On the Bookshelf: The Fourth Star

The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army.

by David Cloud and Greg Jaffe

History fascinates me. Beyond the facts of the names, the dates and the places, there is the endlessly mutable level of context where for me real thinking and learning take place. Doubly fascinating to me is watching history occur. I can study the events of the distant past, but I can never really know what it was like then. What were the subtleties of life in Athens? What were the personalities of the Athenian leaders? What were the lessons and events that shaped their world-view and drove them to create a democracy and spread their influence far from their shores? The significance of The Fourth Star is that it offers a unique opportunity to understand the influences, strengths, weaknesses and character of four men who have had a profound impact on the shape of the history that is unfolding today.

 

General John Abizaid

General George Casey Jr.

General Peter Chiarelli

General David Petraeus

 

There is an old saying, “Come the moment, come the man.” I am not sure if it was intentional or not, but the most striking thing to me about The Fourth Star is that it gives a clear and compelling picture of how history unfolded to not only shape the skills, talents and ideas of these four leaders, but put them into places where those skills, talents and ideas impacted upon the world around them. All four of these men joined an army broken by the failures against an insurgency in Vietnam. All of them rose through the ranks of an army that built itself into the Cold War Leviathan yet along the way gained experiences and skills that would become vital in the Iraq War. With just a few minor changes to those events, how different could the world be today?

 

The Fourth Star is very well written and enlightening profile of four of the key military leaders of the Iraq War. Each General is portrayed in a way that feels fair and without malice or bias. Each is highlighted for the unique contribution he made to the reshaping and of the United States military. Granted, General Petraeus seems to come off particularly well, but even General Casey who has been maligned in other accounts is shown to be a soldier’s soldier as well as a thoughtful, intelligent and dedicated leader didn’t flinch when faced with what was, in many ways, an untenable situation and learned its hardest lessons. Though it may require a basic understanding of military culture and practice, it is clear and engaging to read. In its pages you can really get a sense for the driving forces behind each of these four Generals. Many books have already been written about the Iraq War, and there is no doubt that there are many more yet to come, but for a student of history The Fourth Star is a book that should be read very early on in any study of the events of this time period for the context it provides.

On The Bookshelf: The Gathering Storm

Many reviews have already been written about The Gathering Storm. Some reviews are glowing, some are lukewarm, all seem to be mostly concerned with how Brandon Sanderson did filling in for Robert Jordan. While I am pretty sure that if I got right down to it I could probably dissect out what parts Jordan had already written, what parts he left notes and outlines, and what parts Sanderson created from scratch, none of that was foremost on my mind when I was reading the book mostly because it really doesn’t matter to me. When Sanderson was named to be the author to continue the Wheel of Time series I did my homework and read the books he had already published; Elantris, the Mistborn trilogy and Warbreaker. He is, hands-down, an outstanding writer and possibly one of the best world builders in fiction past or present. I long ago came to the conclusion that Brandon Sanderson is a writer with the ability and the attitude to write the ending to the Wheel of Time and give it the consideration and the credit it deserves even to the point of asking that Robert Jordan’s signature be printed on the title page of each book because he didn’t feel right signing a book without it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is true class.

So, putting aside the question of Sanderson’s ‘voice’, what about the story of The Gathering Storm itself? In short, I found The Gathering Storm to be the darkest and most emotional of all of the Wheel of Time books. Several events of the book resolve major plot arcs and will leave any dedicated Wheel of Time reader grinning from ear to ear. However, one of the criticisms of the Wheel of Time is that most of the main characters as twenty-somethings, shouldn’t have the experience or couldn’t have the ability to do the things that they do as they match themselves against, in some cases, people who have literally hundreds of years of experience. In The Gathering Storm the answer to this criticism reveals itself as at least one of the main characters is being crushed under the weight and strain of that duty. What this does for the story is to temper the emotional highs for the victories of some with a sense of profound sadness for the emotional agony of others. This isn’t the book that will define the series, that book is no doubt two books away, but for the reader of the Wheel of Time this is the book where everything in the plot up until now comes to the point that it cannot become any worse and finally, coming to a Garden of Gethsemane moment, strips away everything until there is only one thing left; hope.

Everything seems to be falling apart. Nothing seems to be positioned in the right place to withstand the coming Last Battle. Nobody seems to have a correct and comprehensive picture of the situation. Yet, if the reader takes a step back from the details, the foreshadowing and all of the expectations and assumptions to look at all of the events of the story in context, there are clues that point toward these apparent flaws and reveal them to be anything but. For example, the pattern itself seems to be unraveling to the point that rooms and hallways inside buildings are physically rearranging themselves. This seems to serve nothing but chaos, and may even be evidence of the Dark One touching the pattern, yet, if it were not for one of those seemingly random shifts one of the pivotal and climactic moments of The Gathering Storm would have occurred in a much different and probably disastrous manner. Taking that into account what purpose may be served, for example, by the Borderland army that is far, far away from the Blight, or by a half dozen other elements that seems to be wildly out-of-place.

