America's War for the Greater Middle East

In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan

Seth G. Jones · 414 pages

This book is a definitive account of the American experience in Afghanistan from the rise of the Taliban to the depths of the insurgency. After the swift defeat of the Taliban in 2001, American optimism has steadily evaporated in the face of mounting violence; a new "war of a thousand cuts" has now brought the country to its knees. In the Graveyard of Empires is a political history of Afghanistan

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa

Jason Stearns · 416 pages

Intent to Destroy: Russia’s Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine

Eugene Finkel · 336 pages

The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic

Chalmers Johnson · 394 pages

The Fall of Yugoslavia

Misha Glenny · 257 pages

The Fall of Yugoslavia tells the whole, true story of the Balkan Crisis - and the ensuing war - for those around the world who have watched the battle unfold with a mixture of horror, dread, and confusion. When Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence in June 1991, peaceful neighbors of four decades took up arms against each other once again and a savage war flared in the Balkans. The unde

The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al-Qaeda

Peter L. Bergen · 502 pages

The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War

Fred Kaplan · 413 pages

This book describes the attempt to reform the culture of the US Armed Forces in the face of the challenges of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from a cold war machinery focussed on major battles against a massive enemy towards the flexible dominance over an elusive, ingrained and invisible one.

The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One

David Kilcullen · 365 pages

From the Publisher: David Kilcullen is one of the world's most influential experts on counterinsurgency and modern warfare. A Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to General David Petraeus in Iraq, his vision of war dramatically influenced America's decision to rethink its military strategy in Iraq and implement "the surge." Now, in The Accidental Guerrilla, Kilcullen provides a remarkably fresh persp

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq

Thomas E. Ricks · 487 pages

The definitive military chronicle of the Iraq war and a searing judgment on the strategic blindness with which America has conducted it, drawing on the accounts of senior military officers giving voice to their anger for the first time.Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post senior Pentagon correspondant Thomas E. Ricks's Fiasco is masterful and explosive reckoning with the planning and execution o

Courage Can Save Us: Ten Extraordinary Americans and the Fight for Our Future

Rye Barcott

From a U.S. Marine and co-founder of With Honor, and written ahead of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, comes the story of principled veterans who work across party lines to shape our nation and inspire us to serve with courage in our own lives. When most Americans think of acts of courage, elected office is rarely the first place they look. And while more Americans than

The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth

Mark Mazzetti · 400 pages

An account of the transformation of the CIA and America's special operations forces into man-hunting and killing machines in the world's dark spaces: the new American way of war.

Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power

Rachel Maddow · 281 pages

Maddow shows how deeply militarized our culture has become--how the role of the national security sector has shape-shifted and grown over the past century to the point of being financially unsustainable and confused in mission.

How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon

Rosa Brooks · 438 pages

The Pentagon's a strange place. Inside secure command centers, military officials make life and death decisions--but the Pentagon also offers food courts, banks, drugstores, florists, and chocolate shops. When Rosa Brooks gave her family a tour, her mother gaped at the glossy window displays: "So the heart of American military power is a shopping mall?" In a sense, yes: the U.S. military has becom

Black Hawk Down

Mark Bowden · 486 pages

Late in the afternoon of Sunday, 3 October 1993, 140 elite US soldiers abseiled from helicopters into a teeming market neighbourhood in the heart of the city of Mogadishu, Somalia. Their mission was to abduct two top lieutenants of a Somali warlord and return to base. It was supposed to take them about an hour. Instead, they were pinned down through a long and terrible night in a hostile city,

Obama's Wars

Bob Woodward

Bob Woodward interviewed dozens of high-ranking government officials to compile this record of the discussions and thought processes behind President Obama's decision to increase the American presence in Afghanistan by 30,000 military in early 2010 and begin phase-out of American involvement in mid-2011. The author used his access well in documenting secret discussions and public pronouncements

Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield

Jeremy Scahill · 680 pages

In this book the author of "Blackwater," takes us inside America's new covert wars. As he reveals, the foot soldiers in these battles operate daily across the globe and inside the United States with orders from the White House to do whatever is necessary to hunt down, capture, or kill individuals designated by the president as enemies of America. Funded through "black budgets", Special Operations

The Best and the Brightest

David Halberstam · 688 pages

David Halberstam's masterpiece, the defining history of the making of the Vietnam tragedy, with a new Foreword by Senator John McCain.Using portraits of America's flawed policy makers and accounts of the forces that drove them, The Best and the Brightest reckons magnificently with the most important abiding question of our country's recent history: Why did America become mired in Vietnam, and why

Infamy: Pearl Harbor and its Aftermath

John Willard Toland · 371 pages

Investigates the military, political, and historical remifications of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, examining the unpreparedness of the United States, the cover-up following the disaster, and other important aspects of the attack and its effects.

The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan

Michael Hastings

The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014

Carlotta Gall · 368 pages

The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran

David Crist · 638 pages

No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah

Francis J. West Jr. · 380 pages

"This is the face of war as only those who have fought it can describe it."--Senator John McCainFallujah: Iraq's most dangerous city unexpectedly emerged as the major battleground of the Iraqi insurgency. For twenty months, one American battalion after another tried to quell the violence, culminating in a bloody, full-scale assault. Victory came at a terrible price: 151 Americans and thousands o

Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags

Tim Marshall · 266 pages

From the renewed sense of nationalism in China to troubled identities in Europe and the USA, to the terrifying rise of Islamic State, the world is a confusing place right now and we need to understand the symbols, old and new, that people are rallying around. For thousands of years, flags have represented our hopes and dreams. We wave them. Burn them. March under their colors. And still, in the tw

Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib

Seymour M. Hersh · 432 pages

Since September 11, 2001, Seymour M. Hersh has riveted readers -- and outraged the Bush Administration -- with his stories in The New Yorker, including his breakthrough pieces on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Now, in Chain of Command, he brings together this reporting, along with new revelations, to answer the critical question of the last three years: how did America get from the clear morning w