-- Sydney J. Freedberg Jr., NationalJournal.com

My fellow bloggers have collectively offered a rich and intriguing list to mine for the Winter ahead.  I’d add just a few thoughts.  The first is a “me too” endorsement.  The week before Christmas I gobbled up with great pleasure Malcom Gladwell’s latest book, Outliers. Unpacking diverse research to explain what makes for successes in life, this is, like his earlier books, Blink and The Tipping Point, concise, well-written and a fascinating read.

Christmas in our home is a time of traditions, including re-reading favorite books.  As the new year approaches, I’m again reading Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, in a lovely edition new to me edited by Robert Strassler, which is accompanied by wonderfully detailed maps, photographs, graphics and notes.  At the risk of sounding unbearably stuffy, reading this fountainhead of historical analysis again every decade or so really does, as your college professor promised, reward a reader with an iteratively deeper understanding of modern times. 

Two other novels of war that I treasure are Eugenio Corti’s The Red Horse (Ignatius) and Mark Helprin’s A Soldier of the Great War.  The former is a classic of World War II written by an Italian Freedom Fighter.  It carriers its readers across the whole sweep of the various fronts of war as seen by Italian forces, particularly the heartbreaking conflict among the Italians themselves in the final months of the war in the villages, towns and cities of Northern Italy.  Helprin’s novel of the earlier World War is an astonishing and mesmerizing account of a young man’s life drawn into an all-consuming war, of history, philosophy, art and learning in a country transformed by the war. 

Those who will soon assume senior positions in the new Administration will ask themselves repeatedly how to get the best from the team of men and women they are called to lead in a time of war, civilians and soldiers alike. Another work by Mark Helprin merits giving to any friend assuming such a role: “Monday” (reprinted in The Pacific and Other Stories).  It is a 30-page story that captures the American character, our impulse to service and the extraordinary generosity of so many individuals.  Set in New York in the months after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the protagonist is an unforgettable building contractor named Fitch.  Fitch conveys a simple leadership lesson of this season: everyone has gifts to give, the trick is knowing how to ask, how to enable and inspire others to give what they can.

Which gets me to the point: most of my ordinary reading - I suspect like everyone else - is on a computer screen, and it's news and journal articles from the internet.  This technology has transformed our work; what is today ordinary - having daily access to hundreds of newspapers and journals from all over the world - would have been considered truly extraordinary not too many years ago.  What I regard as especially revealing from this extraordinary ordinary reading is how insular and inwardly focused we remain as Americans, even though we think of ourselves as global citizens, not virtual isolationists.  To read foreign journalists and others' analysis of what is going on out there tells me that as Americans we do any extremely poor job of attempting to understand why others do what they do.  Being inside our own information loop can have tremendously negative consequences, and, given what is going on out there now, we will be extremely lucky if we avoid those consequences in the new year. 

It's not a particularly uplifting thought for the new year; sorry.

I'm also reading Catch-22. I have a long-running joke with some of my West Point students that histories and journalistic accounts cannot adequately prepare them for the wars they're going to fight, only literature can do that. I had a note from a former student , 2LT Chris Beeler, who's in Iraq, telling me nothing prepared him for Iraq quite like Heller's classic. I hadn't read it since college and had forgotten just how funny Yossarian's exasperation is.

I am reading Dale Van Atta’s biography of Richard Nixon’s first Secretary of Defense, Melvin Laird (With Honor: Melvin Laird in War, Peace and Politics, University of Wisconsin Press, 2008.) Van Atta analyzes how Laird, who took over the Pentagon in 1969 was able to accomplish three difficult tasks that are relevant to the challenges faced by the incoming Obama Administration.  First, he was able to overcome the fierce resistance by the uniformed military and National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger to removing American forces from Vietnam, the previous needless, senseless war in which the US had become engaged , a war that like Iraq that was undermining our overall national security.

Second, Laird was able to modernize and reset the force in an era when the regular defense budget declined in real terms.  Third, he fixed the military’s manpower crisis by ending the draft and creating the All Volunteer Force, which endures to this day, and which was also initially strongly resisted by the uniformed military. 

Van Atta demonstrates that Laird (who in my view was the most effective Secretary of Defense in the 60-some years since the creation of the Department of Defense) was able to accomplish these goals for several reasons.  First, he had carte blanche from President Nixon to make all his own appointments.  In fact that was a condition for his taking the job.  His appointments included such distinguished people as David Packard and Paul Nitze.  Second, he was not intimidated by military commanders and WWII heroes like Admiral John McCain (the current Senator’s father and then head of the Pacific Command) or Generals William Westmoreland and Creighton Abrams (the ground commanders in Vietnam who went on to become Army Chiefs of Staff) or intellectuals like Kissinger who wanted to leave more than 300,000 American troops in Vietnam indefinitely.  He let them know from day one that their role was to implement not make policy.  Third, from his first day in office, he established a clear four year timeline for accomplishing his goals, including setting his own departure date.  Within four years, all 600,000 American troops were out of Vietnam, the draft had ended, the US military was developing weapons like the F-15 and F-16, that still exist today, and Laird had returned to civilian life.