With that in mind, The Gathering Storm is a less a great book in itself (though it is), but more of a promise that the greatest parts of the epic Wheel of Time story are yet to come. For that, The Gathering Storm and the rest of the Wheel of Time books are well worth the read.

On the Bookshelf: Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson

Warbreaker is a work of epic scale. It has a sense of history and flavor that comes only from masterful world building. It has characters that are interesting and mysterious, heroic and yet flawed in surprising ways. It has a story that is compelling, exciting and twisty. You may think you know what will happen next, but you’re probably wrong and you can’t be sure until the final pages. It is a story told with an economy of effort and pacing that is dead-on perfect.

As if this accomplishment wasn’t enough Brandon Sanderson manages to do all of this in one book. Not an epic series, not a trilogy, a single book that effortlessly draws the reader into the story and makes them want to keep reading. It is for that reason that Brandon Sanderson is one of the best authors, of any genre, writing today. You may not read fantasy fiction, but you should read Sanderson.

Sanderson likes to write about the contrasting what-ifs that go against the fantasy formula. The Mistborn trilogy (a fascinating story with an amazing magic system) was essentially a story about what happened when the Dark Lord instead of the Hero won. Warbreaker is about the princess who is sent to marry the Evil Lord and instead of being saved, actually has to marry him! Personally, my favorite aspect of the book isn’t the settings, the characters or even the exceedingly cool magic system, but rather that even though the plot reached its conclusion, Sanderson doesn’t actually tie up all of the loose ends into one tidy little “that was convinient” package. There is still mystery in this world. There are still questions to be answered and magics to be discovered. I don’t need more from the story, but I do want to read more about the world the story is in.

Three More Books!

 Tor Books officially announced yesterday that the final volume of Robert Jordan’s epic saga The Wheel of Time will be broken into three volumes that will be released over the next two years.

From the Tor press release:

Harriet McDougal said on the process behind A Memory of Light: “The scope and size of the novel was such that it could not be contained in a single volume. It was a piece of marvellous good fortune that Brandon Sanderson undertook the work. He is a great pleasure to work with, as well as a wonderful writer.”

President and Publisher of Tor Books, Tom Doherty, also expressed his happiness with A Memory of Light, saying: “It is a magnificent closure to a great American epic fantasy whose journey began almost twenty years ago. There is no way Robert Jordan would have squeezed it to a single volume, and somehow it seems fitting that what began as a trilogy will also end as one.”

A split of the novel has long been rumored and came to a fever pitch after the apparent leak of unofficial cover art for The Gathering Storm.

Brandon Sanderson, the author completing the series has been silent up until this point about the possibility of a split, saying that he is doing the writing and leaving those decisions up to the editor, Robert Jordan’s widow Harriet McDougal, and publisher Tom Doherty. Now that the decision has been made he has written a lengthy and informative explination on his website.

“April 2008. I had to make a decision. I realized that the book would be impossible to do in 200k. I’d begun to say on my blog that it would be at least 400k, but even that seemed a stretch. I looked over the outlines, both mine and Mr. Jordan’s. I stared at them for a long time, thinking about the book. And this is where the first decision came in. Did I try to cram it into 400k? Or did I let it burgeon larger?

To get this into one book, I’d need to railroad the story from climax to climax. I’d have to ignore a lot of the smaller characters–and even some aspects of the larger characters. I just couldn’t justify that. It wouldn’t do the story justice. I cringed to consider what I would have to cut or ignore.

Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps readers would have preferred a single, condensed volume so that they at least knew what happened. But I just couldn’t do it. The Wheel of Time deserved better.”

The split strikes me as ironic because, for the last four or so books Robert Jordan continually claimed that he would finish in “at least three more books“, and doubly ironic because the whole series was originally envisioned to be a trilogy in the first place. All of that considered, I like the idea of the split. I don’t mind laying out the money for three books instead of one dictionary size volume that comes with its own book cart. The readers will get to see The Gathering Storm far sooner than otherwise and Sanderson gets to finish the book as it should be finished, as Robert Jordan no doubt would have finished it himself. After reading Sanderson’s work with Elantris and the Mistborn trilogy, and studying the brilliance of his ability to build, and more importantly, to understand a fantasy world, I trust him as a writer. Not only is he a very good author on the cusp of greatness, but a great fan of Robert Jordan as well. He’ll do it right.

Link: CTLab Virtual Symposium on Wired for War

CTLab is hosting an online/virutual symposium exploring the topics raised by P. W. Singer’s new book, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.

