SWJ Book Review

SWJ Book Review of Jason Bohm’s "From the Cold War to ISIL: One Marine’s Journey".

This gripping, eyewitness narrative and unique, deeply researched analysis of one of the least known large battles at the height of the Vietnam War radically contradicts all the other misinformed and misinterpreted accounts of it. This book is well written containing extensive end notes to backstop assertions.

Lt. Col. Brendan Gallagher has dedicated much of his life to the study and practice of war. Through decades of soldiering on the battlefields that defined our modern era of war, Gallagher has experienced the various outcomes of war firsthand: victory, defeat and the excruciating in-between. Coupled with his extensive study on the topic, it is this experience that Gallagher offers as the foundation for his new book, "The Day After: Why America Wins the War but Loses the Peace".

One of the most impressive things about this book is its readability. Reading government reports is dry stuff. Yet here, Klare has carefully gleaned the Pentagon’s view of Climate Change from abstruse and difficult to come by reports to give us a highly readable 20,000-foot view of the literature. I read it leisurely in just over two days in my free time.

In the book "Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present", Max Boot provides an insightful look into conflicts where revolutionary movements and guerrilla forces out-maneuver and out-strategize conventional armies that are exceptionally larger.

In "Why American Loses Wars", Professor Donald Stoker, Fulbright Scholar and academic, persuasively argues warfare has changed over the last 75 years and the United States no longer knows how to approach war correctly. As a country, our over reliance on limited war and a failure to adequately conclude with them has left us incapable of winning, forever mired in endless wars.

Rick Atkinson's thorough research reveals a Continental Army that was often hapless, frightened, and under-resourced. It’s often terrified soldiers are led by the ineffectual, the self-interested, and the deceitful.

Historian and author, Stephen L. Harris, has written the definitive history of shared combat experience of the 3rd Infantry Division and the soldiers who fought in the Second Battle of the Marne in 1918. The American involvement in the First World War was minor compared to the French and British commitment. Yet, the American combat experience was equally demanding on the soldiers. Rock of the Marne detailed the recollection of the weeks and day leading into the Second Battle of the Marne.

"Understanding Human Trafficking" by Luz Nagle takes the reader into the sometimes arcane yet important legal world for a master lesson in how global and domestic actors can and will fight the scourge that is human trafficking.