(Part 2) Top products from r/CredibleDefense

If you want to understand the nature of the war and the strategy used to fight it from the surge (2007) onward I recommend David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War by Fred Kaplan. This book will describe all the big names and texts that helped formulate modern counterinsurgency doctrine and will give you plenty of authors and publications to further explore. To further understand counterinsurgency, I recommend The Accidental Guerilla by David Kilcullen (this link downloads the file, it does not open it a new window) that has a great chapter on Iraq since he was the senior COIN advisor for a few months into the surge. You can also read FM3-24 the original 2006 version, but its a dense read and I recommend you familiarize yourself with the doctrine through other publications before tackling the field manual itself.

Fiasco by Thomas Ricks is a decent history of the run up to the Iraq war and the first years, I would say 2002-2005 is where it is strongest although it does discuss important history prior to 9/11 in the containment of Iraq and some detail into 2006.

From the Surge onward I recommend Ricks' follow on book The Gamble, and The Surge by Peter Mansoor. These books will detail the important changes and in strategy and operational practices that characterized the Surge and the post 2006 war effort.

These are the books I have personally read that best address your questions. Books that are more tactically oriented instead of focusing on the big picture include The Forever War by Dexter Filkins, which is a morbid book that does justice to the horror of the Iraq's sectarian civil war. Thunder Run by David Zucchino is worthy of being a masterpiece in terms of how well the author constructed an incredible narrative on the tank forays into the heart of Baghdad in the early weeks of the war. My Share of the Task by Stanley McChrystal is a great read on McChrystal fomented a significant evolution in JSOC's intelligence culture and operational tempo. This book is of value specifically to what you asked because his men were the ones that were tracking Abu Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and was the first iteration of what is now known as ISIS. McChrystal describes the structure of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and much of ISIS's organization and methods can be traced back to Zarqawi's leadership.

I don't think you will find any books that will do justice to your interest in terms of recent events however I have some advice that I feel will help you immensely. Simply type in (topic of interest) and end it with pdf into google. This cuts out brief news articles and wikipedia entries and leaves you with top notch reports published by peer reviewed journals and think tanks. This is all free, and its very well researched work.

A report I'm currently reading that I'm sure you will find interesting is Iraq in Crisis by CSIS. It's of course long for a think tank report, but it has a lot of information and great statistics and charts that help the reader better understand Iraq's trends in violence and other challenges. Here are two more interesting reports by well known think tanks that pertinent to what you are looking for.

On the evolution of Al Qaeda and other salafi jihadists by RAND

Iraqi politics, governance and human rights by the Congressional Research Service

http://www.amazon.com/Bleeding-Talent-Military-Mismanages-Revolution/dp/0230391273

A slightly related book is this. It gets into fairly decent detail about how the current personnel system fails to promote any type of real innovative thinkers.

Innovative thinking at its very heart involves thinking outside of the scope of established procedure and often results in mistakes.

We now live in a world where a single honest mistake by a talented and well meaning officer is a career ender.

This isn't a system that will foster the best and brightest.

John Nagl's Learning To Eat Soup With A Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam is a great read. Nagl contrasts the successful British counterinsurgency in Malaya with the unsuccessful US counterinsurgency in Vietnam and tries to analyze what lessons the US military can take to be more successful at counterinsurgency in the future.

If you want a great and contemporary work on this topic I would recommend Robert D. Kaplan's Monsoon: http://www.amazon.com/Monsoon-Indian-Ocean-Future-American/dp/0812979206

On China, India, the US and the shift of both the economic and military center of gravity from the West to the East.

I have a long list of books that I usually recommend to people who are interested in these types of subjects. Here are some that may be of interest to you. If you are ever interested in more books on the Middle East or international affairs issues, check out the r/geopolitics wiki.

As for the books that have been recommended to you, they are pretty good. I even repeated a few of them in my recommendations. The only ones that I would have reservations about are Gen. Daniel Bolger's because I have never read it.

Author | Title | Synopsis
---|---|----
Daniel Byman | Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and the Global Jihadist Movement: What Everyone Needs to Know | A terrific primer on al-Qaida, ISIL, and jihadism. Its a brief outline of the history of al-Qaida, its ideological underpinnings, and the rise of ISIL in the shadow of the Syrian Civil War.
Lawrence Wright | The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 | Probably the most approachable and argueably the best book for outlining the pro-9/11 history of al-Qaida and why 9/11 happened.
Michael Wiess and Hassan Hassan | ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror | One of several recent books on ISIL, this one provides an overview on the history and organization of ISIL.
Charles Lister | The Syrian Jihad: Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Evolution of an Insurgency | Written by an expert on jihadism in Syria, this books looks at the history and evolution of jihadists in the Syrian conflict.
Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger | ISIS: The State of Terror | Written by two top experts in the study of terrorism, this book focuses on how ISIL radicalizes and recruits individuals from all over the world to join their cause.
William McCants | The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State | An examination of ISIL's worldview and how it influenced its growth and strategy.
Kenneth Pollack | The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America | An excellent overview of the history of relations and tensions between the United States and Iran over the decades. Pollack published a second book on U.S.-Iranian relations in the wake of Iran's nuclear program called Unthinkable: Iran, the Bomb, and American Strategy
Bob Woodward | Obama's Wars | Outline of the U.S. foreign policy decision making towards Iraq and Afghanistan in the early years of the Obama administration.
Michael R. Gordon | The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama | Follows U.S. strategic and political decision making process during the Iraq War and the U.S. occupation.
Peter R. Mansoor | Surge: My Journey with General David Petraeus and the Remaking of the Iraq War | An extensive outline of the development and outcome of the Surge during the U.S. Occupation of Iraq.
Mark Mazzetti | The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth | An overview of the CIA's targeted drone program against terrorist organizations.
Michael Morrell | The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From al Qa'ida to ISIS | Written by the former acting director of the CIA, this book examines U.S. counterterrorism successes and failures of the past two decades.