I’m not quite finished with the book yet, but so far it is excellent and well worth the price of admission. For any military thinker, futurist or tech junkie out there this is a great read. The symposium, starting today, already looks to be off to a great start with a great lineup of contributors.

 

The Bookshelf: In Pursuit of Military Excellence by Shimon Naveh

The recent buzz in this corner of the blogosphere about the theories of General Shimon Naveh caused me to search for his book, In Pursuit of Military Excellence with great excitement and I was initially very hopeful but soon very disappointed.

I won’t say I didn’t like the book. I found it very hard to read, mostly because I disagreed with Dr. Naveh so often, but also because I couldn’t understand how a thinker of his caliber could be this skewed in his view of military history and theory. He would likely call me a fool (or worse) and tell me I don’t ‘get it, but truly I don’t.

Just to hit some of the highlights that contributed to my dissatisfaction, first Dr. Naveh takes on the same historical limitation of Lind’s Generations of Modern Warfare with the claim that operational thinking arose with the levee en masse.  He treats Carl von Clausewitz very badly with a incredibly reductionist interpretation that amounts to the idea that the purpose of war is to kill the enemy (cue chanting: Attrition! Attrition! Attrition!) that carried all the way through the First World War. When he comes to the Second World War Dr. Naveh advances the theory that the essence of blitzkrieg was a technical/tactical devotion to the idea of the double-envelopment (from Cannae of course) and therefore the entire invasion of France should be excluded any discussion of blitzkrieg (he also has some very unflattering things to say about Guderian that seem to ignore Guderian’s study of the Mongols). Dr, Naveh also advances the consideration that the Soviets were the first true masters of operational thinking (somehow they were paying attention to the Mongols, in spite of the assumption that operational thinking started in Napoleon’s era) though somehow, to my reading, their operational theory seems very reliant on the conviction that as long as the well escheloned (to maximize depth) plan is followed through with a dedication to udar (or operational shock, a term I really did like) that all the pieces would work together, achieve synergy, and triumph.

The last section that delved into the development of AirLand battle to replace the doctrine of Active Defense in the US military. It didn’t seem to have the same slant as the rest of the book and I didn’t object to it as much, though I am not sure why.

Speaking from my own personal experience, if you are interested in operational maneuver theory I do not recommend this book as being very informative. Instead I would recommend two books by Robert R. Leonhard, The Art of Mauever, and The Principles of War for the Information Age.

What I was missing was the 5GWish thinking that sparked my interest in the first place.

“This space that you look at, this room that you look at, is nothing but your interpretation of it. Now, you can stretch the boundaries of your interpretation, but not in an unlimited fashion, after all, it must be bound by physics, as it contains buildings and alleys. The question is, how do you interpret the alley? Do you interpret the alley as a place, like every architect and every town planner does, to walk through, or do you interpret the alley as a place forbidden to walk through? This depends only on interpretation.”

Perhaps there is another book forthcoming, and perhaps what I really want to know is behind the paywall at the Center for Excellence and I’ll never see it. I do know it isn’t in this book.

The Bookshelf: Great Powers by Thomas P.M. Barnett.

Great Powers: America and the World After Bush

by Thomas P.M. Barnett

If you know nothing about Tom Barnett, or have heard of him but have read none of his books or watched his presentations, there are a few things you really need to know:

1) Barnett is a grand strategist. This means he doesn’t just look at the forest; he looks at the forest, the plains, the oceans, and everything else, exploring what connects one to the other and how those relationships have developed over time and will continue to develop in the future.

2) Barnett is relentlessly optimistic. You won’t find any doom-and-gloom scenarios in his books because as a grand strategist Barnett is completely fixated on creating the best future possible, not the most (or least) disastrous one. His creed, like that of any true grand strategist, is how do I create opportunity from any and all situations. As he says on page 48: “The opposite of war isn’t peace, it’s creation.”

3) Barnett has an energy is his presentation and in his writing that can sometimes be exhausting for those trying to digest his broad and sweeping vision. This is a good thing in my opinion because the reader can’t help but feel excited about potential, rather than depressed or isolated by seeming inevitability.

4) Barnett isn’t really ‘jargon-heavy, ‘ but it is a really good idea to read the glossary first if you aren’t familiar with his concepts.

Reading Note: Grand Strategy and 5GW

From Great Powers: America and the World After Bush by Thomas P.M. Barnett

Pg. 375

“This is what the next generation of warfare will be all about: achieving nonkinetic victories by steering other nations’ ambitions.”

