So little read...so much to say...

I didn't post on my reading in this space last year. I don't recall why. Perhaps it was laziness. Perhaps I'd had some of my illusions about the utility of what I tried to learn faced with an unpleasant reality. Perhaps I was simply tired. In any case, I look back at 2018 and see some things I wish I'd seen in 2019.

I can see reading in 2018 focused on the job I held at the time: learn as much as you can about a topic, get shifted to another project, and try again. That was...fun. I can see some effort at professional development. I can see a turn to the unexpected (and unpleasant) news of a new job on a new continent and an effort to wrestle with that new challenge. I also see some secondary passion, some general interest, and some frivolity.

It's odd to look back on 2018 (and previous years) in my reading and compare the effort and rationale to this year. The long commutes with time to read and reflect have been traded for longer hours with neither time to read nor reflect...for "reasons." (So. Many. Reasons.) The idea that a book I read might matter in how I perform by duties has been traded for the knowledge that this matters very little to anyone around or above me: "That's not your job."

So, I read a lot less this year than last.* In the end, that's not a tragedy. I read MUCH less that anyone might construe as having anything to do with my current assignment. That's a tragedy, I think...but I'm the only one. I read a great deal more poetry than in recent years, and that is NOT a tragedy. I read some fiction--both outstanding art and delightful pablum and at least one title combining the two--but I wonder at why in some cases. I read a few titles driven by my interest in Africa, an interest difficult to maintain in the face of circumstance; I regret none, and I wish I'd read more...but this is what the coming year is for. I read several books driven by a desire to understand the things I see and the places I go in the place I live; I've been lucky in those titles, and I hope to remain so as I frequent Amazon more often than I should...and less often than I'd like.

I wonder if I should weigh in on the best and worst of what I read this year, but in the aggregate I find myself thinking, "It depends." Some were extraordinary, and some were not...but opinions vary. Some were a waste...but might not be for someone else. From some I leaned more than expected...and others might learn nothing. Since I'm thinking about my reading and not reviewing books, I'll not weigh in on specific titles here. Maybe I'll do that elsewhere...and I'm happy to discuss....but not today.

In the end, this was a year too random, I think. (It didn't begin that way, but it and I were overcome.) There were gems, but they were uncovered as part of a drunkard's walk rather than a deliberate search. While there is something to be said for the former and the possibility of serendipity, room for serendipity doesn't make sense of the books I've read and the time I've spent.

The part of this year that raises the greatest distress: I've read some...I've thought a bit...and I've written nothing. (To be fair, some of the compensations in traveling Europe have been lovely.) Perhaps I had nothing to say...but in reading the things some think they have to say, this may be doing myself a disservice. Perhaps I focused more on others than on me...and that may be a good thing. Perhaps I lack the time...but this is the excuse too easy to offer. Perhaps I lack the discipline...and this is my new fear. The latter issues are to one degree or another within my control, however.

The secret to solving these problems of reading, thinking, and writing--if problems they are--may be in a simple commitment to writing. If the wish is to write, once must write. And if the wish is for direction; I hold with Scharnhorst:

"The drafting of a report reveals gaps in knowledge, whether in various disciplines, in presentation, or in language. The drafting of a short essay is sometimes more useful to the writer than the reading of a thick book. — These are known truths."

Looking back at the clumsiness of the preceding suggests that I need practice in the craft...and an editor. I can do better this coming year. It remains to be seen if I shall.

* A note on method is perhaps worthwhile. I include only those work read from end to end for the first time. I do not include books previously read, and I do not include those books I've "gutted," reading introductions and conclusions, extracting the minimum necessary content to place the work in a broader literature as fast as possible. I can do this, and I have done this; it's not wrong, but I'm doing a different kind of virtue signalling, I suppose. I also do not include audio books; that's a separate debate in which I don't intend to engage here.

"When I get a little money I buy books..."

For reasons I can't explain, I've been pondering Erasmus lately...

Read

“When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.”

This excerpt, even if the translation abuses the original text a bit, captures some of my own personal pathology when it comes to books. This year, though, the pathology showed an interesting pattern, with surges in subject matter…and a certain amount of consistency in the escape sought from those surges.

