Very good book - just finished.
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What are you reading?
- Thread starter Recovering LSO
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Props for this recommendation. I just finished reading it. The writing is a little too much like a War College paper and he made a few errors, but his research and facts are amazing. It is well worth reading.
Beckettatchess
New Member
West with the Night by Beryl Markham. Amazing, amazing book. Hemingway, among many others, was a fan.
Re-read Team of Teams awhile back, ironically more in my civilian capacity. I know some here scoffed at the idea that McChrystal’s ideas could be realistically implemented without a hand-picked team. But mindset-wise, a lot of what he focuses on seems like it’d pay great dividends in software development; the industry is moving in a similar direction, but some old heads and management types have trouble letting go. At any rate, I started writing down some of the sources in the footnotes, and picked a couple of them up on Amazon.
Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and Nelson's Battle of Trafalgar - a great study of how Nelson was vaulted to fame as British society gave new value to heroes and the heroic. But it also touches on how Nelson formed a culture which led to victory at Trafalgar. Part of this was finding the right balance of control and initiative. The British did this, in contrast to the French and Spanish. The French came from a post-Revolution society which threw away too much of military and other traditions uncritically. The Spanish were the opposite, stuck in a backward and almost medieval feudal mentality. The book also goes into great detail about how the battle was fought, and it’s incredible just how much of a brutal bloodbath fighting in the Age of Sail was.
Chaos: Making a New Science - An introduction to chaos theory, how it works, what it is and isn’t, and how it was developed.
Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and Nelson's Battle of Trafalgar - a great study of how Nelson was vaulted to fame as British society gave new value to heroes and the heroic. But it also touches on how Nelson formed a culture which led to victory at Trafalgar. Part of this was finding the right balance of control and initiative. The British did this, in contrast to the French and Spanish. The French came from a post-Revolution society which threw away too much of military and other traditions uncritically. The Spanish were the opposite, stuck in a backward and almost medieval feudal mentality. The book also goes into great detail about how the battle was fought, and it’s incredible just how much of a brutal bloodbath fighting in the Age of Sail was.
Chaos: Making a New Science - An introduction to chaos theory, how it works, what it is and isn’t, and how it was developed.
Reading it now - cool perspective to hear the origins of the school from the horse's mouth.
@Pags - reading Adkins' Trafalgar book, similarly impressed by the dynamics you note above, and certainly the brutality. Wonder how many young mids and leftenants there were in the RN asking "Does anyone know how hard it is to select barques? I thought I wanted first class ship of the line, but I'm uncomfortable with the idea that I may be blown to smithereens by grapeshot."
I’m sure it has been mentioned, but in the same vein I’d say HR McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty is required reading. Will check this one out.
Some have been asking recently whether or not he has read his own book.
Hardly a fair comment. McMaster stood his ground against Trump and his team hard on many issues and in the end it cost him his job.
I think you'll get a wide array of opinions on that matter, but that's not what I'm talking about. He just made a speech Wednesday that some have viewed as somewhat... ironic.
Wasn’t aware. I’ll check out the speech.