Denny was a WW2 bomber pilot and reporter. I don't know how he was at his day job, but he's not much of a novelist. Robinson and Amandson hail from different strata of a small Pennsylvania mining town. Lt. Google is from California and know kung fu. Together, they're part of the 8th Air Force. It's 1945, and they just need to make it till the end of the war. Denny plays with history a little, making the wasserfall SAM and an elite unit armed with Me 262s more deadly then they actually were. The story ambles through meditations on the warrior ethos, and class and sex in the 1940s, before settling into a happy ending for Robinson, with his enemies confronted and killed, and peace made with the death of Amundson.

This is an odd and uneven book that's more about games publishing than game design per se. Tom Vasel is the head of the Dice Tower podcast, and in this book puts together a bunch of interviews with game industry professionals, all conducted around 2005. There's a solid cross section of the hobby here, from Avalon Hill grognard wargamers, to Essen-style German family game designers, from big publishers like Steve Jackson to people who run monthly email lists about games. There are dips into collectible card games and roleplaying games, but the focus is primarily on board games and strategy games.

Interviews are a tricky business, and at over a decade's remove this feels like a whole different universe. Not a word to be said about Kickstarter (though GMT's P-500 system for preorders before a game is published is an interesting twist), andBoardGameGeek.com is just one site, instead of an 800 gorilla. It's the internet as a faster version of mail-order businesses, not social media virality. The interviews require a fair bit of prior knowledge about games. I consider myself a hobbyist, and I was somewhat lost.

This leads to my main problem with the book, which is that in theory it's set up as one component of a college course on game design. There are study questions in the front, and an example syllabus from George Phillies in the back, but I honestly couldn't see using much more than Greg Costiyikan's essay "I have no words and I much design" as assigned reading. The rest is too unfriendly, or too uneven in quality.

Worth your six dollars, maybe not worth the hours it takes to read, an certainly hardly modern by this point.

Who really likes corporate HR training activities? Not this guy.

This book has everything from awkward stereotype-based sensitivity exercise to awkward physical coordination and group dexterity exercises. Admittedly, I believe that workplace issues and miscommunication are a matter of material differences between managers and employees, and reflect mutually incommensurate interests that can't be bridged by *any* hour long workshop, but even so, most of the exercises in this book feel needlessly obfuscatory, rather than representing any real task or process.

Admittedly, if I ever need to run a training exercise now I can draw one from this book with out having to think about it, so there is that.

Kelly is an experienced defense journalist, so he has a keen ear for the stories that resonate, and how to convey them to readers who may lack a lot of context. From a Dark Sky focuses on the history of Air Force Special Operations from World War 2 to Desert Storm. One of the dreams of military flight was to leapfrog over defensive lines, landing armies in vulnerable rear areas and parachuting . Of course, the devil is in actually doing this stuff, which involves low-level navigation at night through contested air space.

The first section is a solid history of the air commandos role in the Burma campaign, and supporting OSS and SOE agents in Occupied Europe during World War 2. The special forces capabilities were mostly lost in the post-war draw down, and had to be reinvented for Korea, and then reinvented a third time for Vietnam. Vietnam was where aerial special forces came into their own, with helicopters a marked improvement over gliders for inserting and evaccing special forces operators, and night navigation equipment reaching a tipping point of usability, and the deadly side-firing gunships becoming standard platforms for air support. The Son Tay raid demonstrated that tactical perfection could be spoiled by faulty intelligence, while the fiascos of the USS Mayageuz and Operation Eagle Claw demonstrated how quickly the delicate intermeshing of skills required for aerial special operations could decay.

The 1980s and 1990s saw a final renaissance for the Air Commandos, incorporated into their own command, and adequately funded for once, with specialized aircraft, helicopters, and veteran crews.

For what's it worth, pararescuemen are almost entirely absent, aside from the cover photo. And this is a popular history, not a complete account.

The Making of a Quagmire is an absolutely heartbreaking look, a clear-eyed examination of the failures of the Vietnam War that came out just a little too late to make a difference. Halberstam drew on his experience as a reporter to chart in detail three related problems.

The first was the government of Ngo Dinh Diem: isolated, corrupt, paranoid, Diem and his brother and sister-in-law the Nhus were the rotting head of South Vietnamese politics. Everything was cast through the lens of personal loyalty and palace intrigue. At one point, there were 13 separate and warring secret police factions. Competent men who told the truth were punished, corrupt toadies rewarded. Even as American aid and advice flowed in, it was absorbed by the infinite avarice of the South Vietnamese ruling class, rather than the peasants who were the center of gravity of the war.

