War Comes to Long An is prototype district study in the counter-insurgency literature; a cognizant and powerful case study of the loss of a key district in the Vietnam War over fifteen years. Long An province stretched from the border with Cambodia to the outskirts of Saigon. In hundreds of hours of interviews with government figures and Vietcong defectors, and thousands of pages of primary source analysis, Race describes how the revolutionary movement of the Vietcong out-strategized and overpowered the urban elites of the Saigon government.

Race describes the Vietnam War as a social struggle between Saigon and the revolutionary movement for the loyalty of various components of Vietnamese society. The key 'terrain' in this agrarian nation was the village, the level of governance that ordinary people encountered most often, and the key issues were land redistribution and promotion within society.

Land reform is, and always has been the key issue in Vietnamese society. The land system that the Saigon regime inherited was tilted towards large landlords and plantations, with landless farmers serving as an easily exploitable labor pool for French commercial interests. Prior to 1954, Long An had been a liberated district, with the Viet Minh allocating land to the tillers. After the Geneva Treaty, the landlords and government returned and demanded nine years of back rent and taxes! Way to start off on the right foot, guys. The fitfully implemented land reform law only kicked in for plots over 100 hectares and required peasants to pay for land transferred to them. The forced dislocations of the agroville and strategic hamlet programs were the final insults to anyone who considered themselves an apolitical farmer. By contrast, the revolutionary movement separated Vietnamese society into five classes: landless laborer, renter, self-sufficient farmer, rich farmer, and landlord, and organized the first four against the last, with an effective land redistribution scheme.

Promotion and prestige are key elements to any human being. The revolutionary movement promoted within the echelon. A person would sign up as a village guerrilla, and effective people would rise to the district, province, region, and finally central levels. By contrast, the most effective pro-Saigon Village Councillor would remain at the village level indefinitely. Officials at the District and above level were dispatched from Saigon, from the educated classes, and they did not understand the needs of farmers. Village-level communists had a great deal of discretion and power. Village level officials in the government had almost none.

As such, the revolutionary movement was able to mobilize far greater numbers of people, and get supplies, intelligence, and loyalty. A relatively sparing use of violence, 80 assassinations in 1960, was enough to complete cripple the government, while lavish use of artillery, airpower, and foreign troops, with the commensurate loss of thousands of civilians lives, could not break the revolutionary movement. The security strategy of the government, which involved isolating the population from the revolution, could not succeed with any reasonable level of troops. The revolutionary movement was nearly completely decimated in 1959 and in 1968, and managed to return to some semblance of strength both times.

I have two quibbles with War Comes to Long An: First, this is very much a dissertation and it sometimes descends into turgid 60s organizational sociology, to the detriment of actually making a point. Second, for all its clear diagnosis of the failures of the Saigon government, their immense cognitive blind spot which meant that the more efficient and active they were, the more they recruited for the revolution, Race offers no diagnosis of how a guerrilla movement might be defeated. There has to be some power to being a legitimate government, with courts and police and all that, as well as the ability to call on nearly limitless American aid, but it seems the best thing to do is hide in the jungle eating rice and conducting revolutionary self-criticism sessions.

Finding God is exactly what it says on the label, a well-organized survey of Jewish approaches to theological questions, particularly the nature of God and the problem of evil, from the Biblical era to modern thinkers. The authors are from the Reform tradition, and so this book is tilted more towards modern, humanistic, and heterodox thinkers, rather than getting deeply into any particular text or Rabbinic school. While limited by nature, and a little dated, this book is an excellent survey and introduction to 20th century Jewish theology.

The Three Body Problem is the first translated work to win the Hugo. Liu Cixin is a titan in Chinese science-fiction, having won 9 out of 27 Galaxy awards, the Chinese equivalent of the Hugo. Ken Liu's translation adds context for American readers. While the stilted style may be an artifact of translation, I think a lot of my disagreements with the novel are deeper and more structural.

The story presents two parallel timelines. In one, Ye Wenjie is a young astrophysicist in the tumult of the Cultural Revolution. She witnesses her mother denounce her father in front of a mob, her father murdered for the crime of teaching Einstein's theory of relativity. Ye is sent to Inner Mongolia in a construction battalion, where after being denounced for opposing clear cutting the ancient forests, she is saved by Yang, the head of a secret space warfare and radio astronomy facility. The traumatized Ye restores some balance to her life, but when a Chinese SETI broadcast receives a reply and warning from aliens, she makes a snap decision: Humanity's crimes mean that they do not deserve to rule Earth. The aliens need to invade and save us from ourselves.

