Military, Scientific, and Technological

The Blind Strategist: John Boyd and the American Art of War

BY STEPHEN ROBINSON. Exisle, 2021, 360 pp.

Colonel John Boyd was one of the most influential American strategic theorists of the last century. From his experience as a fighter pilot during the Korean War, he developed the so-called ooda loop— observe, orient, decide, act—as an approach to warfighting. In the 1970s and 1980s, he convinced senior U.S. policymakers of the need to abandon strategies based on attrition and embrace those based on sophisticated maneuvers instead. He drew heavily on accounts of how the German army had gained impressive victories during the World War II and on the work of the British military historian Basil Liddell Hart, who had urged an “indirect approach” to warfare to avoid deadly frontal assaults. But as Robinson reveals, the more that scholars learn about German operations and about Hart’s determination to fit all military history into his own simplistic framework, the flimsier Boyd’s thesis appears. Robinson carries out a meticulous demolition job that will be of interest to students of the Wehrmacht and to the U.S. Army and Marine Corps, demonstrating how grand theories with an emotional appeal can go a long way on the back of dubious history.

The American War in Afghanistan: A History

BY CARTER MALKASIAN. Oxford University Press, 2021, 576 pp.

The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

BY CRAIG WHITLOCK. Simon & Schuster, 2021, 368 pp.

Malkasian provides a full and authoritative account of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan from President Jimmy Carter’s decision to back the mujahideen after the Soviet Union invaded in December 1979 to President Joe Biden’s decision earlier this year to pull U.S. troops out. Malkasian combines meticulous scholarship with a practitioner’s eye. It helps that he knows the country well, speaks Pashto, can navigate his way through the complex tribal structures that shape local politics, and has a good grasp of the Taliban’s attitudes and operations. The story he tells is a painful one. Successive U.S. administrations were unwilling to deal diplomatically with the Taliban because the militant group was either too weak or too strong, and Washington failed to put the effort and resources into building up the new Afghan government and army after 2001. The Bush administration’s focus in the early days of the post-9/11 invasion was on catching terrorists, which led to operations that killed civilians, resulting in a loss of support from the local population. In the end, despite their harsh ideology and brutal misogyny, the Taliban were able to sell themselves as authentically Afghan and resisting foreign occupation, whereas the government forces lacked conviction.

Whitlock covers the same ground using materials he obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, including interviews conducted by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, U.S. Army oral histories, and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s memos. The disparate sources make for a disjointed narrative, and although there are many quotes from U.S. officials, there is a marked absence of Afghan voices. Whitlock’s approach has the advantage, however, of showing participants expressing themselves in revealing, colorful language, as they talk about the futility of spending billions of dollars trying to turn Afghanistan into a modern country, complain about the incompetence in the Afghan security forces and corruption in the government, and note how U.S. attempts to deal with the Afghan drug trade failed to take into account the importance of the poppies to the local economy. The most depressing aspect of the book is the gap it reveals between insiders’ official optimism and their private pessimism. In public, progress was always being made and corners being turned. Behind closed doors, there were far more doubts.

Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II

BY SEAN MCMEEKIN. Basic Books, 2021, 864 pp.

Instead of writing yet another history of World War II centered on Adolf Hitler, McMeekin takes a more original approach, focusing on Joseph Stalin. McMeekin pulls no punches in reminding readers that throughout the war,

Stalin played a cruel, manipulative, and uncompromising game. His cynical deal with Hitler in August 1939 allowed the Soviet Union to take Poland and the Baltic states and pushed European democracies into a draining war with Germany. When it was the Soviet Union that was struggling to push the Germans back, Stalin demanded that the United Kingdom and the United States contort their own war plans to provide him with material assistance and establish a second front. McMeekin argues, less persuasively, that Stalin was acting as an orthodox Leninist with a long-term goal from the start. McMeekin also develops an unconvincing and at times preposterous counterfactual war. He argues, for example, that to thwart Stalin’s plans, the United Kingdom could have sided with Finland in the “Winter War” of 1939–40 and made its own peace with Germany after the fall of France. McMeekin’s research is prodigious, and his writing is vigorous, but in the end, he pushes his argument past the breaking point.

The Changing of the Guard: The British Army Since 9/11

BY SIMON AKAM. Scribe, 2021,

704 pp.

The British army’s experience of the Iraq war began with dissatisfaction with a role that it did not feel was commensurate with its contribution and ended with humiliation. The army got bogged down fighting a Shiite militia in Basra with which they eventually had to cut a deal. British forces were spared further embarrassment only when they were able to help defeat the militia by participating in a 2008 battle referred

to as Operation Charge of the Knights, which was initiated by the Iraqi government and backed by the Americans. Well before that, British senior commanders had tried to retrieve the army’s reputation by taking a major role in Afghanistan, but that did not go much better. Drawing on some 260 interviews (including one with me), Akam, a journalist who himself spent a year serving in the British army, recounts the story of these difficult years with candor, great detail, and occasional indignation, bemoaning the harm done to the institution by class tensions, alcohol, and unaccountable officers who made poor tactical choices in pursuit of often incoherent strategies. Akam makes no claim to be balanced, and this is a dense and at times undisciplined book. But much of what he writes rings true, and all told, it makes for a valuable and salutary read.