The second side was the War in the Delta, and the related propaganda war on the American home front. ARVN units lacked the leadership to pursue and destroy Viet Cong forces, as commanders who lost troops were sacked. The Strategic Hamlet program was a twisted joke of forced relocation against a profoundly place-based culture. Meanwhile, General Harkins at MACV and various figures in the State department were feeding back the same optimistic and fundamentally false stats. Halberstam and the other reporters were ordered to get on the team, or get out.

The final bit is the Buddhist Crisis and the coup that depose Diem and the Nhus in 1963. Through an escalating series of missteps, the Diem government forced a showdown with the last vestige of independent civil society, the Buddhist masses. As protests rocked the streets, the CIA orchestrated a coup that brought down Diem, and replaced him with a rotating set of empty suits.

As Halberstam demonstrates again and again, American diplomacy was simply incapable of meaningfully changing the political culture of South Vietnam. New technological weapons like helicopters and APCs could provide a temporary advantage, but couldn't alter the fundamental dynamics of peasant political war. This book, written post '63 and published in 1965, predicted exactly what actually happened with the escalation. It seems like no one in power read it, and they certainly failed to understand its lessons.

Rueben and Nancy Noel were struggling musicians, trying to keep their heads above water, when they were offered a good deal. Go to Vietnam, play some shows, support the troops, make some money, and get settled. Sure, it's 1969, but the country is mostly safe and the Army will take good care of you. They signed on the dotted line and took that bird into Saigon as civilians, with a trunk load of instruments, a husband-and-wife musical variety and comedy show, and a desire to help out however they could.

What they got was an introduction to the fractally fucked up Vietnam War. It turned out that entertainers were bureaucratically locked out of the American PX system: mail, meals, supplies. Everything was sink or swim on the black market. Club sergeants would book impossible shows and leave transportation through a warzone and Kafka-esque maze of checkpoints to fate. Agents and managers were alcoholic, on the take, or both. While they were dodging VC snipers and sleeping in rat infested hooches and playing shows before crowds of doped out combat vets, the bank was threatening to foreclose on their house.

While the Noels were playing 250 shows over six months in atrocious conditions, they discovered an immense conspiracy of kickbacks and money-laundering that went right to the top. Club sergeants demanded bribes from agents, treating some acts, mostly Korean and Philippine dancing girls, like hookers, and generally profited while boys died in the mud. Disgusted, Reuben Noel drew on his past life as a reporter to write a letter to Senator Goldwater, that started a corruption scandal that eventually brought down the first Sergeant Major of the Army William O. Wooldridge. Most of the conspiracy escaped real punishment, but these sergeants were apparently skimming a total of $150 million off the club system annually, and had their fingers all through the $2 billion PX system (in 1970 dollars, so more like $900 million of corruption today). It was just one example of the moral decay of the army, that career NCOs would get rich in a warzone while draftees died, and everybody looked the other way. Sure, it was just some musicians getting screwed the hardest, but honor is a core military value, and one that was betrayed in every way in Vietnam.

So why three stars? Well, this book is niche, and only okay writing-wise, although the Noels are charming enough to carry the story. The club corruption scandal never really went anywhere, being eclipsed by My Lai, Vietnamization, and the 70s in general. In worse luck, Robin Moore (author of The Green Berets) and June Collins (ex-callgirl and key witness in the Senate hearings) got there first with their 1971 novel The Khaki Mafia. This book is an interesting picture of Saigon high life and corruption, and how it ties to the mud and blood of the battlefield, but at the end of the day it's still marginal to the war as a whole.

Sidenote: There is a local connection, since the Noels lived in Phoenix before their tour. I picked this up at a giant Arizona used book sale, and my copy is inscribed by Rueben Noel (he has terrible handwriting). Rueben apparently passed away between 1993 and whenever the internet started archiving everything, but Nancy Noel was alive as of this past summer. Sadly, their music has not survived, or at least not in an easily googleable way. I think they would've been better live, though maybe without accompaniment by 105mm Howitzer.

There are few topics more contentious than the use of airpower in the Vietnam War. Tilford attempts a balanced, academic dismantling of two major airpower myths, that Rolling Thunder could have been successful if Johnson and McNamara untied commanders hands and let them use maximum force, and that the Linebacker II Christmas Bombings brought North Vietnam to its knees. Vietnam was in many ways an air war: airpower was the first component in, the last to leave, and accounted for 50% of the cost of the war to America. Understanding airpower is key to understanding the war, but Tilford's efforts don't quite match up to his thesis.

