Chris Otero
“Beware the man of a single book” – Thomas Aquinas
In two weeks, I will be taking on one of the most important assignments in my career – Professor of Military Science at a college in the northeast. I am extremely happy to take this posting, but also a bit apprehensive. I am going to be responsible for educating young men and women who will go on to become Army Officers, an awesome responsibility. There is a curriculum given to us to teach, but there is also a fair amount of latitude in how we present the material. But I also know I am there to share applicable experiences and knowledge with the Cadets in order to get them ready for the road ahead.
I passionately believe in reading. There’s hardly been a day in my life which I haven’t read a book. My professional life has been immeasurably aided by ability to read 2 to 3 books a week for the past couple of decades. Reading isn’t a substitute for experience, but it has allowed me to place my experiences into context and inform future decisions. As Thomas Aquinas said above, ‘Beware the man of one book’, I also add, ‘Beware the man of no books’. I cannot make my Cadets into avid readers but I will ensure they are aware there are vast amounts of knowledge available for them which can help them understand the world they operate.
What should they read? I am a huge fan of professional reading lists and all of the services have approved reading lists which encompass a wide variety of useful military titles. I would advise my Cadets to be familiar with the list and recommend several titles to them – but I also have my own professional reading list which suits my tastes and experiences.
My list is eclectic but it serves one of the principle lessons that I have learned in my career – one doesn’t read for knowledge, one reads in order to prepare their minds to receive knowledge. My point and my divergence from the official reading lists is that the world is big and complex and requires a much broader list than what is typically found. I am not against the official lists – before one goes off the beaten path one must know the path exists and where it leads. But the best thinkers and strategists we have went beyond the official lists to seek out knowledge across the full spectrum of study and were made better for it. Here are several books which I believe should be read and why:
Future of Freedom – Fareed Zakaria: I don’t care for the title but excellent book on modern day civics and the relationship between Democracy and Liberty. Mind blowing to me because it was the first time I came across the idea that Democracy and ‘Freedom’ isn’t the same thing. Many on the right and left take issue with Zakaria’s book – but I find myself in agreement that populism can be the enemy of Freedom and often time it is the undemocratic structures which are vital to the maintenance of liberty.
On War – Carl Von Clauswitz: The I-Ching of War – and the first of my ‘On….’ books. Many military professional officers have an opinion about it but almost no one has actually read the damn thing. It is a difficult read, very Kantian in its presentation and it demands intellectual engagement – but when it clicks, nothing else on strategy will ever measure up. Mao Zedong admired the book so much that in 1938, he presented it to his Officers as a book to be studied.
The Landmark Thucyclides – Victor David Hanson: VDH has a negative reputation as being something of an ideologue and thus his reputation suffers. This is unfortunate because VDH is a first rate Greek and Classics professor and this version of the ‘History of the Peloponnesian Wars’ is the essential version of the story. It even has informative footnotes in the margin to explain certain things in the text. The History of the Peloponnesian Wars is one of the best war accounts of all time and has a little of EVERYTHING. Great power politics, battle sequences, heroism, villains, atrocity, PTSD and great speeches. The Athenian’s response to the citizens of Melos is straight out of ‘300’.
Meditations – Marcus Aurelius: This was the Roman’s Emperor’s personal diary to himself and considered one of the foundational documents of stoicism. Marcus spent all but 3 years of his 19 year reign on the campaign trail and Meditation talks a lot about service and duty, a fitting message for soldiers. Basic message: Life is hard. Suck it up, Cupcake, and do your duty.
Guns, Germs, and Steel – Jared Diamond: Jared Diamond is one of the most important writers alive and this book, along with ‘Collapse’, should be mandatory reading. I am taken with the concept of ‘Ecology’ and how everything resides in a system where single changes resonate in surprising ways – both constructive and destructive. The more I look at the myriad of problems in the world, the more I think Ecology is going to be vital to understanding what is really going on.
Clash of Civilizations – Samuel Huntington: Famous work by a powerful intellectual. The work is predicated on the notion that the world is divided into ‘cultural groups’ and those groups are inevitably doomed to compete and clash against each other. There are a lot of folks which hate this idea and criticize Huntington but like Malthus’s work, every year people feel compelled to debate it again – maybe the opposition rails against it because they desperately wish it weren’t true but are finding out Huntington was right.
Into Thin Air – Jon Krakuer: Riveting book about a mountain climbing expedition to Mount Everest in 1996 where eight people died. It is a book about a worst case scenario and instructive because it highlights the danger of overconfidence. At various points, I yelled at the book, ‘Turn back! What are you doing?’ but they kept going to their doom. Readable, gripping, and tragic – the lesson here is if you’re in the business of taking risks, make sure they are informed risks.
Blackhearts – Jim Fredericks: If I had to pick one book from my list which I would force my Cadets to read, it would be this one. It is a tale of an Infantry Company in Baghdad and the atrocity which some of their soldiers committed – the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl and her family. It is tough stuff but the writer was fair and this is no hatchet job. More than most books out there, this is a book about leadership and discipline and why those two commodities are so vitally important in a war zone. I could construct and entire class out of the lessons learned from this book.
Personal Memoirs of Ulysses Grant – Ulyssess S Grant: The personal memoirs of the greatest General this country has produced. In my opinion, Grant was the most American of our great Generals and one of the most authentic and sympathetic. He was a failure at most everything in his life and utterly unremarkable – but when his moment came, he was exactly what was needed. Chapter 16 of his book should be required reading for every American.
