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How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything
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BY FAR the best book to date on this topic!
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Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. The rules, policies, and institutions that have guided the world since World War II have largely run their course. Respect for sovereignty alone cannot uphold order in an age defined by global challenges from terrorism and the spread of nuclear weapons to climate change and cyberspace. Meanwhile, great power rivalry is returning. Weak states pose problems just as confounding as strong ones.
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War with China is much more likely than anyone thinks. When Athens went to war with Sparta some 2,500 years ago, the Greek historian Thucydides identified one simple cause: A rising power threatened to displace a ruling one. As the eminent Harvard scholar Graham Allison explains, in the past 500 years, great powers have found themselves in "Thucydides's Trap" 16 times. In 12 of the 16, the results have been catastrophic.
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"Speak softly and carry a big stick", Theodore Roosevelt famously said in 1901 when the United States was emerging as a great power. It was the right sentiment, perhaps, in an age of imperial rivalry. But today many Americans doubt the utility of their global military presence, thinking it outdated, unnecessary, or even dangerous. In The Big Stick, Eliot A. Cohen - a scholar and practitioner of international relations - disagrees.
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A World in Disarray
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Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. The rules, policies, and institutions that have guided the world since World War II have largely run their course. Respect for sovereignty alone cannot uphold order in an age defined by global challenges from terrorism and the spread of nuclear weapons to climate change and cyberspace. Meanwhile, great power rivalry is returning. Weak states pose problems just as confounding as strong ones.
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Destined for War
- Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?
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- Unabridged
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Overall
-
Performance
-
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War with China is much more likely than anyone thinks. When Athens went to war with Sparta some 2,500 years ago, the Greek historian Thucydides identified one simple cause: A rising power threatened to displace a ruling one. As the eminent Harvard scholar Graham Allison explains, in the past 500 years, great powers have found themselves in "Thucydides's Trap" 16 times. In 12 of the 16, the results have been catastrophic.
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-
Theoretically fundamental, but not inevitable nor statistically sound.
- By G. Hutcheson on 12-29-18
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The Future of War
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- Length: 12 hrs and 59 mins
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-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Future of War - which covers civil wars to as yet unknown nuclear conflicts, proxy wars (real) to the Cold War (not), fashionably small wars to the War to End All Wars (it didn't) - is filled with insight and fascinating nuggets of military history and culture from one of the most brilliant military and strategic historians of his generation.
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-
A good historical review of the progression of war
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America's War for the Greater Middle East
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Overall
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From the end of World War II until 1980, virtually no American soldiers were killed in action while serving in the Greater Middle East. Since 1990, virtually no American soldiers have been killed in action anywhere else. What caused this shift? Andrew J. Bacevich, one of the country's most respected voices on foreign affairs, offers an incisive critical history of this ongoing military enterprise - now more than 30 years old and with no end in sight.
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This is a book rife with revelations, from the secret communications between the Obama administration and the Iranian government to dispatches from the front lines of the new field of financial warfare. For listeners of Steve Coll's Ghost Wars and Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower, The Iran Wars exposes the hidden history of a conflict most Americans don't even realize is being fought but whose outcome could have far-reaching geopolitical implications.
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American diplomacy is under siege. Offices across the State Department sit empty while abroad, the military-industrial complex has assumed the work once undertaken by peacemakers. We're becoming a nation that shoots first and asks questions later. In an astonishing account ranging from Washington, DC, to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and North Korea in the years since 9/11, acclaimed journalist and former diplomat Ronan Farrow illuminates one of the most consequential and poorly understood changes in American history.
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Gifted Author
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On Tyranny
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The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the 20th century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.
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Important read/listen
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The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States is an exciting piece of "speculative fiction." The novel posits that there was a nuclear attack against the US on March 21, 2020 by North Korea, and that a national bipartisan commission was created to investigate what and how it happened. It's pretty scary stuff.
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For over 20 years, a select group of Yale undergraduates has been admitted into the year-long "Grand Strategy" seminar team-taught by John Lewis Gaddis and Paul Kennedy. Its purpose: to provide a grounding in strategic decision-making in the face of crisis to prepare future American leaders for important work. Now, John Lewis Gaddis has transposed the experience of that course into a wonderfully succinct, lucid and inspirational book, a view from the commanding heights of statesmanship across the landscape of world history from the ancient Greeks to Lincoln, and beyond.
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Interesting, but fails to offer real lessons.
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The Road Not Taken
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In chronicling the adventurous life of legendary CIA operative Edward Lansdale, The Road Not Taken definitively reframes our understanding of the Vietnam War. In this epic biography of Edward Lansdale (1908-1987) best-selling historian Max Boot demonstrates how Lansdale pioneered a "hearts and mind" diplomacy, first in the Philippines, then in Vietnam. It was a visionary policy that, as Boot reveals, was ultimately crushed by America's giant military bureaucracy.
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An honest look at Vietnam Nam and USA
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Directorate S
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All the detail you could want
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Playing to the Edge
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An unprecedented high-level master narrative of America's intelligence wars from the only person ever to helm both the CIA and NSA, at a time of heinous new threats and wrenching change. For General Michael Hayden, playing to the edge means playing so close to the line that you get chalk dust on your cleats. Otherwise, by playing back, you may protect yourself, but you will be less successful in protecting America.
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excellent
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Dereliction of Duty
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Dereliction of Duty is a stunning analysis of how and why the United States became involved in an all-out and disastrous war in Southeast Asia. Fully and convincingly researched, based on transcripts and personal accounts of crucial meetings, confrontations, and decisions, it is the only book that fully re-creates what happened and why. McMaster pinpoints the policies and decisions that got the United States into the morass and reveals who made these decisions and the motives behind them, disproving the published theories of other historians and excuses of the participants.
