Destroyers are the workhorses of the fleets. While carriers might have the glory, battleships the honor, and cruisers a sleek elegance, destroyers get the job done where bigger ships are too expensive to risk. With 5" guns, torpedoes, and a potent mix of anti-aircraft and anti-submarine weapons, destroyers do all the dirty and dangerous jobs of the fleet.

Tin Can Titans focuses on the decorated ships of DesRon 21, primarily the Fletcher-class destroyers USS Fletcher, USS Nicholas, and USS O'Bannon. This ships were the frontline in the most desperate days of the Solomon Islands campaign, first escorting supply ships to Guadalcanal, and then pushing back the IJN along the Slot.

Wukovits writes a conventional WW2 hagiography, celebrating the heroism of the common sailor and their rapid professionalism. Senior leadership is called out for failing to use destroyers as independent units in night action, relegating them to a close screening role that invited confusion and reduced the effectiveness of radar in key battles in 1942 and 1943. The narrative focuses closely on the men of the ships, but as a military history it loses focus later in the war. As the Pacific Fleet swelled, destroyers were no longer Halsey's only punch, but merely once component of a massive amphibious war machine. This is a good book, and I appreciated the details on the Solomon Islands, but there are few surprises here.

"This is a political war and it calls for discrimination in killing. The best weapon for killing would be a knife, but I'm afraid we can't do it that way. The worst is an airplane. The next worst is artillery. Barring a knife, the best is a rifle — you know who you're killing"
--USAID advisor Lt. Col John Paul Vann

War is an atrocity. Murder is an atrocity. The Phoenix Program, as documented in this book, is an atrocity. And unfortunately, it is one which undergirds the present national security state. As we've all learned since 9/11, the political terrorist does not fit neatly into the categories of Westphalian order. The terrorist does not wear a uniform or fight in ranks, so he is not a soldier. And while acts of violence are crimes, an ideology of violence is not, making judicial convictions difficult to obtain. Phoenix is about the gray area between war and crime, and America's complicity in both in Vietnam.

Writing about the Phoenix Program is difficult for several reasons. First is one of bureaucratic confusion over the 20 year stretch of the Second Indochina War, with dozens of paramilitary action groups and even more diversity in funding and organizations. The best thing to do is to avoid hair-splitting and unwarranted precision; the Phoenix Program was an effort to eliminate individual civilians in South Vietnam as communist agents, and support for communism as a political phenomenon. The second difficulty is one of official evasion. Much of the program is and was classified. Official testimony, particularly by CIA director William Colby, is full of obfuscation and outright lies. The third difficult is one of conspiracy. Valentine alleges that records have been doctored to make some of his sources look insane, to say that they were never even in Vietnam. Still, even discounting the conspiratorial, there is plenty in the public record and his on-the-record interviews to document Phoenix.

As Ngo Dinh Diem tightened his grasp on power in the late 1950s, the basic problem his regime confronted was one of unpopularity. Guerrilla warfare experts, most notably Ed Lansdale, suggested an aggressive program of counter-terror. Small forces would attack pro-Communist villages dressed in VC black pajamas and make public spectacles of murder. Assisted by intelligence from the rural grievance survey, these programs attempted to dislocate the Viet Cong. Of course, getting people for these units was a problem. The Viet Cong could rely on large numbers of ardent nationalists and Party members for their squads. The government turned to the dregs of society, Nung mercenaries and the sweepings of hardened criminals in Saigon jails.

As the war expanded after 1965, the Phoenix Program fell victim to the characteristic American mistake of the war: bad metrics and short-term careerism. Robert "Blowtorch" Komer used all his powers to organize a national system of Provincial Reconnaissance Unit (PRU) assassination teams, and district and province interrogation centers. Interrogation centers were rated on prisoners taken in and processed, frequently involving torture, while collating usable intelligence took a backseat. The overburdened South Vietnamese judicial system couldn't process thousands of detainees, who languished in jail on flimsy pretexts. US advisors varied wildly in quality, with the unconventional warfare experts of the early years pushed out in favor of junior counter-intelligence lieutenants and CIA case officers.