Meanwhile, in the present (2007, but it still feels current) Wang Miao is a cutting edge nanotech researcher who is contacted by a strange international military organization that asks him to infiltrate a group called the Frontiers of Science, which may be connected to the suicide of several leading physicists. Through a virtual reality video game called 3body, Wang learns of the strange Trisolarian system, where a chaotic orbit around three suns creates incredibly harsh conditions for life. It turns out that the 3body game is a recruitment tool for the Earth-Trisolarian Organization, a group set up by Ye Wenjie and billionaire environmentalist Mike Evans to prepare to Earth for a very real Trisolarian interstellar invasion. Meanwhile, in order to ensure that the Earth will be vulnerable when the 0.1 lightspeed invasion fleet arrives, the Trisolarians have sent Sophonts, AIs inscribed in the hidden dimensions of protons, to scramble the results of scientific experiments and gaslight physicists. The book ends with Wang and the military aware that the invasion is coming, as the Sophonts mock humans as bugs, and humanity prepares to resist.

If there's one word to describe this book, it's overstuffed: First contact, human fifth columnists, evolution on a planet that orbits multiple suns, virtual reality, quantum AIs, the use of models in science, astrophysics... The Three-Body Problem is packed with dense infodumps. Unfortunately, this means that there's not really time to develop the implications of any of these ideas, which are just present as fait accomplai, or to round out any character aside from Ye Wenjie. Wang, for all the indications that he should be the protagonist, is particularly a blank slate. His partner, rogue cop Shi Qiang, is a bag of stereotypes, but is at least an amusing bag.

And for all the density of ideas in this book, Cixin misses out on the most interesting one. Are aliens just people in different bodies, or are they really aliens? What does it take to bridge cultures that don't share any evolutionary history. The Trisolarians grasp human culture very quickly, and come up with a very precise plan for how to destroy it. Their motives of "kill them and take their biosphere" seem, well, not very exotic for a space-faring species from a very strange planet.

The idea that sticks with me most out of The Three-Body Problem are the number of people who have simply given up on humanity: the environmentalists, scientists, philosophers, and artists in the Earth-Trisolarian Organization who have decided that humanity is worthless, and that the aliens can save us, all on the flimsiest of messages from space. There's a real darkness here about the integrity of self-proclaimed elites and prophets.

****
(original review from December 7, 2014)

I picked up the The Three Body Problem with very high expectations. Someone (tor.com, IEET?) advertised it as the first modern classic of Chinese science fiction. That may be true, but its not the strongest book. The story is fascinating, but painted in very broad, almost operatic strokes. Ye Wenije is a traumatized survivor of the Cultural Revolution, who winds up assigned to a top secret radio astronomy station. There she makes a discover-mankind is not along in the universe, and a decision-that we cannot take care of ourselves, and that an alien power will set Earth to rights. Her story is paralleled by a much less interesting contemporary investigation of the movement she founded to welcome the aliens, and the strange society that develops on a planet orbiting three suns (Alpha Centauri?)

First contact stories are a staple of science fiction, and the reaction that 'humanity doesn't deserve to survive' and the formation of a pro-alien 5th column are pretty standard responses. There's not enough fidelity or realism in the story to lift it above average. It's enjoyable enough for fiction in translation, but it's far from a must read, and I'll probably skip the sequels.

Richard Sorge was one of the greatest spies of all times. For 8 years he orchestrated a top-level Soviet operation in Tokyo, literally operating out of the German Embassy. He was a close confidant of Ambassador Ott, his top Japanese source Hotsumi Ozaki was a member of elite Japanese think-tanks and part of a weekly breakfast with the Prime Minister. Sorge and Ozaki both pursued their covers with dedicate, maintaining a reputation as insightful journalists. Sorge's information may have provided warnings of Operation Barbarossa, and reassurances that Japan would not attack Siberia while the USSR was occupied by Germany. The unwinding of the spy ring, and the slow march to execution, is also tragic.

This book is a nearly month by month account of the Sorge ring, and the man himself. Sorge was brilliant, an alcoholic, a womanizer, a scandalous loudmouth beloved of the German expat community in Tokyo, and a charismatic man who inspired loyalty even in those he betrayed. The workings of his relationships with his mistress Hanako, radioman Max Clausen, and with the distant 4th Directorate in Moscow, swirl around the tensions and secrets of his life. Prange is a dedicated and detailed historian, and this is a fascinating subject, but somehow this book was a slog, a real life spy story of narrow escapes and information that disappeared into the void of the Soviet strategic apparatus.

