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Human Game: The True Story of the 'Great Escape' Murders and the Hunt for the Gestapo Gunmen by Simon Read.
“In the summer of 1945, British investigator Francis McKenna and his team began a trek across post-war #Europe to pursue the men who murdered British #POWs in cold blood following the famous #GreatEscape from Stalag Luft III in March #1944. Simon Read details the hunt in a book that is one part detective story and one part morality play, striking themes that will resonate in the present day. Remarkably, many of the Germans who witnessed or were tangentially involved in the atrocity retained an active sense of guilt and helped the investigators, even when it put them at risk for retribution from both sides. Simon Read has done an impressive job stitching together a highly readable and informative story from various sources, and making it live again.”—Jim DeFelice, bestselling author of Rangers at Dieppe, Omar Bradley: General at War, and American Sniper __ “A gut-wrenching account of World War II’s Great Escape and its brutal aftermath. Simon Read’s riveting tale of the #RoyalAirForce’s #RAF manhunt for the #Gestapo perpetrators of the cold-blooded murder of fifty unarmed Allied escapees will touch your soul and increase your admiration for the ‘Greatest Generation.’ Whether justice ultimately triumphed over evil can be found in Read’s engrossing narrative.”—Colonel Cole C. Kingseed, USA (Ret.), New York Times bestselling coauthor of Beyond Band of Brothers. http://www.amazon.com/Human-Game-Escape-Murders-Gestapo/dp/0425253708/ref=la_B002CWVNGY_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1462655134&sr=1-1
"The world has seldom been as dangerous as it is now. Rogue regimes—governments and groups that eschew diplomatic normality, sponsor terrorism, and proliferate nuclear weapons—threaten the United States around the globe. Because sanctions and military action are so costly, the American strategy of first resort is dialogue, on the theory that “it never hurts to talk to enemies.” Seldom is conventional wisdom so wrong.
Engagement with rogue regimes is not cost-free, as Michael Rubin demonstrates by tracing the history of American diplomacy with North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya, the Taliban’s Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Further challenges to traditional diplomacy have come from terrorist groups, such as the PLO in the 1970s and 1980s, or Hamas and Hezbollah in the last two decades. The argument in favor of negotiation with terrorists is suffused with moral equivalence, the idea that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Rarely does the actual record of talking to terrorists come under serious examination. While soldiers spend weeks developing lessons learned after every exercise, diplomats generally do not reflect on why their strategy toward rogues has failed, or consider whether their basic assumptions have been faulty. Rubin’s analysis finds that rogue regimes all have one thing in common: they pretend to be aggrieved in order to put Western diplomats on the defensive. Whether in Pyongyang, Tehran, or Islamabad, rogue leaders understand that the West rewards bluster with incentives and that the U.S. State Department too often values process more than results." https://www.amazon.com/Dancing-Devil-Perils-Engaging-Regimes/dp/159403723X/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1473037607&sr=1-1-fkmr0&keywords=michael+rubin+dance+with+the+devil War Porn By Olivia Garard, Strategy Bridge: “War is socially organized political violence. What I mean by that is that war is directed, socially authorized violence undertaken by one human collective that identifies itself as a coherent, bounded body against another such body. This seems to me to be the best working sociological definition of war, helping us to distinguish asymmetric warfare—terrorism or guerrilla war, for example—from merely criminal violence, or to distinguish a war of occupation (in which one distinct political body is fighting against one or more distinct political bodies) from peacekeeping (in which one political body is working to establish a monopoly of violence in a situation where no other political body exists).” How Lethal, Mobile, Protected and Aware?
By Jeff Becker, Small Wars Journal: “In 2002, an obscure, yet very important study by Andrew Marshall’s Office of Net Assessment (OSD/NA) described the historical evolution of the infantry unit as a tactical system. The most important observation described how complementary and interlocking tactical systems create small unit advantages, with each part of the system “trading aspects of mobility, engagement, and protection capabilities to achieve some advantageous military characteristic.”” Obituary, Maryam Mirzakhani: Few academic careers are as short yet prolific and brilliant as that of the globally-recognized Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, who died at a Californian hospital on Saturday, aged 40, writes Sami Moubayed. Mirzakhani rose to international fame in 2014 by winning the Fields Medal, considered the Nobel Prize for mathematicians, and her heroic national standing was underlined when Iranian newspapers broke a strict taboo over the weekend by publishing front page photographs of her with no hijab. READ THE STORY HERE
Free Economics Course Taught By John B. Taylor, Stanford University-Hoover Institution Fellow7/17/2017 Clausewitz in His Time
By Youri Cormier, Strategy Bridge: “Clausewitz has been primarily studied and presented by historians: from Liddell Hart onwards... Howard, Paret, Keegan, and van Creveld, to name only a few. As a result, the narratives tend to overemphasize one of two things. First, speculatively linking the man’s experience, acquaintances, and life story, to his possible state of mind at the time and then to his writing. And second, in their dissection of Clausewitz, they sometimes place too much importance on single words or phrases instead of their meaning when they come together as a whole.” The Path to Prototype Warfare By Robert Kozloski, War on the Rocks: “Can a radical approach to weapons development help the Pentagon cope with uncertainty and improve military effectiveness?” Replacing the Geographic Combatant Commands
By Wilson VornDick, War on the Rocks: “Globalization now allows localized crises and conflicts to immediately spill beyond their porous regional boundaries and flow directly into the global commons. Gen. Joe Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, has acknowledged that any future conflict would have “transregional” and “multifunctional” implications and require “global integration.”” For the second time in less than a year, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is putting India through a revolution in the way the country does business….On Saturday, a nationwide sales tax replaces the current hodgepodge of business taxes that vary from state to state and are seen as an impediment to growth. It is expected to unify in a single market 1.3 billion people spread over 29 states and seven union territories in India’s $2 trillion economy. – New York Times
Sadanand Dhume writes: In Parliament Friday, Mr. Modi praised the GST as a “good and simple tax.” This may be far from current reality, but it remains a laudable aspiration. His administration deserves credit for taking a big step on a long journey. – Wall Street Journal (subscription required) Thucydides and the Tragedy of Athens: A Parable for America
By John H. Maurer, Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI): “Thucydides is nowadays all the rage. Presidents, members of Congress, admirals and generals, foreign policy and national security professionals, scholars, and news commentators invoke his name and refer reverently to his history as offering ancient wisdom on politics, ethics, strategy, and war. Not bad for a disgraced general who turned to writing history after his fellow Athenians held him responsible for a major military defeat and sent him packing into exile.” |
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December 2023
EXAMPLE OF SUCCESS IN U.S. FOREIGN POLICY ACE VENTURA
PAUL RAHE: REALISM IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS, SPARTA
CONSCIENCE & TEMPORAL AUTHORITY
SHAKESPEARE
POSITIVE LAW vs. CONSCIENCE
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