There are at least two Britains. One is cricket and public schools and the old boys network. The other are hard bastards who ruled the world through merciless force applied to vulnerable places: knives in kidneys, windpipe strikes, kicking them while they're down. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is about the latter Britain, an oddly balanced account of the Special Operations Executive during World War 2.

Milton makes his protagonists come alive, particularly Colin Gubbins, with his faith that a good saboteur could do more destruction in a single strike than a fortnight of bombing raids. Gubbins organized a secret army that blended the bored children of the nobility with street toughs and patriotic exiles from occupied Europe. They truly did set Europe ablaze!

Milton has a breezy and delightful narrative style, which comes through strongest on the accounts of the great raids: destroying the docks at St. Nazaire, the attack on the Norwegian heavy water plant vital to the Nazi A-bomb, and my new favorite, Operation Postmaster, a piratical cutting-out operation against a spy ship near the African Island of Fernando Po. Milton also has a love of the back office, and the madcap inventors who designed limpet mines, sticky bombs, precision time fuses, and all sorts of specialized Q-branch sabotage devices. I have to give credit to a ploy to replace the lubricant on an SS division's tank transporter rail cars with carborundum right before D-Day as an exceptional use of applied science.

This is a popular history, not a comprehensive work, but it's delightfully written and a worthy addition to anyone's library of dirty tricks. And for disclosure, I won this book in a Goodreads contest.

The Saga of Pappy Gunn is a kindly testimonial to a great airman from his commanding officer, General George C. Kenny. "Pappy" Gunn was part of the first class of naval aviators, an enlisted man who beat the odds to became one of the first carrier pilots. He retired from the Navy in 1939, retiring to the Philippines to try his hand at running an air line. He didn't have long to enjoy his retirement. World War 2 struck, and Pappy signed up in the Army Air Force. McAurthur's Far East Forces were a world onto their own, and in the desperate defense of the Philippines Pappy coordinated aerial evacuations, repairs, and patrols. His own family was captured and interned, but Pappy managed to bring vital planes and pilots south to Australia.

There he met up with General Kenny, who recognized a man of exceptional talents. Pappy was promoted from Wing maintenance officer to head of special projects. He had an uncanny talent for field modification, turning A-20 and B-25 medium bombers into machine-gun bristling strafing ships. These modifications played a key role in the Battle of the Bismark Sea, and became an official B-25 variant. Pappy kept up morale with a string of tale tales and irrepressible energy, despite being a generation older than most of the men he served with.

The story has a bittersweet ending. Pappy was severely wounded during the liberation of the Philippines, and had a difficult recovery. He ran a shoestring airline in the Pacific after the war, dying with his boots on in a plane crash. There are some neat anecdotes here, and it's a lovely memorial, but I can't recommend this book on any literary qualities.

Body of Secrets is a fascinating history of the Cold War as viewed through the lens of cryptography, as well as a time capsule of the foremost US intelligence agency in a pre-9/11 mindset.

As any decent history of World War 2 notes, codebreaking played a key role in winning that war. As the battlelines of the Cold War firmed up along the Iron Curtain, the frontiers of space and science, and brushfire wars across the third world, the National Security Agency formed to manage a secret army of cryptographers, linguists, and analysts, among more abstruse specializations. Bamford tells a thrilling story of very dangerous missions in the 50s and 60s, like penetration of Soviet air defense systems by RB-47 and U-2 spyplanes, along with spy ships like the USS Liberty and Pueblo, and outposts manned in the most unforgiving locations on Earth.

Bamford blends this tales with accounts of bureaucratic warfare for budgets, over secrets, and the covert power of the agency to listen in on the communications of Americans and nominal allies. A secret army is expensive, and even with its massive budget for technology and analysis, the NSA failed to provide the President with necessary analysis in time to forestall disaster, or to manage complex negotiations. Even in the 1980s, the NSA was listening in on every international phone call, with the FISA courts the only real protection of American communications. And morale and organization seems to be a recurring problem, with feuding deputy directors holding the real power below political appointees, and a human resource system that has trouble acquiring and holding onto the baroque specialists needed for the job.

