Hacker News Books

"Small Unit Leadership" is also excellent and also from the US Army.

Good ones are also:
"Duty" (Robert Gates)
"Call Sign Chaos" (Mattis)
"Extreme Ownership"

The one about Mattis has a very long list of book recommendations at the end.

Maybe my view is merely more radical than tradition requires: if executors and operators of intention find themselves in an ethically ambiguous situation, crippled by analysis paralysis, the commander has failed to sufficiently articulate his intentions and directives and possibly even in the training of standards and requirements.

The entire purpose of commanders intent is to make the mission clearly known, and allow for decentralized decision making of the tactical day-to-day. It should never replace tradecraft, yet it also shouldn’t stand in the way of independent thinking either.

Instead, those ethical decisions should include commanders’s intent.

Gen. Bruce Clarke has a brilliant book on this, “About Face”-with many lessons on this echoed more recently by the likes of Gen. James Mattis (“Call-Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead”) and the popular Jocko Willink (“Leadership Strategies and Tactics-FM-02”). Therefore I say thusly: commander’s intent informs tradecraft, tradecraft is commander’s intent manifested.

Edit: I believe I got the Clarke book wrong, instead it appears to be a collection of his writings on leadership, he himself didn’t give it this name apparently.

You learn from history and what other people did well and didn't do well. Leadership is a combination of your own innate abilities combined with self-awareness and feedback. From this, you can apply historical knowledge (understand you may not have Washington's height and strength, but may be a better tactical decision maker).

Read biographies on others:

Washington: A Life

Hamilton

Grant

Fighter Pilot (Robin Olds)

Boyd

Anyone you admire - read about them - find out what was good and what was bad.

Mattis's new book is good: Call Sign Chaos.

Go find some debates against far-right neo-fascists in the 60s and then listen to some debates with modern crypto-fascist intellectual lightweights like Jordan Peterson.

BTW I am on your side and I'm sick of the left intellectually handicapping itself with trendy bullshit.

Edit: replying on Peterson because I hit the thread limit:

All Peterson's interesting ideas are ripped off of Carl Jung and various 60s-era consciousness/psychedelic thinkers like Leary and Wilson (who were heavily influenced by Jung). There's a bit of Nietzsche in there too.

Peterson's original ideas are uninteresting confused rubbish. The central theme of his work is misogyny. Not sure if he's really fascist but his fan base is definitely fascist adjacent.

TL;DR: "nothing good about him is original, and nothing original about him is good."

If the idea of myths being a valid form of truth is appealing, read Jung. Jung is an infinitely better writer too. If you want an explicitly Christian version, read C.S. Lewis who is also an infinitely better writer.

If his "get your butt in gear" and "clean your room" thing is appealing, read some good military memoirs like Call Sign Chaos by Jim Mattis. The latter are great motivational works minus the overt misogyny and confused bullshit about "alpha males" and lobsters. (Don't have a clue what Mattis's politics are, but he keeps it mostly out of his writing and focuses on practical stuff.)

Anything good about Peterson can be found from better sources. It mystifies me that anyone took him seriously. Of course maybe Peterson wasn't the best example as he's actually one of the better alt-right or alt-right adjacent intellectuals (on a purely intellectual level). A better sample of the intellectual chops of the alt-right would be an artisanal fountain of bullshit like Stefan Molyneux or Richard Spencer.

I recently finished reading "Call Sign Chaos" by James Mattis, and it was interesting reading his viewpoint on Iraq and Afghanistan. A common theme with the Bush and Obama administrations is that they would ignore the recommendations from military and intelligence advisors, and pick whichever option was the best for them politically. He said that these "bring the troops home" statements made by Biden are being done to pander to his base, and are causing these forever wars. By bringing most of the troops home, he can look good on TV, even though it means there isn't a military presence big enough to actually get anything done.

It's probably for the best now, but it shouldn't have needed to come to this. In "Call Sign Chaos" by Jim Mattis, he talks about how the Bush and Obama administrations both repeatedly ignored the recommendations of military and intelligence officials. The Bush administration was too cavalier and thought they knew best, the Obama administration was too weak and wanted to score political points by not providing the force that was required. When I was in the Marines, they told us that we shouldn't need to be there, but politicians from the 80s/90s left things such a mess after trying to stop the Soviets, that now we had to go try and clean up the mess created 20 years prior.