Small Wars Journal

USSOCOM Commander’s Reading List 2017

Sat, 07/08/2017 - 1:38am

USSOCOM Commander’s Reading List 2017

Joint Special Operations University Library

Leadership in Complexity

  • Washington’s Crossing, by David Hackett Fischer (2006)
  • Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders, by L. David Marquet (2013)
  • Six Simple Rules: How to Manage Complexity without Getting Complicated, by Yves Morieux and Peter Tollman (2014)

Adapting to Uncertainty

  • Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder, Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2014)
  • Learning from the Octopus: How Secrets from Nature Can Help Us Fight Terrorist Attacks, Natural Disasters, and Disease, by Rafe Sagarin (2012)

Disruptive Technology

  • Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War, P.W. Singer and August Cole (2016)
  • 3D Printing Will Rock the World, by John Hornick (2015)
  • The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries, by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan (2015)

Perspectives and Emergence

  • Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World, by Tim Marshall (2016)
  • Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, by Peter Pomerantsev (2015)
  • Putinism: Russia and Its Future with the West, by Walter Laqueur (2015)
  • The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower, by Michael Pillsbury (2016)
  • The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa, by Deborah Brautigam (2011)
  • A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind, by Michael Axworthy (2016)
  • Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, by Barbara Demick (2010)
  • Special Operations from a Small State Perspective: Future Security Challenges, New Security Challenges, by Gunilla Eriksson and Ulrica Pettersson, editors (2017)

Comments

okcupid

Tue, 10/26/2021 - 11:17am

I enjoyed Fischer's book very much. <i>Paul Revere's Ride</i>, also by Fischer, is equally good. Lots of sourced background information added to the traditional stories with which we are familiar.

Granite_State

Sun, 07/09/2017 - 10:55pm

What happened to the study of history as the basis of the military profession? This looks like a lot of forgettable poli sci reads and the kind of books bankers read at airports.

Robert C. Jones

Sun, 07/09/2017 - 12:42am

I read a great deal to find small insights to help better understand the challenges we face and how to best shape/employ SOF in strategically effective ways.

But I doubt I will read any of the books on this list.