Bamford keeps it breezy, talking about SIGINT and cryptography in layman friendly metaphors. And of course, this is a book before 9/11 changed the US intelligence community, and before the internet changed everything else. The leaks revealed by NSA contractor Edward Snowden show an agency more powerful than ever before, yet we seem at the mercy of botnets and lone wolves. Still, the Cold War history is solid, and includes original research revealing some of the tensest moments in that conflict. It's impossible not to be impressed by the NSA, but Bamford is not seduced by his subject, and offers a critical and nearly-objective review.

There is something in all of us that thrills to the sea. The vast oceans cover 70% of Earth's surface, eternal and everchanging. They are the highways of the world's commerce, the source of a great power's strength and prosperity, and a site where desperate battles fought, and heroic deeds done. In a swift and deeply sourced history, Toll brings alive the character of the period, and the role of the American Navy at the dawn of this country.

The Navy is specified in the constitution, but a naval build-up was controversial from the get-go. While Federalists saw a navy as a key protector of trade and defender of national honor, the agrarian Jeffersonian Republican party saw the navy as a useless expense that would incur ruinous debts, entangle America in European wars and benefit New England merchants at the expense of the common man. As Barbary corsairs began to prey on unescorted American traders, the Washington administration ordered the construction of six frigates to serve as the capital ships of the American Navy.

The six frigates, designed by renegade Quaker shipwright Joshua Humpfrey, proved controversial from the start. Humpfrey's design was larger than European frigates, with exceptionally heavy framing of southern live oak. Finely cut and powerfully armed, the frigates were intended to outrun lumbering ships of the line and overpower lesser frigates and brigs. Philadelphia, then the capitol and commercial center of North America, was the logical place to build the ships, but in an early example of pork barrel defense procurement, the actual job of construction was split to separate cities up and down the Atlantic sea coast, increasing cost and complexity.

The ships served with both success and catastrophe in the quasi-war with France and the initial retaliatory raids against Tripoli. The USS Philadelphia ran hard around outside Tripoli and was forced to strike her colors, before being destroyed in a daring raid. Ships were only one part of the American navy. The officers and sailors were even more important, and Tolls describes an alien martial culture of dueling and high honor.

The key conflict of the era was over impressment of American sailors. The British Navy faced a personnel problem of epic proportions as it waged war against Napoleon, and the burgeoning American merchant fleet was full of sailors, some deserters from the British Navy, but many Americans. The British were cavalier in stopping American ships and topping up their crews, no matter the legalities. British merchantile interests resented the Americans, who were prospering on trade with embargoed France as Britain bled. Through 1811, diplomacy failed and bellicosity increased, with the Chesapeake incident, where British ships attacked, boarded, and impressed sailors from an American man-of-war, tilting the balance towards outright war.

The six frigates earned their place in the history in the war, with a series of sharp single-ship actions against British frigates that showed that the Americans could fight and defeat the seemingly invincible British Navy. These battles had little strategic impact, the loss of four ships was a pin-prick, but the battles had an outsized effect on morale. American spirits soared, the British despaired, and large and expensive forces were used to tie the frigates down in port, while hundreds of American privateers sallied from smaller ports and devastated British merchants worldwide. The war ended two years later in exhaustion, with Washington DC burnt and the status quo ante restored.

But the six frigates proved their worth, and laid a tradition of victory. Toll closes with a historiographic review, discussing hooary 19th century American myth-making, an influential but libelous British account that was the standard work, and finally a young Theodore Roosevelt's The Naval War of 1812, which put seapower in a proper historical context. Roosevelt of course saw the birth of the American Navy as major power, with the Great White Fleet and the Panama Canal.

Six Frigates lives up to every accolade as one of the finest general histories and military histories I have ever read!

The events of Dune were a tentative step towards the superhuman. Paul Muad'Dib was the Messiah, gifted with prescient powers, trained to a razors edge, and rising from renegade ducal heir to conqueror of a galaxy. But his visions revealed something terrifying, something which lead to his defeat in Dune Messiah, and a dangerous pathway.

Children of Dune is a return to Dune, in a way that is both more rewarding than Messiah, but also a reflection of the initial book. Young Leto II Atreides has to find his own path, against the conspiracies of his Aunt, St. Alia of the Knife. Alia's regency has become corrupt and calcified, and Alia herself fallen into possession by an ancestor, a state both the Fremen and Bene Gesserit deem 'abomination', and correctly so, since her possessor is the Baron Harkonnen.

