USSOCOM Commander’s Reading List 2017
07.08.2017 at 05:38am
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)
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.
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.
I enjoyed Fischer’s book very much. Paul Revere’s Ride, also by Fischer, is equally good. Lots of sourced background information added to the traditional stories with which we are familiar.