Army Chief of Staff – Cannonball Read 17

Army Chief of Staff Reading List

Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam by H.R. McMaster

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War by Paul Scharre

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 by Paul Kennedy

December 16, 2019 by thewheelbarrow Leave a Comment

I read all three of these books as they are on the Army Chief of Staff Reading List. That list is a bi-annual list the highest ranking member of the Army publishes for professional development. Sometimes the lists are highly curated and you can see the purpose and direction intended. Sometimes, they are just a huge collection of non-fiction books that people have been told to read for years. The current list has 120+ books and seems to have no defining theme. The books in […]

Chief of Staff Reading List #15-17

December 31, 2018 by thewheelbarrow Leave a Comment

Ok, this is crappy and I know it but I am finishing the cannonball. Last year I finished book 52 on the 31st but I was a dozen reviews behind. This year, I got to 64 books and I’m still behind on my reviews but I can get there and I read all of these books for the same reason and that is professional development at work which makes them inherently less interesting to those who do not share my profession. Anyway, here I go. […]

Chief of Staff Reading List #14

August 30, 2018 by thewheelbarrow Leave a Comment

So, if I am completely honest with myself, I read this book months ago and had to find a summary to jog my memory. Thus, I can’t say it was great but after reading the summary, I remember finding it interesting. Rise and Fall of Nations is another selection from the Army Chief of Staff reading list. I think I understand why it was added to the list but it really feels more like it was added because it’s the kind of book that people […]

Army Chief of Staff Reading List #13

May 22, 2018 by thewheelbarrow Leave a Comment

The Guns at Last Light is the finale of the Liberation Trilogy by Rick Atkinson, the first of which, An Army at Dawn, won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2003. The series encompasses the history of the United States activity in the European theater of World War II. An Army at Dawn is about the U.S. Military during the North Africa campaign. Book two, The Day of Battle, is about the the war in Italy and the Mediterranean; it is subtitled, The War in […]

Army Chief of Staff Reading List #12

May 10, 2018 by thewheelbarrow Leave a Comment

I usually do not wax poetic about public figures, especially those in politics. I try to remain objective which more often than not means that I am harsher in my judgments of things or people I like. I love Robert Gates and go out of my way to work with and for him. Knowing this, I read A Passion for Leadership trying hard to be objective about it. Even given my aforementioned predisposition towards such scenarios, I loved this book. I find Gates to be […]

Army Chief of Staff Reading List #9

March 31, 2018 by thewheelbarrow Leave a Comment

The Future of Power was written by the man who coined the term “soft power” in the 1980s and is an expert on foreign affairs. Joseph S. Nye Jr. first gained acclaim when he founded, with Robert Keohane, the idea of neoliberalism, as it relates to international relations. It is one of the two major approaches, with neorealism, that govern the field. Borrowing from the wikipedia entry, neoliberalism is “a school of thought which believes that states are, or at least should be, concerned first […]

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