I have previously read a lot of material on World War 2 codebreakers and the likes of Alan Turing and their critical work against Enigma and the invention of modern computing during that period. Of course, codebreaking and cryptography is not a new science and has been a critical part…
The Cuban Revolution was an earth-shattering event with huge consequences internationally, not just in Latin America, but further afield. I felt the impact myself whilst travelling across Scandinavia in 2005. I’d run out of clean underwear and, while scanning the aisles of a Göteborg department store, I came face to…
View More Guerrilla Heroico
At the end of World War 2, after, in particular, the disaster of the Holocaust becoming apparent, many leading Nazis were hunted down and brought to trial to face justice for war crimes. One of the main international trials, indeed the biggest international trial to date, occurred at Nuremburg in…
View More The Nuremburg Code 1947
What’s a grown 45 year old male doing reading a little Bosnian girl’s diary you might ask yourself. Well, it cropped up as a recommendation in a documentary on the war in the former Yugoslavia, a subject to which I have passionately researched from its genesis. The Balkans conflict is…
View More Review: Zlata’s Diary – A Child’s Life in Sarajevo – by Zlata Filipović
‘War and Peace’ needs no introduction. It holds its place in the minds of contemporary society as a literary classic. One cannot pick up a newspaper article on great books without a passing mention of Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece. Like other classical works such as the Bible, I think that their…
View More Review: War and Peace – by Leo Tolstoy
I love Apocalypse Now. It is one of my most favourite films. I learnt that apparently, Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ is the literary work that provides the basic narrative of the film. Apocalypse Now, however is set in war torn Vietnam, with the US Military hunting down an insane,…
View More Review: Heart of Darkness – by Joseph Conrad
This is one of the very best books I have ever read. It is up to date material and full of cutting edge military theory and ideas and I believe is critical essential reading for any politician or military personnel, especially those who conduct their employment in the NATO led…
View More Review: The Dragons and the Snakes – How The Rest Learned to Fight The West – by David Kilcullen
In addition to Sun Tzu’s Art of War, this book authored by Prussian officer Carl von Clausewitz is the quintessential classic book on military theory. The book (although this edition was only an abridged version) puts forward in detail theory for all elements of war, from politics to military leadership,…
View More Review: On War – by Carl von Clausewitz
David Kilcullen has had a few books included on my shelf recently. As a military expert on Guerrilla Warfare, I was thrilled to find this new book on the Colombian Civil War which he coauthors with a group of specialists who went on extensive field research around Colombia, with a…
View More Review: A Great Perhaps? Colombia: Conflict and Convergence – by Dickie Davis, David Kilcullen, Greg Mills and David Spencer
This book was written in 1990 and is thus a bit dated. The postscript announces the start of the first Gulf War after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Post World War 1 saw most of the current political boundaries drawn in the Near East or as we now most predominantly…
View More Review: The Near East Since The First World War – by M.E.Yapp
This is the second book that I have read by David Kilcullen. The author is a former Australian soldier and a senior advisor to the US Military in addition to being a leading theorist of modern warfare. This book looks deeply at the fundamental Islamic terrorist state ISIS. ISIS grew…
View More Review: Blood Year – Islamic State and the Failures of the War on Terror – by David Kilcullen
Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui are from a new generation of Chinese People’s Liberation Army soldiers. They have mused upon the situation of modern military affairs and developed this theoretical book on war to describe the status quo as it was around the turn of the Millenium. The book is…
View More Review: Unrestricted Warfare – Wake Up, America! China’s Master Plan to Destroy America
David Kilcullen is an experienced Australian military professional. He is a senior advisor to the US Military. In this book, Kilcullen describes the recent Western conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq as relative anomalies in the progress of future wars and conflict. He focus on the Urban, networked littoral. Giant coastal…
View More Review: Out of the Mountains – The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla – by David Kilcullen
This is the third Grillo installment that I have tackled and Ioan is an author who is a gritty investigative journalist who tends to put himself into quite dangerous situations in order to explore very controversial and often violent global subjects. Following on from Grillo’s groundbreaking work on Mexican cartels,…
View More Review: Blood, Gun, Money – How America Arms Gangs and Cartels – by Ioan Grillo
Although by the time I finally finished reading this book it was perhaps over a decade old and hence due the hi-tech nature of the subject, perhaps dated, I gained a lot of new knowledge about the robotics industry, technological progress in society and in particular, the application of robotics…
View More Review: Wired for War by P.W.Singer