The Art of Wargaming is a fascinating book, a compendium of advice and key questions that remains relevant almost 30 years later. Perla is an academic who designs and runs professional wargames for the Naval War College, and an ardent hobbyist gamer who can speak about the difference between Avalon Hill and SPI games and the biases of various trade publications. Perla (likely, I can't say for sure) wrote this book as an academic career building block, to bulwark up a small professional wargaming community in his interest, and a direct response to Allan's War Games. In many ways, the books compliment each other. Perla has a narrower focus on US Navy wargaming and an agenda to push, but he also has much deeper knowledge and clear perspective.

The first third of the book is a history of wargames, stretching from Sun Tzu and various European forms of "battle chess", to classic Prussian General Staff kriegspiel, to the heydey of American hobby wargaming in the 60s and 70s, as well as the Naval Electronic Warfare Simulator, a 60s era mainframe monstrosity that let virtual fleet clash in real time. Allan has a better view of seminar gaming and RAND's political simulations, but Perla can talk about the hobby, and the relatively simple Avalon Hill games against the "monsters" that SPI made, and how most games are rarely played, or played solo.

The second and third sections concern Perla's perspective as a game designer, and the role that wargames can play in a professional environment. Wargames are distinct from training exercises, which are tightly constrained to speed learning the proper execution of necessary skills, and operations research, which seek analytic mathematical models. Rather, a wargame is a sequence of decisions made by players, under pressures of time and imperfect information, with rule-bounded consequences, in order to develop the intangible strategic skills of leadership. A wargame is a conversation between its developers and its players, and the most important question is "why": why did the players make their decisions; why did the designers embed these assumptions.

Perla includes several lists of questions to help guide vital debriefings (I refuse to call the post-wargame discussion a 'hot washup') and game design. These lists seem like enumerated common sense, which is high praise. I have to say that Perla and I share many biases as gamers, even if we come from entirely different gaming traditions, in preferring games that abstract away the "weeds" in favor of key decisions, and which look towards the player's process as the key element of gameplay, as long as outcomes are not distinctly immersion breaking in anachronism. Though he has a grognard's disdain for TSR and the goblins and elves of fantasy roleplaying games, he seems the acme of his ambition as the commander's viewpoint game: fully encompassing the fog of war and uncertainty in action, and predicting a bright future for computer aided gaming tools.

I do wish that Perla had written a little more on applications, provided a deconstruction of a few games, or more examples of how he'd build a game to his specifications. The futurism is well... predicting the future is hard, and this book came out a few years before Real Time Strategy emerged as a genre, or before eurogames revitalized board-games for adults. But one of the advantages of the lost time is that Perla isn't thinking about the debates in realism and interfaces and fun in the same terms we are, and that in some sense he's closer to the important issues of information, decision, and action (shades of the OODA loop there) than we are today.

I'd love to see what he thinks of Command: Modern Air Naval Operations as a computerized version of what he does for a living, or of the COIN games (A Distant Plain, Fire in the Lake, etc) as modern representations of asymmetric warfare, or of the Paxgames community. And given that last I googled, he's still around, I may do that.

Pork Chop Hill is an oral account of a month long rolling battle towards the end of the Korean War, a series of brutal night infantry engagements around hilly outposts. S.L.A. Marshall based his book on immediate oral histories, debriefing the survivors of entire companies right after events happened, and then reconstructing a timeline. What emerges is a scattered and desperate narrative. Men alone in the dark, grenades and automatic weapons going off all around them, unreliable lines back to lifesaving artillery batteries, sudden snapshot violence and trance-like states of total exhaustion. Marshall pushes his hobby horses here: That only about 1-in-5 soldiers directly takes action in combat, and that better training and small arms are vital to saving lives.

On the plus side, this is a very candid portrayal of warfare. These are inexperienced men in dangerous situations, and many men panic, freeze, and die, even as some exhibit extraordinary heroism. Dislike of the KATUSA's (Koreans's attached to US Army units is balanced by frank admiration for the Ethiopian contingent to the UN mission. While the people are real, there is barely any characterization beyond 'grenadier' or 'manned a Browning machine-gun', and the writing is as choppy and confusing as the battle itself.

I'm terrible at poker. Not wanting to embarrass myself at the next poker night, I got Gordon's book. This is perhaps a little more advanced that what I could use, but it's a quick and readable introduction to poker strategy, and the art of imperfect information, livened up with examples from the table. Gordon provides the basics of "tight-and-aggressive" strategy, and why it wins most of the time, along with the bigger picture of tournament games and poker psychology. The mathematical parts of the book, on pot odds and quickly figuring the odds of your hand against an assumed AA or AK hand, as well as avoiding common statistical mistakes, is a little rough, and will take me another reread.

