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...in Another Bloody Century. He kind of pooh-poohs it as some of the other commenters here have done, saying that it plays a small part but is mostly an annoyance.

Some of the other lists are more interesting - like the Combined Arms Center counterinsurgency list. It seems like those operations get a little more complicated than 'apply weapon x to target y'. Hearts and minds! What's the Rudyard Kipling quote?

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine,
And bid the sickness cease;

"The white man's burden"; that sounds offensive. But I bet Kipling was getting at more something along the lines of "The Western Civilization burden". Anyhow, "savage wars of peace" certainly hits the nail on the head.

...Chief of Staff's reading list. Short on fighter pilot stuff, long on strategy and counterinsurgency. They see the way things are going, no doubt about it.

> Then goes on to divide the reading list based on the rank of the reader?

Some truth to that... but I don't know. Seems to me that the senior officer books are more around strategy (see the Navy reading list 'Senior Leaders' section) while the junior folks' books are more general stuff and easy reads. For example, look where Ender's Game shows up on several lists...

> Then goes on to divide the reading list based on the rank of the reader?

Some truth to that... but I don't know. Seems to me that the senior officer books are more around strategy (see the Navy reading list 'Senior Leaders' section) while the junior folks' books are more general stuff and easy reads. For example, look where Ender's Game shows up on several lists...

> most of the grunts I have worked with have a
> reading / writing level of less an 8th grade student.

Check out the Army reading list section for cadets, soldiers, and NCOs. Some good stuff there... especially Keegan's "Face of Battle". On the other hand, I have no idea how many folks in those ranks have read any of those.

> any Marine who could read and write
> was immediately promoted to officer.

These days, though, Marines are different. Check out the Marine Corps reading list, especially the "Private to Lance Corporal" section. "Ender's Game", "The Ugly American", etc...

> Keegan is an excellent writer.

Yup, right now he's got three books on the USMC reading list.

...check out John Keegan's Face of Battle. It covers the battle of Agincourt and several other major battles - Waterloo and the Somme. This book really gives you a feel for the human element in these battles.

As an additional stamp of approval, it's also on both the Army and USMC reading lists.

Colin Gray's Another Bloody Century talks about the information warfare side of things and concludes that despite the hype, it's not a huge deal yet. He also talks about the inevitability of space warfare. It's a good book and after reading it you can why he made it onto the Air Force reading list (albeit with another book, "Modern Strategy").

It must be strange times to be in the Air Force - I read somewhere that the USAF turned out more unmanned than manned aircraft last year. Seems like a sea-change for them; something along the same lines as converting from the "big bomber carrying nukes" role.

> if the enemy can thoroughly trounce the image and capability of the military on the web,

Another variant on this "lawfare", where you use the laws of a country against them. Boumediene v. Bush is prime fodder for this.

Along the lines of what you were saying, Robert Coram's book about Medal of Honor recipient Colonel Bud Day talks about how the North Vietnamese would show the POWs videos from back home to show that resistance was hopeless - e.g., John Kerry's testimony before the Senate. Same kind of thing... "mediafare" or something.

> 1) the Russians and Chinese may have access to secrets vital to our national security

Notice that China is on the radar (so to speak) for our Navy; witness the inclusion of The Great Wall at Sea on the Navy reading list.

> 1) the Russians and Chinese may have access to secrets vital to our national security

Notice that China is on the radar (so to speak) for our Navy; witness the inclusion of The Great Wall at Sea on the Navy reading list.

> try some searches on my military reading list site.

Doh. Make that here.

> The book, not the fun-but-not-faithful movie.

Starship Troopers is on the Navy reading list in the junior enlisted section. Look around and you'll see Ender's Game there too...

> Tipping Point

Note that "Tipping Point" is also on the Navy reading list. "Blink" is on the Coast Guard reading list as well. Gladwell, getting it done...

> Tipping Point

Note that "Tipping Point" is also on the Navy reading list. "Blink" is on the Coast Guard reading list as well. Gladwell, getting it done...

...I've been using Sphinx a lot recently and have been really pleased with it. The indexer is fast, there's good Ruby on Rails integration, and I don't worry about scalability since if it's good enough for craigslist it's good enough for me. Definitely worth a look for your next project that needs to do full text search.

For a quick demo of it, do some searches here.

> I recently switched to sphinx (http://www.sphinxsearch.com/) its written in C

Minor nit - it's in C++. But yeah, it's totally awesome - fast when indexing, easy to scale horizontally, powerful query language, custom stop word lists, etc, etc. The APIs (I use the Ruby one, Riddle) make it easy to do nifty excerpt formatting (for example, note the highlighting around the word 'battle'), and there are a couple of different ways to integrate it into a Ruby on Rails app.

Speaking of Sphinx and Rails, here's a code snippet for escaping extended mode Sphinx queries. This will probably make its way into Riddle at some point, but, until then, there it is.

> What is the weird fascination with "eastern" stuff among upper middle management?

That extends to military leadership too; "The Art of War" is on both the Army and the Marine Corps reading lists. It's a little more appropriate in those cases, though...

...Air Force reading list. Several books about counterinsurgency, only one about flying airplanes and that's a historical piece (Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers: Innovation in the U.S. Army, 1917-1945). That's the CSAF's reading list, and he would know where they're going...

> Either the taggers got up on the wrong side of bed today,
> or my general impression of Ruby is horribly wrong.

Quite so. For my military reading list site, Rails is awesome. Plus Sphinx for searching, of course.

Whatever you've got, consider replacing it with Sphinx, which is awesome. I'm using it with Rails and the Ultrasphinx plugin and it's been great - doing excerpts (for example, notice the highlighted results from a search for 'combat') - was a piece of cake.

> the U.S. government often takes a surprisingly passive role
> when China acts aggressively towards it.

Looks like the Navy, at least, is keeping an eye on China. Note that one of the selections in the "senior leaders" section of the Navy reading list is "The Great Wall at Sea: China's Navy Enters the Twenty-First Century". Nothing about cyber-warfare there, though.

> That is, if one country can afford killer robots and another can't,
> then the former has no deterrent to invading the latter.

Hm, although, that assumes that the killer robots are perfectly efficient and the country being invaded has no method of striking back "out of band", e.g., with Tomahawks or something similar.

Also, for understanding what today's senior military leadership thinks is important, check out the selections on the various military reading lists (site contains affiliate links, copy/paste the title links and search on Amazon if you prefer). "Recognizing Islam: Religion and Society in the Modern Middle East", "On the Origins of War: And the Preservation of Peace", and more. Thoughtful stuff.