Future Reading: Strategic Studies

In early July, I posted about my potential 2016 reading goals. I've spent some time identifying categories of books that I want to read over the next few years, so I'll handle these various categories in a series of upcoming posts, starting with strategy.

As I've discussed in great detail, I spent some of 2012 and all of 2013 in Scotland and received my Master of Science (with Distinction) in Strategic Studies from the University of Aberdeen. I've always been interested in military topics, and that course of study helped me to simultaneously expand and focus that interest. While I ready very voraciously before, during, and after my courses of instruction, there were a handful of books I never got around to reading. There are a few more that I'd like to reread. Other books have come up either before or since that course of study. They're listed (and annotated) below.

Bleeding Talent: How the US Military Mismanages Great Leaders and Why It's Time for a Revolution by Tim Kane: This is actually on my 2015 reading list, so I'll let that entry stand.

Cables from Kabul: The Inside Story of the West's Afghanistan Campaign by Sherard Cowper Coles: The author was the British envoy to Afghanistan. This book was added to the 2012-'13 list after I'd already started reading, so I got a copy, but never had a chance to read it. My buddy, CN Constable, says that it's pretty dry material.

Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force by Robert M. Farley: This is also on my 2015 reading list. Parts of the author's case were flawless, and other parts were pretty pedantic and convoluted. If you're going to read this book, do yourself a favor and read it alongside Elinor Sloan's book, listed below.

History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides: I actually found my old Penguin Classic paperback of this book during a recent visit to my storage unit back home. This has been on my list for years due to my study of ancient history, and since it's considered the founding work of both history and strategy, it's time to read it. Once I finish my effort to read Clausewitz's entire volume, I'll transition to Thucydides.

The Influence of Sea Power on History by A.T. Mahan: This is considered the seminal work of naval strategy, and was recommended to me during my days as a Naval ROTC midshipman (and possibly in by my AP US History teacher in high school?).

International Law and the Use of Force by Christine Gray: This was one of the books that was assigned to familiarize students with the Strategic Studies and International Law option. I may or may not make it a priority to read this one.

MCDP 1-1 Strategy: The Marine Corps' MCDP 1: Warfighting is mostly a blatant (albeit liberally footnoted) condensation of Clausewitz. I suspect that this will be similar, but it's worth my time to read. The Marine Corps tends to do better than the Army, who don't even seem to have borrowed writing a doctrinal publication about strategy in the first place.

Modern Military Strategy: An Introduction by Elinor C. Sloan: I want to reread a couple of chapters of this book, particularly the chapter about the "Revolution in Military Affairs". Sloan has another book about precisely that topic that may be added to this list.

Modern Strategy by Colin S. Gray: I read Colin Gray's Another Bloody Century prior to my departure for Aberdeen, and I've quoted this particular book liberally in several items I've written, but it's worth my time to slog through the whole thing.

On War by Carl von Clausewitz: As I've noted elsewhere, I'm currently in the process of reading this epic work, which is the basis for modern strategic thought. Some of it has been difficult to digest, but much of it has been entirely relevant to the conduct of contemporary warfare.

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli: I read this in college, and since it's short, I want to reread it. Machiavelli is described as a notorious cynic, but his writings remain relevant to this day.

Strategic Studies: A Reader by Thomas Mahnken and Joseph A. Maiolo: This was the first book that I started reading back in early 2012 (late 2011?), but I only made it past the first few chapters. I think they have a new edition out, but I'm not sure how much was actually updated. It's a collection of essays, some of them pretty dated, but all of them relevant to the academic discipline of strategic studies.

Strategy in the Contemporary World by James J. Wirtz, Colin S. Gray, and John Baylis: This was meant to be our primary textbook in Aberdeen, but I never read more than a few pages of it. I'd like to remedy that.

The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy by Lawrence Freedman: I read this in 2012, and it was one of the more difficult books because Freedman divides it up by concept, rather than working chronologically. Now that I've completed my Strategic Nuclear Doctrine course, and given that I'm hoping to write about some nuclear issues in the Middle East, I think it would be good to review this one.

The Return of History and the End of Dreams by Robert Kagan: I have an audiobook of this one, and I'd like to give that audiobook a few evenings to refresh my memory. It's dated, but a lot of it is still relevant.

Thinking About Nuclear Weapons: Principles, Problems and Prospects by Michael Quinlan: This book was much shorter and easier to wrap my head around than Freedman's book. Again, my interest in strategic nuclear doctrine recommends a refresher read of this one.

More to come.

OGHAP: The Epic Great War Timeline

While studying for my MSc in Strategic Studies at the University of Aberdeen, I wrote my in-class essay for my course in Strategic Theory on the following prompt: "Explain why and how the conduct of war was transformed between 1815 and 1914." My preparations included developing a timeline of armament, geopolitical, military, sociocultural, technical, and diplomatic (treaty) developments from Waterloo to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. When I came to the realization that I'd be writing a book about the First World War, I dug that note sheet out and used it to begin developing a timeline of dates relevant to the Great War.