The last half of Air War College saw an emphasis on wargaming as I wrestled with the final paper for that program. This blended into reading on Africa as a supplement to and continuation of the Regional and Cultural Studies program in which I was lucky enough to take part. (I say luck because it was far from my first choice, but in retrospect I’m glad and grateful an accident placed me there.) I’ve tried to continue the latter study, but my success there has been mixed, in no small measure because of new surges driven by where I landed following War College, a job driven by surges of “learn all you can about a subject as fast as you can…then change subjects.” This job led from Scales on War—a terrible yet terribly effective book that has displaced Ghost Fleet in the position of worst piece of writing in my recent reading—and the problem of how the Department of Defense invests in close-combat capabilities for the infantry to a brief flirtation with logistics and a longer affair with surprise, revolution, and diffusion of technological, organizational, and social disruptions in the military sphere. Through all that I managed to sneak a few works of fiction—some candy, some extraordinary, and some both—a little (or more than a little) in the way of birding and birdy books, and a bit of serendipity—including the best book I read this year, Jill Lepore’s The Name of War.

In the end, the hit rate on good work was surprisingly high, with some truly fantastic books I’d happily read again or highly recommend to almost anyone (with the caveat that recommendations should always be personal and individual). Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, Girl at War, The Name of War, Queen’s Play, and Weapon of Choice, for example, were extraordinary,

I was also lucky to waste time on only a few stinkers with insufficient redeeming value to outweigh the horrors perpetrated, books I’d recommend to no one or recommend only as negative examples– Blindside, Fighting Power, Scales on War, and The Seventh Sense fall into that category. With almost any book, I could find something to criticize, I suppose, but with these I can find almost nothing to praise. Four of fifty-two is a ratio I’ll accept, though.

Think

“Do not be guilty of possessing a library of learned books while lacking learning yourself.”

This, I fear, has been my lot this year, especially since leaving school. I’ve had—or I’ve made and taken—too little opportunity to reflect and to synthesize. I’ve read a great deal, but what have I made of that reading? I’ve been to Africa, moved across the country, begun a new job, suffered some setbacks, and been exposed to a host of new people and ideas…but what have I made of that? I’m possessed of a library of learned books, but what have I learned. Am I lacking in learning? I fear I am. To mangle Thoreau, I’ve eaten many meals at this table, but what have they made me? I’m not certain, and that troubles me. It seems every year I resolve to do better in this regard, to find some balance…and every year I disappoint myself. Perhaps the coming year will be different. Perhaps.

Write

“The desire to write grows with writing.”

Many were the things I wrote this year for school…but the plans to turn those items into publications never came to fruition. Many were the possibilities discussed for writing down ideas important and interesting…but those have yet to happen. Many were the projects proposed for collaboration with people smarter than I…but I’ve mostly let those people down. I did manage to close the read-think-write loop and turn two books read into books reviewed, one nonfiction and one fiction, but that somehow feels like failure. Maybe it shouldn’t, but it does. A bright spot was #ReadingWomen and the one thing I’m especially glad to have written this year. Now, though, I look at what I’ve read this year in that light, and I wonder if I learned anything at all. Alas.

Looking Ahead

I’m not sure I wish I’d read more, but I do have some regrets about what I read. I was not without thought, but I wish I’d spent more time in reflection than I did. And while I did a bit of worthwhile writing (and am rather pleased with the small part I played in #ReadingWomen), I did not do nearly as much as I expected or should.

Still, there is another year before me, and to borrow a bit of solace from a favorite literary character:

“Isn't it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?“

"...they have made me."

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson

As many do this time of year, I find myself reflecting on the past and contemplating the future. I reflect not to lament, but to understand how I came to be who I am and where I am, a product of where and who I was and the space between then and now. Like a sequence of meals I cannot remember and that individually did little but get me from day to day, the daily record has led me here. Where, though, will I steer the ship of personal growth next?

As Francis Bacon said, "Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man." And this injunction to read, think, and write forms, as ever, the reflective rubric I use to help me make sense of it all.

Read

If there is one thing this year held for me, it was reading. At the close of last year, I said of my reading choices that "I wandered into wandering." I'd like to say I learned from that and my reading was broad by choice or as broad as I planned for it to be, but neither would be an accurate representation of the list below. In many ways, this remained a year of happenstance and wandering, at least until I arrived at Air War College where wandering ended and the study of "grand strategy" began. (I rather wish that six months in I had a definitive definition of grand strategy, but I'm slowly coming to terms with the notion that studying the history of grand strategy is and will likely remain semiological rather than onomasiological, to borrow a characterization from Lukas Milevski and a book that will show up in my list for next year.)

