Category Western Civilization
The Rise of the Robots is not history, in fact it is a forward looking book but so interesting that I am going to review it. As regular readers know I do not always review only history books, I also… Continue Reading →
The Last Battle is the latest of the excellent histories of World War I that Peter Hart has produced. This book is an account of the last year of World War I on the Western Front with an emphasis on… Continue Reading →
An often overlooked aspect of World War II is the war as seen from the enemy side. There have been a plethora of books published about the snail’s eye view of the war from the Allied side from intimate unit… Continue Reading →
In the interwar years of the 1920s and 1930s several books about World War I came out that have become seminal works in their own right. Among these is Goodbye To All That by Robert Graves, his autobiography written and… Continue Reading →
Since 2014 there have been a whole slew of books released dealing with World War I in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of the war. This volume is one of them. In The Great War Peter Hart has produced a… Continue Reading →
Many people have heard of Hadrian’s Wall in the UK and same have even heard of the Antonine Wall a little farther north. What many people have never heard of or if they have heard of do not know where… Continue Reading →
Knights of Jerusalem is not the book you would expect to read about one of the Crusading orders, it is not a list and description of battles the order fought, with blow by blow accounts of the most famous of… Continue Reading →
After reading this latest work from Dr. van Creveld, it is no wonder that Pussycats: Why the Rest Keeps Beating the West had to be self-published as I cannot imagine a mainstream publisher would touch a manuscript that like this that so… Continue Reading →
[FULL DISCLOSURE: I received my copy of this book free from the author and/or publisher. I was not paid for this review and the opinion expressed is purely my own] Many people think that global trade is a relatively new… Continue Reading →
A reluctance to follow traditional, pre-world wars law of war. This point harks back to point #1 and is both a result of and reaction to the high cost of the two 20th century world wars. In the contemporary world… Continue Reading →
A post-World Wars Western (read European or nation-states settled by Europeans) reluctance to accept casualties in the prosecution of a war (note: this does not apply to non-Western countries which often suffer very high casualties) It is obvious to any… Continue Reading →
A reluctance to prosecute war to the extent necessary to achieve victory even when a realistic definition of victory was elucidated. This one should be a no-brainer as recent American experience has shown that stupidity very much exists at the… Continue Reading →
Wars are no longer fought to achieve victory but to achieve often nebulous goals short of the actual defeat of the enemy and often were unrelated or even contrary to national strategic interests. This one is a personal bug-bear of… Continue Reading →
Example: The Israeli bombing of a hospital in Gaza and use of white phosphorous munitions during Operation Cast Lead in 2008 During the 2008-2009 Israeli-Gazan war there were back and forth allegations that Israel had deliberately bombed hospitals in Gaza… Continue Reading →
Modern interpretations of the law of war are flawed from a war winning perspective This point cannot be hammered home enough as it is the root of the problem with Western war making in my opinion. The establishment of the… Continue Reading →