Initially, I was only tracking the dates, events, and which of the aforementioned categories they fell into. As I began researching the early battles on the Western Front, I tried to categorize engagements that were subsets of the Battle of the Frontiers, the Great Retreat, the Race to the Sea. As the list began to balloon in scope, the data quickly became prohibitively unruly, so I decided to organize it - and if I was going to reorganize it, I might as well expand it, right? I re-coded the dates into a "YYYY//MM//DD" format for easier chronological sorting. I also added some additional categories: theater; campaign; whether the military events are ground, naval, or amphibious in nature; and whether the British Expeditionary Force, British Imperial Forces, or neither took place in the engagement. Where relevant, I also track the Wikipedia entry for a given event or topic - I know, boo, hiss, Wikipedia, but it can be useful if you know what you're doing.

Having initially kept the timeline in my .txt manuscript, the expansion made it too unruly for that format. Porting it over into Excel has made the it much easier to manage the data, and Excel allows me to manipulate that data so that I can clump it together for easier use. It ended up being a massive undertaking, and it's still not complete, but I consider it an investment of time that will ultimately make my effort to document the war more efficient in the long run. I can also take pride in the fact that I've amalgamated a variety of sources to create a fairly authoritative timeline of the conflict. Maybe it will have some use beyond OGHAP? Only time will tell.

OGHAP: Primary Sources

When I was studying history as an undergrad, one of my professors was a borderline deranged lunatic on the topic of primary sources. For the uninitiated, primary sources are pieces of historical evidence that constitute eyewitness or participant accounts. If you submitted a paper to him (I think I submitted a total of four) that didn't rest largely on the testimony of primary sources, you were going to have a bad time. As I've researched the service of the Great War Orcadian Gordon Highlanders, I've found myself making use of multiple primary sources.

Medal index cards are often the only remaining official record of a particular soldier's service. (Most First World War personnel service records were destroyed in the Blitz.) My contact in Orkney has diligently assisted me in identifying and procuring the medal cards for the soldiers in question. A few months ago, the BBC published this guide, which includes a guide to reading a medal card. These documents have been extremely valuable in establishing or confirming some basic facts about the various Orcadian Gordon Highlanders.

Earlier this year, I discussed my efforts to procure soldiers' wills for seven Great War Orcadian Gordon Highlanders from the National Archives of Scotland. Since I wrote that post, my contact back in Orkney discovered several additional Orcadian Gordon Highlanders, and one has a will. My good buddy, CN Constable, has agreed to get it for me since the last effort took about a month and cost far more than it needed to.

The United Kingdom's National Archives (known colloquially as "Kew") are releasing and/or digitizing many documents for the Great War's centenary. One such effort is Operation War Diary, about which I learned a couple of months ago from one of War on the Rocks' (W)archives posts. (Here's more information about Operation War Diary.) Since information about many of the Orcadian Gordons is so sparse, I thought that this might be a good way to find information about the various battalions of the Gordon Highlanders, and possibly even about individual Orcadian Gordon Highlanders from my own roster. I put off participating in OWD until I had some time, at which point I discovered that none of the diaries available for tagging pertain to the Gordon Highlanders. However, Kew has a total of thirty-eight individual war diaries, ranging in length from about twelve pages to nearly six hundred. I expect to procure these records in the near future. The National Archives has a good webinar (also available, albeit less illustrative, as a podcast) about how to search for and correlate the various documents available in the archives for the purposes of historical research. I'm not sure I'll have need for more than medal cards and war diaries, but it might be interesting to see what additional resources might be available to allow me to continue researching this and related topics in the future.

I've worked with primary sources before, but this has been my first opportunity to do much archival history. I have to say, I'm really enjoying it, and once I get the book published I may see if my undergraduate alma mater might be interested in having me out to lecture about my experiences doing historical research outside of academia.

Reading in 2015: Mid-Year Update

I recently posted about my progress on my 2015 reading goals. Since I'm doing so well in this endeavour, to the tune of probably exceeding my goals, I'm taking the next logical step by formulating insanely ambitious reading goals for subsequent years that I have no chance whatsoever of actually completing.

One author whose work I enjoyed in high school and college was the late Michael Crichton. Like many young people, I started with Jurassic Park, and continued with (in no particular order): Eaters of the Dead/The 13th Warrior, Congo, Sphere, Rising Sun, Disclosure, The Lost World, and Airframe. There are a number of Crichton's novels that I have yet to read, and I'd like to remedy that. I expect to forego the thrillers that the young Crichton wrote under the pseudonym "John Lange". That leaves some of his older works, and some of his later works: The Andromeda Strain, The Terminal Man, The Great Train Robbery, Timeline, Prey, State of Fear, Next, Pirate Latitudes, and Micro.