The Phoenix Program also suffered from the typical South Vietnamese weakness of public corruption. PRUs were used as the personal goon squads of province governors to eliminate business and political rivals. Diversion of materials into the black market and drug trafficking were rampant. The detention system became a source for bribes and shakedowns.

Money, primarily from the CIA black budget, poured into the system, but to little effect. There were dozens of agencies and informer networks, and rather than combining information, most officials assumed that the South Vietnamese internal security system was thoroughly riddled with Viet Cong agents (it was), and so acted unilaterally. One branch of Phoenix would assassinate a man which another branch of Phoenix had been cultivating as an internal source.

In my favorite "fractally fucked up" story from this book, Komer spent months pushing the phrase 'Viet Con Infrastructure', which got befuddlement from South Vietnamese partners to his endless frustration. This was because when translated, 'infrastructure' means roads, bridges, canals. This was not South Vietnamese incompetence, their secret police understood the enemy, but they called them 'cadres'.

Valentine was writing in the mid-1980s, at the height of dirty wars in Latin America. This book has aged like wine. Maybe Vann is right, and killing with a knife is better than killing from the air. I wouldn't know. But the creation of secret kill lists is anathema to liberty. The fact that when pressed, the American government and American people will take the kill lists over 'disorder' is an enduring indictment of the evils of empire, and how its corruption always returns home.

In the Luna series, if you would first seek revenge, dig a lot of graves. No, more than that. Get an excavator.

Wolf Moon picks up closely in the wake of the Corta's disaster of the first book, with the survivors in various forms of tenuous exile. It turns out that the Corta-Mackenzie war was orchestrated by the Sun family, seeking to smash two rivals and collect the pieces. The Mackenzie stronghold of Crucible is destroyed in a terror attack, their elderly founder assassinated, and the two largest factions set against each other. Sun plots are only hampered by a slight tendency towards villainous monologues, otherwise, they win.

This is a book where the complex motivations of the first book are pared down. Survival, escape, revenge, all in a harrowingly escalating lunar war that sees the breaking of fragile taboos about mass violence and the introduction of knife drones, projectile weapons, and orbital bombardments.

The story focuses on many of the same characters as before. Lucasinho dealing with his trauma, Lucas' ambition and plot to regain his family's power on Earth. Wagner Corta has his viewpoint expanded. He's a 'werewolf', a member of a group that has turned bipolar disorder into a new community that has inhuman creativity and focus as a gestalt pack.

Wolf Moon is a simpler book than the first, as second books often are. Having set the pieces up, McDonald crashes them together, enjoying the destruction. Despite an annoying tendency to start chapters and leave the point-of-view as a surprise, the book holds up well for a second book.

Most Secret War is an account of British scientific intelligence in the Second World War, by it's foremost practitioner R.V. Jones, and is all around stunning. Jones was vital in a series of major turning points, and he's an engaging raconteur with deep insight into the messy busy of technical intelligence and bureaucratic infighting.

Only 28 years old, R.V. Jones was coming off a lackluster career in experimental physics, focusing on infrared detection of aircraft, when the outbreak of war in Europe catapulted him into a key role. A little thinking would show that in industrial total war, technology and applied science could be decisive, and while the British had a system for using their own scientists to advantage, most notably demonstrated in the Chain Home radar system, there was no central branch in charge of figuring out what the Nazis were up to, and how to foil it. Jones was it, with a skeleton staff and little formal authority.

Fortunately, he had the right background, with a wide knowledge of science, especially radio physics, and the tricky soul of an inveterate practical joker. Jones' first break was the discovery of a system of radio navigation beams aimed at England, which would allow the Luftwaffe to bomb accurately at night. While the Spitfire and Hurricanes could hold on by day, there were no effective night fighters in British service at the time. In a tense meeting with Churchill and the war cabinet, Jones conclusive demonstrated the existence of the 'beams', and a plan to bend them by generating false signals, showing up older and more senior scientific advisors Lindemann and Tizard.