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the war
- By 826 Dee Jay on 02-20-19
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The Retreat of Western Liberalism
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In The Retreat of Western Liberalism, Luce makes a larger statement about the weakening of western hegemony and the crisis of liberal democracy - of which Donald Trump and his European counterparts are not the cause, but a terrifying symptom. Luce argues that we are on a menacing trajectory brought about by ignorance of what it took to build the West, arrogance towards society's economic losers, and complacency about our system's durability.
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Interesting, but biased.
- By Megan Tilly on 12-18-17
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Dawn of the Code War
- America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat
- By: John P. Carlin, Garrett M. Graff
- Narrated by: Kevin Stillwell
- Length: 16 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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The inside story of how America's enemies launched a cyberwar against us - and how we've learned to fight back. In this dramatic audiobook, former assistant attorney general John P. Carlin takes listeners to the front lines of a global but little-understood fight as the Justice Department and the FBI chases down hackers, online terrorist recruiters, and spies.
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Master class
- By Robert ONeill on 10-20-18
Publisher's Summary
The first serious book to examine what happens when the ancient boundary between war and peace is erased.
Once, war was a temporary state of affairs - a violent but brief interlude between times of peace. Today America's wars are everywhere and forever: Our enemies change constantly and rarely wear uniforms, and virtually anything can become a weapon. As war expands, so does the role of the US military. Today military personnel don't just "kill people and break stuff". Instead they analyze computer code, train Afghan judges, build Ebola isolation wards, eavesdrop on electronic communications, develop soap operas, and patrol for pirates. You name it, the military does it.
Rosa Brooks traces this seismic shift in how America wages war from an unconventional perspective - that of a former top Pentagon official who is the daughter of two antiwar protesters and a human rights activist married to an army Green Beret. Her experiences led her to an urgent warning: When the boundaries around war disappear, we risk destroying America's founding values and the laws and institutions we've built - and undermining the international rules and organizations that keep our world from sliding toward chaos. If Russia and China have recently grown bolder in their foreign adventures, it's no accident; US precedents have paved the way for the increasingly unconstrained use of military power by states around the globe. Meanwhile we continue to pile new tasks onto the military, making it increasingly ill prepared for the threats America will face in the years to come.
By turns a memoir; a work of journalism; a scholarly exploration into history, anthropology, and law; and a rallying cry, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything transforms the familiar into the alien, showing us that the culture we inhabit is reshaping us in ways we may suspect but don't really understand. It's the kind of book that will leave you moved, astonished, and profoundly disturbed, for the world around us is quietly changing beyond recognition - and time is running out to make things right.
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- bettsgjb
- 10-06-16
A Must-Read for Military and other Govt Leaders
As a senior Army officer and graduate of the U.S. Army War College (the motto of which is "To preserve peace, not to promote war") I found this book very educational and, moreover, extremely relevant to the professional development of military leaders. It's a must-read book for those who are willing to view the current strategic and operational environments through a different lens; which is, in my view, the only way our Nation and the collective Global community will ever have any hope of breaking free of the current pervasive state of armed conflict. Masterfully conceived and written!
7 of 7 people found this review helpful
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- Scott J Phillpott
- 09-06-16
Should be on Pentagon's Mandatory Reading List
Any additional comments?
As a career Naval Officer, it is the type of book I would like to have read early in my career. As for now, all politicians, military leaders, and political scholars should explore our everything is war policy decisions and abandon them.
8 of 9 people found this review helpful
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- DEON E PROVOST
- 08-20-16
Absolutely stunning
an amazing account of the present with a thoughtful account of what the future can, and maybe should, hold. must read! narrator and author are both fantastic
3 of 3 people found this review helpful
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- Kurt T.
- 01-13-17
Eye Opener.
This book was very informative. The author takes a mostly neutral political stance as she deliveries many factual events an offers intuitive insight into how these facts will impact American and world citizens.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
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- B. Ong
- 12-29-16
Ok overall
Had to blast my audio to hear the reader because she talks somewhat quietly. Story itself has very interesting and poignant thoughts but a little long-winded with the anecdotes and some points being drilled a little too repetitively for my tastes. I finished the book for the ideas presented but not a fan of the writing or reading.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
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- jj
- 10-08-16
All Americans need to know this.
Solid information. The United States is and must evolve to address new threats, but it can not do it all.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
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- Nashville spokes
- NASHVILLE, TN, United States
- 08-31-16
New look at the economic complex of the military!
I devoured this. I also recently have been recommending to my son that he seriously consider enlisting. He is a college grad who cannot find work. The military is paying more competitive salaries than the private sector since 2008.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
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- TheJadeFox
- 03-16-18
It's a marathon.. But be patient...
Very detailed analysis of the military industrial complex and how it is spreading. It's a marathon of a book, and often time loses the civilian reader in nuanced inner workings. Nevertheless it paints a shocking picture our current state of perpetual war.
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- William Bolen
- CHAPEL HILL, NC United States
- 01-19-18
must read book, fascinating and profound,<br />
Profound insights into war and the military from insider who knows the truth. Highly recommended.
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- Rosanne
- So Burlington, VT
- 10-19-17
Tenor of the reader’s voice
I was distracted and then aggravated by the way the reader read the story. Her voice and the way she used inflection would have fit a romance novel or mystery far better than a book about military issues. Her voice often trailed off at the end of phrases to a whisper and it was hard to understand what she was saying. Another thing that I found very distracting was the spittle in her mouth. It sounded like she had to swallow or spit as I could almost hear the bubbling coming from her lips