I worked hard to allow a little whimsy, though, hearing the ever-wise Francis Bacon whispering in my ear that sometimes "studies serve for delight," and I was surprised to discover as a result a book that made me laugh out loud (and, as a staff officer and strategist, occasionally wish to weep) in Alex Finley's Victor in the Rubble. And when in doubt as to what might amuse, interest, or help you find your center, even if only for a few hundred pages, always trust the friends who know you best. That led me to some brilliant fiction in authors such as Dorothy Dunnett and Sigrid Undset. That success was balanced by some poor decisions on my part, though--I have no idea what possessed me to pick up Dan Brown's Inferno in an airport and then foolishly fail to put it aside when I realized what a mistake I'd made. Then there was the Air War College, with it's highlights and lowlights.

In the end, I read a lot that was new to me. (I'm aware that I've not read as much as many others, but treating this problem of growth as a competition seems silly at best and dangerous at worst, so I try to measure myself against others only by height, as the immortal Ty Webb once said). As I hoped, I read some fiction, some poetry, and some things that just happened upon me; I read instrumentally; I read because it was assigned; and I read for no reason at all. I read innumerable draft articles for The Strategy Bridge. (That's an exaggeration, of course. I suppose there were something like 300 articles and reviews in that reading and a handful of references/citations for each article. The same might be said for Air War College, with the articles and supplemental reading that have gone into it.) The bottom line is clear, though. I read a lot. It feels somehow as if it wasn't enough, though, and in many ways it feels as if it wasn't the right reading. But, since I don't really know what the right reading was, perhaps I'm simply restless in my search to know all of the things. And like the meals I can't remember, these books are now a part of me.

Think

Reading is easy. Making sense of the reading we do--or anything we do--is hard. It is in the latter sense that I feel a certain despondence. Some of the books I read were great. Many were good. A few were a waste. At least none were Ghost Fleet, though. (The Dan Brown nonsense I picked up in an airport came within a nose, but I just can't give it pride of position.)

"The Thinker," Auguste Rodin

But it is in this area that I feel the greatest loss this year. Whether it was command, a move, or a schedule enforced by curriculum and unsupported by discourse demanding thought, I wrestled with daily worry, and I wrestle in retrospect, over the possibility that I failed to think. I fear that I failed to ponder. I fear that I failed to evaluate and incorporate the new knowledge I absorbed so as to grow and move forward (or move at all). Again, it is Bacon whispering in my ear. I can hear his voice, or the voice I imagine, saying, "To spend too much time in studies is sloth." Is that what this year has been, despite my best intentions? I fear it is so, at least if judged in the context of deliberate personal development. The failure here is mine, I suppose. I'm surrounded by iron with which to sharpen my countenance, and if I've not availed myself of that, I have no one to blame but myself.

For at least a part of 2017, the menu of reading, writing, and thinking  was single-minded and exogenously imposed, but I once again find myself hoping for room and committed to strategy in my approach to growth...and to a bit less time with my head down, a bit more time eyes open and looking around.

Write

If I thought too little this year, I wrote less. I wasn't absent from the world of productive letters, of course. (At least I hope I put those letters together productively.) For example, I produced a review of George Kennan's American Diplomacy that doesn't make me shiver with horror--though I wish I'd read Gaddis before writing the review. Mentioning this short review does raise the spectre of reviews I could and should have written, though. Alas. But I also collaborated on an article addressing a critical issue associated with an historic decision to open ground combat career fields to women. I wrote an introduction to a book of poetry of which I am proud (and tickled because of the books it led me to read, in particular The Holy or the Broken and The Hatred of Poetry). And, feeling an absence of thought and writing to create some coherence from my reading, I placed a special emphasis on recording something--anything--for each work I read. I imposed on my friends in creating some degree of Bacon's readiness and exactness from the tools and time available.

The résumé above left me in momentary despair as I wrote it, and I even felt a kind of upset at having intruded on my friends with my continuing experiment in Facebook micro-blogging. (I don't feel enough upset to cease and desist, though, and for that I apologize in advance for 2017.)

Then I considered all the things others wrote of which I am a part, from which I will never derive nor seek credit, and yet through which I have this year made a difference in the lives of individuals and shaped, in some small way, the verses of the powerful play. Even if the verse isn't mine, I've learned--internalized in an indelible and powerful way--that helping someone to contribute their own is a contribution that leaves me genuinely fulfilled. This is the thing I love most about my involvement with the evolving and powerful project that is The Strategy Bridge.