While Jones made mistakes, including a careless oversight on guidance tones that he believes lead to the destruction of Coventry, his efforts blunted Luftwaffe night attacks. The next step was to figure out how to carry the war to Germany. Bomber command believed that traditional navigation techniques of dead reckoning and stellar fixes were sufficient to hit a city, but evidence piled up showing bombers were missing targets by miles, and losses were unsustainable. Jones developed techniques to foil the radar systems of the Kammhuber Line and direct Pathfinder crews to their targets. Even so, Bomber command had terrible radio discipline, and crews were lost unnecessarily. A particular pernicious pilot's tale was that the British IFF system acted as a jammer, when in fact the Nazis had figured out how to use it as a beacon, unerringly directing their defenses onto hapless bombers.

The final major battle was with the V-1 and V-2 missiles. Jones had been tracking the development of these weapons at Peenemunde, and had guessed their capabilities and effects with astounding accuracy. In one particular feat of guesswork, he figured that the V-1 would be used operationally on D-Day +7, with the first missiles hitting on June 13th, one week after the landings. Again, the more senior scientific establishment disagreed with Jones's claim, with effective countermeasures bounding up in useless committee meetings, and overseen by the incompetent Duncan Sandys, Chruchill's son-in-law. The V-1 could be intercepted and shot down, but there was no counter against the ballistic V-2 except conquering all launching sites.

Postwar, Jones was forced out of intelligence in bureaucratic turf fight, his job taken over by ineffective committees. He wound up with a chair at the University of Aberdeen and a host of decorations, which is solid for someone who had thought he had burnt his bridges with the academy years before, though less than he deserved. He returned to public service irregularly, continuing his friendship with Churchill, who saw him as a straight shooter who delivered the goods when others were wrong.

This is a long book, but it's full of delightful details and easy-to-grasp explanations of technical matters. The insights into bureaucracy, the difficulties of figuring out what is actually going on, and the importance of horizontal networks among the people who actually get things, are eternal. While Jones wields a hatchet against his seniors, he is unstinting in his praise of the people who made his work possible, the Resistance spies, photo-recon pilots, and signals analysts who gathered the raw intelligence. This is a top tier memoir and history in its detail, analysis, and quality of writing.

And one historiographic note. Jones cites David Irving in several places. At the time this book was written, Irving was known as a solid historian and expert on the Luftwaffe, who's pro-German bias didn't impact the validity of his data. Irving's discrediting as a holocaust denier didn't occur until several years after Most Secret War was published.

Cribsheet is the logical sequel to Oster's prior book Expecting Better, a data-driven dive into the first few years of a child's life. Having a couple of kids seems to have knocked some of the starch out of Oster's hyper-Type A personality, and this book is a fair summary of the current research.

There are two problems with the current research. First, children are unique little individuals (or perverse little monsters, depending on how well rested you are), and while there are trends, the range bars on them are so wide that it's impossible to aim for specific benchmarks on sleep, breast feeding potty training, walking, talking, etc, except in the widest possible sense.

The other problem is that a lot of this stuff correlates mostly with being white and having a college degree, and that this tends to overwhelm patterns. SIDS is horrific, and not co-sleeping is one of the few specific things that can make a big impact. The 'best parents' (breast feeding, no alcohol, non-smoking) have SIDS incidences of 0.08 in 1000 for not bed sharing and 0.22 for bed sharing, a roughly 3x increase from a low benchmark. For the 'worst parents' (bottle feeding, both smoking, mother drinking), SIDS goes from 1.77 in 1000 to 27.61 in 1000 with co-sleeping. But if you're in that last category, you're probably not reading this book.