You should check out the book Desert Warrior by the Saudi general Khaled bin Sultan if you're interested in this stuff. He and Schwarzkopf were both the equal-ranked Joint Forces Commander during Desert Storm, with Schwarzkopf having responsibility over Western armies and bin Sultan being responsible for keeping the Arab armies working well together.

An interesting tidbit from this conflict is that Israel purposefully played no military role, so that the other Arab states would not get upset fighting allied with Israel against another Arab state. This is of course why Saddam Hussein fired a bunch of scuds at Israeli cities, to try to goad them into entering the war and try to cause the truly miraculous alliance of Western and Arab states to fragment. It didn't work for Saddam in the end.

While this is somewhat outside of your scope, I would recommend reading Boyd. I recommend this because it follows the life of a deeply influential military man during the cold war. It will provide you with general knowledge as well as a peak into the social, economic & political fabric of the USA DoD during his tenure.

His work, primarily the OODA loop & Maneuver Warfare, are also discussed and will provide you with the jumping off points to further explore your interests in more appropriate detail.

In 1996 synchronous systolic arrays made sense for signal processing. That hasn't been the case for decades now. Bulk synchronous parallel algorithms are ideal on gpus, which have obviated things like the paper you linked above.

I don't have time to go into detail, but just on the first page they quote 7.7gflop raw. Current GPUs offer thousands of gflops. There are very few application areas where ASICs are still warranted.

I'd suggest reading H&P for a solid general overview of things.

Absolutely. This is the book in question.

Sorry, can't agree with this. Alone the reading of Jeremy Bowen's Six Days reveals Oren applied a very 'selective' approach to his 'sources' and the way he used related materials.

Comparison with books specialized in description of military related issues and based on official documentation (see Arab MiGs, Volume 3 as example), reveal a mass of omissions, failures, and even significant confusion in Oren's reconstruction of related events.

A book people should read is: *Politics of Frustration: The United States in Germany Naval Planning 1889-1945. In the book, Herwig talks a lot about the German plans to land an army on the East Coast in the event of a war. German planners had a number of different ideas. But the most interesting was one which called for a preliminary invasion of Puerto Rico (which the German planners couldnt even spell correctly). With Puerto Rico, the German Army was then to land across the East Coast, but to concentrate along Boston, Norfolk, Philadelphia, DC, and New York, otherwise known as every major city on the coast. Problematically, places like New York, Boston, and DC were well defended by fortifications and heavy artillery. So the German planners also envisioned a scenario where 1-3 million German regulars would capture Norfolk, then land along key beaches in New York and New England. Then they would push on the key cities. If they couldnt take them, then the German Navy was instructed to bombard the cities (especially New York, which was to be leveled in most plans if it wasnt taken by a quick coup de main). Ideally, capturing three or four major US cities would force the American government to the negotiating table, and make a quick peace to evict the Germans.

But the plan was pretty problematic, and the planners who drew up these ideas were doing them more as an exercise than as a true war plan. One major criticism came from the army, which argued that 1-3 million men would only hold a few beachheads, while the Americans counter-attacked relentlessly against them from the interior. Another criticism was the plans real disregard for the US navy. It was assumed rather off hand that the US navy would stand and fight the Germans somewhere between Puerto Rico, Norfolk, or New York, and that the German navy would smash the American navy. The plans never delt with the possibility of commerce raiding, or with digging the US Navy out of a protected harbor (except to say that the Germans could bomb New York, and then smash the American battle fleet). This is of course under the assumption too that the German navy, after traveling an immense distance (a distance so far from Germany that the dreadnoughts would have to stack their decks literally full of extra coal just to make the trip) would then fight at full efficiency in foreign waters.

Really strange stuff. Im not sure how serious most of the plans were (they were mostly just exercises), but it sure is interesting nonetheless!

I haven't read this book, but suggesting that the USA's geopolitical control rests exclusively, or primarily, on her military power seems a little short sighted. It kind of seems to betray the effects of American consumption of goods and the proliferation of capital into foreign nations. The soft power of economy is just as decisive as the bayonet.

Edit ~ For a nice treatment on this subject, Amsden's "Escape from Empire" offers an analysis of the power of the American economic "empire", if you can overlook some of its arguments. There's some good reason to suspect that America will actually begin to lag behind foreign powers; and Friedman seems to take for granted that China's power structure isn't capable of adapting to change and structural inequalities. I'll stop making assumptions until I read his book, though.

You're right about people ignoring Africa. The deadliest conflict of the 21st century, and I bet not many people could even name the belligerents in the Second Congo War, which still isn't entirely resolved. And I hate to be a pessimist, but border disputes are likely to get even more heated if China really does manage to set off another "Scramble for Africa."

Gérard Prunier's book Africa's World War is a fair look at the war and its origins.