Recommended books
We started a list of books (by no means final) that inspired us to think, discuss and argue among ourselves and with the authors . The guideline for picking the books is simple, no how to books, no leadership, management, operations for dummies. Naturally they cover our areas of interest, military topics, but the lessons they bring are far reaching. We started the list and will be adding more books and reviews as we go along (so come back from time to time to check whats new). Some of the books refer to the same events and provide a more rounded view of what relay happened.
we hope you enjoy.
The review and opinions in this section are the readers perspective, feel free to accept, argue, disagree and write us about it.
Books we like
An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943 Rick Atkinson
Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War Eliot Cohen & John Gooch
Commentary by:
1. Williamsom Murray2. Robert A. Doughty
There are in my mind two important chapter in the book. The first is the one dealing with the failure in Perl Harbor, in this chapter there is an attempt to quantify and assess the cause for the why and how events ended up the way they did. Its unique in the way that it recommends a research method for failure.
The second important chapter deals with the 1973 war in the middle east. As a student at the IDF Staff and Command College in the mid 80’s we studied this event in depth. Being exposed to more classified material than the writes on one hand and getting firsthand account from the players in the events (that where to some extant trying to cover their mistakes) we came to different conclusions. Later as the years went by more material became unclassified and it became evident that there was more to the story than meets the author’s eye. “Knowledge” can be dangerous when coming to conclusions in assessments of success and failure.
Even though I agree to many of Robert A. Doughty’s comments I still think its an important book and a reminder of how important it is to get an as balanced as possible view of events.
In all respects it’s a great read and a lesson of how important it is to get to the bottom of the events before judging not just in a historical perspective.
Command in War Martin Van Creveld
This book deals with the nature of command itself, and traces its development over two thousand years from ancient Greece to Vietnam. It treats a variety of topics such as commanding armies, staff organization and administration, communications methods and technologies, weaponry, and logistics. It analyzes the relationship between these topics and military strategy. Although vast changes have occurred in military thinking and technology, the one constant has been an endless search for certainty—certainty about the state and intentions of the enemy’s forces; certainty about the manifold factors that together constitute the environment in which war is fought, from the weather and terrain to radioactivity and the presence of chemical warfare agents; and certainty about the state, intentions, and activities of one’s own forces. The book concludes that progress in command has usually been achieved less by employing more advanced technologies than by finding ways to transcend the limitations of existing ones.
Chapter 7 carries a massage all leaders should be aware of.
Articales we like
1930s German Doctrine A Manifestation of Operational Art Tal Tovy, Ph.D.
Academics are still divided in defining the essence of German doctrine - the blitzkrieg. Was it a tactical doctrine that emerged as a response to technological advances, Or, was it a strategic doctrine? In this article Dr. Tal Tovy discusses the origins of this operational methodology trying to determine what came first the chicken or the egg.
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