A quote so short from a book so extensive is, of course, taken out of its context. Barnett isn’t speaking here about the Generations of Modern Warfare (GMW) or about XGW (or at least there is no mention of it in the director’s commentary or endnotes), but he is in this section, and throughout the book, talking about grand strategy, the pinnacle level of expressions of Force, a level for which the mainly non-kinetic doctrines of the fifth gradient are optimized.

Additions to the Antilibrary: 2/21/09

From Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan: The Antilibrary

“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market will allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”

I am blessed to live in a community with a high quality local library system and, as a result, I am able to access an antilibrary well beyond anything my own personal financial means could provide (including the works of Umberto Eco). Here are some books currently on my antilibrary shelf:

 

I’m in Great Powers: America and the World After Bush!

I have yet to read the book (though my copy should be arriving soon if not today) but Thomas P. M. Barnett has listed in the acknowledgements for Great Powers the bloggers, readers and commentators who have contributed articles, information and thoughts to his online workspace.

“My weblog has remained my primary workspace, along with my weekly column for Scripps Howard News Service and my periodic articles in Esquire. Among the many bloggers, readers, and frequent commentators who deserve my special thanks for connecting me to so many sources over the past few years are: 54th Bn CEF, 77grampa77, a517dogg, Al Alborn, Alicescheshirecat, Allen, Andrew in Baghdad, Andrew Sullivan, Andy Shelley, andyinsdca, ansmeister, antonymous, Arherring, Art Hutchinson, Baltimoron, bdunbar, Benjamin, Bill C, Bill Millan, Bill Nagle, bill s, blairistic, boqueronman, Brad B., Brandon Winter, Brent Grace, Brian, Brian H, Brian Rhea, BrotherCaine, Bruce Sterling, Cadet Echo Boomer, Caitlyn, Cbiggs, Chad, Chap, Charles Ganske, Charles Sheehan-Miles, Chicago Boyz, China Law Blog, Chirol, Chris Albon, Chris Janiec, Christofer Hoff, Christopher Plummer, Chuck Butcher, CitSAR, Constantina, Consul-At-Arms, Critt Jarvis, Cuffy Meigs, Curtis Gale Weeks, Curzon, cyberdyver, Czechbikr, D Blair, Dan, Dan Hare, dan tdaxp, Dave Dilegge, Dave Goldberg, David Hallowell, David Stewart, David Sutton, Desiree Fox, DHM, dipaolom, drsteph, Eddie Beaver, EJDUBYA, Elmer Humes, emjayinc, Ethan Zuckerman, Fabius Maximus, farhad, felixdzerzhinsky, Fipps, Francisco, Frank Hecker, Galrahn, Gerry, Gilbert Garza, Gunnar Peterson, Hansrudolf Suter, historyguy99, hof1991, Hugh, Information Dissemination, Iskendar, jake, Jarrod Myrick, Javaid Akhtar, JBAndrsn, Jeff J., Jeremiah, Jeremy A, jerseyrefugee, Jesse, JFRiley, Jim Keenan, Jimmy J., Jimmy the Dhimmi, Joe Blizzard, Joe Canepa, Joe Crawford, Joel Helgeson, John of Argghhh!, John Robb, JohnShreffler, Joshua Foust, JTM, jwbarton, Keith, Keith_Indy, Kevin in Dallas, kilngoddess, Kim McD, Lance, Larry Dunbar, Larry Y, Lexington Green, Louis Heberlein, lrb, Major B, Manny, Marcus Vitruvius, Mark in Texas, Matt R., Matthew Garcia, Michael, Michael SteelWolf, Michael Tanji, michael75we, Michal Shapiro, MountainRunner, Mystery Meat, Nate Edwards, Nathan Machula, Noah Shachtman, nykrindc, outback71, Outside the Beltway, PamC, PeteJ, Peter Kay, phil, Phil Windley, Pilgrim, Prescottrjp, Purple-slog, Ray Kimball, Robert L, Robert Langland, sailordude, Sergio, Seth, Shane Deichman, shloky, Sopwith, SR, Steve Barrera, Steve Knott, Steven, Stuart Abrams, Sturt, subadei, taka2k7, TCG, Ted O’Connor, TEJ, thaddeusphoenix, The Globalizer, Tim Lerew, Tim Roth, TM Lutas, Todd McLauchlin, Tom Mull, Tyler Durden of CENTCOM, Valdis, Vinay Gupta, VoteWithTroops.com, Wiggins, William R. Cumming, Wiredman, Younghusband, and zenpundit.”

Once I’ve finished it I’ll be sure to post a review of Great Powers, but based on The Pentagon’s New Map, Blueprint for Action and the early reviews, buying Great Powers is a sure thing for anyone even remotely interested in current events (It looks like the first two books are even on sale at Amazon right now so you can get a whole set for a steal).

To whet your whistle, here is a great conversation between Tom Barnett and the Zenpundit!