I’m also convinced (with apologies to Napoleon) that in irregular warfare the human trumps the technological at least three to one. Unfortunately we know very little about the human dimension in war. Our bookshelves groan under volumes that investigate war as a technological endeavor but very few that view warfare from the human perspective.

For the past few months I’ve been putting together a list of the few books that might act as a primer for the human dimension. They are:

S L A Marshall, Men Against Fire. Although flawed this is the book that began the study of war from the soldier’s perspective.

Lord Moran: The Anatomy of Courage. Moran was a surgeon in WWI and was the first to try to understand what motivates soldiers in battle.

William Manchester, Goodbye Darkness. The best first person account of the realities of battle from an American.

Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory. The best scholarly account of the human dimension in war.

J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle. The first book to delve into the psychology of close combat

I’ve found only two modern works that try to look at close combat from an analytical perspective:

COL Tom Kolditz, In Extremis Leadership. Tom is Department Head of Leadership at West Point.

Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Dave’s book is a bit extreme but it covers ground that few have attempted in the past.

My hope is that the next Administration will begin to pay more attention to men rather than machines. I also hope that DoD will spend the resources to understand how soldiers fight since close combat accounts for most combat deaths in modern warfare.

Right now I am reading volume one of "Menlo Park Reminiscences" by Francis Jehl (1937), which describes what it was like in Thomas Edison's laboratory during his research on the phonograph, telephone and  incandescent light bulb.  I am also belatedly reading "Rising Above the Gathering Storm," a National Academy of Sciences study of U.S. technological competiveness published in 2005.  I plan to move on to a science-fiction novel by Hugo Award winner Vernor Vinge entitled "Rainbow's End," (2006) about a future in which only the kids really understand new technology.  I may also read Ha-Joon Chang's "Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism."  It's sort of a revisionist history of how global trade competitiveness really works.

I'm just finishing www.amazon.com/Sacred-Willow-Generations-Vietnamese-Family/dp/0195137876 Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family, a fascinating account of a family moving from mandarins at the top of the Confucian hierarchy, through French colonialism to the aftermath of the Vietnam War.  From the role of Vietnamese elites under the French, to the guerilla warfare of the author's sister as a Viet Cong, and the arrest of her brother in an internment camp, it is an amazing lens into the history of that country, and guerilla warfare in general.

I'm just picking up Joshua White's monograph:  www.cfia.org/Events/EventsDetail.aspx Pakistan's Islamist Frontier, published by the Center on Faith and International Affairs.  I was lucky enough to get to know Josh as we travelled to Pakistan last year to monitor the Pakistani elections.  He was lucky and intrepid enough to have entered Pakistan the year before, after finding that he could get no Fulbright money to study there, and basically get himself adopted by the head of the religious party that then governed Pakistan's northwest frontier provinces.  Living in the guest house of one of the leading Islamist politicians in the NWFP, Josh got to know the leaders of the Islamist movements across that province better than perhaps any other living American. 

And for fun?  John McPhee's www.johnmcphee.com/deltoid.htm The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed.  I just read everything that McPhee writes, and was pleased as punch to find there was something left I hadn't discovered yet! 

Wilberforce is a companion to Hague's deservedly acclaimed life of Pitt the Younger, and provides a parallel perspective of politics and mores in the wartime England of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While neither book is a hagiography, both reflect the high esteem with which the author holds his subjects. Both books also share a curious omission: Jews, whether as individuals or as a group, are nowhere to be found. Yet Jews, notably the Goldsmid brothers, were among those who financed Pitt's wars, while one of the many evangelical organizations in which Wilbeforce played prominently was the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews. In fact, Wilberforce was vice-president from its inception.

I am about to begin a highly regarded book about a man who preferred to persecute Jews rather than convert them. But then, Joseph Stalin was an equal opportunity tyrant and murderer, whose voracious appetite for conquest brought on the Cold War. Young Stalin, by Simon Sebag Montefiore, comes to me highly recommended, and I look forward to curling up with it in my sitting room overlooking the White Mountains.

Nazism and all its fellow-travelers from dictatorships to Islamist terrorists offer nothing but the death of freedom. So here are two books to read to remind us all to pray for the champion's of liberty during the sacred season.

And, for pleasure, I'm reading a first edition of Theodore Roosevelt's Hunting Trips of a Ranchman first published in 1886.  There is nothing better than sitting in a mountain house with a real fire burning and reading about TR's adventures.  

Every conflict and failed state on earth has its representatives in the United States--not just a spokesman or two, but real people who have fled for their lives and yet remain connected in ways that were neither attractive nor possible for my East European grandmother, who refused to tell me not only where she was from but also what her native language was.  The same is true for emerging economies, which are sending their best and brightest to be schooled in the US, if they can get visas.  Anne-Marie argues that this connectedness provides dramatic advantages to the US in a world that is increasingly networked and decreasingly hierarchical.

