimacy in Afghanistan" by Thomas J. Barfield (old bio, I think), former President of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies at Boston U. It's in the June 2004 edition of Iranian Studies, and I only have a pdf file, so no link. It's very good, and you should read it if you can find it. (Or, to use Christian Bleuer's approach, email me if you need it for collaborative research efforts.)

UPDATE: I'm also reminded in the comments that I'm reading a good friend's yet-to-be-submitted Master's thesis, entitled "To Kill or Not To Kill: The Global Jihadist Movement and the Doctrine of Takfir." It's good work, especially considering that I haven't read a whole lot of stuff (and this may be related to my limited language skills) that examines al-Qaeda's grand strategy, so to speak, or the linkage between professed ideology and operations.

Gunslinger:

As you can probably tell by the dearth of my posting, I haven't been around much the past couple of weeks. I spent a week on a much-needed vacation and then business took me overseas. So the preponderance of my reading is catching up on all the blogs and articles I've missed. But in the spirit of coming off of vacation and before the real world hits again tomorrow, I'll be finishing up a biography on Dmitry Schostokovich before returning to my usual programming.

Lil:
I've also been offline for a couple days so like Gunslinger, I'm catching up. Still, next stop, King Leopold's Ghost and I've also been wanting to get my hands on Kalyvas' book. Any other suggestions?

What we're reading #2

Coming into the weekend, I always imagine that it'll be an opportunity for me to get caught up in all the reading I've yet to make a dent in, just carting it to and from work in a manila folder all week. Rarely works out that way, but here's hoping!

Gulliver:

• Paul Cornish and Andrew Dorman's [British] "National Defence in the Age of Austerity." I've just about finished this one.
• Brendan Simms' review of Kimberly Kagan's new book The Surge.

Of course there's a lot Afghanistan stuff out there lately...

• Bacevich in The Atlantic: "Give up on democracy in Afghanistan."
• "Is it worth it?: The difficult case for war in Afghanistan", by Stephen Biddle
• "Winning the good war," from Peter Bergen.

And one I've just finished reading, on which there will certainly be some commentary later: the Aerospace Industries' Association's threat piece "The Unseen Cost: Industrial base consequences of defense strategy choices." If you like to see the defense industry making dire predictions and pressuring defense planners to build strategy around profit-based procurement considerations, you'll love this one!

Gunslinger: I'm going native this weekend, thanks to a few documents sent my way by our good friend SNLII. I'm embarrassed to say I've never read anything from the insurgent's side, outside of readings on the American Revolution.

• Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla by Carlos Marighella.
• Handbook for Volunteers of the Irish Republican Army Notes on Guerrilla Warfare.
• Irish Republican Army Green Book.

I promise not to be reciting Mao and Marx or wearing dishdashas by Monday. I do intend, though, to drink my share of Irish-made beverages before the weekend is over.


Alma:
Finishing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness will be the first thing I do this weekend (I am trying to catch up on my classics).

Another small book is already in my weekend bag: Olivier Roy’s Généalogie de l’islamisme, which was unfortunately not translated into English (but L’Islam mondialisé was).

Stacked between the toothpaste and the cell phone charger are Biddle’s article, of course, as well as print-outs of a very interesting debate in the Boston Review where a bunch of extremely smart people (Mike McGovern, Larry Diamond, and William Easterly, to name but a few) respond to Paul Collier’s proposals for the “Bottom Billion”—including his rather controversial suggestion that international military force should be used to restore constitutional legality in the case of a coup.

If anyone is looking for me, I will be there. Have a great weekend everyone.

Lil:

I just got back from a very long week of interviewing people in New York for a work project so I'm pretty exhausted (it looks like Alma's taking some time to enjoy NYC this weekend, something I didn't get to do much of this time).

Anyway, I'm still working on Prunier's Africa's World War--it's something like 400 pages long so it's going to take a while.

The UNDPKO just put out its newest report on peacekeeping titled "A New Partnership Agenda: Charting a New Horizon for UN Peacekeeping."

And then and I think I'm going to have to bandwagon and read some of the stuff my co-conspirators are reading because it looks interesting.

What we're reading

In what I hope will be institutionalized as a regular feature, we're going to tell you what reading material will be joining us on the plane, in the car, or at the picnic this Fourth of July weekend.

Gulliver:

• Ahmed Rashid's acclaimed 2000 book Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia
• "The People in Arms: A Practitioner's Guide to Understanding Insurgency and Dealing With it Effectively," by retired Army colonel G. L. Lamborn (courtesy of SWJ).
• "The Kill Company," Raffi Khatchadourian's 19-page New Yorker feature on COL Michael Steele and the 2006 killing (murder?) of eight Iraqis by a squad from Steele's 3/101. [I've actually already finished this one, and it's very, very thought-provoking. Find a copy!]

Alma:

"The Kill Company" is on my list too, as well as Lawrence Wright's "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11" (I know, it's about time).

Anyone has something more joyful for a Fourth of July?

Gunslinger:

Other than a ton of articles for work, I'll be reading the "The Soloist" by Steve Lopez (it is a long weekend after all - I can't read COIN all the time) and "The Rough Riders" by Teddy Roosevelt.

MK

I'll be finishing off Woodward's The War Within before turning to meatier stuff, like:

• Analytic Support to Counterinsurgency (RAND 2008)
• Intelligence Operations and Metrics in Iraq and Afghanistan (RAND November 2008)
• Skimming through USAID's Conflict Assessment Framework half for work, half for interest.

And if I can find it, I'd like to pick up a copy of Abdulkader Sinno's book Organizations at War in Afghanistan and Beyond.

Lil

Gerard Prunier's Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe and I need to find a silly novel to read in the sun...any suggestions?