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What are you reading?

Short

Well-Known Member
None
This was a diamond in the rough. Can't recall where/when I heard of it, but wow. It's essentially the story of a real life CAPT Queeg. There's a lot to pull out of here from the perspectives of the guys working for the captain (how does the XO play middle man between a lunatic and the crew; how does the crew wrestle with the ideas of loyalty and right/wrong, etc).

Article/review/summary from Harvard Crimson (1972).
Obligatory wiki entry for the captain.

The book is, not surprisingly, out of print, but I was able to get a used copy in decent shape for about $15.

View attachment 15418
Good rec
 

Recovering LSO

Suck Less
pilot
Contributor
Picked this (@war) up last weekend. It's a pretty quick read (~250 pages of text). It presents a somewhat surprising level of detail/info. Some precent discussion concerning private/civilian "hack back" ethics and legality.

It's been out for a little over a year and now in paperback.
 
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Recovering LSO

Suck Less
pilot
Contributor
About 25 pages into this one and so far it's very good. Horne's writing style (unsurprisingly) is dense - lots of long verbose passive voice sentences. It doesn't look like it'll be a quick read, but should be good.

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Picked this up at Barnes and Noble tonight, 20% off and another 10% with membership, less than $20 for new release hardback.
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Recovering LSO

Suck Less
pilot
Contributor
My beef with Team of Teams and much of Gen McChrystal's whole pitch is: well of course you were able to do remarkable things with extremely motivated, hand selected individuals with a unlimited resources. It doesn't make it any less impressive, but it does limit the portability of the message.
 

Piposterous

"The road to success is always under construction"
pilot
Got this for Christmas and started it last week. So far it's a pretty good read - has some great history regarding the developments of air combat and has some great accounts of the Second Gulf War.

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robav8r

Well-Known Member
None
Contributor
My beef with Team of Teams and much of Gen McChrystal's whole pitch is: well of course you were able to do remarkable things with extremely motivated, hand selected individuals with a unlimited resources. It doesn't make it any less impressive, but it does limit the portability of the message.
Good pont - and I agree. As part of our elective concentration, one of McChrystals prior SEAL's, now working for "CrossLead" came and spoke to us about the company and his operational experience. The pitch about complicated versus complex problems and the way they talk about networks was informative. However, we brought up the difference between what he had to work with and what the average organization has to work with wrt human capital. Lots of pearls to take away from the book and what CrossLead consulting does, but you can't ignore the baseline level of competence you are starting with.
 

redfox7777

New Member
Right now I'm about 2/3 through Witness by Whittaker Chambers. This is an excellent story and really an eye opener for those unaware of Soviet espionage.
 

Randy Daytona

Cold War Relic
pilot
Super Moderator
A couple of historical fiction novels for thought provoking reading.

For those of us who came in during the Cold War - this was what we dreaded but had to prepare for:

The Third World War: August 1985 by General Sir John Winthrop Hackett (Commander, British Army of the Rhine)

Early in 1977 a retired NATO general called together six of his collegues--including an admiral, an airman, an economist and a diplomat--to write a dramatized game-plan for the next world war. A sensational international bestseller, it is a vivid, detailed, and often blood-curdling on-the-spot report from the battle fronts of a "real war", from tank assaults to air clashes to ICBM launchings, based on an insider's knowledge of weaponry and actual NATO and Soviet battle strategies. In the light of changes in Eastern Europe the question now is: Could it ever have happened? Could it ever happen again?

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A refresher for those who have forgotten about the Fulda Gap and the Russian Tank Armies (not tank brigades or tank divisions but entire tank armies in East Germany) from the National Interest - http://nationalinterest.org/feature/why-nato-expected-lose-most-europe-russia-15267


If the above was the danger of conventional warfare, asymmetrical warfare is shown below:

One Second After by William R. Forstchen, PhD

New York Times best selling author William R. Forstchen now brings us a story which can be all too terrifyingly real...a story in which one man struggles to save his family and his small North Carolina town after America loses a war, in one second, a war that will send America back to the Dark Ages...A war based upon a weapon, an Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP)

 
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