One interesting area where the research is shifting is on food allergies and exposure. The conventional wisdom for the past few decades has been to avoid potential allergens, especially tree nuts and peanut butter, in the early stages of life. However, randomized controlled trials show that giving children nut butters (whole nuts are a choking hazard) significantly reduces future allergies. Similarly, diverse exposure to foods, especially vegetables and fruits, may lead to less picky eaters.

There are three areas where Oster has firm recommendations. Vaccinate your kids (I'm not sure why this is still a debate). 'Cry it out' sleep training is fairly effective, has noted beneficial effects for parents who report better and mental health, and no detected long-term effects on children. Attachment theory studies arguing against this tend to be based on bad experiences in Romanian orphanages in the 1960s, and all parents are more affectionate than overburdened communist bloc caretakers. And finally, while no particular pre-school educational philosophy shows better results than others, there are easy checklists of features you want in a preschool in regards to individual space and care.

But the final advice is probably best. Just relax, it'll likely turn out okay. Which is not something Oster would have written at the start of this parenting side project.

And in a cool aside, Oster has been involved in a childhood development side-project her whole life. Her parents were economics professors, and since she was an early sleep talker, she was a toddler research participant in how language develops.

If new parents were honest about what it's like, no one would have kids. Or at least, that's the thrust of this book. Dais has her own experiences, and a host of other moms (the only one I remember is Chipper Jen), and they take you through an odyssey of sleep deprivation and bodily fluids. It is a trip.

High points for candor on some points, like a useful system of ziplock bags for dirty clothes on the go, and Dais' sleep deprived partner coming in to say "I hate you" in the middle of a night of sleep training. Big minuses for treating vaccines as some kind of debatable issue. I guess a lot of parents are anxious, and it's good to be candid about these anxieties, but Dais's implcit endorsement of antivax is enough to knock this book down a star.

One of the nice things about being out of the academy is that I no longer have to pretend to like over-theorized claptrap. Cowen aims at a critical history of global logistics as an applied discipline which has reconfigured shipping, production, cities, and the political economy of modern empire. She uses Marx, Foucault, cybernetics, and Queer theory to attack her subject. The end result is banal, preferring digressions on theory to discussion of the actual evidence, and overall a work which mistakes invective for criticism.

First, traditional logistics. Armies have always needed supplies, and an overwhelming concern of competent commanders is ensuring those supplies. Cowen gestures at Martin Van Crevald as one of the few historians of logistics (true), but she doesn't actually discuss military logistics. Since details matter, my own capsule summary, with what Cowen touches on in bold.

In pre-industrial times, this meant wagons and pack trains, and also since military supplies were much the same as civilian supplies, ensuring that an army moved and stayed in hostile territory, since that meant the enemy's population fed your troops. Railroads enabled strategic land logistic, and campaigns from the American Civil War to the Second World War were centered around railroads. The Second World War also saw the development of motorized blitzkrieg tactics. Motorized armies had tactical mobility greater than ever before, but required constant inputs of fuel, parts, and ammunition. Even a casual survey of WW2 shows that the key driver of Allied victory was the ability to produce more war material and deliver it to the battlefield. As Axis troops starved on Guadalcanal and froze outside Moscow, Allied forces were building strength for a series of counter-offensives which won the war. Subsequent to WW2, the American military industrial complex sponsored a series of R&D projects on improving logistics, which resulted in the development of the standardized military CONEX and civilian 20' & 40' cargo container in the 1960s. Cold War planning assumed that a war would progress too quickly to move armored divisions across the Atlantic, so REFORGER plans had pre-positioned tanks which would be united with crews flown in on chartered airliners. While REFORGER was never activated, the mobilization of forces in Desert Storm demonstrated the capability of the United States to mass overwhelming force anywhere on the planet on short notice. The key feature of the American empire since 1991 has been this overwhelming logistical superiority: With few exceptions (light armor in the initial occupation of Iraq), no American soldier anywhere on the global has lacked the material necessary for their mission. Even with political incoherence and immense expense, this logistical empire has conquered the globe.