Whereas Dune was obsessed with the future, with the power of Paul's visions and the potential of the Fremen, Children is haunted by the past, most directly by the genetic ancestral ghosts that Leto, Alia, and Leto's twin sister Ghanima have access to. These genetic memories are a wellspring of experience, and a threat.

Leto escapes an assassination plot, and thought dead, falls in with the outcast Fremen of Jacurutu, reviled as ancestral water stealers. There he is tested with massive amounts of spice, confronts the mysterious Preacher, a charismatic blind prophet who rails against the deification of Muad'Dib, and embarks on the start of his Golden Path. Leto merges with the sandtrout, becoming a hybrid human sandworm. He will rule for thousands of years, a force which will make humanity evolve.

As a kid, I really loved the weird ambition of this book, and the fantasy of Leto's sandworm power armor. As an adult, well, it's Dune with more weird bits.

Ship of Ghosts is both smaller and bigger than Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors. Hornfisher focuses on the men of the USS Houston, a heavy cruiser assigned to the Asiatic Fleet at the start of the Second World War. Previously President Roosevelt's favorite cruiser, in the dark days of the initial Japanese assaults, the Houston was the lynchpin of the defense of the island of Java.

Part of an ad hoc American-Dutch-British-Australian command, the Houston and the other defenders of Java faced terrible odds against an enemy with absolute air superiority. The Houston dodged bombs and fought a single significant engagement at the Battle of the Java Sea. The Allies didn't have the strength to resist a multipronged Japanese invasion, and in retreating the USS Houston and HMAS Perth sailed right into one of the landing fleets. Houston and Perth gave their best before sinking, but the long ordeal of the survivors had only just begun.

Captured by the Japanese along with the 131st Field Artillery (the Lost Battalion) and the other defenders of Java, the crew of the Houston were shipped to Singapore and an archipelago of Japanese POW camps. The worst of these were along the Railway of Death, a roughly 200 km cut through untracked jungle between Thailand and Burma that would be immortalized (and thoroughly fictionalized) as The Bridge Over The River Kwai. Roughly 20% of the men died of starvation, disease, beatings administered by their captors, and simple hopelessness. Perhaps 200,000 people in total died, mostly native laborers without military discipline to help them maintain field sanitation. Other survivors were dispatched to Japan, and some suffered the supreme misfortune of being killed by Allied bombs and torpedoes, as Japan did not mark their POW transports, one final mark in a litany of Geneva Code violations.

Hornfischer gives his all in commemorating these old veterans, in the years when the WW2 generation passed out of life and into memory. The prose gets a little purple at times, but serves to convey the pride of the pre-War Houston, the desperation of its last battle, and the endurance of its crew in captivity.

"War is simply the continuation of politics by other means."

Far too many people quote Clausewitz without reading him, but after reading this edition of On War, there is no excuse not to read Clausewitz, and perhaps understand him.

I will speak first to the translation: This is how it should be done. Howard, Paret, and Brodie produce an accurate and highly readable text, with invaluable supplementary essays on the historical impact of Clausewitz and his key points. Accept no other translations.

Second, the text itself. I'm a war nerd, and this is one of the best books on strategy that I've read. Compared to The Art of War or Liddell Hart's Strategy, Clausewitz is clear and direct. War is violence used to disarm and enemy and compel him to your will. The best way to achieve this end is to concentrate your forces and destroy the enemy in a decisive battle. But this reading is also simplistic and unfair. Clausewitz has the utmost respect for friction, uncertainty and confusion in war, and the impact of psychological and political factors. He does not advocate for war, merely for clarity in the process of conducting a war. If there is one aphorism that is not in the text but should be, it is "The object of war is to secure a better peace." If more political leaders had a conception of the better peace they aimed at, and the cost and limitations of military means in securing that end, we would have a safer and more secure world.

The philosophy is timeless, but much of the specific detail is tied up in the tactics of Napoleonic arms and armies, and may be of limited interest to anyone aside from the most dedicated history buffs. After reading this book, I just wish that we had a thinker of similar ability and breadth today to clarify the use of modern combined arms, the problems of counter-insurgency warfare, and the features of Cold War style economic, political, and cultural competition. Clausewitz has moved to the top of my post-Singularity Resurrection list.