The strategic analysis is quite good, as Tilford discusses the evolution of airpower theory from Douhet and Mitchell through the 1960s, the adoption as an article of faith by airforce brass that strategic bomber strikes against 'vital centers' could destroy the foe's ability and will to wage war, and how it became solidified in a nuclear-centric heavy bomber force. This doctrine might have been applicable to WW2 Germany and Japan, but the agrarian economy of North Vietnam had no vital centers, and the people were totally committed to the war. Rather, from 65-68 airpower proved ineffective because Hanoi was willing to endure any sane attack, short of nuclear weapons, and in 72 the Christmas bombings were irrelevant because the recalcitrant party were the South Vietnamese, who recognized a bad deal when they saw one. But I think acceptance of the strategic analysis is tied more to your agreement with the Revisionist school of Vietnam War historians (personally, I disagree with the Revisionists entirely. Vastly increased American firepower and commitment would not have changed the final outcome)

What I wanted from this book was more of an operational/tactical critique of the air war. In the introduction, Tilford talks about his experiences as a briefing officer, being unable to use the word 'retreat' to describe ARVN behavior during the Lam Son 719 fiasco, and being punished for 'taking the commander's planes away' to do close-air support. For the key interdiction campaign against the Ho Chi Minh trail, truck kill counts had no basis in reality. When the Air Force finally shot at real truck on a range stateside, the found a "destroyed" truck hit by a 40mm Bofors shell had easily repairable damage, and a "damaged" near-miss from the same shell might not even puncture tires.

Those are fascinating moments, but that's all there is. I've heard that the command structure for airpower in Vietnam was a mess: CINCPAC, 7th Airforce, 13th Airforce, ground commanders with on call fire support, etc. Unity of command is a basic precept of military operations, and this book doesn't adequately describe disunity in Vietnam. Likewise, while Crosswinds describes three campaigns in detail (Rolling Thunder, Linebacker, and Commando Hunt), close air support for troops in South Vietnam is barely covered at all, with just an aside that it took 110,000 tons of bombs to kill 10,000 PAVN soldiers at Khe Sanh.

The final chapter is a recapitulation of the success of airpower in Desert Storm, where stealth bombers and precision guided weapons devastated Saddam's tank army in the open field, paving the way for a stunning limited victory. This chapter feels tacked on, and at odds with the rest of the book.

Aligning the destructive force of airpower with the objectives of modern limited wars is definitely a challenge, but all I can say after reading this book is that we definitely didn't do it in Vietnam.

Klein's Interdisciplinarity is an important look at the state of interdisciplinarity research circa 1990, but its argument is caught up in the glorious rhetoric of interdisciplinarity rather than the decidedly mixed record of actual interdisciplinary programs.

Modern interdisciplinarity has been seen as a panacea for a research endeavor which has fragmented into fiefdoms and abstractions. Interdisciplinarity is seen as a pragmatic application of scholarly inquiry to immediate ends; from sustaining fragile ecosystems, to landing on the moon, to coming to grips with rapidly changing technology. Interdisciplinarity is also a radical practice of speaking truth to power, of critical inquiry towards race and gender and imperialism. And finally, interdisciplinarity is a way to rejuvenate tired and dogmatic professors and programs.

All well and good, and the study of the history of interdisciplinary efforts through 1990 is quite strong. My problem is that Klein rather uncritically accepts Donald Campbell's "fishscale" metaphor of interdisciplinary omniscience. In Campbell's metaphor, the disciplines represent tight clusters of knowledge with large gaps of ignorance between them. By rearranging knowledge (and knowledge production) to cover the gaps, we can achieve a more comprehensive view of the world. This is an empirical claim about the structure of knowledge and the nature of problems that we face, and while it's a pretty metaphor it doesn't bear up to scrutiny. Managing the behavior of complex sociotechnical systems doesn't require further research, it's just very hard to impossible. And as for pressing social problems, usually they remain so because solving them would cost powerful people money.

Klein is right to note that the highest goal of interdisciplinary research is the synthetic integration of knowledge. But disciplines are a matter of intellectual genealogy, of things in the past that have proved durable and distinct enough to be given a name. It is possible to be integrative, synthetic, and to flow smoothly from theory to application within one discipline. And it is equally possible to combine insights and methods from many disciplines into an unbalanced hodgepodge. Interdisciplinarity in practice is fraught with hazards, from the misuse to decontextualized concepts to the need to create a sui generis framework for discourse before work even properly begins.