So Cowen is not a serious military historian, which is fine. Most lefty geographers find war abhorrent. But while military and civilian logistics share genealogy and some techniques, (including a love of cybernetics inspired systems diagrams), there's a big difference between enabling high-tempo kinetic operations in an evolving strategic domain, and multi-modal value added supply chains.

The major point of the book (I decline to give it the honor of thesis) is that the actual workings of the current American empire are enacted through a doctrine of total supply chain security. This hidden foreign policy is managed through anodyne acronyms, like C-TPAP (Customs-Trade Partnership against Terrorism) and TWIC (Transportation Workers Identification Credential). Even as the border became more fortified in the wake of 9/11, public-private partnerships carved out a trusted regime of security partners, manufacturing and shipping firms qualified to manage their own inspections.

But nuggets of facts are buried in depths of theory. If I might digress for a moment, one reason why academic research is valuable is that experts have the time and skill to read things we'd rather not, like the voluminous official documentation on the DHS website about C-TPAP. My sense of this book is that the analysis of the actual materials is rather cursory. Cowen is far more interested in delving into Marx and Foucault than the actual subjects of her work. A similar lackadaisical approach to the matter is evident in the interviews, which concern a fatality of a union longshoreman, and not the grinding pace of the casual logistics worker. App-based delivery like Uber Eats or Doordash was a true start-up when this book was written in 2013, but Mother Jones was writing about the horrific conditions of warehouse workers in 2012. Again and again, Cowen points to the existence of a thing, offers a 'first-page-of-Google' summary, and then hares off in pursuit of some Theory driven explanation. It is rather telling that the most sustained and systematic analysis in the book is of the symbolism in a National Geographic produced, UPS sponsored wildlife documentary series Great Migrations.

This review is becoming rather scattered, but Deadly Life is a rather scattered book. The Mother Jones article linked above is far shorter, more focused, and has more evidence. In particular, Cowen makes the key error of using her theoretical tools to construct a monolithic strawman of a neoliberal American logistics empire, rather than using those tools to critically interrogate the gaps and contingencies in real world logistical systems and concepts. That said, Deadly Life broadly opens up some questions for further research.

1) Protection of the supply chain has become an obsession of modern states and large corporations. Yet supply chain disruption attacks have not happened? (I follow John Robb, if it had happened, he would have mentioned it). Is this due to the success of these security policies, or are they based on a fantasy? While the COVID-19 pandemic saw shortages and disruptions, these were represented by price increases and temporarily bare shelves, rather than any kind of collapse. Even road-blocking protests as part of Black Lives Matter are about disrupting commutes rather than logistics broadly. If logistics are so vulnerable, how are they so resilient?

2) Logistics Hubs underpin urban amenities, and require armies of disposable workers to function. Can these hubs work with humane labor practices? How can labor power be rebuilt against technology to render them deskilled biorobots?

3) What is the impact of American-style unlimited logistics on contemporary military operations? Can a leaner force with a smaller logistic tail still meet the political needs of American empire?

Interesting questions. However, this is not the book the answer them.

Infinite Detail is a novel of our grim cyberpunk present, of a time that feels distinctly pre-apocalyptic. We live in a world with immense accumulations of wealth and power and information, and yet rather than steer towards a coherent vision of the future, hell, do anything at all, these machines alternately brutalize and seduce us. If you want a vision of the future, it's Kendal Jenner offering a riot cop a Pepsi forever.

One timeline, BEFORE, follows hacktivist Rushdi Manaan. Rushdi is British, the sysadmin of the ferociously anti-surveillance Croft, a hip Bristol neighborhood blockaded with wifi jammers running on a Bluetooth mesh network. Rush is in a long distance relationship with Scott in New York, living in a world ruled by a surveillance capitalism machine he hates.

