I realized today, halfway through my latest book, that I haven’t updated my reading selection on the weblog here. Sorry. I finished “Madison’s Notes” weeks ago, and am now deep into Keegan’s “Intelligence in War.” John Keegan is my son Christopher’s favorite author, and this is Chris’ book I am borrowing. Good stuff so far. I’ll update links tomorrow.
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I read Keegan’s History of Warfare about 15 years ago now and thoroughly enjoyed it.
I’ve been reading various books by Keegan for about a year now. Started with the Face of Battle as an audio book that I listened to while driving from LA to MWSF’05 in a driving rainstorm. (So I drove slow and listened intently. Really fun drive, with nobody else on the road. This was the time of the massive mudslides, and the biggest storm in the series of storms that gave SoCal its highest rainfall totals in ~150 years.) Now I’m reading the Book of War, which is not by Keegan but is a series of stories he selected from many war journalists and chroniclers of war.
Coincidentally with your mention of Intelligence in War, earlier today (and before reading your post here) I’d looked up Keegan in my favorite remaindered book store online and found Intel for $9 new. Gonna buy it. Probably won’t have it before you’re done, but am very much looking forward to it. Strange that we don’t have it in our library here at rand. We’ve got 11 others by Keegan, and one would think this would be an important one.
One more thing… Keegan is not quite as insightful or as unequivocally correct as he would have you believe. Look at the review comments by Thomas Powers and Robert Steele on Amazon’s listing of this book. http://tinyurl.com/jyxae
Powers is a well known observer of military and especially intelligence (and failure thereof) affairs. While less well known than Keegan, imho he has a much better view of nuance, of the gray areas between the blacks and whites that Keegan frequently casts his pronouncements from.
Yeah, I read that and grabbed a quote for my .sig file. It sounds like Steele was responding to a SUMMARY of the book, which is a vast simplification. It is not Keegan’s best, but it is a nice armchair analysis of the PROCESS and APPLICATION of intel, using a few case studies. It really is a historical view, about how technology and communications have changed how intel is used in warfare.