Hacker News Books

had my temporary fill of tech books, so:

on my bedstand is "when you are engulfed in flames"

and my next major read is probably "the gathering storm" once it comes out.

If you want hypotheticals, here is what Winston Churchill had to say on the topic in a speech to the US Congress after the war was won.

President Roosevelt one day asked what this War should be called. My answer was, "The Unnecessary War." If the United Stated States had taken an active part in the League of Nations, and if the League of Nations had been prepared to use concerted force, even had it only been European force, to prevent the re-armament of Germany, there was no need for further serious bloodshed. If the Allies had resisted Hitler strongly in his early stages, even up to his seizure of the Rhineland in 1936, he would have been forced to recoil, and a chance would have been given to the sane elements in German life, which were very powerful especially in the High Command, to free Germany of the maniacal Government and system into the grip of which she was falling.Do not forget that twice the German people, by a majority, voted against Hitler, but the Allies and the League of Nations acted with such feebleness and lack of clairvoyance, that each of Hitler's encroachments became a triumph for him over all moderate and restraining forces until, finally, we resigned ourselves without further protest to the vast process of German re-armament and war preparation which ended in a renewed outbreak of destructive war. Let us profit at least by this terrible lesson. In vain did I attempt to teach it before the war.

In his book The Gathering Storm, he adds several more points where Hitler could have been easily stopped before he started.

But there are thresholds of danger.

Right now I'm re-reading Churchill's The Gathering Storm, which covers the pre-WWII era and ends with him being appointed PM. Just past the part where Hitler tells a British official that Germany had achieved air parity, which was true, which was a shock since the government had been insisting they were far behind. But this was in the mid-30s, about the right time for the government to start ordering large numbers of Hurricanes and Spitfires. Nazi Germany didn't become really dangerous until a few years later ... and with a little will and force (unfortunately, France had structured her army so that the latter wasn't an option without total mobilization, see this excellent and short book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0811714608/) could have been stopped at that stage and for a while later, but....

Now, we're swimming in a sea filled with the Internet of Shit and evidently a greater potential for ugliness for which we don't have things like Hurricanes, Spitfires and Chain Home radar as an answer. Hmmm, Chain Home development also started around then, 1935, and was barely ready in time for the Battle of Britain, and early use of the first few systems revealed a need for coordination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowding_system.

Then again, maybe we can hack up stuff reasonably quickly, do major league routers still use FPGAs for flexibility at speed? But we should start now, like the Brits did when they got serious in the mid-30s.

It's a long list, because I'm guilty of interleaving my reading of dozens (or more) of books at at time. My Goodreads "currently reading" shelf has about 25 books in it. :-(

But of the ones I'm really actively reading right now, and plan to finish soon:

1. Surfaces and Essences: Analogy As The Fuel And Fire Of Thinking - Douglas Hofstader and Emmanuel Sander

2. The Gathering Storm - Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson

3. The Balanced Scorecard - David P. Norton and Robert S. Kaplan

Also, books that I don't really think of in terms of "reading" so much as "working through":

4. Learning R - Richard Cotton

5. Practical Common Lisp - Peter Seibel

Probably too late for the very hard mid-December deadline for those losing their insurance, maybe too late for getting enough young healthy people enrolled before adverse selection forces insane 2015 premium filings from insurance companies, which are due by the end of March.

They also have only 4 well functioning states' systems to chose from as I understand it.

The centralized subsidy calculation/verification/etc. process, which the Federal system does for all the exchanges is another issue, although I've only heard that some time ago is was known to produce incorrect results under testing.

Also would require the Federal government to admit a much bigger screwup than they've been willing to so far, in a process entirely driven by politics (http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/challenges-have-dogge...) until the last week of last month when CMS was fired and the fix-it czar was appointed.

If you've been in this game long enough you've seen projects and companies destroyed by a failure to take decisive action when it could have made a difference (or read, for example, Churchill's The Gathering Storm, or any shorter version of how WWII could have been so easily averted by preventing German rearmament). The odds are pretty high this is going to be another example of that.

I've been waiting years for someone to ask this question :)

Wishlited this last night on amazon:
Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power by Victor Davis Hanson

Have read these and enjoyed these:

General Warfare theory:
History of Warfare by Keegan

Intel:
Intelligence and War by Keegan

Counterinsurgency:
"Ghost Wars" by Steve Coll. For a really enjoyable experience read "The Great Game" by Hopkirk first.

The Civil War deserves it's own category. Watch the PBS dvds, actually buy them. If you're hungry for more dig into "The Civil War" by Shelby Foote is hefty but it's satisfying.

1776 is a classic.

"Blind mans bluff" is a great book about submarine warfare.

For more current stuff Robert Kagan is probably the most informed pundit on war and military strategy.

WW-II
"The Last Lion" books 1 and 2 are about Churchill and they involve lots of military strategy. You should also check out "The gathering storm + the other six books Churchill wrote on WWII.

Man I could go on forever. I have "Panzer General" and "Caesar's Conquest of Gaul" on my nightstand...

Enjoy...

PS: Once you're well versed you'll hear people referring to Clauswitz a lot. When you're sick of hearing his name and you want more than the wikipedia entry go read "On War." Art of War goes w/o saying as well...

Hmmm, Churchill's "greatest" histories, The World Crisis (WWI) and The Second World War, which I've recently started re-reading (or at least The Gathering Storm, the first volume of the interim period ending with him being selected as PM as the Nazis descended upon the Low Countries and France), were written first when he lost his seat in Parliament altogether (and previously during the war had been removed from the government and his position as First Lord of the Admiralty, although he recovered his political position to a degree), and then when he was turned out as PM after winning WWII. And much of his later writing was when he was a backbencher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill_as_writer#Wr...

I just found a reference to this concept in Churchill's The Gathering Storm (WWI->him being appointed PM), first page of chapter 11, he talked about opinions events had caused to become no longer "excluded from lawful thought", at least by several major groups of people. The events were in 1936, the book written in 1948.

Read "The Gathering Storm" for an argument to topple Saddam made before we went in (but post 9-11) There is a long list of reasons which I won't go into here. 9-11 was the tipping point in terms of domestic politics, no doubt. It also seems to be the tipping point in terms of strategic policy.

There's an interesting discussion about why democratic nations go to war. If there is a mixed number of reasons and a volunteer army, which are the actual reasons we fight? I just read read a blog entry by an Army 1st Lt. killed last year who made the argument that he was joining up to stop oppression. To do something and make a difference. I also hear a lot of folks talk about leaders with supposedly bad intentions who "got us into this." So when a president and congress vote on something, and people volunteer to do it, is it possible to assign any one reason to why it's being done?

Perhaps I'm splitting hairs. Probably get downmodded again for this comment. Have at it, then.