President Donald Trump’s pick to head the national security council, Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, outlined his reading list for military professionals in a 2013 interview with the McKinsey company.
The reading list was originally distributed by Thomas Ricks of Foreign Policy and is organized by subject matter. McMaster preceded the list saying: “we need leaders who can adapt and innovate. As Sir Michael Howard has said—and I’m paraphrasing—we’re never going to get the problem of future war precisely right. The key is to not be so far off the mark that you can’t adapt once the real demands of combat reveal themselves, and you need leaders who can adapt rapidly to unforeseen circumstances. They need to be able retain the initiative as well as sustain the types of campaigns that require a broad range of capabilities—rule of law, development of indigenous forces, and military support for governance, for example.”
General grounding
There are several essential reads for professionals involved in military affairs:
Carl von Clausewitz, On War. The author uses a dialectical approach to understanding war without being prescriptive.
Michael Howard, War in European History. This book is excellent, as is anything by this author.
Elting Morison, Men, Machines, and Modern Times. The author discusses the limitations of emerging technologies—specifically, he argues that instead of taming our environment, technology has further complicated it.
Williamson Murray, The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War. This book helps connect military action to strategy.
Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War. The Greek historian shows that the drivers of war—fear, honor, self-interest—haven’t changed over time.
Innovation and the world wars
Much has been written about World War I, World War II, and the interwar period—and about how these events changed the nature of war. The following are favorites:
Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat
Robert A. Doughty, The Breaking Point: Sedan and the Fall of France, 1940, and Pyrrhic Victory: French Strategy and Operations in the Great War
Timothy T. Lupfer, Dynamics of Doctrine: The Changes in German Tactical Doctrine During the First World War
Williamson Murray, Military Innovation in the Interwar Period
Memoirs and biographies
It is important to understand how leaders have adapted and thought about war and warfare across their careers. The Autobiography of General Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs of the Civil War is perhaps the best war memoir ever written. The following are some other significant titles:
Carlo D’Este, Patton: A Genius for War
David Fraser, Knight’s Cross: A Life of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel
Matthew B. Ridgway, The Korean War
Selected histories of military campaigns
For selected histories of wars and military campaigns, the following are some of my favorites; I’ve also included recommendations on contemporary threats:
Ancient warfare
Donald Kagan, The Peloponnesian War
Seven Years’ War
Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766
The American military profession and the American Revolution
David Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Crossing
Don Higginbotham, George Washington and the American Military Tradition and The War of American Independence
Civil War
James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
Franco–Prussian War
Michael Howard, The Franco–Prussian War: The German Invasion of France 1870–1871
World War II
Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942–1943; The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943–1944; and the forthcoming The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944–1945
Gerhard Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II
Korean War
T. R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War
David Halberstam, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War
Vietnam War
Eric Bergerud, Red Thunder, Tropic Lightning: The World of a Combat Division in Vietnam
Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway, We Were Soldiers Once . . . And Young: Ia Drang—The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam
Iraq
Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq and The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama
Afghanistan
Peter Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts, and the Failures of Great Powers
Contemporary threats to international security
Peter Bergen, The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al-Qaeda
Victor Cha, The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future
David Crist, The Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran
Bruce Riedel, Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America, and the Future of the Global Jihad
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