• Armed Humanitarians

  • The Rise of the Nation Builders
  • By: Nathan Hodge
  • Narrated by: Tom Parks
  • Length: 12 hrs and 12 mins
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars (6 ratings)

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Armed Humanitarians

By: Nathan Hodge
Narrated by: Tom Parks
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Publisher's summary

In May 2003, President George W. Bush declared victory in Iraq. But while we won the war, we catastrophically lost the peace. Our failure prompted a fundamental change in our foreign policy. Confronted with theshortcomings of "shock and awe", the U.S. military shifted its focus to"stability operations": counterinsurgency and the rebuilding of failed states. In less than a decade, foreign assistance has become militarized; humanitarianism has been armed.

Combining recent history and firsthand reporting, Armed Humanitarians traces how the concepts of nation-building came into vogue, and how, evangelized through think tanks, government seminars, and the press, this new doctrine took root inside the Pentagon and the State Department. Following this extraordinary experiment in armed social work as it plays out from Afghanistan and Iraq to Africa and Haiti, Nathan Hodge exposes the difficulties of translating these ambitious new theories into action.

Ultimately seeing this new era in foreign relations as a noble but flawed experiment, he shows how armed humanitarianism strains our resources, deepens our reliance on outsourcing and private contractors, and leads to perceptions of a new imperialism, arguably a major factor in any number of new conflicts around the world. As we attempt to build nations, we may in fact be weakening our own.

Nathan Hodge is a Washington, D.C.-based writer who specializes in defense and national security. He has reported from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia, and a number of other countries in the Middle East and former Soviet Union. He is the author, with Sharon Weinberger, of A Nuclear Family Vacation, and his work has appeared in Slate, the Financial Times, Foreign Policy, and many other newspapers and magazines.

©2011 Nathan Hodge (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: History

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Critical Reporting on American Nation Building


Armed Humanitarians is a well packaged and meaningful work of journalism on American nation building efforts going back at least as far as the Vietnam War. In particular, it focuses on the dramatic changes the military has seen since it took on major post-9-11 nation building missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it covers a whole lot more than just these ventures.

The book argues that the military has become dramatically more humane because that is what’s needed to win against insurgencies. In short, the military needs to get out of their bases, meet the locals, learn the culture, talk with tribal and village leaders, and ultimately win hearts and minds. In the absence of a civilian bureaucracy capable of carrying out large missions, they also need to focus on nation building. That means training police forces and engaging in development aid. But while countless books have been written on nation building, this one gets at a deeper change in military culture.

Nathan Hodge covered the material for this book as a reporter for Jane’s Defense, the respected military news site. So, the reporting has the feel of a critical insider’s view. The changes that occurred in the American approach to war making were spurred by criticisms of the Vietnam War, reaching back to its earliest stages, the work of David Petraus and David Kilcullin in theorizing counter-insurgency, and the efforts of the Obama administration to minimize civilian harm. In short, they spring from a range of sources and the author leaves no stone unturned in uncovering their origins—from within the United States.

However, Hodge failed to mention a wide range of global forces that have been at work in making war more humane for well over a century. These are covered by the human rights critic Samuel Moyn in his more recent work, Humane, which argues that war has become more humane and that in the process it has become more acceptable. These forces pertain more to an increasingly globalized society, the historical emergence of human rights campaigning, an abundance of human rights treaties, the greater prominence of international institutions, and the greater scrutiny that military ventures now receive from the press.

Hodge’s concerns are more with the use of American military forces and whether or not their recent emphasis on nation building serves their purposes. To that end, he asks some important questions like whether nation building is even appropriate in far flung places where we don’t know the culture and whether it can be sustained in the midst of other bigger geopolitical concerns like the increasing belligerence of China and Russia. The point is all the more salient as Russian troops mass on the Ukrainian border as I write this review. But while the critical analysis that is found at the end of the book is in many ways the best part of it, his criticisms are not altogether convincing. Failed states tend to generate the very problems the American military is being called on to put and end to. Their failure leads to genocide, famine, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, civil war, and wider regional wars. There is simply no way around the indispensable nation, along with the wider international community, engaging in nation building in the twenty-first century. Fortunately, he leaves open this possibility, suggesting some ways to do it better, though.

But with this book, the emphasis is first and foremost on top notch intelligent reporting. So, wherever you may fall on the question of whether or not to engage in nation building, Armed Humanitarians can deepen your arguments and understanding. And for those who have been tracking the forever wars forever, it is a refreshingly different slant on the topic.

~ Theo Horesh, author of The Holocausts We All Deny


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intrigueing look at civil military relations

A new look ,with healthy criticism, at Civil Military Realtionships between the United States, her allies, and fragile countries.

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