THE WARBIRD'S BOOKSHELF
Another bloody century
Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare (Colin Gray)
Colin Gray is my favorite War Studies scholar.
I came upon this much-overlooked book (today's rank on Amazon.com: about
250,000) because it happens to contain some dismissive sentences about
John Boyd--this, after Mr Gray had praised
Boyd's OODA Loop as 'grand strategy' in a
textbook on that subject. In context, his dissing of Boyd didn't seem
as damning as those statements sounded when I read them online. Meanwhile,
the other 400-odd pages made great reading. Difficult stuff, but very
worthwhile.
Go here for more.
The heroes of the Berlin Airlift
Daring Young Men: The Heroism and Triumph of The Berlin Airlift-June 1948-May 1949 (Richard Reeves)
In an era when too many people are embarrassed by American displays of power, here's a great reminder that it wasn't always that way. The Cold War began when the Soviet Union shut off all land access to Berlin from the western zones of Germany. Against the advice of his generals and diplomats, Harry Truman dug in his heels: "We stay in Berlin, period." In a matter of days, hundreds of pilots, air traffic controllers, and crew chiefs were recalled to active duty. Together with the Royal Air Force and German workers, they built an air bridge that hauled food and clothing, coal and candy, to a city of 2,100,000 people, and kept them alive for nearly a year, until the Russians caved. By then the future was set: Europe would be divided into a democratic west and a totalitarian east, with West Berlin as an island outpost in a communist East Germany. A great story. Get it on Amazon.
The Iraq War gets its masterpiece
The Good Soldiers (David Finkel)
Read this book! It's a wonder.
David
Finkel is a fifty-something journalist for the Washington Post
who hasn't done much that's remarkable in his newspaper career. (Okay,
he won a Pulitzer, but for one of those earnest series that are
admired more by literary panels than by the average reader.) Then,
neatly paralleling Bush's troop surge and change of strategy in
Iraq, he teamed up with the 2/16 Infantry battalion from Fort Riley,
and he spent eight months in their company, interspersed with research
visits in the US. The result is this superlative portrait of American
soldiers in a war where you're much more likely to be blown up by
a jerry-built mine than you are to be shot by an AK-47.
Go here for a thoroughgoing review.