AFTER is, well, after. Someone broke the internet, killing every connected device. As communication networks failed and supply chains froze, 'local autonomy' has risen up to replace the survivors. It's a grim world, with a dislocated population sheltering under warlords of various ideological stripes. The various people in After are trying to make sense of their lives in Bristol. Mary sees dead people, those chaotic final hours in the Croft. Tyrone keeps her safe, tries to score survive Bristol Jungle tapes of a dead rave culture. Anika is a guerilla fighter, on the run from the military dictatorship that runs the UK and looking for a new weapon in her liberation campaign.

At a kind of page-by-page level, this is a pretty good novel. Great gritty feel. But stepping back, it doesn't have characters so much as points of view on events that the characters have no ability to influence. And this is 2020, alarmism about surveillance capitalism is practically passé. At least Maughan is honest that what comes next will likely be sticks, stones, and a lot of corpses, to paraphrase Albert Einstein on World War 4.

Borders of Infinity is nearly the perfect pocket-sized Vorkosigan story. Miles is dropped into a Cetagandan POW camp with orders to rescue one man and turn him into the nucleus of a future resistance. The target is already dead, and so Miles improvises, going from one religion fanatic to an army of 700 soldiers and unquestioned power in the hellish POW camp (24 hour light, enough food to meet Red Cross obligations, and a blank forcefield separating the camp from the outside world. No information, no hope, no escape). The plan comes together in a heart pounding rescue. Pretty much everything you'd want or expect, pressed into 100 pages.

The Mountains of Mourning is a rather traditional murder mystery, with Miles forced to confront the anti-mutant prejudices of rural Barrayar when a young woman seeks justice for her murdered baby. It's a fascinating look at where Barrayar came from, compared to where it's going.

Labyrinth is the weak link in the collection. While I was excited at first to see the criminal planet of Jackson's Whole, we mostly see receiving halls and laboratory corridors-pale imitations of Cetaganda and Beta Colony. The actual plot, concerning genetically modified super-soldier Nine and her and Miles's seduction/escape/recruitment just hit way too many of my squick buttons. I guess Nine/Taura matter, since she's on the cover of Miles Errant, but this is the only part of the series so far I *wanted* to put down.

*Bookrace 2014 notes: 3 Novellas counts as a book. I actually read these in a different set of collections, but they count. Didn't read the framing story.

The Praxis is grand space opera with the fatal flaw of being glacially paced. For thousands of years, the galactic empire has been dominated by the all-powerful Shaa, who haver gathered the lesser races beneath them. But the Shaa have dwindled, and their last survivor is dying. Something like 80% of the book is taken up with the mundane business of main characters in these last days of peace. Martinez is a junior officer in the navy, maneuvering to advance his own career and his noble house. Sula is another junior officer, who's disgraced name hides the darker secret that she's an imposter, and the real Lady Sula is dead.

The story ambles through the non-events of these non-entities lives, until the 80% mark, where it turns out that one of the races of the Praxis has planned a coup to make themselves the new immortal masters. Martinez is the only one to spot the coup going off, while lucky coincidence saves the Home Fleet from the rebellion. Then there's a titanic battle that sees the good guys losing, but our heroes advancing, ready for book 2.

The pacing is awful. If there's any saving grace, it's that it does help set up the general incompetence of all involved. The Shaa have ruled for 3400 years, and the closest thing to battles in all that time have been bombarding much more primitive races. The finely tuned antimatters weapons have never been fired in anger, and the navy is full of deadwood, incompetent third sons, and officers more interested in sports than tactics. No one knows what they're doing in a way that very reminiscent of the slaughters of the opening days of the First World War.

At the same time, the other saving grace of space opera, a fantastic setting, is barely used. Galactic politics are another top-heavy bureaucracy with aristocratic elegance, without the delightful tense fragility of say, Tsarist Russia, or the absurdity of the late Austro-Hungarian empire. There are many alien species, but our characters are human, and don't even get a good evolutionarily derived stereotype.

I'll probably pick up book two from the library to see if it's better now that the shooting has started, but for now I'm notably bored.