That's nine books, and while it might be fun to follow the nine books I'm likely to read this year with nine books by a single author, I suspect that it would get monotonous, and I have other priorities to satisfy as well. So, what other categories am I considering?

Still in the leisure category, I also read a number of Ian Fleming's classic James Bond novels during and after my undergraduate years. I still have yet to read For Your Eyes Only, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, The Man With the Golden Gun, The Spy Who Loved Me, Thunderball, and You Only Live Twice. One of these, For Your Eyes Only, is a collection of short stories that was combined with Octopussy and The Living Daylights into Quantum of Solace in 2008, to coincide with the release of what may have been the worst Bond film ever made. I already read the latter collection around 2006, and I have the Quantum of Solace volume, so I'll just read those stories from that particular volume. Otherwise, I'll try to salt these into the mix along with the Crichton novels.

Aside from these two authors, I hope to read a few other books. One of these is Armor by John Steakley, which has been highly recommended to me for years, and which I attempted to read in 2014. Another is Animal Farm by George Orwell, which I also started reading years ago and only ever got a few pages into - maybe on a plane? I don't remember.

While I was in Scotland, I may have gotten about a quarter of the way into The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, and I'd love to finish it at some point. I've also spent years trying to get through the audiobook of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, and attempted to listen to Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island while on a road trip to the East Coast in 2014. Those may be good bedtime reading/listening projects for the winter months of 2015/'16.

As I continue to identify categories and books within those categories, I'll continue posting about it.

Reading in 2015 Update

We're nearly halfway through 2015, and I'm more than halfway through my goal of reading eight books in 2015. Thus far, I've finished five books: Cyber War Will Not Take Place by Thomas Rid, Warlords of Oman by P.S. Allfree, Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force by Robert M. Farley, and The Martian by Andy Weir, Churchill's First War: Young Winston at War with the Afghans by Con Coughlin. I started the first couple of books in 2014, so I should probably read a ninth book just for good measure.

The remaining books on my 2015 list are Bleeding Talent: How the US Military Mismanages Great Leaders and Why It's Time for a Revolution by Tim Kane, Bomb: The Race to Build--and Steal--the World's Most Dangerous Weapon by Steve Sheinkin, and Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa by Michael Totten. That would put me up to eight. However, there may be a couple of changes. The original plan was to read Sheinkin's book with Lady Jaye as part of a program at her school, but we never got around to reading it during the school year, so it may get shelved for the time being. I also began reading The Devil's Sandbox: With the 2nd Battalion, 162nd Infantry at War in Iraq by John Bruning during a recent trip. I've intended to read this for about a decade, I've had it on my Kindle for two years, and I'm finally getting around to reading it. I retain the hope of finishing On War by Carl von Clausewitz and The Design and Evaluation of Physical Protection Systems by Mary Lynn Garcia this year. Other potential supplements include The Story of the Malakand Field Force by Winston Churchill (as a follow-up to Coughlin's book), and Where the West Ends by Michael Totten (as a supplement to Tower of the Sun).

I typically underperform on this particular goal, but being more than halfway through with around half of the year yet to go is encouraging.

Another Container Home

Hey, it's another blurb about another shipping container home!

Saloons in the Gulf

A couple of weeks ago, I saw an article in the Kuwait Times entitled When a Saloon Isn't. As the author rightly notes:

The word ‘saloon’ to an American immediately conjures up images of the Old West, of John Wayne movies and gun fights at the OK Corral. Watch any of the Hollywood Westerns from the 1950s and 1960s and you will see the word ‘saloon’ flash across the screen each time Gary Cooper or Clint Eastwood walked into a bar. Saloons have a very rough, low reputation. They are the places where cowboys caroused, swilled beer and mingled with saloon girls (aka prostitutes).

So it’s ironic whenever an American arrives in Kuwait that they find saloons on almost every corner - but not a drop of legal alcohol to drink.

When I lived in the Gulf, I also frequented a local "saloon", and went in on most of my days off to get my head shaved and my beard trimmed. Most of my favorite memories of my time in the Gulf are of being in that barber's chair, while some Pakistani guy with whom I could barely communicate held a blade to my scalp or my throat. (If we're being quite honest, that took some getting used to, but it was a pretty good experience for me.) Being able to read Arabic myself, I eventually got a good enough look at the little wood carving, but didn't know what it meant. So, when I saw the article, I was naturally intrigued. When you zoom in on the wood carving, you can see that it reads:

That's "صالون الفطيم", or "Saloon al Futtaim". As far as I can tell from some casual Googling, "al Futtaim" is a family name, but Wikipedia, the undisputed source of all knowledge, confirms that "saloon" is the South Asian word for a barber shop, potentially derived from the French "salon" or "sala". Isn't it interesting what you find out several years after the fact?

UPDATE: The Kuwait Times published another article about barber shops on Friday.