National Security
These books are drawn from the Chester W. Nimitz Memorial Lectures in National Security Affairs, which each year brings a distinguished scholar, professional military person, or government official to Berkeley for a series of lectures on national security affairs.
The History and Success of American Generals
Thomas E. Ricks | $10 | Order Now!
Thomas E. Ricks, a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) sent several days at UC Berkeley and delivered two lectures. One focused on the history and success of American generals and why they were more successful in World War II than in Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq/Afghanistan. The second was a case study of leadership through the actions of American General Oliver Prince Smith, who was one of the Marine Corps great generals of recent times. Also included are question and answer sessions with midshipmen and cadets.
A Marine Officer's Perspective on Modern Warfare
Nathaniel C. Fick | $10 | Order Now!
Nathaniel C. Fick was appointed chief executive officer of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) in June 2009. He was previously the chief operating officer of CNAS and has been a fellow at the center since its founding in 2007.
Prior to joining CNAS, Fick served as a Marine Corps infantry officer. He took part in the earliest phases of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2001 and 2002 and led a reconnaissance unit during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In 2006, he was a visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and served in 2007 as a civilian instructor at the Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Academy in Kabul. Fick spoke at Denver’s Invesco Field at the 2008 Democratic National Convention and later served on the presidential transition team at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
He is the author of the 2005 New York Times bestseller One Bullet Away, recognized as one of the “best books of the year” by The Washington Post. The Marine Corps Heritage Foundation honored the book with its General Wallace M. Greene, Jr. Award, given annually to outstanding nonfiction pertinent to marine corps history. The book was also awarded the Colby Award from the William E. Colby Military Writers Symposium, which recognizes a major contribution to the understanding of intelligence operations, military history, or international affairs. The commanding general of U.S. Marine Corps Forces Central Command made One Bullet Away required reading for officers deploying to Afghanistan and Iraq.
Fick’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Forbes, and Foreign Policy, among many other publications, and he is a frequent contributor to television and radio. He was formerly an on-air national security consultant to CBS News and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Fick serves on the boards of the Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation, dedicated to providing educational opportunities for the children of marines killed in action, and the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy at Dartmouth College, which encourages graduates to embark on careers in public service.
He holds an A.B. degree with high honors in classics and government from Dartmouth, where he won a national championship title in cycling. He received an MPA in International Security Policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where he was a dean’s fellow, and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.
He is a certified sailboat charter captain and lives with his wife, Margaret Angell, in Washington, D.C.
When the Unconventional Becomes Conventional: Assessing Threats, Finding Solutions
Barbara K. Bodine | $10 | Order Now!
Ambassador Barbara K. Bodine is a lecturer in public policy at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs where she teaches courses on the Iraq War and on U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East as it relates to the Persian Gulf region and Southwest Asia. She also serves as director of the school’s Scholars in the Nation’s Service Initiative, an innovative intern and fellowship program for students pursuing careers in federal service.
Bodine’s over 30 years in the U.S. Foreign Service were spent primarily on Arabian Peninsula and greater Persian Gulf issues, specifically U.S. bilateral and regional policy, strategic security issues, counterterrorism, and governance and reform. Her tour as ambassador to the Republic of Yemen 1997-2001, saw enhanced support for democratization and increased security and counterterrorism cooperation, the establishment of a coast guard, resumption of Fulbright scholarships for Yemeni students, initiation of a $40 million/year economic assistance and development program, and an indigenous landmine awareness and demining program. She also served in Baghdad as Deputy Principal Officer during the Iran-Iraq War, Kuwait as Deputy Chief of Mission during the Iraqi invasion and occupation of 1990-1991, and again, seconded to the Department of Defense, in Iraq in 2003 as the senior State Department official and the first coalition coordinator for reconstruction in Baghdad and the central governorates. Bodine spoke about her 30-plus years of experience in the context of assessing threats and finding solutions.
America and the Middle East: Challenges for the Future
John Abizaid and Michael Scheuer | $10 | Order Now!
John P. Abizaid retired from the United States Army in May 2007, after 34 years of active service. After graduating from the United States Military Academy at West Point, he rose from infantry platoon leader to become, at that time, the youngest four-star general in the Army. At the time of his retirement he was the longest-serving commander of United States Central Command. During a distinguished career he commanded units at every level, serving in the combat zones of Grenada, Lebanon, Kurdistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. Units under his command have included the 1st Infantry Division, a brigade in the 82nd Airborne Division, and two Ranger companies. Abizaid worked on the Joint Staff three times, the last as director. He studied at the University of Jordan in Amman, holds a master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University, and is widely considered to be an expert in the field of Middle Eastern affairs. As such, Abizaid was one of the first to recognize the protracted nature of the ongoing conflict against religious-inspired extremists, which he has termed “The Long War.” Abizaid spoke about strategic challenges in the Middle East.
New York Times and Washington Post bestselling author Michael Scheuer is the former head of the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit. He resigned from CIA in November 2004 after nearly two decades of experience in covert action and national security issues related to Afghanistan, South Asia, and the Middle East. He is the author of the new book, Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (Free Press, 2008). He also wrote Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terrorism (Potomac Books, 2004), and Through Our Enemies’ Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America (Potomac Books, 2002).
