Category: Counter Insurgency
-
The Boer War (1979) by Thomas Pakenham
Thomas Pakenham’s The Boer War, first published in 1979, remains one of the most absorbing accounts of imperial warfare ever written. It is at once sweeping and immediate: a grand chronicle of armies clashing across South Africa’s high veldt, yet also a study of private fears and petty ambitions that together reshaped the British Empire’s…
-
The Army and Vietnam (1986) by Andrew F. Krepinevich
There are several ways to read Andrew Krepinevich’s “The Army and Vietnam,” which was published in 1986 when many wounds from the Vietnam War were still raw. First, it can be read as a summary and general assessment of the decade long Army experience with counterinsurgency (COIN) in Southeast Asia. Second, it can be viewed…
-
Guerrilla Leader: T. E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt (2011) by James Schneider
The author, James Schneider, is a professor at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. In the Preface and Acknowledgements in the advanced proof of “Guerrilla Leader” he hints that he sees T.E. Lawrence as an exemplar of the type of military officer the U.S. Army needs to cultivate in order to be successful…
-
Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan (2012) by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
I am a Navy reservist and served as one of the primary economic development officers at NATO’s Regional Command – South headquarters in Kandahar from September 2009 to September 2010. Thus it was with more than passing interest that I read Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s recent journalistic expose, “Little America: The War within the War for Afghanistan,”…
-
The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam (2018) by Max Boot
When the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Edward Lansdale was a 38-year-old advertising executive in San Francisco with a wife and two young children with no background or education in national security or defense policy. Amazingly, within twenty years he would emerge as the country’s leading expert on counter-insurgency. Author Max Boot…
-
War Comes to Garmser: Thirty Years of Conflict on the Afghan Frontier (2013) by Carter Malkasian
I deployed to southern Afghanistan in late 2009, roughly the same time that Carter Malkasian arrived as the lead political officer in Garmser in Helmand Province. It was just the beginning of the so-called “Obama Surge” into Afghanistan and the situation in many areas in southern Afghanistan – Helmand Province in particular – was bleak.…
What's Tim Reading Now? 