Dempsey’s Reading List Sucks
By all accounts, the 37th Chief of Staff of the Army and the incoming Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin E. Dempsey is a helluva smart, articulate and inspiring man, as high-rising bureaucrats go.
That’s why I’m surprised at the middle brow pile of horsesh** he’s masquerading as the CSA’s Professional Reading List.
Dempsey might intend for his catalog to serve as something of a blueprint to educate soldiers, but he also must not think much of them. I say this because his list refuses to acknowledge lasting works of literature, history, memoir, psychology, economics and cinema, books and films that not only shall give some meaning to a military mind but also challenge us to think critically about our democracy, service and life.
While there are many outstanding books on Dempsey’s list, he cheats the professional men of arms by inflicting upon them the wooden writings of Thomas Friedman (twice!), the chipper but not exactly revolutionary Malcolm Gladwell and the solid but hardly probing journalism of Robert D. Kaplan.
This is the sort of professional education an officer or NCO can get during long waits at the dentist’s office or pinched from the remainder bins of airport bookstores.
Unlike the Commandant’s list for Marines, one also notices the conspicuous absence of the U.S. Constitution from Dempsey’s canon. I suppose that in this age of Petraeus and McChrystal, Army generals no longer feel the itch to mention that obsolete pile of parchment.
Andrew Exum over at Abu Muqawama already has weighed in with his worthy substitutes, and I couldn’t improve on his pick of E.B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa or the very fine compilation he plucked from the graduate student’s syllabus, Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age.
I was surprised that Exum, a former scholar of the classics, didn’t include Thucydides, Homer or any of the Greek tragedies, but he’s a puzzler, that Exum.
Might be the beard.
I’ll let you in on a blogger’s secret: Writing blogs kind of sucks. One never knows what to scribble and, well, one always wonders what original idea can be scratched out of the latest Tricare legislation or the sundry New York Times’ article about the Korengal Valley.
That and, most candidly, the stupidest things I post are the ones you like the most. If I pen something that features iteratively the word “poop” or something that pokes fun at Rolling Stone or Barack Obama, you love it.
I can’t tell you how disheartening that is.
But when I took this gig I thought we might make a different sort of blog, and so I’m going to carry out the game plan until they fire my ass (noting that when I write about fashion, photography and the other arts I tend to do a brisk business and bring in readers who normally wouldn’t want anyone to see a milblog in their history cache).
I’ve been mulling over a project: Fifty or so important modern (and post-modern) works about war that I think every serving officer and NCO should read but often don’t.
Journalism, poetry, film, literature, history, memoir, letters and analysis. About once every week, I’ll come out with a book and stake my argument about why it should be read and how it might apply to today’s lot of the modern military member.
The reason I pause is because rereading these pieces and regurgitating them (none of you ever clicks a link and you know it) takes time, and I’m already working 100 hour weeks.
But Dempsey’s list bugged me. He might estimate your ASVAB score between moronic and slightly above average, but I refuse to do so. I’m going to continue to show you the respect you’ve earned by treating you like a bright, informed adult (who seems also to like poop jokes).
Perhaps because my studies at the grad level were in literature, history and the law, I gravitate toward those fields, which is all the better because they’re disciplines hardly fallow when one goes to harvest good reads, right?
So we’ll begin next week. And I have some surprises (alas, most of them don’t involve poop).
Tags: His Reading List Blows Goat, Martin Dempsey, So does Tom Friedman