Phew, I was worried that all that time spent reading novels about imaginary Sudanese and Afghans was wasted.  Why am I not surprised at the truth:  this is where America's great strength lies--in recent immigrants who suffer a lot but manage to survive and even thrive despite the odds.  

But don't read Eggers, Hosseini or Sabar for their national security implications--you can read Anne-Marie Slaughter for that.  Read them for their great stories and their incredible insights into what it means to become American in our times.

On the lighter side, I'm going to try But Didn't We Have Fun, a look back at the 1843-1970 early years in baseball.  If the jacket blurbs are any indication, Abner Doubleday's purported role in inventing baseball is in serious jeopardy.

The second book is Edwin S. Gaustad's biography of Roger Williams (Liberty of Conscience, Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1999). This book reminds us that there is a reason that there were no witch trials in Rhode Island. Roger Williams linked religious freedom and security early on (see his 1663 colonial charter), recognizing that if citizens were allowed to practice their faith freely they would not agitate against the state. The result has been a civil society that seeks integration of minorities not assimilation. Integrations respects and includes differences, assimilation suggests that the minority needs to look like the majority -- this is Europe's problem where Muslim minorities are more easily radicalized because, in general, they have not been integrated.

The third book is Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (Great Britain: John Murray Publishers, 1990). Although he doesn't it frame it as such, Hopkirk gives a historical basis for understanding Mackinderstan. Halford Mackinder's heartland theory -- articulated three times in 1904, 1919, and 1943 in a manner that sought to balance hard and soft power -- suggested that the present day areas of southern Russia, western China, Central Asia, and northern Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran would impact both global security and global civil society. Generally remote and repressive, Mackinderstan today sits atop the "I-axis" as a mountain pool of disaffected young Muslim men with no opportunities -- spiritually or economically -- who seep south, seeking to fight for a manipulated version of their religion that is deeply inconsistent with the Islamic faith.

Finally, I just finished Walter Russell Mead's God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Knopf, 2007). Refreshingly, this book gives religion serious treatment, relating the flexodoxy of the anglosphere's predominant religion -- a Christianity rooted in Anglicanism's three-legged stool of scripture, reason, and tradition -- and Abrahamic sense of calling to geo-politics and capitalism. It is a sweeping and worthy read.

Also highly recommend Daniel Walker Howe's What hath God Wrought: The Transformation of  America 1815-1848 (Oxford U. Press, 2007), described by my young historian niece as a "whiggish" view of the period, but very enlightening and a pleasure to read.

Happy holiday to all.

I am currently reading British journalist Richard Reeves' biography John Stuart Mill - Victorian Firebrand.  Mills was one of the most famous economists of the 19th Century.  He was also a social commentator and activist well ahead of his time seeking rights for the underpriviliged and equality for women.  Not popular in his time, but right.

The other one in the "rotation" is Rick Perlstein's Nixonland.  He does a wonderfully detailed study of the fracture of the mid 20th century body politic and the fractiousness that still divides our country today.

My guilty pleasure is comedian Artie Lange's autobiography Too Fat To Fish. I knew Lange from his work with shock jock Howard Stern.  I have never seen a more soul exposing book from a man wracked with guilt about his success and unable to cope with it.

If Santa likes me, I will get Jon Meacham's book on Jackson and Buffet's bio called Snowball.

I’ve finished Cynthia Cooper’s book, Extraordinary Circumstances, the autobiographical story of the whistleblower who blew up WorldCom.  Actually, she didn’t blow it up…the management blew it up.  But the book provides a compelling lesson in the importance of having “escape paths” for bad news, particularly in highly disciplined, hierarchical, compartmented organizations (read defense contractors, the military, police departments, etc.).  Absent opportunities to correct problems while they are small, big problems tend to emerge; in the case addressed in Cooper’s book, really big problems.  The book also offers instructive lessons in individual courage.

Next up is Ship of Ghosts: The story of the USS Houston, by James Hornfischer.

And I can’t believe I missed this opportunity to plug Augustine’s Laws (available from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics) that tells what’s wrong with defense acquisition—and what to do about it.

I am also reading American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, by Jon Meacham, and The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940, by William Shirer.

A few years ago, I put together a National Security Book List, which includes my recommended reading to all officers of the Armed Forces, to Members of Congress, and to those interested in national security issues.  The fifty books on my list cover the topics of leadership, character, and military art.  The subject matter ranges from ancient to modern warfare, although a large number of my recommendations focus on the Civil War and World War II. 

Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief, by James M. McPherson

and

Lincoln:  The biography of a Writer, by Fred Kaplan.

One surveys Lincoln’s role in directing the war.  The other is an in-depth look at his influences and development as a writer.

I am also hoping that Santa brings me two new Churchill books:

Warlord:  A Life of Winston Churchill at War, 1874-1945, by Carlo D’Este

and

Churchill by Himself:  The definitive Collection of Quotations, by Richard Langworth.

I will also take a careful look at the Project on National Security Reform’s Forging a New Shield, a study on the existing national security structure with recommendations for reform.