The car bomb, or VBIED (Vehicle Born Improved Explosive Device), if you have an MSAF (Milspec Acronym Fetish) is the guerrilla smart bomb. In its more basic form, it marries the mundane infrastructure of urban life like trucks and driveways, to easily available explosives like ANFO and diesel fuel, to a deadly weapon. Whether abandoned in a parking garage or brazenly crashed through the front gates of an embassy by a suicide bomber, the car bomb is a way for poor organizations to hit sensitive targets with precision.

Davis rolls through the long history of the car bomb, from its invention by Italian anarchist Mario Buda, to its perfection by the Zionist terrorist group Irgun, to its proliferation across the world in the hands of the Tamil Tigers, the IRA, and Al Qaeda in Iraq. There's an odd tonal disconnect between coldly clinical history and near-conspiratorial glee at CIA blowback, as car bombs disrupt French, British, and American imperialism, but in a short and breezy book the style mostly works.

Davis is by training a Marxist urbanist, and he's best in noting that car bombs are more than cheap precision weapons used to hit hard targets like embassies and barracks. The generalized threat of car bombs is paralyzing, demanding a 'Ring of Steel' to protect downtowns and upper class districts. Indiscriminate in their death, car bombs can be used against soft targets like schools and markets to foster ethnic violence and sidetrack peace negotiations. Finally, given the ease by which vehicles circulate through cities, there's no way to ensure security. Buda's wagon is the hotrod of the apocalypse.

There's not much original research in this book, and in some ways the threat of car bombs has been supplemented by the pure kinetic energy of ISIS vehicular attacks. Still, afun little military history worth a read.

I've read a few of these young-adultish-fantasy-unlikely-scion-become-ruler books recently, and The Goblin Emperor is definitely one of them.

When the current emperor and his three sons are killed in an airship crash, Maia is elevated from disgraced exile to emperor. He has to deal with his abusive guardian, a high chancellor who plainly dislikes him, and the conspiracy that killed his father, with nary a friend at court. Worse, it is an empire of Elves, and Maia is half-goblin through his mother, a political marriage that didn't work out at all.

The story and setting kind of limp along. There's magic, because this is fantasy. Steampunk, because zeppelins are cool. Politics, because politics make fantasy smart. But none of it really connects. Maia is cast in the role of the sensible modern person in an archaic and sometimes cruel system, but without much ferocity. The key flaw is that Maia and his allies are good and decent people, and his opponents corrupt, evil, and mad. This is not a contest of anything approaching ideologies. Rather, it's good-guy factions and bad-guy factions, and too many indistinguishable Elven names.

Read City of Brass instead.

Behind Enemy Lines is part memoir, part history, and part anthropology. In the darkest days of World War 2, with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan on the march everywhere, President Roosevelt ordered the creation of the OSS, a worldwide intelligence agency and guerilla warfare bureau under the legendary "Wild Bill" Donovan. Their first mission was the Burma theater, unwanted stepchild of the war, yet a vital link to China and defense for India.

The small OSS team, Detachment 101 (named as such because 'hell, we can't let the Brits know we only have one unit') had the good fortune to meet the Kachin people of the Burmese highlands. In their initial invasion, the Japanese had treated the Kachin with exceptional brutality, massacring and mutilating entire villages. Whether this was due to the IJA's own cruelty or bad advice from local Shan allies, the Japanese made mortal enemies of an entire people. Kachin warriors needed no training in jungle warfare. They could march miles across some of the worst terrain in the world, living off of grubs and fruits, and leaving no trace as they moved. All they needed were guns, radios, and a handful of experts in industrial warfare, and they would make the Japanese bleed.

Part of this book is a conventional military history, Unit X marched to Y and attacked. The better part is a memoir, as Dunlop was one of these OSS agents, and managed to get the tales of many of the other Detachment 101 men. He has high regard for the Kachin, a little less for the OSS, much less for the British, and no regard at all for the Chinese. What comes through, again and again, is a sincerely love of the Kachin, their courage, and their skill living in the jungle.