Next

Last year I lamented a lack of balance. In some ways I've remedied that; in others I've lapsed. Balance, indeed, but not the balance for which I'd hoped. We all have our windmills, but I hope for a new balance in my reading, thinking, and writing...and in relationships with the people who make it possible for me to read, think, and write.

Reading Lists

Perhaps I should be ashamed of "re-blogging" an item from Tom Ricks' blog on Foreign Policy, but I can never resist a new reading list.  You'll find the reading recommended by the UK's Chief of Defence Staff here.  Of this list, he writes,

"I cannot predict the future. But I can predict that it will test our intellectual mettle. We will have to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity, to decide how best to achieve the necessary outcomes, and to persuade others of the need to act in a timely and effective fashion. We will have to do this in ways that reflect and advance our national interest and make best use of the resources that we are provided with.  This will increasingly require a breadth and depth of contextual understanding, an ability to interpret the lessons of history, agile and creative thinking, and a dedicated professional approach to all that we do, be that on operations or in the office. This web page is designed to tempt readers into developing such attributes. It contains lists of books and articles that will provide intellectual stimulus for those who work in or with Defence, be they military or civilian."

This is not necessarily the most original sentiment, but it is perhaps as close to truth as one can get (at least in this regard).  Mooch has started a nice list here (of both required and interesting reading), but I wonder...

• What is NOT on these lists (the UK's and Mooch's) that should be?
• What IS on the list that should not be?  Why?
• What is it that shapes our views on what comprises the "right" list of recommended reading?  For analysts?  For military professionals?

Essentially--in the spirit of the first element of "read, think, write"--I wonder what our cannon is, what it should be, and why.

The Revenge of Geography

This post is a perhaps a bit outside the norm for an analysis forum--depending, I suppose, on how one defines "discussions in the analysis realm"--but I just finished reading Robert Kaplan's most recent book, The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Is About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate, and I couldn't resist sharing.  (If the urge to read the full work doesn't consume you, an article length treatment published in Foreign Policy is available here.)

Amazon summarizes the book as building "on the insights, discoveries, and theories of great geographers and geopolitical thinkers of the near and distant past to look back at critical pivots in history and then to look forward at the evolving global scene."  These great geographers and geopolitical thinkers include people to admire (Sir Halford Mackinder whose Democratic Ideals and Reality should be required reading for every policy analyst; Alfred Thayer Mahan; Sir Julian Corbett; Nicholas Spykman, etc.) and some, such as Karl Haushofer, the geopolitician of Nazism, for whom the opposite sentiment will dominate.  This is a fairly long-winded way of saying that the first half of Kaplan's work is very much a book-report regurgitating the ideas of others.  While I happen to prefer reading the primary sources (see the seminal strategic works of Mahan and Corbett, for example, that are available online here and here through the genius of Project Gutenberg) Kaplan's summary is worth reading as an introduction.  With this introduction then in hand...

..the second half of the book then applies the principles of geopolitics to Europe, Russia, China, India, Iran, the rest of the Middle East and the former Ottoman Empire, and to the relationship between the United States and Mexico.  It's almost as if the rest of the book is a prelude to the central point Kaplan wishes to make regarding U.S. grand strategy vis-a-vis our "failing" neighbor to the south.  (This last comes with shades of George Friedman's work in The Next 100 Years, and makes one wonder if Kaplan's STRATFOR connection is showing through.)  This discussion addresses the geopolitical motives for each of the regions and states described, illuminates the geopolitical seams along which conflict may concentrate, and makes implicit and explicit suggestions regarding U.S. policy based on these geopolitical discussions.

So, why do I offer all this up?  First, it's refreshing to see the unfairly maligned--and, in my opinion, very powerful--discipline of geopolitics given a hearing, especially from a voice likely to resonate in policy circles.  Second, in the world of force structure analysis (the world in which I was analytically raised) these issues seem to matter a great deal.  Identifying the potential (dare one say likely?) contexts and causes of future conflict matters in determinations of force posture (e.g., the pivot to Asia that we're not supposed to call a pivot), basing, capability requirements, etc., has obvious value in my little world.  These questions can be viewed absent considerations of geopolitics, of course, but the additional rigorous analytic lens these considerations offer seems quite powerful (and multiple lenses is usually best, it seems, to avoid being trapped by our assumptions).

What thinkest thou?

Merf