Scheuer's writings also have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Washington Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Antiwar.com, New York Times, American Conservative, Dallas Morning News, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Washington Post, the National Interest, and the American Interest. Scheuer has been featured on such national television news programs as Meet the Press, Nightline, 60 Minutes, the O’Reilly Factor, and the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, as well as on international television news programs in Britain, Australia, France, Spain, Japan, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, China, and Germany. He has been interviewed for broadcast media and documentaries -- including Frontline, the History Channel, the BBC, the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and PBS -- and has been the focus of print media worldwide. Scheuer spoke about America’s global war on terrorism and the price of distorting and misunderstanding the enemy.
Strong Horse, Weak Horse: American Power and World Perception
Mark Steyn | $10 | Order Now!
In a series of three talks, the writer Mark Steyn examines America's role in the world and how it might change. In "Strong Horse, Weak Horse: American Power and World Perception," he begins by talking about how the world views the United States, especially in light of our occasional willingness to use power and our occasional reluctance to do so. In "After America: New Order and No Order," Steyn speculates about a future in which "America is so isolated that it is no longer the maintainer of global order." And then in the final talk, a question-and-answer session with Naval ROTC students, Steyn describes what he sees as America's admirable role in opposing tyrannies in World War I, World War II, and the Cold War, and yet also discusses the prevalence of resentment toward a superpower. "America is the exceptional nation," he argues, "and so it has to endure exceptional insults from around the planet."
War, Ancient and Modern: What the Conflicts of the Past Teach Us about the Fighting of Today
Victor Davis Hanson | $10 | Order Now!
Hanson presents an elegant, lucidly written analysis of the 27-year civil war, a "colossal absurdity," that ended in Athens's 5th-century B.C. loss to Sparta and the depletion of centuries of material and intellectual wealth. Hanson deftly chronicles these destructive decades, from the conflict's roots (e.g., the fundamental mutual suspicion between Athens and Sparta) to its legacy (the evolution of the nature of war to something "more deadly, amorphous, and concerned with the ends rather than the ethical means"). Hanson considers the war's economic aspects and the ruinous plague that struck Athens before delving into his discussion of warfare. He offers a tour de force analysis of hoplite (or infantry) combat, guerrilla tactics, siege operations and sea battles in the Aegean. Though landlocked Sparta ultimately brought down Athens's once-great naval fleet and replaced democracy with oligarchy by 404 B.C., Hanson complicates the received notion of a lost Hellenic Golden Age. Throughout this trenchant military and cultural history, he draws parallels between the Peloponnesian War and modern-day conflicts from WWII to the Cold War and Vietnam. Across the centuries, these are lessons worth remembering.
A Future Worth Creating
Thomas P.M. Barnett | $10 | Order Now!
This bold and important book strives to be a practical "strategy for a Second American Century." In this brilliantly argued work, Thomas Barnett calls globalization "this country's gift to history" and explains why its wide dissemination is critical to the security of not only America but the entire world. As a senior military analyst for the U.S. Naval War College, Barnett is intimately familiar with the culture of the Pentagon and the State Department (both of which he believes are due for significant overhauls). He explains how the Pentagon, still in shock at the rapid dissolution of the once evil empire, spent the 1990s grasping for a long-term strategy to replace containment. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Barnett argues, revealed the gap between an outdated Cold War-era military and a radically different one needed to deal with emerging threats. He believes that America is the prime mover in developing a "future worth creating" not because of its unrivaled capacity to wage war, but due to its ability to ensure security around the world. Further, he believes that the U.S. has a moral responsibility to create a better world and the way he proposes to do that is by bringing all nations into the fold of globalization, or what he calls connectedness. Eradicating disconnectedness, therefore, is "the defining security task of our age." Ultimately, however, the most impressive aspects of the book is not its revolutionary ideas but its overwhelming optimism. Barnett wants the U.S. to pursue the dream of global peace with the same zeal that was applied to preventing global nuclear war with the former Soviet Union. High-level civilian policy makers and top military leaders are already familiar with his vision of the future--this book is a briefing for the rest of us and it cannot be ignored.
Strategy, Ethics, and the War on Terrorism
Albert C. Pierce | $10 | Order Now!
In two long, thoughtful essays, Albert Pierce, the first director of the Center for the Study of Professional Military Ethics at the U.S. Naval Academy, explores the shifting terrain where strategy and ethics collide in the war on terrorism. The third piece of this important work is a detailed case study of the United States' ill-fated intervention in Haiti. Pierce, a professor of military strategy at the National War College, is currently directing a multi-year project on ethical challenges and the future of conflict.
Lessons from the Iraq War
Robert H. Scales, Jr. | $10 | Order Now!
A decorated soldier and a distinguished scholar, Major General Robert H. Scales, Jr. USA (ret.) is the author of Certain Victory, the official account of the Army in the Gulf War, and Firepower in Limited War, a history of the evolution of firepower doctrine since the end of the Korean War. In 1995 Scales created the Army After Next program, which was the Army's first attempt to build a strategic game and operational concept for future land warfare. This volume, Lessons from the Iraq War, is drawn from a series of talks Scales gave in the Spring of 2004 as the Nimitz Memorial Lecturer at UC, Berkeley. He offers an insider's analysis of and insight into the Iraq war. Casting his observations forward, Scales reflects on what these events augur for the future of warfare and how the American military will adapt to what it has learned.