If there's any criticism that can be fairly levied against The Little Green Book is that it's become so popular that the 'meta' of the game has moved to take advantage of it. This book won't make you a star, but hopefully it'll keep me from embarrassing myself next Thursday.

The Caine Mutiny is a powerful and sentimental tour de force of a novel, about command, responsibility, and becoming a man. Willie Keith is a wealthy dilettante, a Princetonian pianist who's highest calling in life is composing witty couplets at parties. To avoid the draft, he signs up as officer in the US Navy, and after a checkered journey through the academy finds himself aboard the WW1 era USS Caine, a garbage scow of a destroyer-mindsweeper. Their first captain, a genial screwoff and expert shiphandler, is promoted and replaced by Captain Queeg, a petty disciplinarian who immediately becomes the monumental tormentor of Keith's life and the other junior officers. As the Caine conducts escorts and other sundry errands around the Pacific, Queeg's abuses and irrationalities mount, until the exec, Lt. Maryk, relieves him of command at the height of a typhoon under Article 184. Maryk, Keith, and Keefer (an aspiring novelist) are court-martialled, but are acquitted only through the brilliant legal manueverings of the lawyer Greenwald, who badgers Queeg into a paranoid breakdown on the witness stand, and subsequently states that the intellectual Keefer manipulated the whole thing. Men like Queeg are necessary because peace time naval service is tedious and mediocre-that they would be promoted into positions of authority in war is what saves the rest of us while we train to fight.

I have to disagree with this judgment about the necessity of Queeg. Command may be hard and lonely, but Queeg reveals himself as obsessed with minutia, repeatedly refusing to take responsibility for his actions and his command, disproportionate and retaliatory to his subordinates, and incapable of engaging effectively with any sort of external reality. He may not be a clinical psychopath, but any system which would give him command is insane. A man like Queeg is a weak link, to be taken out of the chain for the safety of all.

The main plot is bookended by Willie's pursuit of a girl, which is sentimental and mawkish, and seems almost entirely arranged for him to overcome his prejudices and the inertia of his life. Otherwise, this is a stylish and compelling book, one that stretches to the full length of the story with grace and elegance. Wouk served on a very similar destroyer minesweeper during World War 2, and the authenticity is absolute. I'm thrilled I read it.

Trapped returns to a primitive Earth, set off from the main League of Peoples setting. The plot is a rousing adventure, as five teachers at a school go off on a quest to find a missing student, and run into criminals, powerful Spark Lords, and a god-like alien. The main plot is fun enough, a light heart raconteur with your standard D&D party that soon turns into a bloodbath. The narrator, Philemon Abu Dhubhai, and his fellow teachers, are well drawn as caring people all too aware of their smallness of their lives against their ambitions. Having been called on, they give it their all.

What I didn't like was the implications for the setting. Earth has become infested by magic, a shell of alien nanites that can be manipulated by lucky and trained adepts. There's a dramatic increase in power from the smart doors of the third book, or the intelligent clouds of the fifth. Nanotech can and will do anything. The main plot revolves around an alien called a Lucifer, a nanite hivemind that has gone insane and is being rehabilitated by the Spark Lords, which I just could not bring myself to care about.

Van Creveld states in his introduction that the purpose of this book is to advance the serious study of warfare as an integral and universal part of the human experience, and to defend a long military tradition from the pernicious attacks of its enemies: pacifists, feminists, and pernicious neo-Clausewitzian battlespace managers. The result is sweeping, but also uneven and arbitrary.

The book starts quite well, with an examination of the importance of pomp, ritual, and ceremony in military affairs. As it moves on, it becomes clear that Van Creveld's best depth of sources are in the Classical world and the Napoleonic conflicts. World War 1 is mentioned in terms of its suprisingly militaristic poets, even Siegfried Sassoon loved the thrill of life in the trenches, and anything past 1940 seems to disappear from view. All examples of tribal warfare come from Fadiman's 1982 An Oral History of Tribal Warfare: The Meru of Mt. Kenya. The final chapters on collapses in military culture resulting from mob violence, roboticism, loss of bravery, and feminism are "old man yells at cloud" bad.

I'm someone inclined to be favorable to Van Creveld's arguments. Just look at my "war" shelf, or the airpower pictures I post weekly on Facebook. However, this book is a mess. For an good take on the topic, I strongly recommend Shannon French's The Code of the Warrior: Exploring Warrior Values Past and Present.