I'll be returning to Klein for a snappy quote (she has collected many), and a good summation of the field. But for real insight, Jacob's In Defense of Disciplines is the superior work.

Shootdown is a fascinating piece of Cold War techno-paranoia, a web of circumstance carefully stitched together by British academic R.W. Johnson. The basic facts are clear. At 13:00 UTC, August 31st 1983, Korean Airlines Flight 007 departed Anchorage en route to Seoul. It strayed over Soviet territory, and was shot down at 18:26:46 UTC on September 1, 0626 local time over Sakhalin Island. 269 people were killed, including an American congressman. All parties involved began making accusations and counter-accusations, an international investigation was stonewalled, and the truth disappeared, along with the plane. Tensions between the superpowers escalated another notch, and the situation resumed.

Johnson argues that it is unlikely that the highly trained KAL crew could have made such a fatal navigational error. Rather, he sees KAL 007 flightpath as part of deliberate ploy orchestrated by National Security Adviser William P. Clark Jr. and CIA Director William J. Casey to gain electronic intelligence of Russian defenses in the volatile North Pacific. This effort was part of long tradition of aggressive surveillance by aircraft, most famously Gary Powers U-2 shootdown in 1960. The flight was monitored by an armada of sophisticated sensors, and arranged with the help of the strictly anti-communist Korean Central Intelligence Agency. An earlier incident, KAL 902, had ended in only two deaths, and the gamble of using a plane full of civilians was seen as worthwhile. After all, the Soviets wouldn't shoot an innocent airliner down, right? Except they did, and then the Reagan administration had to arrange a cover-up, which was aided by the tone-deaf propaganda of the Soviet Union.

It's a convincing story, with the single flaw being that it is entirely wrong. Johnson argues that the flight data recorders (the black box) were either destroyed by the US, or never recovered. What he had no way of knowing was that the black box was recovered by the USSR, and their tapes were released in late 1992. The revised report, with all the evidence, is clear. The crew of KAL 007 made a navigation error and failed to switch the autopilot from compass heading to INS waypoints. They never knew that they had entered Soviet airspace, and the Soviet Pacific defenses, far from being the well-oiled machine Johnson believes them to be, were beset by broken equipment and sclerotic command and control. It was a tragedy, and the Soviets shot without provocation.

For what's it worth, Johnson makes a bold stab at the getting the story straight. There was never much reason to trust the official Reagan administration stance on anything. His accounts of superpower technological confrontation are still gripping. The intrigues and incompetence of Reagan administration officials is very familiar. While at the end of the day, this is a conspiracy theory built on circumstantial evidence and gaps in the official record, it's at least plausible that KAL 007 was an unauthorized ELINT probe. Meanwhile, in our present darkest timeline, the right-o-sphere and even some Trump people are fixated on QAnon*, a series of cryptic hints delivered over childporn board 8chan that (((Globalist Deep State Bankers))) are engaged in a massive child sex-slave ring, and that Trump has arrested thousands of these people on double-secret warrants, and that commands are being sent via the web equivalent of number's stations.

Can we have the Cold War back, please?

*QAnon description is approximate. It's... nuts, is all I can say.

Spencer dodges the standard pitying narratives of the Vietnam War to deliver a blast of raw, profane, USMC machismo. Always a tough kid, Spencer moved from Hawaii into the Marines, where he learned the basics of command before being sent to Vietnam in late spring, 1967. The battered Marine units up along the DMZ desperately needed officers, and First Lieutenant Spencer got command of a company, usually a captain's slot.

The book is a series of brief essays, roughly organized by topic and chronology. The main topic is toughness, the bone-deep endurance that it takes for a man to suffer danger, abuse, and pain, and then spit in the face of death. Macho is six months of combat patrols, going to an Air Force club on leave, and getting blackout drunk. Macho is macabre jokes as friends die. Macho is humping through miles of triple canopy jungle. Macho is running towards the sounds of the guns. Real Marines are macho. Charlie is an enemy to be respected. And the doggies in the Army (not my Army!) can go to hell. Second only to macho in Spencer's world is pussy. Unloading an M-16 on full auto in a close ambush-pussy. Well-worn jungle boots-pussy. R&R in Bangkok-yeah, you better believe that pussy.

Spencer's memoir walks through battles around Hill 881 South, and then the Siege of Khe Sanh, where he was evacuated and hospitalized for Tropical Fevers of Unknown Origin, and then search and destroy along the coast. Spencer is one of the few who thrive in combat, and this book captures what a gung ho Marine circa 1967 would have thought about his war.