The Sayyid Qutb Reader – Albert Bergesen: I am often flabbergasted when I run across people who despite the fact we have been at war with Jihadists for 14 years, hardly know anything about them – people whose conception of the enemy is Fox News talking point deep. Qutb is considered the intellectual father of modern Jihadist thought – Osama Bin Laden was a huge fan. Qutb’s themes underpin almost all of the Jihadist messages you see today and this work is a good place to start unpacking their messages. It is possible to understand something without condoning it.
On Guerilla War – Mao Zedong: If you have not read this book, then you are not armed to discuss insurgency/counterinsurgency in any sort of truly intellectual fashion. Mao had this shit figured out. I dare anyone to read it and tell me it doesn’t apply today. It is a guidebook to a people’s revolution which actually succeeded. I don’t know if the Taliban have read it but given how they have evolved over the years in Afghanistan, I tend to think they might have.
Revenge of Geography – Robert Kaplan: Long time geography, travel, and world affairs writer. He actually goes to the places he writes about and writes with a lyrical and descriptive air. He is adept at fusing geographical considerations with the history of an area and extrapolating forward. Personally, one of the most powerful ideas I got from him was the east-west ‘layer cake’ demographics of West Africa and how the north-south colonial borders predicated on the rivers dooms most of the nations in the region to instability.
The Civil War – Shelby Foote: This is the American Iliad. I personally believe that the United States we live in today was forged not in the American Revolution, but in the US Civil War. There are some out there who believe that McPherson’s single volume Civil War history is the best and mock Shelby Foote’s sentimental and lyrical prose. I disagree – like the Gibbon’s ‘Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire’, the Civil War was sufficiently epic that it demands a story told around the fire, not a mere recitation. Yes, it is very long. Pick three summers and read one volume per.
The Philippine War – Brian Linn: One of America’s forgotten conflicts. Unfortunate because so much of what happened in America’s post Spanish-American war occupation of the Philippines tracked with our experiences in Iraq. The war lasted for 14 years and it was a brutal guerilla war fought with tactics which would be utterly shocking – remember a lot of the officers involved gained their experience in the Indian Wars and fought in similar fashion. I would like to go back in a time machine and make every decision maker in 2002 read this book. It would have shattered a lot of the ‘logic’ that was going around in those days.
On Combat – Dave Grossman: Violence is the natural state of humanity, but centuries of progress and civilization have conditioned large segments of people towards finding killing abhorrent. That is a good thing and an achievement to be applauded – except for when it is not, like when you are on the battlefield. This book paired with his earlier work ‘On Killing’ are serious studies on the psychology and physiology of killing and violence. It is not a polite conversation, but a necessary one for those who deal with this subject.
Starship Troopers – Robert Heinlein: This remains one of my favorite classic science fiction books of all time. Come for the amazing action sequences – but stay for the lessons on violence and civics. This book has been criticized as glorifying a fascist future dominated by a militaristic society but I think most of us are smart enough to not buy that line. This is a book about being invested in your society and a citizen’s responsibilities towards maintaining the hard won order. This is definitely one of those cases where you need to ignore the movie and read the book.
New Ideas from Dead Economists – Todd Buchholz: This is an odd book to have on the list and I came to it by accident. Glad I did because it is the most readable economics book ever and gives a great view on various economic theories out there and how they really apply. Not for the serious economist but don’t let it put you off – if you want to get the basics without having to go to school, you could do worse than this book.
Lords of Discipline – Pat Conroy: Conroy is a national treasure and this is my favorite book of his. It is about a Cadet in Southern Military College (modeled after a fictionalized version of the Citadel) during desegregation – and the hero of the story is an Irish Catholic so it has that going for it also. It is a story about fairness, integrity, bravery and humanity and much more so than facile morality tales like ‘Once an Eagle’ – this is the book which should be required reading for young men and women getting ready to become leaders. I cannot recommend it enough.
The Economic Consequences of Peace – John Maynard Keynes: One of two oddball books on my list, this is one of the best ‘intelligence’ books out there even though it has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence at all. Keynes was one of the British negotiators during the Treaty of Versailles. He was vehement in his assertion that the peace treaty was way to brutal on Germany and wrote this book in response. Though it is short and dense, it is eerily prescient in describing everything that would happen in Germany should these harsh conditions be imposed on Germany – in short, he predicted the conditions leading up to World War 2 – “But who can say how much is endurable, or in what direction men will seek at last to escape from their misfortunes?” This is what strategic predictive analysis looks like and given the criticism he could have took for writing it, what intellectual bravery looks like.
People’s History of the United States – Howard Zinn: True story, several years ago I got a donated copy of this book from the post library – not knowing anything about it at all. I had it on my desk unopened when my Boss walked in and seeing it there, got very upset and berated me for being ignorant and took the book away from me. This started by life-long obsession with this book and I have owned a copy of it ever since. This is a controversial book – a retelling of American history from the viewpoint of the ‘oppressed’ which is not at all complimentary of this nation. I disagree with lots of what is written in this book but I do love it so because it challenges assumptions and the mythos of the country and causes one to actually question and explore. In my explorations, I found that Zinn is full of shit on many points – and absolutely right on others. This book taught me two things – 1) Go discover the truth for yourself and 2) Telling a person they can’t read something is a surefire way to get them to read it. I think that’s a a pretty good life lesson for everyone.
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